Here are today's Dragon Age forum highlights, taken from the Dragon Age Official Forum (http://forums.bioware.com/viewforum.html?forum=84). 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.

<font size="3" face="Verdana, Arial" color="#cc6600">David Gaider, Lead Writer</font>

DEVs, please tell me that (txt) (http://forums.bioware.com/viewtopic.html?topic=528995&forum=84)

Yes, there will be random, non-cutscene banter between party members.

Nominate your voice actors for DA! (http://forums.bioware.com/viewtopic.html?topic=504721&forum=84)

I actually really like Mark Hamill's voice acting.

Raphael Sbarge was also a great voice for Carth. I would totally have him in another game. Ditto for Melissa Disney and Grey deLisle.

Vin Diesel did a great job in the Riddick video game, believe it or not.

Nathan Fillion actually did a small role for us in JE (he was Gao the Lesser). I wonder if he would be willing to do a bigger part? Ya never know. If I could get Jewel Staite to do something as well I would squee my geeky little heart out.

Will be seeing this? Please respond! (http://forums.bioware.com/forums/viewtopic.html?topic=526122&forum=84&sp=30)

I'm not sure how big a fan I am of pool regeneration, inside combat or out. If the pool regenerates, the activity you're encouraging is for players to sit around in real time and wait for the pool to recover. I can already hear the automatic response, "but they don't have to!" -- but they will, because that's what the design is encouraging.

I don't really see this as a reason to dispense with any emulation of resting, however. Having pools automatically refresh or only requiring a quick sit-down to refresh all pools then make tactics more problematic... either you're challenging the player completely inside of a single combat or you may as well not even bother. What doesn't kill them, after all, barely affects them.

We're still playing with the system that Dragon Age will end up with, and will probably fall somewhere in the middle -- also using the injury system that I mentioned elsewhere to provide a need for long-term resting and treatment, but we'll see.

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I think the general limitation is one of give and take. If you're going to put your points on character generation into whatever stats you need to cast spells well, chances are you're going to have less points available to make your character also have big muscles and kick butt. There's got to be a weakness somewhere, after all.

But there's nothing specifically stopping you from making your mage more physically fightery. The more you do so, however, the more limited his talent in magery will be. You also aren't likely to have access to a lot of specialized fighting skills, being a mage and all, but that doesn't mean you couldn't wear whatever armor and weapons you were physically capable of wielding and working towards a more fightery-style advanced class. Totally valid.

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Using a game you liked in the past as a reference is super. I've no issues with that at all. When the amount that someone liked a game in the past blurs to the point of them forgetting that it had its own issues and existed in a context even for them -- then that's nostalgia. It's simply something I'd like people to think about a bit more, that's all, as I often see evidence of it in peoples' anecdotes.

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I'll just point out that we're not talking about the entire world -- just one part of it. Mandating that there must be less than a baker's dozen but at least two or three religions, and that the right number is somehow more "immersive", seems a bit odd. What is it about multiple religions that makes it more immersive? Is it just the concept of having more choice? And if that's all it's about, why not simply go all out and have a full pantheon? Lots of immersive choices there. Rather than laughing at someone else, why not explain what you mean?

Extra-party interaction (http://forums.bioware.com/viewtopic.html?topic=528909&forum=84)

<hr />My PC might have speech idiosyncracies, too, but the party's dialogue options never reflect those, either. And without voice-overs, it's not like the dialogue will appear incongruous.<hr />Your PC is never going to have any idiosyncracies in the way he talks... not unless it's in your head.

And the party members *do* get voice-overs. That's part of the point.

<hr />This is all well and good, but that makes it inconsistent with a tradtional party-based RPG of the sort Baldur's Gate was. I'm not just part of a team. I AM the team. That's how these games work. Dragon Age no longer looks party-based at all.<hr />Except... Dragon Age works exactly the same as how Baldur's Gate worked. How is it inconsistent when this works exactly the same way?

<hr />These problems exist because you've created a game with a protagonist. This was the mistake.<hr />Well, I'll just stop you right there. If this is your problem, then there's nothing for us to discuss. We haven't done a game where this wasn't the case, yet, like it or not... and you certainly seemed to enjoy this well enough in the supposedly-more-traditional Baldur's Gate. This aspect isn't going to change, period.

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That is true, and while the exact method one will use stores isn't set yet (there is no Charisma stat, for instance), it isn't in dialogue just as it wasn't in Baldur's Gate and if there is something that gives you a discount it will be character specific. So with regards to buying stuff it should work roughly the same way.

But the point of there not being social skills in Baldur's Gate is irrelevant. The protaganist still did all the talking in Baldur's Gate, made all the decisions and any stats (such as Charisma) that were used in dialogue came from him unless party members were being referenced directly -- so, yes, it works exactly the same way.

Not to mention that, on select occasions where it makes sense, party members can chime in during dialogue to help in a more direct fashion -- again just as in BG2, though it was done very irregularly there.

Someone can imagine this in the worst possible way if it suits them, I suppose, but I really don't see the problem.

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That's essentially the case. Ideally you would make a party member completely independent with AI, controlling level up and combat and such, but as a nod to convenience we're including full control over those aspects (though there certainly may be options for AI control, we don't know yet).

That isn't meant to be a nod, however, to suggest that the player is playing an entire team as their own characters. You have one character. You just control their leveling and combat as part of the tactical element of gameplay. Because it's, well... a game.

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Huh.

Well, color me forgetful. I completely forgot that you could indeed do that in BG. I apologize. I may have been thinking of Planescape: Torment, then, where the Nameless One walks up and initiates dialogue regardless of who you're controlling at the moment.

Even so, you are right to say that the ability to do so in BG is misleading. The dialogues were not written with the other characters in mind, and their stats are not the ones being used regardless of who you used to do the dialogue. The fact that someone might have enjoyed doing the dialogue that way even though the words being spoken are clearly not the party member's own, and indeed the "me" in dialogue is always the PC, is... interesting.

So even so, while I understand a bit more what you were referring to, I still consider it a poor illusion and an unintended one, really.

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Nope, not really sure anymore. Either way, as I said, the dialogues were written from the PC's viewpoint almost exclusively and that was the intention.

When will we able to REALLY roleplay again (http://forums.bioware.com/forums/viewtopic.html?topic=527517&forum=84&sp=45)

That's arguable, I suppose. And to a degree very true. There was a time, after all, when it was possible for one person to make an entire game. Of course, expectations as a whole were much different back then as well.

The only reason I say "nostalgia" is not because I think those older games didn't have merits or that people shouldn't enjoy them or think back on them fondly, it's just that the things we enjoyed in those games might not even be things we would enjoy if they were replicated today, knowing now what other things are possible. We really tend to forget all the bad things and remember only the good, and that means we're comparing newer games to older games that never (to be honest) existed.

I'm a gamer from way back, myself. And there are some games I remember from my early teen days that I'm pretty sure can never be matched... but I'm not sure it would be fair to say that it's because games have gone downhill since. Would I accept waiting 20 minutes for a game to load today like I did back in the days when games came on tape? Not a chance in hell. Would I accept ASCII graphics? Not hardly, but back then that was as good as it got and I wasn't missing anything. Were stories and dialogue better back then? I don't know about that... someone recently said that Ultima V's dialogue has been unmatched since, and I found a website that had that game's dialogue (all key-word activated) in its entirety, and while it had a certain amount of charm overall it was pretty primitive. Yet will anything ever compare to the first time I played Ultima IV? I have to accept at some point that you can never go back and make it as good as the first time.

There are people, after all, who honestly say that black & white movies were much better than their modern counter-parts and that back then there was more focus on quality and story and so forth... is that nostalgia talking? I don't know. All I know is that, for me, when I watch black & white movies I find the ratio of crappy stories to good ones about the same as today, with the added pleasure of having to get over the barrier of poor graphical standards as well.

It's something to think about, at least.

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There's no reason that turn-based combat can't be done other than preference. There have been some good turn-based combat systems in RPG's (Temple of Elemental Evil's was good, in my opinion, if really slow).

If what you're talking about is some kind of toggle, as in have it both ways -- no, that's not really a good solution. The only game I can recall doing that was X-Com: Apocalypse and you could really tell that their system wasn't designed to work very well in turn-based mode.

I know it's often considered the simplest solution to any given design problem to insert a toggle and give everyone what they want, but it's rarely that way in practice.

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Actually, instead of removing the problem, this can sometimes make it worse. You might pick "Refuse" as the quick action-oriented dialogue option, but usually the result is that words are placed inside your character's mouth... without you having any kind of foreknowledge as to what they might be.

If the dialogue options were only action related and never once did the player actually speak, you would get around that issue... but then it would also seem mighty peculiar, no? Sort of the ultimate "silent, stoic hero". Which is a bit of an archetype all on its own to pick for the player, too.

Dialogue options are a bit of a Catch-22. I think that, whichever way you choose to go, just choose... and do it as well as you can afford to.

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<hr />But, I hope Bioware precedes each response with a bracketed indication of how THEY characterize a response (e.g. [intimidating], [condescending], [conciliatory], [persuasive], etcetera).<hr />Nope. Only when it's pursuant to an action intended behind the line (ie. "Lie" or "Intimidate" or what have you.)

Adding such descriptors is redundant. If I've written a response such that one completely mistakes the tone and/or intent behind it, then I've written it badly.

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Much obliged, though I was referring only to those dialogue responses which would have repercussions. So if something you say could put an end to the romance, then it should be blatant. If it's not, and could be interpreted different ways, then either the romance isn't ended or you should get to apologize.

I'm all for a little ambiguity in the regular responses, enough so that the player actually has to read them to figure out what's being communicated. I just don't want the player to be left guessing when his selections could have irrevocable repercussions. And while I get the utility of adding descriptors or having a constant order to the responses -- when it's just regular responses, it seems a little... I don't know... "gamey" to me.

