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.

Derek French, Technical Producer

Highier prority: options and ease for fan-developers/DM's OR an awesome Offical Campaign?
I guess its interesting to me that you think that these things are done by the same people.

For the most part, an "awesome Offical Campaign" is done by our writers, designers and artists, with support from the programmers and the rest of the team.

For the most part, "options and ease for fan-developers/DM's" is done by the game programmers and the tools programmers with support from the rest of the team.

We can try to do both and they won't collide with each other.

Highier prority: options and ease for fan-developers/DM's OR an awesome Offical Campaign?

Really? That doesn't seem to be the case with Neverwinter Nights.

I was not speaking about NWN, nor did I say that in my post. That is completely your assumption.

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Quote: You say one thing, but what you guys actually have done says differently.
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I was not making a comment on any previous BioWare games.

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Quote: Not trying to be an arse here,
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I find this quite difficult to believe Its like when people say "I don't mean to offend you..." or "I don't mean this personally..." when they actually do.

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Quote: but the evidence we have is contrary to what you are saying.
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Again, I am not talking about the past.

Highier prority: options and ease for fan-developers/DM's OR an awesome Offical Campaign?
Back to the original post...

We have learned a lot about making games from all of our previous titles. NWN was our first game of that type and we are looking to build a new game that takes the best of all of our previous titles, build upon our good ideas, and improve the things that didn't work that well in the past.

From the FAQ, we are doing a GM tool of some sort. Our design department is being given pretty much free reign to build a game free of any previous restrictions. We want to support the community even more than we have in the past by making things even more flexible for people to develop their own adventures. (Please note that "more flexible" does not always mean "easier"). Stick around, its going to be a great ride...

Highier prority: options and ease for fan-developers/DM's OR an awesome Offical Campaign?

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An example would be that design templates that are used in the OC will be passed on into the fan-developer tools. Naturaly. But that also means that those templates could be limited to what was done specificaly in the OC. It would take some extra tweaking to impliment a toolset that would give fan-developers the capability to design beyond the parameters of the OC. I say "templates" in the broadest possible of meanings. Example- a "creature creator" tool that allows the developer to csutomize the properties and appearence of creatures (and create new ones) as easily as they can in the nwn item wizard. (two headed firebreathing trolls for example). Without having to go through gmax to custom-create graphics and animations etc etc.
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Ahhhh, I see what you are referring to.

I believe that we are looking to further expand what can be done to all the end users to create what they want. Whether or not this takes place in the Toolset or in other related tools has yet to be determined, but we are looking forward to working with the community in the future for their feedback on some ideas.

Georg Zoeller, Designer

Stop! I see a trap

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I agree completely. In NWN, even if I flag a trap I've found, my henchmen will still walk merrily straight into it. Dumb dumbs!
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Actually they assume you are unable to disarm it and throw themselves valiantly on it in order to sacrifice their lives for you . So it's heroic, not dumb (at least not only dumb). But I agree with your criticism

Food/drink
I didn't propose any cutting. I just said that any feature that wants to be a global system needs to meet certain conditions or it's not worth it.

If you don't evaluate every feature against "does it add to gameplay", "is it worth it" and other criteria you end up with feature creep and the game will suffer. More is not always better, everyone likes features, but only if they make sense.

Please also keep in mind that it would be a bad idea if I create the image that a certain feature would be in DA. If I say "this might be in DA", someone will come back in a couple of years and say "but they said it would be in, I'm disappointed, they lied". So by default I am far more likely to deny that a certain feature has a chance to make it in the game than to say that there is a good chance for it. Plus I'm currently working on Jade, so I honestly don't know

And I agree with you, this is a good discussion here, lots of interesting things.

Food/drink

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A fantasy game can't per definition not be realistic. I came up with multiple reasons why i think it should be included. GAMEPLAY and ATMOSPHERE to name the most important of those. I never demanded a realistic simulation of medival live. Thats what i heard as a counter argument from a lot of people, but thats simply NOT the point. Bringing up examples of wizards that drop dead when casting a spell can't really be meant serious, right ?
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Which is a pretty good summary. If something adds to immersion and gameplay, it can be evaluated and be included or not. If something is plain annoying it needs to be changed to add to gameplay or be cut. This doesn't exclude from food being put into games, it just raises the bar for an implementation that makes it past the "gameplay first" rule check.

