Dragon Age Forum News (Nov. 8, 04)

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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

will persistent worlds be in?

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Most of the resentment coming out of the PW community is the result of misleading prerelease PR. While the term "persistant world" was never used, "24/7, massive worlds, huge player bases(we were told 64x64 player bases)" got regular exercise down in Bioware and Atari PR land before the game's release.

The amount of denial surrounding this is curious to say the least. BW know that a proportion of customers bought the product to bring their campaign worlds to life, it was part of the PR.

That NWN was never intented to host a persistant or MMo world is obvious from an architectural POV, but that contradicts what we were told. Some people actually have an attention span longer than 30 seconds and a memory past last week. Telling these people that BW never advertised NWN as a persistant world builder is false, no matter how much denial is paid to that fact.

My assessment of the CRPG community is that developers can't run away from toolsets and persistant support fast enough. Its strangely ironic that NWN will probably be the best PW building toolkit for at least a decade to come(yes, I looked at the obisan website and NWN2 is looking woeful - worse than NWN).

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Sigh. I remember very clearly and consistently telling the folks in the PW crowd throughout NWN's development that the things they were talking about were not really supported and might not even be possible. Not that there wasn't plenty of hype about the game out there, but the tagline "create your own worlds" conjured some very specific images in some folks' heads despite what we said on the forums.

Not that we said that PW's wouldn't be possible, because obviously they are... we just cautioned that some folks were getting pretty carried away with their interpretations of the specs and that in no way would PW-type applications be officially supported. We would do what we could not to restrict that form of use, but never could someone come to us and say "I can't do my persistent world properly! It breaks!" and we would be required to fix it. That's all we've ever said.

We've never set out to design a PW-maker, and we're not promising that DA will be any better or worse in that respect. It's not a consideration in the design. Again, we're not designing against it, but if some change or fix is needed down the line for something that DA is intended for that will make PW's impossible, then that's how it has to be. Darcy's comment is only one additional consideration as to why we might be leery of ever giving PW's more consideration.

Not that it's impossible. Obviously there's a nice chunk of people in the community who want PW support and are bound and determined and fairly brilliant and if we can accomodate them, of course we will.

Dialogue and voice for the main character.
I think part of it is that since you will have multiple player response options (usually), you don't want to go on at length because you have limited space. The player also needs to be able to read through and understand those options quickly.

Part of it is also a hesitation on our part (the writers) to put too many words in the player's mouth. I remember experimenting with this and it never felt quite right inserting the player's end of the conversation... the longer it got, after all, the less options you could have (back to the limited-space-thing) and if you just had one must-choose player dialogue where you have the player talking at length... well, it felt like I was impugning on the player's character.

I am a bit averse, as well, to adding multiple responses solely to provide personality on behalf of the player. Motivation, yes, personality, no. Do you really want a whole list, after all, of responses that add in "snarky" and "serious" versions and so forth if what's being said amounts to the exact same thing?

Is that a silly idea? I don't know. You tell me.

Darcy Pajak, Assistant Producer

Gold in them thar hills? Pffft.
Gold is used as currency mostly because most new CRPG players knows that gold is valuable and they should collect it. It's simple to have "gold pieces" in the game as the only coin to barter becuase then developers don't have to worry about exchange rates, extra layout slots, etc. And just because it's called a "gold piece" doesn't mean that it's 100% pure gold. It could be lead with some gold wrapped around it with a stamp.

Derek French, Technical Producer

Languages
And the callout that most how and when and where decisions are made by the publisher, which we don't have yet.

Brenon Holmes, Programmer

Languages
I don't think we'll be sure what localizations we'll be doing until closer to release.