The Guildmaster

GameSpot sits down with several members of the Star Wars Knights of the Old Republic II: The Sith Lords design team, and discusses decisions the team made during the making of the game. Check out the Developer Interview 3 link!

You can set this in your control panel. Click 'My Controls' in the upper-right hand corner of most forum pages and select the "Board Settings" option. You can set the number of posts to show in each topic, and the number of topics to show on each forum page there. This can be done several ways: 1) Click the "My Assistant" link in the upper-right hand corner of most forum pages. It opens up a helpful popup to show you your last 10 posts, and also quickly view new replies to topics you started. 2) In the My Controls, check out the "View Topics" option. This will show you all the posts you are subscribed to. Next to each topic, there's a "New Window" link. If you click that, it spawns another browser window with the topic in question, so you don't have to search for it.

QA is Quality Assurance -- the guys who do the functionality, compatibility and fun-factor testing. Working in QA is a good avenue to move up at a publisher that also has internal development or a large developer that actually has internal QA -- a lot of the guys at Obsidian, in fact almost all the owners of the company, took that route. For smaller developers, it's probably better to put together a really good mod for a popular game. We've been interviewing some folks from the NWN community for our scripter position because their talents are something we can look at tangibly. Offering to work for free or low pay as an intern is another great route. We've been fortunate to work with some really talented folks who joined us as interns.

So we're adding the developer icon feature to the boards so folks can quickly determine which theads a developer or admin has posted in. There are two ways we can implement this however, and I wanted to get the community's feeling on which format is preferred: ( A ) On BioWare's forums, if you click the developer icon, it filters out developer posts from a given topic and just displays those posts. Pro's: You can see all the dev posts on one page. Con's: You can't easily see what their replies were in response to unless they quoted previous posts. ( B ) On Blizzard's forums, if you click the developer icon, it takes you to the first developer post in the given topic. Pro's: You can see the entire post and scroll up to see what the dev is responding to. Con: It only shows you the first dev post. Which do you guys prefer?

We're looking into adding this, so hopefully soon it'll be much easier to find dev posts. TG

Please take the off-topic discussion offline. Thanks, TG

Done.

That indeed seems to be some kind of IE and NN bug -- I corrected the offending background color tag and it looks happy in Opera now. Please let me know if you guys have any further problems. Thanks! TG

IGN has a brand new KOTOR II preview with four minutes of new video on Telos, a planet devestated by the Sith during the Jedi Civil War. Check it out now!

We're definitely working on it -- I wish you could see how many messages have been put into our post gulag in the past few days

Several things: - Our forum software doesn't have a feature to limit signature size or number of images, but our Forum Guidelines do. - Our software will auto-scale any avatar posted to it so you don't have to resize it (unless you prefer the quality of an art program to the rescaler) - Unfortunately we're sticking to 64x64 avatar size. Compared to many other game company forums, I feel we've been fairly accomodating in regard to signature and avatar options. TG

I'd like to take a stab at this one as well, as we've received posts, PM's and e-mail about this very issue, and I want to express that this of great concern to us. Since the announcement two weeks ago, we've had a lot of new folks join our boards -- almost all with great intentions, but we've gained others who simply saw it as an opportunity to have fun at other's expense. From these teething experiences, we've made a real effort internally to grow our web presence in conjunction with the growth of our forums and the community. During this time, we've upgraded our forum servers, brought our moderator staff up to 11 with more coming soon, we've enabled inappropriate post reporting for all users, we've revised our forum guidelines with new enforcement policies, we're hiring an internal community manager, and we'll continue to grow our moderation team to meet and exceed the demand on the boards. I just want to assure everyone that we are very serious and commited to making this a fun, mature place to talk about the games we are developing, and I hope that our efforts will become more apparent in the coming days. I would also welcome any member to send a PM to me or our moderation staff if they'd like to learn more or are interested in helping. We definitely want to see all of you here, and again, having a fun, mature forum community for all is our ultimate goal. Thanks, TG

That feature was enabled at 500 posts which came from an artifact of upgrading the board software, and was not intended. Yes, "levels" is a little boring -- we're working on coming up with a new system, but for now, we'd like to stick with 'regulated' titles. TG

Check out GameSpot's newest interview with Obsidian CEO Feargus Urquhart. He talks about Neverwinter Nights 2, Star Wars Knights of the Old Republic II: The Sith Lords, Fallout 3, and working with BioWare.

