Dragon Age Forum News (Jan. 06, 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.

David Gaider, Designer

Spirituality in DA

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BioWare (and modders too, to some extent) must be very cautious in their work when dealing with religion(s) of DA. In my opinion, it's better to develop your own system of spirituality than borrow too heavily from existing ones and at the same time risk angering the wrong people. I mean, there are already more than enough intolerant & otherwise nice fanatics out there thinking all RPG's are nothing but satanic inventions and tools of the Devil...

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At the same time, however, people tend to see what they want to see. If you have a prophet, for instance, some people are immediately going to see Jesus or Mohammed even if nothing that character did correlates to their lives. Then, too, one must consider that organized religions tend to have certain characteristics that are common between them... which will only deepen the certainty of some folks who will eventually come here and say "that religion is too much like X!"

The funny part is that you will get seperate people talking about the same religion and yet their X will be different (the same thing, I expect, will occur with regards to the cultures and races).

At the end of the day, however, I would still rather have an impassioned reaction that is occasionally negative as opposed to an apathetic reaction. On a related note, I would consider characters such as Anomen and Aribeth more successful than, say, Valygar or Aarin Gend for that very reason. Religion is a bit touchier of a subject, naturally, but in essence it would still hold true... why go through all the trouble to create something that nobody will discuss or be particularly interested in?

Day and Night Cycle!!!!

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And well, I'm not sure about this trade off you're talking about David. It comes down to an old question: Quality or Quantity. In this case, I can say less area but with rich enchanment or more area but looks plain.

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But areas don't look plain if you don't have a day/night cycle. They look pretty awesome regardless of what time of day you set it as. Indeed, having the light sources baked into the level allow you to do some things that you really can't if you want everything set up to transition.

The question one must ask here is whether or not having day/night cycles adds enough to the game to be worth having less areas and therefore the game being either shorter or more repetitive visually. The quality of the art in the levels themselves is unaffected.

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Hence, I feel, the importance of day / night cycles in contributing to in-game quests and story flow.

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You're missing my point.

If I didn't have a day/night cycle to work with, I wouldn't include a plot where you would have to be in the same area in both time frames. That does not mean, however, that there aren't plenty of plots or even ways to work around it.

Consider this:

You get your quest to rob a particular mansion at night. You proceed to that part of the city to perform the quest (perhaps a new area that opens up). Have a cutscene of the sun going down, and you're now in the new area that includes the mansion and it is night-time. You perform the mission inside that area entirely and it remains night throughout (as it should). When you leave, you have a transition cutscene and you're back at the regular day-time city area(s).

Does that strike you as being limiting in any fashion, story-wise? The only difference we're talking about here is having a transition from a day appearance to a night appearance in the same area. Heck, if we really wanted to and needed it for the plot, we could even include two versions of the same area... one day, one night... and use either as necessary for whichever plot required it. The only difference is that you would never be standing in that area and have it go from one to the other.

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Personally, I can not say I like it. What you're proposing is more like a temporary or instant solution for a specific case.

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And most of the reasons people are coming up with as to why a day/night cycle is so necessary seem very specific and ignore the fact that you can find a way around the issue for just about any kind of quest. And it does not have feel static, either, which is the assumption some people seem to have. Time can still pass and events do not have to be linked to the passage of day and night in order to provide a sense of urgency.

You come to a town during the day and are warned that zombies will come out at night. How is the story improved, really, if you have the capability of standing around until the night transition occurs? Would you really do that, just to see if it could happen? And if we needed a night version of the town anyway and had one, what is to say that we couldn't use a cutscene "sundown" to transition to the new area? As I said, there is always a solution and the only way you are going to encounter the kind of static situations which some seem to fear is if you purposefully go out of your way to find them.

Again, all things being equal, it would be preferable to have the ability for day/night transitions so that some of these situations are possible... they do provide more options, after all. But none of these situations are necessary in order to have a good story or a good game.

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But the harder the work, the sweeter the result IMO.

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It's not generally harder work but the fact that there's more of it that's the limitation. If you're okay with having a shorter game so you can have day/night cycling, that's one thing... it's not like we just don't want to work hard.

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Uhm...I mean harder in the mean of difficulties level (easy, medium, hard), not in the mean of hard worker or slacker

I know some of you guys sometime have to stay in the office to 2am

So just feel good

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Err... yes, I know, but how does a higher difficulty level not translate into more work, as well? If the level is more difficult to create that means it takes longer to produce. It's not just a question of skill and someone rolls a dice, "Woo hoo! I got an 18!".

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If Dragon Age will be a kick *** game to mod similiar to NWN. Then should not the emphasis be on making the game engine as flexible as possible?

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As we have said many times prior to now, the emphasis of DA does not rest on the toolset as it did with NWN. There will be a toolset and in many ways it will be more flexible than the NWN toolset (we intend to leave a lot more things open to alteration and scripting, for instance) but the goal is not to focus on the toolset at the expense of the game.

