Dragon Age Forum News

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(Originally posted by chevalier)

Here are today's BioWare forum highlights, collected by Neverwinter Vault. 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

Lets have elves how they were meant to be
We didn't feel constrained. In fact, built-in preconceptions can be advantageous for several reasons.

Must have flying
While I love City of Heroes, I would have to comment that the cool flying/teleporting/super-speed not only is pretty integral to the whole superhero thing (integral as opposed to a nifty addition) we're also talking about a game that is purposefully massive to allow hordes of fellow players in at the same time you are and where you spend lots of time traveling. If flight were similarly integral to DA's theme and gameplay, it would pretty much be a given.

Having your own house/castle
If it makes sense in the overall context of the story that might be cool to consider. I always liked the class-specific stuff from BG2. If it doesn't make sense, however, there's no way we would put such a thing in... putting an urgent quest on hold so you can run an inn or shop around for a new castle only fits in certain campaigns. If it doesn't fit in ours we'll just have to find other neat stuff.

Lets have elves how they were meant to be
I think there are certain things people expect to see in any race that is called 'elf'. Some preconceptions can be done away with, however, but we've tried to do that in a way that is refreshing rather than jarring. I suppose some people will be jarred anyhow, but I expect they might just be those looking for the LoTR elf verbatim and nothing else... in which case they will be disappointed.

Georg Zoeller, Designer

Does your own IP speed things up or slow them down?

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Whoa... I've been asleep for a while. Just realized Black Isle disbanded and didn't even consider that Interplay died as well. Luckily I think the team at Black Isle are still doing something... forgot what that was.
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Some of them founded Obsidian Entertainment and are working on KotOR 2.

Two simple ways to reduce Warezing and increase Sales

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I completely disagree that copy protection "works" if it violates copyright laws regarding making backups of the media. why should the copyright owner get to trample on other's rights in the course protecting their own?a solution where EVERYONE'S rights are enforced is good. letting EITHER PARTY GET SCREWED is NOT a valid solution. cd keys work. "cd copy protection" is conceptually broken, in that it stops one party from carrying out their rights as a consumer, to make backups of the media in question. in an age when publishers can knowingly sell faulty cds that crack or explode in cd drives and then refuse to replace them, it's very important that the consumer can make a backup of the media.
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Torias, It is not up to BioWare to settle the conflict that currently exists between "fair use" and "copyright laws". Our own IP might give us a lot more freedom than we had when working with a license - but that doesn't mean we can change the laws of the market (such as "nobody publishes games without copy protection"). This conflict needs to be settled by lawmakers, not game development companies. Given the investment you need to put into the development of AAA titles these days and the number of jobs at stake should your product not meet projected sales, it is unrealistic to expect any developer trying to be idealistic and duke it out this against publishers/retailers/lazy lawmakers. Point is - the discussion whether or not copy protection works is useless here. I am sure our producers will forward our and our fans opinion to the publisher when it comes to the question "which copy protection". If other, less intrusive copy protection methods are available and accepted by the market in the future (i.e. cd key tied product activation like windows XP), they will probably be evaluated.Finally - this is no longer DA specific. Any discussion about the merits and flaws of copy protection should be continued in the offtopic forum.

Two simple ways to reduce Warezing and increase Sales
Copy protection works, it may not deter everyone, but it is displeasure enough for the average IT noob to search through trojan and p0rn infested crack sites every time we release a patch / new feature to our game to convince most people to buy the software instead.

Retailers do not put games without copy protection into the shelves anymore - publishers do not publish games without copy protection anymore - so the question is not "copy protection yes or no", the question is which copy protection will be used - and that question isn't of interest at the moment, due to a variety of reasons outlined in my previous posts in this thread. You can expect us giving input to our publisher (whoever that may be) when it comes to decide this question, as it is our best interest that people can use our products without hassle.

It is an unfortunate reality, but even if we wanted to, we could not release a game without copy protection because the major retailers will not put it on the shelves and publishers don't publish games without copy protection.

My point is: If you want to discuss the viability of copy protection, you will need to go to the forums / websites of the global players in publishing and distributing and post your arguments there.

Toolset GUI

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7) A visual debugger. Ideally a debugger that can tie into the game running in a virtual machine with the display sent to a resizeable window.
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You are aware that there is such a script debugger in the util subfoldfolder in your NWN directory?

Must have flying

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Some of the guys I work with are big into City of Heroes, and from what they say, the flight system is pretty amazing. One of the guys blathered on non-stop for almost a full day when he finally got his flying ability.
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I agree, City of Heroes has the most fun implementation of personal flight (and teleportation by the way) I've seen so far on the computer. Damn, I spent hours just teleporting and flying around

Scripting language - OO?
The first and foremost reason for our scripting languages is to enable the designers to do their job in a fast and efficient way while preventing them (that includes me from crashing the game with their weird ideas.

Thus any feature that would be of use for the designers here at Bioware has a much better chance of ending up in the final scripting language and toolset than anything else. As said earlier, things that would lead to an extensive retraining of writers/designers before they can do their job are unlikely, so I would expect less major changes to the way scripting works, and more thoughtful optimizations and feature additions that increase productivity.

Also remember that there are several technical designers at BioWare that have been recruited from the NWN community, some of them had been working on the expansion packs, some are now working on DA. You can guess that all of them had their pet feature wishes to make their life easier and I'm sure Tim has his own nightmares about that

Jade Empire and its relationship to Dragon Age...
I think it is fairly safe to say that Dragon Age will not use the Jade Empire Rules system.

Jade Empire (http://jade.bioware.com) is an Action Role Playing game that features real time combat, Dragon Age combat will be very different from that, it wouldn't make much sense to use the same rules system.

Tim Smith, Tools Programmer

Is it a Canadian holiday?

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Are you bragging?I am sure there were a lot of people at work today. Not all of us have the luxury of havng a day off. As for your behind, lets just leave it at that, behind us...
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Nah, I wasn't bragging. It was more like whining.

Is it a Canadian holiday?
I was at work today.

No rest for the behind...

Hmm, that didn't come out right.

Toolset GUI

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Things I would like to see:...
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Many of these items are game side and not really tools issues.#3, #4, #5 and #7 depend on what game side wants to do. NWScript is a perfect example. The script compiler was written by a game side programmer. We just invoke it when we to compile scripts.

Scott Meadows, Programmer

Toolset GUI

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1. Consider making parameter insight, code completion in the script editor activate automatically after a certain delay, preferrably adjustable delay too.2. Version control. Compiling modules for older game versions for backward compatibility without glorious hacks.3. Option for storing the module unpacked. Great for development, avoid repacking the module on every save and it will work well with CVS if each script belongs to its own individual file.4. All singing, all dancing debugger for code tracing so we don't have to start the game every single time we test out scripts. That's probably too much to ask for
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It is never too much too ask for, just don't expect the world. We do hope that everyone will continue to make suggestions as we do read them and take them ALL into consideration.

Scripting language - OO?

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This is the best news I've heard all day. This means I can spend the next 2-3 years prototyping things in NWN and not feeling like I have to rewrite the whole system from the ground up.Plus, I'm extremely comfortable with the syntax at this point, as I suspect many other people are as well. NWN was a great training system for Dragon Age. I'm sure that was your plan all along.
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Just keep in mind that you will not be able to import your NWN modules into DA due to licensing issues.