[TrashMan]

http://www.1up.com/do/newsStory?cId=3154863

[Polpolion]

I am honestly not really impressed with the visual quality.

[vyper]

Looks Oblivion-esque.

[Flipside]

It actually looks very much like Gothic 3, I only hope it's more stable.

[Mefustae]

For a thread with a title in all-capitals, I was expecting the screenshot to be a lot better.

[Turnsky]

those textures look rather plain.

that shot looks....underwhelming

[Deepblue]

Doesn't look anywhere near as good as Mass Effect...

What the heck.

[Turnsky]

Doesn't look anywhere near as good as Mass Effect...

What the heck.

that's because mass effect uses onna the unreal engine iterations.

[Prophet]

Once again I am amazed at you guys. If it's first shot, then could there be a possibility that the game is not yet finished? As in BETA? How many of you candyeyed mother****ers have a rig that could run that thing full details on? And the textures really are no good reason to ***** about. If the game is good, fans will re-do them regardless, wheter they are good or bad.

Maybe I have been playing good games so long that a single screenshot doesn't really tell me anything. Other than that it won't run on my computer.

[Herra Tohtori]

Being resized to 800x640 resolution might also have some slight effect as to why that screenshot may not look all that spectacular.

[Turnsky]

Once again I am amazed at you guys. If it's first shot, then could there be a possibility that the game is not yet finished? As in BETA? How many of you candyeyed mother****ers have a rig that could run that thing full details on? And the textures really are no good reason to ***** about. If the game is good, fans will re-do them regardless, wheter they are good or bad.

Maybe I have been playing good games so long that a single screenshot doesn't really tell me anything. Other than that it won't run on my computer.

jebus man, don't get your panties in a bunch, i don't really care either way, for the excitation of the first post of this thread, as well as its title, it doesn't warrent a reaction like that from a screenshot that not only doesn't look all that great, but also doesn't tell us much about the game, or what state of being it's in.
i, myself personally don't see what all the excitement is about, i could say the same about anything. really, jury's out until i've actually played it, screenshots are nothing compared to seeing it with your own eyes, and in motion.

[Prophet]

I don't know **** about the game. This was the first time I heared about the game, and interest levels remain the same as before (nothing). Since I don't have any information about the game, I will not form any opinions about the game whatsoever.

The reason for my post was that people say haw poor that shot is. I think it is unfair considering the circumstances. Furthermore my eye didn't see anything worth *****ing for in the picture. It might be that I pay attention on other things than textures. Or it may be that some people pay too much attention on things that I consider irrelevant. Either way, I couldn't care less.

My bottom line is that one screenshot shouldn't be enought to judge anything, no matter how bad it would look. One screenshot shouldn't be enought for Trashman to get all hyped up.

[Flipside]

No-ones really saying it looks bad as such, they are saying it looks very similar to Oblivion/Gothic etc. I don't think anyones actually suggested that because the graphics look average in that shot that it is a bad game or anything.

I think people are saying that, from the full caps title etc, something special was expected, from the shot that we see, it doesn't look special. It might be a great game to play, but that picture gives nothing away except for the graphics are on par with Oblivion. Personally, I don't see that as an insult in the first place.

[Gloriano]

Remember this game comes early 2008 or earlier so they have quite a lot time to tweak graphics that screenshot is not very impressive but i think it's from early build.

[TrashMan]

Allow me to shed some light on the matter.

David Graider, lead designer at Bioware told me that the date in the magazine is false as they havn't set a date yet. It might be a yer and half, it might be 2 or whatever.

That screenshot was taken from the latest alpha build, and the devs said there's still a lot of work to do, so don't take this screenshot as a definite..

As fo DA itself, it's a spiritual sucessor to Baldurs Gate, KOTOR and NWN.
It's NOT D&D, Bioware has come up with their own system (details very sketchy at this point)

The world is also of their making and it seems they prepared for a project like this for a long time, since they have thousands upon thousands of pages of backgorund info, histroy and everything else. They also hired linguists and experts from other fields.

As far as I understand they want to maek the game as atmospheric as possible and closer to our world. Tehre is no proof of Gods existance in THEDAS (The Dragon age Setting), and definately nothing that can be called "devine magic".  So there are no paladins, alltough there will be a "similar" class.
It's a low-magic setting where magical itmes are rare and powerfull.

Party numbers are uncertain, ranging from 2 to 6, probably 4.



Here's a few interesting quotes from the Dev's:

Take a simpler example: I had an artist come to me today and tell me he needed to know more about a particular ruin so he could get a better idea of how to concept it. So I proceeded to tell him the basics of the culture of the people who had lived there, what had destroyed that particular place, what brought the players there, etc. He listened but seemed puzzled, and when I asked him why he said, "I really just wanted to know how old it was."

No dwarves don't have any gunpowder. Mind you, they aren't big on the axes, either (chopping is not an activity they have a great need for). There *is* gunpowder in the world, and by that I mean primitive cannons, but it's not the province of the dwarves.

There are some other skills that the dwarves specialize in where they have what might be considered "rudimentary tech"... but it doesn't approach anything like in Warhammer or in the steampunk genre.

