Dragon Age Forum News (Nov. 29, 05)

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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.

David Gaider, Lead Writer

Classes that change...

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No, I was wanting a flexible base system, allowing a decent set of "normal" classes.

With the ability to take prestiege classes, or kits, if and when you complete certain in-game tasks.

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Meaning you want D&D. Or am I mistaken? What constitutes a "decent set"? 10? What is "normal" about those classes? I'm curious.

The 4th race
We have no half-breed races.

For those races that can interbreed, I believe the child favors either one parent or the other.

finally new gen. party based rpg!

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Forgive me Dave, but what other characters did you write as well? I cannot keep track of them all.

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For BG2? Let's see... I was the primary writer for Anomen, Viconia, Aerie, Haer'Dalis, Valygar... maybe a few others, I forget. I remember writing a lot of Jan and Keldorn.

Same characters for ToB, plus Imoen and Sarevok.

For NWN it was Ariberth and Aarin Gend (in Chapter 2 only, though) as well as Tomi Undergallows and Sharwyn. Add Deekin and Valen to that for the expansions.

For KotOR it was Carth, Jolee, HK-47 and about half of Bastila (the romance part).

Umm... I think that's a complete list. Probably more than you were asking for.

About Wilderness

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(Sindarian Elvish)
rithannen i geven
thangen i harn
na fennas i daur
ol dûr ristannen
Eryn echuiannen
i ngelaidh dagrar
ristar thyn, cúa tawar
Dambedir enyd i ganed
Si linna i waew trin ylf
Isto i dur i chuiyl
i ngelaidh dagrar

(English)
Earth shakes,
Stone breaks
The forest is at your door
The dark sleep is broken
The woods have awoken
The trees have gone to war
Roots rend, wood bends
The Ents have answered the call
Through branches now the wind sings
Feel the power of living things
The trees have gone to war

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Sorry, not to be rude or anything, but... does this whole thing need to be repeated every single post? You are exceeding my tolerance levels for self-indulgent poetry, I'm afraid.

Definition of a Dwarf

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See? Yer not smart. Maybe ye should read the quote and Dave´s statement again. Certainly you should *understand* something better then.

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I have to agree with Samurai. I don't get your conclusion, either. Unless the fact that of the various classes at least a few are warrior types with some ability to buff their abilities and weapons leads to the conclusion that the game is a "hackfest" -- does it? Or are you being deliberately obtuse?

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But if in game you meet and elven king/prince/lord NPC, given his lifespan and everything, I wouldn't ming at all if he would be a master fighter AND spellcaster.

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You might not mind it, but it won't happen regardless.

More: Um. Just so you know... dwarves in Dragon Age aren't going to be much like that, really. In case you were expecting them to be, that is.

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That's fine by me. That was just posted in the spirit of the original post at the start of this thread which asked how we like to think of dwarfs

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Oh. Well, alrighty. Carry on, then.

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must be great fun in dwarf-land... all that booze & everyone so serious... like a funeral.

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They're serious... like a FOX!

Magic items: Wondrous vs Powerful

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A lot of people seem to echo this sentiment. The problem is, are you willing to sacrifice game balance in order for magic to be "special"?

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Why must game balance be sacrificed? You seem to be making a lot of assumptions.

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EVERY rpg ever made that features powerful weapons that are vastly more powerful than regular weapons has been imbalanced.

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And why are magic items so vastly powerful? I said magic was powerful. I said magic has changed history -- not rolled across those non-magical losers in a display of uber-pwnage.

Actual enchanted items are rare, and most quality equipment is non-magical, but that neither means that what enchanted items exist are earth-shakingly powerful weapons nor that said weapons would automatically make their way into the hands of the players.

And if they did, and they unbalanced the game completely because said magical artifacts completely pwned everyone with their piddly non-magical stuff, you'd think we might notice.

But I suppose it's easier to fill in the blanks yourself, leap to a conclusion, and then demand a solution to this non-existant problem. I mean... you claim other RPG's have taken this route you describe. Certainly that's more than enough evidence to base your conclusion on, am I right?

Magic and Magical Items?

