Dragon Age Forum News (Oct. 06, 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

Romance options

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Quote: But let's give Bioware the benefit of the doubt. How do you explain the limited dialogue in KotOR -including, for example, the absence of an alternate same sex dialogue for Carth and Bastilla- if not by cost restrictions?

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Carth and Bastila did not have same-sex romance dialogue because they do not romance members of the same sex. Juhani did because she does, exclusively. That is who these characters are.

Certainly there are budgets on how much time we can spend writing, but in the case of KotOR even had we had had the opportunity to write more I'm not sure that's the direction we would have gone in, regardless.

EDIT: On re-examining this, I wonder if Amiety actually didn't mean romance at all, but same-sex friendships. If that is the case, I would say that writing seperate friendship dialogue even when there is a romance that already exists for a character is not something we've even really considered doing until now.

More:

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besides dialog options, how about improvements on the visuals? we got see huggings, kissings and various different types of visual enhancements?

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That comes down to animations, which may be easier considering the whole motion-capture thing, but I'm not sure that's been settled yet. Part of the issue depends on whether we will have models of very different sizes... that alone makes interactive animations much more problematic. I know it's something that I personally have been lobbying for, though.

why transparent dialogue skill checks in DA would be a bad thing

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i'm suggesting that, at the very least, they should be presented in a more literary style, e.g:

1. (bluffing) "don't bother running, you'll never escape"
2. (intimidating) "if you move i'll kill you"
etc

instead of:

1. [bluff] "don't bother running, you'll never escape"
2. [intimidate] "if you move i'll kill you"
etc

it's obviously not a big deal, but anything to minimize the clunkiness of dialogue skills is probably a good thing.

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Err... not to point out the obvious or anything, but are you aware that the only difference between your two options is that the first uses round brackets and a present verb tense. Why is that more literary?


I think in regards to this it needs to be kept in mind that this is a game with mechanics and abstraction involved. I think the point with indicating the skill involved when it comes up in dialogue is so that the player knows for certain the bar for success. Otherwise you might see a response that looks like it might involve persuasion... but if you fail you might be left to wonder if that was because the line was not a good one or because your skill was low. In a way, we are also letting the player know that their skills are indeed having an effect on dialogue and when and not leave them guessing.

Could we leave them invisible? Certainly, and there are points to be made in favor of that, too, but isn't gameplay at least as important a consideration for something like this as flavour?

Culture Hints
Such is the tricky part of introducing the setting in a way that makes it look like the character knows what is going on while still teaching it to the player.

Direct game clues are an idea, but if used I'd suspect would be best used for non-critical information. Speaking for myself, I'd suspect my eyes would start to glaze over if presented with something so heavy-handed.

Georg Zoeller, Designer

"Semi-real time" gameplay again?

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The "realtime with pause" gameplay is almost a certainty in my opinion. In order to be a "spiritual successor" to NWN and BG, that's the sort of control system they've both used.

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Well, we have said numerous times that we consider
"full turn based" (like in fallout / silent storm) as not optimal for the kind of games we create and that DA won't be "twitch based" (while you need to keep in mind that this is our defintion of twitch based, not the definition of twitch based other people might have. Whether or not you hit someone in combat is mainly dependent on your characters stats / equipment, etc and not on your skill on the controller/mouse/keyboard - as opposed to i.e. Jade Empire, where hits are based on creature collission volumes)

Considering that we use a newly created rules system for DA, I wouldn't bank on "exactly like BG" or "exactly like NWN", but the general direction is correct, after all those systems seemed to be pretty popular with a lot of people