SteveThaiBinh

An Iraq thread! :ninja10: Hmmm. If there was hope on that day, and if anyone's betrayed it, surely it's Messrs. Bush, Rumsfeld, Blair and co. who failed to put a proper post-invasion plan into action? As I recall, the toppling of the statue was covered in a fair amount of depth by news organisations. The positive co-operation between the crowd and the US troops wasn't glossed over or ignored, but neither was the obvious negative reaction of Iraqis to seeing the US flag flying there. The anniversary of the start of the war wasn't so long ago, and now with this one, the anniversary of Bush's speech announcing the cessation of major combat operations must be coming up soon. I'm particularly looking forward to that one.

Rob McGinnis posted this over at the NWN2 forums: I agree that given what's been said, an official announcement on an expansion pack is likely to come soon, but this isn't it. Legacy of the Gith would be an interesting title, though - even if it was formerly used for NWN2 itself. I guess it refers to the silver sword, and the end of NWN2 did try to focus our attention on the fate of the sword.

I miss the PNJ forum. There aren't enough ninja pirate threads or crates vs. barrels threads anywhere else.

Excellent. Problem solved. I've added something to the FAQ about this as well.

DAWUSS, could you clarify what you intended this thread to discuss, please? I'm a little confused.

I quite like what I'm reading, too . Last time I checked in on Dragon Age there wasn't much information, and what there was seemed a bit generic. It looks like they're hoping to do something interesting with race, culture and religion, not just falling back on an imitation of other fantasy settings. The key is whether they can make it important, not just pretty background material. The thing is, will having high persuade just mean that you can get away with anything? That doesn't work for me in the long term. Surely the NPC you bluffed into doing something evil will have second thoughts after the event - there should be consequences, recriminations, and defections. Well implemented, persuade could be really interesting, and I'm always a fan of non-violent ways through difficult situations, but badly implemented it's just a cheat to give you access to more options than your character really should have.

Would it really be impossible to create new heads for the characters? I appreciate the engine might prevent Oblivion-style freedom in editing features, but triple the choice of faces and hairstyles and I think people would be happier.

Oh, they had that in Civ3. It was purely cosmetic, though - not really part of the game. I can't say I miss it.

I don't think the cut content from NWN2 stayed on the discs that got sent out. Kotor2 was rather unusual in that regard, in that so much of the cut content seemed still to be available - hence Team Gizka. Besides, as the Obsidian people are forever saying, every game has content that's cut - for whatever reason - during the development process. It's normal. I think the end of NWN2 was such that it demands a continuation of the story, preferably with the same character and some of the same NPCs. That would entail epic levels, which would be an attractive selling point for an expansion pack. If they also take the time to 'enhance', not 'restore', content to the basic NWN2 campaign (using some of the stuff from the cutting room floor), that would be another positive feature that I'd value. Casavir's content and/or Luskan seem to be mentioned a lot, so why not please the fans and go with that?

Ooh, how did that work? (I never played Civ1 or Civ2 :blush10: )

I've never stayed in a scenario for more than a few minutes. I guess I'm not very adventurous, but I stick with the regular game.

I think you mean Darth Sion (cut off Kreia's hand?), and you do meet him again, . You don't need to worry about trying to look for him. While the game views killing Vrook as a Dark Side act, opinion on these boards leans in the other direction. It's up to you what you do - but I believe that if you kill one Jedi, the others will ultimately hear of it.

So the internet people have decided it's Beyond the Sword and not Beyond the Stars, eh? They didn't seem too sure last week. Good news, definitely. Corporations sounds like fun - I hope it's not completely identical to religion, but does work along similar lines. Events could definitely be interesting, whether in the ancient world (Volcano!) or the modern (two nations on the other side of the world have gone to war and apparently my people are miserable because they think I should do something about it!).

Yes. I really wish these companies would produce fewer new games and game engines (with all the bugs and technical problems that entails) and spend more time producing quality expansion packs for each others' games. I would have loved to see a Troika or Obsidian expansion pack for Oblivion, or a Bethesda premium mod for NWN.

I liked it. It was quirky and humourous, but not in a way that made you laugh out loud very often. I'm still in shock at liking Will Ferrell in something. I saw The Queen a few days ago. and loved it. Helen Mirren definitely deserved her Oscar for that, and I think Martin Sheen captures the essential sliminess of Tony Blair very well. It was very challenging and disconcerting to watch something in which Blair is in the right - that hardly ever happens now in real life. I'm still a little glad I wasn't in the UK at the time of Diana's death - I wonder if I would have been caught up in the collective grief, or recoiled from it.

