Dragon Age Forum News (Nov. 11, 04)

Remove all ads!

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

Fighting to the death is stupid. How about Morale?
Come to think of it, we did have times in NWN when the player beat down an creature, or NPC, and then they surrendered. I’m pretty sure we’ll have something similar to that in Dragon Age.

I’ll just make one last comment on player morale:

One thing that people complained a lot about in NWN was the fear effect. When the player became feared, the player could do nothing but watch them run into corners and, more then likely, get killed. Yes it was a rule from D&D, but that didn’t make it any less frustrating.

We’ve learned from that to not take control from the player. And there is no real reason to. As this is a mature game, we going to keep accountability in the hands of player. If the human controlling the player does not want to run away from the 20’ foot lizard breathing fire, then so be it. If they then die off, at least they can say they had a choice. We’re not going to let them get away with “But then the Monster feared me so I ran off.” I’d rather hear them say “We had to run off and recoup because that monster was kicking our ***.”

Party moral boils down to this: Either run away or die. It’s up to the player to decide when that time comes.

will persistent worlds be in?

---

Hail and well met!
...Now, in regards to the last paragraph of your response.. I may be reading too much into the last paragraph, but it seems to me that by the wording and my own interpretation of your meaning.. if it were solely up to you, you would have such limitations imposed either to specifically shut out the PW community or to at minimum quell threads such as these... I do freely admit I may be wrong in this interpretation, and if so I do apologize. If I am correct however, I do prefer honesty rather than sugar-coating.

---

I’ll clarify my server comment a bit.

In some cases, it would make our jobs easier if we did limit the number of people on a server. As we could make some accurate assumptions on bandwidth, user interfaces, game balance, resource loading, etc. However, we do not plan to limit the number of people on a server because we may want to be able to scale this in the future. (Not necessarily to create our own persistent world, but any cap would limit our flexibility).

What is and what isn’t solely up to me is exactly the same as what is best for the project. We have a common vision among the team of what Dragon Age is going to be, how it will play, and to whom it will appeal.
(Currently a bit of this vision is blurry, and we need to include any publishing partners, but the overall goals are clear).

Georg Zoeller, Designer

will persistent worlds be in?
I think it is evident that we are very cautious this time around after getting burned by people continually misreading comments and later complaining about them - this time around we rather dash your hopes for something like PWs as good as possible - if something that we say will probably not work happens to work after release, people can *** about it, but not the other way around

As for holding us responsible for i.e. what external preview websites tell you - that's not a good idea.

One thing that I have learned since working here is that game magazines / pages often have much less an idea of what's going on than dedicated fans i.e. on the boards. They have so many games to cover that they often don't really invest time into verifying that what they are writing is actually correct or if someone just jumped to conclusions. I.e. having seen the Dragon Age presentation that was given at E3 - I can honestly say that about every second report about it that can be found on the web had at least 1, often more facts wrong (and for a game where close to no facts have been released, that's a lot ) - and we really can't afford to chase down every single author who happens to get something wrong and force them to print a correction. (Through I still want to strangle that guy who played through SoU with a level 20 character and then wrote a lengthy review about just how unchallenging it was)

Hype happens, and it's only partially under your control, and worse, a certain level of it it is required these days - so completely shutting it down is a bad idea - but the community at these boards has the opportunity to ask and we will provide you with answers, when we are ready to give them. Whether or not people want to listen and actually understand them, that's another question and unfortunately not under our control.

Right now, if you ask "will PWs be possible", the answer is "we don't know, the product is not at a state where we could make such a judgement" and we attach the "but we do not specifically design for it and our attention is focused into different directions for the game" string to it to make sure that certain people don't hype themselves into inevitable letdown again. If someone *would* be thinking about PWs, then it would probably be the Live Team, not the DA project team.

will persistent worlds be in?

---

I believe the relevent quote from the press release is:

"...the toolset will give players the power to create their very own persistent worlds..."

Ahem. - all good fun.

---

well, the full context is

Massively multiplayer games are becoming increasingly popular and prevalent within the industry. While the Official Neverwinter Nights Campaign will not include a massively multiplayer component, the toolset will give players the power to create their very own persistent worlds. This is made possible by our innovative Portal System. Through the placement of Portals within your gameworld, you will be able to connect your Neverwinter module to modules running on the machines of friends, guildmates, and fellow players.

Note the reference to MMORPGs and the focus on player numbers? Note the absense of words like "easy", "your own rules", and which is what most people complained about after the release ("I need to script? That's too complicated"). Now evidently there are PWs, there have been from the start, so I don't think this is misleading.

If you take what some of the pw people have been complaining about against what was stated the toolset could do, you see a certain disattachment from reality.

---

This is precisely how NWNs' publisher has failed some sections of the title's consumers. By not giving clear a determined information to the marketplace on exactly what the product does and does not do(to the point of being misleading), BW's publishers have invited threads like this. Just look at the sheer number of PW threads on this and other BW forum boards as evidence.

---

While I like clear and precise information where possible, I would say that this is an example where a customer failed to inform himself before buying a product. In todays advertisement and keyword driven world you would expect people to be able to make educated decisions based on research, not just based on the advertisement a publisher puts out. It's their job to generate hype and to sell, and they do this by highlighting the stuff that they think is important and leaving it blurry around the edges. Let's stay a bit realistic here, ok?

If you claim misleading advertisement (which is your right and you should let the publisher know about this), you have to bring a few stronger arguments than "they said vague things that could be interpreted as 'xxx' and I got hyped on it", because that can be shot down with "common sense".

While I have a certain disgust for all the advertisment slogans you are attacked with on a daily basis (noticed that every minor movie is the "DVD event of the year" lately?, I think that anyone who had 5th grade (at least at German schools) has been informed on how to make decisions based on research rather than buying into slogans (because while ads are not neccessary lies, they usually highlight certain aspects of a product in a positive way while ignoring others in order to get the potential customer to give in to a buying impulse).

Children (and unfortunately some adults) have issues with that, which is why they can not make legally binding purchases until reaching an age where you expect them to have developed the amount of common sense not to buy something based on just slogans.

I don't disagree that there is a too much hype in this industry, but it's really not our job to play the shnining knight that battles and ultimately dies against this phenomen (meaning that you fail on the market today with your products if you don't get a certain amount of hype).

I think we are already very open about our products and don't refuse to discuss stuff that might affect sales in a negative way, which is more than you can say about a lot of our competitors.

We run these forums so that people can ask questions and inform themselves, and that the people in this community get a place to chat with other about their thoughts and they know that we provide as precise information as possible at the time so they can make their decision. During the development of NWN, I remember several people asking "Can I do XXX in regards to running a PW" and the prompt answer was "maybe, but it's not supported". If you take that for a yes, I think you have worse problems in your daily life (i.e. nigerian scammers having fun with your dollars).

My advice: Ask questions, get reviews if you are unsure about something, inform yourself before spending money, the world will become a much less dangerous place (for your wallet).

ELC/ILR for DA?
Yea, I'd be a bit careful with the word "cut" around Darcy, he takes quite a pleasure in using that word a lot, give him a reason and he'll cut movement or the graphics engine out of the game in no time