Dragon Age - 20 Minute Look @ Giant Bomb
 

They call this a Quick Look over at Giant Bomb but 20 minutes of gameplay footage is fairly substantial. The video concentrates on combat from an early part of the game and is spoiler free but you get a good feel for the menus and general flow and is well worth a look.
Thanks, leth!
More information.

Hmmmm.. I do like indoor combat more than outdoor. Looks nice.

Ya that looks real nice.

Frankly, this game is starting to look better and better.

Damn.

Nice video.

Just need to make the fog dx10 to prevent the horrible slab effect ;)

Frankly, this game is looking worse and worse.

Damn.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Seriously, how much more derivative of the D&D universe can they get? Looks like NWN 3.0 nothing more. Coupled with the horrendous advertisements and "everything is bloody" motif, I find myself dreadfully disappointed.
Mind, I was never a Bioware fan, but I did enjoy Jade Empire. Wonky combat system aside (along with the typical "make a choice, though it hardly matters which" Biowarian design), it was a decent and relatively unique RPG. My expectations for this, however, have plummeted since day one.
Also, what is up with the retard-aka-console-friendly "allies faint when defeated" nonsense? They had best append a permadeath option or count one lost customer.

I don't think they will miss you. Bio has gone mainstream long time ago and I think they are doing well where they are so no reason for them to change.

However I have already pre ordered Dragon Age :)

I enjoyed JE too, for much the same reasons, and I have much the same beefs with BioWare games. However, at their best, they do do certain things better than anyone else out there, and by the looks of it, with DA, they're playing to their strengths.

Originality, maturity, or cutting-edge writing isn't one of them, though.

(Re ally death -- that, IMO, is a red herring. Games have to handle death in some way; having ally perma-death with no possibility of raising them is just stupid, because all it means that you'll be re-re-re-reloading battles, which isn't challenge -- it's lazy game design masquerading as challenge. IMO the only cRPG to handle ally (and PC) death truly elegantly is Planescape: Torment, and that solution isn't easily portable to other games.)

You don't necessarily reload endlessly in that case, as it tends to provoke players into playing smart and with fewer deaths.

A good game design will let smart players avoid death altogether. The really wonderful thing about games that pull this off, is that they not only make you think - they also make you feel good about yourself and make your choices have real meaning. That's something players tend to enjoy immensely, even if they don't realise it at first, cursing the game for being too hard on them.

If you simply revive dead players, you're not only making a non-immersive design choice, you're also taking the easy way out.

However, if death is not avoidable by smart character choices and smart tactical decisions, then naturally you don't want to compound a weak design by punishing players further, forcing them to reload.

The sad thing about this case, as far as I can see, is that Dragon Age SEEMS to be the kind of game that rewards clever players - and as such it's kinda counterproductive to have this insta-revive thing, but such is par for the course when dealing with a large audience that can't be bothered to learn the intricacies of battle and would likely be frustrated with a proper death mechanic.

Anyway, it's not something I can really know until I play the game for myself.

BG2 comes to mind, or was it IWD1/2? One of those or all of them featured hard battles that were pretty much impossible to prepare for in advance if you had never seen them before -- which made re-re-re-reloading part of the strategy. Just from what I've heard, never played them myself (I did play BG2 until some time in chapter 2, but lost all savegames and never tried again).

Great, some more games to put on my "To Play" list, just what I need … ;)

Well there's an economic cost to insta-revive if I understood the commentary correctly - you suffer from injuries if you go down mid-fight, which apply penalties to stats etc.

That's kinda my point. Character and ally death is one part of a big gameplay package. If you want to have ally perma-death in a party-based RPG, you have to structure the gameplay in such a way that it makes sense. Perma-death makes balancing way, way more difficult, in a genre that's already hard to balance because of the variety of character and party builds you can make.

IOW, yeah, I like the idea of ally perma-death as well. However, in practice, I realize how much work it would be to get it working well enough that the game wouldn't be either incredibly frustrating or mindlessly easy; therefore, I recognize that all the effort needed to make it work might be better spent elsewhere.

True. It's sort of the flip side of forcing players to endlessly reload -- just as lazy. Given a choice between lazily implemented perma-death and post-combat revival, I'll take revival; I just don't have the patience for the save-and-load rhumba the former entails.

