Dragon Age Forum News

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Here are today's BioWare 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.

Stanley Woo, Quality Assurance

suggestions for new races in game- devs comment??

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lizardmen? yeah, maybe DA could feature a sinister plot by evil time-travelling reptilians to resurrect their ancient glory. because i never get bored of that one.

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Perfect! That's exactly the kind of plot we should be us--- hey, wait a second... *re-reads fables' post* Oh, I see... sarcasm. What if the player character were the scion of a noble family and falls in love with a girl from a rival family, only the plan they have for staying together goes horribly wrong and they both kill themselves? That's never been done, has it?

Georg Zoeller, Designer

Seemless Area Transitions and Multiple Servers

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So an MP-compatible campaign ranks below certain other elements, but is still desirable. That seems reasonable. The co-op MP market isn't all that big, but it exists.

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Yes.

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"The co-op MP market isn't all that big, but it exists."

alan has been 'round 'nuff to listen to bis and biowarians and other developers complain 'bout how much effort it takes to do both mp and sp... this is not like adding gnomes to a d&d crpg.

so, is it so reasonable… especially based on past comments from bio regarding the 'mount of folks that play mp co-op and just how much effort such a feature requires?

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Apparently it is, right? Otherwise, why would we be bothering to do it... Not that this means that we will do MP exactly like it was in BG or NWN, but I think that has been mentioned already.

You know, I remember the old BIS boards quite well, and frankly, I don't recall any excessive complaints about this topic. Yea, it was mentioned that MP in BG was expensive and that in retrospect the resources for it were not justified, but a lot of complaining - you prolly just listened a bit too often to karzak those days.

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Apparently it is, right? Otherwise, why would we be bothering to do it...

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you being rhetorical? or do you want us to speculate?

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Probably latter . I mean, somewhere there must be a reason for it, and apparently not an apparent one, so it would be interesting to speculate about it .

Or maybe I was just smacking around Gromnir a bit for trying to play the "inexperienced" tune again. Who knows.

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and they came to a very different conclusion 'bout the cost v. benefit of mp.

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Which is not surprising.

Those decisions need to be made on a per game and per target audience basis, taking into account things like your teams experience with creating their own engine, your available resources, your publisher, your community (FO community certainly has some different expectations at times...) and your company's goals.

For DA we have decided an MP campaign (in whatever form it may take) is justified/possible. For HotU we decided it was not.

Remember your roots | Why NWN failed us

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am sure you learned all kinds o' things from 5+ years of working on nwn. just seems that you has not learned other, more obvious lessons.

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Good, finally someone revealed the true reason why we have this board - So you can save us from making grave mistakes by pointing out the obvious lessons to be learned from previous games

I wonder if we should just save money and all migrate over to some turn based cult website

Let's make classes ambiguous!

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I like the idea of starting with a normal guy , maybe at character creation you get to choose Race , Stats , Look etc but not Class.

As the game progresses the character can make a choice of what class he/she would like to progress in (maybe through the help of a trainer , reading a book or completing a quest of some sort)...

So as a general example my new character decides to study magic , so he goes to a Magic school and studies under a trainer , by the end of his studies he recieves the class of (say Wizard) , after that he can progress on his own.

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What you think about the way Dark Age of Camelot (general opinion on the game/mmorpgs aside) handled classes?

DA Toolset Suggestions

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By the sound of the posts, I get the impression that DA's toolset is supposed to be Aurora 2?

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I don't think anyone said that, at least nobody official.

Remember your roots | Why NWN failed us
Lots lots More.

The NWN community, 2+ years after release, even several month after the last patch, is still very much alive (and the next patch / dd) will probably give it a good bump again). For the last few months it's probably (*very rough estimate*) around 100k different people just doing NWN multiplayer in one or another form.

To get an idea how many people download from the vault, you would have to check the total number of downloads and then calculate from there, not the max number a single module receives (can't assume very good module is downloaded by every fan interested in modules ). I would guess it's in above 100k people per month, probably well above.

Multiplayer and Custom content are, at this point, probably an important reason why NWN and Expansions are still on the shelves of most retailers. You do not find a lot 2 year old games there these days, most games drop off the shelves after less than a year.

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not another guestimate by geo...

anybody from bio who actually is privy to info got a number?

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lol.

I fear you will have to trust me on that my friend, especially since you won't get exact numbers, after all you are not privy to info

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Why are they still on the shelves? shouldnt they have sold out by now NWN being so good?

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See below....

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BG1/2 have no official toolset/ extra MP tools yet are still going strong after how many?

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Ah, wait, shouldn't it be sold out Hmm, there must have been someone resupplying them I didn't see BG I around during the last years or so, but BG 2 is still around in some stores here in Edmonton.

I didn't say that it's *necessary* to have Mp or tools to stay that long on the shelf either, but it's certainly helpful.

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I havent seen the point in offical tools when in past for most games modders created them, lately fad is to give every game a toolset but not every buyer is not a modder so if its taking away time to do other stuff...

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I think since games are getting complexer, the time where fans created most of the mod tools are pretty much over - without lots of support from the developer (file format documentation, export filters, etc), you have a hard time to create 3rd party tools for existing games.

