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

A quote from the Great One concerning Henchmen

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We already know that is not the way DA will handle parties, so what is the "focus" solution going to be? What are James Ohlen's instructions to the writing staff? Has James even considered this yet?
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Err... yes, James has considered this. The focus of the story is always on our minds. But thanks for the reminder. As for what his instructions to the writers, I'm not sure what answer you're looking for. This isn't our first party-based story, after all. At any rate, it's too early to talk even in generalities, so I guess there's no need for us to "whine" about it right now, is there? (Incidentally, I was around for those conversations, and I don't particularly think we did any whining on this topic back then, either.)

Visible Cloaks/Capes?
Yes, we understand about the cloaks. "Cloaks are neat. When my character puts his on, he looks cool. I want my cloak to billow lots." Got it. Written down, even. "billowing essential to story and gameplay" noted and hi-lited. Moving on. (Obviously we can do cloaks. For the person who suggested that doing them was easy and killed that poor kitten, perhaps they might talk to Heed or any of the community members who have done cloaks and ask them what the inherent difficulties seem to be? Just a thought.)

Gnome!

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But I've read a few DnD novels, that predated BG, where the gnomes had a Jansen-like personality (except not as amusing).
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Really? Wow. You mean we did it right by accident? *scratches head* Huh. Who knew?

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I bet the marketing people would love to change this, just to get the obligatory "cover-of-box" chick like that from the wallpaper sample.
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Yeah, well, I suspect you don't have to have pointy ears in order to be the obligatory cover chick. Just check out your local magazine rack sometime. Sigh.

Derek French, Technical Producer

About some engine limitations
The short answer is "dunno" as we are still building the engine.

What, exacty, is Dragon Age the name of?

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It seems like "Dragon Age" would be a period of time.(i.e. as in "stone age", "ice age", etc.) Just a guess though.
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MrPhysics has it right.

Georg Zoeller, Designer

A quote from the Great One concerning Henchmen

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Well, I don't think that it's impossible to have both, but I think that it would be easy to be distracted with your monster-bashing to romance the NPC.
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Gor some reason this conjured the following image with me:

Romance Interest: Oh my dearest !
Player: Oh my beautiful
Romance Interest: How can I brighten your live today?
Player: Grant me a kiss so I may have fire and strength in the upcoming battle
Romance Interest: My dear , you have not yet gained sufficient fame with my person, please slay 30 more goblins and ask again
Player: Oh crap.

Should Bioware haggle with WoTC?
In case you didn't notice, we actually enjoy building our own system and IP.

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Just tell me one thing.... Do the DEV's like some of the thing we wrote around here? Are they actually considering a few of them?
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That's one of the points of having those forums that early in the project. Usually games get announced much later in the development cycle but by having these boards that early we can have feedback on things way earlier. Since most of the stuff in DA is in flow right now and not much has been decided, there is not much solid information to post for us right now, but that doesn't mean we are not considering things we read here on the boards. Every once in a while a cool idea is thrown around here that will make it's way to one of the meetings about DA and eventually end up on the To Be Investigated list. As the project progresses and things become more solid, you will probably see more posts with questions or descriptions about thing that we want input on.

Certain things won't change no matter how "loud' they are posted (i.e. "please BioWare, make it d20", "please, make combat FPS like", etc), but a lot of things are up for discussion at this point, a lot more than in any previous project, because in this case we have full control over ruleset and implementation.

Hope that helps

AoE spells hurting allies- Poll
One mistake in NWN in regards to AoE spell behavior was to tie it to the difficulty setting, which is incredibly untransparent. If there was something like an AoE FF switch in DA, it would most likely not be tied to the difficulty setting.

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I think friendly fire is unlikely to make it into DA, simply because it makes the AI much simpler.
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Not neccessarily. The main problems with friendly fire came from the horrible auto faction system in NWN (I don't think anyone really likes it around here, it's probably the worst nightmare of anyone who had been involved with AI scripting in the past).

Assuming that there will not be a faction system that has automatic adjustments, a whole level of complexity is removed.

Adding evaluation functions to area of effect spells that make NPCs evaluate whether or not it's justified to throw that fireball on the 10 trolls that surround that one party member is still not trivial but hardly too expensive not to try (plus you could have some interesting options, i.e. an evil wizard might have a little lower threshold of firing that fireball...)

