Dragon Age Forum News (Sep. 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.

James Henley, Designer

Dealing with the Dragon Age Community Online
Launching the Dragon Age game may or may not be prefaced by a substantially complicated Idiot Quotient testing program. Failure to score within certain levels will prevent the game from booting, thus protecting the entire community from your folly.

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Awwwww

At least make their PC horribly crash and burn, preferably exploding in a violent inferno destroying everything in a square mile radius.

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I'd rather not risk having an explosion of that magnitude occur in my neighborhood. I'm sure it would be an inconvenience, at the very least.

Derek French, Technical Producer

Anybody agree with me on this?

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Anybody agree with me on this?

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Yes, its called John Gabriel's Greater Internet Fskwad Theory.

Although, from the MMOG perspective, there are many proper tools that exist to manage it. While I am sure these people exist in the game I play, I never hear from them ever once they encounter the mighty wrath of my /ignore list.

Turn-Based Combat: A Reprise

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So Brennon, what about Level42's suggestion?

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Gah! B-R-E-N-O-N.

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Jeeze, and I have been calling him Bruce all this time...

"You name's not Bruce? That's going to cause some confusion around here."

Brenon Holmes, Programmer

Turn-Based Combat: A Reprise

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So... the absence of rounds could mean a few things. Will the gameplay still be heavily based on action queues (when I click an action, the character does it whenever he gets around to it), or will it be more instant-control? (Meaning I start an action the second I click the appropriate action button, interrupting whatever I'm currently doing if necessary.)

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There will probably be a mix of interface options... an easy way of either queuing or executing immediately would probably be ideal.

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For instance, if I'm playing a druid ( I know, this isn't D&D) in a real time game. I'm never going to use stuff like animal empathy, because it's so much easier to just click-melee, click-melee, click-melee til the animal is dead. The same thing with Mages... in real time games, you just don't have time to 'chose' the best spell to use for a given situation. You're just going to magic missle/fireball the guy to death.

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But, and this is just a personal opinion... not something necessarily reflected by the choices we'll be making for DA... in that case, you should die.

You should get your *** handed to you on a silver plate. The system *should* be set up in such a way to encourage you to think about what you're doing (and that also implies not spamming the same attacks over and over). Or suffer the consequences...

Obviously, this could not be the case for 100% of the battles... but I would be very disappointed if it were possible to simply click a few buttons and then go check your email while fighting and expect to win.

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The more turn-based you make the game, the more strategic you make the combat.. IMHO anyway.

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That is true. However, I would still maintain that it is possible to emulate some of the aspects of turn based play with a robust enough set of auto-pause features.

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So Brennon, what about Level42's suggestion?

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Gah! B-R-E-N-O-N.

It's okay though... I'm not bitter. It hasn't been years since someone spelled my name right... It's also not like it's listed right next to my forum post...

What do I think of the idea?

It's an interesting idea... it would probably work for simple actions. But you wouldn't be able to use it for area of effect attacks, positional attacks or situational attacks.

It also doesn't allow for actions spread out across multiple targets (since you can't really macro that, which is basically what we're talking about here with the suggested system).

Essentially, if you're talking about quick queueing... why not just push for either client side scripting or macros. Then you get the same functionality plus extra goodies... and everyone loves goodies.

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Jeeze, and I have been calling him Bruce all this time...

"You name's not Bruce? That's going to cause some confusion around here."

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Can I make one suggestion? When dealing with spells that have a casting time (if there are any such spells), the game should auto-pause and let you select a target AFTER the casting time is complete.

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I thought about this for a little bit, and I think it would actually be fairly hard to implement with a standard spell-casting system. Especially when you start to consider all the things that need to be resolved before you can even start casting... like range and LOS for example...

Using the idea of charging spells (like touch attacks in DnD) might work though...

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This way, you can avoid hitting all your idiot teammates with a fireball, or casting a level 99 heal spell at a guy who's already dead.

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But you are controlling the party, so if you don't want to hit them... don't move them there.

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In fully turn-based games, there's often some degree of strategy involved in long casting times. You have to predict where the enemy will be and act accordingly. But in a real-time game, you have too many people running all over the place of their own accord for this to work well.

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Again, you control the action. If you need a sec to figure out exactly what's going on, pause the game. Take stock of the situation, then make a decision on what you want to do.

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Consider also that in PnP D&D, the fully turn-based system makes all spells effectively instant-cast. This is because except for AoO's, nobody can interrupt your turn and run in front of your fireball, or kill the target you're about to heal, or whatever.

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Are you sure? Maybe for standard action spells... but for spells that have a casting time of a round+ you still have to decide who you're targetting when you start casting. All the things you mention can happen easily in that time.

As to how it compares to NWN, I agree. For standard spells, you had about a three second cast time. Which could made casting standard spells difficult, until you got used to the "lag".

I'm sure there will end up being an assortment of spells with various casting times. All of which, should be fairly transparent. In the end though, trying to hit a group of creatures that are running with an area of effect spell with a long casting time will probably always be difficult.

Which is something that you as a user should take into account when deciding what you want to do against that slavering horde of orcs running straight at you...