As for taking away from the game, that's really depends. Tools benefit both modders and people who play custom content. In some cases I played mods More than the original game (i.e. Battlefield 1942) and it certainly added to the number of hours I got out of the original game. If you look at the download numbers from CEP, you get a good idea how many people are still interested in user created content for NWN, interested enough for a 100+ MB download (which is a lot for most europeans ).

In our case, the tools we use internally have a very high grade of polish and user friendlyness, so making them available to the community in the end does not directly result in time taken from the development of official campaign, at least not alot.

IMO, things that had More impact on the offical campaign in NWN were tilesets which were great for entry level modders, but had an sacrificed some visual variety of locations in the OC - or decisions made on the toolset side that traded the "advanced features/possiblity to crash the game" combo for "userfriendlyness/error prevention" combo.

As a direct result, there will be no tilesets in DA.

Same for multiplayer by the way - localvault, IMO, equals wasted time - without it, and the associated tasks like ILR and ELC - your multiplayer implementation suddenly gets a somewhat cheaper.

Bottomline:
As Dave already mentioned - MP does not mean "MP exactly like in NWN" and Toolset does not mean "Toolset exactly like in NWN". So just because there is a toolset and MP in DA, it does not mean that the offical campaign in DA will be like the one in NWN.

More: Gromnir, just out of pure ignorance, can you dig out the numbers we gave about how small our multiplayer community is?

Since I'm a community hire my word can apparently not be trusted, so I'll rely on you to bring some numbers here so we can have a look at them.

Will DragonAge have Teleport Spells? - Baldur's Gate had them but NeverWinter did not

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teleport that teleports you instantly to a certain location… but only for a limited time. After the time is up you teleport back to where you came from (with multiple teleports that would be back to the start). This has some added nice properties in that you could make it so that the higher the level of the spell the longer you can stay away. And it could be used for some specific wizard puzzles too (teleport somewhere and do something there before your time runs out).

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I like that idea ... just think about it ... teleport inside the bank ... and even if the guards catch you, instant ticket home. Would work only for very specific locations however.

David Gaider, Designer

Remember your roots | Why NWN failed us
Hmm. Just before the speculation marches on, I'd like to point something out that some of you may not have considered: Dragon Age is not NWN2. Yes, I know this is partly obvious, but there also seem to be some folks who are under the perception that Dragon Age would be NWN2 except for the absence of the D&D license. This is not the case. The focus is not the same as it was with NWN and that has a lot of implications with regards to the design we're working on. Naturally this creates a lot of questions... which is why we're not going into detail on this yet. We're still answering these questions ourselves. But starting with the assumption that Dragon Age will automatically be like NWN in every respect or even have every feature NWN had is doing yourself a disservice. Dragon Age is as much an outgrowth of KotOR and Baldur's Gate as it is NWN, remember. Not that I wish to discourage speculation (as if I could), but simply suggest that you make your assumptions lightly. Naturally I suspect most of you are doing so anyhow, but from some of the discussions it would be easy to get caught up in believing otherwise.

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a good start. too bad you seems to be trying to doing just as much.

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Is this regarding the multiplayer/singleplayer aspect? Because if it is, I can tell you quite definitively that we are not doing it the same way as was attempted in NWN. Not by a longshot.

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point is that you guys did mention, following nwn, that one obstacle to nwn success were your attempt to do mp and sp and a toolset and dm client, etc... seemed to be a recognition that maybes you attempted too much. icarus makes a crpg?

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That's not a bad point. Trying to make the same campaign run in both SP and MP is indeed a problem. As is trying to maintain an equal focus on multiple major elements. Nowhere have we said that is what we are doing with Dragon Age.

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Quote: sure, we bet you learned all kinds o' things from nwn. 'course, we imagine that some things will not have changed. if you gives us an entry level toolset, that is also limiting the bio developers, right?

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Who says the toolset is entry level?

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Quote: is still only a fraction of folks that play the mp campaigns, right?

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That is simply a question of whether the resources to make the MP aspect is justified or not. It has nothing to do with our ability to implement it or how we intend to do so.

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Quote: am sure you learned all kinds o' things from 5+ years of working on nwn.

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Why thank you. So glad to meet your approval.

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Quote: just seems that you has not learned other, more obvious lessons.<hr.
Oh, wait, that was just sarcasm. Gosh. Who'da thunkit?

I know you're a smart man, Gromnir, but I do believe you are proceeding with this "I guess you haven't learned very much" line of reasoning based on quite a few large assumptions of your own.

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it isn't that you're doing SP/MP differently in DA. it's that you're doing it at all.

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So... what's the preference, here? We should leave the MP functionality out of Dragon Age completely? Because if there's none for us, there's also none for you. No DM Client, no persistent worlds, no multiplayer party gaming.

But if we do put the capability for MP to exist in Dragon Age, then it is just a matter of whether or not we wish to create a campaign that takes advantage of that capability. If we don't, then we've just included a major aspect of our new game and engine which nobody can use until and unless the community puts out something to make use of it. Is that smart? You tell me.

