Dragon Age Forum News (Sep. 17, 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

Found out more about the world...

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As for my question about the setting and people: Does your race and/or career and/or sex affect interactions with locals?

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Your background, class, race and/or sex affects many dialogues throughout the game, from the locals to the nobles. Every factor doesn't affect every dialogue, naturally (that would be hell to write), but it's very common.

More:

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Well actually, devine powers (at least some) and the existance of True Good are very important to me. So in the basis, it will not be the "true" paladin, since there is no Ture Good (aka - the one true Good god) Since you like the "subjective morality and good" thing, I can't very well do nothing about it, but then again, not everyone can be satisfied...

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Oh. Well that does sort of contradict what you just said was important to you, but whatever. Yes, not everyone will be satisfied... hopefully most will still find plenty to enjoy, however.

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Quote: Nope. The point of a Role Playing Game is to play a role. What's the point of multiple races if they are all balanced in the end?

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Not balanced in every respect, but not unbalanced. If a halfling is very weak physically compared to other races then he should have other advantages compared to them as well. That's just basic gameplay.

Sorry, but suggesting that balance should be ignored and that some races should "rule" in everything just because and that other races should be available purely for roleplaying reasons, and that challenges throughout the game should accomodate this imbalance... well, that seems a bit backward to me.

At any rate, it is sufficient to say that elves will NOT rule in everything. They have a number of aspects that one would expect to see in elves, but also a great many differences. We certainly would not subject them to silly fantasy stereotypes just because.

Further arguments on this should go in its own thread, please.

Darcy Pajak, Assistant Producer

Z-axis...How important is it in an RPG?
Just before I lock this thread I'd like to clarify my point. A z-axis is just a means to an end. In the same way that 1 million polygon models are. But to what end? What situation, what story element does this help us achive? Is it the thief climbing through windows? Is it jumping from one floating platform to another at just the right time so you can get the talisman? Is it jumping from a castle wall into the moat to escape the evil Baron and his cursed minions? All these situations can be emulated in our engine, or worked out through scripting, so we don’t need to create a z-axis. And flying is another matter. Magic or pure fantasy has to be used to justify a person flying. We want Magic to be a rare and special thing in our game. To create a z-axis for a few moments where a player might fly or ride a flying beast is not worth the effort. Although it would be cool we’re not making Dragon Riders of Pern ™, or Magic Carpet.™

We are making a game where the user is called upon to defeat a great antagonist, and become a hero. They’re going to get themselves into sticky situations which will require strength, intelligence, talented party members, and resources to solve. This all takes place in a world with very simple technology where fears and mysteries from our mythology have been realized in the form of monsters in Dragon Age. Where players will meet other sentient races that represent the best and worse of what we see in ourselves. A place where people can use the forces of nature to heal or harm others with “magic”. It’s a fantastic journey and the most memorable parts will be; “what a cool place <location> was”, and “When we overcame <challenge>”, or “what a character <Henchmen>” is, or “Can you believe <story event> happened?”. Some people will say “When I received <powerful magic item>”, or “I have an attack bonus of X” and I was able to kill <monster> in no time.” Still some people will be even happier saying “I was able to complete the game in 5 hours and found it terribly easy”. What we will not hear is “It was so cool when I jumped that fence”.

The One Feature I would most like to see in DA is . . .!
Great information everyone. I have to lock this thread as it's become too large. We'll ask again later on as there always more things that come up time and again.

Jay Watamaniuk, Community Manager

DA History, Geography, Languages, Etc: Beta Testing (reviewing) by Community
I'd have to go with Georg and Dave on this one: I do get the idea behind opening a beta-like experience to our vast community...but the downsides are impressive to say the least. A few of which are:

1. If you have ever sat on a committee or a meeting with more than 4 people things take longer. In this case the game would not be released until the human race's limbs have atrophied and we have begun to address each other through mental commands and use the Quatlo as our currency.

2. I am hoping that some of those 1 in a 1000 people (even geniuses) work here to represent that section of humanity although I fear Dave's ego at such a statement.

3. Nothing will be agreed upon. Everything will need to change. There will be no end product; no consensus upon world. In fact I would say that months and months would be needed to agree on every single name of the races, lands and even NPC. We took forever here at BioWare to pick out a title for the game and we are only 200.

4. If any group can make a AAA game why don't more get made?

So in the end I love the idea of such involvement but from the harsh practical side of things the informal way BioWare has created through these very forums does serve the purpose of helping to steer design decisions from actual fans who have a passion for RPGs.

Facial animations: accessible to builders?
I think the lip animation stuff is as good as the software that runs it as we will not be synch up words of dialogue with facial animation...at least I hope I don't discover a secret lab in the basement where trained animation monkeys are busy attaching individual words to specific facial expressions. Will our be good? Well since lip animation is getting better and better with each use in games I think we will have a fair shot at creating something that is pretty darn cool.

Georg Zoeller, Designer

Z Axis Really Necessary?

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Then again both KOTOR and NWN wouldn't have sold half as much if they weren't SW and D&D games-not to mention the lack of competition at the time-,

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This is an impression I do not share - I've seen StarWars game flop horribly and I've seen D&D games not being a commercial success or sell even close to the numbers we sell for our games.

Brenon Holmes, Programmer

Facial animations: accessible to builders?

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So how do you guys do the lipsync? Is it all done by hand?

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I'm not sure how it'll end up being done on DA, but in previous projects we take the VO and run it through a program that interprets it and identifies phonemes. It then writes out a file with that time-index and a particular mouth shape (lip files). During the game, I believe we simply read from the lip file and interpolate between the various mouth shape animations. At least that's my understanding of the process... it's possible I'm wrong.