Dragon Age Forum News

Remove all ads!

(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

Going Old School

---------------
You are in a topiary.
---------------

> GET POINTY WAND
You now have the pointy wand.
>
> FROTZ WAND
The pointy wand suddenly emits a bright glow! You can now see the area about you clearly.
>
> LOOK TOPIARY
The topiary is a series of large hedges that have all been shaped into various animal forms. You can see a giraffe, a giant mouse and an elephant. You also see one hedge that looks vaguely like Emperor Herbert Flathead III, but you are not certain. There is no exit.
>
> GET CLIPPERS
You don't see the hedge clippers.
>
> OPEN BACKPACK
You open your backpack. Inside you see a half-eaten cheese sandwich, your spellbook, a whirlygig and a pair of rusty hedge clippers.
>
> REMOVE CLIPPERS FROM BACKPACK
You take the hedge clippers out of the backpack.
>
> CLIP TOPIARY
What do you want to clip the topiary with?
>
> THE CLIPPERS
You can't do that.
>
> WHY NOT?
I don't understand that.
>
> SCREW YOU
Now, now. We don't appreciate that sort of language here in Frobozz country.
>
> HIT TOPIARY
What do you want to hit the topiary with?
>
> THE CLIPPERS
You hit the topiary with the hedge clippers. The topiary appears unaffected.
>
> SCREAM
You scream loudly.
>
Your wand is no longer glowing. You are surrounded by darkness.
>
> LOOK
You are in a topiary. It is very dark.
>
> LEAVE
You stumbled around in the darkness. Eventually you are eaten by a grue.
>
You are dead.
>
[R]e-load game or [Q]uit?
>
> I HATE YOU
Quit it is!

Thank you for playing!!

...how's that for old school?

More:
---------------
I thought about going straight for the Grue reference, but I thought the topiary would be more subtle.
---------------

It was very subtle. Slightly less subtle would have been the Flood Control Damn #3. Although I'm pretty sure now that I mixed up my Enchanter references with Zork II.

MMORPG Style Server
As Orik said, like NWN the design of DA is not intended for PW creation. So any improvements on that front over NWN will be incidental. What they actually might be, along with the answer to your very specific questions, are not subjects we're able to discuss at this early point.

Darcy Pajak, Assistant Producer

drop singleplayer, long live multiplayer

---------------
**SPANK SPANK SPANK**
This thread is totally pointless. DA will be both singleplayer and multiplayer. Nothing will change that. It's a fact.
---------------

Agreed.

Please, I beg you...

---------------
I wasn't trying to start a comparison war here; I think NWN has its niche as a tileset fantasy authoring tool and does it well. What has me worried is that many gaming companies are finding (or think they are finding) that one-player games don't have the market strength that multi-player, fan-created games do. Any company that sticks around the old fashioned, highly customized single player games is a dinosaur, soon to dissappear from this earth.
---------------

Actually through polls and community feedback we've found that find that single player games are far more popular then Multiplayer games. In general people would like to play multiplayer games more often, but the problem is some people don't play nice with others, and that can ruin the experance for some, and so they would rather get their friends together to play.
And there are times when you really just want to sit down and kill an hour or two, you need a game you can instantly play and not wait for everyone else to get on-line.

Georg Zoeller, Designer

Stats: Point Buy or Rolled?
Fairness in multiplayer asks for point buy. But who knows, maybe it's something that isn't point buy or rolling dice?

Stats: Point Buy or Rolled?

---------------
Fairness in multiplayer asks for point buy. But who knows, maybe it's something that isn't point buy or rolling dice?

Hmm. This is what Georg said. 'Nough said.
---------------

Maybe I was asking for alternate ideas from the community? Who knows

"What's yer beef" with NW-Script

---------------
In regards to overriding the AI... I'm pretty sure there's a variable that you set on the creature (load up one of beholders and check out the variable panel). This string variable is the name of an alternative script that is ran instead of the creature's standard combat round -- Georg implemented the system so he'll correct me if I'm giving you false information...
---------------

Yepp, the override code is hidden somewhere at the start of nw_i0_generic.DetermineCombatRound() IIRC. Mindflayers and Beholders use it for their "special attack AI", as well as a couple of bosses in the HotU campaign. There's also a demo creature using this that can be found here.

Learn from Planescape: Torment
My favourite lesson from PS:T

It is torture to create a game that forces the user to read huge amounts of text on a 640x480 screen with a less than eyefriendly font. If the game would have been bad, I could have just stopped playing, but unfortunately I got addicted and wanted to play it finish it. PS:T probably added another 0.1 to my glasses, torture I say!

