Dragon Age Forum News (Oct. 8, 04)

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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.

Georg Zoeller, Designer

Why isn't Dragon Age an mmorpg?

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The most popular MMORPG out (in america) is Sims Online by the way. It seems Internet "Cybering" is still americas most profitable passtime

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Err sure, I think they have actually less subscribers than we have people playing NWN during a month...Click Here

More:

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So what's the argument against allowing people to charge a monthly fee for their PWs as long as Bioware takes a percentage?

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First off, it is not going to happen that you will be allowed to charge your players for playing NWN.

The license does not allow it, we can't and won't allow it and will, as excercised already, enforce this part of NWNs EULA if necessary.

We've already discussed this topic multiple times I think, but a couple of reasons would be:

a) NWN was sold with free multiplayer.

b) Just because BioWare would get a share of the pie doesn't mean the "service" sold meets our quality standards and yet people will associate it with NWN and BioWare - including all negative experiences users might encounter.

c) License implications

If you start to charge for a PW you are violating have a dozend other people's rights (D&D license, Gamespy, etc). It's not a game anymore at that point, it's a commercial venture with all implications, which many people seem not to be aware off (i.e. accepting donations for your PW in Germany has tax and legal implications, not declaring those on taxes constitutes tax fraud).

As it stands, Atari is the license holder for computer D&D. The people doing D&D online payed a lot of cash for the right to do an D&D online game - do you think they would just watch people running their own D&D online world and don't pay those licensing fees?

So now for Dragon age -
First off, the question is highly hypothetical as DA is not a PW construction kit and whether or not it is possible to create NWN style PWs with it still remains to be seen.

Obviously we don't have a whole bunch of licensing issues attached to using the D&D license - but the legal issues still remain.

I'm not saying that there is not the possiblity of working something out, but the question that needs to be asked in the first place is if we actually would WANT to create a Pay for Play environment with DA - after all it would radically change the face of the community as we know it.

People who create i.e. a new monster would want a share from people running a server using it, etc ... it would introduce a level of commercial exploitation (with all attached things like fraud, name calling, etc) into a community that benefited a lot from the universal free nature NWN's EULA ensured.

My *personal* opinion is that this would probably not be worth it, the impact on the community would probably do to much damage - much less free content, people suing each other over stolen modules, spam advertisement, items sold on ebay - all the crap you get when people see an opportunity to make quick cash out of unsupecting others.

If anything like this would happen I think it would probably be more along the lines EA went with Battlefield 1942 - Rent a server - which would mean that there is a fee you pay for your server, which is transparent and everyone knows how much it is, and if you band together in a guild and raise cash among to pay it, that's fine.

Community Created Retail Expansion

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But if Bioware said they would pay $5,000 for the winning polished 60 hour campaign

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Wow, that would be quite a ripoff.

Based on how long it took to create Witch's Wake and taking some guess number, to create a 60 hours campaign for NWN, that meets our quality and design standards, even if you added no new content and programming functionality, you probably could schedule at least 6 man years full design (experience writers and tech designers) time, which would give you an hourly rate of ~0.09$ for those $5k - not exactly a bargain (and remember, you can't sell an expansion without new art, programming features, etc).

Brenon Holmes, Programmer

Conversation and party mechanics

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As I think about the mechanics of a party-based game, there's a number of issues that come to mind. Many of these are dialog-related, though I've snuck in a few other things that bubbled into my brain as well.

Multiple triggered conversations?
For single player games, what happens if a second dialog is triggered if one is already happening? Does it simply fail? Will there be a GetIsInConversation(object oPlayer) function that we can use to hold off additional conversations? Can dialogs be cancelled via scripting, or does the player have to finish one before a second can start?

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I don't think this sort of thing has been decided, though generally speaking you should have access to that kind of information via scripting. Additionally, I don't think we'd let another conversation interrupt one that's currently in progress... that's just a thought though, we may end up doing something different.

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Conversations while not standing
It was often difficult to have conversations if the participants weren't standing. They'd rotate to face the player, stand up, and otherwise break the feel of the action unless extraordinary steps were taken. Being able to ignore or override these hard-coded features would be very nice.

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We'll probably be looking at something like this, though whether or not it ends up firming into a system where you could assign any animation to a dialog node (or specify no change to the current animation state) remains to be seen.

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AI overriding of actions
You had to be very careful with the default NPC AI overwriting commands. Sometimes it was an issue of combat not ending precisely when the command was given. Other times it was a ClearAllActions() command being given by the default scripts. It would be nice to be able to give commands to an NPC and have them followed exactly.

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We will be providing full access to the command queue, and with that we'll also be exposing the guts of the commands. So if you wanted to add a command that could not be removed in theory that would be possible.

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Party members & control
One of the things that is quickly becoming a "must have" on my list is the ability to add and remove party members, including the PC, and giving the player direct control over various party members. If the PC is captured, I want to let the player control one of the party members to rescue them (just like KotOR).

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I don't think this sort of thing has really been decided yet... I don't see why it wouldn't be possible... that could change though, we're still fairly far out (as I'm sure you're all aware ).

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Conversations end if distances are too far
I'd like to be able to start a conversation and not have it cancel if the distance between objects is too far or they move out of range. This has caused problems for me in the past.

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Hmm... if we were to add something like this, it'd probably have to be optional (maybe specified on the dialog action) as the default behaviour should probably abort conversations if the player runs away from the talking NPC.

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All good questions. I'll add another: Who does the talking? In KotoR, while you could control any party member, talking to any NPC would instantly switch party members so that the main protagonist did the talking. This essentially made social skills pointless for anyone other than the protagonist.

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Hmm... I'm not really sure what's been decided for this. My personal preference would be that for any plot that doesn't directly involve the PC, that your NPC's could do all the talking. Again though, just my personal preference...

Stanley Woo, Quality Assurance

Community Created Retail Expansion
And all of this isn't even taking into account how effective or ineffective community content developers would be if they were given deadlines, which would be necessary for the release of any commercial product.

As Tarmack says, we may as well just hire talented and willing people from the community, which we have done and will continue to do.

Brent Knowles, Co-Lead Designer

Is it "Build your own Dragon Age Module" or "Make your own fantasy world"?
With Dragon Age we are creating an exciting fantasy world to be the backdrop for our equally exciting story. With that in mind, our focus is entirely on making sure that we have the tools needed to let us build this rich world and the strong rule system needed to support it. We are chosing a cohesive system that meets our needs *exactly*, not a generic system that would dissapoint us and our fans. Unfortunately for some, this means that we not making a kit to help users build their own fantasy world. I do not imagine that doing this will be any easier than in NWN.

James Henley, Technical Designer

Is it "Build your own Dragon Age Module" or "Make your own fantasy world"?
We have a focus and we intend to stick to it; the official campaign. Just how moddable the game will be, I will not say. I will say, however, that what you're asking for is not as easy as you want to make it sound and would create a great deal more work for us. I wouldn't count on seeing that.

 

Well, the no pay for play policy is a good one since that is why I still play nwn online. I am against pay for play. Free multiplayer has worked for years and has the benefit of usually have a decent solopart too, eventhough that wasn't always the case or needed. Pay for play is just another way to squeese the last cent from players. I'm rather sure that if they did enough research, they could find a way to make it profitable without pay for play and still offer the service they claim to "need" the monthly fee for.

 

Actually, I believe there are ways of making single player profitable without squeezing the last penny from players...