Dragon Age: Origins Forum Activity

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Written by BuckGB on April 5th, 2009

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You're not getting scabbards.

The main reason is that they would require a host of additional animation, not clipping. Games will always have clipping. You work to minimize it, but you don't overfocus on it, it's really not that important.

They'd only work for mid sized sword type weapons, all other weapons would require a different set of animation and assets for all humanoid rigs to work, all not really adding anything to the game mechanics.

Yes, I know, everyone likes to complain how minor feature (a) is really so important for their immersion, but frankly ... if we'd listen to every single one of these complaints, we'd never ship a game.

If you feel it is so vital to have scabbards in a game, I think your only recourse it to join the gaming industry, work your way up into a deciding role and make your dream feature become reality.

Realisticly, there is not much more you can do about it, even if you were to vote with your wallet and not buy the game because there are no scabbards, I doubt scabbards would show up on the marketing and sales people's radar when they analyze the sales performance of the game.

Sorry to be that blunt about it, but at least we got that one settled now :).

...

That's actually easy to explain:

Right now the same drawing animation can be used for all weapon s within a style (axes, maces, longswords, daggers, etc.)

Scabbards don't work for maces and axes, so we would have to create an exception for them, which means additional animations on all humanoid rigs.

Sure, but neither does any other feature (or lack thereof) in isolation. No one buys a game simply due to the inclusion or exclusion of realistic scabbards, or click-to-move, or NPC schedules, or cloaks. People buy games because they're fun and exciting and intriguing fun and challenging (and did I mention fun?). The existence or non-existence of a scabbard is merely cosmetic and doesn't affect fun very much, and even if it did, it would only do so for the hour or so when you first play the game that you're actually focusing on the scabbard. After that, you'd be too engrossed in the story and too engaged in combat, party member interaction, inventory, and whatever actually matters in the game to think about the scabbards again.

And yes, some people like to complain about every little thing, but Game development is not a democracy. Ultimately, the player will have to put some kind of faith and trust in the developer to make a good product, even if you don't like some parts of it or can't understand why we'd do something like "that." We have made games before, you know, and we do have some idea of what players like and what kind of game we're making.

That said, it would be a dull forum indeed if we all agreed on absolutely everything.

Hi.

I'm just going to ignore the hostile undertone of your post, sorry, flamebaits don't work here.

We're not ready to announce anything specific regarding post release processes such as support and updates yet, but we will in time.

Since Dragon Age: Origins is planned as the starting point of a franchise, we have a vested interest to offer not only an excellent initial to our customers, but also to make sure we have the infrastructure and means in place to support the game with post release updates and new content.

In regards to stability and technical issues - we're using all available polish time to ensure that we're delivering a kick *** stable experience on launch day. Obviously hardware, driver and software complexity, at least on the PC, always makes for interesting surprises after launch, but with access to resources such as the EA compatibility lab, we believe we have a better shot than ever before at succeeding.

As for any question regarding rights management or technical requirements, it is too early to answer that and any discussion regarding these topics is premature and will result in a thread being locked.

Basically, it means we hope that Dragon Age will produce more than just one game.

While we are focussed on making Dragon Age Origins the absolute best game it can be, we hope that there are opportunities for further development in the world of Dragon Age. Whether that developement comes as expansions, sequels, books, movies, toys or whatever.

Already David Gaider has written a very good book called Dragon Age: The Stolen Throne, which is the first "part" of the Dragon Age franchise to reach the public and we obviously have Dragon Age Origins in the works for later this year. What other franchse opportunites occur, we'll have to see.

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