Dragon Age Forum News (Dec. 16, 04)

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Here are today's Dragon Age 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.

Darcy Pajak, Assistant Producer

Familiars More Usefull
Let me provide an example of streamlining:

Spell casting in D&D is very complicated. The management of a wizards spell book is a key skill a PNP player needs. They only have so many spells they can cast each day and if they pick the wrong spells they're useless.

First they need to decide how to balance their spell book between protection spells, enhancement, healing, attacking, and task-preforming. Then each spicific spell has certain components needed. (eye of neut, gems, etc.) Then, in a tatical situation, the speed of casting a spell plays an important factor.
This is a lot for a casual play to do, and if they get it wrong, their gameplay experance suffers.

After all that they finaly cast their spell, only to find out their target made a "saving throw" and the spell didn't work anyway.(It's no wonder few people played NWN as a pure spell caster).

On the development side, making sure each of the hundreds of spells does what the rules say is not easy.

In Dragon Age the spell caster still has a wide range of choices for spells, but instead of managing a spell book, they'll be managing power. They can cast lower level spells more often, but still have to reserve some power for a big monster.

The exact nature of spells in Dragon Age is still being balanced, so I cannot go into anything more spicific.

Subraces & More?
Let's just see how the main races work out before we start adding variations to them.

More:

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In Dragon Age the spell caster still has a wide range of choices for spells, but instead of managing a spell book, they'll be managing power. They can cast lower level spells more often, but still have to reserve some power for a big monster.

The exact nature of spells in Dragon Age is still being balanced, so I cannot go into anything more spicific.

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So it's "mana" based ?

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That's the plan at the moment, yes.

Jay Watamaniuk, Community Manager

Make it challenging
It is a matter of personal taste when it comes to how difficult a player wants their game. BG was created with the idea of making battles far more tactical then games had before. This meant the player should get killed if they just charge in with no plan or prep to a new battle. The idea was to make sure the player took time to plan out a battle instead of hoping you could smash your way through an encounter.

Dragon Age is taking a lot of years of lessons in creating RPGs here and that includes how difficult the game is. I like being tested but on the other hand I hate playing a game where I get killed every 11 seconds. This usually does not happen in RPGs as it's more of a FPS type game (worst game for this in recent memory Tron-I got killed 34 times in 12 minutes- I call this an Eggshell game where your main character must be made from egg shells).

should DA have a bestiary ?
I have to agree with the idea that I don't like seeing all the monsters I am going to encounter in the manual. That doesn't make sense to me in terms of creating tension. I like to be surprised. I remember way back in Doom seeing the giant demon with the rocket-launcher for a hand for the first time. Had I seen the picture before hand that experience would have been much less cool.