Dragon Age Forum News

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(Originally posted by chevalier)

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.

David Gaider, Designer

more work for dave
Cynicism is very safe. If the game is bad, everything he's said looks justified. If it isn't, then obviously all the kvetching did some good. Win-win situation. It's combining that with an inability to understand that we (meaning all of us here) might in fact be okay with him not liking the game that makes it irritating.

Voice-over

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Because V-O is expensive and time-consuming.
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But, as I already said (and was apparently ignored, because apparently what would I know about such things?), it is not the same people who write who do VO. The time being spent is being spent elsewhere.So less VO does not equal a longer, deeper story. At best, the money could be spent elsewhere... more game sounds and music, likely, since that's sound-related. If you want less VO, do it on that premise than on the fallacy that you'd somehow have more dialogue.

Non-Player Characters (NPCs)
You could do a limited version like this in a game, but making it as open-ended as you are describing it would be... pretty hard, to say the least. Just trying to account for the one relationship you describe would take a lot of effort in order to script it and have all the paths written ahead of time (since the writing must be necessarily linear all paths must be fully developed even if the player only chooses one... therein lies the bulk of the work.)

Barbie & Ken ?
I'm all for customization, but there's a reason why the non-beautiful portraits were almost universally not used by players. Players like their characters to be beautiful. A generalization, yes, for which there are always exceptions, but one that you and I both know is largely true when you look at the issue objectively. It's not just us forcing our desire for beautiful characters upon you all. That said, the preference would be for that level of customization to exist anyway for the sake of NPC variety even if nothing else. But I think that kind of consideration is usually secondary. Maybe that shouldn't be the case? A point to argue, I suppose.

Voice-over

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The trouble with full VO is that the writers will find themselves suddenly limited to what they can write. For example, specific references to the PCs race/gender/class etc. will have to be avoided as each change would require different VO. What would have been a simple engine-handled substitution becomes expensive multiple VO recordings.
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This is true. However, read ahead... This is not necessarily true. It was not true in KotOR, for instance, and for a very good reason. Would you believe that KotOR had a first draft? It was a completely written game at one point, with the shortest dialogue we could possibly get away with because we were under a very draconian word count limit due to the cost of VO. It was also terrible. Awful. If a character had more than one line it, out of necessity, both introduced itself and gave it's quest by the time the second line was done. When you have a 10,000-word limit on a chapter, though, there's not much wiggle room.And the Powers That Be acknowledged the problem. That version of KotOR was scrapped and we started over... with complete carte blanche to write dialogues as long as we felt were necessary. I think it showed in KotOR's writing and we're doing DA the same way. Indeed, we're actually going out of our way to make extra paths the standard.And while we can't do character names, we *do* intend to do such references as he/she and him/her, only sparingly. As you can imagine, doing one of those requires two seperate lines, but when you have another line for an elf and one for a nobleman and one for a barbarian and... well, you get the picture... then it doesn't seem like such a big deal.In short, I would agree that VO can be a huge limiting factor on the writing... but only when it is done cheaply. If the Powers That Be are willing to put the writing first and the VO second there really shouldn't be a problem (beyond having no NPC ever actually say the player's name, which is a bit of a trick to get around... but they didn't do it in KotOR, either, and I don't think it was actually missed.) It should also be noted that less VO does not equate to more writing/more story. Us writers do not work on VO, so it's not as if having less VO means more time for us to write.

Hey, DA Devs ... what have you been reading?

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What do you have against spellfire? It's certainly better than you make "The White Gold Wielder" sound, and better than a lot of other books too!
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Oooo I don't know if I should get started. "White Gold Wielder", while depressing, is still at least well-written. "Spellfire" reads like a bad transcript of the kind of D&D campaign I had when I was twelve.

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I agree that "On a Pale Horse" is great though, along with the rest of the books in that series.
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Really? I found the Time book moderately good and the ones after that pretty poor. I heard the last book about Evil was good but I didn't read it at that point.I remember really liking Piers Anthony's "Split Infinity" series, especially the way the adepts were set up and their system of magic... very cool. Even though that series exemplifies all the annoying tics that Anthony has (mass nakedness, clueless main hero ends up sleeping with everything... in this case, even his horse... I swear Piers Anthony is such a perv...)

Hey, DA Devs ... what have you been reading?
I thought the "A Man of his Word" series by Dave Duncan was great. I just started reading "the Gilded Chain" recently (also by him) which I hear is excellent (it's been recommended to me by several other designers). I really disliked the Thomas Covenant "White Gold Wielder" series, though more because of the man's complete passiveness rather than his whining per se. Seven books and it took until the final book for him to actually do anything. It was also relentlessly depressing, and while the "Hope, Memory and Sorrow" series by Tad Williams (of which "To Green Angel Tower" was mentioned above) was similar in tone I actually found it enjoyable. Except maybe for that interminable section in the tunnels underneath the castle... oh, god, I never want to read that part ever again so long as I live.

