Dragon Age Forum News (Jan. 14, 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.

Scott Greig, Project Director/Producer

I hope the toolset is good...
I just wanted to pop in here and add my thoughts....

The Dragon Age team is committed to ensuring that there is a large amount of high-quality post-release custom content for players to enjoy. While we have not made any final decisions with regard to a toolset in Dragon Age, what we do know for certain is that we will have a powerful and versatile campaign editor that will definitely provide great new content once Dragon Age ships. It will be possible for builders to develop the custom content they envision, rather than being limited by the engine; we'll see a greater variety of new content. While there may be a possibility that building terrain from scratch may require a 3d-modeling tool, we may provide source art to users to make it easier to develop custom areas and revise existing content. At this point, we haven't made any final decisions about Dragon Age custom content; we are dedicated to making Dragon Age the best PC RPG possible, and we certainly appreciate everyone's feedback about the features they're most interested in.

Scott Greig
Project Director / Producer for Dragon Age

David Gaider, Designer

I hope the toolset is good...
Keep in mind that, while it may have been quite difficult and technical to modify a tileset, it need not necessarily be the same for a DA area. Indeed, knowing that there are going to be different hurdles for the community going in, we might be able to offer some solutions that don't currently exist in NWN.

We also happen to have a great community infrastructure set up for after-release support, and far less hinderance from outside the company in how we choose to deliver that support.

More: I'm not quite certain about that, PipBoy. Not saying that the toolsets will resemble each other, but Morrowind's toolset has both a high bar of entry, requires modeling skills and only allows modification of the single-player game without modules or even multiplayer function... and it still has a thriving mod community.

BG2, while its mod community was not as large, it thrived for quite some time without even any support from us at all, based almost entirely on how beloved the game was.

I think it depends on where your expectations lie or in what you're trying to accomplish. You have to keep in mind that there are some things that NWN2 is just naturally going to do better... as it should, that being the entire focus of that project. It would be pointless for us to hamper our own goals to try and compete. At the same time, however, I suspect there will be some things DA will simply do better, though at this point we can't really say which will be which. Certainly your input is appreciated on the subject.

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Heck, no matter what kind of environment, creative thinkers would always be able to whack out any kind of story. What matters is how difficult it will be to create said story using your resources...

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I think that's more the point. Anyone who uses NWN over the long run always complains when they run into its ceiling... in the long run, the toolset's versatility and ease-of-use compromise its flexibility for the advanced user. The plan is for DA to have that flexibility.

However we've already said many times that the focus of this project is not on the toolset, that DA is not NWN2 minus the D&D. We learned a lot from NWN and DA will take the best parts of it, but not all of it, and we draw just as much from BG2 and KotOR. If you're already planning in your head to use DA exactly as you used NWN, then you're setting yourself up for disappointment.

I'm still hopeful that we'll include some kind of area-creation ability with the toolset, but if we don't it will be because that's not the scope of the project. The purpose of DA is not to allow the end user to "create their own worlds". That's what NWN2 will focus on. The purpose of DA is to create the best singleplayer and the best multiplayer story experience we can, with tools that allow us to do that, and then pass those tools onto you with as much support as possible.

Do I foresee that creating anything with DA will be restricted only to DLA-like teams with professional-level modelers? Not really, no. Just about every serious user of the NWN toolset complains about the restrictions they inevitably encounter, or the limitations inherent in using tilesets (even custom ones). Likely there will be certain types of creating that will be more easily done with NWN2 and its tilesets ("I want to create my own world with all-new areas laid out exactly as I envision them"), but that's far from the only way to do things and trying to do that as well as what we're doing now would only weaken DA in the end.
While it's far too early to lay out exactly what the DA toolset's differences and strengths will be, I suspect that what it does it will do very well indeed. That does mean, however, that it won't be everything to everyone (which is what everyone seems to be expecting, due I suppose to lack of information to the contrary).

As for the GM client which someone asked about, that's a bit different from the toolset insofar as the goals of DA go. It's really to early for us to tell where this feature will end up, but I suspect at a minimum it won't be much different from its current incarnation. Now's definitely a good time to suggest what you'd like to see changed.

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While I do realise that it's not necessarily like Morrowind *points to David's post* I would point out that when I looked at mods for Morrowind, they were overwhelmingly things that changed little things in the game

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I would agree on that point. I suspect, however, that this may be inherent in the way that Morrowind's scripting and dialogue systems are set up... not to knock them, but they don't seem that accessible to me (mind you, I have a hard time understanding dialogue that isn't set up in the tree format). There are features in the DA dialogue & scripting editors which make this (even at this stage) easier than it was in NWN.

