Questions about the new blood-splattered logo, defensive casting, level proportions, and dog subtitles have been answered in the latest developer responses on the official Dragon Age: Origins forums.
On the controversial new logo:
The logo you now see at the top of this page (if you don’t, try hitting the F5 key to refresh) is the final logo for the game. The previous logo was a stand in until we finalized things. You will see the old logo disappear from where it is now and the new logo be put in its place as the web team catches up.
And yes, the box art you had seen previously is also not final. I have seen the final box art and it is frankly quite stunning. Definitely not what I think a lot of people are expecting, but very striking and eye catching. I’m not sure when we’ll be revealing the box art yet, but it is going to make a big impact when it appears. Stay tuned.
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It’s easy to become attached to something, but things were always subject to change. Some people will prefer the logo they’re familiar with, some will prefer the finalized one.
It’s like when we were working with the game months ago before final VO went in. Some major characters had temp voicing, and a couple of characters changed their voice a couple of times. Some folks around here really liked the old temp voice, while others really liked the new temp voice. And, of course, when the final VO went in, some liked it a lot, some didn’t. That’s the way the cookie crumbles around here.
Heck, in some cases, we liked the synthetic text-to-speech VO. It was hilarious, but we knew it was going to disappear in the end. *sigh* No more robots saying “happy bark.”
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Frankly, I’m happy to see the old Adam West logo go, I never liked it The new one has much better readability and is less bulky. Also, less bats.
And no, there is no conspiracy, no EA pushed logo, blah blah blah.
Also – looking through recent box covers for console games – I don’t see a lot of blood or blood and steel at all , so that part of the conspiracy is out of the window.
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Sorry, but this is really just BS. Blood and Gore is present in equal share, if not even more on the PC.
* Daggerfall as the precursor to Oblivion had more blood than Oblivion
Doom and Quake laid the foundation for the FPS genre, both pure PC games.
* Fallout I set the tone for what you’re seeing in Fallout 3.
* Vampire: The Maskerade – Redemption (PC) – another RPG, heavy on blood.
* Baldur’s Gate had a lot of blood and gore(insta gib).
* Quite a bit of blood in the upcoming Diablo III as well (PC).
The pattern you are seeing is that FPS games have moved mostly to the console, and with them the trend to violence – but it’s not a console specific thing, it’s genre specific.
More wrong trends you are seeing (most successful console RPGs)
* Fallout 3, sim released on PC and 360 is not linear. It’s the anti-thesis to linear. It’s gory, alright, but that has been a staple of the Fallout franchise from #1
* Oblivion, sim released on PC and 360 is not linear and less gory than most PC RPGs.
* Fable and Fable II, among the most successful RPGs on the console are not overly gory.
* Final Fantasy, console RPG, not gory.
* Legend of Zelda – hugely successful console RPG, not gory.
In general, before making up sweeping generalization about console gaming or rpgs on the console, you might want to take a step back and actually take care of finding examples that would justify the pattern you are seeing.
People really need to chill out regarding the ‘omg, the consoles made them do this’ or ‘omg, EA forced them to do this to please the console market’. Coming up with wild theories and explanations doesn’t really change reality, which is that the old logo was 7 years old, bulky, had low readability and looked like some kind of prop from a 1990’s batman movie.
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It will also help when you see it against the box art and such.
I think Stan had it right (good heavens, thats a first) in that those who feel the old one was better may, in part, be a little shocked that it has changed. Given time and context, I think you’ll grow to like the real one even more.
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Yep, all the old logo will be removed eventually.
On defensive casting:
We’ve talked about this before and have shown the system at various Demos (e.g. NYCC). Flame Weapons was one of the buffs demonstrated.
Buffs in Dragon Age are maintained. They don’t cost any activation cost, but instead reduce the mages maximum mana and increase his fatigue (which, in turn, increases the activation cost for all spells). Once activated, they stay on until deactivated or dispelled (at which point they go into cooldown).
