Dragon Age Forum News

Remove all ads!

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

NPC reaction to the PC

---

Yeah. After I killed Carth's kid at the Sith Academy, Carth was still trying to get in my female PC's pants... That was too funny...

---

And, if true, would be a bug. If you killed Carth's son, he normally does not speak to you again. As to the original poster: yes, we are aiming at having more recognition by the world not only of your deeds, but of your background as race, class and background as well. I've done numerous dialogues that have entire sections devoted to just one background, for instance. When I'm done writing it, I sit back and think to myself, "Wow... only someone who picks Background X is ever going to even see that one." But then I remind myself how very special someone with Background X will feel when they read that, and those sorts of things are all over the place.

More:

---

Would be interesting to know if Backgrounds(tm) are tied to class and/or race.

---

Currently, yes, your selection of Backgrounds is based on what class and race you are, though the final number and types of Backgrounds is not finalized yet. To clarify on what's said in the FAQ a bit: if I'm going to be an elven mage (just a race and class off the top of my head, nothing implied) I want to feel like an elven mage and I want to be treated like an elven mage. I want that quintessential elven mage experience. So rather than starting the game in a tavern and just happening to be an elven mage we go back a bit earlier in the story and start with what it was like to be a mage and an elf and what happened in my life that propelled me into the story. It affects how my story plays out as well as how it ends. From a writing perspective that's a tall order (and an exhausting one) but one I'm rather pleased we're getting the opportunity to explore.

More:

---

I hope for your sake that Dragon Age doesn't have a huge number of class & race combinations.

---

It does and it doesn't. I can't explain it without giving out more info about how our class system works, but no... there's not going to be that many backgrounds. That would be just silliness. We want to provide a variety of archetypal fantasy experiences while still giving enough variety... but it also has to be do-able in my lifetime.

More:

---

Er... Again, I don't quite know about how this is set up, of course, but what about multi-class types? Like my favored Ranger/Rogue combo. Would it only recognize one? Or is there some wierd way of... er... Okay, let's just say "Or what?"

---

What do you mean? I'm not going to go into detail on our class structure, as I said, but even in D&D you don't start off multi-classed, do you? And while you might be able to make a Ranger/Rogue-type of character it does not necessarily follow that we will even have multi-classing.

More:

---

What's the plan for introducing this basic background information to the player during character creation? Let's say I decide to create a dwarven fighter, expecting the generic gruff, solemn, clannish, axe wielding tank with a remote mountain upbringing. Would I, as a player, be told that the dwarven fighter background actually involved ululating, swamp-mucking, spear-chucking hedonist (uh, for example) before or after the module starts? IF during character creation, do you plan to have the player choose a background, and then appropriate race/class combinations, or chose race and class, then provide which backgrounds make sense (perhaps having had it narrowed down to only the mysterious past)?

---

You would be given an array of backgrounds to choose from during character creation and told what they involve before you choose them. However, while the backgrounds put you in a place and situation they still assume as little about your character as possible. Your dwarven fighter might have a clan and a home, for instance, but you would establish for yourself just how much of an ululating hedonist you are.

Georg Zoeller, Designer

Non-human companions

---

Once again, no reply from Bioware. Might this mean no animal companions?

---

Not commenting on stuff is usually neither a confirmation nor a denial. Things will be revealed when their time comes. "Patience", so sayeth the Georg.

Tim Smith, Tools Programmer

DA scripting language
I doubt you will be able to take NWN scripts and port them to DA via an automated tool we supply. The reason being is that even though the structure might not change, the API routines are changing significantly.

Priorities list: custom content
We are well aware of the contribution that custom content has made to NWN. Two of the four people profiled this Wednesday are community members who now work on DA. I myself did a fair amount of work for custom content prior to joining BioWare and now I am lead tools for DA (it will be all my fault).

But all is not wine and roses (boy, that statement dates me). There is nothing we can do to make everyone happy. We could spend 10 years developing a toolset that meets everyone's needs from the newbie to the master. But that would drive BioWare out of business and 20% of the community still wouldn't be happy because you can never really please everyone. So everyday we make some very hard choices about how we will present things to the end user. But I know that the reaction to the toolset will run the gambit between people who love it and people who think that we are idiots. For every 20 people who love the toolset only one will post on the forum saying how great it is. For every 20 people who hate the toolset, 15 will think to themselves "what morons" and never use the toolset again. The other five will post endlessly about how bad the toolset is.

I can deal with this since it is to be expected and it really isn't the fault of the end user. They have expectations and when they aren't met, they get disappointed and angry. That is normal and there really isn't anything wrong with that. (As long as people act with at least a minimum level of maturity.)

What I don't want is people running around saying that BioWare is ignoring the needs of the end user just because feature X isn't there. Not that I am trying to lower expectations, but the end users aren't privy to the reasons why feature X wasn't done. To be perfectly honest, most of the reasons given why X wasn't done on the forums by people who DON'T work for BioWare are wrong. I didn't realize how wrong they where until I saw how some of my pet theories where totally wrong when I transitioned from community member to a BioWare employee.

Often when feature X isn't included, it is because it is in total contradiction to feature Y. This happens more that people think. Keep in mind that when I use the word feature, I consider most every element in the game a feature. Stability is a feature. Quality and quantity of content is a feature. Ease of content creation is a feature. Right there we hit three features that are intertwined. How can you create a large quantity of quality content easily.

So all I really want to say is that we are thinking of you guys a LOT. Often it boils down to what is good for you guys is also good for us. Then again, NWN has shown us that what is good for you guys can be bad for us. In the end, I will get flamed for providing a toolset that doesn't meet the needs of everyone. To some of those people it will seem obvious to them that a feature should have been in the toolset. In some instances we will have totally missed the boat and never even considered a feature. But more often than not, we decided that for the health of the total project, it was best not to implement something that on the surface seems a no brainier.

(EDIT: Ok, I really didn't answer your question because I can't really talk about specifics. But I hope what I said will put to rest any fears you might have.)

Brenon Holmes, Programmer

Will DA be more event-driven?
A few comments:

A full load on the scripting engine is about equal to the load on the graphics engine at the moment in terms of CPU.

Perception is only run on creatures, it was only ever designed to run on creatures. Changing the perception system so that it could apply to non-creature objects, a relatively significant amount of work, isn't really worth it as the demand for something like that is quite small.

As far as changing the event model... interesting. The only thing to keep in mind is that we can't change the interface to the system too drastically. So I could see something like maybe the ability to add a listener to a specific event for a specific object (remember that events are targetted - one event per object) in which case when that object received the event the other object would be notified.

Additionally, we are exposing a lot more of the engine in DAScript so it will be possible to do quite a bit more than you could with NWScript. One specific instance of this is the action queue (or command queue as we're calling it now) which you will be able to get direct access to and modify to your heart's content.