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.

Derek French, Technical Producer

Does Bioware look at Competition

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Im curous if bioware looks at there Competition, for the next line of incomeing rpgs, do you look at Gas Powered Games, or Blizzard, etc, to see what they do, what people find there games interesting and intergrate it into yours?

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Most of us here at BioWare are avid game players from all genres and between all of us, I think we have almost every game on every platform covered. Do we look at other RPGs and compare them to our games of the past and future? You bet, just like every other game developer out there.

Don Moar, Tools Programmer

OK... but HOW do we mod it?
Yeah, I did use those phrases together in the same sentence earlier but it was in the context of a hypothetical situation.

Georg Zoeller, Designer

How will Dragon Age stand out?

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DA script uses object-oriented commands? (that contain a . !)

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Tim will kill me for sparking that rumour . The above example is more "sarcasm script 2.0".

Transformation: latest fashion from BW

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And let's face it. It really adds something special to have your everyday looking hero turn into a raveging burning Demon before venturing into battle

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Speaking of that ... remember BG?

Are the game rules being playtested?

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Game rules like combat rules editing: __???___ (quite improbable, imho, this will belong to the hardcoded world)

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Nothing in this regard has been decided yet.

When will Bioware Wednesday shift focus from NWN/Jade Empire to DA?

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I for one wonder at the idea that DA will not be released for 'years'. Why would Bioware open a discussion forum if the game was at least not within the forseeable future?

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Among other things, it gives us the opportunity to collect feedback from our community early in the project. DA will have a new world, new rules, and a lot of other things with the "new" label attached, so getting some idea on what the community thinks about certain issues is quite valuable.

Does Bioware look at Competition

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Thing is, graphics isn't all that important. Graphics is simple eye candy that I don't really pay attention to.

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Unfortunately the overwhelming majority of the market does. Your game can be brilliant and have a great story, but if the visuals are not right, you won't sell. If you are interested in commercial success, you need to be at least en par with the rest of the market in that segment.

More:

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So how does that explain NWN success then? Graphically, its not that impressive compared to its cheif competitors when it was released: Morrowind and Dungeon Siege.

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It was within the range of en par graphics for it's type of game. While some aspects didn't look too great, partially a trade off for customization, others were more that en par (i.e. vfx). Reviews at that time noted that and were louder with SoU, leading up to significant improvements for HotU in order to stay on the market. As usual you are trying to oversimplify things in order to make a point - graphics are not the sole reason for success/failure of a game, but without graphics inside an "acceptable range" (which is different for every type of game and ultimately decided on by the audience), you don't sell well.

More:

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would you admitt to taking ideas from other games and intergrating them into your future games?

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Admit? I really got to wonder which world you are living in. I think the appropriate description would be "Acknowledge the influence" - and anyone who claims that he is completely unaffected by the games, books, other media he consumes is either a liar or deceiving himself. Ever asked yourself why there is more than just one brand of car, mp3 player, bread or cake available on the market? Where do you think things like "hit points" you see in every single rpg out there? Why is there Call of Duty, Return to Castle Wolfenstein when there is already Medal of Honor? Why is there are genre of "RTS" games and not just "Dune I to IX"? Why the sudden appearance of "MMORPGs" on the market after Everquest got so successful? I think you have a strange perception on how any kind of developement or evolution works ... the world of games would be a pretty bland place with ideas not jumping between games and genres. It's not that you go out there, pick apart other games on the market and say "hey, let's see which feature we can steal from them..." - but if you play a good game, watch a movie, read a good book, and you see something you like, it's quite likely that it will influence you, in a concious ("wouldn't it be cool if we could do mass battles like Helms Deep") or nonconcious way. I bet there are quite a few D&D campaigns running out there that suddenly had elements shown in the impressive LotR movies introduced by their DM.

The industry is quite open about this process, if you read some game developer interviews about BG, NWN or recently NWN2, you will often see references to games that are considered "influencial" by the people interviewed.

Sure, you got quite some copycats out there that go for the fast buck (just look at the number of diablo clones), but these are in 90% of the cases not games that classify as AAA games anyway and most people learn quite fast that clones seldom work as well as the original. The market is kind of self regulating, if you try to get by by just cloning other peoples ideas, you are dead in a second.