The more buffs your mage runs, the less overall mana he has available for casting other spells and the more expensive these other spells become.
It’s a bit similar to Buffs in Dark Age of Camelot if you played that game.
The objective behind the system was to allow for tactical buffing before and during combat while removing the tedious aspects such as recasting buffs every n minutes and the limited flexibility other systems give you (e.g. we didn’t want to create situations where the player is expected to somehow know what will be behind the next door and buff accordingly – instead you can buff on the spot when you see what is behind the door, as most buffs cast in under 1 second).
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Different spells have differing casting times. Some are essentially instant, others (usually the more powerful ones, but not always) take soem time in casting.
We’ll be delving more into magic in the coming months and more will be made clear. Stay tuned.
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Here’s your design problem if you just did lower mana pool: Since activation of buffs is free, a mage who has already cast most of his major spells and is low on mana would have no reason not to activate every single buff in the book, since he’s probably not going to regenerate all his mana back to the max anyway during the battle.
That’s not really a desireable situation from my point of view, hence the fatigue mechanic (which isn’t a mage specific things, other things in the game also contribute to fatigue – but more on that in the coming months)
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However, the increase in cost for all other spells tends to hurt a lot when you’re already low on mana. It’s a soft limit – it doesn’t stop you from using every buff in the book – but doing so would ensure your mage can’t really do anything else anymore since his maximum mana would be very low and the cost of casting even cheap spells would be very high.
We’ve got a lot of spells with alpha-strike potential, so some mages will blow a lot of their mana in the first few seconds of combat – but that does not mean you want them to be useless for the rest of the battle.
Keep in mind that buffs, like any other spell, have a cooldown once they are deactivated and that some of them are mutually exclusive.
On level caps and proportions:
The cap is high enough that it seems unlikely someone will reach it over the course of the game. (I hate reaching caps too early – yes, I’m looking at you FallOut 3).
If you’d reached the highest level possible, your character would be very powerful, but not godlike. However, you’re command a group of equally powerful allies…
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Difficulty increases the challenge you get from encounters, but does not affect level of creatures or XP you’re getting from them.
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To answer that question correctly, one would first have to dispel the expectations as to what ‘level’ might be in Dragon Age. My point being that the difference in power between level n and level n+1 is different from game to game.
In Dragon Age, level is a secondary metric when it comes to power, Rank is a more interesting one (that Aldoar misread in his post).
The above formula answers some of it, but not enough to really get the picture (we’ll be talking about that at some point in the future I guess).
From a philosophical point of view, a guard captain in a small village would probably not pose a threat to the player once he’s completed his Gray Warden training – but the circumstances are really what’s important. If that village was frequently tested by bandit raids or maybe darkspawn scouts, the guards there might be more capable than our average, lazy town guard. That statement however is not possible to express in ‘level’, since level does not work like in D&D.
On dog subtitles:
If you have subtitles turned on, you’ll see something like, “Happy bark!” or, “Growls,” when Dog speaks. The robo-voice for him was eerily awesome.
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What you generally will see when Dog “speaks” is some narrative text which goes *happy barking!* or *angry growl!* but you will hear Dog actually making the appropriate noises. He has a surprisingly diverse array (there was an actual canine VO actor used, I understand). But you don’t see Dog’s barks translated in any way, no — he’s a little like R2-D2 in that way. People might interpret his sounds, but they’re never made into actual text.
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Dog’s conversation is written in a similar manner to the conversations with T3-M4 from KOTOR. You talk to him, and he responds, and the player’s dialogue choices are frequently interpretations of whatever he just said. i.e. “What’s that, boy? Sten fell down a well?”
That said, Dog’s got a lot more communication skill than T3 did. He’s very expressive, and our cinematic designers and animators did a terrific job making him act doggy.
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Seems to be a lot of doggy interest lately.
Hmmm… maybe I should try to get the team to do an update on Dog for next week?
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