I know the "consistent order" of responses is something I've resisted for a long time. We writers get asked from time to time to put our dialogue in a set order -- the first response being the "best" and so forth on down to the most negative responses and/or the ones that exit from the dialogue. And I've resisted that. Indeed, my response to such internal requests is to mix up the order even more (and lay traps!), as the impetus behind those requests is from some folks who I know don't want to spend time reading the dialogue and would prefer to simply 1-1-1-1 their way through and check the journal later. It's rebellious of me and perhaps short-sighted, but the way I see it is that writing comprehension is required for the type of game we produce -- and it seems a bit strange to go out of our way to accomodate players who don't actually like the type of game we produce.

But maybe I'm just crazy.

George RR Martin...did you hire him? (http://forums.bioware.com/viewtopic.html?topic=513450&forum=84)

Heh. Like Chris said, he's definitely an influence (I, myself, am a big fan and I'm not alone), but no... we're not copying anything and Mr. Martin isn't involved in anything we're doing. Though that would be sweet.

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Right. And we are talking about only one influence amongst several, of course.

I think I like Martin's work primarily because the last few fantasy series that I read all seemed like rather overblown epics (the Wheel of Time springs to mind... I swear if I read one more fantasy series that begins with a young lad in a remote village who discovers himself to be the Chosen One of some ancient prophecy I will just die), and I found it quite refreshing in a way for a fantasy work to focus more on the cutthroat politics and not shy away from imperfect characters. The slow redemption of Jaime Lannister is, to me, brilliant... and the fact that what Martin did to Robb Stark made me so angry I threw the book across the room is even better.

Is it the best writing ever? No, I don't think so. Martin has his own conceits which can be annoying, and there are extended sequences in the books I could do without (the whole Danyris thing is boring, if you ask me)... and sometimes I find the books to be dark to the point of depressing... but overall it's one of the first fantasy series in a long time that made me look at fantasy in a new way. Your mileage may vary, of course, as I'm told there's lots of less famous authors out there who have written brilliant stuff, but this just happens to be my experience.

As for other influences? I guess Tolkien is one, though more from the movies than his books to be frank (I just never got much out of Tolkien's writing, though I enjoyed the books well enough). Dave Duncan, Tad Williams, Guy Gavriel Kay ("Tigana" in particular) are also big influences for me. I'm sure there's others that I just can't think of.

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Ooooh, yes, Neil Gaiman. How could I forget him? Though I suppose he's not specifically a fantasy author. He's as big a writing influence on me as Joss Whedon, though.

I'm starting to think I need to pick up a few books this week, though, since I'm on vacation anyhow. Maybe I'll take a look for Robin Hobb or China Mievelle tomorrow, just to see.

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Just a note of caution that labeling the DA world as "low magic" isn't quite correct. It is low magic in some ways... magic is uncommon, for instance, but certain more powerful than you would find in most strictly low magic settings. Indeed, as I've said elsewhere, magic has had a very defining effect on the Dragon Age world's history.

And from the player's perspective, it's not even going to be that uncommon as you'll be encountering it quite a bit.

So it's lower magic than some, and certainly no Forgotten Realms, if what you're picturing is a setting like George R.R. Martin's books, that would be a mistake.

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Huh. That's interesting. Having read several of Stephen R. Donaldson's series, I would have thought his inspiration might have come from a long bout of clinical depression followed by an attempt at suicide.

That's certainly how *I* felt when I was finished reading.

Good/Evil (http://forums.bioware.com/viewtopic.html?topic=526428&forum=84)

I've said it before in a few other places, but I'll repeat it here.

The concept of good and evil exist, just as they do in our world, but which is which can sometimes be subjective. Dragon Age has no good/evil slider nor alignment, so you're not going to find clear "good" and "evil" options in every quest and dialogue as that's not the focus of our world (as it would be in, say, Star Wars or D&D, both of which revolve around that duality).

Nor will it always be clear which is the right path to take (though sometimes it is... but I would say that the clear heroic path, when it's available, is generally the harder and less materially rewarding one).

Morality is still an issue, but it's up to you to decide which path to take and the only repercussions you will face are those to your reputation and your conscience.

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<hr />I suppose then that the 'prestige' classes etc will not be alignment based since there is no such thing.<hr />
Correct. Want to be a knight that appears holier-than-thou but is really secretly nasty and evil? Go hard.

<hr />You did mention Reputation though.

What kind of perks or drawbacks will this have?<hr />Just the ones you would expect, in the context of the story. We have no over-arching "Reputation" stat or anything like that; this is not the sort of game where you wander around randomly adventuring and gaining faction points, after all.

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<hr />is there anything being done to ensure that there is some kind of *significant* in-game motivation to act "evil"?<hr />
Not really, no. Part of the point of not enslaving the system to a good/evil meter is not being required to have clearly good and evil results for every plot and dialogue. Instead we allow for actions that could require a variety of motivations... some of them will be clearly altruistic, some more immoral and selfish. The tendency is for the immoral actions to be either quicker (ie. you don't care about the means so long as the ends are ideal) or more rewarding (ie. what's in it for me?), but there are also paths that are there for those who want to try and do the right thing whenever they can... even if finding that path requires some straining and investigation.

Ultimately, however, it is up to the player to determine for herself what her true motivations are for doing something. Characters in the game, and especially your party companions, will have their own interpretations of your actions... and if you're persuasive enough, you may even get them to agree with you. ("Gee, Bob, I slaughtered that guy because it was for the good of the mission. You know that, right? You don't want the mission to fail, do you, Bob?")

There are various people on the team and in QA who champion certain character viewpoints and tend to make sure that such a character type can be played throughout the game legitimately... but beyond that we don't make any assumptions as to how good or evil you are. Personally I find the whole "make a choice!" thing of Star Wars or Fable to ring a bit false anyhow, but I guess it'll be up to the player to decide whether its absence makes for better writing or worse. I, for one, find it much easier to design this way, and much easier to include complex decisions when you aren't forced to abide by a pre-existing dichotomy.

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Yes, it works both ways. If Mr. Evil Poopy Pants companion character objects to your deeds, your persuasive skills can mollify him there as well. ("Gee, Evil Bob, I let that guy go because it was not only right but smart. Do we really need to slaughter everything in our path?")

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<hr />Not ascribing motivations to my character is fine. But if a dialog choice has him lying about an objective fact, I'd like to see it flagged as a lie. It's a good way to keep track of your quest state variables anyway.<hr />
I agree. And DA does that, specifically.

<a href="http://forums.bioware.com/viewtopic.html?topic=527440&forum=84" target="_blank">Party based SP mode.
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You create a single character: your own. Any party members beyond that you meet during the game and recruit. Whether you have the ability to create your own party members outside of that, through a toolset or otherwise, we'll have to see -- though any ability to do so is unlikely to be part of the intended functionality.

Romances Part 2 (llama edition) (http://forums.bioware.com/viewtopic.html?topic=519141&forum=84)

Any feature that gets examined here on the forums often gets to the point where it seems like it is being overblown and examined in exclusion to the rest of the game.

It is very easy for fans to forget, after all, that there is this whole other game to be made. It is less easy for us to forget that, however, so have no fear.

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I think they just don't want to see the game turn into the fantasy version of a Harlequin romance. Not that it was going to, but from the way some people dwell on the romance aspect of the game you could be forgiven for coming away with that impression.

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I would just like to point out that many people who express this viewpoint are generally also the same ones who say that they like the idea of party members having their own opinions and lives and such -- but apparently only up to a point, eh? It's a fine line, the occasional contradiction between good gameplay and good story.

Either that or Willpower-in-Japan is just being Mr. Poopy Pants.

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If this is about Bastila, then, doesn't the fact that you could turn her back to the Light Side mean anything? Though I would have preferred a way for the player to keep her from falling at all, for the Light Side player who really liked her there was indeed a way to get her back. And if you were Dark Side and agreed to her offer on the Unknown Planet, you got her back much easier, right?

I could see if an NPC suddenly up and left the party near the end of the game and there wasn't anything you could do about it, period, but if there's a way to avoid that happening (if it's really important to you to do so) or to undo it, I'm not sure the objection is as valid.

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I would just interject that one of the things that some people liked so much about the writing in Planescape: Torment was its use of narrative.

We've played with it a little, ourselves (we used light narrative in Hordes of the Underdark), but the comment that Gecon makes about the masses of text is directly relevant to this. Once you start including narrative, the amount of text your producing starts increasing exponentially.

I rather like it, myself, from a writing perspective... but text volume (and pacing, by extension) does seem to be a big issue for many players, not to mention that narrative is of questionable value when you actually start showing more and more detail with the graphics and animation.

Planescape: Torment also had the writing benefit of having a set character for its protaganist, making certain writing aspects much easier to deal with... but I'll just leave that as self-evident, and it's certainly not responsible for what I thought was pretty snappy characterization anyhow.

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Perhaps. But there are plenty of RPG's that go the full route and specify exactly who you are and where you're from, even to the point of giving you a character that you don't customize at all. And those fill their own niche and are plenty popular.

We aren't going half that far, but we are stepping away from the strange adventurer of NWN/IWD. In fact, we did consider implementing the "Mysterious Stranger" origin story for a while -- until it became clear that it simply didn't work for the type of game we were making. At their very base the origins work as introductions to the world -- being the generic, nameless adventurer in NWN/IWD is fine because there's really nothing for you to know about the Forgotten Realms that your race and class info didn't already tell you. We couldn't really justify the "Mysterious Stranger" as it was clear that no matter how we twisted it it was always a lesser experience compared to the other origins, and the notion that a player might not want to be "tied down" with roots in the actual setting ran contrary to the type of game we wanted to make.

So, yes, some of the audience out there does like having the generic character without a background -- especially those that like to imagine their character's history even if that means it never comes up during the game at all (perfectly valid) -- but I suspect the players who can *only* play that way wouldn't have enjoyed what DA was aiming for regardless. Some elements of DA are fairly generic for fantasy, it's true, but it's not so generic that it can be disregarded. Which is how it should be, in my opinion.

