Dragon Age: Origins Forum Activity

Questions about gaining follower reputation, Gray Warden history, and the game’s system requirements have been answered in the latest developer responses on the official Dragon Age: Origins forums.

David Gaider on gaining follower reputation:

No, there is indeed a “you have gained X approval with Morrigan” type of message — it briefly pops up on the bottom left of your screen, the same place where you’ll get all such status messages (such as new codex entries added, new journal entries added, etc). The heart symbol mentioned is just an icon to denote an approval change (every status message has a different icon).

If approval changed during the course of dialogue you don’t actually see the message during the dialogue itself (so you won’t see it the moment you select a response) but you will see any sum total changes once the dialogue is completed.

If that’s annoying… well, that’s too bad. We tried out several methods of delivering feedback to the player and this was the most inobtrusive way we felt worked. The approval bar itself is on the individual NPC’s character sheet and fairly easy to ignore, if that’s your intent.

As for a good/evil meter, as was noted in a post above it’s not the same thing at all. Each NPC has a different standard that they hold you to. The fact that their opinion of you changes is one of the consequences for your actions (the ones they are aware of), not an arbitrary and universal judgement of your morality. Removing the good/evil meter is not intended to render the game free of consequence.

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Indeed. Too much feedback — like you see the individual +1/-1 as you pick each line of dialogue — was decided against, but too little left players wondering what they had done to make their companions upset or friendly, and not being aware their opinion was even changing until something obvious occurred (we just can’t make it reflect more subtly in every line of their dialogue — as was pointed out in another post, that’s simply beyond our capabilities).

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Unless you’re advocating that there shouldn’t be any kind of approval system with companions at all? That it’s all just driven by set plot globals and dialogue progression, as in our older titles? Because that’s how it was done in Mass Effect. And KotOR. Unless you mean KotOR2, which we didn’t make.

Or is this the same kind of “regression” that will no doubt be referred to by some regarding our lack of player VO? I’m curious.

David Gaider on Gray Warden history:

Yes, there are only a few dozen in Ferelden. There are more in other nations, especially in the far-off Anderfels where Weisshaupt Fortress is located (which is Grey Warden Central, if you will).

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there is no hard and fast rule amongst the Grey Wardens — there is simply tradition, as well as experience. Exceptional circumstances do exist, but for the most part once a Grey Warden joins the order, that is her life. As much as they are respected as legends, they are also outsiders, and occasionally politically inconvenient. This is a fact they must simply deal with.

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As for belief in the darkspawn, the general assumption is that at the end of the last Blight the Grey Wardens defeated them so soundly that they would never become a problem again — or perhaps they were simply gone forever.

That last is a simplistic view, and anyone who is educated knows better. Dwarves know MUCH better, and they scoff at the out-of-sight out-of-mind attitude of surfacers. The longer that time went without a Blight, however, the easier it became for many to believe that the threat might indeed be over. Darkspawn became boogeymen to humans. Real enough but not really relevant.

Recruiting is indeed an issue, as is tithing, and that is why the Grey Wardens have dwindled to a shadow of what they once were in the interim. They do not, however, need to persuade recruits as to the reality of the darkspawn. One needs only to go into the Deep Roads to be persuaded of that.

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As for the causes behind the Exalted March being declared, one could probably write a dissertation on it — suffice it to say that it was a build-up of hostility against the elves caused by them refusing to aid the human nations against the Second Blight and their particular religious practices which the Chantry saw as objectionable. The actual spark was actually provided by a Dalish raid on the Orlesian town of Red Crossing in 2:9 Glory… where a number of atrocities enraged the human population within the Empire, though the Dalish today claim those stories are completely fabricated.

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The first number is the Age, while the second is the year.

So 2:9 is the 9th year of the 2nd Age, keeping in mind that each Age will go up to 99 before the Divine selects the name for the next (so 2:0 Glory would have been the dawn of the Glory Age).

