Dragon Age Forum News (Oct. 06, 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.

Daniel Erickson, Senior Designer

Authoritively spoken actors for DA please
I'd have to agree with the original point of hiring voice actors and not Hollywood stars for game voices. Having worked with both I can say that it's a rare Hollywood actor that has the interest or experience with voice acting necessary to really turn in a star performance. Add in the money and time constraints -- often you get only a single recording session and one pick up if you're lucky -- and it becomes only worth it if the marketing folks are really counting on the star’s power to sell the game.

Which always poses the question: Does anyone actually buy a videogame because their favorite movie star is in it? Well, okay there’s The Daedalus Encounter, obviously, but that was the fine acting talent of Tia Carrere – who could resist?

More: You'd have to check with Dave G. but I'm fairly sure the dwarves in DA are supposed to speak in one of the lesser known African click-based languages...

Derek French, Technical Producer

Will DA be PW friendly?

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I mean they had to actually develop a db

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We did not develop the database code. We used Codebase

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to answer calls from players.

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We did it because we had need of such a system for the campaign, and because we knew that the community would get something out of it, too.

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Why not do it from the start?

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Because we didn't need one at the start.

More:

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Anything planned on this front or is DA not meant to be played as a PW?

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It is honestly too early to tell at this point. There are a number of things that still need to be finalized before any comment on this would be valid.

David Gaider, Lead Writer

Will DA be PW friendly?
And what Derek means by that is that we are still making some decisions regarding the overall design (and, no, we're not still in the concepting phase overall, but as we all know things can change). At this point, nothing has entered the picture which would rule out PW's.

BUT. Big but coming.

BUT PW's are not part of Dragon Age's focus. They weren't part of NWN's focus, either, but there at least they coincided nicely with the primary way that NWN was made to be played. They just involved more players than NWN could officially support.
DA is not being built as a build-your-own-module and play-it-online game, as NWN (and, indeed, NWN2) was. It may end up having some aspects of that, but primarily it is a SP/MP party-based RPG with a story we designed just as with BG or KotOR (not just an "official campaign" or OC). We intend to release our tools as a toolset and incorporate some of the modding and GM'ing elements that NWN had, but unlike with that game it will not be the point of the entire project.

Do you see the difference? The toolset may end up being very powerful, but that will be because we're not going to restrict its power so that it will be easy for everyone to use. And just what role it will play in the end will depend a lot on the decisions we are making right now (for that and many other things, which will all inter-relate).
So Dragon Age may end up serving your purposes, it's very possible... but if you come from the NWN crowd and what you're solely looking for is a toolset and a PW-maker, you might be better served by looking at NWN2 instead. Unsurprisingly, NWN2 has the same goals and focus as NWN did.

Hope that addresses the question fully.

A question to the developers
Objectivity is hard for us as developers. I remember shortly before BG2 came out, we were pretty certain that it was just plain awful. Why? Because by the time a game gets close to ship, we are all hyper-aware of every single flaw and keenly aware of every mistake or every thing that was cut along the way.

We've also played the game something like a million times by that point, and when the game was still fresh for us it was also the buggiest kind of alpha you can imagine. So it's difficult, and at best you can try to trust you QA or whatever beta testers you have for their opinions.

Even so, it's never going to please everyone. Some people out there are going to sneer like the Comic Book Guy and declare it "mediocre at best", some are going to love it and some, no matter what you do, simply won't play it. Comes with the territory. All we can do is have faith that we've put in our best effort and try to learn from whatever mistakes we've made.

More:

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It is to bad you guys can't do a "test market" of unbiased people.

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If you know of any, let us know.

Seriously, though, QA and beta testers are about as close as we can get. And even there "unbiased" is not a word I would use. Of course, neither are the friends who are judging your work. If they are your friends then they are completely biased, even though they might try to remain objective.

And by objective I mean they'll try to judge it based on what it is trying to achieve. If one of your friends handed back your work and branded it "mediocre at best" they are neither being unbiased nor particularly helpful.

Brenon Holmes, Programmer

Another Question...
I would love it to death if we could all talk about the same thing and mean the same thing...

You're not talking about 3D.

You're talking about jumping and flight. I can tell you flat out that there will be no jumping (initiated specifically by the player) or player flight.

I guess we'll just be left in the dust... .

I am of course ignoring the fact that Morrowind is a completely different beast than DA, with very different goals.

Bethesda can do some neat things because they're making a single player game (you only control one player)... they're making a game in which exploration is a major part... they're making a sandbox game where you can poke the AI and maybe it pokes back...

We have some things in common with some of these goals... but by and large 'flight' and the ability to hop like a bunny really add nothing of value to the play experience.

Especially since, as far as I can tell... humans in DA have not yet evolved wings and are otherwise unable to miss when throwing themselves at the ground.

Edit: Clarity.

More:

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Jumping and flying aside, I think it would be interesting if map/engine design used vertical space a bit more. Obviously the engine will be CAPABLE of 3d environments, unless they're using the Doom 2 engine . But there's still a question of how much they incorporate that vertical dimension into map design. For example, you could have an area where archers fire down on you from a second-story balcony. The tile-based maps of NWN wouldn't allow such hijinx, but it seems that it would be easy enough to implement in a non-tile-based game like DA.

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My reasoning is this for adding in climbing and jumping is lets say you wear to do some breaking and entering in some wizard's tower. If you go through the front door you will get fried to a crisp. You spy an open third story window. You could climb up through the window, do the deed, then get out. Hell, if a guard did see you you could flee from roof top to roof top, jumping across alleys, or you could be a guard chasing a dangerous criminal who took the rooftop route.

There are hundreds of thousand scenrios where climbing and jumping would be necessary in a story driven CRPG.

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Yep, sure are... and I bet most of those you could probably cover with situational actions.

For example, is it necessary to be able to climb *any* surface? Or just specific ones?

Do you need to be able to jump *all* the time or just in specific situations?