Dragon Age Forum News (Aug. 22, 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.

Scott Meadows, Programmer

Will Dragon Age be a Multiplayer game?

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Well, I'm pretty sure that there might not be many DA servers, according to how the editor is going to be designed. I don't think you'll have to worry about not being able to join a lot of servers.

Off topic: In regards to the "American English", there are so many types "English" in the U.S., I don't think it's possible to have plain old "American English".

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Why do you say that?

From what I have seen and participated in this community as a player and my own server for a group of friends, anything is possible.

I am curious to hear your reasoning on this, how does the editor being designed affect how many servers there are?

More:

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I don't know that there really is a correlation, but it wouldn't be shocking to see fewer servers running if there are fewer modules to run on them.

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I agree that their is no correlation.
I agree that their may well be less modules in total. But not as a result of an assumed complexity of a toolset. More as a result of more products offering toolsets and people finding their favorite and sticking with it.

But it is possible that DA will have the same amount of servers but more of them are running the same modules?

I just don't like people making assumptions about things that we haven't even discussed yet, like the design of the toolset.

More: Some very good points and observations.

I will just add that I would like more "focused" modules that are memorable and less "1 hour and let's see if I can get it to work, cause I can" modules.

Not saying that the 1 hour are lower quality, just that they are not as memorable and don't have all the goodies in them.

I loved the fact that I could grab a module off the vault and read it in a couple of hours then DM it for friends. I didn't have to plan anything additional or add anything in, it was all there for me to just work with. But it did take a while to find those type in the vault.

I personally hope that DA has as large or larger community as NWN, cause it is looking really good.

David Gaider, Designer

Large Buildings
Well, Dragon Age doesn't use tilesets like NWN did... and the view is not isometric all the time, either, so unlike NWN we do need things like tops of buildings and roofs and such. I don't know if you'll be able to do massive buildings and such necessarily, but I'm simply saying that the requirements for DA are much different than NWN and thus so will the restrictions be different.

The Opening Scene

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I can see the opening cutscene being different for each backstory though I think all of them will start off at or around pretty much the same time and place.

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I imagine that if there's a prerendered CG opening, it'll be the same for every backstory, because those things are apparently crazy expensive to do well. But I certainly think there should be a separate in-game cutscene opening for each backstory.

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That is the case, I believe. Unless I'm massively mis-remembering it, there's a pre-rendered cutscene which opens the game (which everyone gets) and then a seperate in-game cutscene for each of the backgrounds.

Though they don't start off in the same place. Each background has you starting off in a different "home" area which you will be able to return to later on in the game (and thus have a different experience in).

Is this expensive? Yes, indeedy. But we've always been willing to pay the price if we feel the pay-off is worth it... and this is one of those features we feel like we need to try out and thus do the work for.

Brenon Holmes, Programmer

What types of battles do you want to see in DA

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What I would like to see is battles is better stage setting.

For example, if I can see the bad guys, they should be able to see me (if I'm not hidden in some manner). In NWN, and even BG to some extent, many times you could be in full view of the people you know you were going to fight and cast buffing spells, lay down traps or in the case of BG, position your party to it's best advantage all the while the bad guys just stood there and then when the battle started, run right into those traps that they saw you lay down.

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This is an interesting case. We actually originally had monsters with the same perception ranges as the player in NWN. It was changed in testing, mostly because the player cannot react as quickly as the AI... resulting in the player *always* getting ambushed...

That was a generic system though, I wouldn't be adverse to at least a few encounters where your enemies were waiting in ambush for you.

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Another thing, encounters should have more of a flow to them. Every battle in BG/NWM was the same. Once the bad guys saw you, they attacked in a straight line. No falling back, if they were getting creamed, no flanking movements, no attacks geared to taking out certain attacking party members (i.e. mages or spell casters or perhaps ignoring summons to get at the spell caster first). No calling in re-inforcements or no pulling back to spring a trap on the party. This doesn't necessarily have to be better scripting, but just better encounter setup.

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Yep, agree. We're looking in to some of these for DA.

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What I would like to see are encounters that depend as much or more on the tactics used as the power of the items that I have at my command.

What I would like to see is better tactical command of my party (which I liked in BG). The ability to create battle scripts that have each party member play the way that I want them to without having to be constantly supervised. But I want these scripts to be more like the NWN scripts, rather than the limited ones that were used in BG.

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We're still not sure how we'll be handling party AI (if there will even *be* party AI).

The scripting language is syntactically similar to NWScript (though there are some nifty new changes), so if you know it the only adjustment should be adapting to the new API.

It might be possible to hack the DA campaign to layer your combat AI in there for NPC's... but it's hard to say if that would be successful or not at this stage.

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On the whole enemy AI thing, I'd like to see some enemy groups have a 'leader' as well as your usual fighter/healer/mage goons. With the leader present the enemy will often use smart tactics such as focus firing on your casters, falling back, etc. While without a leader most groups would just resort to their usual headless chicken tactics.

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This is also something we're looking into. Though without a leader, the group may end up just being a bit less coordinated as opposed to dumb - though that sort of thing could depend on other factors.