BioWare has issued another community update forDragon Age: Dreadwolf, this time delving into how the company approaches its progression and RPG design. The post offers some intriguing information on studio goals, the development process, and the role of system designers, UX designers, and technical UX designers in the process, yet one thing many fans will immediately notice is the quick glimpses atDragon Age: Dreadwolf’s class and skill tree system.
For a little while now, BioWare has been issuing these community updates. There was one that dove into story design at BioWare on the game, as well as one to explainDragon Age: Dreadwolf’s alpha milestone. In lieu of proper trailers and marketing, this has been a great way to keep the community involved as BioWare continues to work on the next entry in the franchise.
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System Designer Luke Barrett explained how early concepts of power progression, design goals, and such pass on from him to the UX devs. In doing so, he shared an early look at a Microsoft Excel breakdown of an obvious “Warrior Class.” Looking at this shows player levels, skill points, and such in tandem, but it also names some key elements of the class. Notably, it seems there are three major designations: Warrior, Captain, and Knight. It’s also worth adding that the “Knight” class reference was spotted in recentlyleakedDragon Age: Dreadwolfgameplay. Players will invest points in all of these, but they are broken down from there, with the Knight Class showing Defender, Champion, and core ability subclasses. The document also references Battle Master, which fans should be familiar with from past games.
From there, it is passed to the UX design team which takes the early vision and breaks it down into what it will look like through sketches, wireframes, mock-ups, prototypes, and so on. In sharing this, another in-development format for the Skill Tree this time is shown. Not much specifically can be gleaned from it, but the color coding would give some indication of core and/or subclass abilities forDragon Age: Dreadwolf, as well as the sheer number of them. Of course, all of this is in development still and is very likely to have changed since then, but it is still very fascinating to look over.
The update wraps up by discussing the grand element that is design and how BioWare devs could talk endlessly about stat pages, handcraftedlocations inDragon Age: Dreadwolf, and more, and promise to share more in the future. All in all, this is just another teaser for the game, but it is one that makes it feel very real.
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