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I am hoping for a low magic world, where magic is just that, magical.

Playing and Dming in FR for so many years you loose the sense of wonder when dealing with magic. It floods the world so much so that it becomes mundane, mearly a tool to be used, just like a hammer or saw.

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I'm not sure quite what I would call the magic category where DA sits, as Low Magic settings can cover quite a lot of territory.

Magic in DA is Low Magic in the sense that it is rare -- your average commoner is unlikely to encounter anything truly magical in his entire lifetime, and actual magic items are the things of legend (most of our items upgrade via the materials they are made out of and the craftsmanship they are made with as opposed to actual, permanent enchantments).
But unlike a lot of Low Magic, DA's magic is very powerful and those who wield it have had a great impact on the world and on its history.

Hope that sets it up on the scale for you.

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My hope is that the items don't fall too easily into some super simple classification grid. Having hierarchies of bronze sword>iron sword>steel sword>mithril sword or shoddy mace>common mace>fine mace>masterwork mace can be just as unspecial feelling as the +1, +2, +3 system.

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So... items are not allowed to have any kind of gradation to them whatsoever? Doing so automatically removes their specialness? Your ideal would be the player finding his first special item after three hours of play: the Somewhat Better Than Average Longsword! Wheee!

I think I get what you're saying, but I think having the gradation be material- and quality-based is fine even if the classifications are simple so long as you aren't also over-rewarding the player at the same time. Monty Haul is Monty Haul, and if the player is throwing away his Mithril Longsword after three minutes because he's already found a better Masterwork Cold Iron Longsword -- well, I suspect that's probably what will make it less special, not the mere existance of the grid.

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I hope that makes more sense now.

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Sure, but isn't that essentially just flavor text? If both weapons at the end of the day are simply average swords, stat-wise, wouldn't somewhere in their list of stats we'd have to state "AVERAGE SWORD" (or its equivalent)?

While making the item seem unique in its flavor is all well and good, that doesn't have much to do with gradation. I'm not sure that saying "Kalzirian Infantry" instead of "Iron" is so much more fascinating than saying "+1 enchantment" -- all I'm interested in, personally, is saying that the item isn't magical.

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Isn't that really the key thing though? Without flavour, what is your game?

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Must it be one thing or the other? Do you suppose that there was any intention on our part of using bland descriptions and generic names for everything?

What he was saying is that you could take two swords of equal ability and value and the thing that should make them exciting to players and worth acquiring is their flavor descriptions -- and only that.

And I said fine, flavor is all fine and well, but I'm certainly not in favor of replacing the notion of gradation with flavor text. The equipment you have access to is going to slowly get better throughout the game, that's a given, and "better" in this context has to be more than simply "more flavorful". If you're advocating that flavor is the key element to an RPG game, then you're either missing the point entirely or have a definition of flavor that goes way beyond what I'm referring to.

The Mysterious Stranger

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Given that there will be a number of distinct background stories, will you not knowing it hamper your enjoyment.

One option is of course for he mysterious stranger to at some point pick through dialog or choices and so on , which of the distinct background he actually comes from.
It may well cause problems though.. like what if the "mysterious stranger" who becomes a warrior find out he was actually a mage in his past life? Does he suddenly get the abilities of a mage now that he's remembered his old life?

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One thing to keep in mind is that the Mysterious Stranger, such as it is, would be a matter of the character's background being mysterious to everyone else -- not to himself. He wouldn't have amnesia. He just doesn't tell anyone and it doesn't come up.

Because you're correct, you either have to establish the background at some point or leave it alone entirely.

My only concern regarding this particular idea is that it seems apologetic on our part -- like we're sorry for attempting to give you a background rooted in the world we've created, here's this option (and it should be a viable option) to skip that part entirely.

I understand the trepidation that some might have towards this idea, but quite frankly most games already take this route and don't deal with your background in-game at all or don't give you any choice (you come from a single background, like Baldur's Gate) and it seems weird to approach this feature with the idea that it should be okay to skip it entirely (even if the player doesn't necessarily have a complete understanding of what it involves) or come up with an origin that is an origin story -- yet isn't, through some convolution of assigning a background but not seeming like we are. At that point, what would it be for?