Highier prority: options and ease for fan-developers/DM's OR an awesome Offical Campaign?

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it didn't say 'D&D 3rd edition rules, NB: some monsters in game may be considerably weaker than in official rules (e.g. ancient red dragons)'
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So says Baldurs Gate: Dark alliance?

So your point is that the rules did not completely match what you are used to from your PnP campaigns? Which game did? ToEE came close, yes, but you would still find thousand things to nitpick.

As said, rule #1, the DM is always right. If the DM decides dragons are weak in his world, he overrides the Monster Manual. If the DM gives out a sword +11 of SlayAnything, Dragons can be as powerful as they want, they still die in one hit.

If your point is "You guys didn't meet my expectations because for me D&D means "this and that"", that's fine and completely understandable, but not necessarily right or wrong based on the D&D rules alone.

Ah well, thank for our own setting - Dragon Age, may the speculation begin

Dragon Age audience... Mature vs Teen rating

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In Japan it can get very expensive for you if you show a 4 fingered character on the screen (even if it's a only vaguely humanoid monster)
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I've heard contrasting stories.

http://www.oddworld.com/ow_ask.html ( scroll a bit down )

Click Here

Food/drink

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P.S. Can Bioware at least consider some kind of *flexibility* (API?) in the toolset, that could make it easier for modders to include elements not originally supported in the game engine?
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All of the things discussed in this thread can be done in NWN already (--> HCR). While I don't know the planned capabilities of the DA toolset, I would guess that it goes more into the "more power" direction, which would probably have a slight cost on the "easy to use" side. But I'm not on DA and speculating here.

As an example for a global water system: Create a water bottle item. Use tags in it's description to give information on how much water you have left, etc, and attach it to the player. Then write your global scripted system around that.

Highier prority: options and ease for fan-developers/DM's OR an awesome Offical Campaign?

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in your game? you mean DA?

sure.

but NWN was D&D. and most D&D fans found it silly, not least because the D&D rules are set up to make things like ancient red dragons hard to kill. and more or less impossible for mid-level thiefs to kill singlehandedly.

now, maybe the dragons in DA won't be that tough. that's fine, it's your very own setting. but it should go without saying that - in the general imagination - dragons are thought to be kinda tough. so don't go making them complete pussies now, okay?
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I disagree. D&D is whatever story your DM wants to tell. He can make a city of weak dragons that are kicked around by strong humans and that's just fine I agree it's not the stereotypical D&D stuff, but hey, PS:T wasn't stereotypical at all and that made it interesting.

Dragon Age audience... Mature vs Teen rating
We'll see about that.

Anyway, your last post was a good summarization of the process.

If you work with your own IP, your writers have a substantial amount of creative freedom and they will create the story they want to tell. After many iterations, rewrites, changes, the story becomes more solid and most plot elements, events, etc have been defined. You know that you won't sell enough copies with an R rating, so certain things are out of question, but frankly, none of the these things would really add to gameplay anyway.

Next step is to sign up a publisher: During your discussions with the publisher, you will have to give an estimated rating. If the publisher agrees with that rating (which will most likely happen based on market data - i.e. can a M rated beach volleyball game sell enough copies to make it worth publishing it). The market is not as easy as "T sells more than M", especially for complex games with more mature audience - or in case of the infamous beach volleyball game. (Keep in mind that all parts of BG had a T rating and it didn't feel censored or watered down, at least for me).

Larger publishers have a "politics" department that checks through your game for potential problems. This has nothing to do with ESRB and is not necessarily a bad thing. Example: In Japan it can get very expensive for you if you show a 4 fingered character on the screen (even if it's a only vaguely humanoid monster). If the decision is made to publish the game in Japan, you can either create a different model for the japanese version or just change the creature to have five fingers (doesn't change anything gameplaywise anyway). There are hundreds of those things around in the world and a good publisher can be very helpful to make you aware of those.

The ideal solution is to write your story, find that it's fine with T or M rating and go for that rating. If you find that only one scene is pushing the game towards M and that is going to cost you 200.000 potential potential sales, you will probably employ techniques like TScottS suggested (i.e. intelligent camera work, don't show certain things, etc) and be fine off, player's won't see the difference anyway.

