Dragon Age Forum News (Sep. 24, 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.

David Gaider, Designer

The Writers and designers of Dragon Age

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1)Pardon me, but I was always curious about who was behind Jan Jensen, probably the most hilarious character you ever done?

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Kevin Martens, the current lead designer on Jade Empire, is actually Jan's creator. He wrote a lot of Jan's dialogue for BG2, and I picked up Jan afterwards, doing most of his banter and interjections in BG2 and then writing him in ToB.

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Quote: 2) I am hopeful that you haven't lost your vein when it comes to new party companions, I am hopefull of a Jan Jensen relative that somehow got lost in a multi planar device and ended up in Thedas, too many turnips...

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As much as I enjoy writing Jan (and naturally I hat to fit Erb Jansen in NWN), I'm not sure that kind of character would actually fit in DA. I'm sure we will have other interesting characters, though.

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Is their 'stuff' considered the knowledge of writing? Or is it also combined with an understanding of RPG's, or that specific story?

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In that context, them knowing their stuff is them being good writers. If Dan or Drew or whoever takes over a character from me, I can expect that while they might not do him exactly as I would they would still do him justice. Quite often it's better than I think I could do. That makes it easier to give him up, especially when you see a character you love being taken by another writer and made to do wonderful things that you then get to watch.

As for having an understanding of RPG's and the story... well, that's a given. They wouldn't be working here or on a particular project without that.

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So, please please tell me -- who originally thought of Irenicus's storyline and how it was developed from Prism's Ellesime sighting in BG 1 into BG 2 main storyline?

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That's hard to pinpoint, actually, as the story evolved quite a bit over the course of the project. I could tell you what the original story idea was when we started work on BG2 and you would barely recognize it, I think.

As I recall, though, Ellesime and Irencius originally had no connection with each other... she was simply an elven princess. The changes to Irenicus came later as a result of discussions amongst the team.

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Quote: And who wrote those heartbreaking final dialogues?

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Between Irenicus and Ellesime? I did.

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Dave -- you are one of the best fantasy writers I had a good fortune to read. I am as positive about it as only an addict can be.

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Thank you. That's quite the compliment.

Romance options

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Would you rather have a game in the vein of BG/BG2 that took 40 hours to complete that included romances, or one that gives you an extra 10 hours of gameplay because the writers/desginers didn't spend so much of their time & resources writing/scripting romances?

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I really doubt that the translation is quite so neat. It takes more than just us not writing romances to add hours to gameplay.

Regardless, there are going to be romances. Some people may not dig them, but a whole lot do... and by "a whole lot" I mean much more than just a dismissive "segment of the player base". For those who don't like the romances, you'll be happy to note that we intend for them to be primarily player-driven this time around. Whereas before the romance track began just by having the character in your party and you would have to actively discourage it, this time we intend that romances will have to be pursued in order to even begin.

As was mentioned, we also intend to have other types of relationships with NPCs, as well, such as friendships (indeed my plan is to make it possible to decide to be friends with an NPC that you could otherwise romance... I know, what a concept, eh?)

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Ah, just the man I was looking for. Any chance of non-heterosexual romances?

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Certainly. I'd love to work on one, but only if I was able to do it justice (and certainly not for titillation purposes).

Derek French, Technical Producer

Saving game!

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It looks like the troll hooked a Bioware employee- impressive.

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Nothing trollish about it. There are many people that feel this way that saving should be part of the gameplay mechanic. I disagree.

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did u uninstall BG2? Being able to save at a time with no enemies added the chalenge when u killed one and were ambused by another. Far more fun, wasn't it?

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No I did not uninstall BG2. I finished it. You misread what I posted, above. "save almost anywhere". Note the word, "almost". Saving during combat was never something that I wanted to do and why would I? I am too busy dispatching someone to the great beyond to want to save. I have found other action titles that allow you to save during combat, even accidently, usually leads to a problem when loading that save game, usually in the situation where the game runs for about 5 seconds before you are able to control the game again, thus ending up in your death, and a useless save game.

Don Moar, Tools Programmer

An easier toolset
Chaosprism, I tried pretty much the same approach with the NWN Toolset and you know what? It doesn't work. Not everyone thinks like that and you'll wind up making a lot of people very unhappy if you force that kind of workflow on your users. If you don't believe me, take another look at the wide variety of responses to the NWN Toolset.

More: I'd also like to set the record straight: Tim was not talking about a single operation taking 8 seconds, he was talking about 5000 little operations taking a total of 8 seconds (that's roughly 1.6 milliseconds per operation). Also, keep in mind that the improvement he achieved took it down to about 0.8 milliseconds per operation. Considering that I didn't think people were routinely doing that operation in sets of 5000 (and it wasn't related to framerate), I didn't think people would notice the improvement and so I questioned whether or not the 2 man-days spent on it was justified. As it turned out, Tim was able to justify it my satisfaction and everything was happy.

Or so I thought. Little did I realize that Tim resented my even questioning his judgement and began looking for an opportunity to lash out at me in public.

[ September 25, 2004, 21:36: Message edited by: chevalier ]

 

Well, the best proof romances are popular in a large portion of the player base, is the number of topics/questions about them on the BoM and the mods that are made for adding even more romances.

 

With romances, you have two ways to make them perceived as good: 1) Make everyone able to get it and get his desired results so he's happy; 2) Make it so realistic as possible. If you ask me, a good RPG romance is a realistic one. By this I don't mean something that is likely to happen in your life (there are no brave paladins, nor beautiful sorceresses in real life, for example), but realistic consequences of all choices.

Something that's a compromise between 1) and 2) won't really be good. However, one could focus on making everyone get something while still making the dialogue tree logical. By logical, I don't mean any kind of strong implications from cause to result, but just no contradictions and no far-fetched stuff.

One could also do 2) but with reduced risk of getting dumped for a random reason. Let's say, you do get dumped if you choose the bad options, but you don't get dumped because she's in that kind of mood. A further step would be not implementing "competition" or double standards or whatever such. Just making it look more or less like the right girl or guy, although with realistic difficulties.

For debug reasons, the romance interest should give some more or less understandable reason for dumping you. No "magic" lines, no "magic" moments. Those are especially bad in translated versions.

But why are we talking about romances?