After the last discussion on this, I find myself not leaning towards including something like this. But it's not been decided yet.

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It's hard to say, without being given more detail about how restrictive the backgrounds are going to be. Meaning, are we getting three choices on character creation: race, class, background or two choices: race, class and this determines which background the character gets.

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In most cases you choose race, class and then background... unless the class is specific to a single background, in which case you don't get a choice.

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If there's no way you want to RP a prince(ss), but that's the only background a dwarf can have, then not only are you going to miss out on that origin story but you miss out on playing a dwarf too.

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I suppose that's true, but then you could say that about most any game that supplies you with a background. If you didn't want to play an amnesiac Nameless One in PS:T or a Candlekeep orphan raised by Gorion in Baldur's Gate, for instance, you were rather out of luck, weren't you? The alternative would be to play a dwarf in a story that doesn't start you off amongst other dwarves and treat you as a dwarf, in order to make it as generically applicable as possible.

Why does suddenly having the game's story be more recognizing of the choices you made during character generation mean it is somehow more restrictive?

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Or will everything be clear/exposed about the background from the start?

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Your origins are completely clear. Nothing is kept secret from you, there are no revelations that you are suddenly someone other than who you thought you were.

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So If I create a dwarven warrior as an example, I am not restricted to selecting the "dwarven prince" background? I was starting to think there would be only one background for each race, and a background for each specialised class.

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No no... while there won't be a lot of options (there can't be, really, because of the amount of work involved) the only time you will have only one origin to select is when your class demands it.

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So it's 6 backgrounds (7 if the Stranger is included) and 2 of them require you to be a certain race and/or class?

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Where did that number come from? Is that based on something more than a wild guess? Please don't do that, as I'm not going to confirm numbers and later on people will read your post assuming you know what you're talking about and take it as fact.

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That's exactly what I felt when reading the previous thread. A conceivable benefit of this "option" is probably that it enables the players to turn the table in the last minutes. However, if the team is aiming to let players develop stories through their favorite themes gradually from the start to the end, this "option" is rather in the air. If the team is making this "option" possible from a passive reason such as an excuse to give an illusion of freedom to the players, then, I don't think it would be wise to include it. If this is the case, this may be simply another example of the idea which sounds good but in practice… Like a GM, a team sometimes have to say to a certain player that a session/game may not be his/her type.

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I think once people see them and realize what they are that most of the fears regarding them will be dispelled.

I know it seems strange that when we say "there will be class- and race-specific options which determine how the game begins" the knee-jerk reaction is "oh my god! But what if there aren't enough options?!" -- as opposed to all those games which offer, say, no options at all... did those have enough? -- but really we take it pretty easy on the roles insofar as not forcing a player into a particular mode of thinking.

For the most part it will feel very much like how you begin any other RPG -- you are inserted into a particular place and eased into your situation and GO! Just in this instance things will be very specific to your race or class rather than a single story beginning that is the same every time.

And there's more that makes the Mysterious Stranger a bit suspect as a viable choice, as well.

Let's say you're selecting a dwarf and you don't like the origin options as they're presented. So you pick the Mysterious Stranger because that seems like a viable "I don't have to have a pre-set background" option.
Well, we would still have to introduce the world. So we could, for instance, have the character wander into town like a Clint Eastwood character. He knows who he is, sure -- but does the player? Even if we just assume that he comes from "somewhere" and that it never comes up or is important, he must actually come from somewhere and know whatever someone from that place would know, no? And what will he know about being a dwarf? Or an elf? And even assuming we could somehow squeeze in that racial teaching into a single origin -- we would still need a story that inserts them into the overall plot, a situation that teaches them about the world, so what have we gained?

Not only that, but all those situations throughout the game which would look at the player's origin and have variations now need a "neutral" option -- meaning that the Mysterious Stranger will not even see any of those. Not unless we have a lot of people asking where he's from and stick in a stock "Never you mind, bub." kind of response.

