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

What we "DO" know so far....

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if it was my choice, I'd scrap those planets and go for rotating disks, solves all those stupid wraparound issues and finally explains why the ocean isn't raising all the time when it rains into it ... just falls off the edges
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If it was my choice, I'd have the setting be a large moon of a particularly radiant gas giant. A close enough orbit could provide enough heat and light to sustain life, and think of the spectacular skyscape!

As for a binary/trinary star system, the other suns would have to be pretty far away (a bright star to the world's POV, as someone mentioned) else the "green zone" around the one sun is going to be disrupted by the second/third star's gravitational pull and radiation... the reason why in most such systems they suspect no "green zone" exists at all (if any planets are even able to form with such alternating gravitational pressures).

One weird planet might exist in a binary system with two strong suns with the "green zone" existing just exactly in the middle between them (what are the odds of that, anyway?) ...that would be a very interesting planet to calculate such oddness as seasons and day length and such, but we're talking sci-fi at that point and who knows if it would even sustain much life?

Mind you, I do recall one fantasy series that was quite excellent which took place on a world with an erratic orbit... the entire world would get plunged into an ice age for centuries at a time as the world hit its far orbit and then warmed up considerably as it came close. Wish I remembered what it was called.

A Better Sneak Attack
I think the stealthy/dextrous fighter is basically attempting to do two things with this sort of attack:

1) Bypass armor.
2) Hit a critical area.

So if fighting someone in plate, you're trying to plant the dagger in the unprotected armpit, or slip it between the plates or go for the eyes... and if performed successfully, any benefits that armor gives to the target should be ignored.

Doing the attack really well should give the additional benefit of doing a critical hit. The same as if someone else had deliberately aimed for the head or so forth... except that in the case of a stealthy/dextrous fighter, this is the sort of strike they excel in and rely on.

Not that this is what DA is doing, but these are my thoughts on this sort of attack. I don't really understand the implentations it has gone through to date in D&D. Like needing the target to be flanked... why? Surprise isn't the issue (though it should help). The problem with using a dagger is the need to get in close to the target, especially when they're using a weapon with greater reach than yours. That's the issue. Get past that and you should be able to use a stealth strike on anyone.

Georg Zoeller, Designer

More words from the Great One - 1st Level Assumptions

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In the interests of actually distilling this down to something useful and general..... (I.e. - the underlying mechanic rather that how it is used).

There are to related mechanics which would be useful to us.

1) OnPCLevulUP: This exists in NWN already, but it doesn't fire until AFTER the player levels up. It should be changed to work the way OnPCRest does - so that an event fires when they START the levelup process (allowing us to detect it and interfere with it) as well as firing again when the rest concludes.

2) Variables to allow ALL classes to be taken which work exactly as do the variables in the PrC class 2da files, allowing access to specific classes to be turned on and off through scripts.

The addition of these two features would give us nearly all the control over leveling up that we might ever want.
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Assumptions here again such as the free availablity of multi classing without limits. Just a reminder that you don't really know the system yet - not saying whether or not there will be multi classing in DA.

As for skills being easy and we should crap the class system .. that's highly deceptive, on a base level it's far harder to balance a skill based system where you do not only have to account for balancing the usefulness of skills against each other (which will usually screw over the roleplaying skills) but also have to deal with the usual "extreme builds" that are hard to catch through development and can ruin the game for either being too hard or too easy. Classes are an excellent tool organize abilities into sets that can be used for balancing of the campaign as well as the addition of "class specific options" and themes (instead of skill specific options which would hard to get right and somewhat shallow by nature).

Yes, it forces to make decisions and some people could feel that they are restricted if they had to make a choise between sword or sorcery - but then again, that's traditional RPG and if it's a party based game, I don't think thats a bad thing.

Again: Talking on a non DA specific level, I don't know what the plans are for DA in this regard.

More:
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So the key to class advancement is twofold: skills and credentials. Skills come with exposure, aptitude, and practice. But the credentials can come only from other people or organizations. Will any of this be considered in DA's class system?
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To answer your question I doubt this stuff will be affecting things on rules level, but on level of story and official campaign, credentials or past experience (i.e. selected character background story) usually plays some kind of role at points in the game.

