Dragon Age Forum News

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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.

Georg Zoeller, Designer

Complexity = good!
I think the optimal experience is easy to learn, hard to master through this has somewhat limited application in a RPG. Complexity is good as long as it is presented in a way that makes it easy for the player to understand what's going on.

Will DA be difficult and long enough?
Let's put it this way: When you are moving on new ground (i.e. own IP, new rules system, etc), you better make sure that the game you are developing still retains some of the elements that made people buy and love your previous games.

It wouldn't be very smart to *completely* change your winning recipe in one step, because if you throw too much of what you've done in the past overboard in a single game you

a) lose the advantage of your team's experience. If you start over with too many things at once, you lose technical and creative experience you gained with your previous games and your development time will skyrocket.

b) run a huge risk of alienating your loyal fans/customers and potentially losing them.

Innovation is good and necessariy to keep on top, but there is no need for radical innovation if your system works. Stepwise improvement is much smarter

BioWare is innovating - with Jade we are entering new ground in many ways (Action based combat, no "classbased" system, etc), with NWN we entered new ground (modable RPG, 3D engine) and with DA we will again enter new ground. But all of these games also have BioWare signature elements that most of the people that buy our games expect from us. NWN went a small bit too far from what people expected and there was quite some critique about it - and we went in with hordes and tried to fix those (i.e. henchman interactivity, number of henchmen) and the review scores tell us that we were on the right track.

In the end there is only space for so much innovation in a single game, and you will do a risk analysis and see if "that piece more of innovation" is really worth a significant higher development time or potential lost base customers.

Finally, not doing certain things doesn't mean we are not willing to innovate, it can also mean that we think these things don't work, don't work in a BioWare game or that market / technology are not ready for them yet. If we think that i.e. "turnbased combat" or "learning by doing" doesn't belong into a BioWare game, there is no way you will see it.

I mean, if it was all about the big buck and such, it would be a lot easier for us to do what most companies seem to be doing these days and throw a couple more sequels at you guys, these are so much cheaper to develop and tend to sell pretty good.

Things that have gone over well in other rpg's

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Having played ToEE, and enjoying the combat design, I've since come to the conclusion that the pseudo-realtime combat is the better choice. This is the method where you can pause (or have set autopause) and issue commands to your party members at will. Then you can let it go. If you don't want to have slow combat, you can go at it in realtime as you please. ToEE's combat really slowed the game down to a crawl and I think moving away from full turn-based combat is perfect. Even with games like FO, it could have been easily done with a nice pseudo-realtime system to speed up gameplay.

That way, you can still get all the strategy, tactics, and magic aiming you need, while allowing the player to set it up the way they like. BG2 had it right for a party-based game.

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There is a problem with that though

I aim a Fireball, and by the time i'm finished Casting the target has moved out of the spot i targeted, which never happens in PnP or turn based CRPGs

I should be able to aim Magick after casting, or pick a enemey to be the Target and not a piece of terrian

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In NWN, when you aimed the fireball on a creature, you would cast it on the creatue, regardless of movement or not...

BioWarez, or level 4 Protection From Piracy spell
Hehe, the monthly copy protection discussion/rant. Copy protection is up to the publisher. This game doesn't have a publisher signed. End of story.

David Gaider, Designer

Seamless Area Transitions and Multiple Servers
Seamless area transitions could work. No-one's saying they couldn't. As Tarmack said, however, if one is going to use them it's a huge design decision that affects many things down the line. So many other game elements will need to accomodate that decision down the road.

Sacred and Dungeon Siege both use the seamless transitions as I understand, and I'm sure those games have their particular strengths as well as weaknesses... including some major differences from something like NWN, some of which are going to be necessitated solely because of those seamless transitions.

So we could have seamless area transitions, but it would change a lot of things about how DA would work compared to NWN. Some good and some bad, no doubt, but eventually we need to decide which effects are most important to us and go that one.

One effect that WILL NOT be taken into consideration when making this decision, however, is how seamless area transition would affect the development of PW's. While I truly find the idea truly baffling that developing a PW-maker for $50 is some veritable gold mine waiting to come into being, that's neither here nor there. Maybe I'm wrong and that's correct, maybe a PW-maker would be a smart way to go. DA can't be everything for everyone and we can't afford to spend our time including features that will work the best for making PW's AND making a single-player game AND making a multiplayer game AND making a good toolset to make single/multi-player modules. We've said where our focus lies and that we will support PW-making as far as that focus allows... and if someone else wants to come along and get rich making a system that primarily focuses on PW-making instead, then God bless 'em. But that ain't us. Period.

Spellcasting time- please not all the same like NWN
The reason all casting times were the same in NWN is because that's how the 3rd edition D&D rules dictated it to be. Casting always took a simple action, no more, no less... unless one used the Quicken Metamagic feat. There's no need to do the same in Dragon Age. What kind of casting times would you prefer to see? Or maybe there should be no actual "casting" at all?

Darcy Pajak, Assistant Producer

Limits to number of PCs in party

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My impression was that the number of PCs each player could control within the party was going to be what was limited. Would a BioWaran care to comment?

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That's right, we don't want 64 parties of 4~6 people each playing in a module. We haven't set a limit on the number of people on a server, but we are thinking of allowing only one henchmen per player in a multiplayer game.

 

How long was Baldur's Gate in measure of gameplay hours if you did absolutely everything for the first time?

And isn't difficulty relative, I died numerous (underrated) times the first time I played Baldur's gate II. After ten times nothing is difficult with the exception of mods.

 

There are longer RPGs, some of them take months, but 200 hours is already much. I hope DA won't end up 30-40 hours long and with great "replayability potential". Replayability potential means you have diverse character options allowing you to render a completely different character as well as diverse dialogue and quest solution options allowing you much the same with respect to plot advancement, however, you are still having the same dialogues and doing the same quests. Especially if you have photographic memory, or even simply decent attention focus, you won't find much pleasure in running through one game so many times. Unless you only or mostly play for character building, then that would be fine.

 

Agreed, that would mean a game that looks nothing as the single player campaign of Neverwinter Nights. And I am probably alone on this but give me lots and lots of fed ex quests, I love 'em. Of course there should also be a number of meaningful quests