Yst

Favourite BIS villains: The Luremaster (Icewind Dale: Trials of the Luremaster) - You only get the full story if you really read all the items you find there. All in all, great villain. Ravel (Planescape: Torment) - More interesting than TTO. More nuanced. Just as evil, really. But she's better developed. And purely for voice acting awesomeness: Tony Jay as Kresselack (Icewind Dale) and TTO (Planescape: Torment) - This guy has such an incredible villain voice. It's fantastic.

Finding Heart of Winter's original standalone release at present would be exceedingly unlikely. However, the 'Ultimate Collection' release, complete with IWD1, IWD:HoW, IWD2, sound track and bonus materials sells for less than HoW sold for originally on its own at most game stores (I've twice seen it for $25CDN recently), so this is clearly the sensible choice if you feel the need to pay for a hard copy. Mind you, seeing as Black Isle doesn't exist anymore, nor do Interplay or Titus in any meaningful sense, it's not like you're benefiting anyone other than the game shop who put it on the shelf by buying it.

If we're talking soundtracks as in "albums which were specifically released as the official soundtrack to a game" then, PS:T The Longest Journey Icewind Dale If we're just talking about "the music from a game": Rome: Total War Zelda II (with remixes) Chrono Trigger (with remixes) FFVI (with remixes) Metroid (with remixes)

Interplay was already on the way to its death when PS:T was released, and PS:T got advertising and marketing more in keeping with what would be appropriate to a bargain bin budget title rather than a masterpiece published by the biggest name in the CRPG business. It was released with terrible box art for a fairly short initial run then rereleased for a short time, bundled with a failed Interplay (not BIS) title, Soulbringer, which was almost universally panned. For most of the time since then, it has been out of production and unable to accrue profits its fame would otherwise have easily allowed. Asserting that PS:T was not a profitable title, without elaborating the point, is a bit like saying that the Titanic's boilers had a poor operational life. After all, the boilers stopped mere days into the ship's maiden voyage. Surely we don't have to elaborate why the boilers had a poor operational life? Sure, the ship was sinking around them, but that's no excuse for the boiliers to have stopped.

It didn't quite beat it for me. After BG1's release, I played the game four times in direct succession. JE I played three times in direct succession. So it doesn't quite take the crown. Mind you, PS:T is the game I've played the most in the long run.

No matter how much I consider myself an ex-BISer fanboy, I really think JE stands up the best in the present day, assuming no particular genre bias on the basis of which to choose one of these over another. Deus Ex has aged somewhat, and it's just not nearly as polished a production, even putting age wholly aside. TSL is a middle ground between the two, with present day production values, although the art's not nearly as interesting as JE's, but with, in addition, more of the technical complexity and depth of Deus Ex''s system. Regardless, not as polished as JE. I suppose TSL is for people who find JE just a bit too facile, and Deus Ex for those who, in turn, find even TSL just too dull as a system.

Indeed, I find myself completely at odds with those who believe the beginning to be a weak point in the game. Meeting Morte and Deionarra for the first time? These were, respectively, delightfully comedic and powefully tragic events of almost unmatched quality, both of which occur in that early section. I really do think meeting Deionarra for the first time was my most emotional moment, ever, in gaming. Certain moments in Grim Fandango might approach it, but not with anywhere near the atmosphere Torment provided. So, as for the Mortuary and the game's beginning, I consider it a high point in the game. Certainly not a low point. There's as much interesting dialogue in the Mortuary as anywhere else in the game.

Well not quite. Apogee was a pretty prolific shareware platformer developer and publisher before it introduced the 3D Realms brand which catapulted it into the FPS era as a leading competitor.

For a clan or guild who spends many hours every week together, for a bunch of people working towards long term collective goals, communicating constantly, engaging in what is for many their chiefest hobby, for such a group, considering themselves to have some real life personal investment in the experience (which would make duplicity a real life moral concern) is weird? I mean, what's a hobby that does justify real life personal investment in the associations one makes through it, if that kind of constant cooperation, communication and interaction doesn't serve as an adequate premise for some sort of sense of comeraderie which would at least make lies and deceit something more than gameworld tactical elements?

Indeed, paint me surprised that a game with graphics like these got an 80% from PCGamer. I may have to check it (or its successor) out.

