Dragon Age: Origins Forum Tidbits

It’s time for another round-up of choice developer quotes from the official Dragon Age: Origins forums.

David Gaider on if your party will know what you’ve done:

Sometimes. Occasionally they’ll still hear about things back at the camp, especially if what happened is something that everyone knows about. Normally, however, only those who actually accompany you in your party will react to your decisions.

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Sometimes people take exception to decisions regardless of how good or evil they are. Sometimes people consider things to be important to them, period.

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Think of it this way: instead of thinking of it as trying to be “good” or “evil” throughout the entire game, you just treat each situation as a problem that you will deal with as you feel is necessary.

If you are trying to be a good, moral person then you’ll need to decide what is the good, moral thing to do… without having the game attaching a signpost to it indicating that is what it is. If a party member– or anyone else– takes exception to what you’ve done, you’ll defend your actions on that basis. Sometimes even two good, moral people can have different ideas on what the right thing to do is. That’s sort of the point, sometimes.

If you are the sort of person who believes that morality is irrelevant or that it is more important to advance your own personal agenda then you are going to have to do things secretly or surround yourself with like-minded party members to avoid conflict — or else be very persuasive so you can pull the wool over their eyes when they object. But there are no “evil” actions labeled as such — you will simply sometimes have solutions presented to you that are more rewarding or which allow you to dispense with complications without regard for how they affect others. As in real life, you will need to decide just how heartless you can be and deal with the consequences appropriately.

Possibly we have trained ourselves to play these games with alignment on the brain– whether it is D&D-type alignment, the Light Side/Dark Side of Star Wars or the dichotomies in JE and ME. The idea here, however, is not to screw you by simply removing the information that tells you which acts are good and which are evil but rather to remove the need for it to be a gameplay mechanic at all and allow you to consider actions based on how you feel about them individually and what consequences they will have on your reputation and your friends– rather than having the mechanic telling you what is right or wrong.

Does that make sense?

Chris Priestly on no multiplayer:

Once again, it was not a question of “easier or harder” or similar. BioWare chose not to have multiplay for Dragon Age: Origins as we wanted to focus on the story of our newly created IP.

There is a ton of lore, history, politics, monsters, etc in the Dragon Age universe and we wanted to give the players of Dragon Age: Origins an excellent story driven adventure to allow people to become immersed in the DA information. After careful deliberation, we decided that a single player game was the best way to do this. You can check out David Gaider’s posts about writing story for single player vs. multiplayer in other threads (he has to discuss this far too often) for more information on this.

We are hoping that Dragon Age proves to be a popular franchise with players and that the possibility of future games, maybe with a co-op or multiplay aspect, are possible. However, at this time, the team is focused on making the best Single Player game possible.

Georg Zoeller on melee/stealth being as fun as spellcasting:

I’m mostly playing Rogue as main character at the moment. It’s really different and requires a very different approach to most encounters, especially in parts of the game where you are on your own.

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There are very limited situations where you are without party support, but you know, every story has a beginning and such.

That said – if you’re a rogue and you’re faced with some warrior in heavy armor wielding a huge maul – if you don’t use your classes strengths and special abilities, you’re not going to walk out of there – because those bludgeoning weapons really really don’t care about light armor all that much. You might be more agile and harder to score a hit on, but that alone is not enough.

I suppose you could try wearing heavier armor, but that still won’t allow you to go 1:1 in most cases.

You’ll have to wait a bit until we talk about the classes in detail, but I’m pretty confident you’ll find that there is plenty of flexibility in how you can develop your character and each class has it’s own role that can’t be filled by any other (e.g. no spells that can replicate rogue or warrior specific talents effectively)

David Gaider and Georg Zoeller on save or DIE! spells, combat manuvers, and poisons:

Is there a reason that we should use such save-or-die-instantly mechanics? Do they actually make for fun design?

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I smell flamebait. Where is that gas can again…

Here’s my stance on it:

a) Who said anything about saves?
b) If it happens to the player, it better damn happen from a boss and the player better damn has some kind of way to avoid it in the future (e.g. learn from her mistake).

Pure random ‘poof, you’re dead’ isn’t fun. It better be on a very long cooldown.

c) Player using instant kill spells or high level abilites with similar effects are ok, but again, a matter of proper cooldown.

I’m all for old school, but just because a mechanic was in Baldur’s Gate or some other old game doesn’t make it good.

Save and die is on the ‘not fun’ list (unless used under very specific circumstances) and just added the ‘and now I’m reloading again, man was that fun to get instant killed by that kobold again’ element to the game that got old and frustrating about 20 seconds. There are many ways to make combat challenging, random(2)==1?die():live() isn’t part of it.

I’ve got no problem with a boss bringing down flaming tornadoes from the sky that deal insane damage – that is unless you’re wearing a flameproof suit. Because in that example, there is something the player can do in response to getting grilled the first time.

And no … no amount of pleading will add perma death for individual characters outside of “the party just died” to this game. The only thing that can add it is scripting … and not by me.