But that's not how the story is meant to be presented. In which case me allowing the player the opportunity to shoot himself in the foot because he thinks he knows better before the game has even began would be a bit stupid of me.

I suppose there are going to be people (like Gromnir) who won't appreciate the various origins no matter what we do -- but I don't think they'd like the Mysterious Stranger any better, either.

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generally speaking, the frigidity of class system doesn't work with complex backgrounds.

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Mmmm... have to disagree with you, there. Whether we say that Ability X is given to the player through a specific class or through a skill, what we're saying is that in some instances that Ability X requires a specific origin in order for it to be acquired.

If being a Priest, for instance, meant that first you must be an acolyte in some temple receiving training in religious instruction -- well, does it really matter whether we're talking about a Priest class or Holy Spells as a skill? Either way what we're saying is that the player must first be that acolyte in the church.

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The difference from such a background to other backgrounds is minor, i understand that, but i'd think it would keep the char more mysterious to other npcs.
Would this work or not?

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But his background still needs to be known to the player, and that involves some introduction. Again, we could say he came from "somewhere" before he landed in his current body, but that doesn't gain us anything -- especially if your character comes from a race that he should know something about.

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You keep bringing this up, David, so I suspect the cultural distinctions are so important to chracter make-up (presumably, even for those that reject it, if that's even possible) that they are not something that can be brushed over.

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That's correct. At the very least, you're going to encounter your own people when you return there during the game (or go the first time, I suppose, in the case of the Mysterious Stranger). How weird would it be to have your own people talking to you like you don't know what they're all about?

And, yes, I suppose in that sense your choice of race has much more effect than in D&D where it's primarily just a state of being and cultural knowledge is mostly assumed but largely irrelevant.

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Personally, I simply hope it is included as a way to replay the game a bit quicker than having to go through the tutorial section again.

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It's not a tutorial section, however. The tutorial will be seperate. It's essentially an entire, unique chapter -- with adventuring areas and XP and such all of its own. If you skipped it, you'd also be skipping the rewards that come from playing through it. Again -- hard to justify as a viable alternative to offer the player.

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I don't know if this would fit with your intentions, but wouldn't it be possible to have a background which focused exclusively on the PCs more recent past, without really specifying anything of his ultimate origins.

For example, a "Mercenary" background could be fairly open about who you were previously, while the mercenary band of which you are a member could provide you with acquaintances, an introduction to the world and a place to start the game from.

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That works fine... as an additional origin story, the "Mercenary" background. Really, though, it's not much different than how the others work, it would just be an additional choice -- and still wouldn't work well for elves and dwarves.

The whole point of the Mysterious Stranger idea is that it's supposed to accomodate those people who fear that none of the origin choices available will fit "their" character and thus there should be a catch-all background that doesn't attempt to define them at all prior to entering the game. Being a mercenary is still defining one's background, just because it might not attempt to assign a social standing or a family to the character does not mean that it wouldn't represent the same kind of choice to these players as the other origins.

This has nothing to do with how mysterious the character is to the NPC's, it's a story archetype similar to the "guy with amnesia" that allows a character to be introduced that requires no explanation to the audience, and whose background will never be known -- whether it is because the character himself does not know it (amnesia) or because he will never speak of it or it is just not important.
To these players, they see this as leaving the character blank and thus giving them a canvas on which they can put their own background and thus not have our story actively contradict it. Never mind that most RPG's make at least some attempt to define the protaganist -- because the only way to make the story about the protaganist is to define him first, whether it's just a few aspects about him (BG) or the character entirely (PS:T). If the protaganist is completely undefined (like IWD or NWN) then the protaganist's relation to the story MUST be incidental at best. That's how it works.

Of course, the Mysterious Stranger concept ignores how we are saying the story is going to be told and the fact that these origins play a major role in it. But this idea follows the thinking that the freedom to design any desired character concept should trump story. Should we allow the player the freedom to lessen his story experience in order to play whatever he wants?

