Naso

Well you could look at it as a single player MMO or you could look on it as an attempt to realize an entire world. It sorta seemed like what you were talking about when you said you wanted a freer game world. You looking forward to Oblivion though? It's supposed to have better combat, the world goes about on its own with a life simulation of npc's and the story is supposed to be stronger. Seems like they're working hard to address all the problems with MW.

You don't think they're good enough? I would be that they'd change their design philosophy for that. The big open thing has been the model for the Elder Scrolls, and I doubt they'd go overboard with it on an established franchise.

They simply don't care. They're marketed at a young enough age group that there's always a fresh crop coming for when the alienate the last group, so the business model of quick sales has replaced any concern for the actual product.

Was just an example, and the incident that made me a very skeptical and irascible consumer....

Corollary question: O Devs, why have you forsaken us?

Because I was really excited for this game and somehow hoping, stupidly, that it would turn out ok.. For some reason I stuck through with the original through all the crashes, lockups, black screens, and random inverted polygon coordinates... Thought maybe they'd have most of that fixed by now, could do the rest of it, and make a good game. Thought, stupidly, from the developer posts that the Obsidian people were making a real good faith effort to do a bang-up job despite LA. That is why I'm here, and I'm waiting for the PC version. It remains to be seen whether this stuff will be fixed, but I'm becoming less and less hopeful by the day.

So a market criticism then, like how I would kill for a good space-sim. You didn't like Morrowind though? THe interface kinda sucked, but the world was really cool, and I kinda liked the main quest too.

How about "KotOR 3: We're Sorry. Really Sorry. It'll work this time. We promise"

Ack.... That's too bad. I mean UT2k4 was released with bugs, but they've patched it constantly, released new content, supported the mod community, and everything, and it's been really great. I'm not saying devs need contests, prizes, and stuff. The kind of quality support they haveis what wins customers. I mean, after this game, I would have no hesitation to buy something from them, because I know that they care and will support it. I guess I'll have to cherry-pick like that. The thing is, Lucas Arts had me branded from a small child. My first game was x-wing, which I got in grade-school. The little company store / magazine things made me want their other products. I got the whole xwing series and the whole jedi knight series. Hell, I even got galactic battlegrounds against my better judgement, though mainly so I'd have something I could run on my laptop. My point is, I was a very loyal customer, and it takes quite a lot to destroy that, yet somehow they have.

Problem is, what games are there to buy? Doom 3 was patched, but like JA it took a month to have a working server browser. I guess that's more forgiveable because mp wasn't the main focus but still..... NWN was a mess. KotOR was a mess. JA was a disaster. Far Cry was supported ok I guess, but still had a lot of issues and was slow being patched. Homeworld 2 was never completely fixed because Sierra went down the toilet. Raven I wouldn't buy a game from ever anymore. What's a safe dev or publisher to buy from? UT2k4 has been wonderfully supported. Is Atari usually good? What about infogrames? I only have Civ3 from them. Oh, Raven is Raven Software, the guys who made Elite Force 1, Jedi Outcast, and Jedi Academy. Jedi Outcast was one of my favorite games, and then they released this broken mess for JA. I bought it the day it came out, because I played JO multiplayer a lot, my friend and I, and I couldn't get into servers. I finally found out that the server browser just didn't work... That and there were weird performance problems..... After weeks and no word from the devs or tech support, I went to the message boards and asked when they were going to fix it. The resident fanboys and moderator were very offended that someone wasn't in complete orgasmic joy about the game and flamed me. It carried on for a day or two, and I was banned. I sent an email about this to Raven, since what I said was perfectly legitimate and not at all rude, no bad language, etc, and they replied once asking what my username was and what exactly happened, (showing they got the email), and then left me banned and didn't respond any more.

And you get thrills from the game being so hidebound as to subject you to every little thing, as opposed to putting "fun" slightly ahead of strictness? There's nothing wrong with complex rpg's, and I'm all in favor of them. KotOR, however, is supposed to be a less complicated game and gets its strength from immersion and presentation, not complexity. You can play the games you like, and it really shouldn't bother you that games you don't like exist, since you don't have to play them.