Personally I like friendly fire because it adds some tactial depth to battles, but I also understand people who hate it, especially when they got knocked off their feet by Deekin's for the 10th time in a row (or anyone remember what happened if you gave a party member the "firedoom staff" in U7?). Regardless how good your AI is, there will still be a good amount of players who will not be satisfied with how it reacts.

The optimal solution would probably be to make it an optional switch and retain special AI routines for the "FF on" setting so NPCs still would be somewhat careful about what they do with their AoE attacks, but only time will tell what ends up in DA.

Will D&D fans support Dragon Age?
I think the number of people who say "I'm not playing any CRPG except D&D" out there is very very small, and as chris said, it's not that you are divorcing with a certain game/ruleset when you try out others.

I'm sure there will still be lot's of D&D games in the future so it's not that our decision to pursue our own IP is going harm that franchise.

I for my part will still buy any CRPG out there that get really decent reviews, regardless which IP they are using, because I like playing CRPGs.

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I'd like to know what the final numbers for it would be, say, a year after DA gets released, as to HOW MANY of the buyers are "hardcore" DnDers (ie. PnP foamers).
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I would guess it's less than 1/50 *active* PnP players per total buyers on NWN. More people probably played PnP in the past, but it's not that there are a lot new PnP players among the teen generation these days. Probably 1/100 of these guys is a religious fanatic who would never buy anything else than a D&D CRPG.

Reality vs Fantasy (All Aspects of Gameplay)
Realism is overrated these days.

Back in the days where you could tell pixels from each other on the screen, adding elements from the real world helped us to jump the barrier and get immersed into the virtual world. "Hey they have to eat food too, just like real people".

Today facial expressions and animations, VO and very close to real graphics already help to make those computer creatures look more real, the additional step of introducing things for the sake of realism isn't needed anymore.

I'm not saying that you need to cut all realism because as soon as you stray to far from the world as we know it (i.e. different physics), it's getting very hard for people to believe the world you are painting there. I just say that the industry has correctly identified that adding more and more realism does not neccessarily add fun or immersion - things like "food and water", "bathroom break", "using cloth to manage body temperature" have proven to be more annoying than helpful in the past (to the majority of players) and got rid of it.

Take encumbrance. An encumbrance system can serve as a balancing tool, but so can limited inventory space (in a more apparent way). If you overdo your encumbrance system by going "real life", most character would barely be able to carry around the armor or weapon they have. That would lead to people engaging in boring activity such as continuously travel between places to pick up all the treasure they found, because it is seriously unfun to throw away 50% of your loot in order to pick up that one armor that happens to be heavy. People WILL engage in boring, repeating activities in order to get around barriers like that and they will hate you for that.

IMO, if your RPG moves focus from "role playing game" to "every day life simulation" , you screwed up (unless you are trying to run a MMORPG and need to keep people busy with minor stuff in order to keep them long enough for the social network effect to kick in).

As for "realism" in combat, I think mostly we are talking about "realism" as it is perceived on the movie screens - the flashy kind of stuff.

Opinions on customizing party members
What do you think about the solution BG had? Either completely custom create every of your party members or take the ones that are in game with all their personality?

How about the stuff in HotU (tell your henchmen what class to specialize in)?

Why reinvent the wheel, world-wise?

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again, don’t let self get confused. this is not ‘bout whether “repackaged” is an appropriate term. geo claims that since we disagree as to term that reasonable discourse is impossible…
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Yea yea whatever you say. I'm sure somewhere inside that pile of broken grammar is a piece of truth, if you read it backwards and in the correct language. But I'm also sure it's not on topic. Maybe once you got to the point where you can get more than 3 letters of my name right, we can continue this discussion on the appropriate board.

Arttibutes List (New Thread)
Lots of interesting thoughts here, we will see how everyone will react when our system is unveiled

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We will hate it at first, then play it and get used to it and finally love it. How could it be any other way?
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You forgot the part where you will take the book of rules and keep finding any discrepancies between it and the implementation and ride on them for all eternity

E3 Demo; where is it ?

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On the contrary - I believe that what they showed at E3 was actual game code, not a 'trailer'. And they did not allow the press to tape the demo. As a result, there is nothing to show us.
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Yepp, the demo was live code, not video Of course it has since then been destroyed, the CD broken down to bit level and the remains are now guarded by Skwikky in the basement along with the corpse of the guy who tried to tape it during the demo session.