Didn't DA have some kind of semi-permanent injury system going on, though? I.e., that characters that were knocked out in combat didn't fully heal up until you had a chance to rest, or something? If so, that sounds like a good way to mitigate that design choice and motivate players to play smart.

Kinda stating the obvious there, mate. The remark, on my part, was merely my way of expressing disapproval, nothing more. I had plans to purchase DA on its initial announcement, yet as ever more elaborate videos displaying one feature or another are unveiled, I find them conflicting more and more with what I desire from a "dark and gritty epic roleplaying experience" (to quote their PR blurb).
Hence, too, the very dry copy-edit-paste of DArtagnan's first post.

I can appreciate the distinction and have often made that jump myself: permadeath = quicksave/quickload spam.
However, here I am forced to agree with DArtagnan, whose points I would rehash if only he hadn't so succinctly summed them up already.
In any case I did say permadeath option. By all means, let everyone else play with the system as displayed in the linked-clip, but let me play my way. Seems like the sort of thing they should include in all serious roleplaying games; rather akin to the touted customization aspects of the forthcoming Arcania (really, the only aspects I like thus far), such as the ability to toggle on or off the in-game quest markers, minimap and the like. Something that allows a player to truly personalize their gameplay experience.

Clarification:
For me, far more than the mere "ironman" experience that stems from a permadeath feature, it is the suspension-of-belief that hangs in the balance. In watching the clip, notably the last three minutes, I was absolutely appalled at the manner in which the VO-guys laughed off the sudden rising of nearly the entire team after being horribly "slain" by some kind of monsters.
"Ah-ha-ha, they fainted in the middle of a fight! I'm Mordecai the Mage!"
Seriously? I thought. These daemonic-creatures slashed your men with their non-Nerf swords, filled them with arrows and ultimately bashed 'em to the ground, yet all it took for a revival was for the monsters to fall over…ingenious! What a world!
That kind of illogicality frustrates me. When a character in a game is cut down, they ought to stay down. Revive them with a necromancy or resurrection spell, go JRPG on me and use a phoenix down, whatever, just don't tell me that in the midst of all this bloodshed, they "fainted."
With mechanics such as that, your characters are effectively immortal.

I would do something like a hybrid method, where there are are levels of functionality. So a guy/gal does not just get up after they have been put down, it all depends on the variables, their con, how much they are damaged, any bleeding wounds sort of thing. So someone would have to get them back up though there is a chance they get back up on their own. Healing spells, potions, bandages, work normally. Point is the more people that are down the worse off you are, which is true anyway presently, but more pronounced in this stated case.

So you could have a variety of results. Where one person is unconscious, or comatose as no appropriate healing is available at present, so the party has to drag them along. Ever done that? I think most players have ,at least the PnP crowd. Also the variations conditions that the party are in would make the party more vulnerable to wandering patrols, monsters, who happened upon them.

Alternatively you could just have them all get up based on their con, hits below a certain level i.e. unconscious, and they all get up in a random order, unless they are attended too. Would not be all that hard to script.

Games are different things to different people. The commentary guys had a great sense of humour (IMHO) and it sounded like they were having fun. Games also inherently illogical and if you want to be immersed then you need to have some measure of suspension-of-disbelief. Why do I have x amount of mana and spells take y amount from it? Why does my sword do 16 points of damage? The list goes on, but we recognise they are things for gameplay mechanics, which help us have more fun, and exercise our imagination to get around.

If you're happy with jRPG systems etc. then just pretend your characters were all taught the basics of a revival spell and as soon as it's safe to do so they utter it. Job done, no more illogicality and makes sense within the game world.

@themadhatter: I've nothing against an "ironman" mode. Hell, make it even tougher -- save only on quit, and load wipes your save, NetHack style.

Also, given what they're saying about the toolset, I don't think it'd be hard at all to mod in perma-death plus some resurrection magic of some kind.

Well, I'm not a big supporter of perma-death as the standard option. I wasn't aware that was the only alternative to insta-revival.

I'm talking about the more traditional resurrection method, or a limited resource system where you'd rather not have to spend resources reviving as they should be precious.

But perma-death is, in my opinion, something that should be reserved as a special option and there definitely should be some kind of reward for that. Increased XP is an obvious choice.

However, then it'd have to be real perma-death, as in death = death and no reloads to avoid it.

In that case, I'd agree - but again, I wasn't thinking of perma-death as the only alternative to instant free-of-charge revival.

