Trouble in Rainesfere, my first quest mod

Making a mod for Dragon Age: Origins was a very spur-of-the-moment decision -- a decision which I made shortly after successfully building a pleasant landscape in the toolset after following one of Mikemike37's video tutorials on Youtube. I documented the whole process over two weeks on the Nexus forum and the Bioware Social Network, so there's no need to retread that ground here, but if you're interested in a behind the scenes look at the process of making a mod in the Dragon Age toolset, you might enjoy the read. There are plenty of screenshots there, too.

Download either on Nexus or BSN.

I'm generally satisfied with how it came out, with the adage in mind that "the perfect is the enemy of the good." Users can expect a relatively small download and a short questline that doesn't take itself too seriously, in brand-new locales.

I imposed time restrictions upon myself for it, to ensure I would get it finished and available for people to play while I still had the free time to spend on it. I know that if I left it as an open, unplanned schedule, it could have become one of the countless abandoned entries littering the "Projects" section of BSN with high hopes and broken promises.

Early on in this process, I was taken by how easy it was to create new landscapes (much like in Oblivion), with the sculpting and texturing of land. The placement of vegetation was also fairly simple, though it wasn't very intelligent about the height at which the scatter tool placed them. I had to adjust the height of every shrub, grass, and tree so it wouldn't be floating above the land (and then of course there was a strange export problem right at the end that resulted in extra floating trees anyway).

I thought the ease of new landscape creation was a strong argument against the reuse of areas in the Dragon Age games (especially in the second game), and in some senses it still is, despite my troubles with other aspects of it -- namely the light mapping. Since we modders didn't get the same lighting software Bioware used, one would expect that Bioware employees didn't have quite the same problems as I did with the rendering of the light maps after the design of the land was done.

The necessity of rendering baked lighting with EclipseRay made the experience excruciatingly slow and full of problems I didn't understand. It's enough to make me want to avoid any future mod that would involve that process. So I could probably fill my new lands up with new side quests and characters, but not make more lands, unless I could pass them off to someone else to render the light maps. The dialogue and quest/plot system is actually very nice, and a positive first experience for me in quest modding.

Anyone examining the code and dialogue trees in my mod (if they can do such a thing with the files I released) might find numerous tangential story elements that did not make it into the mod as released. I "commented out" those elements (by setting conditions that couldn't be fulfilled) because of problems getting them to work correctly or because it would have required too much more alternate story development for too little justification. There are still some unresolved bugs in conversations which I can't figure out, in regard to party members, but since they didn't interfere with the gameplay, I considered it an acceptable flaw for the sake of people having something to to play. There's also some "ghost" code in various scripts where I wanted something to happen, but nothing did, and I just left the code in without even commenting it out.

When faced with such problems in the code, I devised workarounds so that I essentially got the desired effect, albeit through different means.

A good taste, but an appetiser for something more?

"The depth of the Dragon Age toolset, with Bioware's long history of community innovation, will ensure that the Dragon Age community is a thriving centre of creativity and content for years to come."

--Jay Watamaniuk, Bioware Community Manager

I wasn't aware until I started this mod that the toolset was no longer receiving support from Bioware, but I suppose that should have been obvious by the fact that they ceased further DLC or expansions of DA:O long before the time that they promised at the outset that they'd do so. I pre-ordered the game partially due to their promotion of it as a platform for gaming, with its powerful toolset and the promise of expansions for years to come, as it was promoted in the beginning. "The future of gaming mods", they called it in their promotional video. While perhaps true, that future didn't last long before the company moved on. The abrupt abandonment of that "platform" and the quick release of a sequel shifted it away from that concept, and the cessation of expansions means that it will not receive any new official assets that can be used in modding.

In my catch-up feast of old forum posts on the topic of Neverwinter Nights 2 (a game which I had previously overlooked due to my dislike of its forerunner), I've recently seen that many of the names I got to know from Dragon Age modding had originally been prolific or otherwise well-respected modders for NWN2, and I see that they moved to Dragon Age with the understanding that it would be as long-supported and expanded-upon as the NWN games had been. With that promise broken, and compared to NWN2's sheer variety of creatures, spells, placeables, and the rich and detailed lore to draw upon, I can see now that the paucity of Dragon Age's bestiary and sundries makes it a far more restrictive system to work with for telling the variety of stories one can tell in NWN2. Perhaps, like me, others might notice this, and take another look at Neverwinter Nights 2 as a modding platform, as these experiences (and my subsequent playing of NWN2) have led me to revise my previous opinion that Dragon Age: Origins is the best modern game engine to create Baldur's Gate-style adventures.

