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

Ressurection
I tend to come out against being able to raise the dead simply because it makes death irrelevent both in the story and setting. And that's not good.

I also think this hardcore ideal being expressed that party members should die and that everyone should just "suck it up and reload" to be rather odd.

So should party members die and be able to be raised? Or are you actually saying that if a party member dies that he should not be able to come back, period, and that the only option should be to reload? (and that's not cheesy?)

Because if that's the case and we want a decent-sized party, we'll either need a lot less combat or a lot more party members out there to pick from. And if your answer is "a lot more party members" then okay... but they're not about to have much in the way of dialogue and story involvement, then, are they? Unless that's okay and you just want lots of light party members who pretty much die all the time, at which point I wonder just what kind of game you're asking for.

Unless of course we expect you to reload so they don't actually die at all. And if they don't die at all, I fail to see the difference. Or am I missing something? I'm confused.

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Just at least don't give the players ressurection spells please. Maybe carrying a party members body to one of the 3 known people on the planet who can ressurect for insane prices would be alright.

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So in that world it's the wealthy who do not die? Any given King or Queen would live until advanced age (assuming age itself could not be bypassed and was itself a hinderance to resurrection), eliminating such things as assassination, usurpation, disease, etc?

And that wouldn't get annoying having to suddenly go on some major hike to the far side of the planet because one of your party members died?

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Quote: More prty members would be my preferred option though. We'd just have to try really hard not to let the party member with the good dialogue die, or settle for 'strong silent types' of mercenaries.

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But how would you know who had the good dialogue? And if you somehow knew, if they died... oh well, so much for their story? That's okay? You'd settle for strong, silent mercs? (Though they need not be silent, I suppose... BG's NPC's had party members who had voice-over comments and maybe two or three short dialogues each... would that fly with most of the community today?)

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Quote: PS. My sneaky way of getting around it - which I'm not proud of - is to simply fight to the death rather than fleeing after a few party members drop. Then I have no option but to reload.

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But in your story, then, nobody is dying, correct? You go through the whole story with essentially nobody dying. So how is that different? I'm not talking about not being able to fail (like with the teleport stone), but how is forcing party member death so that you need to reload and make it so that it never happened a superior option?

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I think having an engine that allowed for a difference between incapacitation and death might solve these problems. Then most of the time you would not be "raising" fellow party members, but instead healing them.

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I think that was exactly what Hades_One in particular was saying was so terrible, as that's what happens in Kngihts of the Old Republic.

Although, yes, in KotOR enemies died and were not incapacitated. Though, really, that's because you won the battle. If you didn't win the battle that you'd be dead, no?

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David, to be honest, you have me slightly confused. You say that resurrection seems to make the spectre of death cheap, yet you are against using the "Load Game" option to avoid this problem?

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Well, what was being said is that having party members be incapacitated but not dead, and that they only died if you lost (in which case you lost the game and would have to reload, anyway) is bad and that it would be preferable to have them die and be dead forever.

If you don't want to force a reload, you're left with either including some kind of raise dead option or with the multitude of mostly-silent party members (which I don't really think is much of an option). But if you do reload, and this is that advocation as to why party members should die, then they're not actually dying, are they?

I played a strategy game once called "Warhammer: Shadow of the Horned Rat", and the way the campaigns were arranged you couldn't afford to lose any of your army in-between the various fights. So if you did, you had to keep re-loading until you did a fight practically perfect until you could move on, and I hated that. So why would it be better to force someone to constantly have that "perfect fight" every time in DA, as well?

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I take it ressurections are definitely in then.

To be honset I wasn't really speaking within the context of the gameplay when I started this - I just don't like the idea of ressurections.

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No, I don't mean to imply that resurrections are in at all. Would it surprise you if DA's world had it so that bringing someone back from the dead was simply impossible (or at least miraculous)?

I only asked my question because I wanted to understand why some thought the "suck it up and reload" option was a superior one.

Hieghts of character?

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I Hope so I want a 300lb 3'5 blind albino dwarf called squeaky.

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This is why I hate MMORPG's.

Darcy Pajak, Assistant Producer

The one feature that i dont want to see in DA
Lewis, I'm afraid you're going to be disapointed. The player is the Hero, (or Anti-hero). The world (game) was created for them, and it will revolve around them. We'll try and make sure that this is not obvious, and people you've just met don't know you from Abe, but the reality is that your the star of this story.

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I hate to see the story is base on the concept that 'I am the centre of the world'. Really many game make me feel that the gameworld exist just because it wait for me to save it. The farmer house exist because it wait foe me to get inside without permit and rob the money from the chest. The NPC exist just because they wait for me to save them and allow them to join with me. The boss exist just because they wait for me to kill him.....

A well developed background of the story, with religion, social structure etc. Apart from me, they are also other adventurer try to save the world/ finish the mission also. Well interactive NPC with their own activity. (At least some of the farmer would refuse me from getting inside their home, or call for the guard if I insist). The playable NPC actually have their own mission and they join me just becuase we have similar mission/direction at that time. (They may latter choose to leave me if they want). I should at least meet the boss several time, or at least their their main generals, and they would try to kill me instead of allow me to grow strong enough.