Don't know about this one. I think perhaps crippled limbs or something, that can be healed by a proper healer or at the "home-base" would work better. What you're talking about is still hardly an incentive to fight well - because you get them back in a fighting state no matter what happens to them.

A reasonably good solution is sort of what they did in Baldur's Gate or Neverwinter IIRC. Make the standard difficulty level "normal" be the instant revival thing - and let there be a difficulty level called "hardcore" (not hard) and let it be what I'm talking about with limited resurrection. Then all would be happy, and I wouldn't have to worry about the game being "hard" just "hardcore" as they liked to call it back in the day. I tend to loathe the average "hard" mode because that's just scaled hitpoints/damage and can never really work well unless the developers worked twice as hard when balancing the game - which they never do.

Looking great, definite purchase for me.

To clarify things a little, there are persistent combat injuries:

From the wiki and gamebanshee preview:
While I don't see the appeal of being forced to save and reload all the time, here is something that will make sure that you experience "perma death" (or complete party wipe) ALL the time:

Use Nightmare difficulty settings

Well, now, that sounds pretty good about the persistant injuries. That should do to inspire me to play well without getting lazy.

I don't think it makes sense to have Full AI removed from "normal" mode, as I expect most of us want the AI as smart as possible.

However, since it's 100% damage in hard and not beyond that, I guess I'll be playing it on hard. I think it sounds like what normal should have been, though - or rather the "hardcore" mode I was wishing for. I'd have to see what they mean by enemies hitting harder before being certain.

I think they should have made AI sophistication be a separate choice, or in fact all the aspects should be separate selections. But that can likely be modded in with ease.

In any case, this sounds quite good and I don't think I will have a problem with revival afterall - even if I think it's kinda non-immersive to have your characters just stand up after death. But maybe that's just me.

Well they're not dead. They're just really beaten up, uncoscious, temporarily unable to fight etc. Enemies see them go down and change target to someone who can actually damage them. If the whole party goes down, then the enemy will proceed with coup de grâce.

Oh come on, the amount one would die in BG2 you would not have any party members past middle stages on that huge game.The injury system in DA sounds much better than reloading all the time.

That's your interpretation made necessary because you have the same problem as I do :)

Of course you can argue your case, and since they DO get up it's obviously true. But if you notice the UI - you'll see skeleton faces when your players go down, and it's a stretch to claim that no single "death stroke" should ever kill a player entirely. In that case, the party must have really lucky faces.

Even so, if your party - all except you - are all incapacitated or unconscious, it STILL hurts immersion to have them magically stand up once the enemies go down.

Is it a big deal though? Nah, and one gets used to these things.

But it's not entirely irrelevant to me, because I think this game is specifically going for emotional investment on the part of the player. It would add something if you knew there were genuine risks and that you could actually lose a party member to death if you should so choose. It would add some weight to the whole thing, and the way they instantly stand up kinda gets in the way of the "dark fantasy" tone that's supposed to be there.

Again, that's just what I'm getting from previews and videos. I've yet to experience the actual game, and I'd like to reserve final judgement until I've played it for myself.

Bioware has been using this system since KotOR - and though I've never really liked it, it hasn't hurt any of their games to the extent that I found it truly distracting. I'm guessing it'll take me all of 5 minutes to get used to it in DA:O and think no more of it.

It's more the general principle of the thing that gets to me. I remember thinking it was awful in Neverwinter Nights 2, because it totally removed the whole cleric with raise death aspects. Naturally, the AI in that game was abysmal - so it worked out alright all the same.

Something else that I just found in my search of info related to increasing Dragon Age difficulty.
Don't shoot me for this one please, I am just a messenger. :)

For those of us who think that armor for female characters in games are nothing but, gamesradar presents fighting naked!

Seriously though, I hope we get to make "beserker" type characters. And I think a mod that would let blood stain persist on a character would be very nice. :idea:

That wonderfully presents Bioware's version of 'naked' too. Yes, Morrigan puts ON clothes to have sex :p

I guess fighting naked should give serious penalties to your defence. A single blade scratch could made a huge laceration, punture or whatever.

All you need is all wizards, and ONE TNO: http://img304.imageshack.us/img304/3…less6je.th.jpg ;)

Jade Empire? That game was so horrendously mediocre, so grotesquely average that it sucked quality from everything around it. After playing it, Knights of the Old Republic was permanently tarnished. Yes, somehow Jade Empire went back in time and rewrote my opinion of KotOR.

