Dragon Age Forum News (Mar. 12, 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.

David Gaider, Designer

PC Diversity
Hmm. I'd have to agree with Gromnir, here. I see relatively little point in the idea that there needs to be many different races, classes and class variations just to add choice and complexity for their own sake.

I think it's important to make the choices meaningful instead of shallow (like the hundreds of prestige classes which come out for 3rd edition daily and which are best, in my opinion, ignored in their entirety) and focus on ensuring that the system is elegant and balanced.

Moral Alignment
I believe our plan is to keep track of how evil/good you are acting... but that will be a completely invisible mechanic which the story uses as opposed to an attribute of some kind. You will not be racking up "evil points" that you can see or which would affect your character outside of the story, and at no point do you select your "alignment". Reputation is something different, and depends solely on your public actions in the course of the story.

Moral Alignment

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what do canadian's view as evil
littering?

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Player unions.

Brenon Holmes, Programmer

Moral Alignment
Cod Liver Oil

PPU: Physics Processing Units Supported by DA?
Novodex (the physics engine produced by AGEIA) is actually a middleware engine. So having your physics engine use the hardware isn't actually an issue (if you're using Novodex).

To put it another way, it will behave exactly like software did when we were first getting into 3d, if you have a card it's accelerated... otherwise it's done in software.

In the end, I suspect it's probably going to depend a lot on what kind of visual benefit consumers get and what it's priced at... if you have to buy a 500$ card every two years... well... ... I'm skeptical.

Stanley Woo, Quality Assurance

Internal Quality Assurance

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Thank you, Stan for the informative reply! It sounds like a great working environment.

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You're very welcome. I always try to be as candid as I can when chatting with our fans and the community in general. It's a lot better than "we try to leverage our platform synergies across all paradigms to transpose as much 'green-dot' as we can to our demographic subset from our re-allocation processes." Yeesh.

And yes, BioWare is a great place to work. There's a reason why we made Maclean's magazine's "Top 100 Employers in Canada" list.

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Quote: But what happened to all those pool noodles?

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We wore them all out by hitting Derrick Collins a whole heckuva lot.

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Quote: QA would seem to be very important. In my short span of time involved with computer gaming, the major bug reports create quite a ruckus (eg; PoR); even some minor ones make a bit of a splash. Keep up the great work, y'all!

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It's just like any product, really. A few people decide that this problem is responsible for world hunger, killing their parents, and kicking their dog, so they treat it as the most heinous crime one could possibly commit. Then, a bunch of like-minded raving nutjobs (who may or may not have experienced the problem themselves) feel compelled to jump on the bandwagon and elevate this to Extinction Level Event status on a few message boards and chat channels. Suddenly, this problem is the greatest travesty since the Bubonic Plague wiped out half the population of Europe.

I'd like the general gaming populace to take a step back and keep things in perspective. It's just a game, a luxury. I don't see a whole lot of people saying that the producers of "Gigli" owed them their money back for making a bad movie. Or rant on and on about how you'll never see a Wych Kaosayananda film (he directed "Ballistic: Ecks Vs. Sever") again because he doesn't care about the fans and he's only in it for the money. Sure, you can hate it and comment on it and criticize, but man, get a grip. It's not the end of the world.

Spring is coming. Get out there and get some sunshine and fresh air. Then come back and play another game.

Physics
This is super-new so the number of games that will use it will be exceedingly small, probably restricted to graphics-intensive first-person shooters. I don't think many games short of FPSs will have need of such a thing, but what do I know?

How do I.........
Navarre13 has the gist of it. Moderators are chosen from among the community by current Moderators, whenever we have a need to increase our numbers, our coverage, whatever. We recommend potential Moderators to our Community Manager, Jay Watamaniuk, who makes the final decision on whether a recommendation becomes a Moderator.

Prospective Moderators are veterans of the forums who have proven, through their history of posts, to be mature, professional, well-spoken and helpful to community members, old and new. In summary, the only time the community will know that we're looking for new Moderators is after new ones have already been chosen! Heck, sometimes the people we choose as Moderators don't even know they've been selected! I hope that helps.

when does the game come out?
Believe me, if you visit these boards, you'll know when we announce a release date.

[ March 13, 2005, 20:47: Message edited by: chevalier ]

 

I can see it is getting closer, but still a lot of loose ends. I'm looking forward to see some more details soon.
Think it will be a nice game, my only concerns are the graphics

 

Do we have any kind of estimate on the time of arrival? and or any other screens or movies?

 

Changed the date to Mar. 12 for organisation reasons.

 

Oy....Baldur's Gate 1 deya vu, oh well that one was worth the wait tenfold, let's hope this one as well.