I hate to be the centre of the world. I hate to be the hero of the world just because I am the 'only one' that can save the world.

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Georg Zoeller, Designer

The one feature that i dont want to see in DA

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I hope they dont sell me another Multiplayer game that is only Single player freindly. NWN was billed as being a Multiplayer game, but the game was set up for only single player play, and as much as many people tryed to make multiplayer modules and worlds for online play, most of them failed because NWN is not multiplayer freindly.

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I think you have a different definiton of multiplayer friendly. If you mean "MMORPG like" - friendly - that's not the design focus of Dragon age and while there will be no artificial hurdles to prevent people from using DA for something like PWs, it will not officially support it either.

I might misunderstand what you mean with multiplayer friendly here however.

As for "most people failed", I guess that's a highly subjective point of view and depends on your expectations.

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I would also have wished that the designers would have attempted to create a online NWN multiplayer world using their toolset (NOT A Linear SinglePlayer Module) and host it so that they would be aware of the problems that the users of their toolset would encounter prior to coming out with DA.

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If "world" means something like PW - no, and it won't happen for DA as well. DA is designed to be a "build your persistent world" toolkit and that means that design and qa time is not likely to be allocated to create something like a PW.

NWN had Contest of Champions, Witch's Wake and a couple of other BioWare created modules that were designed to work single player and multiplayer or multiplayer only (like CoC). It did not have a BioWare in house created PW as PWs were not part of the design.


You can disagree with what we think how multiplayer in our game should work, and from the PM about horses you sent me I can see that you are expecting something really different from what we have in mind for our game, so be careful not to set you up for a huge disappointment, DA's multiplayer mode will not be a second Ultima Online and it will not be easy to build your own Persistent World with DA. It might be possible, and due to technological advancement in our engine some things people liked to do but couldn't in NWN might be possible in DA, but DA will NOT be a "build your own persistent online world" toolkit.

DA is not NWN2 - so do not expect it to be "everything NWN minus D&D" either, it's going to be quite different in certain aspects (i.e. party control, area editing, etc).

Finally, I'm fairly certain that you won't have to bother about "item cost" issues in DA. The whole item cost thing was tied into ELC and ILR and these system spawned from the local vault concept which was created with PnP D&D in mind. I seriously doubt there will be localvault in DA, so this would probably remove the need for the whole item cost thing (and there was much rejoicing).


That said, I think both multiplayer and singleplayer component of the game will benefit from the planned "seperate multiplayer and singleplayer campaign" feature.

Brenon Holmes, Programmer

Scalable Models discussion

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Very intriging. Now, I'm not certain you meant this, but one interesting approach to such a system might be to have some very simple animations that could be applied to a wide range of objects. Let's say you have 10 or so placeables with an emitter object called emitter1. Let say you load an animation called "GreenEmitter" and apply it to any of those 10 objects. Suddenly the emitter turns a deep green. Alternatively you could have an animation called "MoveLeft" that moves the rootdummy object a meter to the left.

Now, I suspect you meant to say that you could load any animation that exists within the model on the fly, but perhaps not.

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Actually... as the system currently stands, you can dynamically load any model animation into the supermodel list of any animating object. So the first example is correct.

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I can see that would be extremely complex. However I wasn't thinking of going quite that far.

As an example of what I was thinking of, you've got a frost giant hewing his behemoth of a sword from right to left, striking at the body of the target (of whatever size). Leg and hip animation (step and twist) is all the same. Hinge upper body at hips to bring tip of sword into strike zone (be it hobbit, human or giant-size target). Hinge head at neck so the giant is looking at his target and not blankly off somewhere into the distance. Rest of animation about left alone to run as it normally would.

Is something like that exactly what Inverse Kinematics is, or is it simpler? If simpler, is something like that doable without too much more overhead in calculating the angles each hinge needs to be bent by?

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Yeah, if you've played Lineage II they do something like that there - from the looks of things they grab the bones in the spine and change the orientation based on the height of the object. However there are still limits... we might end up doing something like this for 'lookat' positions for head and eye tracking and the like.

From what I've seen it works well for general attacks, but for specific interactions it might not work as well. We'd have to run some tests to be sure...

I'm not certain if we'll end up using it in interaction animations - there was some talk of it, we'll have to see how the prototype goes.

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In my coffee-induced morning blatherings, I wonder if it would be possible to change out the bitmap via animation? That would in theory let you animate the reskinning of objects, which lets you do some neat things. I suppose you could do the same with duplicate geometry and animating the alpha values, but that's a bit too much work for something that's just a cool effect. Anyway, this is all exciting stuff. Glad to see you programmers aren't simply sitting around shooting the breeze this fine Friday morning.

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We're looking in to a materials animation system - so in theory... you might eventually be able to do something like that.

More: Whew... long post.