Firearms? (http://forums.bioware.com/forums/viewtopic.html?topic=526677&forum=84&sp=45)

I would say that is correct. There is a sense of impending technological advancement in Dragon Age. "Eternally medieval" does not really interest me and is about as realistic as the tens of thousands of years spent in the Star Wars universe without a single scientist apparently inventing anything of relevance.

Not that realism is exactly high on the priority list, but I'd like to maintain a certain amount of suspension of disbelief if we can.

I would think that magic would preclude some degree of technological advance (necessity being the mother of invention, would one need to invent firearms or necessarily even conceive of it being possible if magic existed that threw fireballs?) or at least slow it down, but so long as there's a plausible need for an invention somewhere in the world I don't see any reason not to include it. The fact that there are no firearms in Dragon Age isn't a matter of design philosophy -- there just happen to be none.

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<hr />Will this feeling of impending technological advancement pay an important part of the mood of the game? In other worlds, will we see much conflict between old ways and new ones?<hr />Mmmmm no, I would say that, in the first story at least, that's very much just in the background.

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Just as a note, Dragon Age isn't steampunk by any stretch of the imagination. We're talking pretty early cannons, and even those aren't going to be seen right off the bat as they're the province of a pretty distant culture. Any advent of gunpowder in the near future would very likely be at the blunderbuss/arquebus stage, and chemistry would at best be an uncertain science no doubt treated more as alchemy then anything else.

But ultimately this is just a snapshot of one element of the background and it's not something you're going to see march in anytime soon and take center stage. If that ruins someone's notion of eternal fantasy medievalism or whatever that's simply too bad -- no matter what details we give about TheDAS it's going to mean yet one more thing it's not for someone. But it's very much not steampunk, and the way we've made the world is for the sake of tone and not out of some artistic desire just to make something wildly "different".

I want to kill annoying party members (http://forums.bioware.com/viewtopic.html?topic=531228&forum=84)

So... you want either the whimsical and random ability to have annoying party members killed, in imperious Queen of Hearts fashion? Or plotlines where these people who have offered to help you could be slain in a more elaborate fashion, again at your whim?

Boy, you guys are kinda jerks, ain'tcha?

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You can certainly pretend to play an evil jerk if you like, but there is no "evil path" per se (as much of an "evil path" as most games have ever had, realistically speaking). So suggesting "I want to be evil" as a reason for doing anything is going to fall on deaf ears.

At any rate, if party members could die in the normal course of things as they could in BG, then this would be fine -- you want to kill them yourself? Go ahead. But seeing as they don't, this isn't going to be something we'll add in just so you can. So in all seriousness, this just isn't going to happen.

The role of Magic in the world of DA (http://forums.bioware.com/viewtopic.html?topic=524137&forum=84)

Magic is seen as a corruptive influence, yes, and for very good reasons that go beyond the fact that magic is a path to power. But if what you're picturing is some kind of uncontrollable force from a gameplay perspective -- no, not quite. Still, there are aspects to mages and magic in Dragon Age that should make them interesting. I can't wait to discuss them in more detail, personally.

In fact, that could happen sooner than you might suppose.

That's actually pretty close to the mark. In Dragon Age, there are two types of intimidation in dialogue:

1) [Intimidate] "Out of my way or I cut your throat."

2) "I am a mage."

Usually, both will have the same result.

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That's true. I suppose I should point out that the player's circumstances in this particular story do mean that he's not going to have people screaming in terror every single settlement he enters... but it does come up from time to time.

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Well, first off, wanting to do magic is not the same as being able to do magic. Secondly, while there are certainly difficulties to being a mage, I'm not certain I would call them weaknesses per se. Thirdly, you can't switch main classes -- so your warrior can't also be a mage.

And lastly, why would one need to balance the mage class against the warrior class? This is a party game, and each class has a role -- balancing the classes against each other is the duty of a MMORPG or PvP game.

As for the mage class drawing evil types -- so?

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That's a very good analogy, and is rooted in the history and religion of TheDAS... and we've tried to work it out in what we see as a realistic manner.

Take a hypothetical example from our own world: what if Hitler had been a mage? What if he had elevated mages to the "superior race" and had campaigned against a people that had no magical ability? How would the view of magic be coloured forever afterwards?

Or the opposite: what if Hitler had been completely anti-magic and it was mages that he had locked up in concentration camps?

What if Jesus had been a mage?

It was thinking about questions not unlike this that actually led to the original inspiration for TheDAS's history, which is kinda a neat job to have come to think of it.

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<hr />So, since this is DA (not D&D), and mostly (to be confirmed...) a singleplayer game, will some classes be more powerful than others?<hr />
Not intentionally, but situationally I imagine so.

<hr />Will the human enemies/adversaries we encounter also follow the class system of the player or will we encounter some which do not?<hr />Most will, but some definitely will not. We're leaving plenty of room for expansion, both in terms of the world and the rules/class system.

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Ummm... yes, you get to pick your own gender.

How bizarre. Was there any reason to suspect you couldn't?

Non-Combat Camera (http://forums.bioware.com/viewtopic.html?topic=530761&forum=84Non-Combat Camera)

<hr />Any chance for a first-person camera outside of combat? If so, you will have (possibly inadvertantly) recreated a classic, 20-year old control scheme.<hr />It's possible. We're not sold 100% on the camera system as it is and are leaving open the possibility that actual play may modify our plans. While I doubt that we would move to the first-person view as the official mode, it was an oft-requested feature for NWN so it could be something that is added as an option -- it's difficult to say at this point.

DA Classes (http://forums.bioware.com/viewtopic.html?topic=524415&forum=84)

<hr />Basic classes essentially are fighter, wizard, and thief.<hr />
Close. Think of something more along the lines of a skill-based rogue rather than thief. There are several ways to slant the rogue other than someone who steals from others, should you so wish.

<hr />Access to advanced classes are available early ("very quickly"), and they allow you to customize abilities, stats (stats? interesting) and talents. You can buy points (in something) and build your character up in this secondary class and eventually open up even more advanced classes.<hr />
Which you don't have to take. It's often a question of specializing or not specializing, though some of the advanced classes offer more divergent paths depending on how they're acquired.

<hr />There is cross-over in roles - you can make your fighter pick up magical abilities or become a raging barbarian.<hr />
Sort of. Only someone who starts as a mage will ever have spells, but some of the advanced classes have some very magical talents.

Just some partial clarification of stuff already talked about in the article.

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All advanced classes have pre-requisites, which can include training or some other kind of story choice. So you're not automatically going to have access to every advanced class -- some of them need to be found.

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It can be as complex or as simple as we want it to be, as it's simply a script-activated switch: eligible/non-eligible.

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I have no idea at this point whether the array of advanced classed would be advertised in the manual or not. Maybe so. Either way, none of them are "super secret" or involve joining an organization or anything irrevocable like that. They're mostly just wherever it would be logical for them to be.

As for the usefulness of advanced classes... I suppose that's mostly subjective, but if you've been searching for a specific class that you know about it's probably because you wanted it. And unlocking a class does mean it's unlocked for the whole party, so someone can probably use it.

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For the most part, yes. You do their entire level-up, the same as your own character (though that may be optional, I suppose, for those people who can't be bothered). Some of the NPC's might have a few classes that they simply won't take, but for the most part you can determine their career path for yourself.

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All advanced classes stem from their base class. All advanced classes that stem from a warrior, for instance, are at heart warriors even if they have slightly different takes. The one thing you cannot do is switch your base class. So Warrior Guy is never going to become Mage Guy, or vice versa... and while Warrior Guy could become Ranger Guy or Barbarian Guy (just to use two D&D classes) those are not so different from Warrior Guy that they would require different personalities.

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<hr />You say that mages are somewhat rare in Dragon Age, and generally feared/not trusted/despised. Yet mage is one of three basic classes available at character generation. If you wanted to make mages something special and different from other games/worlds, is it really a good idea to cheapen them by making them easily available ?<hr />
Easily available to players -- who are in unusual circumstances compared to the majority of the population. Magic is uncommon in the world, but it's not Middle Earth rare... and making it one of the starting classes does not mean that one-third of all people in the world are mages. I'm not quite sure what you're picturing.

<hr />If I understand correctly, mages are in some ways similar to dark elves of Forgotten Realms. We all know how it looks in practice. There are dozens of people who take drows just for stats/racial bonus, and ther rest are 1337, all original Drizzts. What you don't get is drows behaving like a drow should.

Are Dragon Age designers taking any steps to prevent Drizztification of mages ?<hr />
I'm uncertain what qualities of dark elves you think are in common with the Dragon Age mage. Mages are not inherently kewl except for those people who might like to play mages, nor does it give any kind of advantage over other classes necessarily -- mages are not the only powerful people in Dragon Age, and as powerful as their magic might make them it does not make them invincible.

As the other poster mentioned, as well, the thing about Drizz't and why his clones are so despised is because Drizz't himself is an exception to the established behavior of the rest of the drow... and because of his popularity, not-standard drow went from being an exception to common-place. Dragon Age mages can be of any kind of personality they wish, and the way the world reacts to them has nothing to do with how many players choose to take the class.

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The main campaign in Dragon Age is certainly single-player only. Whatever the multiplayer element consists of will be completely seperate from that.

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You are referring to old information, our initial plans for Dragon Age when the game was announced. Some plans can and do change, on every project. The only things that can be considered "confirmed" about Dragon Age can be found on this page. Which is to say very little.

Regardless, even in a multiplayer situation the players would still be playing in some kind of exceptional situation from your average citizen. If what you're picturing is some kind of PW or MMORPG where all the players are essentially nobodies, all playing mages because they think it's hawt and ruining the scarcity of mages by their abundance -- no, that's pretty unlikely.

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Uhhh... maybe? My experience with Middle Earth begins and ends with the time depicted in the main books/movies.

