Dragon Age Forum News (Aug. 06-16, 05)

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Here are today's Dragon Age forum highlights, taken from Dragon Age Official Forum. 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.

James Henley, Designer

A Visual Timeline, capable for in-game access
While I personally like the general idea, it ultimately strikes me as a serious waste of valuable resources/work time.


Think of the zots. And the kittens.

Dev Team Roster?
I can name the rest of the design team, and a large portion of the programming team, but I couldn't tell you what previous projects they've been involved in with any kind of accuracy.

I'm on DA as a cinematic designer, and I'm Jade-stock, born and bred.

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As a side-note, this James Ohlen is not in the pull-down menu "choose a developper" of the search engine.

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Neither is Brenon Holmes. Is he working on DA too or just moderating the forum for his own amusement?

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I can assure you that James Ohlen is not a figment of Dave's imagination, unless we've having group delusions.

As for Brenon, he is certainly on Dragon Age with the rest of us.

Stanley Woo, QA Ninja

A Visual Timeline, capable for in-game access

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I think a lot of this could be done by tweaking the journal, rather than taking screenshots or having timelines. Being able to add our own notes to individual journal entries for instance. Making the journal updates not write over the initial quest details, just adding it on the end would make it a lot easier to remember what a half finished quest was all about too. Also having access to the previous chapters' journal entries like in BG would be nice too.

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I am in favour of fluffyamoeba's iddea of the journal here. I've always liked the character's journals to be, well, an actual journal of his adventures. Quest progress would be appended to the original quest entry, so you would see:

THINGY:
7am: Mr. Jones wants the thingy from Mr. Smith.
8:30am: Mr. Smith says the thingy was lost in the pond and could you get it because he left his flange in it.
2:45pm: Found the thingy in the pond. A superfrog had it.
3pm: Returned thingy to Mr. Smith, who got his flange. He gave me a cookie.
4:30pm: Returned thingy to Mr. Jones. He gave me twenty bucks.

Having the character's progression visible to the player conveys more of a sense of the passage of time, and of the steps the player has already completed in the quest. Having a simple snapshot of a character's quest progress may make the quest information easy to read, but doesn't have the same sense of "adventuring and progressing." But this has a limit, too.

I don't necessarily want the journal to read like a fantasy journal:

THINGY:
7am: The Companions didst encounter Goodman Jonnes, an unremarkable fellow, who impressed within us the wherewithal to embarque upon a light queste--quite remarkably, the Goodman didst misplace his thingy (likely a gizmo of unusual construction and function). He surmises that he has been carousing time and again with Goodman Smith of late, and that Smith is likely to have said thingy in his possession. Should we wish a monetary reward along with his thanks and kind regard, we shouldst perambulate to the domicile of Goodman Smith and retrieve the thingy before the morrow.

Brenon Holmes, Programmer

Randomness in Character Design

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randomized hit points and ability scores in a rpg, and particularly in a crpg, is just plain stoopid.

period.

HA! Good Fun!

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Yep. Sure are. You probably won't see anything of that nature...

Dev Team Roster?
The lead programmer on KotOR was actually David Falkner.

Mark, is currently working on other stuff in the company which has not been made public.

When is this game coming out?!?
There is no current release date (it'll be done when it's done). Thank you.

I can understand wanting to see more of the game... we want to show you more too, patience... good food comes to those who wait... or something like that. Wasn't there something about prunes?

Andrew Farrell, Artist

Dev Team Roster?
Im an Artist working on the Environments in Dragon Age, this is my first project at Bioware.

But I have worked on other games for a different company.

Bob McCabe, Troublemaker

Dev Team Roster?

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... and luke...

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Luke's still around, though he's progressed from Senior Writer to Doddering Writer. I thought I spotted him twisting a tail from a My Little Pony onto a GI Joe the other day...

Scott Meadows, Programmer

Dev Team Roster?
Since you asked,

I am working on the Toolset and this is my first Bio Project.
I don't reply to many topics but I read almost all of them.

David Gaider, Designer

Randomness in Character Design
Rolling dice for stats is a bit of a visceral thrill, sure. But let's face it: for all but the truly masochistic, rolling up a D&D character (for instance) isn't truly random. You roll a crap character? You toss it out. Even in a PnP situation with the DM looming over you, when you show him that your highest score was 12 he'll undoubtedly let you re-roll. Being reasonable is one thing... having a gimped character is quite something else. Often, groups had rules like "roll 4d6 but take the best 3 dice" or allowed the transfer of a certain number of points between stats after rolling.

The result? In my experience, rolling stats ended up with characters that had overall higher stats than anything you should reasonably get when rolling normally or using point-buy. And naturally there is always at least one player in the group who rolled ("I rolled it! I swear!") unbelievably amazing stats and thus was overpowered right off the start, irritating the other players every time that was demonstrated in-game.

Maybe there's a little power-gamer in all of us? Or maybe most of us just don't like the idea of starting off with a disadvantaged character when there was no barrier against being better. You see this attitude in MMORPG's a lot, too, and while there are true roleplayers out there who would say they like playing to their character's disadvantages, when push comes to shove I'm willing to bet they lean the exact same way.

