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

DA Fantasy Theme

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I hope that your comment was made at least partly in jest
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Everything Stan says is at least partly in jest. We might consider doing a less-fantasyish sci-fi setting or even something more out there... but for someone to claim to be dismayed that we're making a full-blown fantasy RPG is a bit naive, isn't it? It's one thing to say that you'd prefer we did something else, quite another to say that upon coming here and discovering the fantasy theme of our next game your shock and horror were so great that you felt the need to leap into a vat full of Norwegian stinging scorpions while stabbing yourself repeatedly. I hyperbolize, of course, but that appears to be the theme of the day anyhow.

Dragon age and PvP ?

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so im just wondering, will Dragon Age be balanced in PvP, so that those who enjoy dont need to ban certain spells and similiar to have a fair fight, or are we better off playing a difrent game ?
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The same as with persistent worlds, PvP isn't an aspect that DA will be designed to accomodate. If it's able to be used for that, it will be incidental to our design (just as in NWN). As to just how much PvP will be accomodated, it's a bit too early for us to tell just yet.

Georg Zoeller, Designer

Elven Blade Singers
I could see use in a bladesinger class - munchkin magnet A certain group of gamers will select this class at start and get teleported into a single 10x10 meter area with monsters constantly respawning until they are dead. The rest plays on the normal server, nobody will notice the difference.

Allow GMs to charge for servers?
The charging for server question has nothing to do with WotC or D20. I wouldn't expect any changes in that policy. As Dave said in other threads, creating a PW Kit to allow people to roll out their own persistent worlds and make money from it isn't something we are interested in at the moment. DA's first and foremost goal is to deliver a AAA single and multiplayer story driven RPG.

Improving Network Code?
While there is always room for improvements, I don't think there is any priority in allowing more people per server. If bandwith is freed up, it will probably be put to use for other features. There are a lot of things that *could* be done with excess bandwith, from voice communication to accomodating a different model for sending environment information to the client or supporting a physics engine. Not to forget that the planned mass battle capabilities will require a good load of bandwith. I'm not saying that any of those things will be or will not be in DA, I'm just saying that there are a lot of things that could be done with new bandwith, and most of those are more interesting than allowing more players per server.

DA vs D&D

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D & D simplified this with a number that made human DMs rolling dice settlte the issue quickly and easily. Why now continue this in the computer?
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Right. i.e. why should damage be represented as integer value? The computer is pretty good juggling floating point values, so things like damage can be much more fine grained.

MMORPG Style Server

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I think that's rediculous. Bioware already "unofficially" supports PW's.
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No, PWs are unsupported. Yes, we do not prevent people from creating PW and every once in a while we sneak in a feature that is useful for people running PW servers and yes, when adding new features we discuss the implications those may have for PWs (such as the customize character button), but PWs are unsupported.

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They made many additions to NWN that was obviously for persistant worlds and the communities desire for them. When they saw the community was designing their own NWN databases what did bioware do? They created a NWN database.
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No, the database was added to allow pass data between campaign chapters in the first place. It can be used for PWs, sure, but any PW person out there will attest you that it is not really suited to do so (for performance reasons)

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I really don't see your point here and why your trying to down play the importance of PW's to this kind of game. There is a HUGE amount of people out there who still play the old text only MUD's. It wouldn't take much more to draw them to the graphical type of game such as NWN and DA.
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Compared to our core audience, NWN PWs *are* insignificant, there is nothing to downplay here. It's not that we are guessing in the dark, we know people play on NWN PWs, we know how many people play at which time of the day, how long they play, and how long the servers stay up. We monitor those numbers and we use them to make decisions for our future games.

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If Bioware could attract more of those people there would be a definate boost in sales. But, they don't "officially" support that kind of gaming.
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Official support for PWs would force a focus shift that would hurt our core audience as the resources used to create PW friendlyness could also be used in adding something that helps our core audience. A lof of people play counterstrike as well, maybe we should try to attract those as well? Example: We could allow 128 players per server by optimizing our bandwith or we could instead add a more sophisticated combat system (that would require more messages/bandwith per player). This doesn't mean that there isn't a significant overlap between what's nice for PW people and what's nice for our core audience and PWs however.