I have no idea how much "more" magic there is at the end of the Second Age... all I meant to say is that when it's said magic isn't common in Dragon Age it's that it isn't mundane like in the Forgotten Realms or something that your average person in the Dragon Age world would even see much of. It isn't a case of their being two or three mages wandering the world.

Older Games Lessons (http://forums.bioware.com/viewtopic.html?topic=529090&forum=84)

These are great. I would only make one caution: one should keep in mind that none of these features existed in a vacuum. I remember one poster way back who went on for a time insisting that we should have X feature from one game and Y feature from another and so on... shopping cart game design, I guess you'd call it.

And I said back then that that was all fine and well, but it was unrealistic to expect that those seperate features were all transferable. Not only did they exist with other, complementary systems that were different but also one has to realize that there is a trade-off when it comes to any game's development. Game's X feature was done well, but that's probably because they decided to focus on it and thus had less time for feature Y or Z. Another game's Y feature was awesome, but the way they did it made their X terrible, and if that Y were in any other game it probably wouldn't be as good.

I imagine most of you know the difference, and there's certainly no harm in pointing to the positives and negatives of past games (what other point of reference do you have, after all?), but keep the context in perspective and I'll be happy.

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<hr />I don't know. Having no distinctions between attackable and non attackable npcs can help the game become more immersive.<hr />Really? It increases immersion? I don't think I've ever heard that as a reason to include a feature before.

As it is, no, you won't be able to attack simply anybody in Dragon Age, either. You can enter combat with hostiles only. Granted, this does mean less psychotic episodes where one gleefully slaughters random villagers and disliked NPC's (oo! immersion!), but the trade off is worth it.

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Ah. If there's even an outside reason that you might want or need to attack someone who is currently non-hostile to you, it usually comes up as a dialogue option. There is no GUI to "attack" outside of combat.

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Well now you got me nervous that someone's going to come up and remind me that BG did in fact use the stats of whoever was in the party lead... but I'm pretty sure it didn't. Certainly it was never written that way. But as you point out in the other thread, it's been a damn long while.

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<hr />Can you make one? I'm sure it's easy. The only hard part are the ramifications, right? Make a town militia, so if I start to kill people, they can kick my ***, granted I am of low enough level.<hr />
And if you're not of "low enough" level? What then? Shall we go the MMORPG route and have every town guard be level 40 and unkillable? Shall we just have a text pop-up that says "Eventually you are hunted down like a dog. Nice try. Please re-load."?

<hr />Surely the DA team intelligence is up to the task.<hr />Well, gee, it's nice to know that we have your vote of confidence. Lord knows that we were planning on coming up with the most awkward and limiting implementation of this as we could get away with, seeing as how we hate you players so much and all.

<hr /> What's the trade off. Tell me what's good about it. I don't see any upside for the player, only for the designer.<hr />These are not diametrically opposed positions. What's good for the designer tends to also be good for the player.

<hr />Tell me why it can't work with DA's design implementation or why it cannot included. I thought this was the spiritual successor of BG2 (or whatever you called it). Aim higher in the beginning so you can aim high at the end. It just pisses me of that such a trivial thing as letting the player attack whomever he/she pleases is not there. What kind of freedom is that?<hr />So if it's the spiritual successor it must replicate every feature no matter how ill-conceived? BG2 managed to work despite that feature and not because of it. I'm not quite sure how you imagine it works in DA, but I'm not going to lead you through it if this is how you're going to approach the question. You disagree, and nothing but freedom to slaughter anyone you please will be considered "freedom"? Very well. Thank you for letting us know how you feel. We'll take that into consideration.

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Yes, we actually have done this -- mostly more for stealth routes, however. "You see a guard -- do you want to attack him or sneak past?" And if the player sneaks past and the guard sees him, the guard goes "Hey, you!" and combat is initiated that way. For the most part, however, we try to design encounters so this sort of thing isn't necessary.

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I don't know how it will work for a party, precisely. There's several options we're still considering. I do know, however, that several quests have the option (or requirement) of a single party member splitting off solo to attempt a stealthier route -- or the one-man assault team, for those with such inclinations.

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The lack of a storyline in Darklands isn't quite true... there was one, but you had to sort of stumble upon it. I'm not sure that was a good thing, precisely, as the time I found it I remember feeling more perplexed than engaged.

I really wish there had been some kind of introduction with Darklands, some way of easing you into the larger world and making it feel like a living place. As it was, you get dropped into the world seemingly out of nowhere, and it took a lot of time (if you weren't quickly killed) before you got a feeling for what was going on. Or this was my experience, anyhow. Between that and all the bugs (it was a Microprose game, after all) Darklands was something you really had to work at enjoying.

I didn't mind the text-based stuff in cities and dungeons, however. Indeed, it's really similar to the quest elements in Space Rangers 2 (if anyone's played that), and pretty nifty. I'm not sure how well text would fly in a game intended for the mass market, but personally I'd like to see some development down that path as opposed to requiring that every location be fully mapped and wanderable. It certainly has potential.

Another excellent older RPG (and relatively obscure one) that has really excellent elements inside of a questionable framework is the Realms of Arkania series ("Blade of Destiny" being the first and best).

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<hr />Now the third title, "Shadows over Riva", came out in 1997, just before BG was released. Did the Arkania series ever have an influence at that time on Baldur's Gate?<hr />I doubt it. I don't think James even played any of the Arkania RPG's. Feargus was heavily involved in them prior to going to Interplay, I understand, but he came on as the producer for BG2 rather late.

I know I will bring up certain features from Arkania from time to time during meetings... though I never say where they came from. I would just get that look, the same one one gets whenever ToEE is brought up.

game length (http://forums.bioware.com/forums/viewtopic.html?topic=529344&forum=84&sp=60)

<hr />Games LOSING features as time goes on makes no sense.<hr />I can see how one might get that sense. After all, at this point we can confirm a few things that Dragon Age is NOT without being able to talk about all the things that it is. So in your mind you envision BG and when we start saying that this or that isn't in there, you mentally remove chunks from what BG was and suddenly it seems like it's all so much smaller. Fair enough.

Dragon Age isn't going to be a short game. Not sure why you think that's "confirmed". Unless by short you mean "shorter than BG2", in which case, yes certainly. That goes without saying. In fact, we wouldn't make another game as long as BG2 again even if all other things were equal. Similarly, we would not try to have another game where we must accomodate (poorly) all things being killable/attackable. It required backflips in BG2, way more than the effort was worth. If you disagree, and this removes all sense of RPG-ness for you -- a statement I find a little odd, but you're entitled to your own opinion -- by all means, don't buy it. I think you'll be missing out on game that will be, overall, our most serious RPG outing since BG2 and that it's a little early to start judgeing DA based on one or two features -- but, hey, that's never stopped anyone before, on this forum or any other.

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I can't speculate on game length, as we won't truly know until we've had a chance to play through it. We're aiming for a somewhat lengthier game, but none of us are going to be pinned down at this point on a number or comparison until we can make it an educated guess.

Insofar as godhood is concerned, all I can really say at this point is that we're leaving lots of room for expansion of the game system in the future -- so there's no way you can anywhere near to the "end" of the power curve in Dragon Age. You're not weak, mind you, but I don't think it's comparable to the 1-20 leveling of NWN.

As for your other concerns, this isn't really the thread for them as this thread is about game length. Just about all of them have been discussed at length in other threads, however, so feel free to do a search or start a new thread on them.

Will DA have a "toolset"? (http://forums.bioware.com/forums/viewtopic.html?topic=528067&forum=84&sp=15)

<hr />complex doesn't necessarily mean harder to use or less intuitive<hr />Except that it probably would be harder to use AND less intuitive... if more powerful. Any editor that could possibly ship with DA is not the same as the type of toolset that shipped with NWN1/NWN2. If NWN, the toolsart is part of its central purpose: they are putting out a toolset meant to be used by the end user, that's one of their selling features. With DA, it's very likely to be similar to the way editors are for other RPG's -- a release of our own tools as an added bonus.

Keep that in mind. What the editor actually ends up being remains to be seen, but I really doubt there's any circumstance where it will be set at the same level of importance to the rest of the project as in NWN. These are totally different games.

<a href="http://forums.bioware.com/forums/viewtopic.html?topic=530254&forum=84&sp=75" target="_blank">The Strength of BG - back in DA ?
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There are some pretty disturbing themes in Dragon Age... but depravity? Atrocities? Graphic images of horror and violence? Umm, no, not interested. And it's not because I don't know that these things exist or because we fear that there would be an objection from the public or because Dragon Age is kiddy fantasy -- it's not. We're just not interested in writing that kind of fantasy.

Dragon Age is dark fantasy, but not horrific. It's also heroic fantasy. It certainly isn't "Apocalypse Now the RPG".

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We had piles of burning corpses in the NWN OC, as I recall. So, no, I don't think I would consider it too dark, depending on how it was done. Going too far, in my opinion, would be dwelling on the gruesomeness... rats gnawing on a corpse's innards, a baby suckling the teat of a dead mother, soldiers raping women in the street and so forth. Such things could even be hinted at, in fact... I would just never want to force the player to watch it.

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Do we need to dwell on the reality of evil? This is dark, heroic fantasy after all and not dark, heroic reality. At some level fantasy should still be escapist. If I wanted to read fantasy that made me depressed and gloomy I would go and read Stephen R. Donaldson novels.

I hear what you're saying and I don't think Dragon Age is sanitized, per se... but there are levels of darkness here, and dwelling on horror and gruesomeness can be just as puerile and titillating as unrealistic violence. In the end it's a question of what tone we want to achieve, and teaching the player a lesson about the reality of evil is not what we're going for.

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Oh, sure, but sociopaths are rarely as interesting as those who do care about their actions. I'd much rather a villain who believed he was doing the right thing -- or at least the wrong thing for the right reasons. Failing that, an immoral villain who knows that what they are doing is wrong is still far preferable than one who simply does so because he is insane. I usually find such unreasoned evil to be the hallmark of more juvenile fantasy than otherwise.

