Design Decisions - Part 2
written by Timelord
on June 16, 2010
In my previous post, I had mentioned how certain skills were unusable given the current design of Blood and Lyrium where the player will take on the role of a Dalish Elf ruin-raider. For those that aren't familiar with Dragon Age lore (are there any readers of this blog who aren't? but anyway...), the Dalish live in isolation as much as possible. They do not live among humans or dwarves, they do not undergo military training alongside them and they most certainly do not learn magic in the Circle of Magi.
Given this, I did not want my Dalish Elves to follow the same Warrior/Rogue/Mage classes that have been established. I understand Bioware did this since they had to cater to each origin and having race-specific classes would have added a big overhead (though that would have made the UI more flexible at least). But hey, us module makers have the freedom to do that! Players in BaL will have the option of choosing one of the two new classes for playing - and only one of those two.
The custom classes to be added in BaL do not have a rogue flavor. This meant that the core rogue skills - disarming traps and lockpicking - had to be factored in as skills so that the player will have access to them. That was another reason for the redesign of the skills system.
On to level design...
I finally decided to buy a replacement RAM kit since the RMA was taking too much time (and this will put me in a position to get up to 8 gigs when it does come). I finished up one more interior level and will be working on filling it out with NPCs, dialog and quests this week.
This area will feature a lot of ambient behaviour on the NPCs and will probably require a few scans through Beerfish's excel utilities to pin down the animations required. This will the first time I am going to do extensive ambient behaviour set up so it should be interesting.
Till later...