To me, it sounds a bit like a player approaching his GM with a character already made before he even knows what kind of story the GM wants to run.
"But what if it doesn't fit into the campaign I have prepared?" the GM asks.
And so the player furrows his brow quizzically. "Shouldn't the campaign fit the character I want to play, not the other way around?"
And there you have the conflict in a nutshell. The GM has the option of making his story generic enough it could fit whatever possible concept the player could come up with. Or coming up with a single aspect (Bhaalspawn!) that gives him a hook but still could apply to any concept. In this case we're saying we don't want to make it generic, and instead of telling the player what his character must be to fit into our story we're providing numerous options of how we're willing to start our story based on the choices the player made when he made his character.

Anyhow, I've rambled on enough on this subject.

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I think it is wise to have the MS background, just because this one increases the what? five or ten pre-made backgrounds to 'infinite'.

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It doesn't, though. At first I thought that it might, but there simply is no way to make it an equal option to the other origin stories. As someone above mentioned, the freedom to bring a character into the game with any background you choose when the game must, by design, ignore that background completely makes it a pretty shallow option, indeed.

No, players will have to be satisfied with the options we've already provided. If, out of all those, a player can't find anything to satisfy his taste -- well, that's just too bad, I suppose. The same could happen with almost any other RPG, and with DA we're actually trying to offer something a bit new which has taken a lot of work to provide -- I'm not about to let a fear of the unknown force us into providing an option to skip all that based on a false notion of freedom.

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It's only if it keeps coming up - and makes a significant difference in how things unfold - do I understand why the Mysterious Stranger background cannot work.

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Short of being able to adequately convey a proper sense of culture to any non-human character (which is not a small thing), the Mysterious Stranger could be made to work. I don't think I meant to say that it could not.

It will always, however, be a lesser choice then the other origins -- and what is gained? Being able to make up your own story but never have the game recognize it is not freedom. And any attempt we make to add in some kind of history into the Mysterious Stranger defeats the non-definition thing that it was supposed to provide in the first place.

You could have any background you imagined in the NWN OC or in IWD -- did that feel like freedom? Sure, those games never have anything occur that would recognize a background, but what if they did? Would those backgrounds have to make a "significant difference" in order to suggest that allowing the player to skip it was also allowing them to have a lesser experience? Not only that but opting for the lesser experience thinking it was the superior choice.

The first chapter that the origin provides is not a boring tutorial, it's not short and it shouldn't be skippable (I mean, even if you're replaying the game -- if you're that bored of one origin, why not try another? You'd think you'd never played an RPG before where subsequent play-throughs didn't start off exactly the same as the time before.)

And yes, if that means "forcing" the player to pick one of the origins so she can get the full experience that we're providing, that's what I believe should be done. If the player opting for because of what she thought it might be, or might not be, is not okay. At first I thought this might be a good idea because it felt more inclusive -- but really, in the end, it isn't.

Hope that makes sense.

More about romances

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The Viconia romance, as cliché as some of the themes in it were, had impressed me at the time, by its somewhat brazen willingness to be real in some of the senses we're talking about here... at least, for a computer game.

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Hmm. It appears I've been caught in a double-standard. I wrote the Viconia romance, and you're correct -- it does lean towards the titillating on several levels.

I don't know. Maybe that just seemed natural for a drow romance because that's what the drow are all about. For some reason, the idea of including a lesbian or gay romance simply because some people might find that "hot" seems rather cheap -- but I suppose the same could have been said about having a romance with a sleazy, evil drow as well.

Yet I still feel that if I were to include a gay romance I'd want it to be serious and equitable with the others and lean very much away from the titillating aspect it might have. I'll have to think about that, I suppose. I'm not sure why I feel that way.

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The best way, in most cases, is to have the player initiate the romance.

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This is exactly how it will be. Unless the player initiates something further, the very most that an NPC will do is flirt... and even that can be stopped gently.

More: Christ. And you guys wonder why we don't discuss everything in detail? Is it even possible for us to say something without having people read the oddest things into it?