I stopped reading the "Wheel of Time" series about half-way through the "Path of Daggers". Just... no. I swear every single woman in that series is one sentence away from 'boxing your ears'. I think Robert Jordan has a thing about aggressive women. This series actually influenced DA's story a lot... in that "I think that's in the Wheel of Time series" was a statement that defeated a proposed plot point instantly and irrevocably. I confess to liking Peirs Anthony's "Magic of Xanth" series, too. Mainly the first trilogy, though. After "Dragon on a Pedestal" it became completely unreadable. Or I grew up, one of the two. He probably was the author who most influenced me while I was growing up, though, which makes me a bit sad. I never did get why everyone had to run around naked at least once in every novel of his. "On a Pale Horse" still stands out of all of his books, though, even if it isn't fantasy. I know there are relatively obscure fantasy books that I've read and enjoyed recently that I should recommend, but I forget now. Grrr. Oh well. I will go on record, though, by saying that "Spellfire" is the worst fantasy book I have read in my entire life. And that's saying a lot. Don't try to read it to find out if I'm correct, just trust me.

EDIT: Just remembered one, a duology of all things: "The Mirror Of Her Dreams" and "A Man Rides Through", both by Stephen R. Donaldson of "White Gold Wielder" infamy. I forgave him after those two.

Thieve's Cant in Dragon Age?
Not that we would particularly want to do a Narlen Darkwalk NPC, good or no.

more work for dave

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I didn't find it annoying at all. I found it as being normal for a dungeon crawling. I mean haven't you guys ever done so in PnP gaming?
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Indeed. We would say, "We want to leave the dungeon and camp." And the DM would say "Done!" and it was so. He did not spend the next ten minutes laboriously describing our journey back through all those parts of the dungeon we'd already explored. If he had, we would have hit him.

more work for dave

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David, Watcher's Keep was lame. It is the worse dungeon I have ever came across in a game. The Puzzles made no sense, the critters were laughable, and the challenge was nil. Where did it rocked?
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Because it was fun. Durlag's was fun, too... except when I had to drag my sorry *** all the way back to the entrance just to rest. Then not so much.But I take it you disagree. Ah, well, there's a shocker.

Instead of having priests and divine magic..
Just as a comment, there's no particular reason to have a seperation between the magic that priests and mages would use unless the background story fits it. Indeed, there is no reason for priests to be spell-casters unless that's what you want, nor for priests to be healers per se.

I know that some of you have said precisely this, I'm just saying that we have the same thoughts. You'll see precisely what we've set up eventually.

more work for dave

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1: No city under siege stories. We have seen it done in Saradush in ToB, we have seen it done in Neverwinter in Neverwinter Nights, and we have seen in it done with Waterdeep in HotU. NO MORE!
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You know, this almost makes me want to include a city under siege just because. If it fits the story well enough, I see no reason not to do it again.

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Quote: 3: The moderately annoying male character. We had Ajantis in BG1, ANomen in BG2, Carth in KotOR, Tomi in NWN, Deekin in SoU, and both TOmi and Deekin in HotU. ENOUGH ALREADY! Grr... Argh...
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Everybody is always annoyed by NPC's. I can guarantee you that everyone will find some of the NPC's in DA slightly annoying and at least one incredibly so.

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Quote: 4: The big dungeon. I like big dungeons and would like to see one of Durlag's Tower quality put into Dragon Age. Watcher's Keep in ToB blew major chunks of kibble. Being able to leave at any moment really killed the tension and fear for my characters' lives.
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Watcher's Keep rocked. I would love to do a dungeon like that again.

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Quote: 5: Instant Get out of Jail free cards are just annoying and should be removed completely in Dragon Age. I hated it in ToB, it was worse in NWN, KotOR, SoU, and HotU. It really kills the challenge of the game and that is why the majority of us play the game. We play for the challenge as much as for the story.
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We? Is that the royal We? Or by that do you mean to imply Everyone? On whose behalf are you speaking?

Darcy Pajak, Assistant Producer

Gender differences
There will be no gender differences in Dragon Age.

Why not D&D rules?

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i mean multyplay like in nwn
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Dragon age will have a multiplayer campaign designed for a group of people to play through together. When playing this, the party will play as a team to complete the game.

Why not D&D rules?

