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

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

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I dont think BioWare should feel pressured by demands to include this or that, accompanied by threats of people not buying the game because a few features werent added. They should put in what they can, use what they can and make a great game.
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Oh, we don't feel pressured unduly, don't worry. Like I already said, we acknowledge that fans are going to want what they want. Why wouldn't you want everything? There's no reason not to want it, after all. We're the ones who are going to have to worry about what we can do with the resources and time that we have, and that will always be the way it is. I do find it interesting, though, how some people are demanding that we implement all these features "or else". Heh... we're going to make the best game we can and put in all the features that we believe are necessary (and there is a LOT more to a game like this than just how much you can jump, fly and ride in the gameworld, as much as some of you might obsess about that) and in the end you're going to have to decide whether the game is what you want. Certainly feel free to express what you'd like to see us do with our resources, but ultimatums have no place here at all. And keep in mind that we haven't said anything at all about what features will or won't be in yet, so getting angry over what might or might not be is a tad premature at this point.

Derek French, Technical Producer

A message, and a plea....

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Let's not turn this into an OS war thread. I'm sure that Bioware will carefully consider doing Mac/Linux versions if/when the time comes, after the technical details of the game are a bit more solid. A port may be easy or hard, depending on what tools/language the game uses, and also depending on the as yet non-existent publisher. It's a bit too early to tell, though.
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Well said ElAntonius.

Georg Zoeller, Designer

Please do give us turn based combat!!
A multiplayer environment where other players have to wait for the current players turn to finish is among the most "unfun" things I can imagine. Yes, it's nice for certain types of games (i.e. Civilisation) where you can spent hours watching the units move over the screen or those 1 on 1 games you can play in HotSeat mode, but not for a RPG with more than 2 players. Playing BG II in MP mode with just one pause-happy companion was annoying enough, full turnbased combat would drive me nuts. No, I think BG/KotOR worked pretty well with a real time based approach (and probably sold much better than ToEE), so I wouldn't see a reason to suddenly go full turn based. But that's my personal opinion, I'm sure at least the guys at RPGCodex would disagree

scripting language - improving on nwscript

Graphics aren't the main CPU load;

That's actually not true. For NWN the impact of scripts on overall performance is pretty low for your average module (not talking about crazy 500 area PW projects here) compared to the CPU time allocated by the graphics engine. In a big battle loading models and animations, rendering the battle, displaying visual effects as well as sending over all the happenings through a heavily compressed network stream takes up *far* more CPU resources constantly than creature AI and other scripted tasks. If you want to see how much CPU the graphics engine takes up compared to every other subsystem, run a timegraph on NWN - graphics is the huge block in the middle . Same with memory by the way. The total memory allocated by scripts in your average module is nothing, a single skybox is probably taking up more. That doesn't mean that possible performance improvements for scripting shouldn't be explored, but those could also be achieved by doing things like removing heartbeats from the engine...

Opinion: Impossible Enemies

My thoughts about this topic... Restricted save (game autosaves at specific points): A very bad idea in my opinion. It is extremely annoying to have to redo a large part of the game over and over if you are killed in a difficult fight just prior to reaching the next save point. It is annoying to be unable to save if you need to take a break from playing briefly to handle something in real life. It is annoying to be unable to stop playing when you want just because you'd need to wait until you reach the next save point unless you want to replay what you've just been doing next time you continue to play. I recently played Farcry, and being unable to save when I wanted to was not fun. It also discourages experimenting and trying to solve a specific situation in different ways, pushing you to do things the safest/easiest way to avoid being forced to reload and replay. Please, don't do it.

I don't think you need to have any concerns about that, in a BioWare RPG, you are able to save at any time.