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[upsettingshorts]

So I've been at PAX for almost all the panels, and I have some time to kill.  I can answer any questions the developers themselves have answered in one way or another. 

Fire away and stuff, if you want.

[Allan Schumacher]

Thanks for doing this guys (I see a few have chimed in for answers.)
In random news... I have a craving for shrimp.... 

[Allan Schumacher]

We still want to maintain some level of distinction between classes.

For things like the mage staff, IIRC (since I occasionally make lore errors.... >_>) the staff is a big part of the mage's magical ability. I know the combat guys were exploring some newer approaches to staves and how they work, but it is still quite early for those details so things are in flux and I cannot comment too much on it.

[Allan Schumacher]

Nope.

[Allan Schumacher]

Pseudocognition wrote...

Marek-B wrote...

Will you be able to split your group on a wider range within an area?
For example in the demo: can we try to save the village AND protect the keep at the same time (e.g. with 2 party members each)?

This was discussed actually and the answer was that there will have to be a limit to how far you can split the party for technical reasons. The specific distance is unknown and probably something they're still working on. I'm no technical expert so someone can step in to clarify if I'm completely wrong, but with frostbite's streaming, the game has to keep the area around the party members loaded so you can switch to them instantly. However, there's only so much a computer can handle having loaded at once. So if you split the party four ways and send them to four corners of the map and a certain radius around each character has to remain loaded... that's not a happy computer.

Yeah.  Just to expand: we have really large levels, which is awesome.  Part of that is because of how well Frostbite can stream, which is also awesome.  This means that at any given point, your computer only has local content loaded and that all will take a certain amount of memory.  Moving farther apart will cause more stuff to be loaded, and that's less awesome as you run out of it and Thedas explodes.

Large scale party separation would be similar to hoping that DAO/DA2 let you have active party members in completely different levels.

On some level player can obviously separate his or her party, but it will have some sort of tether on it to cap the distance.

[Allan Schumacher]

Well Schumacher didn't like my comments.
A tad touchy aren't you ?

Given that I did absolutely nothing to your comments (you can see your original post remains completely untouched), it's more a testament that the person quoted saw that your comments and deemed them ridiculous.

While I agree with the assessment of Pseudocognition, if your intention is to continue to call me out for stuff, then incorrectly conclude that I am feeling touchy based on your own inability to recognize what actually happened, you will find that I do indeed start to get annoyed.

Note... I am reciprocating a call out with this post.  So now we're even.  Do *not* reciprocate in kind, nor continue to derail the thread further.

Thank you.

option to have the LI on a leash

you know.....so she does not get lost -coughs-

This would only happen if the LI were, so to speak, into that type of stuff.  Unfortunately, I suspect most of them are not going to be this way.

[Allan Schumacher]

ArenCordial wrote...

Hey Allan,

If you don't mind I was just trying to get some clarification on combat.

We
saw the tactical non-action overhead mode and the over the shoulder
action mode. Gamespot said you can mix and match. Does that mean you
can go ots non-action and overhead action? Or did that simply mean you
can swap between the two modes?

ArenCordial wrote...

devSin wrote...

I believe Mike already said you can resolve combat entirely in tactical view, if you choose.

Yeah I caught that.  I was curious if I could play ots with just clicking on my abilities bar like DAO and DA2.

First off, I must preface that you can still expect a lot of changes as polish and iteration happens.  Still a year or so to go until launch.

I believe as the system currently stands, you could effectively play through the entire game in the tactical camera mode, though to progress through the non-combat parts you'd still need to activate the "engage" mode to allow time to elapse.  It's probably be a bit cumbersome (and I'm on a holiday now for a couple weeks so cannot verify, but I suspect there's issues such as the conversation system not behaving nicely with the camera changes and stuff like that).

Currently the OTS mode behaves roughly similar to DAO Console and DA2 OTS.  In that I am pretty sure that the character the player has selected will require input.  Though that may not always be the case and it may be possible to allow for a more "let the combat resolve itself like tactical mode" in OTS as well.  Don't know how it will play out.  Although I wouldn't be surprised if you could just click your abilities since part of that is moving into range if necessary.


