Dragon Age Forum News (Jan. 13, 05)

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Here are today's Dragon Age forum highlights, collected by NWVault. Please take into account that these are only single parts of various threads and should not be taken out of context. Bear in mind also that the posts presented here are copied as-is, and that any bad spelling and grammar does not get corrected on our end.

Darcy Pajak, Assistant Producer

Day and Night Cycle!!!!
Well this topic has gone on for too long.

In Dragon Age you will notice the passing of time. It will be day when it should be day, and night when it should be night.
We know what quests the player will go on, we know what encounters they will find, we can and will set the stage for each event that makes the most sense, and feels right.
Commented on this topic earlier were two scenarios which people felt would be left out because of no automatic day/night cycle. Let me explain how they would work in Dragon age.

Scenario #1 Player wants to break into houses and steal stuff:

In Dragon age the quest is laid before you, you arrive in a town to stock up on supplies and meet the leader of the thieves guild because he as something you need. (information, item, whatever). He tells you he’ll give it to you, but you need to get something from him first. (his son is in love with a merchant’s daughter, but her father refuses to let them marry) He wants you to break into this merchant’s home, and either:
A: Leave a heart-felt note by the merchant’s wife’s side of the bed, written by the Thieves son, which will tug at her heart strings and she will force the husband, to consent to the marriage
B: Help the Daughter Elope so her and the son can be married.
C: Find the Merchant’s secret chest, and steal his stuff so the thief can ransom it.
D: Kidnap the Daughter and ransom her for both money from the merchant, and whatever you need from the Thief.
E: Slaughter everyone and walk out the front door with the merchant’s traumatized daughter.

Once you agree to this particular event (for non-thieves there may be other ways to get what you need from the thieves-guild leader), something like this would appear:

Mob-Boss – “So you’ve come back to me after looking around the city. Does that mean you accept this mission to help my son?”
You – “Sure, but because there is no Day/night cycle how do I get to his house when it’s night?”
Mob-Boss – “I see what you mean. In real time, you would have to wait 12 hours for the sun to set. And that could be pretty dull… Tell you what, go back to the inn and rest.”
You – “Sounds great! see you in the morning”

The player then goes to the Inn, clicks on the door, and gets a message “Do you want to wait until night fall?” You click yes, and bingo! it’s night.

(of course if you’re not a very honest character, you may be able to break into a few other places while in the area, or at least loot the snot out of the merchant.).

Scenario #1 Player wants to wander the graveyard during the day because fighting vampires at night is much more difficult.

In Dragon age the quest is laid before you, you arrive in a town to stock up on supplies and meet the leader of the thieves guild because he as something you need. (information, item, whatever). He tells you he’ll give it to you, but you need to get something from him first. (his son is in love with a merchant’s daughter, but her father refuses to let them marry) He wants you to break into this merchant’s home, and…
But before he goes on, you tell him your not a thief, and cannot do that. So he suggest you find a relic rumored to be buried in the graveyard worth a lot of gold. Of course you ask him why he hasn’t just took it himself being all sneaky and all? Which he tells you it’s a forbidden place because people who go there at night die. And he’s very superstitious. (he’s lying, he knows what’s there but is too scared to go there, and leave his son an orphan).

So you wander down to the graveyard and find it just like every other kind of graveyard. There are crypts, headstones, grass, bunnies, etc, but no monsters. You find a crypt but the entrance is protect by some magic you cannot get through.
Fustrated you wander around and find the curator of the graveyard. He tells you that that crypt holds the corpse of a very power family that was in cahoots with some Dwarfs. The dwarves just Read Lord of the Rings and decided to protect the tomb with the same magic they did in the book to protect the entrance to the mines of Moria. (ha ha).

So you go back to the inn and choose the “yes wait for nightfall” option. You go back and bingo! Lots of juicy monsters for you to kill!

And that’s why we don’t need a Day night cycle.

I hope the toolset is good...
The DA toolset is more powerful to use then the NWN toolset was.
This is both a good thing, and can be seen as a bad thing.
it's good because you'll have more opportunity to do the things that the NWN toolset couldn't
Most things are looking like they can be manipulated through scripting, and not through coding so the basic rules can be modified.
However, this requires more scripting knowledge.
Also, At this time it's not looking good for a level-creation tool. You'll either have to use one of our levels, or build one in a third party 3d modeling tool, which will take a lot of time.
But the huge benefit of that is you can build the level to look exactly like you want it to, and it should solve a mess of walkmesh issue we currently see in the tile-based system.

I expect that this means that fewer people will use it, but the one's who do will make way better modules.

More: Let me say that nothing is written in stone yet. We're going to make sure that Dragon Age is a great game that encompases the best of our previous games.