I think i would put one of my party members naked and see how NPCs reacted or how the DA game world's reacted to the present our group of naked hero and heroine saving them from doomsday

As soon as you are past the intro part of DA losing a party member is pretty much a death sentence in many battles if your playing at a decent difficulty level unless it is close to the end of the battle. Given the load times in DA I think I prefer this system.

No perma death? Is there atleast penalties for dyng like that aka drakensang??

This hardly makes sense, does it?

If losing a party member means a death sentence for the party, then you'll reload anyway?

If not, please explain the logic behind this.

That's what bothers you? Not that characters survive dozens of sword and axe blows, performing flawlessly to the end but suddenly dropping stone dead?

Really, I can't see how the "just getting back up" is even slightly more immersion-breaking than the whole didn't-go-down-with-the-first-axe-cut-and-bleed-out.

To me, it makes just as much sense that characters might be incapacitated (injured and unable to continue / unconcious) than 1 hit point, everything functions -> 0 hit point, drop dead.

I see what you're saying.

Could you enlighten us as to where you'd draw the line? Is there some kind of death penalty or lack thereof where you'd say it's not immersive enough? Would you mind being immortal, because that's basically what it is - so why even have players drop down? Just let them stand there not doing anything because they're in shock or something.

I'd be curious to know where this line of thought ends with you, and if there's anything you would consider TOO "unrealistic."

You're always immortal. 99% of players (a scientifically tested result, I promise) reload as soon as a party member dies. I'm sure some people reload just because they didn't get an optimal result - maybe they lost too many hitpoints or used a potion or two more than they would prefer. If you aren't immortal, shouldn't dying be the end of the game? Start over?

I think Dragon Age strikes a good balance (as best I can tell without having played it). If my party is knocked down, they carry injuries as a consequence, which affects their performance and acts as an incentive to improve next time. With a traditional system, there are no real consequences - most people just reload.

Going back to your point - your sarcasm aside - standing there is clearly not what happens when someone is seriously injured in a battle. From a gameplay perspective, it also adds nothing. As I said, though, I don't see why an instant-death system is any more immersive than the dozens of other rather obvious breaks from reality.

Speaking of immersion, doesn't it make sense that some participants would be seriously injured and unable to continue fighting, rather than just plain dead? In that sense, everyone-is-always-injured is no better or worse than everyone-is-always-dead.

Yeah, that's true. But that's my point - and why I asked if there's some kind of line you wouldn't want to cross?

I mean, personally I think it's vital to have that illusion of death being a threat - and my own tastes lean towards some kind of middle-ground where it's something you really want to avoid, but not so devastating that you lose all your progress.

Reloading might be the first option for the majority, but consider the reason. They know that if they don't they'll have to deal with player death. The reason that's not so bad, is that it actually provokes most players (or so is the theory) into playing smart, because reloading IS NOT desirable. It's a hassle to start over and reload, and players will automatically care less if they know they can win a fight without having to mess around with player death. Is that convenient? Yeah. But is it desirable from a gameplay standpoint? I honestly couldn't say, but I know that I personally enjoy a challenge and I enjoy playing smart and being rewarded.

Doesn't it seem wrong that you lose interest in whether or not your characters die? Because that's basically what happens - or at least that's what happened many times to me in games like NWN2. Is that really what we want in our roleplaying games?

I distinctly remember really not giving a shit in games like Mass Effect and KotOR - because the AI control is generally not good enough to make you feel you're fully in control. So you end up simply focusing on your own character, and you know they're gonna die half the time, so you don't really want to invest in their deaths. I can't say how many times I was the only one standing and not really caring because of this system. Of course, the AI is a big issue here - and it needs to be smart for you to want to care and setup the actions of your party members.

About perma-death, I think the "hardcore ironman" option is a very interesting one, and I'd support it in almost any game as a possibility if you're into that sort of thing.

I agree, it sounds like a decent balance - though I would prefer "dead" characters needing to be resurrected.

The reason being that I personally don't just reload if the battle was a tough one, and I spent a lot of time winning it without dying entirely. In such an instance, I'd rather just spend some resources or some time gettting my party member(s) back to life. I don't enjoy repeating a long tough battle, if I can at all avoid it. Also, it adds to the immersion that I have to actually work at getting my comrade(s) back in fighting shape as long as they don't overdo the hassle.

