4 réponses à ce sujet

[shenfrey]

Agreed upon?

[Rob Bartel]

buba10 wrote...

Nite77 wrote...

The thing about Stone Prisoner being so integrated is that it originally was supposed to be part of the normal game, and not a DLC. But something happened and it didn't make the final cut. As it stands, I'm happy that it is included now (for free in the CE I bought), in it's finished state. It's quite good piece of work, actually and I rather liked Shale... But not pidgeons

Indeed, its quite clear that Shale was intended to be part of the game.
And although i quite enjoy having him around, i think its a bit silly they make people believe that their getting something  for free.
Same goes for the wardens keep thing, if they had time to make that and bring it out at the same date as the game. Why then dint they just released it with the game, instead of making us pay for or "giving" it for free?

PS. im a huge fan DAO, but i was wondering about this.

I can speak to this a little. Shale was originally designed to be part of the main game that the player would stumble across in Redcliffe. A lot of the banter and interjection lines were written with that in mind and a number of NPCs went as far as having those lines recorded.

Shale posed some serious issues, however, and the project was on a very tight timeline. The existing golem models were too large to fit through doorways, for instance, and posed some problems when party-controlled in combat. The large size was also extremely difficult for our cutscene designers to work around and pretty much every cutscene in the game would be affected. Meanwhile, the golem models also didn't have the full range of animations that a party member requires and their facial structure was poorly-suited to lip-synching. Between that and a variety of other issues (a complex custom inventory proposal, no clear design for custom abilities, etc), the team made the correct decision to cut Shale from the core game.

I was brought onto the Dragon Age PRC team after that decision was made (previously, I had been heading up the NWN PRC team and working on another unannounced project that had recently been canceled). Shale was recommended as a piece of content that could potentially be salvaged for use as PRC. Looking at the scope of the problems surrounding Shale, I actually made the recommendation that we not proceed. In the end, Shale's humor and story and inherent value won the day and we decided to gamble everything and go ahead.

Emergency meetings were held and the artists and animators burned a ridiculous amount of midnight oil (after just coming off crunch time to finish their work on the main game) to shrink Shale down to Qunari size, sink the head so that its eye level matched that of a human, apply the Dwarven overlay animations to account for a slightly stockier body, and merge the Qunari and golem animation rigs. Programming went the extra mile to provide the animators with a means of excluding some of the more emotive or "human" animations that just didn't look right for Shale (no on likes a bum-scratching golem). The cutscene designers still had to make a pass through every cutscene in the game but these changes brought the required fixes down to a manageable level.

Meanwhile, Design simplified the inventory GUI plans down to leverage the existing interface already being used by Dog. Shale's talent tree was designed and redesigned multiple times to minimize the impact on core scripts, which were already under a tight lockdown. The VFX for Shale's crystals piggybacked on an unexpected node inheritance bug that we decided to approach as a feature (if you want to see the bug/feature in action, try casting Flame Weapon on Dog :innocent:). Shale's dialog (which fortunately hadn't been recorded yet) was rewritten to account for her removal from Redcliffe and the changes to her character art and inventory systems. The level artists went to town creating Honnleath, the Cellars, and Cadash Thaig.

The vast majority of this took place after the PC version had entered a tight lockdown and the core DA:O team had moved onto the console versions or over to Mass Effect 2. It wouldn't have been possible without the additional manpower made available as a result of our very difficult decision to cancel the project I had formerly been on. Even with that additional manpower, there's no way that content would have made it fully onto the disc rather than via download (some aspects did make it onto the disc but most of those were the elements that had already been created as part of Shale's initial design). In the end, it was an extremely high risk gamble and, right until the very end, emerging problems and unexpected issues threatened to derail the Shale project entirely. Fortunately, it all worked out (by the skin of our teeth!) and we were able to have Shale available for download at the time of launch.

Knowing that Shale had previously been announced as being a part of the main game and knowing that there was the potential for a community backlash if we asked all of you to pay cold hard cash for it at launch, the decision was made to include the redemption code in all new copies of the game. In essence, we're choosing to provide Shale as a "lost leader" and a demonstration in good faith of what's to come with future PRC. A lot of blood, sweat, and tears went into making Shale happen - the fact that the content blends so seamlessly with the rest of the game and looks so effortless is a sign that we did our job right.

Enjoy the game,
Rob

[Rob Bartel]

poofpoof wrote...

Rob Bartel wrote...
I had been heading up the NWN PRC team and working on another unannounced project that had recently been canceled).

care to tell us what it was?

It went by the codename Revolver (entire nonsense - don't read too much into it) and was a multiplatform action-RPG.

poofpoof wrote...
good work on the shale quest (as always rob), too bad i couldn't talk to him afterwards without being mysteriously teleported to a black area.

Thanks, and sorry to hear that you're experiencing that particular problem. What's happened is that a plot state's been reset somehow, causing Shale to thinks its back as a statue in Honnleath. When the conversation looks for the corresponding cutscene stage, it can't find it and it therefore jumps you to the neutral 0,0,0 coordinate for the area (which is often way off in the middle of nowhere).

We've been investigating it internally and initially we thought it was due to the issue where a toolset export resets the GUID but that doesn't appear to be the case. We now suspect that it's due to the authorization de-synch issue. In theory, if you back up to a savegame from before that de-synch occurred on your machine, everything should go back to normal. The team is aware of the issue and is working on it but, from what I understand, we don't have a solution in place yet. You can track the current status of the issue in the tech support forums.

[Rob Bartel]

GravityParade wrote...
Will future DLC be content the size of Circle Tower, Elven Ruins, Deep Roads, etc...? I would pay money over and over again just to get new and interesting dungeons. The dungeons are great in this game.

The goal with future DLC is to provide as wide a range of content as possible. Expect some content to be larger than what you're used to and some to be smaller.

That was one of the things we learned from the NWN Premium Module program, where we painted ourselves into a bit of a corner by assuming a "one size fits all" approach. For Dragon Age, we hope to be a little more nimble.

[Rob Bartel]

Frumyfrenzy wrote...

Since this thread has some attention:

Will future DLC be woven into Dragon Age like "Stone Prisoner"?
How does Bioware evaluate this "blending into existing content" approach (Stone Prisoner) compared to the simple adding of a seperate and new location + seperate story (Wardens Keep)?

Again, we hope to take a mix of approaches. From a technical perspective, however, it will be very difficult to integrate future content to the same extent we were able to with "The Stone Prisoner." While it wouldn't have been possible to include Shale on the disc, Shale definitely benefitted from being originally planned and partially implemented as part of the main game. That said, I think you'll be pleased with the degree of integration we're achieving for some of the content we currently have in development.