So okay, it seems the long version is necessary. Undoubtedly it will still not be enough (as the Mysterious Stranger thread has shown):

If you and a party member hit it off well enough (meaning that your interactions have been positive ones and that your actions have been ones that the party member approves of), your relationship will proceed to the point where there's friendly banter and then a bit of flirting. This is the party member indicating to you that they're interested, but they won't proceed past this point without some reciprocation from you.
If you're playing it shy and never give them any indication of how you feel, then yes... that means the romance will never get off the ground. As it should be. And you can also shut down any notion of attraction, gently or not. There is a "comrade" path which you can switch back to if you're nice.
Should you, however, give some reciprocation (this is the "initiation" that was mentioned) that you're interested in them, that's the go-ahead for the romance path to begin. This is still largely player-driven... the party member is not going to fall in love with you just because you let them talk to you, you have to actively pursue it.

And that's the gist of the mechanism involved. Cue expressions of dissatisfaction and at least one person angrily declaring how this will limit their roleplaying freedom.

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Seriously, are we going to get the choice to be nice to them or to be teasingly flirtacious?

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For the ones I write, yes, without a doubt... though it depends, to a degree, on the character involved. I added similar banter to the Valen romance in HotU, though he wasn't the sort to really reciprocate in kind as Carth was and thus made for a different dynamic.

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I'm also curious. When the PC is given the choice to express interest, do you guys plan for there be more than one way to do this? Perhaps outrageously flirtatious versus only coyly so? Just in general, what did you have in mind?

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Yes. I've dubbed the two routes "Aggressive" and "Passive-Aggressive", but only for my own amusement.

Brenon Holmes, Programmer

Havoc physics?

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Well even if a full physics solution isn't used, I'd be willing to bet that there will be some form of physics engine. Unlike character animation, there is a good bit of simple physics content that can be simulated, it creates a more realistic and reactive world and frees up animators to continue working on the things that can't be simulated. Fron a purely visual standpoint I think that physics are a vital part of any game coming out in the future. As far as gameplay, I think that the case probably is that there are only a limited number of applications though I'd say any tools that can be given to designers to make interesting gameplay shouldn't be excluded.

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Probably a fairly safe bet.

More: *mutters* Ruining all my fun...

How about: 'We are currently using a physics engine... it's not Havok. It's been mentioned by name on these forums before... It is likely that we'll end up using it or something like it. As to what kind of effects we'll be looking at, anything beyond fluff style physics (flying tea cosies) is currently under discussion for many of the same reasons that have been mentioned here.'

More: It's so I can sneakily post things that can't be referenced later... I'm taking ninja lessons from Stan.

Magic items: Wondrous vs Powerful
In that particular case, I believe David is referring to magic in general and its affect on the world as opposed to items specifically.

More: Oop, you found us out. Drat.

Jennifer Hepler, Writer

The Mysterious Stranger
I'm pretty sure this has been explained in every possible way, but I'm going to go ahead and give it my try.

The origin stories are not passive choices of background. They are closer to having multiple first chapters of the same game. Depending on your selections in character creation, you can begin the game in a different part of the world, which is undergoing a different story with its own connection to the main plot of the game. You play through this story, during which you have the same options as in all other Bioware games to select dialogue which makes your character who he is: good, evil, kind, snarky, compassionate or indifferent. Nothing in the backstories sets your character's personality -- what they set are where, physically, you begin the story and who your first few encounters are with. If you want to replay the game, you can begin in an entirely different area of the world and play through a totally different first hour or so of the game. Then, throughout the game, your experience will be slightly different based on what you learned/who you met/what decisions you made in your personal first chapter.

Since there is no written/pre-generated backstory for the main characters, a Mysterious Stranger origin would not be significantly different than any other background; i.e. you start in a place, undergo encounters, and determine through your actions and dialogue choices what your character is like. To make it sufficiently different, we would have to eliminate the first chapter entirely, or eliminate the ability to define your character at all (even in the usual ways, by dialogue and action) in order to "keep the mystery." Neither of those provides a comparable game experience to the rest of Dragon Age.

I'm not conceited enough to think that this post will make any difference when so many similar ones haven't. But honestly, the use of origin stories in Dragon Age is no more restrictive than the other character creation options which give you a defined, limited selection -- i.e. the choice of gender, race, class, etc. -- which everyone seems to understand and accept can be interesting and varied without being infinite.