Again, if you remove the penalty of death, you start caring less - and then it will partially remove the motivation to build powerful characters and take tactical decisions seriously. I'm sure many players find that great, but I think it's kinda sad when so much work has obviously been put into the tactical aspect of Dragon Age.

But how would you measure the extent of immersion breaking? If something has become tradition - much like we all are ok with characters not going to the bathroom, then it'd truly be a questionable feature to have. But instant revival is relatively new, and for many of us represent a break of immersion that we're simply not conditioned to.

Does that mean we SHOULD condition ourselves to it, and that anything that can be argued to be "logical" in terms of gameplay should be auto accepted? No, I don't think so. That leads to games that play themselves ala Dungeon Siege where this kind of thing became too much.

Certainly, and if they could implement a realistic and plausible system like that without messing around with balance - then I'd support it all the way. I think the problem is how difficult it is to implement a reasonable "injury system" where players gradually perform worse as their injuries increase - and the same would be true for the enemies. I mean, that's a bit too much to expect from developers, because it's a hard challenge. But I agree it's immersion breaking, and I welcome any alternative like the ones seen in Fallout and others.

Not having instant-revival - though - seems to me much less of a challenge, and whether it breaks immersion on the same scale as something else that's not realistic is simply not a logical reason for it to be left as is.

There are other reasons, though, like the modern audience not wanting actual death and breaks of that nature in gameplay, and those I can understand. I don't like them, but I can understand and accept them.

Have to agree with Dhruin here. There are many things that should break immersion long before the "get up after being knocked down" part. In various D&D games, I've seen characters literaly tank Dragons. That's about as likely as tanking a truck or a train.

If you can do that, having enough magical protection to constantly get knocked down instead of dying from a blow that would kill a normal man shouldn't be too hard.

Personally I like the whole knock down thing. If I lose a character I just reload anyway, so games with perma-death must be balanced around it (easier to protect people from dying/getting knocked down). In most games that have the knock-down feature, getting knocked down happens all over the place, and having every one of those cases turned into a reload would be extremely frustrating.

What I don't like is the whole "resurrection" spell. That's redicilous. Why would any hero ever die or fear death, if resurrection was available? The Drizzt series wouldn't make much sense if Salvatore took the D&D spell Resurrection into consideration. Luckily he has simply ignored it.

Certain people coming back after being dead, in specific situations - sure. A simple spell that will resurrect the target? No.

Ehm, the Dragon thing is part of the fantasy environment isn't it? I mean, typically it's an end-game encounter where only the most powerful players can defeat them. If we start mirror-comparing with the real world - then any argument loses its meaning entirely.

We might as well just dispense completely with the notion of hitpoints and weapons, and just have anything be auto-success and a storyboard slideshow.

If there's some kind of explanation for this, then sure. If they can implement it in the story as some kind of anti-death magic - then it'd be much better.

Can you not imagine one of the long hard battles that always exist in games, where you might lose one of your characters, but you really don't want to do it all over again. In such a case, it'd make sense to have resurrection as a limited resource because, without insta-revival, it would discourage careless playing and would retain the immersion and illusion of death being a problem.

The hero might not fear anything, but the player would take care to protect the healer and it would be a tactical dimension which is present in many, many CRPGs where the healer is an essential character precisely because of this ability.

If the healer should die, then the player faces the journey back and the expensive service of getting his character(s) resurrected - which is precisely why he'd want to avoid death - and especially the death of the healer.

The way I see it, 'combat time' is different (slower) than 'out of combat' time. Once you're out of combat, basically, all enemies dead and nothing threatening you, unconscious characters getting up is not really instantaneous but just a compression of time in which the surviving members brought them back from unconsciousness.

What I'd personally like to see, is gratitude from NPC's whenever they are healed. It can just be a little one liner type thing, but at least acknowledge that you've been healed by someone. You could even write it in where a person who starts out disliking the party healer, would gain admiration for them after a resurrection or curing. General awareness of what took place on the battlefield would be great too. I'd love to see the mage thank the warrior for saving him from the unwashed barbarian, and the knight to praise the mage for the web spell that ensnared the troll mob bearing down on the party. AI should be getting powerful enough for these types of things to start happening.