Dragon Age: Origins Forum Activity
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Category: News ArchiveHits: 696
Georg Zoeller on facial expressions:
Actually there are facial expressions, etc. when people get hurt.
The main problem is that whoever is doing the demos is often playing with characters set to immortal - because during a demo it's hard to devote the attention needed to the game to avoid dying.
When you're immortal, you don't take damage, and if you don't take damage, you're not playing reaction animations of any kind...
We're looking at altering the way these things are demonstrated in order to avoid this issue in the future.
And Georg Zoeller on hard difficulty:
It really depends on what kind of AI you have.
The AI in Dragon Age uses mechanics similar to the 'tactics' system available to the player combined with certain 'decision helpers' such as the ability to detect clusters of enemies (for AoE spells) and a threat based hostility system.
We're not using anything overly fancy (neural net / learning AI, etc) - because the majority of enemies you are fighting are not going to be around after a battle to learn from mistakes - and due to the number of abilities available and the existing cooldown mechanics, they'd rarely attempt to repeat a previously failed attack again (e.g. casting fireball on a fire immune enemy).
By changing the amount of threat generated by certain actions (e.g. such as casting certain spells) as well as adding more complex spells or even combos onto the decision tables, we can affect game difficulty.
Ultimately, we use a blend of options to increase the difficulty in the game, along the lines discussed earlier - Removal of benefits from the player on higher difficulty, resistance scaling, friendly fire, modification of AI aggression and threat behavior, scaling of certain combat stats (e.g. lower levels of difficulty have certain types of enemies not do full damage, etc.) to create the desired effect: Players have to think and act more tactical on higher difficulties.
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Actually, our AI is done by Yaron Jakobs, the Lead Technical Designer on DA. He's the mastermind behind creature AI and tactics.
My job (Lead Systems Designer) is to plan and implement or coordinate the implementation of low level game systems between departments, which means I'm a designer and a programmer.
I'm responsible for the difficulty system, yes - but as most game systems, it's a collaborative effort of many people.