Take diablo - the basic gameplay is very close to the idea of nethak or gauntlet, but Blizzard improved, added and innovated enough to make it an insanely popular game. Other companies tried to copy and nearly all of them fell short.

Take Everquest - it's basically a MUD repackaged, down to the slash commands. The concept and idea has been around for years, but they morphed and improved the concept to a point where it could capture a huge number of people. A lot of others tried to copy and fell short, a few innovated again and managed to create and hold a bubble in the market because of their improvements/changes.

Brenon Holmes, Programmer

Scalable Models discussion
The scaling itself isn't a problem. Heck, in NWN I had an easter egg made up that scaled the player up by 500%... it never saw the light of day, but it was pretty funny...The major issue is interaction animations. When I have two objects that interact with one another, like for example a lever and a human. The human walks up and pulls the lever. Those are very specific animations (in this example), if I change the size of the human or the lever too much the animations will no longer sync up. The only way to alleviate something like that would be a RT IK system... or something along those lines (or forcing both objects to scale the same amount... which would be silly).

More: Animations are generally static, you can't change them on the fly... unless you have some kind of system like an Inverse Kinematics system, which as PipBoy mentioned is quite costly in terms of implementation.

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How about this? Make every level or whatever have a "gripping" point noted in the object or by having a second invisible object at the gripping point. Then make animals for all models to reach up, down, or ahead for that gripping point. The program could then compare the height of the characters "hands" and use the best version of the animation to manipulate that lever, door, chest, etc.

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This is sort of what we had in NWN, we had three generic animations that were not synchronized with anything in particular... and we simply used which ever one was best fit. Ideally we won't be doing that again as visually it doesn't look very polished, especially if you have other detailed synchronized animations. Again, as I mentioned earlier... we're still looking in to scaling. We may or may not have it, currently we're looking at a range (+/-) percentage or something along those lines...Something to think about though, if you look at a crowd of people - a simple 20% variation in size can make a real difference...

Scripting Events

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This, as far as I?m aware, doesn?t work very well with copied objects (particularly copied PCs). Say I want to create a copy of the PC and turn it into the classical ?doppelganger from the mirror? monster then I can?t change to scripts to give it better combat AI. It was dreadfully easy to defeat my mirror copy in HotU since my character was incredibly weak without using the proper spells. Unless I?ve missed something.

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Hmm... well, assuming the PC got events ( ) you should be able to do what I mentioned in my example... to change the scripts on the doppleganger you'd just need to access and change the variable on the monster (er, at least it seems that way to me). Hopefully you'll be able to do something like this in DAScript... well, you will if I can get all the stuff on my list here in... I'll poke about a bit and see what I can come up with using the current rev. I think it should be easier to do something like that with DAScript though.


Brent Knowles, Co-Lead Designer

Are the game rules being playtested?

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Not saying that the combat system of the official release isn't important, but I hope you spend plenty of time making sure that the combat system can be almost entirely changed via hak or scripting. The community will bring out the best combat system, all you have to do is make sure it's possible to do so.

The only thing that is keeping me and my friends interested in Dragon Age is its ability to be modded or HakPaked into something completely custom, more so then Neverwinter. We don't just mean the modules themselves which I'm sure will be great, but the game system itself.

Some people want to re-create the D&D system into Dragon Age, others want to make it Resemble a Rolemaster system, some want to see thier favorite Mana-Based Spell system be put in. As long as you don't lock down the game engine with hardcoding or some silly reason involving the "Official Campaign" then the game will be made a Hit even if you completely botch the Official Campaign and screw up all the game systems.

Like any previous game, the Official campaign is 10-40 hours of play but the game itself is worth 2-3 years of entertainment if the community can change customize it. Most people know that when looking to buy the one of 50 games a year that come out.

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Dragon Age is not going to be a "generic build your own game system" toolkit.

You will be able to add to our rules more easily than you could add to the rules in Neverwinter Nights. But you will not be able to modify core concepts (i.e., our rules for determining whether a hit occurred). That's unavoidable and is not the focus of what we are trying to achieve with Dragon Age.

Our primary intent is to create an awesome gameplay experience, which requires a great story and a solid rule-system.