Seriously, what the hell is it going to take to get devs to release working products? It's getting worse and worse. I mean, tech support questions go unanswered a lot of the time. As a last ditch attempt to get some help with Jedi Academy I posted on the raven forums and was immediately flamed and banned by the mod. Nothing happens. Nothing gets fixed. We still buy these games. Everything gets worse. I'm sorry if I'm becoming pretty nasty, (I was actually pretty polite in getting banned at raven), but this is getting to be too much. We buy these damn things as *recreational* prducts, and yet we have to worry so much about simply getting them to work an not being cheated out of our $50, which is a lot of money when you really think about it....

Yeah.... I'm not falling for it a second time. LA pulled the bait and switch by giving a crappy unsupported sequel to the great Jedi Outcast, so, however much I would like to, I'm not going to be tricked with KotOR. Sorry LA, your crap just won't cut it anymore. I knew a guy who when he used to get junk mail with the little return envelopes, would mail old candy wrappers and stuff back. I'm thinking maybe we should start this with games. We could just fill up the box with paper trash and random stuff and mail it to the devs or publishers. I mean, it's rude and stupid, but nothing else has worked......

If wishes were pennies I'd be a millionaire.

Either the contract bound them to LA's will on release dates and when it was done, or this was rushed on their own initiative. Either way, they are culpable.

I miss floppies. I remember getting X-Wing on 5 floppies for x-mas. Funny thing was, way back when, they actually made games that worked.... Imagine that.... You can say it was easier back then, but coding the different hardware paths manually wasn't exactly the best.

Exar_Kun: Did Obsidian sign a contract or did they not? It's that simple.

Yeah Hades, I agree. Learned my lesson with Jedi Academy, day it came out.... Good policy for all games, but with Lucas Arts, no way I'd trust them. I'm suprised one of their games hasn't repartitioned my harddrive yet or locked my browser to their company store. That's about what's left for them imo.

Well, the PC version should have many few performance problems, of course that's assuming it will actually run on the hardware it allegedly supports. That's a very big if..... Judging from promises, the results of those promises, and the hideous mess that seems to be the xbox version, it's probably big enough to fly an ISD through....

Only dvd game I've gotten so far is UT2k4, but didn't have any problems with that, though oddly enough it doesn't require the actual disk to play....

It's a bad position to be in, but it is completely obvious from just observing LA's behavior in the last few years that this would happen, so to not take some measures against it, aggressively negotiate, or whatever, and to sign up anyway means they are just as culpable as LA. They wanted to have big high-profile first game and were willing the sacrifice the actual game and the quality for that, so they have to live with the consequences, which are going to be a lot of lost credibility and trust that will hurt them more in the long run than these quick profits will help. If you think that's unfair, look at the people who paid 50 bucks to have the thing up and die on them. Now that's not fair.

Think it'll be any good? The gameplay movie I saw made the interface look really really good, but the action seemed more like stand here nigh on invincibly and shoot at enemies who also stand there until they fall over. Maybe it was on easy or something to make a nice movie, but still..........

The big thing I think is that we've already seen the end result of trying to add any more complexity to prerecorded mo-cap: JA and it's horrid kata's, lack of control, and just general terribleness. If they make a new one we need a drastically new control system that lets you use the lightsaber in a freer manner. How this is possible, I don't know. Jaden was horrible. Just a generic little brat. No story whatsoever. Then there was the dreadful support for the game. Not as bad as KotOR's, but then I didn't get banned from message boards for mentioning the fact that KotOR was a non-functional product.....

Wait, who was Gluupor again?

For the love of whatever you find holy, stop with the "given enough time" thing, like Obsidian had no control. They had to sign the contract too. Lucas Arts didn't put a gun to their collective head and say WORK! It goes by mutual consent so if they didn't hold out for a contract that allowed them to do a decent job, it is their fault too. It really seems that what the devs said about features and fixes has mostly evaporated too. I'm definitely waiting for reviews and the tech support forum before I get the PC version now......