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Dragon Age Forum News

Discussion in 'Game/SP News & Comments' started by Taluntain, Aug 20, 2004.

  1. Taluntain

    Taluntain Resident Alpha and Omega Staff Member ★ SPS Account Holder Resourceful Adored Veteran Pillars of Eternity SP Immortalizer (for helping immortalize Sorcerer's Place in the game!) New Server Contributor [2012] (for helping Sorcerer's Place lease a new, more powerful server!) Torment: Tides of Numenera SP Immortalizer (for helping immortalize Sorcerer's Place in the game!) BoM XenForo Migration Contributor [2015] (for helping support the migration to new forum software!)

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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

    Will Dragons be a possible player race?
    Yes, playing as a dragon sounds like a fun game. I believe you can do that, even, in a game called "Horizons".

    You will not be able to in Dragon Age, however. Period. If someone wants to mod it somehow, then all the power to them.

    Two rings or ten?
    Quote: From NWVault’s E3 preview (emphasis mine): Once at the bottom they were standing in front of a lake and the female magic user starts saying how she can't find her ring of focusing with her body language mirroring what she was saying. Now I understand that things are not set in stone, but that certainly seems to indicate that you’re planning on including enchanted rings.
    And, once again, that was a tech concept demo, more to show graphical quality, the new animation concepts and the mass battle stuff. It was not intended to have more than a peripheral relation to the actual Dragon Age story or setting.

    How about... ahem... riders?
    When I first heard of Dragon Age I was hoping that it would be agame built on and expanded from Neverwinter and the other games, allowing for many of the things that were TRULY desired by the community to make thier custom modules with and not restricted by any limitations of the D&D license. A true to heart "Fantasy RPG" that could be Modded and Haked to be just about anything relatively easy. Every RPG gamers dream. From reading these posts it sounds like Dragon Age is going to be a revamped graphical engine built around a strictly official single player campaign with Multiplayer and all other features not directly associated with "The Single Player Game" being given low priority (translated to "It MIGHT be in a patch 2 years after the game comes out but most likely a hlaf-*** ugly hak made by the community"), much the same mentality that Neverwinter was built on. Does this mean Bioware is going to spend ANOTHER 4 years developng essentially "The same game"?
    So... I don't get it. If THAT'S what you think the NWN mentality was, why would you hope for the former? You just thought that maybe Dragon Age would be NWN but everything NWN was not and include everything NWN didn't? And because it isn't and never intended to be, that's a bad thing? Well, alrighty then. I'm interested to see how much closer Obsidian's NWN2 comes to that ideal but we've said right from the beginning that Dragon Age is the spiritual successor to BG and KotOR as much as NWN and is not "NWN2 minus the D&D". Mind you, from your post I can't tell whether that's good or bad, since even NWN apaprently wasn't what you wanted. Are you sure you didn't mean "every RPG gamer's daydream"? ;)

    Will Dragons be a possible player race?
    "If someone wants to mod it somehow" -- uh, oh...makes me think that it wont be too easy to make a mod with the given tools.....
    Yes. Of course that's what I meant. Making any mod period will be difficult with the tools, not just making a campaign with a PC dragon as was being discussed. :rolleyes: Our intention is to have the game being very moddable, with more of the guts exposed to scripting than NWN was, but making a mod focused on a PC dragon? I suspect that a "somehow" is not really out of the question there even so.

    Derek French, Technical Producer

    AI scripting
    I supposed you could deliver a pre trained AI that does not learn anymore in the official campaign but could be switched to "learn" mode for other "modules".
    Anyone else here getting a Terminator 2 flashback on this?

    Georg Zoeller, Designer

    AI scripting
    Learning AI is a nice touch, it has serious drawbacks however: It is unpredictable and as such very hard to test and balance. Just imagine the support nightmare if people get stuck at certain encounters because they trained the AI well enough to react in a more than optimal manner. I supposed you could deliver a pre trained AI that does not learn anymore in the official campaign but could be switched to "learn" mode for other "modules". Technically it's doable, most of the stuff described, including basic learning AI can be implemented in NWN already. The question would be cost vs. result for that case.

    Brenon Holmes, Programmer

    How about... ahem... riders?
    But the solo mode in KOTOR was also made for a party based game, and it seems to work fairly well. In KOTOR, one goes into a room to spy, lay mines, or pillage, then regroups the others at a safer location.
    KotOR was a bit different though, primarily it was all about your character... everyone else was pretty much along for the ride. Additionally - you couldn't go places with one character that your party members couldn't get to if need be.

    What if I wanted to fly three characters up to a spire? Do I have to send them all one at a time (in solo mode)? Also, what if the fly spell expires while they're up there... and I don't have a wizard or a spell to cast it again? Are they then stranded up there?

    To dupe for DA, allowing the swimmer in the group to go solo, cross the dangerous moat, then release the lever for the bridge so the others may cross might work. Or the flying party member sails to the pinnacle of the mount to secure the line so that the others may follow may solve party reunions.

    Or has all this been considered and ZOT cost is simply too high? While I would luv Z-Axis as the top new feature, I would much rather have a solid foundation in other base areas of the CRPG. Any Bio thoughts?
    We're not really sure about flying or any other feature mentioned here quite yet. Some of them are still being investigated in terms of how much actual work they'd be... I would like to mention that if we do not do flying (or any other wishlist feature mentioned in this thread) now, it's not like we can't do it later.

    Movement on another axis isn't trivial, but it's always been possible.

    [ August 21, 2004, 12:01: Message edited by: Mollusken ]
     
    Last edited: Jan 3, 2018
    Taluntain, Aug 20, 2004
    #1
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