The name of the Age follows the numerical designation in practice, although really it’s redundant — the 2nd Age is always the Glory Age. So you could simply cite the date as 2:9 and be understood.

For those who are curious, the world is currently in its 9th Age (since the first Divine of the Chantry, when this calendar begins). The Ages are (in order):

Divine
Glory
Towers
Black
Exalted
Steel
Storm
Blessed
Dragon

First person to come up with a handy mnemonic gets a cookie.

Ross Gardner on the game’s system requirements:

Speaking to the single core questions, the game actually runs OK on a single core depending on the clock speed. We change the threading model slightly to take that into account and Andreas is saying it is about 20% slower, with likely a few dips in a larger heated combat. The min-spec was actually supposed to be an Intel Core 2 (single core) although that is not very clear. If it was a single core though, I’d want to run at higher than 1.4Ghz.

To the older AMD questions I ran the game all through development on the following system:

AMD 64 X2 Dual 4400+ 2.21Ghz w/ 3 gigs of RAM which I assume is DDR 2 without pulling the box apart. I tried and it runs really well on 1.5 Gigs but I constantly had a crapload of other apps running so hence the 3.
The video card I had was a 256MB 7800GT.
OS was XP

I ran on medium settings and the game ran really well – 99% of the time about 20fps and usually between 25-40.

Most of our single core work was done on a similar system with 1 core disabled.

We did a lot of work to make it run on lower end PC’s well and if you have the minimum you will have an OK gaming experience. If anything I’d recommend closer to a 2Ghz and above processor before upgrading to a dual core (or a quad) if you can do that cheaply. And before upgrading you should try the game – because it might just surprise you.

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It actually does for the Intel one:

“CPU: Intel Core 2 (or equivalent) running at 1.4Ghz or greater
AMD X2 (or equivalent) running at 1.8Ghz or greater”

The AMD spec is for dual core, but as I was saying if you had a single core AMD 64 running around 2+Ghz you should be OK. The game will run on lower than that for sure, but then you start getting into questionable experiences IMO – and that will be up the individual if that is acceptable or not.

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That is some good feedback, and we certainly have a chance to change what min/recommended specs actually make it onto the box. Based on the feedback we are getting for the min and recommended one change that comes to mind is lowering recommended to 3Ghz+ dual core. Another might be to specify single core, but with 2Ghz. We have some time still to do some more in depth tests in-house.

It is always tough as min and recommended mean different things to different people and from developer to developer. Our goal for these specs was to give playable specs (not runnable) if that makes sense. So minimum is actually playable, even though it will run on less. And for recommended you will get 100% of the game at an FPS that never drops below 30 (and frequently sits well above 40).

In any case our goal is to be as up front as we can about what sort of machine you will need to run the game, so keep the questions coming and we’ll take the feedback to heart.

PS – Hey Bob. Ya, you’re good to go buddy – at least at 1024 by 768. Oddly enough it runs slightly better in windowed mode on the 7000 series due to the way our renderer works with that series of Nvidia cards.

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I can’t say for sure without testing, but at 3.2Ghz I’m assuming it is one of the later P4’s (64 bit?) which were designed to compete with the AMD 64s. I would assume so and would definately try it out before upgrading.

As for resolution the PC supports 800×600 as the lowest.

DAO has been a long haul and most of us have been pretty heads down to make it as good as it can be (and it totally is ), but now that we are focused on the consoles I’ll be more active in the forums and see if some of my guys can do that as well. Sometimes a couple of minutes of our time can save hours of speculation – which is sometimes fun but not always.

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The GUI’s are fully scalable so it will go up to any resolution that your video card and monitor support – and I mean that in the physical sense and in the FPS sense.

As for PhysX I don’t think it is a secret that DAO is using PhysX. We don’t have any special features for hardware acceleration ONLY, however the version we use supports it if your card does. Hopefully I’m allowed to say that.