My next post will be about Neverwinter Nights 2.

More Dragon Age: Origins

I mentioned earlier that I was planning on going through the rest of the origins in Dragon Age: Origins that I hadn't played through yet, as well as trying out some quest mods. I started up a Dalish elf rogue, and enjoyed the origin story very much. And it makes me realise how much more depth this game has than DA2. Each origin that I play reveals more about the world and how it all fits together. I had no idea until now, for instance, that Merrill from Dragon Age 2 was also in DA:O. The focus of the origin was the discovery of some ruins which contained some kind of portal/communication device in the form of a large mirror. Is this the same kind of mirror that I've heard is involved in the Witch Hunt DLC?

The only origin left for me to play is the dwarf commoner, and I wonder what new perspective I might gain from that one.

But in the meantime, I've discovered I really like playing as a rogue, and ended up playing beyond the end of the origin at Ostagar, and have actually gone through Redcliffe, stopping after fending off the undead attacks. From there I headed to Denerim, because that's where the Community Contest 7 quest mods begin. But before I began those, I found an NPC I'd never seen before, named Slim Couldry, offering rogue-specific quests! As a mage in my first playthrough, I had never encountered this character, and I'm not sure if it's because I was a mage, or because I hadn't had Leliana pick any pockets until after getting to Denerim. In this playthrough, I had picked some pockets in Lothering, so it could have been either that or just the fact that I'm a rogue that triggered his quests.

His quests were pretty simple for the most part. Pay him increasing amounts of money for increasingly lucrative thieving opportunities that simply don't exist unless you have the quest. I went through all that he had available, though he said he was planning on getting more. I don't know if he'll really have any more in the future, but I'll check. They may be related to my level, since the last one was actually very tough -- fighting a warehouse full of Arl Howe's men to get the cargo they were guarding. It's the first of the thieft quests that actually involved violent crime, but it is Arl Howe's crowd we're talking about. When I say this one was tough, I mean it took me 4 or 5 tries to do it successfully (without being wiped). This was the toughest fight I've experienced yet in this playthrough, and I'm playing on Hard with two dual-wielding dagger rogues (Leliana and myself, with Leliana specialised as Ranger for the animal summoning), Morrigan respecced to mostly entropy plus the ice line, and Alistair on sword and board. The first time around, I used Sten as the tank, and had 2 mages (myself and Morrigan), and Leliana using bow and arrow.

Not all roses

Despite how much I like DA:O compared to its limited competition in the current market, there are still some issues which are very annoying. I mentioned the frequent crashing in my last Dragon Age post, which had not been a problem during my first playthrough. That's a strange development that I don't understand, but I have found a couple of workarounds that dramatically reduce the number of crashes.

First thing is to add a command switch to the game shortcut to force it to use DirectX 9. The switch is "-dx9". I'm not sure how much this helps, but it doesn't seem to hurt, and I use it combined with the second fix. The second fix apparently must be done while the game is running, each time you run it. Start the game, then switch to Windows task manager, find the "daorigins.exe" process under the Processes tab, right-click it, choose "Set affinity", and set it to use only one core (like "CPU 0"). It doesn't seem to reduce the performance of the game (most processing is probably in the GPU anyway), but the game's stability is markedly increased.

On my last session, I forgot about doing this, and I loaded up a game as normal. When it loaded, the first thing I did was to check the inventory to see what I had equipped, and it crashed immediately on trying to show the inventory. Starting the game again, and doing the same thing resulted in another instant crash. Then I remembered to set the CPU affinity to a single core, and it worked without crashing again.

I'd love to know of a way to force it to always run like this without having to manually change it each time while it's running.