A high level mage owns psionic abilities? (http://forums.bioware.com/viewtopic.html?topic=531880&forum=84)

Mind control of any sort in TheDAS is considered evil, and thus not the sort of magic readily available to mages. Either way, it certainly isn't "psionic" in origin. Psionic abilities don't exist, per se.

Multiplayer? (http://forums.bioware.com/forums/viewtopic.html?topic=502801&forum=84&sp=60)

Thanks for the positive comments, Mr. Nielson. Naturally as we go from the nebulous early vision to a more concrete implementation some things have to fall by the wayside, you obviously understand that. What it will be by this point we don't really know just yet -- if they're not mentioned in publicity it's because it's not nailed down 100%, not necessarily because it's gone. But we shall see.

Certainly we do want elements of Neverwinter Nights within Dragon Age, as we've always said, even if the goal of the project was never to replicate the idea of putting out an end user toolset of the same level. This doesn't preclude us from ever doing another game of that type, however.

As for when we can announce where we're at with Dragon Age, exactly? Soon. It's always "soon" at this point, I'm afraid.

Class-specific origins (http://forums.bioware.com/viewtopic.html?topic=530811&forum=84)

Except that the backgrounds for Arcanum only impact your character's abilities/disabilities, though I think they might get referenced from time to time in dialogue. Regardless of what you pick, the game starts the same way at the crash site and your origins are largely irrelevant.

When we talk about the origin stories in Dragon Age, we're talking about a different starting point for the story, a completely unique and origin-specific starting chapter and changes that will be felt throughout the rest of the story right up until the ending. It's a pretty big feature.

As for the origins themselves, no, there is not an origin for each class/race combination. What you will get is a choice based on either your class (for those classes which have their own origin, due to their nature) or your race (if you are not one of those classes).

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That's an excellent point. I would say, however, that most people tend to play the initial part of a game so frequently that it can get monotonous. How many people got so tired of the Irenicus dungeon at the beginning of BG2 that they used the hack to by-pass it? Having the different origin stories does mean that replaying with different class/race choices is not only encouraged but facilitated.

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Right. I think only one origin has an area that isn't visited again later in the game. Though in all those cases the person from that origin gets completely different dialogue than anyone else would -- meaning there is an expense there, as well. But as we've said elsewhere, expensive features are all right if we're we think the effort will be worthwhile. In this case, we're talking about a feature that everyone will see right off the bat -- in a way, it's a more sellable feature than multiple endings, which you can talk about but never really "show".

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<hr />I just hope it does not dig too much into the resources for other aspects of the game such as game length, number of sidequests available to each character, etcetera<hr />Well, yes it does, but one must consider the order of magnitude of resources we are putting into Dragon Age. Which is to say a lot. This is not going to be a short game by any means.

<hr />BTW: Can anybody comment on the number of races and backrounds in the game?<hr />Races or playable races? Those are two different numbers. As for backgrounds, more than a few but less than a dozen.

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Well, we do really like our non-serious answers, but for the moment... yeah, we can't discuss that just yet. As far as playable races which the PC can be in this first game, though, we're probably not talking very many.

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I think ideally we'd always like to do expansions/sequels. It's hardly a revelation, is it?

<a href="http://forums.bioware.com/viewtopic.html?topic=531454&forum=84" target="_blank">Undead, construct or monstrous party members?
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No potential party members are "evil", per se, though some are certainly more moral than others. There are a few party members who are of non-standard races, but Shale (the golem) is really the only one that falls into the category you seem to be looking for -- though he is, essentially, unique.

A little bit depressed about the impending "Spiritual Sequel to BG II". (http://forums.bioware.com/forums/viewtopic.html?topic=532100&forum=84&sp=30)

Right now? Nope. No reason whatsoever. Which is why we're not saying anything about it at all, aside from the recent G4W article I guess. I'm not sure how we can be both really quiet and hyping the game for years -- the idea is that when Dragon Age's time comes you will hear plenty and then some. I know it's hard to believe, but there is a plan. And not a plan like the people behind Lost have a plan (which is to say no plan at all), but a real plan. Oh, yes. I have seen it.

As for some concern about the shots, sure I get it. There was some similar reaction to a few of those screenshots when the magazine first came out. As has been pointed out it's still really early for us to be showing content -- none of the bells and whistles are active in the engine in what you're looking at, and there's years of polish yet to come. Should we have kept everything under our hats longer? Maybe. But we're not exactly deluging the market with information.

For the original poster, I would say that keeping an eye on DA is certainly your right -- and a good idea. But we're still a ways off. We announced Dragon Age sooner than we normally might another project, for various reasons (one of which was to show our continuing support for PC gaming, for instance). I get that you're unhappy with NWN2 -- but you're talking about two entirely different companies as well as a huge difference in time frames (NWN2 was done in, what? 2 years? 3? NWN1 was done in 5 and DA will no doubt be comparable once it's done.)

Otherwise, insofar as Dragon Age's features are concerned, I think LdyShayna had it about covered. She is wise in the ways of the ninja squirrel. Heed her well, grasshopper.

<font size="3" face="Verdana, Arial" color="#cc6600">Chris Priestly, Community Coordinator</font>

<a href="http://forums.bioware.com/forums/viewtopic.html?topic=504721&forum=84&sp=30" target="_blank">Nominate your voice actors for DA!
</a>

I'm hoping we can find room for Maurice LaMarche someplace.
http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0005606/

I can see it now.
"What'll we do tonight Romthudd?"
"Same thig we do every night, Vrix. Try to take over TheDAS!"

George RR Martin...did you hire him? (http://forums.bioware.com/viewtopic.html?topic=513450&forum=84)

I think Mr Martin is far too busy with his writing and editing dutes to come work for us (at least, he better be. I'm still waiting on another Wildcards book and teh next installment to Game of Thrones).

As far as influence, I don't think there's a writer at BioWare who has read Game of Thrones and doesn't think of it slightly in the back of their heads when they create things. Not that they try to copy him, just that Mr Martin's writing is very good and as a writer you draw your style from a myriad of talented sources. Dragin age (compared to Mass Effect or Jade Empire) is much more like Game of Thrones, so there are bound to be some similarities.

Huge Request for a Linux/Mac version #2 (http://forums.bioware.com/forums/viewtopic.html?topic=527573&forum=84&sp=15)

He's also a fan of any kind of praise, even the fake kind, the big manwhore.

I am more of a downer. There really is not discussion here. We haven't announced our publisher yet, so any talk of Mac versions, Linux versions, console versions, etc is kind of silly. We know there is a market for each and we are investigating things, but until we announce the publisher, it's pretty much just a wishlist at this point. Not that I'm suggesting it stops, just so that people keep that in mind.

I do think it's interesting though that everyone is hoping for a Linux/Mac version as well as a PC version. Since we haven't announced anything yet, why aren't people assuming it will be a Mac/Linux version and hoping for a PC version? Never thought about that, didja? BioWare. When you think you know all the answers, we change the questions.

<font size="3" face="Verdana, Arial" color="#cc6600">Sheryl Chee, Writer</font>

Will be seeing this? Please respond! (http://forums.bioware.com/forums/viewtopic.html?topic=526122&forum=84&sp=90)

<hr />Is there any info on DA's dragons?<hr />
Yes.

Oh, you mean available to the public? No, not really.

<hr />Is the dragon on the cover of Games for Windows magazine BioWare art?<hr />
Yes.

<hr />If it is, the things I got from it are: They are not overgrown chicken with feathers, they have lots of teeth, don't seem too intelligent, are rather evil and dangerous based on that tiny squinted eye, and what do you know... they can spit fire.<hr />Dragons are not evil. Dragons are just... badass. And will eat your face.

When will we able to REALLY roleplay again? (http://forums.bioware.com/forums/viewtopic.html?topic=527517&forum=84&sp=15)

I concur.

Also, I know that if asked to write responses to keywords, I'd spend over half my time putting in strange responses to random keywords like "rabbit", "fluffy mackerel pudding" and "pyjama fairies".

George RR Martin...did you hire him? (http://forums.bioware.com/forums/viewtopic.html?topic=513450&forum=84&sp=30)

I read and enjoyed Perdido Street Station. I couldn't put it down after I had gone through a third of the book (rough estimation here). Was a little slow before that, at least to my mind. From what Grid System has said, I'm starting to think I should pick up The Scar as well.

I don't read a lot of traditional high fantasy. Miéville is probably more my speed. China Miéville and Neil Gaiman. What genre is that? Urban fantasy? Modern fantasy? I know some people categorize Perdido St Station under steampunk but that doesn't seem right to me.

The role of Magic in the world of DA (http://forums.bioware.com/forums/viewtopic.html?topic=524137&forum=84&sp=75)

<hr />Minorities are targeted because they are weak. Mages are distinct primarily because they are powerful, and a coordinated campaign against them by non-mages is therefore not credible to me.<hr />

You are assuming that the mages of Thedas are a unified force. I assure you, this is not the case. The mages are like any other group of people. Within that group there exist differing opinions. Perhaps some of them would reject their powers, if they could.

Now, of course if the mages could all decide to agree to rebel... that would be another story.

<hr />It's only logical if you assume that mages in Thedas are so weak as to be irrelevent.<hr />
Our mages are not weak. You don't have to worry about that.

Will DA have a "toolset"? (http://forums.bioware.com/viewtopic.html?topic=528067&forum=84)

<hr />I'd rather get a buggy toolset than none at all, but the bad publicity from releasing an unpolished version of it may put game developers off from doing that.<hr />
I'm working with the new toolset right now and I actually find it very user-friendly. Never played with NWN2's toolset, so I can't comment on that, but I am really happy with the DA toolset. It has a lot more functionality than the NWN1 toolset and the best thing is, they're still working on improving it.

Seriously, it's like buttah. Actually, maybe we shouldn't ship it, we should keep it all to ourselves. Mmmm... toolset loooove.

