Dragon Age Forum News (Feb. 23, 05)

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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

dumb question
I think that subscription fees only really work if there is constant, and consistant release of new content for the game.

However, MMORPG's do not have to release as much because there are so many people about that the game experance can be diffrent enought each time you play that it keeps you comming back.

dumb question

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Subscription fees only make sense to me if the games are being hosted on a company's dedicated network. That generates overhead which understandably needs to be compensated. If I built my own dedicated server and am playing with my small group of friends, then it only makes sense that I'd by the game and payment ends there barring expansion packs etc.

-E

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This is true, however the company also has to supply a really good game experance to make me pay a fee. And the more I have to pay, the better the experance should be.

If it's free, I'll be happy just to connect and play with my friends, if it cost $100/ month, It should be better then sex.

Engine vs Story
They were/are being worked on simultaneously. We know what sort of gameplay experience we want to have, and so the engine is built on that, with additions that design requests for their story, and scripting. But there are some key separations. Simply put, when writing the story the designers do not worry about how spells, or combat works. They are concerned with what happens between key incident points. Programmers do not worry about who says what to whom, or what makes up an encounter, but do need to add code so that the game has a usable interface for party control, and new party-based systems.

The Technical designers live between them, the implement the scripting and encounters as planned by the designers, using commands enabled by the programmers. The tech designers also start planning the combat, spell, and skill systems and work with the programmers to get them in the game.

Art and animation start getting involved when the story line is plotted out. They start building the levels, monsters and animating them. Animation works with both design and programming to get the combat and movement systems to look awesome.

Audio then gets involved putting sound, and music and voices in the game.

Of course at all times everyone can add input to whatever feature they want to. We are all critics of our work and if someone likes or dislikes a part of the game, we look into it.