Game News Dragon Age semi-annual update

[Vault Dweller]

... especially if there is some motiviation for them to stay there.

That's a big IF that may change a lot of thing.

 

[Mr.Rocco]

Based on what?

It's just a hunch but Bioware track record speaks for itself.
After nwn,
kotor
ja
me

See where I'm getting at? Bioware wants to make money and we all know where the money people think it is, and I am not going to blame them if they decided to go ahead and do console/pc. Gaider is not even sure whether it will stay as pc-only title. At least, he seems to be honest enough to admit the murky future.

Who can be sure? However, Bio had no problems making console-exclusive games like Jade Empire and Mass Effect plus the unannounced projects. DA is a solid PC title, and they have no reasons to change that. After all the BG and NWN games did extremely well, and I doubt that Bio missed this fact.

I beg to differ. As you've noticed Bioware's recent merger and expansion, they want to grow bigger and better(?) to reach wider audience. It is highly unlikey that they haven't pay attention to Oblivion's success. When the mass public embrace Bethesda's switch from pc to console with such open arms, why shouldn't Bioware think the same way?

 

[HanoverF]

You need to get a better picture up online

 

[Vault Dweller]

I beg to differ. As you've noticed Bioware's recent merger and expansion, they wants to grow bigger and better(?) to reach wider audience. It is highly unlikey that they haven't pay attention to Oblivion's success. When the mass public embrace Bethesda's switch from pc to console with such open arms, why shouldn't Bioware think the same way?

Bio did that long time ago. They've tried the console waters with console/pc KOTOR, followed up with console only Jade Empire, started a console only ME trilogy, plus the unannouced projects (console/pc, I assume, and handheld). The focus is clearly on the consoles, so even for diversity purposes they need a PC only title.

Besides, like I said, Bio's past PC titles did extremely well, and I highly doubt that Bio would ignore this opportunity to make money and establish their own foothold in the PC market, without being limited/restricted by licenses.

 

[Volourn]

"Dgaider is being owned completely here."

No. No, he isn't. OMG! The Codex doesn't like the of a base camp. That doens't mean he's being 'owned'. Moron. Besides, slavery is WRONG. Scumbag. Go join Hitler's dead army. You fuckin' peace of slave holding loving shit.


P.S. I don't care about base camps either. In fact, I stated that on the BIO boards in the thread this thread quotes to start. LOL However, it's just a difference of opinion.

Idiot.

 

[Dgaider]

That's where that infamous choices & consequences thing kicks in. Is it any more realistic though that a lot of people are willing to drop everything and travel with you, patiently waiting for you at the base camp, despite the fact that you rarely/never use their services?

Not more, perhaps, but certainly not less... and the camp allows us to do other things, as well. If you have suggestions for something we could try to make the camp more palatable, I'm all ears, but I don't see it as being any better to have your party members sitting around elsewhere for you to approach (and having them wander off to do their own thing simply so they aren't available when you need them would probably be very annoying, I suspect).

Purely out of curiosity, would the plot make no sense at all without the timely help of some plot-critical NPCs? Wouldn't it be cool to replay the game with different NPCs and get a different perspective on the events from them? Your answer doesn't have to be about DA, but about story-driven games in general.

Well, as far as DA goes, you have plenty of party members to try it out with or not -- even the plot-critical ones don't have to impact on you very much outside of the reasons they are present. Speaking about story-driven games in general, I don't know that it's any vast improvement to make it so that all party members are ancillary to the plot, but in a larger sense I think it would be an improvement for our design to be less heavy-handed overall. I'm not a fan of sandbox games, but there is a middle ground to approach where the player's personal story is at least as important as our own... and, believe it or not, I think that is actually where we're slowly headed.

I think that a base "prisoners" camp is kinda obtrusive, but maybe that's just me.

Easy to say, and easy to imagine in a poor light I have no doubt. Given that we want the other benefits, however, what is the alternative?

 

[Dgaider]

You need to get a better picture up online

Shut up, bitch. I would kill for that much hair.

Dgaider is being owned completely here.