Here are my thoughts - I think they've mostly been said by other people already, but never mind... I agree that unwinnable battles need to be handled with care and skill. It's rather sloppy presentation to have you clearly defeating an opponent (e.g. Malak), and then have a cut scene force you to run away. Instead, the designers should carefully engineer it so that you are losing and losing badly, for believable reasons, before triggering the necessary cut scene and defeat. New games don't exist in a vacuum, so exactly how you handle unwinnable battles has to be influenced by gamers' past experiences of RPGs. I don't see this as an excuse to say you can't do different stuff because it's not what people expect, just that you have to take their expectations into account when pushing the envelope. If I'm playing an RPG and I lose a seemingly important battle, I get nervous. Have I just screwed the game up, or at least, blocked myself off from the 'best' outcomes of the game? Should I reload and try again, or not? It spoils the immersion and makes the game less fun. I've played D&D or similar RPGs where I've made decent progress until suddenly coming across an enemy I couldn't defeat the first two or three times of trying. I could have given up, accepted this as a defeat, and tried to advance by other means - the problem is that, with hindsight, I know that I wouldn't have got anywhere - this was a main quest path encounter and there was no alternative solution. It wasn't even that hard a battle, it was just that I'd never used buffs before (never having needed them), and suddenly I did need them and I had to figure out how they worked. I wouldn't have progressed beyond this point if I hadn't viewed the battle as a puzzle that I had to reload and find a solution for. So when I'm faced with an unwinnable battle in any new game, I need very strong signals (cutscenes?) to persuade me not to keep reloading and retrying. Because I will tend to do exactly that, long after it stops being fun, because I won't have confidence in the developer that the other path, the path of accepting defeat, is either properly written or fun. I wonder if developers or gamers will be happy with a battle with a tiny tiny chance to win. Either most gamers will accept the easier path of defeat, in which case the designers are still having to produce dialogue and responses for the 'victory' outcome that will only be experienced by a small minority of players. On the other hand, if most gamers keep trying to get that elusive 'victory' outcome, they're going to get bored playing again and again with only a tiny chance to success - it stops being fun after a while. Surely as a designer you'd want to avoid both these cases. So I think unwinnable battles are good, because in life some battles are unwinnable and the consequences of that are interesting. Make them truly unwinnable, but also convincingly unwinnable - don't interrupt a battle you're winning with a cutscene that tells you it's hopeless - send twenty werewolves instead, each 10 times more powerful than your party or character. And above all, constantly reassure the gamer that he's on the right track and hasn't missed something vital.

Dunno. I've never heard of it. So you tell us about it. It's the end of the week and I'm all googled out.

Indeed. Many thanks to the great Norwegian taxpaying public. We love you! Looks a ways in the future, mind.

I don't think so - it would have been different, certainly, and not to everyone's taste, I suppose. For me, it would have invoked the really good Chinese movies I've seen - martial arts and otherwise - and added to the atmosphere.

No, but getting back on topic certainly is. Is it called LARPing, then? We had a bunch of people doing this by the lake outside my accommodation when I was at uni two years ago. From a distance, I thought they were some kind of civil war reenactment group, but then one day I wandered past and thought the swords and axes looked unrealistically big. I decided they must be rehearsing for some kind of outdoor theatrical performance. I suppose I should have gone up and asked them, but they were waving the swords around quite energetically and some appeared to have bows and arrows.

The Iranians have seen close up what happens to a country when the US or 'the West' invades. I think you could count on much stronger resistance than was offered by the Iraqis. Iranians are extremely proud of their cultural heritage and will not willingly see it ransacked. In the view of the Daily Telegraph, these sailors were taken because Tony Blair expressed regret about the slave trade, which apparently makes Britain appear weak in the eyes of the rest of the world. Oh, and please steer clear in the discussion of anything that looks like advocating nuclear annihilation, even if not meant seriously.

As suggested in the FAQ on the Kotor 2 forum, you're probably better off looking for help in the LucasArts Tech Support forum as well as here - there seem to be more solutions getting posted there. Good luck, and if you do find something that works, please let me know, and I'll add a note linking the error message and the solution in the FAQ.

Sadly, this quest seems to be unfinishable. There's a good chance the Restoration Project will fix this, but for the moment, I don't think there's anything you can do.

The Witcher (I guess - I hope it's not too action-y) Sam & Max Episodes 5 and 6 (I'm getting through these much too fast ) The NWN2 expansion (I really hope all these rumours are true, and an announcement would be very reassuring) Simon the Sorceror 4 Gray Matter The Black Hound mod (Meaningful choices, eh? I think I could go for that. ) The Silver Lining (still due any day now, I gather) TSLRP I'll be watching Fable 2 to see if it's any better than Fable 1, and might buy it if the reviews are unanimous that this is the case, but not unless it has a save-anywhere option. I hate missions. I'm interested to see what happens with Mass Effect, too, but I'm not getting an X-Box - I'll wait until the whole trilogy is out and converted to PC, thanks. I'm not optimistic about Fallout 3, but I'll probably buy it. I enjoyed Oblivion a fair bit, so I'll probably get something out of Fallout 3 as well. In the far distant future... TLJ 3 Dragon Age Kotor 3 (who knows when) Lots and lots of very good NWN2 mods.