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& why its not masive multyplay?
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There are many reasons why this chapter of Dragon Age is not a massivly multiplayer roleplaying online game.A MMORG doesn't need an indepth story and personal character involement. One thing crtitcs consistantly say about our games is that the stories our writters create are fantastic, and the NPC's are interesting and deep. I don't know any MMORG that can make one person feel the world revolves around them.They are like theme parks. Pay your ticket, enter and ride the rides, take in the shows, and you're treated like the next guy.In our games you are the most important person. You and nobody else can do what needs to be done. Each plot, each character was designed for you to find, complete, talk to and witness.Each type of game serves a purpose in entertainment. We choose the story side.

Barbie & Ken ?
All I know is that if i'm going to be playing a game for hours and hours, I want something nice to look at. Call me shallow but for me, and all those people who like hollywood movies, that means supermodels.

Derek French, Live Team Producer

Two simple ways to reduce Warezing and increase Sales

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How about a hole punched CD? I specifically made CD that has a hole on the side which if the computer cannot detect it won't run the game.
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Just like the dongle and CD check, it is just as easy to crack. Because the code to do all these checks are in the game executable, the game can be cracked.

Two simple ways to reduce Warezing and increase Sales

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How to stop piracy to almost nillcreate a USB device like a cartridge drive.
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This is the failed 'dongle' idea from 10+ years ago. It comes with hardware incompatibilities and is just as easily cracked as a CD check. This would also drive up manufacturing costs significantly.

Don Moar, Tools Programmer

Toolset GUI
Hey,

First of all, the aerospace industry analogy as you describe, khazar-khum, is not quite accurate. You would never put a full compliment of 217 passengers on the Boeing 7E7 for its first flight. Similarly, you would not hand over untried / unreliable tools into the hands of artists and designers working on your project; they are _not_ test pilots. Their work is not testing the tools, it is using the tools to make the game. Just as passengers on airplanes have a reasonable expectation of safety and reliability so too, do the users of our tools. Continuing with the aerospace analogy, there is another saying "Never marry an untried engine to an untried airframe." It is all well and good to build tools using game and graphics code that is more or less final. It is an _entirely_ different matter to be developing them simultaneously. This introduces not just one, but several additional layers of complexity that must be managed in order for development of the game to proceed as smoothly as possible.

The simple fact is, there is a (slightly) higher failure tolerance for the game than for the tools for most of the project. That is, when the game goes down, it's bad but not critical because you can always restart / reload without loss of work. When the tools (using the same game and graphics code as the... game) go down, you have now introduced negative work into the project. Ignoring the cost of finding the bug for now, the basic cost is that the content creator must now reimplement whatever work has just been lost. This means the content creator is no longer moving the project forward, he or she is trying to recover lost ground. Now imagine an entire team of artists or designers who can't work because of an unknown data corrupting or crash-inducing bug. Don't think it doesn't happen.

Let's actually look at the cost of finding that bug. If the bug occurs only in the game, you are losing time the game or graphics programmer could be polishing existing or adding new features to the game. This is bad because it impacts the product our customers are purchasing. If the bug occurs in the tools, the tools programmers are usually the first ones to begin the investigation. This means that the tools programmers are no longer polishing existing or adding new features to the tools. When you consider the value that a new tools feature could add to the project in terms of allowing the artists or designers to complete some task faster (and the corresponding ripple effect benefit that could have on the final product) this can quickly multiply into a huge loss. Now, good testing and change management practices help to mitigate that risk, but when it's your work that's just been flushed, it doesn't make you feel any better that the tools programmers saved a little time by reusing that code. When a project is developing the game and graphics engine systems and tools simultaneously, any sharing of code should be considered very carefully because the "issues" that you avoid later may be outweighed by the "issues" that you face today.

Georg Zoeller, Designer

Must have flying

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For G2, had the setting been changed accordingly, say from an island, to a valley surrounded by impassible mountains, I think the game would have more or less been equally enjoyable (with a couple appropriate plot alterations, of course). It's really about the setting and the methods of movement complimenting each other.As far as U9, unfortunately, I didn't manage to play very far through the game, as I simply didn't have a system that could handle it, and I was in university at the time too - I didn't have the time to dedicate to playing on my slow computer (and was unable to afford a system upgrade).
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I played Ultima 9, at least as far as it was possible.Levitation control itself was ok but not as good as Morrowind in that regard. Combat could be easily exploited. Swimming was ok but you would drown/take damage whenever you got too far from the shore. I liked the way they shut off parts of the world against further exploration early on, it didn't feel too forced. However Ultima 9 did not have followers because they couldn't get a party to work in the 3D environment.

