1. Are there any plans for adding more types of familiars to future games? Or a system other than alignment for determining which familiar you’ll get?
Submitted by BlackLungFish |
By future games, I’m assuming you mean NWN. With NWN, I know that familiars and animal companions are being included…and while I don’t know if there will be ‘more’ types than in BG2, there will certainly be different ones. 3rd-edition familiar rules make the familiar and animal companion more of a core feature for their respective classes (as opposed to a 1st level spell), so they will have considerably more utility. You also get to select what your familiar is (as per the 3rd edition rules)…it isn’t assigned to you based on alignment or chance as the 2nd edition spell is.
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2. Dave, there are many concerns about NWN on the boards now. I can see why you would not try to put in climbing walls as to the difficulty of the computer aspects of it, but why not horses, or levitation? It’s been done before in many games for the computer? Can you give us a good explanation? As far as I’m concerned horses are a major part of Dungeons and Dragons.
Submitted by H’rothgar Firehammer on behalf of The Dragon’s Breath Forge |
OK, first off, levitation represents exactly the same sort of problem (engine-wise) as climbing walls does.
1) There is no ‘height’ or z-axis in the game. In order to reduce the graphical engine-load, there is no horizon and no sky…the viewpoint in NWN is fixed as ‘looking down from above’ so the only tile that needs to be loaded by the computer is the one the character is currently in and those immediately surrounding it. The farther you are able to look off into the horizon, the more tiles that would need to be loaded…and the less processing power you would have available for such things as more characters on a server. Not to say that it couldn’t be done (as there are 3-D engines that would support it), it’s just a trade-off for the lowered graphical requirements.
2) Since someone can’t levitate very high (not more than a foot or two, if it was done), the only useful application that I can see for levitation would be to overcome obstacles. This would mean implementing an entirely different pathfinding system for levitation, however…otherwise clicking to go somewhere with someone who is levitating would have them following exactly the same path as someone who is walking. And what would be the point in that? The complexity involved in doing this (as I understand) hardly makes the benefit of levitating seem worth it (except in specific, scripted circumstances). It would be great to have an entirely-3D engine that allowed dragons to fly and wizards along with them…but the cost in having this kind of capability would be quite high, both time and resource-wise.
Now, horses CAN be done. We’re not arguing that they can’t. However:
1) The simplest way to do them would be to have a horse that allowed you to transit to another area when you clicked on it. That’s really the main purpose of horses, after all: transportation. But that’s not what people are asking for.
2) What they’re asking for is players being able to visually mount horses and ride them around. Now, if they were going to be done, we’d have to
a) put in a large amount of animation time not only for the horse itself but for the various characters that would go on the horse…and synchronize them, naturally.
b) include all the variations to combat and travel that horses would cause…the differences in someone on a horse attacking someone on the ground, jousting, horse armor and attacks that the mount, itself, makes.
c) give the player somewhere to use those horses. At the speed a horse would be travelling at a full gallop, even the largest NWN map could be crossed in a matter of seconds…either we’d need larger maps and more resources dedicated to them or we’d need to make horse travel more abstracted, which again would bring up the reasoning behind putting them in in the first place.
All in all, if the NWN team was going to include horses, they’d prefer to include them all the way. As it stands, NWN is a big enough project without dedicating all the resources required to a feature that wouldn’t give an equal return. When you think of all NWN has to do right out of the gate with its initial release, my question would be: exactly why do you consider horses such a big part of Dungeons & Dragons? They’re a part of it…and maybe something that can be addressed in the future…but to try to do them now when so many other more basic and more important features need to be done properly seems to be a waste of the team’s time.
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3. What’s next for Black Isle in the Dungeon’s and Dragon’s series? Will we ever see a Dragonlance game? Or are you guys sticking with the Forgotten Realms?
Submitted by Drow Dracula |
Black Isle is a division of Interplay, which is a publisher that we work with…as an employee of Bioware, I can’t really speak on their behalf.. Interplay has the license for the Forgotten Realms but I’m not aware of what the full deal is regarding that. Bioware does D&D; games through Interplay’s license…and if there’s any games beyond NWN currently in the works for us, they haven’t been announced yet.
As for Dragonlance, the deal with that is that it’s a different license from the Forgotten Realms. We couldn’t do a Dragonlance game without acquiring that license, first, and I’m not even sure who owns it.
