Dragon Age Forum News

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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

"no" ending?
The story will have a definite end. And while we may have more of an epilogue than we've done previously, you won't be able to wander around in some kind of story-less mode. I understand the sentiment behind wanting to do that (ie. wanting the game to continue on) but that isn't going to happen.

Dragon Age Setting
Two things:

1) The artistic style used in the E3 demo, both with regards to clothing & armor as well as architecture, has little in relation to the final styles that will be used in the final Dragon Age setting.
2) I don't know where the reviewer got the Oriental angle. That's quite a stretch and is just his own interpretation and not based on anything we said.

More:

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You just know any game so careful to avoid offending anyone's sense of realism has got to be immensely fun to play.

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Indeed. There will be plenty of time for that sort of griping after we've announced what will be in the game.

I want to be a lich!
I don't even think we have something like a lich. That said, I would generally argue that being undead is generally considered a bad thing. Great on the stats (which is as far as some see it, I guess), bad on the lifestyle.

General Direction of Dragon Age : Story Emphasis or Tool Emphasis

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In the case of KotOR I personally believe all the emphasis on a "cinematic" gaming experience ended up doing far more harm than good. Because the dialogue was entirely voice acted for example there was a hard cap on how much dialogue could be included and the number of possible responses at any given dialogue node was limited (3 was luxurious. In replaying the game recently I noticed that in most cases your initial dialogue options are limited to "Who are you?", "Can I ask you some questions" and "Nevermind").

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What's funny here is that we had less of a leash in terms of how much dialogue we could write with KotOR than we were with BG2. In BG2 we had a hard cap on word count and even spent a month going back and cutting down the length of every dialogue in the game.

For KotOR, meanwhile, there were no caps and nobody looming over our shoulder warning us to keep it short due to the cost of VO. The overall game is shorter, but I don't think the dialogues were lacking in complexity at all... I remember off the top of my head writing several very complex dialogues in Korriban alone.

BG2 was just a massively long game by comparison to KotOR. But don't confuse overall game length with dialogue complexity.

As for the initial dialogue options: that was true in cases where you didn't know the NPC in question. But you tell me: if you're walking up to someone you don't know and don't have any specific business with and are initiating dialogue with them, just how many things can you kick off a conversation with anyway? Not many.

With DA, the dialogues are having even more paths then before. It's quite literally headache-inducing for us poor writers, as we suddenly need to take into consideration all the background options as well as race and gender as well as new-fangled stuff like, oh, an NPC having a philosophical discussion with you where your answers to her questions rely on your background and (at last count) there are ten paths through that part of her dialogue alone. Not plot-critical, I suppose, but fun... and very wordy: VO is not a factor.

Darcy Pajak, Assistant Producer

2005 Release?

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So can you give us a rough estimate of how many Zots are being utilized in Dragon Age Stan? You may have to poke Darcy with a sharp stick to find out. he is the secretive evil type.

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2 things:
1 - It will not be done in 2005.
2 - It will take 200,000,487.thursday 1/2 zots
(disclaimer: the number of zots can change based on the following factors, and should not be taken as locked down:
Feature set additions based on what cool movie or game we saw last night.
Additions based on something the community thinks is cool.
Subtractions based on seeing another game try it and fail.
Subtractions based on cost of a feature.
Anything the publisher suggests.
James or David getting hit by a bus
Employment Headhunters
Bad donair
A really freaking good donair
Economic recession
Some brain damaged moron going on a killing spree and blaming CRPG as the reason, causing legislation controlling the content of video games.
Discovering the valley of the shmoo
etc)

(disclaimer#2: A zot is not a real time unit, but a made up thing created as a means to give examples of effort)

(disclaimer#3: Darcy Pajak's views do not represent the view's of BioWare, Dragon age, or reasonable people in general. In fact he's a crazy, sad little man with a shmoo fixation. Don’t listen to him)

Could you tell me when the demo releases?
We did a proof of concept demo, and showed it to selected Press and Publishers up until E3, now it's reserved to show really cool community members, and new employees what we're trying to do. It's not to show the community as a whole for a whole bunch of reasons. Wild speculation being the biggest. When we show it one on one we can answer questions, or explain details better. Typical developers provide a working demo of the game before it's final release, or more press demo's at trade shows. As we make Dragon Age there will be stuff to show off, and depending on size and distribution we may make a public demo. That is yet to be determined and would still be is a long way off.

Georg Zoeller, Designer

What about an API?
In case you are wondering what can happens when custom content makers have full access to everything within the game framework and are able to pack their changes into harmless looking "passive files"....Click Here

"no" ending?
While we are on the "ending topic"...Would be interesting to know what people consider a good ending. Which game had your favourite ending? (I bet it's not EoB I ) How did you like the ending in HotU?