In the end, the ESRB rating restrictions are not a big deal, they are not to limiting and as seen with BG, BG2 you can do a lot of mature themed scenarios and still retain your T rating. Granted, the public perception in North America has changed a bit lately (towards "puritan"), but still not too significant.

Your publisher has potentially far more impact on the story contents - and if you are using an existing IP, the license holder also comes into play. If publisher or license holder are known as "a company creating toys for children up to 12 and a good american family image", they will be a lot more restrictive on what you can do in your game with a T rating than a publisher that doesn't have a "family image". Usually you know that beforehand, unless the publisher or license is acquired by another company while you are working on a game, with development cycles of 3+ years, not unheard of.

Finally, a thought on the "M":
Checking through some of the higher populated NWN servers or most popular hakpaks, I find a lot of "jiggly" or sticky content. The type of this content could probably make a game M rated, but the people who are downloading this content and are playing on those servers are most likely not of the "mature" category, it looks more like typical teen-age stuff (exceptions may apply).

So, bottomline:
Our writers are going to tell the story they want to tell. They will write whatever they think is necessary to make the best singleplayer experience we created so far and they are certainly not writing with any specific rating in mind (with the exception of R/X rated stuff that makes your games unsellable).

Linux client?
Talrias is right, anything with the label GPL must be considered "poisoned" and can't get near a commercial game. Not very idealistic, but that's the way it is.

Highier prority: options and ease for fan-developers/DM's OR an awesome Offical Campaign?

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(quote) Ahhhh, I see what you are referring to.
In my humble opinion, the OC should be the "bonus", not the tools. Like, "Here is this awesome game that is a set of tools in which worlds and campaigns can be created by the community, and here (the OC) is a good example of what can be done with these tools".
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That's a very controversial opinion, through I can understand it (preordered NWN the moment they announced the toolset). Since the SP campaing makes roughly 80+% of the sales, it's not business compatible however. The SP OC will (for the near and medium future) be the most important part of our games, just for that reason.

Highier prority: options and ease for fan-developers/DM's OR an awesome Offical Campaign?
Because in Ultima you played the Avatar, a human (no playable races, appearance limited to 6 different portraits or heads) being very well defined through the existing story. Even "believe wise" you were pretty limited. You had to worship the virtues if you wanted to complete the game (speaking of 4,5,6) - no evil path apart from the usual "I can kill most NPCs and feel evil" story. All that creates other limitations, story wise, so each system has it's pros and cons.

Highier prority: options and ease for fan-developers/DM's OR an awesome Offical Campaign?

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As long as there is no compromise I'm happy. I'll buy Dragon Age for the Single Player and see Multiplayer as a bonus.
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Thats not what I said. The current plan for DA is to have both parts of the game to be awesome by having a version of the OC for SP and one for MP tailored to the strength and weaknesses of each type of game. Many issues people had with the NWN OC came from the fact that the same module had to accomodate both MP and SP and compromises had to be made that watered down the SP experience.

Highier prority: options and ease for fan-developers/DM's OR an awesome Offical Campaign?

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Yes, you could take on dragons solo in BG2, but that was a challenge while NWN OC it was not. Also it helped that your character was nearly to or above 20th level when you do so while in NWN OC you were merely 9th.

Of course I tried to solo through BG2 and never really got all that far. I do remember getting my party killed by Firkang a number of times. A party of six characters, with a paladin in the lead. Nalia polymorphed Firkaag into a squirrel and the squirrel-Firkaag killed me after Nalia, Jaheira, and Viconia.
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Difficulty is subjective. I've seen enough posts of people cursing the dragon in NWN on this boards as well. Phrase4s like "you should not be able to do ... because that's just not right" are usually very subjective idealistic smarttalk . If we decide that the hero can singlehandedly defeat a dragon in our game, so be it. "That ain't right" or "You couldn't do that in previous games" may be your opinion in that case, but that doesn't make it more right or wrong than ours.

Highier prority: options and ease for fan-developers/DM's OR an awesome Offical Campaign?

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Actions speak louder than words, Derek.
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Right, just like HotU (which should have made clear that we were not going to make a compromise at the cost of the SP campaign)

Highier prority: options and ease for fan-developers/DM's OR an awesome Offical Campaign?