It looks like "be as inobtrusive as you can make it" is the same as being completely irrelevant. Just read tha pretty story is all that maters.

I don't get it. In what way is the camp irrelevant? I just finished saying that it has several uses, even ignoring the convenience it offers.

You do know what irrelevant means, don't you? You managed to spell it correctly, so I assume you must have access to a dictionary of some kind (since a spell-checker is out of the question, considering the rest of your posts). From the last time we spoke I know that logic is a real stretch for you, elander, but for your sake you might want to try a little harder from time to time. Just a helpful suggestion, feel free to ignore it. :D

 

[kris]

but I don't see it as being any better to have your party members sitting around elsewhere for you to approach (and having them wander off to do their own thing simply so they aren't available when you need them would probably be very annoying, I suspect).

Should be a tighter limit IMO.

But I have another question, will this bas camp mean that the game is railroaded or will you still be able to get back and forth more like the BG games? More like, will it be the JE almost linear style, or KOTOR 1-1-4-1-1 style or like BG with a more open choice, but "phasing".

 

[Vault Dweller]

If you have suggestions for something we could try to make the camp more palatable, I'm all ears, but I don't see it as being any better to have your party members sitting around elsewhere for you to approach...

Well, that's the thing. If they sit around elsewhere, they are not your party members, are they?

As for suggestions, if the base setup is a must, then I'd like to see something like:

- reasons for the party members to form the camp, i.e. convincing answers to the question "don't you people have *anything* better to do than follow me around all day?"

- reasons for you to travel with this circus, i.e. what can you do for me? Something unique, something that I can't get elsewhere, something that would justify the circus (unique perks, spells, item - not armor/weapon, but maybe a map, part of the key; a money making scheme, etc). Going with Bio focus on uber items, maybe a weapon that all of the party member - the entire circus - can contribute to: one guy can work with rare ore, another guy knows a tempering technique, someone else can balance it, etc. Maybe taking care of the loot - selling what you don't need (through a dedicated trader in the party), buying supplies, etc.

- speaking of circus, it would be nice if they can do something together, as a group. I mean, you have a large group (8-10?) of very capable people travelling together. Then you pick two (?) and go adventuring. What are the other 5-7 people doing? It would be great, if you were presented with some minor tasks (text adventure or the actual gameplay) for money (to feed the camp) or out of goodness of your combined hearts. You would decide what tasks to take, what side to take, and would assign duties. The success rate would depend on whom you send, what instuctions you give, personalities, etc. Going with KOTOR's Juhani example, if you send a guardian-like character, he would kill her, while if you send a consular, he would resolve it differently. A simple situation, yet it may add a lot to the camp idea, I think.

Easy to say, and easy to imagine in a poor light I have no doubt. Given that we want the other benefits, however, what is the alternative?

Btw, what's wrong with the 6-character setup? What's with the 3-character parties everywhere?

 

[elander_]

You do know what irrelevant means, don't you? You managed to spell it correctly, so I assume you must have access to a dictionary of some kind (since a spell-checker is out of the question, considering the rest of your posts).

No fucking kidding, did i miss doubling some dds or tts properly? This argument is allways so gay.

From the last time we spoke I know that logic is a real stretch for you, elander, but for your sake you might want to try a little harder from time to time. Just a helpful suggestion, feel free to ignore it. :D

First try to counter-argue properly then i will try harder.

I don't get it. In what way is the camp irrelevant? I just finished saying that it has several uses, even ignoring the convenience it offers.

I think that what VD was trying to tell is that a camp, in a role-playing game, needs to feel and play like a camp and not just look like one.

The "be as inobtrusive as you can make it" comment imideatly trigered the idea this game can be just another Oblivion where you can be anything and have no restrictions no mater what character you choose. You just have to pile the necessary amount of corpses in your path and the world is yours no mater what you do.

A role-playing game needs characters to have frailities that stick to him and puts real obstacles in the path of the player character that depend on the player character creation choices and background to make the experience more alive and realistic. Consequences that stick to the player is also something that makes an rpg world feel more realistic and interesting.

