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

Elven Blade Singers
I would sooner tear my eyeballs out of their sockets rather than see something resembling the bladesinger (a class which even its own creator admits he made too overpowered) put into Dragon Age. With a spoon, even. How's that for an answer?

Georg Zoeller, Designer

Can Bioware please standardise their ingame systems?
I prefer "stones" like in Ultima or maybe fish? Someone want to trade 15 fish worth of equipment?

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Boy that Georg, he sure has some stones . . . Hopefully the linguist who's working on DA will come up with a unique measurement system that our metric and non-metric brains can grasp.
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The more I think about it, we probably should do more to support the Dragon theme, let's try dragons.. Could I have a bag with 0.00006 dragons of mushrooms please? Arr, well, maybe dragon scales or so.

No more quest with colour in DA
That's one of the things we learned for HotU, I don't think it will happen again.

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if you're colour-blind, why don't you just roleplay a PC who isn't colour-blind? problem solved, huh?
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Not really. Next thing people say when fables is asking for a feature is probably "why just not play an an intelligent and emotionally stable PC" and from there the flame war will go out of control. This particular kind of humor is not welcome here.

Healing potions

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One thing i dislike about dev participating in discussions is that they tend to bias on their own opinion. I just think dev should remain neutral on both sides. Describing how a dev staff stating how he 'hates' something is going to give a bad impression on some of the players who happens to have a different point of view.
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Apart from the fact that I'm currently working on Jade Empire and not Dragon Age, what's the point of a discussion if I have to stay neutral. It's not that my opinion is more worthy than yours or Beerfish's or Hades's. We are not acting as referees who decide which side is right or wrong here. BioWare is not some homogenous mass where everyone has the same opinion about everything. Lots of things are born out of heated discussion and I think that's part of the recipe that makes our games successful. I bet that just about the topic of healing potions there are quite a lot of people at BioWare who disagree strongly with my opinion. At some point there will be a scheduled pitfight between all factions on this topic in the focus testing room and the person who manages to come out with the most hitpoints without drinking a potion dictates the final implementation into the game or so.

Maybe some people see it as "the guy from BioWare said it should be this way, so everyone who disagree "lost", but I'm sure most of the people who have been here for a long time know that's not how it works on our boards. Reminder: I was part of the Neverwinter community before joining BioWare and I participated in discussions on these boards long before NWN was released - and just the fact that I now work here doesn't suddenly make my opinion "right" and everyone elses wrong. I might have better insight on certain topics now than I had before, but that doesn't mean I'm infallible. Bottomline: It'll take a bit more to make me shut up, sorry

3D Triggers

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I wonder if triggers could be a 3d plane, rather than a 2d line... so it doesn't matter how high you are flying, you'll still pass through the trigger pane...
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The trigger itself isn't the real problem here, the resulting action is. You fly over the trigger that's supposed to start the cutscene that included the player ... As result you can't do a lot of things you could before (i.e. those cutscenese) or you have resort to ugly cheats like just grounding the player to start the cutscene. I can think of a dozen other things in that direction. That doesn't mean flying or so can't be done, it just says that if we would do this, we would have to sacrifice a couple of things we did in previous games

DA=Updated NWN with DnD purged? If so, great, providing all modding is there!

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Note that Bioware isn't moving away from PnP (after all, any CRPG is, by definition, derivative of PnP); they're simply moving away from D&D.
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One of the goals with DA is to create a ruleset that works well on the computer instead of trying to fit something into the computer that was created with the average human's math (in)capabilities and other PnP specific quirks in mind So no, DA is not "just moving away from D&D", it's also combining the elements that worked well in our previous game and getting rid off or fixing the things that didn't work so well. So no, you can't bring it down to "they just update NWN and rip D&D out".

Flying Dragons

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I am curious, if there are flying critters like dragons. What prevents them from slaughtering party while staying airborne and out of melee range? I think a spellcasting, fire breathing dragon would be rather devastating if you can counterattack only with spells and bows...
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What made dragons so powerful in PnP was the fact that the melee types could not engage without having magical flying bestowed upon them and your party would get devestated. Attacking dragons was a very dangerous undertaking. Since your melee types were able to close to their attack range in NWN, dragons lost all their truly destructive powers and therefore were easily beaten.
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In the Gold box Games, in BG, in the Eye of the Beholder series ... dragons could never fly. Nope, the reason why dragon were "easy" in NWN has nothing to do with flying.

Tim Smith, Tools Programmer

No more quest with colour in DA
I just did and his comment was correct. Providing a secondary method of color feedback outside of visual methods is a common method of getting around the color blind problem.