Dragon Age Forum News (Oct. 11, 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.

Brenon Holmes, Programmer

Will DA be PW friendly?

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What I would like to know is: Is going the extra-mile and making it PW friendly such an expense in time & money?

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Persistent worlds are not a goal of DA. It may be possible, but they're not a goal. If a regular MP feature happens to coincide with a PW-ish feature... great.

In the end, if we get something that is able to support them, that's just a bonus... but:

Persistent Worlds are not a goal of Dragon Age.

If you're really interested in a game that seems be catering more to the PW developer, I would humbly suggest here.

Another Question...

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Seriously though, the developer that manages to do both (and yes its extremely hard to do both) will appeal to a much larger audience than before and will do better at the bank.

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Do you honestly believe the ability to jump by pressing a key will result in more sales?

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Do you honestly believe the ability to jump by pressing a key will result in more sales?

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Absolutely, but only if there are keys for climbing, flyng and swimming as well.

Regards,
Thunderfist

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Heh, I would love to hear how that conversation goes...

Joe: "Hey man, you gotta check out this game!"

Bob: "Oh? What's it called?"

Joe: "It's called Dragon Age. You can jump!"

Bob: "..."

Joe: "You can like, climb up trees in the middle of the forest for no reason too... it's so sweet..."

Bob: "..."

Joe: "I spent twenty minutes just climbing this one tree and giggling... it was awesome!"

Bob: "... does it have horses?"

More: Gah!

DA's mulit player campain
As it currently stands, there's no reason you can't play a multiplayer game by yourself.

I don't really imagine that we would force you to have at least two flesh and blood players in the game before you could fire up a MP game either...

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Brenon, will you consider making up dialogue for interaction between the self-made party members? In BG2, while i could start an mp game myself and create my 'perfect' party, there was no interaction between them at all.

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Me? Heavens no... I'm a horrible writer.

If you're referring to our lovely and talented writing staff... I believe David addressed a similar question about half a year ago... Let me see if I can find a link.

Edit: Okay, it's late and I'm tired... I gave it like... five *whole* minutes of digging through David's old posts. If you ask him nicely, I'm sure he'll give you the short version. (Candy might help).

David Gaider, Lead Writer

Resurrection resurrected (and powerful objects in general)
Yes, resurrection is truly and completely out of the picture. When people die in DA they do not come back.

The exact nature of the damage/death system is currently being determined, so I wouldn't want to comment on where it will end up. Currently I consider it to be something of a hybrid between KotOR and BG2, which is interesting, but we'll see.

Design Questions

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A) Are you going for a zone-approach (as with NWN) or for a full all-in-one world (as with World of Warcraft and most modern MMORPGs)?

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I'd like to point out that WoW does indeed have zones. What it does not have is transitions, which is what you're asking about I believe. Transition-less RPG examples would be Dungeon Siege and Morrowind.

Having transitions allows certain advantages, just as not having them does. We're currently planning on having transitions, though the exact nature of them is yet to be determined.

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B) Will the combat system feature "rounds" or will it be more targeted toward player reflexes, timing and the like

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There are no internal "rounds" as there are in D&D. There's no reason to keep such a thing. We are most definitely not, however, switching over to a more twitch-based combat system where clicking speed or the player's own reflexes play a larger role.

Quick Question

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Whats the difference between a designer and a programmer? Is it as simple a difference as creative/technical, or is there a fair ammount of back and forth and crossover in between those areas?

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This will vary from company to company. I've had headhunters come calling thinking that my "designer" position meant I was everything from a 3D artist to someone who lays out levels.

At Bioware, the programmers are the fellows who create both the structure of the game itself as well as the tools we use to implement each of the areas within it. They'll take the artwork and make it go, they'll implement the rules and figure out the networking issues and give us an interface and a toolset and so forth.

Designers, meanwhile, come in two varieties. Technical designers are a lot like programmers, except that they take the tools that the programmers provide and actually use them to implement the game and story itself. They'll determine what the rules system is going to be and they'll place all the models and apply all the numbers and tell them when to use dialogue and when to use animations and so forth.
Writers, meanwhile, are the designers who work on the story. They'll write all the dialogue and the journals and item descriptions... and then re-write it and write it again. They'll work with the technical designers to put together the various areas and levels involved.

As I understand it, there's a bit of crossover between the programmers and technical designers, and between the technical designers and the writers, but all three of us have pretty specific tasks we need to complete.

Hope that makes sense.

DA's mulit player campain

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It'll most likely be the exact same story as the single-player campaign, just optimised for multiplayer.

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Sorry, Orik, but that's incorrect. The MP campaign is completely different, at least according to the current plan.

As to the original poster: what will you miss out on if you don't play the MP campaign? You will miss out on the MP campaign.

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Oh dear. Two games for the price of one?

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Well... I'd hesitate to say that until we know for sure what kind of scope each campaign will have. All that can be said is that the current plan is that they're not going to have the same story.

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Whoever said it probably did something under-handed like say, "This may change, but . . ." before their statement. They should know by now that if they say it somewhere public it's guaranteed to be in the game. Cautions that things may change are to be ignored.

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It may very well have been something I myself said before. Like you say, things can change... and we figured to make the change for a lot of valid reasons. And it may very well change again.

More: Lovely and talented? Gosh. Suddenly I feel like Vanna White.

Update Info

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You should go feed your PR people to the Bioware pet dragon. They're a little slicker then the ones at the smaller shops (assuming the smaller developers even have PR) but all their cliche PR tactics (trickling out news, PR build ups, hidden dates in the corner of the website etc.)are getting too cutesy. The games and the people who play them, not the PR tricks, make your company great.

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Your indignation is a bit lost on me, sorry. You almost outright claim that you've a right to have a say in the process because you buy our games. I can see feeling a bit of ownership over what we do because you're emotionally invested in it, but let's not lose perspective, shall we? NWN's development was not any more open than Jade's or DA's... you just had more to argue about online with NWN because you already knew something about D&D.

As time progresses with DA we will slowly ramp up the relaying of information and the requests for feedback on the work we've already done... and you will forget that there was ever a period where we weren't seeking publicity on the game. Same as with NWN or any other game we put out.

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Look at old Gaider: that guy drinks gasoline and pees fire! Think he's going to be crying in his pillow at night because he gets a little roasted after a FAQ change?

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Umm... it's not that we fear a few "twerps", as you put it. It's that we don't want misinformation to start getting out. This happens to occur very easily, and if allowed to go unchecked it spreads beyond this site and ends up getting treated as official. We haven't the time to spend constantly re-asserting our intentions and putting down rumors, so we must control the flow of information, it's that simple.

If you like, think of it like we're a chef in the kitchen. If we have a crowd of people in our kitchen all trying to taste the soup and give us their opinion thereof, as much as we appreciate the fact that they all know what good soup tastes like eventually we're going to need to tell them all to get out so we can get on with just making the soup... or it will never get done. When we're ready, we'll offer you a taste and ask you if it's too salty or too bitter or whatever... and until then, you'll have to trust that we just need to cook. The fact that you know that soup's going to be on the menu doesn't really mean you need to stand in my kitchen, does it?

But if you want to be indignant, by all means. There's nothing I can do to stop you. Trying to dare us into involving the community in a "passionate discussion" on our soup by implying that if we don't do so we must be afraid of the community isn't going to work, however.

Party Character Sidekicks (like Boo)
And I was not incorrect in telling you, Tsuga, that familiars and animal companions as you want them to be are not going to happen. Daniel is hinting at something that is similar but yet much different to what you were asking for.