Argue whether it's the rolling part of it that the problem or the system itself that's the problem, it's still a problem... especially when the system must work equally well for both SP and MP.

Of course, taking away all ability for the player to futz with his character on creation isn't much fun, either. We're not talking about having very little customization a la Jade Empire (as someone mentioned)... there's plenty of futzing for you to do. But the system simply doesn't have much randomness(nor would it benefit from it).

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Agreed. And there are, as noted, two solutions and you have chosen to take the easier of the two (understandable) and gone for non-random character creation. This isn't necessarily a bad thing (for one thing, its a new system and therefore the 'jaded' aspects of character creation hopefully wont set in for years) - I just wanted to point out there there ARE some inherent advantages to randomness which have nothing to do with powergaming. It seems you were ignoring those advantages (and those players who enjoy that aspect). Of course, ignoring minorities is often good business sense, but that is life.

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That's not very fair at all.

At no point did we sit there and decide against random stats. We made the system we wanted to, and randomness wouldn't improve it in any way. It has nothing to do with "ignoring" anyone, but rather with making the system that we feel works.

Originality
I'm game, though I won't promise anything. Some things, even if I could talk about them in general terms, aren't good to discuss without being accompanied by full disclosure to prevent folks from jumping to conclusions and leaping off of tall buildings and such. I just can't handle all the drama like I used to, you know.

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(Note to DG: maybe you weren't the best person to play this game, my ideas are much more relevant to gameplay issues and technical stuff than story or other writing issues. Sorry.)

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Well, I do have input on those things as well... I'm just not sure what you're getting at here. It seems like a very circuitous way of asking the same questions that other threads are asking, near as I can tell.

A test to know your romance creature is loyal or betrayal...

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I think romance is beautiful...but that might be better to have a test(no matter the test is from your PC or your enemies) to know your romance creature is loyal or betrayal...

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We have these tests in real-life relationships. They are called "mind games". I suppose I could allow your character to engineer one on your romance, but the writer in me would demand that it go poorly for you.

This is, after all, not a romantic drama. And seeing as there is no way your girlfriend could be "Chaotic Evil" or something else inherently destructive in a fantasy-esque way, playing mind games on her just to test her loyalty to you is begging for her to do just the opposite.

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In addition, will there be able to exchange "engagement rings" or some things with your PC's lover(NPC) in DA...

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You mean ask them to get married? Unlikely. Considering the length of time and events involved, building a romance to the stage where one says "I love you" would be a bit of a stretch as it is... declarations of life-long devotion go a bit beyond that.

Conversation Styles

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Considering that DA is more or less going to have full VO for the npc, descriptive dialog would be redundant wouldn't it? Not to mention facial animations displaying emotive responses.

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That's pretty much it. I really liked the Light Narrative Style (that's what we refer to it as... Heavy Narrative would be Plansescape: Torment) that we tried out in HotU, but it doesn't work well in conjunction with VO and shouldn't (theoretically) be needed when you have such a high degree of animations present.

More: Maybe I should amend what I said. While I enjoyed the foray into Light Narrative style in HotU, obviously that's not what we're doing with Dragon Age, since we will have full VO and animations.

Cue pointless whining.

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If that is what you will have then what choice do we players have then? Still I see it as a waste of resources that could have been used elsewhere.

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Of course you do.

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Still, here's hoping we get narrative for when the pc touches or smells something interesting.

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Yes, there is still text narrative in some instances when you are interacting with an object (so it is all narrative, then) or when something environmental is occuring that isn't otherwise handled by audio or animation effects.

Dev Team Roster?

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Maybe this has already been addressed, but who is the design/dev team? As in have any of them worked on previous games like KOTOR, NWN, or BG (even RPGs from other companies) so we kind of know who's at the helm? thanks

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James Ohlen is the lead designer... as he was on BG, BG2 and KotOR.

On the writing side of design, it's a bit mixed for experience. I'm the lead writer (BG2, Throne of Bhaal, KotOR, HotU are my major projects for Bio) and we have two others currently, Daniel Erickson and Patrick Weekes, for whom DA is their first Bio project.

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right now is it only about the Designer and Writer? What about Art and Cinematic? Or are those belong to the Designer catalogue?

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Well, geez. I live in a small world, you know. There are technical designers and programmers and artists and such folk, but I sure as heck don't know who they all are and wouldn't want to leave anyone out.

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I guess James Ohlen don't have time enough to be around here?

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I know he pops in from time to time and reads through a few threads that seem interesting, but it's not very often. He is pretty darn busy.

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Is Trent involved with DA? Or is he still tossing Gnomes from the lands of NWN? I was scared he was burning out discussing the NeverEnding topics of release dates, trout slapping, and pool noodles!

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Nope, Trent's working on a different project.

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And which of the Bio folks play PnP? Other CRPG's?

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A lot, if not most. I run a weekly Firefly campaign with about 9 players, and I know several other designers who are in PnP campaigns of their own (the new Warhammer Fantasy RPG comes to mind). All the designers try out new CRPG's as a rule (it's not like they have to twist our arms, tho), and I suspect the same is largely true for the other departments.

