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

Please, no typical gods!

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I like the idea of religions, it makes the world more believable, but I believe this can be an element which makes or breaks an interesting storyline. Forget the cliche of warring religious factions, with do-gooder water element wielders against the maligned fire wielders. Give us say, a group of atheists, a group of seemingly good aligned tyrants, a group of benevolent death cultists, etc. Try to make it different and memorable, unlike the jumble of cliches in my head that I really can't distinguish. Instead, forget gods in the traditional sense. I realize that classes such as clerics need healing spells, which by definition is an overt godly act. Instead, let everyone have the potential for magic, and make it a great and heated scholarly debate as to whether these gifts come from gods or whether humans have the ability to ascend to a higher level of being, etc. Are the gods everlasting, or are they former humans ascended Buddha style, or are there no gods and humans make their own way...? I really don't want to go through another game where some Forgotten Realms' god was borrowed, the name changed (from Tyr to Tyros, Tyra...), and the description stays identical. They serve basic purpose: an obligatory reason for paladins and a source of spells for clerics. All I can ask is that you make the world totally original, and that you don't adopt boring conventions from high fantasy.
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While I can't get into specifics, I think you'll rather like what we've got cooked up for Dragon Age, then.

Cloaks, horses, swimming, wall climbing, magic carpet riding and everything that was missed out..

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This doesn't seem to be a winning attitude (I don't know how else to put this). Fable, which is going to be one of your rivals, doesn't seem to mind taking the extra time to put in additional trivialities such as lewd taunts and boys that get their hair cut to emulate the pc. They don't seem to be worrying about the lack of worth storywise. They add it (partly) because they know their fans will see it as being "cool."
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It's a bit early for us to be discussing the "cool" features that we will have, never mind the ones that we won't. Just because we may not have some of these features that this thread is discussing does not mean we won't have plenty of things to please the fans. Let's not kid ourselves... running and all that would be really great to have but it's esentially gravy. The vast majority of the work for a game like DA or NWN lies elsewhere completely.

A role-playing role-model: Darklands
I played Darklands and really enjoyed some aspects of it. The fame system, for instance. And while I could have used a little more actual magic, I do prefer low-magic systems in general so I appreciated the use of saints and alchemy. I did not enjoy how hard the early stages of the game were. Relentlessly, unforgiveably hard. I almost gave up on Darklands before I had a group luck out and survive long enough to get some decent equipment (killed a robber baron more or less by fluke and the fortuitous use of a glue potion, as I recall). I liked the realistic armor, and the stuff you could do in the towns (especially the taverns). I liked that most of the women looked like women and not sex kittens. I liked the map travel system (especially once you had horses... me, this is all I really need horses for in an RPG game. I don't need to see myself riding them, I just want to know that there are horses being ridden. ). I liked the deadly, turn-based combat (though sometimes it felt ridiculously easy to die). The very medieval-ish feel was also great. Incidentally, another RPG that is often overlooked that I felt was a real gem is another German one... 'Sword of Destiny', I think it's called, based on the 'Das Schwarze Auge' pen and paper system. Super, super game if a bit too nordic in feel for my taste.

Darcy Pajak, Assistant Producer

Cloaks, horses, swimming, wall climbing, magic carpet riding and everything that was missed out..
All of these features are cool and neat and can be fun if done right. When we talk about adding a feature to the game we make sure it's justified and is either A) needed to drive the story forward, or B) needed to make the gameplay work, and work well.

For example (and only take this as hypothical, do not quote this months from now saying "dev said they wouldn't put in cloaks nah nah".) Cloaks are not needed to drive the story forward, even having a magic cloak of power can be replaced with the boots of power, or gloves or amulet so cloaks drop in priority of features to be added. We are not adding any feature because it's cool unless we can justify it with either game mechanics or story. (and to change code for a one-off story event is not cost effective so it better be good). We know that people want to see Horses, swimming and cloaks, and flying, and as of this date (June 16, 2004) we still looking into them. As soon as we decide not to put them in we'll let you know

Please do give us turn based combat !!
I would like to know why real time stratigy games are much more popular then turn based ones?

Georg Zoeller, Designer

Please do give us turn based combat !!