I guess it helps that if anything goes wrong with my toolset, all I need to do is walk the twenty metres or so to Scott's office and whine about it. And he fixes it, or tells me how to fix it. Most users won't get the benefit of a Scott... unless we find a way to ship a Scott with every toolset. Now there's a money-spinner, right there.

The Strength of BG - back in DA ? (http://forums.bioware.com/forums/viewtopic.html?topic=530254&forum=84&sp=15)

I find it hard to imagine anyone being evil just for the sake of being evil. I always have to ask why. Why does this person think that taking over the world (or destroying it) is a good idea? People don't just up and decide to destroy everything. They have to have motivations, and "I just wanted to" doesn't satisfy me. What makes him hate everything so much that he "just wants to" destroy stuff?

I don't believe that people are evil either. I believe in evil acts, sure, but sadly, most of the perpetrators of these acts think they are doing good (whatever their perverse idea of good is). Just looking at the world today should convince you of this. I think we are past the point where characters, be in it books, movies or games, can be simple good and evil, because everyone realizes that it doesn't really exist.

I think on some level, we may yearn for a simple black and white world in our escapist entertainments, because reality is just so darned grey. I know sometimes I'll watch Battlestar Galactica and feel emotionally exhausted and wish I could just point out some guy with an English accent and a goatee and say "Aha! He's the bad guy! I need to hate him now!" But I know that it is precisely because I cannot do this that makes BSG so compelling.

Bringing it back to DA now... no, I don't think we have any people in it who are strut-around-in-a-black-cloak -like-a-bad-stereotype EEEEVIL.

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Or we could write a villain who tortures people to convert them to his ideology. He believes that the end justifies the means, that once they "see the light", they'll thank him for torturing them. He takes no pleasure in the actual torture, or believes he doesn't. It might cause him mental anguish even, but he consoles himself by saying that in the end, it will be all worth it.

This guy isn't sympathetic either. He's a self-righteous, evil bastard, and I think he'd be a lot more interesting than the spoiled brat who causes suffering because he likes to see suffering. I think it might be a little tacky even, to have this good-looking guy enter a village and go "Now you must all be punished, because I am BORED and I want to watch you suffer!" It's almost a caricature.

<font size="3" face="Verdana, Arial" color="#cc6600">Mary Kirby, Writer</font>

Will be seeing this? Please respond! (http://forums.bioware.com/forums/viewtopic.html?topic=526122&forum=84&sp=90)

No, you're right. They are more similar to real world religions. Some people might have more certainty than others, but it's due to their faith, not to any sort of external proof. Not all the religions are centered around gods, either. . .

Spreken sie Dragon Age (http://forums.bioware.com/viewtopic.html?topic=528930&forum=84)

Undead in DA are not, in fact, resurrected people.

When will we able to REALLY roleplay again? (http://forums.bioware.com/viewtopic.html?topic=527517&forum=84)

Maybe I just haven't played the right games, but every game I ever played that used text parsing for conversations became a vast, complex crossword puzzle: Figure out which variation of the word I'm looking for is the on the list the designers used so I can finally communicate with the NPC. I didn't really find that this made me feel as though I were talking to a person. Although, at least in Starship Titanic the NPCs had amusing variations for their "I don't understand you," responses.

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Immersion is in the eye of the beholder, I guess. . .

Party Member A: (whispering) Does he always talk like this?

Party Member B: He took a mace to the head. Hasn't been quite right since. It's okay, you can speak up. His ears have been ringing since the origin story.

I'm not entirely seeing how that's a more roleplay-oriented system. Why not just use the topic list from Morrowind/Oblivion, then? Why does typing it in yourself make it more immersive?

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Functionally, though, it would be the same. You could type in the word for whatever topic you wanted, and you'd get one of the, "I don't know what you're talking about" NPC replies. Or you just don't see the word you want on the list, so you know ahead of time that the NPC won't respond to that. At least with the word list, you don't waste time trying to figure out which variation on the word, "monster" the designer used to get the NPC response.

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The trouble is that the options are, because of the nature of a video game, constrained. The same number of keywords are going to be used in either case, really. It's just that in one scenario, you know what they are, and in the other scenario you don't. You can ask any question you want of an NPC with a text parser, but unless you hit one of the dozen keywords he uses, you'll get the same, "Huh?" response no matter what.

In your example, if there's only one guy in town who can talk to me about mastodons, I'm not going to feel any more like I did any roleplaying by asking every person on the street until I find the guy who says, "Mastodons! Yeah, they're a nuisance!" than if I click on each NPC and see that none of them have "mastodon" on their topic list, or "Can you tell me about any really hairy elephants?" on the PC response list. Especially if I have to try several times per NPC to see if the writer picked a different word. "Mammoths?" "Mastodonts?" "Prehistoric elephant?" "Bigger than a breadbox?" That makes me feel more like I'm filling out a crossword puzzle. "What's another word for, 'Giant ice-age mammal?'"

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The first video game I remember really be grabbed by was Dragon Warrior. When I look back on it realistically (which is something that requires a lot of coffee and some serious soul-searching for me) I realize that it didn't have much of a story ("Kill ye the bad guy!"). Graphics were pretty primitive, even for the NES. The gameplay was frequently punishing and frustrating. But what it had was newness for me. At the age of twelve, every video game I had ever played was a platformer, a racing game, or Duck Hunt. Turn-based combat? The ability to talk to other characters, even just to get one-liners? Exploring a world? Gaining levels? Loot? A plot? All of that was new and exciting to me. When I finished it and picked up another similar game, Final Fantasy, the new game seemed less impressive by comparison, despite having more gameplay, nicer graphics, and more story, simply because it wasn't the first I'd seen. Nothing was ever going make that huge an impression on me again.

So I can't say with any certainty that I believe the older RPGs that I loved had more or deeper plots than modern games, because just the fact that they had plots was such a shock and a joy to me. When I analyze games that I thought were truly remarkable, they're always games that, at the time, completely surprised me.

Will DA be surprising? I don't know. It's something to shoot for, though.

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Aw man, you mean I have to figure out what tone I intend for every PC line? Heck, I don't even know that most of the time. I have a tougher time writing a strictly "angry" or "happy" player line than all the muddy grey-ish things in-between that can be interpreted either way.

George RR Martin...did you hire him? (http://forums.bioware.com/forums/viewtopic.html?topic=513450&forum=84&sp=45)

I love Gene Wolfe's work. (Though I'm probably odd, since I liked The Book of the Long Sun better than The Book of the New Sun.) I really liked the relatively small sample of Neil Gaiman's work I've seen, as well. I just wouldn't say that they're influences exactly. I think they're brilliant writers, and I admire them a great deal, but I generally can't see myself writing anything even remotely like them. Unlike, for example, Peter S. Beagle -- whom I would consider an influence on me -- as I frequently think about his work while I'm writing. . . and I often set myself the goal of writing sentences that are even a fraction as beautiful as his.

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The primary difference is that in a novel, or even a movie, you can't skip the scenes and passages that devote themselves to characterization unless you actually choose not to read the entire book or watch the whole film. You get everything presented to you in a book, and just absorb what you can. Games rarely force the player to take note of every detail included in them; it's optional, there if you want it, but you don't even have to see it if you aren't looking for it.

Possibly my favorite video game character to date is Vivec from Morrowind. He actually has very little to say when you meet him in person, but I spent a ton of time hunting down his books, The 36 Lessons of Vivec and dissecting his rather complicated relationship to Nerevar. Even in the books, most of what he's written (and is taken as gospel by the Tribunal Temple) is fiction, and you know it, but it lets you into his head a bit. Are the stories he writes about Nerevar (who was, in fact, his friend and mentor) what he wished were the truth, or just simple lies for the masses? At one point, he actually admits that he knows Nerevar is being reincarnated, and declares that he will kill him over and over again. And then he's the one who asks for help. . . I'd argue that Vivec is at least as layered and complex a character as Shylock from Merchant of Venice or MacBeth. None of that is on the critical path of Morrowind. You can, in fact, kill Vivec without ever speaking to him and complete the game.

Is it a weakness that the depth is only apparent if you dig for it? I don't know, honestly.

Man, now I need to play Morrowind. . . *sigh*

Good/Evil (http://forums.bioware.com/forums/viewtopic.html?topic=526428&forum=84&sp=75)

DA doesn't generally ascribe motives to the player. Did you just insist on a reward for rescuing that kitty cat up a tree because you're greedy, because you're desperately broke and about to starve to death, or because you're raising money for orphans?

Man, that was an impressively bad example. I'll run with it!

First of all, why do you take the quest? Do you take the quest? We don't know. That's entirely your decision. Maybe you don't rescue kitties in trees because of your allergies. Maybe you choose to do it because you secretly hate mice. Maybe you would have done it, if only you didn't have to save a little kid who fell down a well just then.

So say there are a variety of ways to go about getting Fluffy out of the tree. You can chop the tree down. You can climb the tree. You can try to lure him out with tuna. Heck, maybe you can shoot him out of the branches. Some of these are going to be less "good" solutions than others. You take your pick. Then you deal with the consequences. The tree's owner is upset that you cut the tree down. You got some nasty scratches from Fluffy, and fell out of the tree. You now smell like tuna and attract cats, stray dogs, and some weird creepy guy, who all follow you around sniffing you. The owner is cheesed about the dead cat.

Your party can comment on your actions, if they're so inclined. "Seriously, why did you think shooting the cat was a good idea?" At which point, you can explain yourself. "He didn't say he wanted the cat back alive." "I can't believe he was so upset! I even cleaned and de-boned it for him!" "It was an evil cat. Didn't you see it's eyes?" "Ever hear of a guy named Shroedinger?" Are any of these true? Are they real explanations or just easy excuses? That's up to you.

These have their own set of consequences on your companion that you deal with in turn. Maybe you convinced your companion that you did the wrong thing for the right reason, and they forgive you. Maybe you convince them that they've been viewing trees wrong all along, and they go on a crusade to stop Arbor Day. Maybe they're impressed with your efficiency in solving that cat-up-a-tree problem. Maybe they just can't be persuaded to see past the fact that you smell like tuna.