Learn from Planescape: Torment

---------------
"It is torture to create a game that forces the user to read huge amounts of text on a 640x480 screen with a less than eyefriendly font."
---------------

Wrong point. The emphasis was on the less than eyefriendly font and the 640x480 resultion. There's nothing wrong with a good amount of text if it's presented in a fashion that doesn't burn your eyeballs out.

Healing potions
I hate healing potions at least when they get common, they degrade the value of armor and hit points.

things i think they will implement and some won't

---------------
Besides, mounted combat is not necasserily ultra complicated when you have a pathable z axis.
---------------

Understatement of the month Feel free to discuss this with the DLA guys to find out about animations (not to speak about design and cutscene issues).

Healing potions

---------------
1. games are played for fun
-> there should be as little tedium as possible.

2. going into a fight fully healed is only common sense

1 and 2: there should be little or no resting or waiting in between fights.
Healing and recovering should only cost resources. Outside of combat all the player should have to do is press a button and the PC quafs enough potions to be completely recovered(instantly).

During combat potions should not instantly recover the PC.
This reduced the value of constitution and above average HP to zero. When both sides can insta heal indefinitely in a fight all that happens is an unnecessarilly drawn out fight.
When monsters don't heal, those that can't kill you with one hit can never defeat you.

Even Diablo2 is superior in this respect to NWN.

I propose either NO healing potions during combat or just regeneration potions (partial% recovery over a few turns--naturally these potions'effects don't stack).
---------------

I don't agree. Resource (i.e. Hitpoints/spells) management leads to choice and tactical gameplay. If you can blast away your most powerful spells all the time, it becomes boring pretty fast. NWN was pretty weak in that regard, unfortunately.

More:
---------------
There's still the management. Just not the tedious waiting.

*edit* There's another advantage: lot's of easy fights are not very interesting. If you can expect every fight to be started fully recovered, the designer can make every fight a worthwhile challenge.
This is more interesting than cleaning up endless mobs. Now every fight counts; is significant.
---------------

That's circular - when fights get too "easy", they get boring. If you take away those unlimited potions, those easy fights can become quite deadly and thrilling. I don't believe in "the fun starts at higher level", lets get a lot of levels fast. Yepp, it's cool to mow through a group of helpless kobolds every once in a while, but if it gets a tedious task, you probably rather want to fight those two pesky kobold commandoes

More:
---------------
Two problems with this: if potions are rare/expensive you'll simply be making the cleric/healers more valuable and promote resting/reentering the dungeon more often. Also, I see every fight being a challenge to the max as an advantage. I prefer 3 big fights over 10 small battles and 1 big finale. I think many players would agree with me.
---------------

Let me put it this way: I prefer BG/BG2 or NWN's approach. But that's just me, other people here might have different preferences.

MMORPG Style Server
I suspect you'll hear no promises about anything regarding PWs from the team for a long time. - Not even that you will be able to do things you can do in NWN. Too many things have not been decided yet, including technical specifications. Later in the project you will probably hear things like "yepp, this may be possible" or "no, unlikely", but I would suggest going into it with a "nothing is certain" stance regarding PWs to shield yourself against potential disappointment.

This does not mean there are plans to cut functionality that is used by PWs or add functionality for PWs, it just means that nothing is certain at this point - and as Dave pointed out already, PWs are not the design focus of Dragon Age. (Why am I posting this? Do a search for "BioWare" and "promised" on google and you see what I mean. Even if it was always made clear that certain features wouldn't be there, including official PW support, people still cried fire and water about broken "promises") Ah, and by the way - can someone explain to me what a "beautiful real compiled script" is? I somehow must have missed the /real flag on the compiler so far

WASD control
My NWN character moves just fine with a WASD key scheme in drive mode...

Tim Smith, Tools Programmer

As a builder, 3 things that scare me about Dragon Age
A infinitely high cylinder test is done by just computing the distance from the center and ignoring the z-axis.

Cylinder:

limit*limit <= (dx*dx) + (dy*dy)

Sphere:

limit*limit <= (dx*dx) + (dy*dy) + (dz*dz)

(Note: Testing against limit*limit is a speed trick. It is much faster to compute limit*limit than to get the root of the other side of the equation.)

Brenon Holmes, Programmer

NWScript
Dragon Age will be using a scripting language very similar syntactically to NWScript. Things that require us to retrain our designers are bad...