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So BG and KotOR is better because it sold allot more copies?
I would say they were better coz they had good stories NPCs and interaction, the thing ToEE completely missed.
I prefer TB over Bioware realtime, because the Bio RT is tedious.
And if you play a mage in NWN you will understand why it's more fun playing a mage in ToEE.
ToEE wasn't even a decent game, but the combat was more fun then any bioware game. TB combat isn't more challenging then Real time, and not more complicated to understand.
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Hey, First, I agree with you that TB is not be harder to understand or more challenging by default, because those things ultimately just depend on your implementation and presentation. However, I didn't say any game was better. I enjoyed ToEE (to a certain degree because of some gamebreaking bugs I encountered) and I enjoyed KotOR and BG (I didn't work on them). I said that KotOR and BG probably sold better, but whether or not this makes them better games are in the eye of the beholder. Obviously, if a game sells well, and general feedback is good (reviews/awards), the message to the developer is "Hey, this worked well, you should build and improve on it" rather than "scrap it and go for TB combat", and that's what I wanted to say with my post. The combat system may not be as important as the story, but given that around 40-60% of what you are doing in your average RPGs is combat, it has a significant impact on how your game is received. Personally I think there is a niche for TB RPGs and every once in a while you find a good game that is fun to play and TB. My perception is that TB games have a smaller potential market than a game based on a real time framework, be it because people are accustomed to the "adrenaline rush" or be it just because the average gamer's / buyers attention span is a bit shorter than it was back in the time where we used to play the SSI GoldBox games (and if you want to have shelfspace for a PC RPG these days, you will need to include the average game at least to a certain extend into your target audience). TB is less mainstream than RT these days (and please don't read that as "RT is better" or "RT is dumbed down for the mainstream, both are valid ways to play games) and since we had tremendous success with the RT framework in the past, I would say it is likely that we stick with it and improve it rather than scrapping it and go for TB.

If we announced the game as "TB reinvented"** perhaps, but not with a "spiritual successor to our previous games" approach.

** (would be hard to claim we invented it, but re-invented should be enough to infuriate certain people - and that is our sole purpose of existance, right? )

scripting language - improving on nwscript

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1) If the memory footprint for scripts is so small, then why the caching?

2) If heartbeats are a big part of the problem, is that because heartbeats all execute on the same interval (0/6/12/18/24/30/etc)? Couldn't this be mitigated by randomly offsetting the heartbeat sequence for each object (i.e. some are 1/7/13/19/etc.)? Maybe you've already done that, but the game *feels* like they are all executing at the same time.
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A) Because some scripts (i.e. main AI scripts) still can become huge and are accessed far more frequently than others and it makes sense to cache those. I already said this in a previous discussion, just because there is the option to cache something, this doesn't mean that it is causing lag/cpu hickups by default.

B) Again heartbeats are not a problem by default, it's how people use them. If you want heartbeats to randomize their execution delay a bit, you can do it by scripting, but I doubt there will be much impact on your module. Of course, having 100's of objects running elaborate heartbeats is going to kick your performance, but then you are doing something wrong. My comment about "scrapping heartbeats" was more meant as "since these tend to cause the most problems for people, we could just take them away and get rid of the problems".

Bumping up the number of frames allocated to scripts doesn't fix anything either. Every once in a while you will probably have seen the "AI Update TimeOut" error message on the console - that's when a script couldn't run because there was no more time on the slice for scripts (which are prioritized by AI_LEVELS). So adding more frames (cpu time) would not make things faster, it would just mean you can execute more scripts before this error appears.
My experience is that other than obviously CPU intensive graphic tasks like visual effects, the hiccups in the game flow come from scripts. Towns with a large number of NPCs milling about, for example

Don't forget that the more objects you are animating/rendering, the more CPU time you need for those as well.

Please do give us turn based combat !!

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I would like to know why Final Fantasy(TB) is more popular then any Bioware game(RT)
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Final fantasy is a RTS (real time strategy game) ?

A role-playing role-model: Darklands
I loved DarkLands, mainly because of it's dark theme, the alternate approach to magic and because of their attention to detail (my little hometown in the forests of germany could be visited). On the other hand it was quite buggy and I never could finish it because at some point my savegames would always get corrupted, but still, great game.

Cloaks, horses, swimming, wall climbing, magic carpet riding and everything that was missed out..

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And just becasue it dosen't propel the story, dosen't mean it woln't make the game better. Look at first person shooters like FarCry. It is selling by the truckload, and it's story dosen't have jack squat. What it does have are sweet features like a vehicle system, physics, and an awsome graphics engine. So lets make the analogy, and you will see how all these features will make the game better even if they don't help the story.
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It's a shooter. Most people who buy a BioWare game expect a good storyline with rich NPCs first. Most people who buy a shooter expect cutting edge graphics and lots of weapons. It's not just "let's throw in a horse, players will be happy": A horse means mounted combat (lots of new animations), villains that use horses, horse options (i.e. adding armor), etc. It also means dealing with things like "what happens with the players horse if he enters a dungeon", "horses in cutscenes" (i.e. making a cutscene that works for players on horse and off horse doubles the amount of static cameras required, etc, etc.)
All this costs time and manpower and that manpower needs to come from somewhere, so if there would be the decision to include horses, another major feature would have to die for it and the decision which features will stay and which will go will most likely be based (among other things) on how much they add to the story or not.