Dragon Age Forum News (Sep. 16, 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

DA History, Geography, Languages, Etc: Beta Testing (reviewing) by Community

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Hades, don't take this the wrong way but I think they'd rather pour gasoline on themselves, light themselves on fire, and run naked through a field of blackberry bushes than give you the job of 'editing' their work.

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Now that's funny. I just about spit soup all over my monitor. As for a beta-test of the setting... I'm not so sure that it wouldn't be more trouble than it's worth. I can see the potential worth, don't get me wrong, but the thing about something like this is that it's mostly opinion and very little fact. I suspect we'd mostly get responses of what people liked and didn't like and far less about what was inconsistent or contradictory. It's not quite like looking for bugs

And while I suppose there would be some use by polling people about their likes/dislikes I'm not sure that the same thing couldn't be achieved internally. We do, after all, have over 200 employees here, all afficionados of games and other esotera, right?

Found out more about the world...

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ERmm...are elves going to be really grand and superior to the pathetic little humans? (as they shoould. They should be better at EVERYTHING..except maby mulitiplying)

If this answer is yes that just might be enough to improve my pesimistic view of the game (after that terrible no paladin punch in the stomach)

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Did I say there would be no paladins? No, I did not. Unless, of course, your definition of a paladin includes requirements like "lawful good" and glowing holy auras and such. But if that was your expectation, and you also think that elves should be Tolkienesque and nothing but... well, you're in for a world of disappointment, then, sadly.

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has the vast majority of the world been fully explored, or are there still large blank regions on their maps with "here their be dragons" written over it?

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The latter.

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In other words, does the storyline (so far) in your eyes make that specialty something believable. Do you (honestly) believe the storyline not to be too farfetched.

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That's not exactly a question I can answer 'yes' to, now, is it? So if I say 'no', it will seem hardly surprising. The answer is no, though... you're no child of prophecy, no unique snowflake of ultimate power, not chosen by the gods or destiny or otherwise selected by those far superior to you to do what they probably should be. Yet, anyway. We may throw a prophecy or two in before we're done, who knows?

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Alright then, I suppose I should jump in with a question too. My question is: Is there a comprehension of other planes of existence? Such as a "hell" plane where devils and demons live, or elemental planes where elementals live (either known or theorised)? Or is the world of Thedas it, with all creatures we will see native to it?

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Hmmm. I can't answer this without going into all sorts of things about magic and philosophy and religion, I'm afraid.

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My definition of a paladin is a holy warrior in shiny armour doing good.

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Then we don't have a problem. Did I say somewhere you couldn't be a holy warrior who did good?

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Quote: And I don't want elves to be copy/aste Tolkien work, but for them to be grand..better than humans..

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Yes, I saw what you wrote. Better at everything than humans except reproducing. Which would sort of make playing a human rather pointless, wouldn't it? Being so grand and "better" is something best left to perspective, probably.

Derek French, Technical Producer

Dragon Age's graphics...... and other games

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Bioware has claimed that they are using a SOTA engine for DA.

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What does SOTA stand for?

More: Ah, I got it figured out.

Silly, Obtuse Terrible Acronym!

Unreal Engine Speculation
That, and the fact that it says "an as-yet unannounced title" game, whereas Dragon Age is announced... Yeah, use the off topic thread provided.

Georg Zoeller, Designer

DA History, Geography, Languages, Etc: Beta Testing (reviewing) by Community
I don't see a "beta test" for the game background by the community happen. Not only that would inevitably contain a good amount of spoilers, it would also remove the joy of discovering a lot of this during the game (reading books, exploring sites and talking to the people there about the background, etc). That doesn't mean that there won't be information on the background and related things available before we ship and discussion about it. Including community feedback into our game development process is a good thing and has been very successful for NWN, but I think at some point you have to draw a line. As for knowledgeable critics - just the presence of certain individuals here on the board is reason enough not to do this kind of beta test - it would spoil them the fun of complaining about things like "fire giant skin color" and "how we get it all wrong" when the game is released.