But new gamers don't like frailities or obstacles or dealing with the consequences of their actions. So what are you going to do? Make an Oblivion game or loose your precious money? Will the main plot be completely linear and equal for every character you choose? This is the kind of questions i would like to see someone answer.

 

[Crichton]

Quote:
Easy to say, and easy to imagine in a poor light I have no doubt. Given that we want the other benefits, however, what is the alternative?

Btw, what's wrong with the 6-character setup? What's with the 3-character parties everywhere?

I think this is the crux of the matter, I don't know what one can do to avoid the problems of the "travelling carnival of NPCs you hate" while keeping the benefits because I don't really know what those benefits are.

The simplest explanation that might help would be something like having the PC only being the pointman of the group and not the leader, so, to keep the analogy, everyone on the ebon hawk admits that 'you tha man!', but you can't space the old bitch because the captain respects her and it's his ship, not yours.

 

[Veracity]

Well, that's the thing. If they sit around elsewhere, they are not your party members, are they?

How are they not? I want to pick up the foul-mouthed dwarf in BG2 for just long enough to do his mini-quest, because I'm roleplaying a relentless XP-whoring min-maxer, so I drop a character to make room. Not realizing she's one of the few that can't conveniently be put into storage at the usual hub (that tavern place), I boot Mazzy and she waltzes off all the way to...Trademeet? Do the dwarf's murder/package retrieval/graverobbing thing (ka-ching!), boot him, traipse over to Trademeet a character short, get Mary Poppins back.

Sure, I can pretend in my head that Mazzy's been attending to her own affairs during the intervening few days (and I can roleplay Batman in Oblivion), but I know damned well all she's really been doing, to put it as gratuitously immersion-breakingly as possible, is sitting in memory waiting to respawn in her house if I want her back. At no point is she not 'mine'...which came out much creepier than intended. Moving on...

This possibly amounts to my failure adequately to suspend disbelief (which I'm exaggerating, obviously). Handling the reserve party in a way that avoids, as much as possible, breaking basic rules of the setting is important - the convenience-over-sense extreme would be, say, a drag-and-drop interface that lets me switch members in and out of the active party at will, completely disregarding whatever movement time or other issues they should need to overcome to reach my position under the game's normal travel rules. That trek to Trademeet and back cost some days - I didn't notice that ever mattering much in BG2 in particular, but it could easily be prohibitive in the face of an important time limit. If the locked door in your example occurs in the middle of some timed event, I can't go back for a rogue, so either the thug bashes the door in, or I live without whatever's behind it - or have the sense to have brought a rogue into uncharted territory in the first place. But this can just as well be achieved by attaching a similar time cost to switching members via the 'camp', whatever exactly it is. As long as it's plausibly justified, I don't really see that the reserve NPCs clustering in one place is inherently more objectionable than any other scheme - they're still clearly just reserve NPCs, either way. Maybe your objection was specifically to a camp with a lack of adequate justification, not to its mere existence, in which case I'm just rambling about nothing.

I would be interested to see recruitable NPCs actually go off and pursue their own agendas when not with the player, but I think that's heading way off into highly-simulated world territory, which is (probably) out of the question technologically, and (almost certainly) not going to get funded, since no-one with designs on the mainstream market is going to touch a mechanic that requires players actually to track down recruitable NPCs again if they want them back, never mind one that might kill them in the player's absence. I'm happy enough settling for NPCs that show some semblance of independence while they're in the active party - I think having them turn on the player character under appropriate circumstances is highly desirable, assuming the PC isn't manipulative enough to work round it. I also like NPCs that'll turn on one another. Considering a lot of people seem to play BG2 with that kind of stuff hacked out so they can just arrange a party of their choice irrespective of glaring conflicts, it may be overly optimistic to expect Bioware to go near it again.

It's hard to say in very generic terms what would make a 'camp' interesting, but I would think some kind of resource management might be a start. Give the thing an upkeep cost and a need to be guarded, let the player assign duties like foraging and equipment maintenance (ok, that's probably not in at all, but it's an example of sorts) that can increase or reduce costs. Make it possible and desirable to move people into reserve for healing purposes, requiring a choice as to whether your best healer goes with you into the fray or stays back at camp because you need that half-dead archer back in a hurry. This is all a bit vague - more generally, I'd say the key thing is just that it should be well integrated into the world so as not to be too obviously a portable party holder, even if that's ultimately the core reason it's there.