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DrDread wrote:

I'm not sure where YOU got the idea that I think that ONLY features for the official campaign are put in since I never used that word (I even did a search for it).

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That seemed to be the implication:

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Wait let me guess, you already have a function like this but left it out because youweren't using it in the official campaign?

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If I misunderstood, or missed some sarcasm - apologies.

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Bioware has put in several features that are useful in Multiplayer or PWs environments but I dare say I can't name off a single function or feature that was't used somewhere in the Official Campaign. I further dare say that those features, without any use at all in the OC, probably would of never made it into the game.

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Well, I'm not so sure about the last part. Generally what occurs (in my experience at least) is that we have a list of features that have been requested by the community. If they're considered easy enough to implement or worth the time - they're implemented.

We then pass on the information to the designers who may or may not 'Oooo' and 'Ahhh' about the new functionality and then think of ways to incorporate that functionality into whatever it is they're working on. In a lot of cases fan suggestions have been quite beneficial in terms of what we can do with our modules.

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This because Neverwinter was never, has never, and will probabaly never be focused on anything but thier Official Campaign. They don't even fully support playng thier Official Campaign Multiplayer let alone Persistent Worlds!

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I assume you're referring to HotU. Old issue, stated reasons. Label on the box.

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My opinion is that this is a tragic mistake, multiplayer and PWs style of play is a lot more popular then even the PW players thought it would be. If given the right tools designed to handle and create good and professional ones, it could very well explode in popularity.

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Maybe it will, but unfortunately it's not something we're prepared to support at this time. You've heard our reasons for it, we've got loads of metrics on multiplayer, singleplayer... all sorts of things. So when we tell you that the PW market share of NWN was comparatively small, you can choose to believe us or not... your prerogative.

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If you don't intend to ever support Persistent World style Play via the toolset or feel that its a small subset of the player base then you'll understand some of our frustrations and confusion we feel when after downplaying your support for them, you officially post things like this:

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Yes. I can understand that. Although, Johnn's blurb about the current multiplayer community seems to be more of an informational post on what is available - content created by you folks out there (at least to me).

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To be fair I realize that there is alot of pressure from the business side to produce the Single Player Campaign over the toolset because that's what supposedly sells the game but half of the point of this argument is that this may be a grossly unfair and narrow-sighted determination.

Until neverwinter, there was no real toolset to make you own game world at all. Even the toolset you've provided isn't capable (without ridiculous effort) to make anything other than an altered single shot module. So how the hell do you explain 15-20% of the users buy it for the Multiplayer or PWs? Most people I know only bought the game because of the toolset and the HINT of what it might be capable of making. So did some of the Bioware designers!

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It's quite possible to make more than a single shot module... 'ridiculous effort' might be a bit of an overstatement, as there do seem to be a fair abundance of fairly detailed series style modules.

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I'm sorry if you find my "intimation" insulting but when you so laughingly claim that Neverwinter has plenty of support and features designed for "us folks" on the Multiplayer/PWs bench, it comes off as such propaganda it becomes insulting to us also.

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Perhaps I misunderstood what you meant by community. What I was referring to was the modding community at large... not your specific community, which from your post seems to be the PW community, yes?

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Before you shrug off all us "Crazy Angry Multiplayer People" I suggest you fire up The Offical Neverwinter Nights Hordes of The Underdark expansion and invite a few of your Multiplayer Supported friends in for a game and watch what happens.

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Hordes, as you know isn't a multiplayer module. There are lots of those out on the 'net as well. Fire any of those up in MP and you'll probably have issues as well.

DA on the other hand, will have a multiplayer campaign - as I'm sure you're aware... so, no problem... right?

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All we ask is that a little "official" focus be placed on Multiplayer and even persistent world style of play, MMORPGs are currently the hottest thing in lucritive PC games right now and theres probably a good reasonfor that.

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There is official focus on Multiplayer. We're supporting multiplayer. You can make your own modules, you can play with your friends. You can host your own games... we're looking at making custom content easier (in theory).

What we've explicitly said is that we're not officially supporting PW's. As was mentioned in the string of quotes you have there, there are numerous reasons why we wouldn't create a 'make your own PW' style toolset.

So to sum up, we're supporting Multiplayer - it's in the FAQ. We're not officially supporting PW's.

More: Just a note on model scaling and somewhat related to the animations stuff I was mentioning... in theory you can also scale models (uniformly) in an animation as well...

Hulk Smash!

Brent Knowles, Co-Lead Designer

Scalable Models discussion
NWN had several features added solely to support the multiplayer community. One of the big ones was Portals -- this cost us a fair bit of time and was never used in the official campaigns.

Almost every single decision made on NWN had to be evaluated in terms of its impact on Single Player and Multi Player (i.e., the faction system is more complicated and hard to use because of multiplayer). We added database support in XP1 solely for the end-user community. We never planned on using it in the campaign. After it was added, we found a use for it.

Dragon Age will not officially support persistent worlds. Our focus is on the single-player and the multi-player campaigns and we will do everything we can to make those as enjoyable as possible.