Keep in mind the screenshot is still not the final game. Although it is taken from the latest build's in game footage, by the time the game is actually released things could change. GUI elements can be altered, graphics will improve, etc. It looks good now, but it'll look even better later

We had a company meeting today where Scott and Trent showed off some of the cool newness for DA and one of the little things shown was the shadows. Sure, in the grand scheme of story, art and such, shadows are a tiny detail. But I personally love it when any game gets the little details right. It makes for a more realistic game imo and I was glad to see the work (which may be explained firther in the future) was done on this.

There's no half-anything. The races either breed true, or not at all.


I didn't mean exactly like the Roman Senate.

Our dwarves are more recognizeable than our elves, perhaps, but they're not quite the short subterranean vikings that some might expect. That's all I'm saying.

Tall dwarves would be an oxymoron, wouldn't it?

No, dwarves and elves should be enough like you'd expect in order to justify using the name. Otherwise we may as well just call them pigwigglies or whatever. With that in mind, all I'm saying is that the elves vary more from that norm than the dwarves do.

[Nix]

Well at least it'll be finished.  I got this excited over Trinity and it got canned by Activision cause they wanted more franchised games like Tony Hawk and Call Of Duty...  geh. 

[brozozo]

What was Trinity? I've never heard of it.

[Nix]

Trinity was supposed to be Gray Matter's next new IP title.  After a pretty good run with Return to Castle Wolfenstein, they were working on Trinity.  It was just another FPS, but ithad a few things that made it uniquely interesting. First, was set in New Orleans, swamplands, etc.   It also introduced something new that I've never seen before in an FPS. At that time, bullet time was all the rage (apparently still is with FEAR), but Trinity had something else, where the player could zip from one point to another real quick-like.  I had been thoroughly impressed and satisfied with RTCW right when it came out, and I thought Gray Matter would make Trinity just as well, if not better, but it turned out that Activision canned the project in the middle of production.  The only game out there today that touches this aspect of gaming is TimeShift, which isn't all that good in the first place.  Probably a smashing hit on a console, but it lacks the substance that PC-based FPS's had in the past. 

Sorry to derail the thread....

[TrashMan]

Some more quotes from the Dev's:

I believe the lighting system in the engine is far from finished at this point, so what you're seeing in that screenshot is rudimentary at best.

So if it's so early, I suppose the question is what have we been doing for the last three years? The answer to that is that the various Dragon Age teams have been working on pieces of the engine (and art and design) seperately, and the milestone that we're passing is that it's finally all being put together. So what you're seeing is a really early version of something that you can go into and run around in and actually play -- but functionally at this point it's still two steps forward and one step back. There's a lot of pouonding out of the kinks before all the content that's been in the making can be put into the engine and all the bells and whistles worked out.

We certainly could have waited until all that was done before we started putting out a peek of the game, sure, but when would that be? Regardless of how much remains to be done, it's really satisfying to see it actually coming together.

The plan is that, yes, Dragon Age would be moddable and that our tools would be available to the end user without prettying them up like in NWN (where accessibility was key), but that plan is completely subject to change. Since putting out a toolset is not part of the project goal like with NWN, it will get looked at more seriously later than other features... so the answer right now is that it's not set.

It's not a matter of whether a gmae is "realistic" or not; it's more to do with consistency of presentation. Game abstractions should seem realistic without actually being realistic. As in the above case of eating and excreting functions, it simply isn't fun to keep a character or party continually fed and/or evacuated. But if a "rest" function is included, that might suffice for an abstraction of daily bathroom and meal breaks, weapons and armour cleaning and maintenance, personal hygiene, and study time or downtime.

Likewise, a combat system isn't necessarily designed to be "realistic." It should, however, be easy to use, relatively balanced for all different levels of difficulty, and above all, fun to play. Whether every single animation corresponds to an attack (as in Jade Empire), or the combat animation is merely a device to keep combat moving while the combat rules work in the background (as in NWN), it is still an abstraction of "real" combat that balances functionality and fun.

In many cases, however, the more "realistic" the system, the less "fun" it becomes. Unlike PnP games, which have a DM to oversee unusual interpretations of rules, bend the rules for story purposes, gloss over huge stretches of time, and make even downtime interesting and fun, CRPGs don't have that luxury. All possible paths and decisions are taken into account and developers devise ways of handling unusual situations if and when they come up. At the very least, developers design a game to minimize the number of unusual situations that might require extensive explanation, unique game resources, or take up too much "game time."

For example, yes it's a lot more fun to be able to get past the guard using stealth, pickpocketing, a trap, an arrow, convincing a beggar to cause a commotion, imitating a lady's cries for help, Three Stooges slapstick, levitating over him, climbing a wall, navigating a dark sewer, or teleporting, but a developer then has to actually make all of those things work. This is why when we sometimes talk about game options, we talk in terms of story length and breadth. The more options you have (ie. the wider a game is), the less time and resources you have to make a long story.

It's the difference between Morrowind (whose critical path wasn't very long but there were near unlimited options for getting there) and Final Fantasy (whose story is very complex and long, but have very few side quests or story paths [minigames are time-consuming but don't deviate too much fromt he story]).

[Colonol Dekker]

Dragons are pants...................Dragons suck