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.

Georg Zoeller, Designer

The story is everything
Simplistic (better than poor) artwork doesn't work today anymore.

Remember playing Ultima 6? Nobody cared about the fact that the Avatar had only like 10 different animations - you just saw the little man on the screen, yourself, the avatar...

Today, if a character not moving his/her lips and fingers while talking, people are upset and skip your game.

You could ask "why don't they just use their imagination" ... and the answer is probably "training" - we can't just turn the clock back to the time when we got into computer games - when 4 (ugly) cga colors on the screen were an improvement over hercules 2 color video and you would translate two blue pixels on a yellow circle into eyes on a head.

The efforts you need to make to "believe" or "immerse yourself" into a game today are fewer and different than they were 15-20 years ago - our perception of games has changed and so have our expectations (well, except for a few in a well-known gallic village resisting the intrusion of real time into the RPG genre ).

Will DA have a DM client?
It's called GM Client, please stay politically correct.

DA Toolset Suggestions

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Scripting

• the ability to hide and show script blocks

Debugging the strangled logic in the HCR is always a fun task that could be made bearable if I could hide the detail in each block. At the moment I have to make do with the bookmark system however an alternative solution would be to use a similar metaphor to the one used in the conversation editor.

In other words display a - box in the margin at the start of each pair of braces. Click on it and the script block collapses back in to the line above and is replaced with a + box in the margin.

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One of my favourite visual studio features - does not really save you a lot if you produce code chaos through

More: DA will not use tilesets

BUT - tilesets themselve are not the limitation, it's memory (especially texture memory).

Tilesets are a nice way of allowing builders to easily create worlds without worrying about technical imitations like textures, etc and when using NWNs built in tilesets you can be sure that the area you create will still fit into memory of a minspec machine (well, most of the time).

So regardless what system DA will come up with, technical limitations are still there - the question is if the new toolset will enforce those limitations or allow people to go wild and create things that will not run on machines out there. Enforcing limitations will give you fire on the boards for "limiting imagination", not enforcing them cause you to draw fire because "my creation does not run, the toolset sucks!". Will be interesting what Tim and the team come up with.

When is dead, really dead?

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I liked the IRON MAN mode of ToEE.

That was something creepy to play with - it actually changed the style of playing.

As a matter of fact many players can allocate a limited amount if time to gaming, so the reloading of a previously saved game is still the best option and time-saver.

Wizbane

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I like this option for the hardcore gamer, it's cheap to implement and adds an interesting option for the hardcore gamer.

In general I really like the approach KotOR had, if your whole party is slain, game over.

What you will not see in a BioWare game are things like limited save/reload (i.e. savepoints). I can find no excuse for taking the ability to save and quit playing at any point from the player. RPGs tend to have a bit higher age average than other games and chances are good that the player has only limited time between job and family to play, so not allowing to save would be really disrespectful to that part of the audience.

Keep in mind that DA is our world, and we are free to decide that there is no such thing as resurrection or rais edead.

In D&D Raise Dead and Resurrection are signature spells you can't really leave out and it's generally assumed in most campaigns that death is not permanent. I hate that as it makes death meaningless (especially after getting rid of the constitution penalty from 2E), but if experience tells you that 95% of all players just save and reload once a party member dies, the question is "do you spend more money on nice loadscreens", "do you frustrate the player by taking away the load ability" or "do you play along".

I think KotOR had an acceptable solution for this problem.