Two simple ways to reduce Warezing and increase Sales

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as i said before stuff like this Click Here is imo one of the best ways to prevent warezing.
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That's a picture of the Ultima Ascension Dragon Edition, which cost about 120USD at the time it was released. I paid significantly more than that to get one of those in europe. Your average player is not going to shell out much money for a game. Keep in mind that game prices have been stable stable/lower over the last few years while production costs are significantly up. I recently (about a week after the official release date) bought Splinter Cell, Unreal Tournament and Far Cry for 39 CDN each, thats about 28 USD for a triple-A game. One reason for stable / lower prices is the larger market as games become more mainstream, the other reason are publishers reducing distribution costs by making lighter / small boxes as well as cutting down manufacturing costs.You will probably still see things like cloth maps, etc in the future, but only in more expensive "special editions".

Two simple ways to reduce Warezing and increase Sales
Plus punching holes in CDs will cause them to spin less harmonic causing significantly increased wear and tear on both CD drive and cd.

Voice-over

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I don't like full voice overs. I find myself being able to read much faster than what is being spoken.
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As long as you recognize that the market demands otherwise, that's fine. You can always turn down the speech volume and skip-click through conversations.

Scripting language - OO?
While you will no longer have all the D&D related functions dealing with ability modifiers, AC, and other D&D system specific things, the general framework of the language is unlikely to change significantly as it has nothing to do with the D&D license.

Scripting language - OO?

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Second it is extremely uncomfortable, especially since there was no Button 'recompile all scripts'.
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That is strange, I have the option to recompile all scripts in my NWN retail toolset using Module->Build .

Game length

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Has C++ changed so much over the years ? Does it now take 2 artists to draw 1 concept art and 2 designers to write the lines of 1 NPC?
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To answer the question:To create (concept, model, skin, animate) a single creature today you need probably about 5-10 times the manpower you needed to create a single creature for BG 2.Do you really think all the eyecandy, normal, shiny and bumpmapping high resolution textures and motion captured animations don't come at a price?Manpower requirements are significantly up for all departments since BG2, but Art/Animation probably had the largest increase. I stand by my statement that the days of 200 hours story driven games are over and are not coming back for a long long time, if ever.

Toolset GUI

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Reader 1: The one thing I would like to see with the toolset is :SPEEDThe toolset and the game should be considered 2 very distinct and seperate entities, and reusing the module format for the toolset is in my opinion a bad idea...
Reader 2: **NNNOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!!!**Please go read any and all articles related to NWN postmortems on gamasutra.com. (Registration is free and relatively painless, and I've received no junk or spam from them)Unless I'm misinterpreting it, because they kept the Toolset and the Game as separate builds (and on separate compilers no less), it contributed to a large number of bugs, plus the inability to port the toolset to Linux and Mac platforms.I would imagine the performance would actually be quicker if both projects were more closely knit. Regardless, I think there exists be a better way of making the Toolset performance quicker in comparison to NWN, *WITHOUT* having to complicate the project production screen with muliple projects and/or multiple compilers.
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Yepp, the more shared code / resources you have between toolset and game, the less problems you will have to fight later dealing with "issues".

Scripting language - OO?

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No, I won't adapt. I'm sorry but I'm not payed for developing scripts in NWNScript, so I don't see the point in using a language that is simply an insult to my programming skills.
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That's a very simplistic view. I would say that "skill" in this case is defined as the ability to apply your knowledge about structures and algorithms with the tools available to you to achieve a result, not the ability to use the most advanced available language. One could argue that it takes "skill" to write code in ASM, even if it is not OO. Yes, OO would be more comfortable, but is it needed to get the job done? No - BGScript is a good example that you can create an AAA game with a simplistic scripting language (compared to nwscript).

Nathan Frederick, Lead Quality Assurance

Must have flying

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nathan, do you really think that Gothic 2 would have been as good without being able to swim?I think it added a lot to immerse the player in the game and the world. I wouldn't miss it, despite of the awful controls.Did you play Ultima 9? Great controls, even underwater. And you could fly/levitate.
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For G2, had the setting been changed accordingly, say from an island, to a valley surrounded by impassible mountains, I think the game would have more or less been equally enjoyable (with a couple appropriate plot alterations, of course). It's really about the setting and the methods of movement complimenting each other.As far as U9, unfortunately, I didn't manage to play very far through the game, as I simply didn't have a system that could handle it, and I was in university at the time too - I didn't have the time to dedicate to playing on my slow computer (and was unable to afford a system upgrade).