I haven't played Eve save in beta, but it's definitely true that 'infiltration' of this sort if very, very poorly viewed in most other MMORPGs. As far as I'm concerned, whether it is or isn't acceptable really just has to be based on a concensus within the community. If everyone accepts that guild/alliance/corp infiltration (which as others have noted, inevitably necessitates RL duplicity and breach of faith) is part of the way the game is played, and that gameplay strategy does indeed extend outside the game universe into RL, then maybe it will add to it in a positive way. But in other games, absolutely the opposite is the case and even if the player does somehow manage to stay RP *all the time* (which is essentially impossible in all MMORPGs where large-scale PvP occurs), it would be considered foul play.

Clearly you aren't defragging your hard drive in-character. It's not about the distribution of data across your disk. It's about what the distribution of that data means to you. Go little blue boxes! Yeah! Stick it to those little red boxes! Woohoo!

The most worrisome thing in the RPG genre for me right now is sky-rocketing production costs. I don't want a gaming culture wherein you can't sell a story-focused game if it costs less than $10 Million to make. And one major reason for those sky-rocketing production costs seems to be the apparent need developers and publishers feel to make RPGs more cinematic. More like feature films. This has hit the FPS genre as well mind you, with games like Mafia and Max Payne putting gameplay in an overtly cinematic context. Small developers can't afford to self-publish a game which is also a hollywood blockbuster and if big publishers don't want to pick up RPG titles without these high budget aspects, this could be a real problem for conventional RPGs. If small developers can't succeed because their Roleplaying Game doesn't look like it could double as the next Michael Bay flick, then I am worried. But I hope that small and indie dev studios are able to keep their titles in distribution as well as on the shelves (for however long shelves continue to be necessary to game distribution) despite these changes. We'll just have to wait and see.

NWN2 is a no-brainer. I've seen copies of Dungeon Keeper 2 in local game shops off and on recently in a rerelease package. I think if I see it again, I'll pick it up and replay it. Dungeon Seige II is a serious possibility. I'll have to read the reviews. Arcanum and Vampire are both on my "if I get around to it" list.

Actually not too many memorable ones aside from Daggerfall, Fallout, Eye of the Beholder III and then a whole bunch of hack and slash games. This period actually corresponds to the "dark ages" of western RPGs. <{POST_SNAPBACK}> The way I see it, it wasn't a dark age from the point of view of quality titles released. It was only a dark age in sales figure terms, and quantity of publicity achieved amongst the public at large. It seems to me the 1990-1996 period was as rife with good RPGs for PC as any era. They just didn't make big news, with Daggerfall perhaps being the major exception. As far as other games from this era that offer party banter and interaction on PC, Lands of Lore, released in 1993 offered in-party banter and dialogue (with voice over!) in a format so completely different from the JRPG style of the day (and so completely in line with the CRPG tradition from which it was spawned) that claiming its inspiration from any such source would seem ridiculous. The one truly serious attempt to bring totally undisguished JRPG stylings to the PC arrived rather late, with Septerra Core. And virtually no one argues for its historical importance or overall quality. Nor do I think its failure particularly encouraged CRPG developers to copy its all-out JRPG-clone model.

It seems to me one might just as easily argue that party banter and complex NPC dialogue came to CRPGs by way of the Adventure genre and its offshoots and hybrid incarnations, as by way of JRPGs. Actually, the prior strikes me as the more credible claim, since Adventure genre design concepts informed so much else in the development of story-focused and character-driven western RPGs. Realistically though, I think it's silly to draw a direct causal link to any one source. We can give credit to those who did it first (If I had to guess, I'd say the first arbitrarily in-party character dialogue interaction was probably that of various Infocom text adventures), and that's all well and good, but attributing all subsequent precedent in party banter and NPC interaction to whatever first precedents are to be unearthed is just silly. Having characters talk to each other in a character and story driven RPG is just common sense. Maybe CRPGs which employed in-depth character interaction early on applied principles they'd seen in JRPGs or Adventures, but on the other hand, maybe they were just applying principles completely generic to every single PnP roleplaying game since the beginning of time. It doesn't take much creativity to stumble upon this particular notion. Merely to apply it.

