Dragon Age Forum News

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(Originally posted by chevalier)

Here are today's BioWare 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

As a setting: Dragon Age compared to Eberron. What do you think?
How can you have anything but an IP vs. license debate here, considering you don't actually know anything about the Dragon Age setting?

Customizing Characters
Character models will certainly be much more customizeable. Just how much remains to be seen.

How would YOU spend zots?

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The new David Gaider collector figure, with Extreme Procrastination Action!! ::hides::
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Well, I guess they wouldn't have to make the "action" figure have much range of motion, then. Maybe just closeable eyes.

Jay Watamaniuk, Community Manager

Concept Art
I am popping in here to make sure this does not wander too far off topic...or I will move this off-topic. Keep in mind the creation of concept art is not a static process it is dynamic. We have gone through many and radically different versions of characters in Jade for example before we settle on what we all like...and even then we are still changing costumes. The debate over the representation of female characters in fantasy literature and other media is an excellent conversation if appraoched from rational and mature point of view. Pray continue but do remember this thread is about a wallpaper for Dragon Age.

Any Idea of the system requirement (Specially W98SE)?
I would have to agree with Georg- if your still running Win98 by the time Dragon Age comes out you will have larger problems than this game to content with. The recommended specs in my completely fabricated and very untechnically sound cauldron of lies are:

Intel Buckrogers 3000
ATI-nVidia Das GroupenBlaster MMZ Overlord 10000 (comes in special space-themed box with fins!)
733t RAM-STEIN
OzZy SoundCard 230,000

Don Moar, Tools Programmer

The Tool Man
Hey, Tools monkeys, Georg? Just to set the record straight: When I started at BioWare, in February of '99, the tools team consisted of just two programmers, myself and one other. It now has 22 programmers and is still growing. When I started, we supported only one project, we now support five (currently they are JE / DA / Live Team / Localization / Unannounced).

The typical project requires anywhere from 20 to 50 individual pieces of tools software ranging in size from a few dozen lines of code to several hundred thousand and with purposes as diverse as content creation to bug tracking to asset management. Some tools depend upon game and graphics systems and require constant maintenance, others are built once and then used for months or years almost without modification. Some tools we know about at the beginning of the project or can anticipate and so design and construction starts as early as possible, but there are others that appear unexpectedly and can only be built later, as the need arises.

The advantage of having a dedicated team of tools programmers like we do at BioWare is that we can more easily apply the lessons learned on previous projects (What tools were required? How long did they take to design and build? When did we realize that they were necessary? etc.) to the current ones. The implication of this is that it should mean better (in at least one respect or another) tools for the community on those projects where they are included.

I'll let Tim & Co. go into the particular details for DA later.

Georg Zoeller, Designer

How would YOU spend zots?

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True - but the toolset they use does not have to be one that is useful to amateurs not used to using professional development tools.
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I tried the Silent Storm editor yesterday and found it quite unfriendly for a first time user, it took me quite a while to figure out how things work. can't really judge how powerful it is based on a couple of hours, but my impression is that our internal toolsets are by default more accessible and ergonomic than many tools used at other companies and even "enduser" editors that ship with many other games. I have no doubt that someone who was reasonably skilled with the NWN toolset *could* adapt to the Jade Toolset relatively fast, even if it is only an internal one.

Sure, you will miss a lot of the "make it easier" features and it might not be so tolerant on you when you try something you shouldn't do, but still.

So I guess when you say "no toolset", you say "spend no time on making the internal toolset user friendly/error tolerant/polished for the end user. Keep in mind however that saving time on that end wouldn't magically make the story longer, add a z-axis to the game or otherwise do stuff you would notice, because tools programmers are tools programmers and don't add z-axis or horses to a game, etc.

I'm not saying that it isn't a lot of work to make the toolset accessible and user friendly so it is easy to use for Trent's Grandma (it sure is *a lot* of work), but I'm saying that any "zots" you save there do not necessarily add up into new game features or a longer story as the free tools resources could also be allocated to other projects, improving our internal tools (which would cause a general productiveness increase for the rest of the team but not necessarily impact the game currently being worked on) and so on.

I think some of you guys should really stop trying to blame the toolset or multiplayer or the GM client for the fact that you didn't like how the NWN OC ended up, because the reasons why the NWN OC ended up the way it ended up are multi fold and complex and while those features have contributed to it, there were a lot of other reasons as well (i.e. you not agreeing with general design decisions - no party control like BG, etc - no amount of additional programming time would have changed that ).

Yes, by making the game use a tileset system (for easy end user modability), things like exciting unique places as seen in the BG story didn't make it for NWN and that had impact on the game's atmosphere (and we tried to remedy this for HotU by using specially crafted tiles for important places (i.e. well room, V's temple, etc).
DA is not going to use a tilebased system as a result, so it's not that we are not aware of the problems out there.

But anyway, the approach in this thread is highly flawed as it doesn't take BioWare's structure into account. Saying 50% zots for writing is a great idea, we just move all the programmers over to writing for a while and I'm sure we will get some wonderfully complex and challenging math puzzles

If you want to speculate, try something more like this

Art
* Animation
* Creatures
* Areas
* 2D Art / GUI, Portraits, Icons
* Cinematics/Cutscenes
* Concept Art
* 3d art, VFX

Programming
* Game Engine
* Game UI
* Network
* Graphics Engine
* Sound
* Goodies (Physics engine, etc)

Technical Design
* Game Rules (Classes, Combat, etc)
* Balancing
* Level Scripting
* Cutscenes
* Global Systems
* Goodies

Writing
* World Background (incl. Race backgrounds, etc)
* Story
* Dialog (NPCs)
* Dialog (Henchmen)
* Dialog (Romances)
* Origin Stories
* Goodies

Tools (project specific)
* Specific Tools (i.e.Art)
* Toolset (core)
* Toolset (enduser friendlyness)
* Additional tools (i.e external compilers)

Production
* VO
* Soundtrack
* Localization
* ...

Of course this is inaccurate and incomplete, but at least it gives you a bit better picture. Happy zot distribution!

What Kind of World is Dragon Age?
I wouldn't take anything for granted at this stage of development. If you insist on believing certain things are granted, I suggest taking the stuff in the FAQ.