SteveThaiBinh

It would discourage the designers from having absurdly large, empty rooms in every house and markets where each stall is a full stall's width from the next. Have these people ever seen a real market? Let's have more compact spaces, more clutter, more bustle, and yes, more walking. I want to push my way through a crowd of people in the market.

By which time he'll have trained a dozen people to replace him. Unless 'he' already is a dozen people, which wouldn't surprise me. So the circus moves on to Iran, and Iraq (like Afghanistan before it) fades from the headlines.

I didn't realise your hatch was locked until you were given the apartment. Still, no problem. You can just wait for one of your neighbours to die and pretend his apartment is yours. I mean, does anyone in this building make it to the end of the game?

You know, I've never managed to do that. It was the sensor beams going up and down that always got me. LaCroix never seemed too bothered about it, though. There's nothing to stop you breaking into your Skyline apartment (floor 4, wasn't it?). Heather and your emails won't go there, but otherwise you can walk around and pretend it was yours.

And if the NPC doesn't decide to kill someone vital to the main quest but you don't find out about it until four hours later because you were in the next house when it happened. Radiant AI worries me. Aside from that, I'm still pretty optimistic about Oblivion. Bethesda seemed to recognise they had to make improvements over Morrowind's storyline and characters, rather than pretending they were good as they were. If Oblivion shows significant improvements in these areas, I will love this game.

Welcome to Kotor III: The Musical. I'm sure LucasArts will be announcing it any day now.

If they have the evidence and a democratic mandate to do so, sure. The Norwegian people would have to balance the loss of liberty resulting from nationalisation of private assets and undermining of property rights versus the gains in liberty as increased prosperity created wealth for the public, and the choices that result from wealth. The evidence would have to be strong for such a dramatic change, though.

Cheers. I just downloaded and read Nightscape (once only, I'll have another go tomorrow.) Same with the others. This is a fun nostalgia trip - I really liked Fighting Fantasy when I was a kid. :D Well done on The Rescue - I look forward to reading the finished version.

I didn't want to comment until I saw the video, and my connection yesterday was poor, so I finally got to see it today. Radiant AI looks interesting, but I hope it gets polished so the characters make a little more sense in their choice of activities. I mean, this woman invites me upstairs and randomly decides to launch into archery practice? She's as bad as my Sims. Plus, it looks like it's still too easy to make people really like you - that always annoyed me in Morrowind.

Mars, your interesting approach to thread titles persuaded me to have another look at the site, and I downloaded the player and played/read a story called 'The Rescue'. It wasn't bad, though it wasn't finished, either. So this is a new version of the old Fighting Fantasy/ Choose-Your-Own-Adventure books, eh? Looks like fun, so can you recommend some good stories? What's the best you've ever read/written?

Because the New Testament and Christianity were influenced by Buddhism? By the way, at one point in its evolution this thread discussed free will. I heard a really good radio programme this week on the 'great debate' between Erasmus and Martin Luther about free will - for those who are interested: here.

I wear it until it feels like the bonuses from other items are overpowering its little +1 CON. The idea of having it upgrade itself like your personal crystal would be in keeping with the game's general approach to levels and attributes, but do we really need another super-powerful item in the game?

Could it be a school project? I always suspected I was just part of someone's experiment. :ph34r: I'd like to see one or two characters from Kotor 1 return, but certainly no more than that. Kotor 2 overdid it, I think.

I agree. It was in this quest that I decided I was really going to like this game. And I did. The 'headrunners' (is that their actual name?) were pretty scary - one attacked me by surprise, as I was going back through the area with lots of little film sets, and I jumped back away from the monitor. This is not a good idea when you're wearing headphones. The headrunners were overused by the end, though.

The Guardian has an article on this here. I thought this bit was quite interesting: If the Norwegian government has evidence that more diverse boards result in more profitable companies, and they've tried and failed to get companies to do this voluntarily, then I think the new law is valid. Making Norwegian business more competitive is the responsibility of the government as well as businesses themselves.

The main story of NWN was criticised, rightly I think, for being too long. Bioware faced the same issue that's being discussed here - you design a game with 20 levels so you want to showcase them, but it doesn't feel right to be levelling up every half and hour. So they made a very long, rather dull campaign. I doubt it would take much for Obsidian to add another 15 hours to NWN2, but would they be good hours?

The last two episodes of the first series aired a few hours ago here in the UK, with the promise of series two starting soon. I've been really impressed so far, and forcing myself not to read spoilers on the internet.

Dxun? Really? Each to his own. My favourite has to be Nar Shaddaa - long, complicated, with special quests for Atton, T3 and a pair of NPCs of your own choosing, lots of interesting characters to meet, and I liked the sidequest where you reunited the woman with her husband. Lots of fun things to do, and it never seemed to drag.

Star Wars teaches us that lightsiders can kill things too.

I'm confused. The thread's about what you're listening to, not limited to music. I'm listening to rain on the window. And music, of course. Quiet music.

So why are the ceilings so high? I'm happy for Obsidian to put in the game whatever tickles their collective creative muse, sewers or no. For preference, I'd also like more exterior locations and fewer absurdly large rooms in buildings.

I hope time travel isn't possible. I don't want someone going back in time and causing me to blink out of existance. If time travel turns out to be possible, we must hope that any civilisation smart enough to create it is also smart enough not to use it.

With Jade Empire and Dreamfall both reported to be 15 hours or so, I was getting worried this was becoming something of a new industry standard. 30-40 hours sounds fine. NWN2 is an RPG, and a well-crafted RPG is inherently more replayable than most other genres. I'll be surprised if I don't get 100+ hours out of it.

There's a case for sewers in RPGs. They add plausibility. It is conceivable that a city would have a sewer system and that it might become infested with monsters. Dungeons, on the other hand - who's building these things in the middle of nowhere? Plus, sewers don't just have rats, they have many varieties of rats. Off the top of my head, I can remember from Arcanum regular rats, giant rats, putrid rodents, granite rats, were rats and rock rats.

If you live somewhere where you can rent games, it's worth renting to see if you like it. You either love it for its freedom, beauty, huge variety of sidequests and fascinating setting, or you hate it for its poor combat and dull main story. Personally I liked it, but found it rather brown in places.