Dungeon Siege, by the way, has a pretty simplistic rules system, at least compared to what you've seen in NWN or will see in DA.

POLL- The manual containing a complete spell list

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Why is this even remotely controversial? Of course it should.
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Oh, you can argue about that one. You see, I'm an exploration fan - I like to find stuff in the gameworld, things I didn't know about beforehand (as opposed to "I want to look forward to finding spell X).

I think that most of the basic content (spells, weapons), etc of the game should be in the manual for the "looking forward" and "planning" effect (through I somewhat despise the whole "build" business), but I feel there should be a part (maybe 33%?) of those things left out of the manual for exploration. ("There are rumours of even greater swords...").

I agree that things like "class abilities" should be completely in the manual so the player knows what he gets into.

In the end that heavily depends on how you like to play those games, if you are more the powergamer, you will probably want to know all the stuff right beforehand - through manuals usually aren't so detailed about these things since they need to go into print well before the final balancing passes are made over a game.

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But I think you should not just give a shortened spell list in the manual and then leave it at that, forcing the designers to extract the information they need manually.
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If it's for designers (which are, granted, not the primary people who buy a game), I'd put the full spellist into the toolset... (especially since the toolset is able to read game data)

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Why? A complete manual is a standard of the genre, and I'm not willing to accept a reduction of the quality of the product without raising a hue and cry. That product includes a complete manual.
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Actually, the recent price drop of AAA games must come from somewhere. In March, several top titles, including Splinter Cell 2 and Unreal Tournament 2004 were available, during launch week, for 39 CDN (30US?, 27EUR?) and these had all one in common - a non existant or .pdf manual. Publishers seem to be dropping manuals and fancy packaging for competetive pricing, and full manuals seem to move more and more into the "special edition" realm. The most popular web store feature special sales events about every week selling AAA titles that have been out for only a couple of weeks for insanely low prices.

[Note: I know, from personal experience, that the above is not necessarily valid in some european countries where you still pay the same price as you did 2 years ago in the US and only get a DVD box without a manual anyway, but that seems to be connected to the local market].

I am not saying that his is a good or bad development, but right now it looks like that's the way publishers go (and they ultimately decide on this issue) and it seems like a good part of the customers are fine with this (trade 10$ for a pdf manual) - the rest gets to pay for the manual as special edition, which has about the same price a full price game had 2 years ago. Personally I don't think that's a bad deal, through I can see people who love a fancy manual being opposed to this.

However, it's way to far out to even think about this stuff for Dragon Age specifically, no publisher has been signed yet, and we understand that a lot of people want a nice manual with a BioWare game, so I wouldn't start worrying about it at the moment, there's nothing you or we can do about it at this point. I doubt the manual is more than a obscure figure in some of the later schedules for us at the moment, the difference in time investment to make a 60 or 200 page manual is insignificant to all the other numbers on schedule, which are more in the man-year range.

More:
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I am not saying that his is a good or bad development, but right now it looks like that's the way publishers go...
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And I, as a consumer, have every right to object.

A hand-held, coil-bound manual is far more useful than a PDF unless the PDF is formatted such that I can print and bind it in a similar style - full letter or A4 sheets are too large.

I'd rather have a text file than a PDF that's formatted for a full page.
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You indeed have and you should if you don't like it, probably best by writing to some of the major publishers. In the end it will come down to market acceptance (10$ down of full price vs. pdf or "full" price and bound manual) and without feedback (except from sales numbers), publishers are likely to assume that most people are fine with that tradeoff - what I personally think is the case.

As for "full ruleset in the .pdf", it's again a publisher thing. They might insist on getting the final manual for editing at a certain point and from there on, it is out of your hands as the developer, you can't do anything about it anymore. But I agree, the optimal thing would the manual to be complete (through, I can say from personal experience, that it sometimes happens that you send in a final manual and what gets printed for foreign versions miraculously is a version of the manual that's 1 month older than the final one...)

What we "DO" know so far....

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Why woudl the moons necessarily have to be very small? You could have two medium sized moons orbiting a planet of similar size to Earth.
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if it was my choice, I'd scrap those planets and go for rotating disks, solves all those stupid wraparound issues and finally explains why the ocean isn't raising all the time when it rains into it ... just falls off the edges