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Dragon Age Forum News

Discussion in 'Game/SP News & Comments' started by chevalier, Jul 28, 2004.

  1. chevalier

    chevalier Knight of Everfull Chalice ★ SPS Account Holder Veteran

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    Here are today's BioWare 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

    In the interest of style
    That's not impossible. Keep in mind, however, that the more time we spend making combats more elaborate, the less time we can spend on things outside of combat.

    More:
    This is the kind of stuff that worries me, Dave. I could be wrong (if not obtuse), but I think DA is still in its formative stages where creativity and innovation should be discussed freely in the hopes that maybe one or two little ideas grow into something useful. Is now really the time for us posters to be worrying about budgets or resource tradeoffs? You are starting to sound like a corporate manager ... you're not, are you?
    I in no way am squelching creativity and innovation, but those two things do not and should not exist in a vacuum. We could do what Zelphi suggested, and it might indeed be an interesting concept, but it's also no small task and goes far beyond simple whipping up a bunch of extra animations. If we spend all that time on making combats all the more impressive, the time is going to have to come from other places. Does that make me a "corporate manager"? Is that what you honestly think? That keeping reality in mind is the same as running about the forums like a dried-up old coot shaking his fist at the durned kids to get off his lawn? "No that can't be done! You and your new-fangled ideas! Git!" (Not that corporate managers are actually like this, I suspect, but that seems to be the implication that you're using here.) Don't be silly. If I see an idea that I think is interesting but I think it needs a reality check as well, I'll say so. I mean, do you think we designers meet in groups away from the programmers and producers and such and talk about ideas in absentia of such things as resource management at any stage? What would be the use of that?

    Is now really the time for you posters to be worrying about budgets or resource tradeoffs? Of course it is. It always is. That is, it is if you really want the idea to have the potential to grow into something useful, as you say. Incidentally: I know you've declared yourself the Keeper of Innovation lately, Argyle, but accusing me of being a corporate manager? Really? Ow.

    Seemless Area Transitions and Multiple Servers

    <Begin Sarcasm>I know when I used to play PnP D&D (20 years ago) we had to wait on "Area Transitions". </end Sarcasm>
    Actually, you did. When the DM goes, "And you spend about three uneventful days on the road to Bergstown. You finally get there in the late afternoon, coming over the hill as you spot the ---" That's a transition, the same as our area transitions. DM's just get to tailor these kinds of things to the moment, with this kind of "blurred time" being something that PnP can do easily while a computer (where everything must be literal) cannot. I know the original comment was sarcasm, but I thought I'd point this out as not everyone actively keeps in mind this one inherent difference between the mediums.

    Georg Zoeller, Designer

    BioWarez, or level 4 Protection From Piracy spell

    Please, Biowar, whatever your publisher plans, DO NOT let them use Starforce or other user-crippling copy protections that refuse to work on a lot of computers or are the reason for massive performance hits.
    I can assure you that nobody around here is thrilled about the ideas of stealth drivers being installed on a users system with a game. That said, the final decision about any copy protection is with the publisher, but you can be assured that we will voice our opinion on that matter.

    Seemless Area Transitions and Multiple Servers

    Which does raise the question of what changed between HotU and DA.
    HotU was an expansion pack with an expansion pack sized team and an expansion pack schedule. Click Here Do most people who buy our products buy them for SP? Yes, by far. Why have multiplayer?
    A couple of possible reasons:
    - probably 10-20% of the people buy your game for multiplayer. Probably 10% wouldn't buy it at all if it had no multiplayer. (10-20% of total sales can be around 200k - 400k units...)
    - multiplayer games tend stay longer in the shelves and thus can sell more on the long run.
    - multiplayer games tend to get better and longer ad exposure, especially on the internet.
    - multiplayer games (and custom content) build community (which is very valuable to us).
    - custom content is best experienced in multiplayer. People want to show off the stuff they do, and multiplayer games give you a lot more exposure (above).
    - maybe adding multiplayer is fun for the programmers?

    Even BG II had multiplayer, through certainly not a whole lot of people ever played it (I stopped after an hour because my buddy pressed the pause key more than any button on his mouse). Did it take away from the official campaign? The plan on DA is to have a seperate campaign optimized for multiplayer, but that doesn't mean singleplayer has to suffer for that - it means that the singleplayer campaign won't have to pass on certain things in order to support multiplayer. It's not that we didn't learn anything from NWN or so

    More:
    size of the design team not invalidate the reasons given for why hotu were sp only. by dumping th mp campaign you not necessarily lose mp players neither. look at all your pws out there. ask the folks who play and design pws if they purchased hotu? biowarians has noted, from time to time, that less than 10% of folks ever played the official campaign in mp. rpgdot likes to quote something that suggests the number is closer to 1%. what does you get by dumping a mp campaign? more resources to spend on stuff that mp and sp players alike both want... rather than a mp campaign that almost nobody actually plays. lost sales? doubtful.

    "Even BG II had multiplayer, through certainly not a whole lot of people ever played it (I stopped after an hour because my buddy pressed the pause key more than any button on his mouse). Did it take away from the official campaign?" yes, it did. you really should speak with your coworkers... the guys who complained for years 'bout the resources wasted and concessions made to add a feature to game that most folks never used. "- maybe adding multiplayer is fun for the programmers?" maybe this is the real reason.

    *shrug*

    HA! Good Fun!
    The 1% figure is a bit too low I think. Yepp, with HotU we did add a lot of value to the existing multiplayer aspect of NWN, be it PW players or other people. New feats, spells, scripting functions, robes, tiles, monsters, etc, etc benefit both thesp and mp faction - so the impact of not having a MP campaign was certainly small (and on that ground the decision against mp was made). Keep in mind however that for a full product, while only a small percentage of the people actually the play the official campaign, it is the only thing that is there when a game is released. During the first months NWN was released, the official campaign was about the only thing people played. Without anything to play in multiplayer for the first months, you run risk that people drop your product before it really gets going, so you can't really compare an expansion pack to a full new game. Plus, if you want to add multiplayer, you need to have a campaign with it, otherwise people will feel cheated. ("Hey, the box said MP, but I need to wait 5 month for someone to put out something I can play?").

    For sake of sanity, no clutter on the tilesets!
    The reasons why those things were cooked into the tileset information in NWN is performance. Seperate objects like placeables take up far more resources than things that are part of the tile geometry and they are soo much cheaper on the pathfinding cost. In NWN you could put the cost for pathfinding through the roof by putting a few placeables in the right, err wrong spots and this is something very noticeable for players ("why does my henchman not follow me there?"...) However, DA is not using the system for areas that NWN did, so this does not really apply anymore

    Brenon Holmes, Programmer

    Seemless Area Transitions and Multiple Servers

    Next time around (in DA), it would be nice to have a few of those things, and some more "Set" functions for objects so I don't need thousands of container blueprints for variable DCs and appearances, which could be used by single or multiplayer builders, including Bioware.
    The current plan with DAScript is to open up a lot of the interface between scripting and the game engine. It's quite likely that you'll be able to change quite a bit more than you were able to in NWN. Even some things that might not necessarily be considered 'safe'.
     
    Last edited by a moderator: Jan 3, 2018
    chevalier, Jul 28, 2004
    #1
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