Does that clear anything up?

My cats are going to hate me for this post.

Romances Part 2 (llama edition) (http://forums.bioware.com/forums/viewtopic.html?topic=519141&forum=84&sp=15)

As Dave has said before, we do also have friendship tracks for the party NPCs in addition to romances. Romance is not the only sort of interaction you can have with the characters, don't worry.

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Hmmm. Well, Kambei was my favorite Kurasawa character by far, and he had a background. He tells it right up front. "Listen, I'm not a man with any special skill, but I've had plenty of experience in battles; losing battles, all of them. In short, that's all I am." Actually, you find out something about the histories of most of the really talkative samurai. Finding out Kikuchiyo's history is a big point in the story. Which is considerably different from, say, Blondie in The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly about whose past you never learn anything.

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What if Blondie shot Tuco? What if he'd split the treasure with Angel Eyes? Would that have made the later movies different? (I haven't seen them; just The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly.)

It's great to have your own plan for your character's backstory. When I DM games, I like to work those into the plot, have people from your past show up occasionally, or have the things you did years ago matter to the current story. Of course, it's easier to make up a backstory if you know the world you live in.

This is what the origin stories let us do. In addition to introducing you to the setting, they let us make who you are an important part of the story. Your choices during the origins matter later on. Without them, yes, your actions would still determine the course of the story, but in many ways you as a person are not important. Anyone could have walked into town on that day and saved the world. It didn't have to be you. You may be an axe-weilding barbarian from the north, but that gang of other barbarians can't tell the difference between you and that elf ranger. This way, you still get some choice of your history, (it doesn't have to be, "you've lived your whole life at Candlekeep.") but that choice, and the decisions you make during your origin playthrough, mean something to the characters around you.

I want to kill annoying party members (http://forums.bioware.com/viewtopic.html?topic=531228&forum=84)

Most of the party members are optional. And all of the optional characters can be induced to leave you permanently, if you pick them up and decide you don't like them.

The role of Magic in the world of DA (http://forums.bioware.com/forums/viewtopic.html?topic=524137&forum=84&sp=45)

You'll have an assortment of advanced classes for your base class with different abilities and specializations. You aren't going to be stuck in the class you pick at character creation for the entire game.

<a href="http://forums.bioware.com/forums/viewtopic.html?topic=529090&forum=84&sp=45" target="_blank">Older Games Lessons
</a>

Personally, being able to kill all the NPCs is a feature I hate in the games I play, despite the fact that you do sometimes want to head those bad guys off before they do whatever it is they're obviously planning, because that only happens a fraction of the time, and more frequently combat with friendlies is forced on me. In BG2, if you tried to pick a pocket and failed you had to fight everyone in the room. What? I didn't want to go killing anybody, let alone everybody. Or in Oblivion, when you're doing one of the innumberable escort quests, the NPC you're guarding frequently runs directly in the path of your weapon, causing you to hit them enough to make them hostile or kill them and fail the quest. What this boils down to in my personal view is that the game will punish you if you play it "wrong." Yes, the feature is there, you can do whatever you want! Oooops, but we didn't want you to do that so we're going to beat the stuffing out of you. Well, you'll know better next time.

Yes, you can reload, but it seems tremendously unfair of the game designers to include a feature that exists just to tell you that you aren't playing "right." I remember playing one of the Zork games, and I was in a hotel room and noticed you could use the lightswitch. I instantly got the message, "It's dark. Grues like the dark...". The switch existed for no other reason than to immediately kill you if you used it. Thanks, but no thanks.

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All of those, are in fact, pretty good reasons. In addition, what not having this random NPC slaying means is that your choices are valid rather than illusionary choices that will just make you reload. If you can kill an NPC, it's not going to break the game or lead to an unwinable battle. You can win and continue the game.

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Sure, let her be as mortal as anyone. Maybe she'll be killed in the battle despite your attempts to protect her, in which case, depending on the plot, it could be "game over" if she's absolutely crucial, or it could mean you have to try to continue without her -- which may make the plot much more difficult. I'm not sure what being able to accidentally hit and kill her myself adds, though.

game length (http://forums.bioware.com/viewtopic.html?topic=529344&forum=84)

I'm not certain what you mean by "length" here. Is that a measurement of how long it takes to beat the game, just plowing from plot-point to plot-point, or the total amount of time you can spend on sidequests, exploring, etc.? Because these are two very different things.

It's been a while since I played BG2. And it was, indeed, a pretty long game. (I've seen people claim it was 200 hours. I don't know how long it took me to play, but I can guarantee it wasn't 200 hours.) But I'm fairly certain that most of the length was due to sidequests. In fact, I just found that some people can do the entire critical path in under two hours. I am so not one of those people.

<a href="http://forums.bioware.com/forums/viewtopic.html?topic=530254&forum=84&sp=75" target="_blank">The Strength of BG - back in DA ?
</a>

Try to recall that what we're shooting for here is not just "dark." It's dark heroic fantasy. All this debate makes me think of this passage from John Barnes' book One for the Morning Glory:

<hr />"I have always found it odd that this castle is so snug and warm," Cedric said, the thought springing from who knew whence. "It seems untypical and not at all like a story."

"I am glad you did not say it wasn't real," the King said, "for the whole power and strength of the Kingdom rests on its questionable reality. But there is wisdom in your question. Now, in most stories, there is a wicked usurper, which is why the castle is cold and drafty -- for atmosphere, as it were. After he is overthrown -- "

"Yes, I see," the Prime Minister said, "it is always said then that the castle rings with joy and warmth and love, and that they live happily ever after. But that is not this castle either -- great sorrow has been known here."

"But never great sorrow without a point," the King said, "for if that were ever to be, the Kingdom would be merely real, and vanish to where your lap goes when you stand up."<hr />
Violence of the mindless kind is real, certainly. But we're not trying to re-create reality. We're trying to create a heroic fantasy story.

<a href="http://forums.bioware.com/forums/viewtopic.html?topic=531880&forum=84&sp=15" target="_blank">A high level mage owns psionic abilities?
</a>

There is no alignment in Dragon Age.

And there are... we'll just call them persuasive reasons in the game which explain why people think of mind control as evil.

Death, Part 3 (http://forums.bioware.com/forums/viewtopic.html?topic=505904&forum=84&sp=75)

Resurrection is not a simple matter of how cheap or expensive it ought to be. The existence of resurrection in the game world should fundamentally change the way all characters in it think about death. No matter how high the price is set, if it exists, people will buy it. Why would any king or queen tolerate the death of their child if they could pay to have her back? Why couldn't commoners get enough donations to get their loved ones restored? If you can buy it for your friend, why can't your enemies do the same and bring one another back? Even if the cost were something incredible -- say it took another human life to bring someone back from the dead -- people would do it.

It should change the way everyone views death and the afterlife. What is a society like, that views death as something only the poor have to accept? What happens to the people who have the power to raise the dead? Do they become the ruling class? Do they have to live in hiding? What about people who are brought back by relatives against their will? Why wouldn't oppressed people bring their martyrs back? Why wouldn't armies keep their great generals alive? It creates a very morbid and terribly confusing spiral of consequences.

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It is interesting to think about. I wouldn't say that a setting where kings can rule for generations, sacrificing their subjects to grant themselves the equivalent of immortality would be low magic, however. I tend to think about the consequences for the people performing the resurrections. If they bring back a suicide victim, or someone else who wouldn't necessarily want to be returned, would they have to fear for their own safety? If the cost of their services were high, but not lethal, I could imagine the commoners kidnapping them and forcing them to raise their dead.

In my D&D campaign, resurrection was so common that some people just came back from the dead entirely on their own. It was something all the cultures had to account for in their burial practices, to avoid accidentally entombing someone who was only "mostly dead."

I think it's just one of those issues that you need to account for if you're including it, personally.

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I consider low magic to be when magic does not affect the daily lives of most commoners. In the scenario I described, although the commoners themselves don't see the mages performing these resurrections, they see the results, and their lives are shaped by those results. That's their normal, everyday life. In a low magic setting, most people never have to be aware of magic at all, let alone come to think of the conditions it creates as "normal." It may exist, and be quite powerful, but it's considered rare and strange by the people who see it.

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I think you could argue, however, that all of those people, and all those events did, in fact, alter the shape of the world, and of our history. That they used their political, ideological, or religious power to do so has permanently affected the way we all think of those things, just as the use of magic for such a purpose would alter the way people think of magic.

<font size="3" face="Verdana, Arial" color="#cc6600">Stanley Woo, QA Ninja</font>

Will be seeing this? Please respond! (http://forums.bioware.com/forums/viewtopic.html?topic=526122&forum=84&sp=90)

Stoopid electrons. What have they ever done for us? Nothing, that's what!

The world of TheDAS has some very unusual (for a fantasy setting) ideas about faith and religion that I think most people will find refreshing and, perhaps, grape-flavoured. But I'm saying no more.

Except for the wombats.

When will we able to REALLY roleplay again? (http://forums.bioware.com/viewtopic.html?topic=527517&forum=84)

Isn't that kind of like asking for a motorcycle that you could have the option of pedaling? Or a remote control you could use with either buttons or dials? Maybe ballpoint pens that you have the option of using as a quill pen?

No.

Games are much more complex, stories much more involved, and generally a lot bigger than their counterparts 20 years ago. While turn-based RPG combat systems like Might & Magic's, the SSI gold box games', Betrayal at Krondor's, and Fallout's were good, they are not necessary and, in some cases, detrimental to the pacing of the game.

I liked the turn-based combat system, but I disagree that they are the best combat system for our story-based RPGs or that an option to revisit them should be included. For that kind of system, I'd just pick up a tactical combat game like Silent Storm 2, which was a whole lot of fun!

