Development Info Dragon Age at first glance - Gamespy

[Voss]

She wasn't bugged. If she starts losing badly and you take too long to finish her off, she talks her way out of the battle- claims she was charmed and forced to attack you, and leaves. I think there should have been a sense motive check there to figure out if she's lying, but... not a bug.

Oh, I was thinking about the lack of publisher yet for Dragon Age, and DemonKing bitching about it. I have a guess as to (with the mention on the Bio site about 'yet to be presented to a publisher') what might be going on. Completely internal funding (or at least no funding from the publisher) which can lead to complete internal control, and any publisher would have very limited say over any last minute changes to the game. And even then it would probably limited to rating/content issues, and not anything big. Given their rep in the industry now (for producing games that sell), they can probably pick and choose a publisher, too.

 

[Shevek]

I found that ToEE better rewarded player use of tactics (through it's implementation of readied actions, tripping attacks, proper spell use, etc) than did NWN. I also felt the party based gameplay was much more fulfilling and deep than NWN's player+henchman thing. Yes, it could have been harder (probably eased up some of the battles to allow players to excel when using odd party configurations) but overall it definately had far more enjoyable combat than anything NWN had to offer and the difficulty, though a tad low, seemed better than NWN's comparative snorefest. This may not be the case with NWN's expansions installed but I did not purchase those so I wouldnt know.

 

[suibhne]

She wasn't bugged. If she starts losing badly and you take too long to finish her off, she talks her way out of the battle- claims she was charmed and forced to attack you, and leaves. I think there should have been a sense motive check there to figure out if she's lying, but... not a bug.

She was way bugged. She acted as you describe, above, but then she reappeared in the same room, totally invisible - and her invisibility had unlimited duration and was undispellable. It was an acknowledged bug, and I believe it was universal - many discussions popped up on the Atari boards, including a pretty amusing one with JE.

I killed her through area-effect spells and a whole lotta luck. (Your melee fighters could target her by clicking on her icon in the initiative bar, even though her actual avatar was un-targetable.) Even after she died, her body remained invisible and thus unlootable; you needed to sleep and return after her body had "decayed" in order to collect the (truly) ph4t l00t.

I'm not sure whether the first patch fixed this, as I've been saving another run-through for the second patch.

As for taks and Voll describing how pathetically easy this game was, did you two roll your characters or use point-buy? It's ridiculously easy to achieve uber characters with ToEE's rolling system, and the game is a cakewalk when using a full party of such characters; when I used point-buy for my second party, though, the game suddenly became tactically challenging. One of the characteristics of 3E is that small stat differences can have a significant effect, and ToEE is a prime illustration of this.

 

[Elwro]

This topic was about GameSpy, you know. Anyway, this John Keefer guy has just been shown one cinematic sequence of a battle. He doesn't reveal any worth-knowing info about the game - my guess is that he doesn't know any. And then he writes:

BioWare combines the best of all its worlds in an amazing new intellectual property.

. I wonder, did he figure it all out by himself?

 

[Transcendent One]

Sorry, I'm kinda late, but Vol, you died 5 times on one battle in NWN?
LOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOL

That is just pathetic, and I'm not trying to be rude either.

 

[Volourn]

LOLOLOLOL You died more than 5 times in TOEE? You had a hard time with the eays battles? Man, that is pathetic. LOLOLOLOL


That is just pathetic, and I'm not trying to be rude either. :wink:

 

[Transcendent One]

Okay in that case I'm teh pwned and I'll go now

 

[Volourn]

Darn. Didn't want you to go away...

 

[Saint_Proverbius]

The main thing that killed me in NWN were the traps in Act I. I died a few times fighting the dragons at level 13(should have been EVERY time, but I digress). I died a few times in HotU, once to the goblins by that bridge in Undermountain and once to that nasty demon guardian in the puzzle area. Not sure what that puzzle area demon thing did to kill me, but it did massive damage pretty quickly.

 

[Jarinor]

Maybe it was a proprietary spell to introduce difficulty to the game.

 

[Voss]

proprietary spell?

Interesting point- almost all the spells that appeared in SoU and HotU have shown up in the new Player's Guide to Faerun. (Essentially the 3.5 upgrade to the main FR book)