Dragon Age Forum News (Jan. 22, 06)

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

Brenon Holmes, Programmer

refraction of a hint of a guesstimate of a signal of a clue?

In a lot of cases certain publishers do have a fair bit to offer. Distribution of games is a fair amount of work, and in a lot of cases publishers already have the infrastructure and the contacts to distribute a lot of games quickly.

It doesn't matter how sexy your game is, if you can't get it to the hands of the people who want to play it you're still sunk.

Everyone already "knows" that a fairly large amount of capital is usually required for development as well, so I don't really have to expouse the merits of having an up front investment.

Folks usually hear about all the publishing horror stories, but unfortunately you never really hear about the good publishing partnerings. Believe it or not, they *do* exist.

Some little things...

Part of the point of a role playing game though is assuming a role... and the willingness on your part to take part in the experience.

Willful suspension of disbelief.

If you aren't willing to believe in the story, characters, and background... how will *any* consequence have any impact on you? Except for ones that directly stop you from "winning teh game".

After all, to take a similar attitude... it's all just pixels right? So all choices are equally meaningles...

More:

What stops you in real life from killing a random civilian and taking their stuff? Besides the legal ramifications, I would assume there is some morality in there somewhere... why does it suddenly not apply when you're playing a role in a video game?

Isn't that adequate in terms of 'consequences' without having to necessarily have a game system track your morality for you?

I'm not bringing this up as a cop out on our side, I'm actually just interested.

Jennifer Hepler, Writer

PHYSICAL interaction between NPCs.

The challenge of creating believable relationships between characters is very different from the challenge of creating naturalistic physical interactions between character models. Both of them need a lot of work to rise above the usual game standards, but to me (factoring in my bias as a writer), the more unforgivable one is the lack of relationships.

There are a lot of technical limitations involved in making character models physically interact when the models involved have no definite size (i.e. a PC who can be a human or a dwarf). To make a character's relationships believable, though, only requires that those characters be written as real people with desires, interests and things in common. Books and comic books manage to convey complex human relationships with no graphics, or still pictures, far better than most games have managed.

Dragon Age definitely has more realistic, involving, character relationships as a major goal of its writers. We hope, by the end, to have a game where you can have a genuine emotional response to the people you meet, whether nemeses or romances. But how exactly that will be played out in the animation, no one can say for certain yet.