At the risk of derailing, why is Kreia such a standard example of a chewing-gum-on-the-ass NPC? I had no such problem with her, though there're quite a few things I found inoffensive in KOTOR2 about which I'm clearly wrong or otherwise peculiar.

 

[obediah]

Easy to say, and easy to imagine in a poor light I have no doubt. Given that we want the other benefits, however, what is the alternative?

Btw, what's wrong with the 6-character setup? What's with the 3-character parties everywhere?

God, I miss parties. I don't prefer, but I can respect the loner rp-heavy setup (like Bloodlines, or AoD). The lobotomized 2-4 character teams is just an insult to everything that made the gold box games, Wasteland, the M&M's, X-COM, JA, etc... It's like if all the jigsaw puzzles were pulled from the market, leaving only the todder toys with 4 geometric shapes.

 

[aboyd]

At the risk of derailing, why is Kreia such a standard example of a chewing-gum-on-the-ass NPC? I had no such problem with her, though there're quite a few things I found inoffensive in KOTOR2 about which I'm clearly wrong or otherwise peculiar.

Well, here was my reaction to Kreia when I first came across her:

http://www.rpgcodex.com/phpBB/viewtopic ... 886#234886

...to be honest, I've still not finished the game. I get the feeling from some spoilerish comments here & there that she might be a bad guy in the end. If that's true, then the fact that my character picked up on it at the start, tried to get the hell away from her, and was STILL stuck with her anyway, is just lame. In fact, it's part of the reason why I've not finished. I got stuck with NPCs that my own character would have ignored or cut down. That felt very JRPG to me, very railroaded.

(I felt that a little with Imoen too -- your character is damn well going to save her, like it or not. However, at least the game made a half-hearted attempt to provide multiple motivations for the player to choose from. I may be mistaken, but I believe that there is a mod that adds more dialogue choices that helps to provide even better motivations. In any case, the point is that some things are railroaded a bit too much, and with Kreia, I felt that they went too far.)

-Tony

 

[EEVIAC]

I'm not sure I get VD's problem with the whole circus thing. Why does every party member need a special skill? If Keith Richards approached you and said "come live in my mansion and snort coke and root supermodels" you'd probably say yes.

 

[Jed]

What next? No choice necessary with equipment? A giant shared inventory with no weight or slot restrictions, shared by all characters with every item available at all times?

Oh wait, KotOR.

Now let's see what other last vestiges of choice and consequence can we stamp out ...

 

[Crichton]

At the risk of derailing, why is Kreia such a standard example of a chewing-gum-on-the-ass NPC? I had no such problem with her, though there're quite a few things I found inoffensive in KOTOR2 about which I'm clearly wrong or otherwise peculiar.

1) There's no reason she has to be along, unlike say bastilla (sp?) in KOTOR, she's not my intermediary with the republic or something, I'm completely on my own and I should be able to decide who I want to take with me on my odessy of self-discovery.

2) The game makes a big deal about how you get to "CHOOSE BETWEEN LIGHT AND DARK!!!!11", so I'm a good jedi, doing good things, and I've got this evil bitch tagging along telling me that I shouldn't attract unwanted attention by helping others, and I can't tell her to go away. I didn't join the kreia army and make it my mission to protect her; I didn't ask her to come along for my thing, and yet our "force bond" means that the Paladin and the old witch have to work together as the intergalatic odd couple. The evil robot was annoying too.

 

[Sarvis]

What next? No choice necessary with equipment? A giant shared inventory with no weight or slot restrictions, shared by all characters with every item available at all times?

Oh wait, KotOR.

Now let's see what other last vestiges of choice and consequence can we stamp out ...

Why do you seem to think that tedious inventory management is fun?

 

[obediah]

What next? No choice necessary with equipment? A giant shared inventory with no weight or slot restrictions, shared by all characters with every item available at all times?

