Dragon Age Forum News (Mar. 04, 05)

Remove all ads!

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

Bioware languages article in Edmonton Journal

---

Am I following this right - there's elven, dwarven and 4th race language, so humans will be speaking English (in the English version)

---

The "common" tongue spoken is English (in the English version of the game anyway, yes) and it is a human tongue. It is also spoken by the other races of the area for economic reasons (in addition to their own, generally speaking).

There are other human tongues, however, such as the one that was described as "Imperial" in the article. There are in-game reasons why we needed to develop the Imperial tongue for this title. Other languages might be visited and developed later.

Lack of Area Builder
There are some things that the DA toolset will probably be better at than NWN's toolset. And for some builders, it will end up being preferential for them.

There are other things, however, which the DA toolset will simply not do. For some builders, this will be a "deal killer", as was said in the first post. Okay, so be it. There are some people who are really looking for something in exactly the same vein as NWN, and that's what NWN2 is for. DA is not NWN2 nor is it meant to compete.

Exactly which parts will be which in the toolset is the fuzzy part right now. Having some kind of area creation ability in the toolset is not ruled out. Only tilesets are, which is in itself a big change from the NWN style right there.

Personally, I fully expect DA to have a large community that is very active and which will be as supported by Bioware as the NWN community is (if not more, considering we will have more freedom to do so). It will not be the NWN commmunity, however, nor do we expect that community to just transfer across to DA en masse. Heck, most of that community will move on to NWN2, I'm sure, and that's by design.

Let there be food and water, clothes and weather!
I have to agree with Syrsuro. If one aspect of the story was basic survival, meaning that it was a challenge to face the elements and gather food, then that would be an excellent (and indeed necessary) game mechanic to include.

You might like that idea and want basic survival to be an aspect of more adventuring stories. But not all stories have it, nor would it work in them. It doesn't work in DA's story, and speaking personally adding it just for ambience or the sheer sake of realism doesn't particularly interest me. Most hardcore realists who demand this in their gaming are, as near as I can tell, really masochists in disguise.

Dragon Age PnP
It's an interesting thing to contemplate, and I don't think we would rule it out.

The only real problem? The system is made to work on the computer. Just like a PnP system that is designed so humans can easily keep track of everything isn't easily ported into a CRPG fully, so is the reverse equally difficult.

For instance: combat has a LOT of factors that go into calculating the basic hit % chance. Computers can do this easily and, hey, they don't mind crunching that many numbers. If we presented that same list to your average gamemaster... well, it's not impossible to do (because like we said we did it ourselves in testing) but it's hardly ideal.

And if we tried to change it into something that was easier for mere humans to follow, suddenly we're changing the game.

See the problem?

Dragon Age PnP
I think it would actually be easier to get behind releasing setting material in terms of "this is a guide to the world" as opposed to making it some kind of supplement to the d20 system.

If we actually were to publish the CRPG rules in PnP format, well then obviously a background supplement would be a given... but if not, making it a literary guide to the world wouldn't be unprecedented. I saw an excellent guide to Dragonlance once that was non-rules-specific, as well as for Middle Earth, amongst others.

Stanley Woo, Quality Assurance

Self Publishing?
We have neither the infrastructure nor the resources in place to consider self-publishing Dragon Age at this time. Also, it's not necessarily better or easier to do so.