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

Found out more about the world...

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I suppose if I had to pick the one thing that drives our history, it would be technology, which seems wrapped up in virtually every war, invasion, or dramatic change in government. As Dragon Age is a fantasy setting, that's probably not the case. Perhaps the answer is magic, religion, or racial strife. I can imagine a world torn by constant wars between the elves and dwarves, or ever-shifting civilizations brought up to worship a new god. The reality of every history is complex, but often there is a driving force behind major historical events. Who knows? Maybe it really is caffiene.

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Well, now, that makes for an interesting question indeed. I certainly wasn't about to start reciting the entire history of the world in point-form, after all. What drives forward the DA world? Religious and racial strife, mainly. Sometimes the two are combined.

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In the Dragon Age game world, will the male and females have equal and even power?

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Depends on the race. Generally speaking, however, the answer would be no. Humans do not replicate real-life gender inequality in the middle ages, but nor do they take the common fantasy route of having no inequality at all. There is an in-game reason for the difference.

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Man, ain't this great......First, Jay comes on the forum with a tempting title for a thread, and then teases us with a few vague sentences. Jay, you'd make a great drunken prom date. Now, after begging and pleading for Bioware to give us something a bit more concrete, we get two words from them: Conventional Geography. I feel so freakin' enlightened!

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That WAS the question. Crikey. Some people are so demanding.

Georg Zoeller, Designer

Is Elder Scrolls IV or NWN2 a Threat to DA
I still fail to the a "threat" or a reason to be worried. Just the fact that there is the potential that someone else might create an AAA RPG, does not mean this is going to damage everyone else in the industry. You talk like there can be only one company making great games on the market and that everyone would then buy only from this company and everyone else suffers yet... there is Valve, there is id, that is Bungee ... all of them are still in business and doing well. Nobody here (well maybe LdyShayna) has seen more than the few bits available on our website on DragonAge and the press reviews of the demo and there is not much available about the other games too ... all at least 2 years off, maybe more, and still you are "worried"? Why? Because there might actually multiple AAA titles on the market? I'm for my part am happy about that, it shows that the RPG market segment is still far away from a "bad period" like we had it in the 90s and that the market is still expanding.

If the question is "what sets DA apart from other games" apart from being "a BioWare RPG" and the fact that it's the only one of the games mentioned that is not based on a established license, well, that will be more visible when we release more information about it later in the development cycle - comparing a screenshots from a E3 prototype and magazine covers to predict how games will affect each other is kind of pointless. In any case, drawing conclusions from us not flooding the boards with featurelists and being a careful when asked whether or not feature X will be in the game or not is premature and everyone who has been around for a bit on our boards knows the reason why we are careful about this. If that gets people worried, well, so be it, better a few doomsingers around now than a rabid "you promised us" mob torching our boards later.

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And if you say that 3 games will be released separately, then there is no point to disscuss this topic.

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Predicting release dates for games that are announced to be "in 2006", "a long time off" and "on PS3 and Xbox2" is going to yield the same results as using a shotgun to switch of your TV. After all we all know how games tend to be on target. Might be the reason why we don't give any releasedats at all anymore.

If the pc versions of two of these games are going to be released in the same month, I owe you a bottle of german beer.br />
More: There is something you can say for any game - if you fail to capture your audience within a certain amount of time (which is different for each game, setting and audience), many people will drop it.

Second you need to maintain the audience's attention during the game, because if you let them slip, they will drop it. The problem here is finding out what your audiences attention span is and how to keep them interested.

How you do it depends on your type of game

See diablo - it does a fantastic job of keeping their players hooked with very little story (compared to most RPGs), mostly through polished game mechanics.

See KotOR - lots of "I want to know what happens next", some mechanics (get better items, etc) as well.

and a lot is pure presentation as well. Really polished and good games can fail to win the audience during the initial "get to know eachother" period due to hard to learn controls or GUI issues.

But - just because you want to capture as many people as possible during the first, let's say 60 minutes of gameplay, doesn't mean that you have to sacrifice complexity or features, it just means you need to streamline your presentation and the first minutes of the game in a way that makes people want more...

Of course you can argue that all these people bought the game already and as such, why should you care about it, but I can guarantee that would come back and haunt you later in sales.

Maximizing Replay Value

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I totally disagree. randomness forces you to adapt your strategies and to improvise...totally random treasure is bad, but controlled randomness is cool...

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I agree with Torias. While non randomness is definitly nice for the designers trying to balance the game, it is a killer for replayability. A certain amount of unpredictable behavior in a game is a must.