Oh wait, KotOR.

Now let's see what other last vestiges of choice and consequence can we stamp out ...

Why do you seem to think that tedious inventory management is fun?

Especially ammo. I hope they take a cue from DE:IW on that one.

Believe it or not, some people like ...well adventuring would be the best word for it. Putting together and equipping a party and sending them out in the wilderness in search of treasure or saving a maiden or whatnot. Some people even want to deal with food, sleep, and the elements.

 

[Jed]

"Tedious inventory management"? So you think it's TEH ROELPLAYING to have every item you've encountered in the game available to you at all times, to never have to plan, to never have to make choices, to never have to deal with the consequences of any of those choices?

Would you prefer not even having to find equipment? How about every item is available to you from the get go. Y'know, maybe talking to NPCs is tedious, too. How about having the journal prefilled with information and quests so you don't have to bother. Dying is inconvenient, party management is now inconvenient, and you know, combat sure can be a chore as well. Why don't we just have auto resolve in the PC's favor? Hell, for that matter, I can see a couple more "next generation blockbuster" games down the road and BioWare will have a button labeled "Win Game" available from the start. Talk about accessible to a wider audience!

Really, Sarvis, it sounds like playing RPGs is getting too "tedious." Maybe you should just stick to watching movies or reading books.

 

[Sarvis]

So you think it's TEH ROELPLAYING

Not at all what I said. In fact, you've argued with me about RPGs in the past to know that my stance on the matter is that it's impossible to roleplay in a video game.

to have every item you've encountered in the game available to you at all times, to never have to plan, to never have to make choices, to never have to deal with the consequences of any of those choices?

Consequences of those choices? From INVENTORY MANAGEMENT? What are you, some emo bitch? Oh noes, my healing potion is on the other character. Woe is me! Seriously, that's the dumbest thing I've ever heard.

Would you prefer not even having to find equipment? How about every item is available to you from the get go. Y'know, maybe talking to NPCs is tedious, too. How about having the journal prefilled with information and quests so you don't have to bother. Dying is inconvenient, party management is now inconvenient, and you know, combat sure can be a chore as well. Why don't we just have auto resolve in the PC's favor? Hell, for that matter, I can see a couple more "next generation blockbuster" games down the road and BioWare will have a button labeled "Win Game" available from the start. Talk about accessible to a wider audience!

Yeah, all those things are on the same level. Taking away the entire game is definately the same thing as not forcing the player to spend ten minutes fiddling with an inventory screen, which for some reason always has a shitty interface, trying to sort things to open up a slot large enough for that magical cloth shirt to fit because it somehow takes up just as much room as a full suit of fucking platemail. WHEE! That's so much like the challenge from combat or the pleasure of collecting that we can't not have it! There'd be no roleplaying without having to sort! Fuck that, LAUNDRY is the best RPG ever because you have to SORT properly or deal with the CONSEQUENCES of pink underwear!



How about a logical fucking idea? Make anything that has to be used in combat be placed on a "belt" for each character so that character can access it. Then throw all the other crap in a big pile so you don't have to stop every combat and spend ten minutes rearranging inventory slots. Or you could just rant about how that violates your precious, yet nonexistant, roleplaying.

 

[Jed]

Or you could just rant about how that violates your precious, yet nonexistant, roleplaying.

A) What the fuck are you talking about, and B) why the fuck are you here?

 

[Sarvis]

Or you could just rant about how that violates your precious, yet nonexistant, roleplaying.

A) What the fuck are you talking about, and B) why the fuck are you here?

We've been through both of those, not my fault if your memory is as anemic as your logic.

 

[Jed]

Here's some anemic logic, repeated with quest compass since you didn't get the implication before: If you believe computer role-playing games don't exist, why are you posting on the Role-Playing Games Codex?

Oh, and EDIT- It's not a memory issue, I just usually skip your posts.

 

[Shoelip]

I've gotta say that a great inventory system doesn't mean shit to me if the narrative sucks. To me, choices in narrative/plot progression are alot more important than choices in what item you want to carry.