The story of Dragon Age, however, is the game, it is not simply a module or an initial scenario.

We take many things from NWN (such as the toolset) but we take an equal amount from Baldur's Gate and KotOR. DA is not a renamed NWN2... that is a seperate project, with the appropriate focus on the toolset, being undertaken by Obsidian.

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I like the need for resting to take time for several reasons and while it's not a game breaker, just as the day/night cycle is not, it's something I'll be sad not to see.

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You like the idea, I imagine, but keep in mind that this does not mean resting is not in the game. It does mean that you will not be taking constant and unrealistic 8-hour breaks as you proceed through a dungeon. We do have a system for resting that works somewhat different than you might be used to but is intended to be more cinematic in its feel.

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Quote: With adequate ability to rest/wait it also gives control to the player to choose when to do something. Travel by day and sleep during the night? Or risk the nastier things that come out at night to hunt?

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But what if going out to hunt is not a part of the story? If you've got a game where it's all about exploration and running out into the forests to hunt... then, sure, you want a day/night cycle. Time is an important element there.

If that's not an issue, then why is it important that a player choose when to do something? If that area where the mansion that you are going to rob only is needed for the night-time robbery, what would it improve to have that area visitable during the day?

The illusion that time is passing is not immediately dispelled simply because you do not see it passing. Like I said earlier, if you don't have that transition, you don't use it and it would be silly to try as indeed that would take the player out of the immersion. There are ways around it which still leave the player in full control of his actions.

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However, give us the option to put a day night cycle into our mods. If PW's will be at all possible, day and night cycles will undoubtedly be very important to them.

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That would be nice, but is rather unlikely seeing as having day/night cycles would require work on the engine to accomodate it. It would be hard to justify that work if we weren't going to use it, though perhaps I am wrong. Naturally it would be ideal if we could accomodate as many options as possible.

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Interactivity is the main element that a CRPG can potentially provide that a movie or book can't, so if you remove interactivity, you're removing what makes a CRPG a CRPG.

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I quite disagree. I would not define a day/night cycle as interactivity, nor do I think interactivity is what defines a CRPG.

If the most important thing to you is that you are able to wander the world and have day and night pass as you do so, there are plenty of games that do that (and I'm sorry to break it to you, but even they have a "predefined" story). That is not a feature, however, that makes them good nor does it make them CRPG's in particular. We are aiming at presenting a story that maintains its integrity and cinematic feel and still provides plenty of options to the player. Saying that all those options are gone simply because you can't stand there and watch the sun go down is just slightly overdramatic.

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Quote: A good CRPG engine should strive to be complex enough, complete enough, and consistent enough to allow players to find solutions to quests/challenges/obstacles that the designers/writers never thought of.

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I'd like to see the CRPG quest that allows you to solve it in some way that hasn't already been accounted for and written or programmed into the game. You must be referring to the CRPG engine that comes with the sentient AI that plays as your DM. Sounds fun, indeed.

Animated cut scenes?
The problem with what the original poster is referring to are the transition screens... when you move from one area to the next, NWN has the static picture that accompanies the loading bar.

The problem with animating that picture or including a picture is that such things take processing power and thus take up the attention of the computer away from the actual area loading that is going on, the reason for the transition in the first place. I'm not so sure that would be a good idea. While there is something there to distract the player, that's true, it would lengthen the load time and that's bad... especially if you're moving through the transition for the nth time.

That said, the cutscene capabilities for DA are going to be miles above what was possible for NWN. NWN was initially built not to even have cut-scenes and we kind of had to clunkily add them after the fact (*shudder*). DA will have tools for several kinds of cutscenes baked right in, which is all kinds of wholesomey goodness when it comes to the ability to tell a decent story.

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u could always have a map of the overall module (jpg or something) and have a little dotted line showing ur movements (like they do in films & stuff to show the party progress).

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That would be different. That would be something you would use for overland movement as opposed to an area transition per se. We will, in fact, have something in DA for overland travel that works somewhat similarly which I think you will probably like.

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u could still apply it for small-scale things, ilke entering a building from the village, just to show the player which building they've entered etc. Sometimes people don't always remember the layout of the village once they're running around inside.

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Umm... that's what the map would be for. I'm thinking it should be okay to ask the player to think a little, no?

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Quote: Also for stuff like time-progression, where other groups are moving around (e.g. the general troop movements of an invading army).

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Those are cutscenes and would still be different from an area transition which is specifically when resources loading/unloading occurs.

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not always, once the army has moved up into position (in a cut-scene or something) it might just stay there (maps in the world wars weren't a real-time representation, they were based on the last information collected). While I'm running around doing stuff, I get a cutscene showing an army moving in to occupy towns and stuff, the AT shows me what towns are currently occupied since the last cutscene.