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By "Randomness", I'm hoping we will be having more wandering monsters/random monster encounters in DA. (We saw this used in BG several times.) That was a concept introduced in the earliest versions of DnD, and I hope Bioware is able to run with this basic concept in DA.

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Are you sure about this, and are you a modder for NWN? I'm not sure but it seems there is a trigger in certain area, if you step on the trigger then the monster will be spawn, so it's not randomize, it depends on you trigger the thing or not.

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Through the trigger could randomly decide to fire or not and can spawn random monsters from a table ....

Z-axis...How important is it in an RPG?

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I see it very important. Playing a rogue type most of the time the best way to break and enter someone's home is to so on the second or third floor, climbing the wall and getting through a window. Or when it comes to estates with guards, it is best to climb over the outer wall than try to go through the main gates.

There are also tactical aspects to consider in the ZX axis, especially if spells that allow flight are in the game.

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I'd question the "very important", it seems to be more "very nice to have", but frankly, apart from morrowind, I can't think of a lot CRPGs that featured it so far, so it doesn't seem to be such a big deal... especially since you could still have a "role playing option" to do it - like "[climb the wall]" IIRC none the RPGs you usually list as your favourites here featured movement along the z axis....That said, I'm not opposed to it either, I think it would be kind of cool to be able to play a rogue close to how it worked in the "Thief" games .... plus I don't know what's planned for DA in this regard.

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@WSM: Lack of imagination is not an excuse for simplifying things.

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You are approaching things from the wrong end. We are coming from the "we want to tell this story, now let's see what we need to tell it" side, not the "let's put in flashy feature X because it's popular right now and see how we can cram it into the story".

There are cases where the latter approach is used, and features can add to the game without having story impact (think of HotU robes - we didn't make a plot for those) as well, but about the most important thing in our games is the story, and anything needed to tell the story we want to tell takes priority over "nice to have" features or features that would break the story and can not be integrated without sacrificing core elements.

So if the story would evolve about a world that is dying because all the water has been falling off the edges of the planet, err, disk, we would naturally not put any resources into swimming, boats and sea battles (unless there would be some reason for it in the story).

If our story would evolve about a seafaring hero, a lot of resources would go into swimming and ships and such, but since there are limited resources on each project, this could mean that a feature like flying would probably not be there because:

a) the story may evolve about the player using his ship or swim from point to point and flying from point to point would break it. Sure you could "patch it in", but then again, it wouldn't really add to the core story...

b) we would concentrate our resources to make the swimming and seafaring part of the game as cool as possible and wouldn't want to spend a lot of "zots" on an expensive side feature like flying.

and if our story would require flying and programming would say "sure, go ahead", there would be flying in the game.

Sure, a story is written with an eye on our capacities and things we can do (or written and then run by programming to gauge from the pain in their eyes how far they can be pushed) - but again - our games are story centric, not "free form explore a simulated fantasy world and do whatever you want", so major features that would add to the simulation level but not the story are lower in priority than features required to tell the story.

A lot of non story critical stuff will be in the game anyway, because it has, like any other RPG, a simulation component and we want a lot of cool things for players to do in the world - I'm just talking about major, expensive things like flying, horses, etc...

And again, I'm on Jade not on DA right now, so I can't tell you what they have possibly planned (and wouldn't even if I knew), so don't try to read any of the above as "feature X will certainly [not] be in the game).

Motion capture and animations for non-humanoids

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Jade Empire seems like a good example. It looks as though martial arts combat will be an important part of this game. Are there any non-humanoid enemies in this game?

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Oh yes.

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Whew! Is there any chance you could explain how it works? Do you use mocap on some actors and just use part of the actors' bodies in the animations and animate the flaming ooze part of the creatures in some other way?

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I really don't know, the works of the animation wizards/witches are mostly just magic to me, I can't really tell how they do that stuff, and frankly as long as it works, I don't ask a lot of questions

Dev's fav RPGs?
Can't really decide in which order, but my top 5 would include:


Ultima VI:
I played this for more than a year, partially because my 4.7 MHZ 8088 took about 10 seconds for each move, but even after getting a 286 and vga graphics I still frequently returned to Britannia.

Ultima VII / VII SI
Not much to say here, I think it's a great example for how you can blend freeform gaming (I love exploration) and a good story (through the story got a bit weird in SI). Plus it had nice graphics.

The other three I'm apparently not supposed to name, even if I didn't work on them