Questions about DLC-only equipment, Windows 7 compatability, and much more have been answered in the latest developer responses on the official Dragon Age: Origins forums.
Mike Laidlaw on the lack of gender-specific clothing:
Armors and clothing are gender-non-specific. So if you put on “Wedding clothes” or “Commander’s Plate,” the armor adjusts itself to match the character’s gender.
David Gaider on the implementation of Shale:
“To a similar degree” means that not all the party members have exactly the same amount of banter and talking in the game. They are, however, in the same ballpark and Shale is the same as the rest. I can’t be more exact without giving you numbers (which I do not have).
“On the first play-through” means that, if you buy the Shale DLC and use Shale the first time you play the game you won’t be able to notice any difference between the way Shale works and the way the other party-members work. Period.
Shale was a big job to add in — this wasn’t *easy* DLC to add by any stretch of the imagination — but the one big advantage we had is that the dialogues Shale has with other party members and various characters in the game had already been recorded a while before. This meant we couldn’t add any *new* banters, and we had to creatively edit a lot of the VO we had, but thankfully there was a lot there. The work in restoring Shale lay in other areas, primarily (frustrating areas to deal with, but eventually we got it all sorted).
So in other words, Shale is a full, completely voiced party member like any other. Can’t be much more direct with an answer than that.
David Gaider on Dragon Age: The Calling’s last page being made available:
I don’t know which is stupider, the fact that a book-selling site would allow people to read the last page (for what possible reason would someone want to?) or that the publisher would actually provide it to them.
Read it if you must, though honestly I don’t know what you’ll get out of it other than spoiling yourself thoroughly and speculating on it endlessly (which is par for the course here, I know, but now with an added dose of context-less conjecture). Ah, well. Such is life.
David Gaider on a Gray Warden’s “calling”:
The Calling comes at the end of a Grey Warden’s life, a life made that much shorter by his duty — but I’d be careful about leaping to the conclusion that the game must end with the Calling. How you feel about a Grey Warden’s overall situation is up to you, but you do NOT know how the game ends or what happens to your character in DAO — and that’s really all there is to it. Nor will we tell anyone how the game ends, no matter how much they run around in circles waving their hands and screaming that they need reassurances lest the sky come falling down.
Fernando Melo on obtaining DLC-only equipment:
Some of the DLC items appear in your inventory, others (usually the more powerful ones) appear later in the game, and even then you may still need to buy some of these from a merchant as you do other game items (usually at a huge discount as compared to its power though).
For the same reason you don’t get (and I don’t think anyone would expect) the DLC loot from Warden’s Keep to just pop into your inventory just because you purchased that DLC. You still have to begin that quest, journey there and look for it. In some cases, you may only find a particular item if you made certain choices, or after completion of the quest, or looted a specific chest squirreld away somewhere.
In the case of items, their DLC descriptions will let you know where to go, or who you need to talk to though.
Not to say all items are like this – for the instant gratification fans, there’s still the promo items etc. Their power reflects that and you should be able to use them straight away.
Also, from a practical standpoint with inventory being limited it is somewhat cruel to force you to lug around a whack of items that only steal useful space from items you can use ‘now’.
As for the topic/OP – I’ll actually need to double check on the Grimoire specifically Sorry, off the top of my head I don’t recall if this goes to your inventory or is later – I suspect later though.
Fernando Melo on the effects of the Memory Ring:
There’s actually two items you get in your inventory with the Memory Band promo code.
The Memory Band itself is a ring, and as such is equipped in one of the two available ring slots in most party members’ equipped items/paper doll view of the inventory – and while equipped provides the +1% xp bonus.
There is also a Tome in your inventory – which (similar to other rare Tomes in the game) when read/used gives you the one time bonus, in this case a skill point.
When you get something like a skill point, (or ability, or attribute point) it makes the level up option for that character become available. You can then use that method to spend the point when you want.
For any promo item DLC, such as the Memory Band, this is added on new game startup as long as that DLC is installed etc.
So if you get the Mem Band, use it + Tome in a game, then at some point start a new game, it’ll be in the new game’s inventory again.
Chris Priestly on removing the blood from your armor:
The blood on your armor will disappear when you have a chance to rest and clean it. So when you retire to the party camp (or similar location) it is assumed you automatically take care of your weapons and armor, so you are clean when you are at camp.
You can also clean up if you have dog in your party. If you don’t mind slobber.
Stanley Woo on the lack of horses:
Would horses add something to the game? Absolutely, and some folks would find it awesomely fun. Does adding horses automatically make something more fun? Absolutely not, and that’s where I think people disagree with you.
Making a game with ridable horses means every part of the game has to take horses into account: combat balance, combat AI, animation, camera angles, level design, movement speed, character progression, stores, etc. Look how long it took for NWN to get horses!
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I think that’s just as silly a notion as believing horses automatically make a game better.
It all has to do with what kind of game is being made, and whether horses fit into the game world and into gameplay. In our games, they tend to not fit, but in other games, they might fit just fine. And who knows what might be available in the future?
David Sims on reviews already being worked on:
Because of the delay, the PC version of Dragon Age has had an abnormally smooth transition to ship version. The build has been quite stable for months, and the press has been able to preview it based on versions that are very close to what we will ship. This review is probably based on the final version, and there should be no reason for any review of Dragon Age to be rushed out the door. I think that will work to our advantage, because Dragon Age is not a superficial game which yields its full entertainment value in just a few hours.
David Sims on adding more than four party members with the toolset:
The party limit doesn’t really have much to do with party interaction. The decision was driven more by the difficulty of controlling a very large party, and the performance implications of having lots of creatures on screen.
With D&D 2nd edition rules, most classes don’t have a lot of active abilities to use in combat. It’s a lot of passive bonuses and auto-attacks. I found that in the BG series I was mostly managing the positioning and targeting of my party and only selecting active abilities for my mage, and only then for hard fights where auto attacks weren’t enough.
The DA rules have more active abilities per character, so you’re spending more time managing that for each party member. If we’d gone with a larger party, we probably would have reduced the number of abilities. It would have been a valid approach, but it wasn’t the one we chose.
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The GUI can only display 4, but I don’t think any of the other parts of the engine have it hard coded. I suspect some of the core scripting is only designed for 4 however. In short, it would be difficult but probably not impossible to increase the size, provided you’re willing to live with the GUI issues.
Trying to do that for the main campaign… well if nothing else you’d have to go through the stages for every single conversation in the game and add two extra party member spots.
And Ross Gardner on Windows 7 compatability:
We’ve done lots of tests with Windows 7 and it runs very well, better than Vista IMO. We haven’t detected any issues so far, but it is a new OS so it is possible that an issue will come up once it is released. There has definately been more testing with XP and Vista than 7.
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