Must have flying
Whew. This is a long thread to read through

I'd like to put in a few comments on some of the posts in this thread, and I'll echo Brenon on the 'this is not indicative of whether or not any particular feature is in the game or not', and add in a 'this reflects my opinion on these features'. There's been several comments in this post on assorted games which have flying/swimming/z-axis. I've actually played almost all of them, and would just like to provide some feedback, and some comparisons across them.

Everquest (I play EQ):
-Swimming exists, and underwater combat exists. It
is horrible to do, with the players having to adjust to height, and position constantly. Horrible to watch, as there simply aren't animations that look good for it (probably because the resources were better put to use elsewhere). The underwater zones aren't visitted unless people have to go there for a quest of some sort. Control method: First person view. You can go into third person, but you can't control it with any degree of control. Levitation exists, but only allows downward drifting, while moving. No actual flying, and no creatures fly. Game overall has some AWFUL z-axis range issues when it comes to combat (creatures have an infinite reach on the z-axis, possibly to prevent people trying to exploit the z-axis by attacking from somewhere a creature cannot reach).

Gothic2 (just finished it last weekend actually):
-Fully 3d world with followers and swimming (even underwater). AWFUL controls in that game underwater. Can't fight underwater. No player flight, and no creatures actually fly (there are several dragons which sort of 'levitate' a few feet over the ground.

Sacred (Playing through it in my spare time in the evenings, including in this post only because it was mentioned):
-2D world faked to look 3D (like NwN). Wyverns which 'fly' have ground circles while they are in the air (and you can hit them by attacking the circle). Tiny rock on the ground - gotta walk around it. No swimming.

Morrowind (played partway through it):
-Has a pretty good flight model. Control mode is first person view, or very awkward in third person. Allowed combat to be horribly exploited (as someone else mentioned). Didn't do a whole lot of swimming, but it more or less functioned the same.

City of Heroes: Haven't played, I'll have to check out someone here flying. Won't comment on it as such.

Overall:
Morrowind is the only singleplayer game on the list which has flying and swimming. The others are MMORPG's. Morrowing has often been described as feeling like a "MMORPG without the MMO". They all lack a solid story (MMO's have 'background', and Morrowind was more 'open').

Flight fits well into these games, because there is very little that occurs as a result of the player. There's conversations, but no cutscenes, and very few scripted events (other than combat style events). Flight adds to these games, because part of these games is simply about going out and looking at things. They are all controlled in first person primarily too.

There have been comments along the line of 'if the designers know it exists, they can design with that in mind'. With flying, that is almost impossible. The majority of events and cutscenes are scripted knowing where the player will be. You drastically reduce your options on where events can take place, or start putting in a lot of artificial restrictions on flight itself (invisible walls, everything of note takes place inside, etc, etc), or start creating 'handle everything' events, which have to be very generic to handle all the possibilities. And the possibility of having bugs introduced from that is VERY high.

If a player is flying, the player could be almost anywhere. For instance, rather than walking into town through the gate, the player could come in over the wall, or in through the back side of the town, or over the wall at such a high altitude that the wall is hardly identifiable. Scripting a plot critical encounter with the city guard who questions the player, and tells them that entrance to the city is restricted is nearly impossible to do well at this point, and is probably avoidable by a clever player.

A large part of creating a compelling believable story, is knowing where the player is, and will be, in order to create events that are tailored to that situation. Generic solutions, tend to be, well, a tad generic, and somewhat bland, and very subject to being broken by a clever player going someplace that was never intended to be reached.

Player flight is cool. I won't argue that. But it only really fits 'open' environments, where a solid, story-driven, event-driven game doesn't exist. It suits the MMO scene nicely, and it fit Morrowind's open-ended gameplay style. Swimming is situationally cool. Gothic2 would have been as good without swimming. EQ would probably be better if I never had to deal with underwater combat again.

Sydney Tang, Programmer

Toolset GUI

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what's the name of that debugger program? I found the commandline compiler.
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The Script Debugger is DebugServer.exe in your utils folder.To use it, just double-click it. You will get a small window that sits around waiting for the game server to connect to it when the game hits a SpawnScriptDebugger() command. It will then pop up a window that lets you step through the script and inspect the values of local variables.Also, make sure that in the toolset, under Tools | Options | Script Editor, you have checked the box next to the label "Generate Debug Information When Compiling Scripts".On the machine on which you will be running nwmain.exe or nwserver.exe, open up nwnplayer.ini. Under [Server Options], make sure you have settings that look something like thisebugger Port=5122Debugger IP Address=127.0.0.1The port in the DebugServer window should match the port in the INI file. If you will be running DebugServer.exe on the same machine as nwmain.exe or nwserver.exe, then leave 127.0.0.1 as the IP address. Otherwise, you will have to specify an appropriate IP address.