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4. Since there were Knights of Solamnia in BG2… why no kender? I love those little guys…
Submitted by Rhune80 |
Same as the above. Dragonlance is part of a different license from the Forgotten Realms. Even that small cameo by the Knights of Solamnia almost ended up getting removed from the game as a result. We wouldn’t want to push it.
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5. My name is Dave as well and I wondered why ToB is such a walkover. It couldn’t be that I’m that good. Couldn’t you have gone for an option on regular setting (core rules) where the monsters are what they are. I mean you made the demogorgon a lot easier then it’s supposed to be. I know this is done to also please less hardcore players. But setting the difficulty higher (where monsters do double damage) just doesn’t give the feel of a real demogorgon or maybe really big armies. I remember having a lot more BIG fights (with over 20 monsters) in IWD so why couldn’t this be done for BG2 ToB? I mean setting difficulty in settings like easy is 2 monsters, core 4 and hard 8 something like that?
Submitted by Dave Oosterhof |
We receive complaints like this consistently. Trouble is, they’re often completely opposite to each other. For as many people as yourself who are hardcore gamers and say the game is very easy, there are twice as many casual gamers who say it is too hard. Overall, we’d rather give a player an easy victory then have a section that some players can’t get by, get frustrated, and give up playing the game. Even with that, Throne of Bhaal has been (on average) said by reviewers to be a much harder game than the previous ones. Where does that leave you, though, right?
We actually do have mass combats in Throne of Bhaal. There is a limit to how many we can have on the screen, though…we had to be careful. There is a minimum-spec machine that the game has to be playable on, and once you start getting many animations and spell-effects on-screen at once, those min-spec machines start to chug. The mass battles in the Yaga-Shura camp and Amkethran already pushed that limit. We also had areas where the number of creatures present depended on the difficulty setting and/or the average level of the party…chances are, however, that you didn’t notice. The number of creatures present isn’t generally what makes a combat difficult, it’s the AI of the creatures involved. And a scalable AI would require practically a new script for each level it could be set at…there is no magic computer command to ‘make this creature smarter’ or ‘make this creature dumber’, after all. We are working on it, though. We recognized the problem we were having with scalability with the engine, which is why in Neverwinter Nights the encounter system has built-in scalability to allow the DM to challenge any party level/number.
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6. Why are there so few good bastard swords and shields in BGII?
Submitted by gfitzpat |
This depends on your definition. There are several powerful bastard swords and shields available in the game. Is a powerful bastard sword a +5 weapon? There’s a limited amount of really powerful magic items in the game…and that meant not every category got one. Each category has at least one very useful item, however…but again that depends on how you like to fight. In the end, everyone seems to have their favorite classes of items that they wanted to see more of, and we had over a thousand-plus items as it was. Those that people specifically thought were lacking had some extra items made for that class in the Throne of Bhaal expansion.
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7. I’ve played both Baldur’s Gates through, and I noticed that Imoen is a child and the main character is a man in BG1, but in BG2 they’re the same age. In fact, when Jaheira notices that Khalid has kicked the bucket in BG2 and Imoen consoles her, Jaheira says, “No, this is not the time for this conversation, child,” and Imoen clarifies that she is the same age as the main character. Yeah, that conversation is needed to foreshadow Imoen’s relationship to Bhaal and the main character, but it also seems like someone is taking an eraser to an error, like when they tried to tell us that Vanessa was a fem-bot in Austin Powers 2. Is my perception false or did BioWare make a mistake?
Submitted by David L. Shenkenburg |
Your perception is false. Imoen may act a child, but it’s established way back when you first meet Imoen back in Candlekeep that you and she are the same age. It’s been a while, so I forget the exact dialogue, but it was indeed discussed in BG1 (maybe when she runs out to join you when you leave Candlekeep?). Not that the design team doesn’t make mistakes (far from it), but this ain’t one of them. 🙂
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8. What do you eat for breakfast?
Submitted by Uther Ironspire (PonteNote: Hey! That was my idea!) |
Bioware supplies our breakfast for us. Usually I have a cup of yoghurt, a banana and a cinnamon bun (if I can steal one).
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9. Are the famed invisible pants now visible?
Submitted by BlackLungFish |
No, but I have an office of my own now…so the point is pretty much moot. I could sit at my desk completely naked if I wanted to…and while that would reduce the number of people barging into my office (hmmm…it’s a thought…) I doubt the lack of any invisible pants would be their first concern.
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10. Does Mr. Gaider like Modka??
Submitted by Brightb1ade |
I’m frightened to ask what Modka is.
PonteNote: If you want to know what Modka is, I suggest that you ask in our general forum.
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