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Which would be a static picture again. Or else you have another cutscene... cutscenes are how story exposition is related in a game, and they often occur in-between story transitions (as opposed to area transitions).

And if you use a cutscene AS an area transition, you still have the problem with resource usage.

Dragon Age - Multiplayer

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I do also get the impression the DA won't have a very good pvp balancing, as said it's not Bioware mainstream.

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I can practically guarantee that.

On one end, you have a party system with classes that are intended to work together. On the other, you have PvP where every class is intended to work both independently and be balanced against each other as opposed to against the computer opponents. The twain rarely meet, and we're pretty sure where our focus should lie, here.

Not to say that it won't be possible. It was possible in NWN, after all, even if it was never the point.


Darcy Pajak, Assistant Producer

Day and Night Cycle!!!!
I think it's much more realistic to remove a clock from the game. In the setting of Dragon Age, time pieces would be very large, non portable devices. Having time count on the side of the screen is unrealistic.

If we did put a day night cycle in the game it would be very rare that anyone would actually see it. A player would have to hang about in an area for about 6 hours before they would notice the sun going down. We don't plan on anyone hanging around in one area that long.

Also, we didn't want to include time sensitive quests. This removes some freedom to explore the world from the player.

The biggest reason is what Dave said. We keep control of that so he and the other writters have more flexibility in creating mood / situations for quests, and such.

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Personally this news saddens me a little, for two main reasons.

Firstly I'm in the camp of people who like day/night cycles. I think it can add a lot of ambience to the game. With adequate ability to rest/wait it also gives control to the player to choose when to do something. Travel by day and sleep during the night? Or risk the nastier things that come out at night to hunt? The system of forced transitions that Dave describes removes choice from the player - now the time of day that they perform an activity is prescibed for them by the developer. While I understand that some choice has to be removed from the player for sake of storytelling, I still think that as much that can be granted without sacrificing the things Bioware are reknowned for is a good goal to strive for. Even if that means a slightly shorter game. As someone said above, quality over quantity.

The second reason this saddens me is that it reveals that it is Bioware's current thinking that resting that takes game time will not be in the game. How can you rest for 8 hours when that should result in a shift of time to a different part of the day/night? I like the need for resting to take time for several reasons and while it's not a game breaker, just as the day/night cycle is not, it's something I'll be sad not to see.

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It's very unlikly that anyone would travel by night. Without lamps, and street lights the darkness can kill you. (out in the middle of a mountain pass at night with clouds covering the stars it's pitch black, "Whoops, Hacky went over the edge!"). Torches help somewhat, but when you're talking about days and days of travel, you'd burn out all your torches.

It also really bothered me that I could stop in the middle of a dungeon and rest for 8 hours?!?! I would think that any creature would stumble past once in a while.

Robin Mayne, Webmaster

Web Site Time Frame

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I would not care if it had the exact same content as now but I would like to see some sort of "style" to it. Will it follow the NWN/KotOR basic website design or will it be more like the Jade Empire site. Adding the the generic Bioware News section and recent forum topics would be nice.

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We have plans for an updated site, but I don't have a specific time frame to give you at this point.

As for overall design, the main site will probably be something unique that will capture the flavour of this new world, so more along the lines of the Jade site, though there will be a few design updates to the current site before we get to the site that will be up for launch.

Robin

Georg Zoeller, Designer

Day and Night Cycle!!!!

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Think of Lord of the Rings and the gates of Moria. The letters written on it were only visible in moon- or starlight. Many tales about undead also deal with certain times, e.g. that ghosts only appear after midnight.
I could also think of riddles in which the sun has to be in a special position to hit some spot on the wall (think of old Egyptian, Inca, and Celtic temples).

Plus, it would look sooooo awesome!

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I doubt you will see a quest from us that requires you to stand around for 10 hours until the sun goes down...

James Henley, Technical Designer

Graphic marvel
Well, let me put it like this, folks.

I was recently treated to a preview of some of the work our Dragon Age graphics programmers were working on, at a company meeting.

I'd be surprised if there was anybody present that didn't hear my stunned exclaimation of "Holy ****!"

Dragon Age - Multiplayer

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Kotor doesn't even have multiplayer mode, and Jade Empire, their newest game around this time will be also solo only (from what I know), despite that many people yelling for Xbox live, I guess it's just the style of certain developer

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That would be correct. There is no multiplayer in Jade Empire, and we currently have no Xbox Live plans.

*scurries back to the Jade forums*

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As for NWN2, well, it's not from Bioware, so I guess people has a reason to hope for a PvP supported feature.

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One must recall that NWN2 will be using the D&D ruleset, where (as was illustrated above) the classes were developed to function together, not as completely independent units, making any kind of PvP balancing more difficult.