The other, non-technical issue with the game is perhaps a design choice. There are many combat encounters that force you into dialogue before the hostilities begin, once you get close enough. This happens regardless of whether you're in stealth mode, and/or have the rest of your party waiting back down the hall in another room. Suddenly, the game teleports everyone right into the middle of the ambush, kicks your rogue(s) out of stealth, cancels any spells that were in progress, and shows you walking casually up to talk to the clearly dangerous, threatening NPC and his army (or showing you and your party charging in recklessly and stopping short in apparent surprise at the enemy, as if you hadn't been scouting ahead in stealth mode). Forget positioning! Forget preemptive tactical strikes! Forget even having your weapons out and ready! If the game decides you should have a little chat first, there's nothing you can do about it. You can't even use a preemptive ranged AoE attack against the group, because they're immortal until you talk to them!

Contrast that to the Baldur's Gate games, which don't restrict your attacks in this way. If you're sneaking around in a dungeon, and you find the boss, and the default action when you click on him is to initiate conversation, you don't have to. You can instead sneak up behind him, click the "attack" button, and make a preemptive strike. You might miss out on interesting information or even a quest if you do that, but so be it! It should be your choice.

Not having looked into the settings in the toolset, I don't know if this is hard-coded into the game engine, or if there's a flag the quest designer can set to prevent forced dialogue from happening if the player is invisible, or prevent it from teleporting everyone else into the room, etc. Seeing how well some mod quest designers have been able to script encounters, though, I'm pretty certain there must be a way around it, even if it is hard-coded.

Combat issues

Speaking of problems with stealth, I'm also not happy with the mechanic that rogues can't enter stealth if the game thinks they're in combat, unless you get the "combat stealth" talent. I'm not talking about situations in the heat of battle, where you'd just vanish in front of an enemy's eyes, but a situation where you've cleared out a whole room full of enemies, but you find you're still "in combat", because there are some enemies in another room behind a closed door that's never been opened, who can't see you and do not suggest they're alert to your presence! (This is possibly caused by the enemies in both rooms being defined as part of the same "team", which all aggro at once.) I think you should be able to enter stealth mode whenever you're out of view of enemies, like in Baldur's Gate, where if you could just get around a corner, you could lose a pursuing attacker.

But perhaps it wouldn't be a problem if we could just tell the game that we're not in combat anymore, in those situations. Or, it would cancel combat mode if you got far enough away from the enemies. It's especially annoying since the game doesn't let you save if you're "in combat" either.

Summons

Rangers can summon animal minions, and mages can summon skeletal warriors, but these summons disappear on any area transition. This ranges from entering or exiting a building, to simply walking from one section of a forest into another. This shouldn't happen (especially in the latter case).

Even worse, the forced unsummoning causes the summon ability to trigger a cooldown period. Ridiculous! Not only has my minion been taken away for no reason, but now I have to sit around waiting for the cooldown to expire so I can summon it again! Either that, or I have to look out for area transitions coming up, and unsummon my minion ahead of time so it'll be off its cooldown by the time I cross the threshold.

This works all right for the ranger, but the mage can only raise a skeleton from the remains of a recently killed enemy, so it really screws the mage.

Dungeon design

Did they hire the ghost of Sarah Winchester as house designer?

In general, Dragon Age dungeons seem rather uninspired, at least in the vanilla game without DLC. Instead of being unique spaces with personality and purpose, they rather seem to be just a jumble of tileset corridors with an occasional large room for bosses. No regard for architecture, no logic in design, and almost no spaces that make you stop and simply admire the place. Not having seen any of the DLC aside from the Stone Prisoner, I can't say whether this is improved elsewhere.

I'll highlight a typical example, as shown in this screenshot. This isn't a cave or a mine, which could have such a rambling structure, but a supposedly abandoned house, with a badly-hidden secret door leading to this random sequence of rooms and hallways. Imagine how much real estate this building must occupy! Is land that cheap in the heart of Denerim?

Bioware used to be pretty good at making unique, interesting interiors which had believeable floor plans, as I highlighted in some of my Baldur's Gate posts. When I say "unique", I mean that each "dungeon" should be a noticeably different experience from another, with its own special flavour, to make these places appeal to the players' sense of exploration and discovery.

