Hawkwise

Thing is with RPGs is they are not as popular as FPS games are right now, or other games. The industry goes where the money is for the most part. Like the movie industry. Super hero movies, and movies with happy endings are big now. Jerry Brockheimer sigh. Music industry follows the money too, Rap and Kiddy Pop (darn you Boys 11 Men, why are there eleven? (i know its a 2) ) used to be the big gig. Now it seems to be shifting towards Crappy Pop-Rock. Either way it will shift back when people get tired of storyless FPS.( Hire me as an intern). I dont care what people say, Half Life 2 was rated on the quality of the engine rather than story or gameplay. So when they shift back to the RPG market EA will churn us out some RPGs with as many expansions as The Sims (shudder). Thankfully there are companies like Obsidian to make quality games. Remember MR. Subliminal from SNL? Eric Ic Foster P.S. If we want RPGs to keep being made people have to stop downloading them for free. High Five to the people at Steam for making it hard to steal, or atleast harder.

My suggestion for KotOR 3 would be as follows. First, more of everything. Bigger worlds to explore. More NPCs. More party members. The ability to not be a jedi as a main character. Make the ability to beat the game multple ways like in fallout, where you could be the charismatic leader and **** your way through the universe getting other people to do things for you. Maybe have charisma effect the number of party members. More races to play as. Longer play time would be cool. Say 40 hours to beat the game just doing story based events, and 70ish hours to complete everything. I cant speak for everyone , but i don't like creating a character playing it then only having 25-30 hours of play time with it. More customization is always a plus. I liked comparing characters with my friends, Fallout 2 characters. Release the toolset with KotOR 3 like the toolset was released with Never Winter Nights so the mod community can get a hold of it easily and mod the crap out of it. Create more content, keeps the game alive and people wanting more. Perhaps even some kind of fort on some planet you can customize and build upon, gather forces at. If your sith it could be a sith training academy. I say drop Revan and the Exile. Create a new story. Something new. Something that does not feel like the movies. To me both games felt like i was playing the movies but with different characters. From a design perspective it is probably easier to not have to worry about all the back story on 2 games to make a 3rd game fit into the story they wrote years ago. Perhaps for the story come at it from a third angle. Instead of having the jedi and sith fighting and you pick a side, you are say a Bounty Hunter or errand boy from some barren planet in the middle of no where, and your just trying to live through the jedi/sith war. Through that conflict you could pick good or evil, or perhaps some neutral side to stop the. Or another story angle could be that your senator father was killed and your tring to find out why, and mystery ensues. Let story be not on such a grand scale that you dictate the future of the entire galaxy. Those are just my humble suggestions. Thanks for the games Obsidian. Cant wait to update my mod to NWN 2, (or to finish my group mod for NWN). Eric Ic Foster

I can't even express how helpful this is. I am currently leading a mod group for NWN. The game school (UAT in Tempe AZ) I go to doesn't have a nice set of guidelines like this that I can follow so I am kind of "Wingen' it". Eric "Ic" Foster

Being that i am currently going to school for game design at UAT, think i will post something. First off you do not NEED a game design degree to get into the game industry. The teachers here freely admit the degree wont get you anything. It can't hurt. However if you do alot of projects while you are in that school and have a beefy portfilio that will say much much more than the name on your certificate. ( I am currently starting a NWN mod project, having problems finding people to model and animate atm...... plenty of coders though lol.........) Keep in mind that 95% give or take 10% of the game industry right now does not have a game degree of any kind. Alot of them come from other places. I know this guy with a masters in Archetecture that is a level designer now and he kicks ass. Being that a game can encorporate everything from real life, almost any degree in anything can be usefull to a company in one way or another. (some more than others obviously. Turf and Soil Management degree wont help much) I would say having an general programming background will help everyone, even if you only know a little, just enough to talk to the programmers. Also i saw a guide book to the NWN toolset a while back, anyone know where i can get one???