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Btw, the popularity of MMORPGS is undeniable. Just look at how many are now available and how many more are in development.
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The popularity of traditional games like Knights of the old Republic or Baldurs Gate is undeniable as well, so where is the point? There is going to be significant bloodshed in the MMORPG sector over the coming years and I'm happy that we are not directly involved with it. Some people see MMORPGs as the second coming and ultimate future of computer games but I'm not one of these. I played and still play (City of Heroes right now) my good share of BBS Multiplayer games, MUDs, and MMORPGs over the last 15 years and I understand their fascination, but I also think we have a long way to go before they become something more than level grinding and game mechanics after the initial enthusiasm wears off. The social aspect is what keeps people coming back on the long run, but many gamers are just not interested in that, which I can fully understand. Our games are story driven RPGs, thats about as different from MMORPGs as you can get.

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Bioware has already created the BEST tool out there for creating your own small scale version of one of these. How much effort would it take for them to take it a step further?
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As said before, NWN was not about "create your own PW" and DA isn't about "create your own PW". We will see what the engine will be capable of doing, it might very well end up being a bit more useable for PWs than NWN because we learned a lot of stuff about custom content and modability with NWN, but I don't think that any significant development resources will go into making DA a PW toolkit, sorry. You know, you are making it really hard for us here to justify leaving any features in as "unsupported" when you keep telling us that we actually support them. That makes it very tempting just to cut those features in order to avoid hassle with them, and that's nothing you or I want. Again - I have no problems with PWs, I think people should play our games the way they want to play them and I am happy with giving all the power into the hands of the players/builders/server admins so they can customize their game experience the way they want it to be. However, I'm against adding expensive features that benefit only a tiny faction of the community. On the positive side most features benefit everyone.

More :
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Oh, one more thing... lol. I looked at my server vault and counted over 1,100 accounts. Considering the fact that my server is quite a humble little one, I think that's a pretty significant amount of new accounts created on it.
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A account folder is created every time someone enters your server for the first time, even if he's just server hopping trying to find a game, so the folder itself has no statistical value. That's why I don't care when people post "I have over 15.000 users on my PW", our master server has much better numbers.

Why Macs deserve a concurent release.

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But if the profit will be higher than costs, why not?
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I'm pretty sure that's what most decision boil down to in the business world

Why Macs deserve a concurent release.

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Interesting point..... I wonder how the devs, suits and lawyers at Blizzard Entertainment would respond to the fact that Macs aren't a huge gaming population and that platform-independent development is much harder and more costly to implement? Then again they are a 500 pound gorilla compared to Bioware, so does that mean that for them (and in general) platform-independent projects are a luxury they can indulge in?
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Please note that the following are just examples, they are not related to Dragon Age or NWN or BioWare or Blizzard or whatever. "Cost" can be comprised of many factors - If you have a lot of people with experience on a certain platform (Win32, Mac, Linux, etc), your cost of creating a native version for a product is significantly lower than for companies without that experience pool. If you have a alot of people who are familiar with a certain type of API (let's take DirectX), your cost of creating a state of the art graphics engine with this API can be significantly (read: "man years") lower than trying to implement the same features with a different API. In the end everything boils down to cost vs. payoff. Cost doesn't need to be monetary, it can also also be negative PR, loss of community resources, time, contacts, etc. Payoff also doesn't need to be cash - It can be experience, contacts, community or other things. Adding the toolset/mod capabilties to NWN opened a whole new pool of human resources for BioWare... Please do not try to read anything Dragon Age related into this post, I am not working on DA and I have no idea what has been decided or not, and what is planned or not regarding release of the game on platforms other than Win32. Thanks.

Brenon Holmes, Programmer

Dragon Age = Pre-Eberron

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Is this related to the game Dragon Age in any way?
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No.