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Doubtful. Real-time speech-to-text systems are still highly specialized and nowhere near the point where normal speech can be translated as quickly as one can speak. Not with the level of accuracy needed, anyway.

And I know it worked for Nintendogs and Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney on the DS, but I'm not about to have my roommates wonder what the heck I'm up to when I start saying things like "Where's the Black Beast?" and "Tell me about the treasure" at my computer. But how would you pronounce "Ferelden"? Is the emphasis on the first, second, or third syllable? And what would happen if you guessed wrong? What if you can never get the pronunciation right, like "Juixlkaeifdre"?

Too much work for too little benefit, in my opinion.

I disliked the text parsers in the old text adventure games, because you had to know how the writer was thinking when he made the game. It was the difference between "PUT BOOK ON TABLE" and "DROP BOOK" that was frustrating, or "STAB GOBLIN," "SWING AT GOBLIN, "FIGHT GOBLIN," "HIT GOBLIN WITH SWORD" and "USE SWORD ON GOBLIN". I don't want to go back to that sort of thing.

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quevellan, while your idea has merit, it nonetheless is unfeasible from a developmental viewpoint. Take the initial player greeting, "Hello." That's a single line with, really, one NPC response that will set the tone for the conversation.

Let's say that you are permitted to choose from a list of emotions or tones (I'll use the ones you provided for this example): hostility, neutrality, happiness, sorrow, urgency, nervousness. With a single line, you've now created 6 variations, with potentially a corresponding number of NPC responses.

But we're not quite done yet. You further suggest letting the player chose varying levels of that emotion. Let's, for the sake of argument, allow three different levels for each: a little, some, and a whole bunch. With 6 responses, that's 18 potential ways of simply saying hello--one word, one meaning, 18 ways to say it. Sure, that's a drop in the bucket when it comes to real-life interaction, but remember that a flesh-and-blood writer needs to take into account all of these responses. You've just dekoctupled his workload for a single node in a single conversation in a single area.

Even if we double up the responses, that's still 9 potential responses, each of which has to be different enough to justify allowing the player to say hello in that many ways.

I don't think any writer would be up for that, not in the kinds of games we make. Maybe in something like Facade, where interaction is limited to a single situation and the point of the game is merely to have a "normal" interaction with only two people in a single area. But that's not so much a "game" as it is a conversation simulator.

<hr />In the end, its the pursuit of immersing oneself in a highly interactive and reactive world where the NPCs appear to 'get to know you' and/or your actions and exploits and react accordingly based on their seemingly evolving opinions in a land that appears to change over time, towns grow, villages pop up and disperse etc.<hr />
As much as we'd love to do things like that, resource considerations force us to limit the scope of a lot of our wild brainstorms. Otherwise, we'll spend millions upon millions of dollars and never have anything to show for it.

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I think this concept is less resource-intensive and more feasible. All that's needed is to add only a couple or three extra responses to some of the nodes, which can come up based on how many similar nodes were chosen in past conversations. It would have to be something simple, though, like a simple counter and number range. The only problem is that, later in the game, things could get a little hairy because players could potentially have clicked anywhere from 1 "sarcastic response" to 50.

But if we limited it by area, or plot state...

DA Classes (http://forums.bioware.com/forums/viewtopic.html?topic=524415&forum=84&sp=30)

Let me get this straight: if you travel through a hard-to-find or hard-to-reach area, go into an unimportant cave, don't do anything useful, spend a whole bunch of time there doing nothing, and you manage to find this secret room, and your stats are high enough, and you somehow "use" those stats, you get something that either you don't want or isn't any better or worse than what you've already got, maybe?

Doesn't sound too appealing to me.

Older Games Lessons (http://forums.bioware.com/forums/viewtopic.html?topic=529090&forum=84&sp=75)

I just liked that Darklands was a non-Western European based fantasy setting. Medieval Germany is a fantastic setting for a dark fantasy game!

Yeah, it got boring after you "finished the story," yes it was buggy, but holy jeepers did I have fun with it.

The Strength of BG - back in DA ? (http://forums.bioware.com/forums/viewtopic.html?topic=530254&forum=84&sp=45)

One way to portray extreme violence or depravity in the gmae would be to exaggerate it. Look at slasher movies, where all manner of icky, gruesome deaths occur every few minutes on screen, but they're so exaggerated that there's a bit of emotional distance between the brutality of the acts and the audience.

Or something like BG, where a more heroic fantasy melodrama separates the audience from any truly inhuman acts a villain might perform.

This will also be a friendly reminder to try to keep the discussion related to Dragon Age. THank you.

<a href="http://forums.bioware.com/forums/viewtopic.html?topic=531880&forum=84&sp=15" target="_blank">A high level mage owns psionic abilities?
</a>

But if you're controlling someone's mind, wouldn't their own thoughts, ideas, and morals, be of little import, since you're controlling their physical impulses?

I guess it depends on what kind of mind control we're talking about, and how easily it can be overridden by the victim.

Death, Part 3 (http://forums.bioware.com/viewtopic.html?topic=505904&forum=84)

It's not even a difference of 10hp. If you add incapacitation at 10hp and death at 0hp, all you're doing is shifting the death effects over; there's no real difference at all. It's the same as having incapacitation at -10hp and death at -20hp, or knockout at 14hp and death at 4hp. It's the same mechanic, only with different numbers.

What we're trying to get at is different mechanics, different abstractions of death and incapacitation and the effects thereof.

Oh, I know! Let's make it so that characters are "Stopped" at 6hp and "Ejected" at -6hp, but we'll allow a "Disc Xchange" Ritual to have the characters "Resume Play"! No perma-ejection at all. That's a different system than what we've been talking about, isn't it? I'm a smrt guy!

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So if you're playing a game with a feature you don't like in it, you intentionally play poorly just so you can prove some point? I don't think so.

And if you want to talk about people being happy with something being optional, how about saving and reloading? Aren't those optional? Why not just refuse to save your game so that when people die, you have tremendous consequences like starting the game over again?

Or in games where you have to pay for resurrection, simply refuse to pay for that resurrection. Or will that "possibility of resurrection" be gnawing at your brain the whole time you're playing, eventually growing into a gigantic throbbing tumour that destroys the planet!

Okay, yes, I'm being very sarcastic and using a lot of hyperbole. But don't you think that the "permadeath = consequences" side of the argument is doing the same thing?

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Shall we also include random disease, tripping over things, congenital health issues, myopia, and poor hygiene in the game as well to help things be more "realistic"? Realism is rarely fun in games, ztemplarz, and most game rules are an abstraction of reality designed to balance randomness and fun.

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But the simple act of saving/reloading, or pausing in combat, or clicking a button to attack, or knowing about the healers/necromancers at the beginning of the game IS metagaming. You, the player, know and can see and do things the character may not be able to.

And doing "your absolute utmost every time to try to ensure that you weren't getting in over your head" may not be enough to keep one of your people from dying. What then? If you've done all you can and someone still dies, whose fault is it? What if the game is designed so that someone dies here, or alternately no one should ever be able to die? Where does game balance, combat balance, and strategy fit in to all this? How do we measure game balance?

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<hr /> I want to have to be faced with those decisions, because then it makes my decisions FAR more relevent, and makes me play more realistically. This causes a net result of substantially more IMMERSION.<hr />
And I don't, because it's a decision irrelevant to the story I'm being encouraged to follow, and forces me to play an unfair decision unrealistically. This causes a net result of substantially less IMMERSION.

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And as I said before: playing in a hardcore fashion is already optional, which means it requires no additional time or resources to implement.

So, based on these very different viewpoints, who do we listen to? Who gets the cookie? Who's right?

(Yes, I'm intentionally being difficult. Your arguments, ztemplarz, are neither new nor particularly well argued, if you are saying that as long as we please everyone (by giving you the kind of game you prefer, no less), no one should complain.)

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Like a universal solvent or turning base metals into gold. It could be the Holy Grail of magical research.

But yes, like Mary said, something like magical resurrection would fundamentally alter people's perception of death, and, because of it, life. Life would have a measurable value, which throws all kinds of philosophy and human survival instincts out of whack.

And just where does one go from the time they die to the time they are resurrected? Do they exist? Do they dream? Do they experience? Or does no time pass for them?

And what does it all mean for the existence of a "soul" or the concept of "self"? So many questions!


<font size="3" face="Verdana, Arial" color="#cc6600">Ferret A. Baudoin, Senior Designer</font>

George RR Martin...did you hire him? (http://forums.bioware.com/forums/viewtopic.html?topic=513450&forum=84&sp=15)

Guy Gavriel Kay all the way for me. And early Robert Jordan.

<font size="3" face="Verdana, Arial" color="#cc6600">Brenon Holmes, Programmer</font>

Firearms? (http://forums.bioware.com/viewtopic.html?topic=526677&forum=84)

No guns.

<font size="3" face="Verdana, Arial" color="#cc6600">James Henley, Designer</font>

A little bit depressed about the impending "Spiritual Sequel to BG II". (http://forums.bioware.com/viewtopic.html?topic=532100&forum=84)

Dragon Age is "hush hush" because there's not point in hyping it at the moment. The hype will come when the time is right. Mass Effect is much closer to release, hence the marketing it is receiving.

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I'm a little confused by that statement. We only announced the game fourteen months ago.

If you want to talk about roots, please bear in mind that we had our roots in medical software, and even where games are concerned, our first title was a mech game.

We are in the business of making games, and the X-BOX 360 is an exciting platform for us to work with. Does this mean we, for some reason, don't care about the quality of Dragon Age? Hardly. The team is working hard to make it the best game it can possibly be.

When the time is right, you'll see the marketing and the banners and all of that fancy jazz. That time is just not now.

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As I am assigned to a different project, I would prefer that your points are addressed by a member of the Dragon Age team rather than through my own extrapolations. I can do little more than assure you that we have no intention of releasing a game that we do not consider to be finished.

I just thought I'd post to cover what I can.

[ December 10, 2006, 03:39: Message edited by: chevalier ]