This poll is in danger of meeting the same demise.

One of our mods runs on dial up sometimes. Unfortunately we're sticking to 64x64. Sorry. TG

We have posted new forum guidelines, which can be viewed here and also via the "Forum Guidelines" link in the upper right hand corner of each forum web page. Our moderation staff will now be reviewing posts using these new guidelines. If you have any questions, please feel free to PM any of our moderators.

We have enabled a feature in our board software that allows users to report inappropriate posts to the moderation staff. If you should find a message that you feel is inappropriate and/or violates our forum guidelines, please click the new "Report" button located on the bottom left of each post. Thank you for your help in keeping this a fun and mature community! The Guildmaster

E-Boredom has a brand new interview with Feargus Urquhart, CEO of Obsidian Entertainment. Feargus talks about what it was like working on several award-winning CRPG's like Baldur's Gate, Fallout 2, Planescape: Torment, and now Star Wars Knights of the Old Republic II: The Sith Lords.

If you've recently registered for access on our forums, but haven't received a validation e-mail yet and are not able to login, please try the following things: 1) Login: When you attempt to log in, the forums give you the opportunity to resend your validation e-mail. Select this option, and the e-mail will be resent immediately. 2) Spam: Some mail servers using anti-spam software mistake our validation e-mail as being a spam message. Check your Junk and Bulk e-mail folders -- you may find the validation letter there. 3) E-mail: If you simply cannot find an e-mail from our board software, please e-mail the Obsidian Webmaster from the e-mail account you listed in your account during registration, and also include your username. HOWEVER, DO NOT SEND YOUR PASSWORD. MODERATORS AND ADMIN ON THESE FORUMS WILL NEVER ASK YOU FOR YOUR PASSWORD. Thanks, The Guildmaster

Thanks for the suggestion -- I improved this a little, let me know what you think.

I'm pleased to announce that the upgrade to the forum software was a success, and opens a whole bunch of new functionality. New features include: - Collapsable forums: Don't want to see forums you never visit? Now you can. Simply click the [-] in the top right of any forum to hide it. - Ignore a user: You can now ignore other user's posts. - MultiQuote. There's a "QUOTE+" button to the bottom right of your post area (next to the "up" arrow) when viewing a topic. Clicking on this will turn the button red and when you next hit "Add Reply", the clicked posts will be added to the post window as quotes! You can click again to turn them off and this feature works across pages, posts, topics and even forums. (The previous button "QUOTE" has been replaced with "REPLY" -- it's functionality is identical) - Online/Offline indicator: Each post reflects the online status of the user. - Lo-Fi Version: Want to browse the boards on a PDA? Just click the Lo-Fi Version link at the bottom of the page for a text online version of the forums. - Many skin tweaks. - Two new topic views, an enhanced 'threaded' mode that's less cumbersome, and a linear+ mode which makes keeping track of topics easier. ... and many other new features! If you should run into any problems, please PM me and we'll get that taken care of. Thanks, The Guildmaster

Check out more new previews from LucasArts' Summer 2004 Press Event at GameSpy, HomeLAN Fed, and TeamXbox!

LucasArts held its Summer 2004 Press Event in San Francisco yesterday and GameSpot sat down with LEC Producer Mike Gallo for a video preview. Also, check out IGN's new previews and interviews with Obsidian's Producer Chris Parker for the PC and Xbox versions!

In GameSpot's Designer Diary #1 for KOTOR 2, LucasArts' Mike Gallo and Obsidian's Chris Parker talk about the many trials and tribulations of preparing the first KOTOR 2 press demo for E3!