Dragon Age Forum News (Mar. 27, 06)

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Here are today's Dragon Age forum highlights, taken from the Dragon Age Official Forum. 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.

Brenon Holmes, Programmer

is dragon age getting developmentally shafted for mass effect?

I think it would be fair to say that the only answer you'll get regarding release dates is that it will be done when we're happy with it (it's done).

Single handed weapons, turned two handed - solved

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The reason why you wouldn't do it all the time is simple: Because you can't wield your weapon two handed and still hold a shield.

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And you probably wouldn't even if you could use a one handed weapon with two hands. Shields are bulky and would most likely clip through the model without yet another custom set of animations for using a one handed weapon with two hands and a shield.

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I'm going to address all your points, because they're all fairly related. Increasing the utility of a single weapon type so that you don't have to spend resources or training to get those same benefits.

Personally, I think those "utility" options should have a cost associated with them. It should take you time to switch weapon styles. It should cost training in order to be able to do "more damage" with your weapon. You should have to make choices about what kind of equipment you're going to lug around...

These are all costs and decisions that you should have to make as a player.

If I can use one weapon with two hands, why can't I use a two handed weapon with one hand? Or throw my sword and use it ranged? Or do reasonable melee damage with a ranged weapon? Otherwise you're presenting options to a single style that aren't present in others.

We have clear distinctions between our various combat styles, and I'm not very much in favour of things that will end up muddying the flavour and feel of each of those styles.

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I think it's been quite some time since the interface was a serious issue.

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Most games already let you decide the details on your own, like the detail of grass, if you want skies, turn off weather effects and what not. Why is it so hard to click "Two Handed" and use a weapon with both hands?

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For the same reason I don't have a button in my compiler than I can hit that does all my programming for the next few months.

Did I just hear a kitten being punted?

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Second, what about small races like gnomes and halflings? They already use long swords in both hands due to their small size.

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Gnomes? Halflings? What are those?

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Er... not D&D. Dragon Age.

James Henley, Designer

is dragon age getting developmentally shafted for mass effect?

I see no reason to regret the early announcement.

I believe the advantage of being able to hear the community voice early on ultimately outweighs the negativity that is frequently heard on the boards regarding release dates, lack of information, etc. etc.

Chris Priestly, Quality Assurance

DragoN Age & E3 2006

Just for the record, QA is/are part of the Dev team. As design QA we directly help the design team with their work and can directly affect the story. For example, I personally worked with Luke Kristjanson and came up with the "Fen teh Flower of the Fields" scene in Jade Empire's Chapter 1.

Not to mention the fact that, unlike specific team members, we directly work on each and every game that BioWare makes.

David Gaider, Lead Writer

Horses/Ponies!

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I can't see why a horse would take any more time to animate than any of the other hundreds of creatures they probably have planned.

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Horses on their own aren't more difficult to animate, no. If we just wanted to have horses present as ambient creatures -- like you see them in a stable or out in a field -- that really wouldn't be much of an issue.

Having them rideable means that now you've got to have the characters able to sit on the horse and have them animate fluidly together. If you're lucky, you won't be dealing with characters of varying sizes. An additional issue, but not a huge one.

Then there's pathfinding. Games that have one character to deal with don't have to worry much about this. If you have a party of people that must more or less move in unison, then you've got to worry about making it not frustrating. You worry about the group bumping into each other and have them calculate alternate paths if they bump too much -- hopefully not one that makes that one party member take some weird route around the entire map -- and THEN you've got to add the complexity of having this party pathfind once they are both larger (they take up more space as a model) and longer (they are mostly horizontal rather than vertical).

And after that there's the issue of whether or not you're going to even tackle mounted combat.

None of these issues are impossible to deal with. Far from it. There's a game out there called "Mount & Blade" which does both riding and mounted combat very well, for instance -- check it out.

But the question you as a developer have to ask yourself is whether or not you can justify the work involved? A game where mounts take a higher importance can be very cool -- you can have jousts and knights on horseback and just the act of riding across the countryside can be very exhilirating in and of itself.
But what if the game doesn't involve traveling across vast tracts of land? If you have to keep getting off your horse before entering dungeons and cities, and the player spends the majority of his time in such places, then how much time would they even need to spend on a horse at all?

A game that does use mounts can be very cool, but mounts as a feature is simply not going to be of equal value to every game. And including it just because you can imagine that it might be useful in a game (but not necessarily this game) or because you believe technological progress is such that, by now, it's only a couple of lines of programming and ... presto! ...character's now on a horse! --- well, that's not going to happen.

There are lots of less labour-intensive features that we choose not to include because they don't quite fit the game we want to make or because we have so many features that we need to allocate our resources to. All I said before is that if we include mounts in DA (and we may) it will have to be because they're of some importance to either the story or the gameplay -- enough to justify the work involved, which is not "OMG that's impossible!" but neither is it insignificant by any stretch.