Nevertheless, despite all of these various criticisms, I still consider DA:O to be the best overall choice for designing a Baldur's Gate-style quest/adventure mod in a modern engine. I must say, though, that I've very recently become aware that Neverwinter Nights 2 has the elements that I found missing in Neverwinter Nights 1, and I understand it has a very large set of resources to build with, so I'll be investigating that soon, as well.

Quest mods

Speaking of which, I'm also enjoying some excellent quest mods, including the two quest mods from Community Contest 7. Spiders and Knives is a good one to start with, since it's pretty short and straightforward, adding a couple of new quests and locations and an NPC with a fun personality to Lothering. Eye and Shadow is good for Mengtzu's creatively orchestrated and challenging boss fights, set in a beautiful new location from one of the previous community contests.

Now I'm playing an even bigger treat: Dark Times: The Confederacy of Malkuth, Act 1. I'm not sure exactly how large this mod is, but if I take the new world map as an indication, I should call this an unofficial expansion pack, or even a sequel! I had many hours of play time racked up doing quests around the first town before the world map was unlocked, and when I saw it for the first time, a huge smile came to my face at the prospect of more hours of enjoyable gaming to come.

I don't think I can adequately communicate how enthusiastic I am about this mod. It has everything you could possibly want in a Dragon Age expansion. 32 new locations, many new NPCs and 3 new party members, lots of personal stories and side quests, new factions to join or fight, new loot and artifacts with background stories, new unlockable character specialisations, possible new romance(s), and some really heavy-duty moral choices to make.

Some areas need some polish -- mostly in spelling, a missing mesh or two, and some various bugs, but this in no way casts a shadow over the incredible overall job this team did with what I've seen of it so far. They've accomplished a great deal, and I'm very happy to know that they're working on a second act.

One very interesting thing here is that they seem to have cracked the 4-member party limit. Multiple times I've been joined by one or more NPCs, and although they don't get their own portraits on the side of the screen like other party members, I am nevertheless able to access their character screens, level them up as I like, add and remove equipment, adjust their tactics, and even directly control them. I wonder if the Baldur's Gate Redux team could use this kind of system to allow a full Baldur's Gate 6-member party in their mod.

There are numerous other quest mods that I've saved and I'm eager to try out, from some well-respected names in the modding field. It's also been somewhat inspiring to try my own hand at it.

Space Trader: Merchant Marine

One of the other game genres I enjoy is economic trading games. I own and enjoy Patrician 3: Rise of the Hanse, Darkstar One, X3: Terran Conflict, and X3: Reunion. I also own Port Royale, but I haven't actually tried it yet. All of these games involve running your own goods transport business. You purchase a ship or fleet of ships (seafaring or spacefaring), buy goods at low prices, and transport them to other places where you can sell them for high prices. Most of these games offer modes that set up specific challenges for you to meet, usually with a time limit. Each of these games also has something unique that sets it apart from the others, but for now I'm going to focus on my latest acquisition, which is Space Trader: Merchant Marine.

The campaign begins with you as a new, unknown person with no money and no ship. In the first chapter, you have to find someone willing to loan you the capital you need to get started, then earn that money back in a certain time limit. In this first chapter, you're limited to only two ports to trade between (Earth and the Moon), which is expanded more and more in each chapter. As you make more money, you can upgrade your ship to carry more cargo, and you can also afford to buy the more expensive wares that return a much larger profit than the cheaper items that take up the same amount of space.

I bought this during the latest Steam summer sale, when it was cheap enough to take a chance on, especially since I'd never heard of it, and it showed very mediocre reviews. The trailer, which was an unusually helpful trailer showing actual gameplay rather than a pre-rendered cinematic, showed that this game includes one thing that's missing from every other game in this genre that I've ever seen, and it's one that I've really wished would be included: the ability to leave your ship and walk around in all these locations you visit. In X3, you never leave your ship, which must smell pretty bad after a while. In DS1, your character leaves the ship only in cutscenes, and never under your control. In Patrician and probably Port Royale, you don't really have a noticeable presence at all, and just exist as an omniscient overseer of your operations, able to see any town where you have an office or a ship in port.