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Ever thought of doing an arcade fighting game to be shipped as a bonus with DA?

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No, but there was a time when we joked about making a Bioware CCG. There was even a David Gaider card which did nothing initially but was twice as powerful as every other card later in the game.

Which, ummm, isn't funny at all if you know nothing about my narcoleptic work habits, but there you go. It seemed funny at the time.

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There're truly BioWare employees on the boards. How about Todd Grenier (he did BGII's GUI), is he still around?

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Todd's still with us, yup. But he's not working on Dragon Age, I'm afraid.

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I would really like a BGII-like GUI in the combat mode. Actually as BGII-player I would like the option of top-down view whole the time. I guess that many BG-players would like that. But hey, I'll see how this will turn out.

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As far as the view goes, I suspect it will be pretty easy to change it up however it pleases you. We won't know what the default views will be until we start testing it in the final version, though... the intended view schemes we have right now may end up playing like icky-poo. It happens.

Economy in Dragon Age.
Economy simulation is only going to be effective when you're going for a world simulation at the same time... which we are not doing. We could certainly make it seem that there is some kind of economy going on, though you would only ever see evidence of that if there's some kind of hub location which you keep returning to and seeing the fluctuation of prices and availability.

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Hum, but I guess we will be getting the usual stuff.

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Just because we're not attempting an economic simulation does not mean we're not changing how we're balancing magical treasure and wealth for the player. Those are two seperate topics.

Good, Evil, Sacrifice, Temptation
As I've said elsewhere, Dragon Age isn't defined by absolutes of good and evil... it's a matter of perception, though that isn't to say that people in Dragon Age aren't trying to do good or recognize some things as evil. The concepts do exist.

Similarly, when we are designing the quests we aren't going out of our way to make an easily-identifiable "good route" and "evil route" through every quest. There are logical paths to take and sometimes it will be difficult to identify which route is the best to take, as the consequences tend to involve trade-offs. We do, however, look at the quests from the stance of "if I were a player trying to be good or trying to be evil, would I have a reasonable course of action to take?" There may be sacrifices involved, but they shouldn't make the player feel like he's been tricked... you no more want to rap a player on the nose and go "Ha ha! Serves you right for trying to do the right thing!" than you would want to punish a player for being intelligently evil.

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It’s not that easy in Thedas. BioWare isn’t going to be painting a huge neon sign that says, “This is what the god says so this is good.”

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Why not? In our world, just because there's no direct evidence that God exists doesn't mean there's any shortage of people eager to speak on His behalf.

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As I've said elsewhere, Dragon Age isn't defined by absolutes of good and evil... it's a matter of perception, though that isn't to say that people in Dragon Age aren't trying to do good or recognize some things as evil. The concepts do exist.

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Sorry, I didn't mean to take this quote out of context. I did not mean to imply that the game does not actually HAVE the concepts of good or evil in them. The discussion on this thread seems to be whether or not absolute good and evil exist, or whether the concepts of good and evil are relative. Since it's already been pointed out that absolute good and evil do not exist in DA, the discussion is not important to this game.

Possible unbalances between good/neutral/evil playing styles is important to the game however

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No, I heard you... in fact, I followed up the quote you picked with a discussion on our philosophy regarding designing quests around these motivations. Nobody seemed interested in it, though.

Question for Bioware (dont worry nothing bad)

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I was wondering how the forum has helped shape Dragon Age during its development.

Have you changed any aspect of the game due to our posts?

Have you implemented any of our ideas that you thought would work well within the framework you have already created? If so, which ones?

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Well, it's not quite like, "Hey, they mentioned this feature on the forums this morning. Let's implement that." It's more along the lines that things mentioned on the forum sometimes come up when we are discussing features, kind of like having an additional voice at the table.

We could be talking about, say, treasure allocation and I might say "you know, this exact thing came up on the forum just the other day and the consensus seemed to be X."
Then someone looks at me, wide-eyed, and says, "Wow, there was a consensus on the forum?"
And I go, "Yeah. Weird, huh?" And then we move on.

...no, seriously, we'll discuss the point if it has merit and I would say the opinions expressed on the forums have an influence on the game, but less in terms of specific features (after all, it's not like we don't have these same geeky arguments amongst the designers) and more in terms of how much you influence our opinions. I, like the other designers and programmers and such, can be swayed by a thoughtful opinion or a solid argument as much as the next person.

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Are there any specific aspects of Dragon Age you would like more Forum feedback on?

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Well, you can't give feedback on something that you don't know much about, really... but I will say that I tend to be drawn to discussions on specific design elements such as dialogue and character development and am getting a bit tired of the comparison & criticism threads regarding past projects (as if the post-mortem process wasn't enough navel-gazing to last several life times as it is). But whatever. Your mileage may vary, as they say.

 

Yeah, randomness in HP is just strange. In stats, it stands for some realism. After all, it's not like every human has the same sum total of talents and abilities. Pointbuy is flawed, too.

As for romance, it's quite strange how people seem oblivious to such mundane concerns as duration of the game.