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There is no way in any sort of logic should a mid level rogue be able to take out Klauth.
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That prompts an interesting question (not directly connected to Klauth):

Do you think a player should be punished by ending up in a situation where he has to start over the game after several hours of gameplay if he manages to build a gimped character because he didn't really know?

(the D&D multiclass rules and the fact that you can't rebalance classes for computer implementation [can't give a new ability for a one that did not translate int CRPG] make it pretty easy to build a character that ends up dead - one thing the DA rules system hopefully will take care of).

Keep in mind that most gamers would not start over the game after 15 hours but would let it rot in a corner, being frustrated.

What would be your suggested approach to that?

Highier prority: options and ease for fan-developers/DM's OR an awesome Offical Campaign?
To dispell one myth: The DM client was quite cheap in the big picture since it's build on the final game client. Plus, going back to departments, the problems you had with the NWN OC were mostly design side, those programming "zots" for the DM client wouldn't have done much on that.

Also, some people didn't like NWN because it was not a BG game (i.e. full party control, etc). That's nothing a different story-arc would have fixed as the game was supposed to be that way - and I don't consider that a mistake.

Hope bioware learns form the past

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Bioware says a lot of things. THey also said that the NWN OC was going to be as good as BG/BG2 but that was a load of bull. I let myself get excited about NWN and I was a fool to do so. I won't be making the same mistake with Dragon Age.
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The plan is always to learn from mistakes Visc, on both sides of the counter. Plus you rack up experience with everything you do, a lot of games have been made here since NWN (SoU, HotU, KotOR, Jade) and this experience will be put to good use. Don't you think that HotU was reason to hope that we are indeed learning

But then again, you bought both expansions for NWN and you have been around consistently on these boards ever since, so you can't be that disillusioned as you try to look On the other hand, we are talking about you Visc, there would be something severely wrong with a game we release that would completely please you.

Food/drink

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Drinking contests, commoner x who happens to be drinking at the time has the key to door x or whatever, you have many options to solve this, one of them is to challenge him this way. so food/drink is no fun?
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We had the poor slave in HotU who was forced to drink himself to death by the bad drows in the cavern. And the plot didn't become less believable just because there was no global food/drink system. Same goes with a drinking contest, no need for any global system here, can be scripted fine through dialog or using generic "spirits" type items and attaching an appropriate OnUse effect.

Food/drink
Ultima 7 is (along with Ultima 6) still my favourite PC RPG. I really would like to see something like this with modern technology at some point. Through, as food management went, I prefer the implementation in Ultima 6 (food for resting), I think in Ultima 7 simulation went a bit overboard.

Food/drink

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As for actual implementation, I still don't see the problem with my earlier suggestion: a BG-style system with food added in so that if I really DO want to get that level of immersion in the SP campaign, I can go and buy a drink and some dinner at the local inn. It doesn't force anybody to do anything they don't want to at an innopportune time, it adds to the atmosphere for those who DO want it, and I would think it's not that labor intensive on Bioware's part (how hard was it to implement in BG 1, anyway?).
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Scripting/placing a couple of food items into the bartender at most taverns, that's easily done. I was under the impression the discussion was more about managing "hunger levels" and punishing people for not having enough food in their inventory at the time of need. In fact I think every good Inn should have food on the menu.

As for knowing or not knowing the demands, BioWare is constantly reviewing what we think people expect from our games, through our boards, through reviews, press reports and fansites, through direct feedback or specific questions to community leaders, through new employees joining the company and bringing in their views, through statistical data from our masterserver and other means. Knowing your customer is an important part of staying afloat in this industry and that's what BioWare intends to do

Also keep in mind that all I post here is my personal opinion, it might or might not be identical with what the people currently working on DA design think.

Food/drink

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I agree with Georg - spend the time and money on the stuff that everyone will enjoy - a functional combat/magic system, great story, well-crafted class system, and maybe a love affair or three.

Anything more is just icing on the cake.
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Not 100% however - if you make only features that "everyone" loves, your game becomes bland and pretty mainstream. It's about balancing expectations of all your different groups of potential customers, but somewhat weighted toward their overall impact on sales (and not necessarily loudness level on the boards). The icing of a cake is important too, if it's missing you usually get complaints about it