Space Trader sort of reverses this setup. Here, you don't actually experience the travel parts of the game. You mark where you want to travel to, and you get a summary screen showing what's changed in the time during your travel, and then you arrive! This sacrifices the freedom and scenic starscapes of the X series, for certain, but travel in the X series is, for the most part, extremely slow and tedious, so this is a very welcome change.

The campaign

Once you've arrived, you're free to walk around the place, talking to people, making new contacts, buying/selling, picking up side jobs, and following the main quest. Bartenders offer bounty missions, various NPCs offer story-type missions or want specific items (with familiar yellow question marks and exclamation points over their heads), and random events (such as famines or plagues) on different planets can provide opportunities for extra profit.

Boxes of free cargo are also scattered around all over these maps, sometimes hidden, and sometimes placed in locations that require careful jumping. Of course, you can get along without any of this free stuff, but you can take it as part of the challenge of the game, too, if you like, since the percentage of boxes you found is one of the things that's tracked in the summary screen whenever you leave a location.

Another feature that eliminates the tedium of travelling (in this case, walking from one trader to another while you're in port) is the option to instantly teleport to any other trader on your contact list for that location. This makes it easy to check prices, since they each carry different wares, and can also be used as a shortcut to teleport to a different section of the port for cargo-collecting purposes. Don't do this exclusively, though, because there are usually a couple of extra traders in each location that don't appear on your contact list until you find them in person.

There's also a bank system that allows you to either put money into your account to gain interest while you travel, or to take out money as a loan with interest if you happen across a very profitable opportunity. The bank is always instantly available, and there seems to be no penalty for transactions aside from the interest, so there's no reason not to put all your spare cash into the bank every time you travel.

Taxation seems to be a random event in Chapter 5, and it can be pretty outrageous. It goes along well with the general corruption and dirty dealings that take place throughout that chapter. If you like, you can choose to resist the taxes, in which case you enter combat with the Ministry of Accounts soldiers who board your ship. If you do, however, you gain a criminal record, and attacks will become more frequent and more difficult to overcome.

Combat

Speaking of combat, this is the part that's really different about this game from the others. The other games involve ship-to-ship combat (space flight combat in X3 and DS1, and cannon-based sea combat in Patrician), but this game never actually has you visibly travelling in your ship, so the combat here is first-person shooter combat!

The movement and gameplay of these missions remind me of Quake 3 Arena (or OpenArena), or Unreal Tournament. Fast-paced, with health, shield, and weapon pickups, automatic doors and lifts, and a bunch of bots running around the map looking for you. A handy minimap shows the items and enemies around you, as well as the free cargo lying around for you to take. Enemies drop money, and bosses drop money and a good amount of cargo.

You get three chances to beat such an instance, respawning with the default pistol each time, but any enemies you killed are still dead, and the boss seems to retain whatever damage you did to it before dying.

No matter how rich you are, however, you start every FPS encounter with no shields and a default pistol, and have to scavenge your gear from the level pickups. I can forgive this mechanic, though, because if your money influenced your loadout, then it would add several problems. First, the missions would be too easy against simple bounties. Second, the money should also influence your enemy's loadout, so well-connected targets that are much richer than you would be almost impossible to beat.

One of them did seem to be impossible for me, at first, and that was the final boss of chapter 3. Even with three respawns, I failed the scenario twice, and had to wait before being allowed to try again. I was getting dangerously close to the time limit for the chapter, as well, which made it rather tense. What made it especially difficult was that several times I was respawned in the same room as the boss, who immediately began shooting at me before I could even orient myself, let alone find a better weapon! Luckily, I did succeed on the third try, and completed that chapter to unlock more locations to trade with.

These combat missions are offered by various NPCs at various times, but the bartenders at each of the ports usually have at least one available. Strategically, it seems like it's best to take as many combat missions as you can find as soon as you've sold off your cargo when you arrive at a new location, and before you start picking up free cargo around the port or buying anything, so that you'll have as much free cargo space as possible to pick up all the loot in these combat missions.

Non-campaign challenges

There are three challenges outside of the campaign, which isn't very many. They need to be played in order, since you have to unlock the second and third by beating the previous challenge. The first one is a beginner's challenge, and in some ways it's just as much of a tutorial as the first chapter of the campaign, though it includes several things that the campaign didn't mention. It seems that a beginner to this game should play the first challenge here first, and then go on to the first chapter of the campaign.

