Dragon Age Forum News

Remove all ads!

(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

Dragon Age title

---------------
I still figure they should've named the game after whatever they called their world. That way you're not stuck in an age and you're not cornered for sequel titles. Dragon Age would make a better chapter title over a series name.
---------------

We were tempted to name the game after the world. The only trouble there is that you can end up with a name that doesn't mean anything to anyone. Eventually it would, but not at first.

"Scallywagland? What the heck is that?"
"That's the name of the world."
"Oh."

(No, it's not called Scallywagland.)

"Dragon Age" at least has some meaning to it. Or so we decided when we ended up going with it.

---------------
Quote: THink of this: the name has to be marketable. In DA's case it has to be vague enough to build a series around. It has to relate in some way to the world. It has to be clearly indicative of what kind of game it is. It has to be catchy enough that people remember it. Etc.
---------------

And the copyright has to be clear, as well. You'd be surprised how many titles are taken up somewhere by something.

The hardest part about a name is that it's completely subjective as to what people prefer... so therefore everyone on the team has an opinion on it. The process to come up with one is so painful... never ever ever shall I reveal the details of how we went about it. Sheer trauma.

What we "DO" know so far....

---------------
What 'PvP rumour'? I suspect that special balance for PvP is getting little to no special consideration so
---------------

You're right, it isn't. We're doing what works on the computer. If and when we ever decide to make a PnP version... well, I guess we'll cross that bridge when it's time to blow it up and not before.

Can we get a Boo easter egg?

---------------
Boo was pretty cool but if I could have one character from the BG series back, it would be that beholder dude.
---------------

Considering that that character never had a name (I have often referred to him as "Spec" but that's completely unofficial), he's never been trademarked. I suspect, however, that the beholder creature itself is unique enough that it's a trademark of D&D.

Which means that HotU was my last chance to bring him back. Alas, the plans to make him a henchman who you could find in HotU's beholder caves got cut about halfway through development of the expansion pack. Oh well.

Darcy Pajak, Assistant Producer

What we "DO" know so far....

---------------
Do we know it it will be aa binary star system (in other words, will we have 2 suns) or even multiple or no moons?
---------------

The exact number of sun's has not been defined by the Design team yet. And we're not creating the skyboxes for the levels so Art hasn't needed to ask. Sooner or later James, and his merry band will decide how many suns and moons there will be.

Don Moar, Tools Programmer

DA Toolest: More Editing-Wizards please
Hey,

Actually, Monferrat, if the DA Toolset were to lack a script wizard similar to the excellent ones created by Lilac Soul or the Script Ease team it would not indicate that we weren't paying attention or don't care about the shortcomings of NWToolset. As I said earlier, which tools ultimately get created depend entirely upon where it falls in terms of priority and the priority of other tools that are needed at or around the same time.

Some tools make the cut, others don't.

Think about it like this: Suppose you've only got enough resources to make either the super-easy painting system or the super-easy scripting system; which would you choose? Personally, I'd recommend the area painting because users will typically encounter that system first and if it acts as a barrier to entry, they're not going to even see the script wizard. If, on the other hand, the area painting is easy, people are more likely to hang around and stick through the more challenging parts of the toolset. Besides, we have very talented scripters on staff and they might prefer that the tools programmers work on improving the actual IDE instead. That being said, I don't think the guys have ruled anything out at this point.

Georg Zoeller, Designer

More words from the Great One - 1st Level Assumptions
A CRPG is usually about the character's current exploits, not playing through his childhood / training
- I mean, people tend not to care about playing their character through highschool

Through, as already mentioned, DA will have the "origin stories", which will give you the opportunity to add a bit more background to the character (more diverse than the "school" from SoU - which a lot of people didn't like)

---------------
...
"Characters who have achieved 'name' level must merely spend game time ... in training and/or study."
---------------

Ah, I see, he anticipated the time sink/threadmill that defines most of today's MMORPGs. Or could it be that todays MMORPG designers didn't listen to Wayne but some geeky RPG nerd instead? Now that's it, trading awesome fistfights for level threadmill...

As for taking levelup for granted ... that's somehow the point of it, at least when you have a relation between gaining XP and gaining levels in your game - making the player seek out a trainer each time he wants to level up would have impact on the way the story needs to be written without actually adding to it (except to litter the world with trainers for every class to make sure that nobody gets stuck. Forcing people to travel back from the 15th level of the dungeon of ultimate doom to train just to train sucks - unless you go the town portal route...).

This is the reason why most D&D games on the computer dropped this part in the first place. You see it in MMORPGs a lot because you want people to invest time and give them something to waste time on ("oh, I dinged" ... only 15 minutes to the next trainer, great stuff!) - and I don't think we need to add this stuff in order to get a higher "gameplay hours" figure in the end.

In PnP the player can just say "and while the rest of the party recovers from their wounds, I'll travel to my master and train a lot". DM: done, 2 weeks later the party reassembles. In a CRPG we could do that with a "travel home, train and come back button", but I suspect that's not really what people want (plus it would be a wast of time)

Can it go to Xbox 2?
DA is developed for the PC platform.

XNA is a framework, not a magical "make your code run on all platforms" kind of tool, and it's a couple of years before anyone will be able to buy games based on XNA.

Tim Smith, Tools Programmer

DA Toolest: More Editing-Wizards please
Don, Stop using the words "Super Easy". When you say that I get a cold chill and I swear I can hear chains and the word "Ebeneezer".

Sydney Tang, Programmer

DA toolset : What is in this ERF?
Yep, as stoffe pointed out, the Hak Pak editor works for editing ERFs too, and since everyone already has it (nwhak.exe in your utils folder), you don't even need to get the ERF editor.