Maybe I'll give Doom 3 another try. Like many people, I found its scripted events more annoying than interesting. The tactical side of a 3D shooter's design should add to its immersivity. If you're fighting an army of monsters lurking everywhere, their behaviour should add to the sense that they really are an army of lurking monsters. Doom 3's tactical side adds to little more than the sense that you really are trying to avoid a series of predictable scripted events that some programmer put there without half a thought. I'm not fighting an army of enemy monsters, in my head, when I'm playing. I'm fighting a bunch of digital tripwires which some programmer has strewn all over the floor. And that shouldn't be the sense a game gives.

Is the conventional approach to plural's out of style or something. Are apostrophe's the in-thing at present?

...has nothing to do with any imaginary approaching triumphal comeback awaiting the CRPG genre. The number one reason that the popularity of consoles as RPG platforms, over and above the present popularity of PCs as the same, does not herald the end of the CRPG is that PCs were never as popular as consoles as an RPG platform. At no point in history was the PC, either measured in sales or in popular opinion, as widely successful an RPG platform as the consoles of the same era. It seems to me that a lot of people are coming off the massive successes of the Infinity Engine era with a general sense that RPG predominance is the birthright of the PC platform and that history began when god created the earth in 1999 with the release of Baldur's Gate. While I am apt to treat the initial collaboration of Black Isle and Bioware as the defining event in modern human history, the fact is, never before BG's release had PCs managed to dominate the RPG market, and never during or after did they manage to, for that matter, either. So, me, I'm a lot less worried about the popularity of consoles and the success of the major console platforms in snagging up RPG licenses and releases for this generation and the next, because while I'm a huge CRPG fan, I've never conceived of CRPGs as the dominant sector within the wider RPG market. When I see that they won't dominate the next generation either, I just kind of shrug it off and go on following the genre with the same central PC focus I've always had, despite the same niche status the PC platform has and has always had. The pivotal RPG release of the mid to late '90s as far as popularity goes was not Daggerfall, or Albion, or Lands of Lore II, or Ultima VIII or Ultima IX or even Fallout. Like it or not, it was FFVII. Go back a couple more years and see how many people were playing Betrayal at Krondor and Ultima Underworld by comparison to the number at the same time playing Final Fantasy VI or Secret of Mana. And as critical as I am (as are many people nowadays) of the hype that surrounded FFVII, that was the way it was, and there's no erasing history. PC RPGs were never as big and as popular as console RPGs. So when I see that they aren't going to be as big and as popular in the next generation, I somehow find myself not all shocked or disturbed. That's the way it's been, for the most part. It doesn't seem to have shattered my gaming reality so far. Why would it now?

Party banter, eh? And reminiscent of BG? This is good. On both counts. I shall have to download this. It's a weird world, where Microsoft quickly becomes a publisher of choice and reputation in the RPG market. But things look to be going that way.

I can see it now. Prey, Ghost and DNF will all come out, in the same year. That is the year I stop believing there is a god.

It's always interesting to compare the western separation of the homosexual and the heterosexual into such well-defined and distinct cultural categories to foreign treatments of sexuality where the lines separating sexualities and, particularly, defining homosexuality, are generally less well-defined (Japan) or just drastically different in every way (Ancient Greek, Aboriginal North American, Imperial Chinese).

Bah. I hate it when Canadian media get censored releases not necessarily because Canadian ratings boards themselves are more strict than any given foreign one but merely because a single North American release which agrees with American standards regarding obsenity is the most logistically sensible approach for any distributor.

I voted for the nonsense option I favour the mouse and keyboard, certainly, and have an extremely precise, refined set of mouse and keyboard controls which I've honed over many years for absolute maximum possible twitch speed (I use ASDF control rather than WASD or ESDF and frequently bind auxilliary mouse buttons as well as ASDF to directionals for rather arcane control speed optimisation reasons). But even so, I believe that there's enough to what makes an FPS that less than ideal controls are far from the be-all and end-all of FPS gaming, and a console FPS may well prove itself a worthy experience even played with a gamepad.

Yeah. I've always played Open Palm though, and it's annoying hard to get the Sky romance as a male open palm NPC. You need to be unpleasant and dismissive to BOTH Dawn Star and Silk Fox BEFORE Sky's "Eternal Companions" speech. You can't just be neutral. You have to be somewhat rude in both cases. It took me three playthroughs as an Open Palm male NPC to get the Sky romance, despite attempting to get it the first two times and having my OP responses to Dawn Star and Silk Fox make it inaccesssible.