There are numerous conditions and mechanics that exist in one challenge or chapter, but not in others. In the campaign, there seems to be absolutely no disadvantage to dealing in black market goods, but in the challenges there are some legitimate vendors who refuse to do business with you if you're carrying certain kinds of contraband. The Ministry of Accounts is also said to do raids and crackdowns randomly during travel between planets if you're carrying any contraband, but it's apparently only in the challenges, and not in the campaign. The campaign's 5th chapter, on the other hand, requires you to set up a trade office and hire some merchants of your own, which doesn't happen in any of the other challenges.

Factions

The 3rd chapter of the campaign throws an unexpected twist into the gameplay -- that being that if you start doing jobs for the leaders of any of the trade conglomerates, you'll suddenly find that members of rival conglomerates will start refusing to do business with you. I've read about that kind of underhanded anti-competitive dealing in Anthony Bourdain's book Kitchen Confidential, but never saw that sort of thing in a trading game.

The impact it has on your trading is that although you can still sell any items you're carrying, you lose the ability to buy anything at that location that only those merchant sell. This also means you can't compare those prices to the market value, since it's shown in their inventory screens, so you'd be selling without knowing if it's a good deal or not.

This mechanic was only in Chapter 3, though, and not in the later ones, and doesn't seem to be in any of the challenges, either.

Comedy

There's plenty of comedy in this game's dialogues, and it adds a great deal of enjoyment to the experience. Much of it is self-aware or self-referential, with the game poking fun at itself, such as in a dance club on Venus, where the bartender says "This place is pretty dead. Everyone's just standing around!" Robots tend to use internet acronyms in their vocal greetings, such as "OMG 1337", and one of them is named XKCD, likely named after the webcomic of the same name.

I think one of the voice sets was supposed to be comedic, as well, but it rather comes off as annoying. I'm speaking here of the whiny, lisping, mush-mouthed voice that really stands out from the others in its campiness.

The story missions have a lot of whimsical and goofy situations, and even some dark comedy on occasion, which is really good for a laugh. One NPC claims to be turning into a werewolf, and demands some silver to prevent it. A technician in a water treatment plant mentions that one of the job perks is getting to swim whenever he wants to. Your dialogue responses are usually amusingly sarcastic or snarky, too.

Graphics and music

The graphics are nothing special. They pretty much resemble the graphics from Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, actually. Rather low-poly, with interesting but basic texture work. The plus side is that it plays quickly and smoothly with the resolution and graphics settings maxed out, and graphics aren't the draw of this game anyway.

The music is light electronic music. Inoffensive, but unremarkable and repetitive. I turned the music off and played my own music in the background after a while.

Conclusion

I like this game! I had a great time playing the campaign, and was sad to see it was over, with only the challenge modes left to play. There are also still numerous Steam achievements I can shoot for, which is more or less equivalent to another challenge mode condition. The game was exactly as the trailer made it out to be, and I'm quite satisfied with it.

I do wish it had a longer campaign, and that the FPS parts would always respawn me in a safe location. I also wish there were more locations to travel between, with a more developed supply/demand mechanic. Patrician 3, for instance, has 24 cities that you can sail between, and most of those cities have certain items that they produce, so it's best to buy those items from those places, and never try to sell those items there. The other games have many more locations than that! Space Trader, on the other hand, has only five locations in the biggest part of the campaign. More locations would certainly help with its scope.

In what turned out to be the last chapter, some NPCs started dropping some hints that another faction-based challenge was coming up, and the ending text of that chapter also sounded like I was in for a difficult time, but it unexpectedly ended there, which was a bit disappointing. Perhaps more was planned, but cut out.

I'm not sure how much replay value it has, aside from the two times I had to repeat a chapter due to running out of time. After figuring out what I needed to do in those chapters, time was really not much of an issue. This is the kind of game that should be easy to write new challenges for, and it would be nice if there were some community-written ones, but I'm afraid it's too small of a niche game, and those bad reviews are certainly not helping.

I had fun, though, and it brought me smiles, so I'm satisfied.