It's still a pretty fresh system.  Sometime in the last 4-8 weeks or so, the tactical combat perspective was merely a twinkle in the combat team's eye.  It didn't exist at all.  So what you saw was still a pretty early implementation (though an awesome one as far as I'm concerned).  It's honestly probably reasonably shippable at this point, though the ability to start tweaking things and playing around with what is there is now present, where it wasn't before.

Modifié par Allan Schumacher, 04 septembre 2013 - 06:27 .

[Allan Schumacher]

Savber100 wrote...

Question to Allan: Can we receive clarifications on the concern that the Red Templar would just be another mindless villian mooks that had been turned evil by some contrived plot device (e.g. indoctrination on Cerberus)? Are the villains we fight have deeper motivations or are like 75% just mindless bandits/insane people?

This isn't something I'm actually all that qualified to confirm, to be honest.  If I were, however, I'd still skip it because assumptions run rampant without full details and at this point things like story, romances, and stuff like that are still pretty hush hush.  Sorry.

In the demo we had the Human Inquisitor, Cassandra, Vivienne &
Varric. Now say Varric gets into some trouble while fighting. So can the
Two Handed Inquisitor use his "Get over here !" grapple hook-chain to
pull Varric out of that tight spot ?

Can we use abilities like the grappling hook on our allies..?

Interesting thought and suggestion.  Right now the ability only targets hostiles.  Though, if I were to put on my amateur designer hat, I think it'd be an interesting idea for a branch/upgrade in skill system.  I suppose I could annoy someone like Josh or Mike...

[Allan Schumacher]

Rylor Tormtor wrote...

So we have seen the over the shoulder camera view, and the zoomed out "tactical" view, but I have not been to tell if it is an "either/or" scenario, or if we can zoom out to in between the two. Basically, is the camera control binary (action/tactical) or can you stop it at any point in the zoom process?

It is binary in that you switch between two systems.  Although it is actually possible to push the tactical camera to a much lower angle.  I know there was some talk about what the constraints are, so your mileage may vary in the shipped product over whether or not you feel you can sufficiently push it to an OTS type of perspective.

Blair didn't do much of that in the demo, in part because there was finite time and the general beat we were looking to push was "look, we have brought it back" rather than exploring the system in depth.  If you were to tweet Mike Laidlaw, you'd probably get an answer as to whether or not they plan on doing some sort of deep dive presentation in the future. 

[Allan Schumacher]

Chanda wrote...

Allan, one question:

Cullen?

I'm sworn to secrecy and adamantly refuse to confirm or deny.  Because I am mean and like watching people debate it :innocent:

[Allan Schumacher]

Korusus wrote...

Well that admission is rather... demoralizing.  It's a good thing you guys delayed the game for a year because I highly doubt I would have played the game otherwise (Dragon Age without a tactical camera mode is like Mass Effect without OTS).  That was a make or break decision for me, so kudos to you guys for making that call.

Keep in mind we knew about the release date push earlier than the E3 announcement stuff, so some stuff would get reorganized.  But yeah, it's probably likely that there wouldn't have been a tactical camera perspective without the move to the release date.

It's important to realize that if we were certain that we would have had an awesome game experience this year, we probably wouldn't have pushed the release date back; we'd just release an awesome game experience.  The delay is lengthy enough, however, for us to make sure we can focus on continuing to improve and add things to the game that will help it become an excellent experience for people.

I can only imagine how many people worked overtime to get a tac cam into
a game that didn't have even the beginnings of one put in in 4-8 weeks.
But everyone on the panel felt pushed/inspired by the "we need to get
this in so the demo ****ing rocks peoples socks off" motivation.

There's a healthy amount of "I really want this in the game" motivation too.  I can't speak for the whole tactical combat team, but it's definitely one of the features I was hoping to see come back.