Schmooples' Den! The DA News Discussion Thread

So when people call Solas egghead they're possibly also calling him dickhead? 

Still fits.

Crap, I might have to violate my no plushie rule. Dammit. 

Patrick Weekes @patrickweekes
Have been thinking about why Narrative teams have a hard time in games sometimes.

One reason: Writers/narrative designers make asks that feel concrete for reasons that often feel fuzzy.

“Yes, I NEED a cutscene here, even though it’s expensive. Why? Because the story needs it.”

A character artist can say how expensive building and rigging a character is, and the VO director can say how much the actor will cost. The cinematics folks will have time estimates on the scene. The writer has to justify spending that cold hard cash with “quality of narrative.”

Now, this fuzziness isn’t always actually that fuzzy. Every writer on the team may understand that you NEED a scene with that character in moments like that, or the whole plot stinks.

But a lot of game writers are self-taught, so they may lack the vocabulary to explain this.

And, even if the narrative team CAN explain their reasoning for why they need the thing, that explanation only works if other departments are willing to learn narrative’s rules or trust that narrative knows their rules even if other folks don’t.

If I order a level designer to break her rules by putting in more NPCs than our memory budget allows, the game will crash. That rule is easily testable.

If I don’t get a scene I know I need, nothing crashes. A non-writer might look at the mission and say, “Seems fine to me.”

This year, I’m trying to develop a friendly-to-non-writers vocabulary for how some of our rules work, in hopes of making that dialogue more accessible.

We will see how that goes!

Just a quick reminder that Dragon Age: Blue Wraith #1 is out tomorrow.
www.darkhorse.com/Comics/3002-344/Dragon-Age-Blue-Wraith-1

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is it out yet?

...now?

.......is it out yet?

She was lucky enough to obtain a review copy (she's a book blogger who I guess is notable for her reviews of books and games enough to obtain such copies. She's still under embargo, hence she can't speak very openly about the contents, according to her twitter).

This year ...?

Aside from the book in March and issues of Blue Wraith comic? No idea.

No official news

But if there will be any, I would put my money on EA Play

PAX East in late February is technically possible, as the schedule hasn’t been released, but I doubt it.