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All I can say is that, if the versatility for the average user is primarily limited to creating within the OC world--you folk had better deliver a story as deep and fun, and as original as BG2.

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You won't be limited to the DA world, though I suppose if you're unwilling to accept the DA levels (altered or no) as anything but the DA world there is little alternative.

The plan is also that you can still make seperate modules, as well... so you're not limited to simply modding.

But you are also correct. People modded BG2, I think, primarily because the game was so loved. On the flip side, while we couldn't allow the NWN OC modules to be altered and distributed for obvious reasons, I don't think there were many who were eager to try. If the DA world and story don't get players to buy into them, it probably isn't going to matter to many how powerful the toolset is.

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Since it's already come up, is it expected that DA level creation will be at about the same level of difficulty as Morrowind level creation?

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We really don't know just yet, and I don't know enough of how levels are made in Morrowind to draw a comparison.

More: Hmm. I've seen numerous mods for BG2 which weren't just alterations to the main story ("total conversions", I believe they are called) and I even played one. Did it strike me as being unrealistic that the levels used were the same as those used elsewhere in BG2? No more than the fact that ever city in a NWN module looks like Neverwinter or ever forest and rural area look roughly the same. Some of those areas in BG2 were really beautiful, to boot.

And this ignores the possibility that we may be able to provide the possibility to easily change areas even if you can't create them from scratch without a third party tool, through the use of placeables or colouring or... well, I don't know, really.

The one thing that keeps hitting us is that we spent so long even in NWN's development underestimating what the community was capable of. "They'll never build their own tilesets," we worried. At best we thought a few people might model some creatures and maybe some existing tilesets might be remodeled.
I wonder, too, how things might have been had we been freer to respond more quickly to the needs of NWN's custom content community. How long did the custom content people have to wait for things to be approved? How many third-party app's were created by brilliant people while we watched with our hands tied, amazed at how quickly these things were coming to be despite the limitations?

There's no doubt that creating custom levels will be a hurdle (and that's even if we get some kind of terrain builder), but we're identifying this one well ahead of the gate and hopefully we can come up with something. We're not trying to compete with NWN2, and it's clear that some people's expectations will simply be better met there, but for the rest I still think DA offers a lot of potential. I know I get excited, and especially when it comes to showing you what we have planned for the world and the story and the characters I wish we could just show it all to you right now.

Right now! Gaah! My head's going to explode!

Okay, back to work.

The freedom to explore and do what I want

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I don't think that DA will change a lot in respect to linearity.

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Linearity means different things to different people, but in essence you are correct. The focus is on the story while at the same time providing more options and paths for the player to choose from (more than we've attempted in the past, in fact). You are not going to be ignoring the plot, however, and wandering the countryside to do unrelated side-quests.

Jay Watamaniuk, Community Manager

I hope the toolset is good...
While I am certainly not involved in the technical details of what is being developed for the DA toolset I do know that a considerable amount of time and development has been spent with one thought at the back of the mind of everybody involved with it: BioWare supports its community because it makes sense for us from a very practical business point of view. Having been around here before the launch of NWN I remember a great of panic about what the toolset was and what it wasn't and yet when it was released the community adapted to making use of it in tremendous new ways that amazed us. I have left doubting that the community when faced with an obstacle will construct something to get around it no matter how impossible it seems at the time.

The examples of innovation, dealing with adversity and straight up hard work for overcoming limitations has been proven by everyone here. Whatever the final version of the toolset for DA is, it will only be the first version of what the community uses. It may take a talented person to make something that helps the rest of us…and I do mean us because I have no technical nothing for scripting and need all the help I can get. Someone always comes up with something to help those who are like me along.

With this dedicated community of world makers I do not give much thought to what will limit me in this new toolset but I do wonder what new toys will be developed for me to compliment the new toolset by the community enhancing the ‘official’ toolset.

Brenon Holmes, Programmer

Data storing - Boo to TLKS/2das
We're using 2da's. We've changed them a bit though, so that it's easier to overwrite and extend game resources. (They still look the same though).

I hope the toolset is good...
I can't say for sure, but I don't think there'd be any issues with modifying the OC, as long as you weren't profiting from it.