What you don't need to tell me is that trying to create the one NWN campaign to be both a great SP and a great MP experience at the same time didn't work well. We already know that. There are other options available to us.

Let's make classes ambiguous!

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I mean it. You start off with one normal guy and u have a bunch of abilites infront of you. It would solve the problem of ppl "power classing". Characters will differ from one another. Ofcoz, i absolutely disagree with the idea of fighers trying to stealth. But realistically, they should be able to. Perhaps skill points should limit tat.

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So... we make the system appear to be skill-based... but really make it class-based and limit the skills one can get according to class, but not tell the player why or how? Wouldn't that be a mite... frustrating?

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C'mon Gaider, you know you knew what he thought he was expressing but didn't

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Actually, I didn't understand. Which is why I didn't get it. I think I see what he was getting at now, tho.

The story is everything

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Bioware, please allow enhanced exploring (e.g. great and varied 3D scenery, first person view).

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Exploration is an important element. You've always got to have, at least at points in the game, the ability for the player to explore and find his own way rather than being driven along a set path.

How much exploration depends on the type of game you're aiming for, however. If you're asking for exploration a la Morrowind (a very legitimate route) where the focus is having a vast landscape that you wander about in and the plot is very secondary, then I can say that you won't find that in Dragon Age. Dragon Age will be much More story-driven overall, and while there might still be plenty of exploration it will be in the context of the story and not aside from it.

The story IS king, at least as far as I'm concerned. We're spending a lot of effort on coming up with a great story as well as a very detailed and expansive setting for that story to take place in. That may not mean you'll get to wander willy-nilly around every square inch of it, but a convincing setting can only add to the story experience.

As for those who would normally ignore the campaign and go right for the toolset, I guess that has its place, as well and it's certainly going to be an important and exciting element for Dragon Age. This isn't NWN, though, and the goals aren't necessarily the same... as I've said elsewhere, keep in mind that Dragon Age is an outgrowth of KotOR and Baldur's Gate as much as it is NWN.

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I think the trick for a good RPG is to balance the goodness across all the pieces that make a great game - gameplay, art, story, and character development.

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That's probably the fairest assessment. If story was as important as I'd like to think, then we'd all still be playing Infocom-like text adventures, right?

A friend brought up one thing about art with me recently, however, that made me think. He said that he liked the push towards More detailed art (and I agree, it is all very gorgeous) but that one cost he thought it might have is with regards to leaving less for our imaginations to do. He said he found it almost easier to believe in a world like Baldur's Gate where you had to fill in the blanks with your imagination because you saw less... but that when every single thing starts being laid out for you you also start expecting More. You start looking at what's missing rather than looking at what's there... a situation very similar to the art catch-22 known as the "uncanny valley" (for those of you who aren't familiar with that expression, a quick google search should fill you in).

Any thoughts on that?

Will DragonAge have Teleport Spells? - Baldur's Gate had them but NeverWinter did not
The really super-duper thing about doing our own IP is that, if we were of a mind to, we could just say "teleportation is impossible, even with magic" as we define what the magic system is.

Isn't that great? *I* think it's great.

Mind you, then the enemy mages couldn't cackle at you and then disappear before you could do anything about it. And that would be bad. Or wait... maybe it's good?

So many plot devices... destroyed! What would I do without my crutches?! Ahhh! *runs off, screaming*

Or we could go ahead and have teleportation. But then we can define exactly how teleportation works. Also cool. Maybe it's a long-distance transport only. Maybe it's short-distance Dimension Door-like hopping. Maybe you need to be able to scry wherever you want to go to. Whatever it would be, you can bet yer collective butts it would function in a computer setting. As Martha Stewart would say, "Somebody send me a file!"

Or, wait... "It's a good thing." Yeah, that's it.

Win-win situation, I think.

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Gotta love 'em Bioware non-answers. Always so much fun.

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It's mostly a matter of misdirection.

"The Holy Roman Empire was neither holy nor Roman nor an empire! Discuss!"

*runs off*

The story is everything

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The other thing I think I learned from this experience is to let people adjust to a "new world" slowly and put them in familiar territory first. Then start fleshing things out for them as they move along. This makes things feel More natural and less forced.

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That's a good point. It's been a difficult process for us to try and identify the best way to introduce a player to our world, especially when they can start in so many different places and situations.

I know when we made the list of all the things (even basic concepts) that the player would need to be exposed to over the course of the story, it was pretty huge.

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I have no idea what this really has to do with the topic, though

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"The Holy Roman Empire was neither holy nor Roman nor an empire! Discuss!"

*runs off*

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As a module builder, I'm overwhelmed thinking about all the work that would have to be done to support even five or six beginning stories for players.

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Yeah, tell me about it.

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Quote: It also means that the places where people begin are also accessable to other players (otherwise they're "wasted" on the majority of the people who play).

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Excellent observation.

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Quote: It greatly increases replayability for players, though at the cost of development time.

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Design and writing time More than anything else, yes.

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Quote: These days I try focus on the main quest and minimize costly branching. It's been a hard lesson, learned after putting in lots of variation that most players never see.

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You, suh, are a very wise man.