A (very small) number of people got and will get to see what we have in store for various games and we were /will be certainly watching their reaction very carefully (or chained them into a focus test room to watch them through the one way mirror, right Shayna?) - but Orik is right, that's NDA stuff and I don't see us going out and NDA half of the community on the boards for this.

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Hades could be good as he is MOTIVATED. One wants the toughest possible critics doing the reviewing.

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Won't work, he's not representing anything close to our target audience.

I wouldn't mind having people giving stuff a critical eye, but people that have demonstrated their lack of understanding what we consider important a hundred times aren't the best group to test it, the game would end up fun for 5% of the market and confusing for the people we want to sell it to.

Plus he is too destructive - (as opposed to giving constructive critizism) too often which prevents him from being included into anything like this as this would seen as encouragement for such negative behavior. A motivated arsonist is still an arsonist.

I think Maria pretty much summed it up otherwise.

Z-axis...How important is it in an RPG?

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This thread seems to be focusing on the Freedom Force comparison a bit much. I'm sure I'm not the only one who's played World of Warcraft...? It's different than NWN or DA, of course-- massively multiplayer, not moddable, etc.-- but it has tons of quest/story content, and I daresay it's as ambitious (in terms of refinement if not revolution) as anything Bioware tries. I think if they wanted to use the WOW engine for a moddable party-based game they easily could. Does anyone see a downside to the z-axis and movement in WOW?

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It's an MMORPG. You control one character not a party. It's not story centric but free form. You might want to compare it to Morrowind, but not to DA.

MMORPGs are about as far away as it can get from what we want to create with DA.

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I just don't see how Bioware can claim to have a state of the art engine without a z axis in the game. If it doesn't have a Z axis with fully destructable terrain, then its not SOTA.

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To define State of the Art, you would need to know what Art means. The Art of making a BioWare RPG perhaps? Ahh, I see.

State of the Art =! Hades favourite features.

It's like telling the guys at id that their Doom3 engine is not state of the art as they don't use more than 4 or 5 creatures per scene and since Halo and Halflife both featured more creatures per scene ... you get it *(hopefully).

Dragon Age's graphics...... and other games
As for Hades posts, I think we are at the point where it's about his strong confidence in the ability of game companies to learn from their previous games and improve them... Well, maybe small consistency issues when comparing his posts here with posts on other boards, err well...

Unreal Engine Speculation
The official place for speculation about this press announcement is here: Click Here

Bioware using Unreal Engine 3

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Wow, now I'm intrigued! The obvious conclusion is that they're developing a first person perspective RPG. This could either be very good or very bad

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Unreal Engine games *can* be 3rd person. Notable examples would be splinter cell 1 and 2.

Firefox 1.0 PR is out!
I like the Live Bookmark feature as it works with our very own forum RSS feeds

http://www.bioware.com/feeds/

Just add a Live Bookmark to http://www.bioware.com/rss/bioware_off_topic.rss and you get your offtopic forum right from the bookmarks ... just neat!

Found out more about the world...
Just to show that the word "paladin" has meanings that can be quite different from definition used in D&D. Click Here Google Wikipedia

Stanley Woo, Quality Assurance

Queries about the mods and Bioware in general

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But wondering if you need the scripting/programming skills to be able to say "this went wrong, because.." ?

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Nope, though we do have several QA guys who have a programming background, plus a QA Programmer.

 

Good, not too cliche thingies.

I actually hope they do. Prophecies are the worst form of cliche, but I actually like it. So insert it, pretty please.

Can people please start to make a distinction between rpg (and DA) and D&D rules and setting?

Well, I would still play the human, if they inserted the reproducing part

 

Oh my, I must make a will save or I'll write another rant about paladins not being D&D's own concept but merely an adaptation. There's no need to give up the paladin name if they aren't making the class the same as it is in D&D.

 

Well, thanks to my comment on the quote, you don't need to write an entire book again.