Tigranes

I hardly think the actual content of any of those projects involved uncreative corporate suit dictated work. Of course Obs wants to work on their own IPs eventually but it's not like they're forced into making cookie cutter.

Keep in mind that you'll never find traps of that difficulty anywhere else other than Durlag. I remember all the trap placements by now, of course, so I could probably do without a thief even :/

Thinking that KOTOR2, NWN2, FO:NV and DS3, all in all, are 'taking jobs that noone else will' is pure nonsense. They all had their legacy problems but the first three have been definitely worth it for Obs, and probably the publishers, so far. All of Troika's games had sales figures like 100k-200k in the first year (can anyone remember?), while Obs' sequels break million point.

I think there's quite big differences at the management level though - Obsidian isn't the master of project management and they've had problems with publisher relationships, polish, etc, but overall they've managed to pull through the difficult early years and establish themselves in a way taht Troika never could, who were essentially in danger already after Arcanum and just slid down to oblivion from there. I'm not the greatest fan of their sequel strategy but I think it's undeniable Feargus ensured the company's survival and initial growth with some clever dealmaking. Certainly FO:NV for instance achieved sales, audiences and a combination of critical acclaim & popular appeal that no Troika game ever did, as much as I love Arcanum. You can't seriously compare this to, say, a decision to make TOEE, which was pretty inexplicable from a business point of view.

BG2, NWN1, Morrowind are just examples of some great modding communities. BG2 was insane in its longevity and level of skill, NWN1 in its size and variety, etc. In all cases also doing a lot of crazy things like pretty much implementing Guitar Hero style combat in NWN... DS never really made a wave in general as far as its modding scene went, so it's interesting to hear that people who did enjoy the game had a lot of things going on. I doubt we'll have a huge amount of modding support this time as it's the Onyx engine's first debut and they're not getting 4-5 years, but hopefully things can still be done.

From what we've heard, it seems yes you can use controllers, even two controllers, on PC. Devs have repeatedly stated how you can plug in controller & play.

I think the spawn issues are largely fixed now, though I used to Ctrl+Y through some of the more retarded random spawns.

Yeah, you get a ton of potions, oils and wand uses in BG1, especially if you sell & rebuy wands near endgame with the extra cash. One of the reasons I love tutu/etc is that you can retool some of the more stupidly designed NPCs (or just give them kits) - i.e. Kivan is deadly as an archer. I'm not sure, but the vanilla version of a certain dwarf in Beregost is a pretty meaty fighter, no? Always liked the way you pick him up, no nonsense, no romance, just a appropriate backdrop, easy 2-dimensional character and go. Had to abandon my previous BG Trilogy playthrough as that megamod lagged way too much later on, might go back to Tutu double install and play through again.

Certainly Haste is a gamewinner, but if you're determined you can get by without them, and Wand of Monster Summoning can arguably be substituted by two pally tanks + two cleric backups if played right. Again, its definitely easier with a mage in there but I don't think it's crucial.

You won't be shafted by leaving the wizard behind, really. I'm a huge wizard fan but there aren't any situations where a lack of one would seriously screw you over. Am unsure how fun playing 2 pals + 2 clerics is though, I personally prefer a variety so I can keep using different skills.

I think we've got enough threads on that point, no need to resurrect old threads to say the same thing multiple times. By all means continue here.

I played Theme Hospital again a couple of years ago, rather simple but great fun and pretty funny. I remember not getting into Dungeon Keeper at all but Bullfrog would definitely be nice to see.

Interesting... so how many games can you actually play with that setup? Can't think of a lot, unless you just set it on easy and let it do its thing.

I played it at release until a little bit after Barcelona and to be honest, even the first half isn't that good. As in, certainly the first half is much much better and is a pretty decent game, but it's not as if it's an unmissable piece of awesomeness that's been buried by the tripe that comes after. I don't think you *really* miss that much. Certainly the combat was odd and quite frustrating all the way through, mainly involving finding roundabout ways to avoid getting smashed by powerful beasts and running like hell around on a weird pseudo-ISO map.

Arcanum combat was somehow fun, though. It was really broken, but especially with certain builds and without abusing RT/TB switch too much, it was fun. You could blaze past filler combat in seconds in fast RT like you can't do with many TB games, but still have glorious TB combat when it mattered; guns made you care about repair and ammo even more than FO's post-apocalyptic settings; companions weren't too smart but often helpful and made you care about them; some cool magic; etc. It looks beautiful though, there's a lot of fun things, and character building is great fun, and finally some quests are very imaginative. I think it also helps that Tarant is actually navigatable in higher resolutions these days.

So I've been playing this game the last couple of days and really enjoying it, but it really does need to be more transparent about how the mechanics work. I've now played Fuel Crisis twice, crashing and burning the world once in the 70's and now in the 90's. In the last game I used Tobin Tax initially and used the $ to set Middle East, Africas, etc on the right track, while going in really strong on China's energy use with Coal-Free industry & commit to nuclear. I generally used forest protection and commit/expand renewable energy, expecting that if I was consistent in pushing renewable energy and the related techs all over the world, coal emissions & oil dependency would lessen. Unfortunately, the way the game calculates dependency and use seems odd to me, and certainly not easy to decipher from the game itself. Global emission increase rate steady declined and I forced it to start going down by the 70's, but simultaneously I was getting hit with massive oil shortages (eventually 100%), and soon a huge global financial crisis wiping out over 50% of the world GDP - almost as if the world was not reducing emissions by replacing coal/oil/gas use with renewables, but sort of saying "well we'll use renewables but we'll also rely heaps on oil/etc, and when that runs out we'll just cut all production by half". In the first game I also tried a global carbon trading scheme. It would really help if the game had a (1) tech chart, so it's easier to see which techs can contribute to which renewable energy, and (2) charts on dependency & use, showing you clearlyl how your investment in, say, hydro, is helping phase out oil. I suspect that I need to make use of some other policies such as electric cars and actually ban Oil, even? How do I make sure the world phases out oil/etc before it runs out?

Unfortunately, online petitions have a history of not effecting anything. On the assumption that the Atari executives are willing to listen, though, you'd need way, way more than 3000 signatures. How many sales would make a BG3 viable? At least a million, for full AA funding. At least half a million even if a smaller project. How many signatures would persuade the executives those kind of sales are achievable? I'd say high 5-digits or even 6 digits - or at least, lower 5-digits boosted by huge word of mouth speculation around game media. Of course, that doesn't mean a petition is worthless. It just means it acts as supporting evidence to a companya lready considering a revival, not the primary motivator. That's where Atari's current condition comes in - it doesn't have a lot of funds and I don't know if they've sorted out their D&D license problems?

In the nicest possible way: no. Can I keep your head in a jar when you crock it then?

Yeah, I was literally this close to going to Warwick - my field is media (cultural studies, globalisation, consumer culture, etc) and UK fits me a lot better. In the end though the array of resources Penn had was impressive, and the reputation the dept in particular has. Not to mention the UK economy in the gutter, some of the unis couldn't even offer full funding to anyone. In the end I wanted to have as varied a career prospects as possible in terms of countries, and perhaps subconsciously 5 more years in school rather than 3. Wals/Monty hopefully I'll be able to visit the UK at some point during my studies though. Guard yer liver safe till then.

That's very true, I'd love to have seen an Alpha Protocol that played a lot more like Thief, where you really don't want to go in guns blazing except in a very few opportunities. I enjoyed the over the topness of the AP we got but sometimes it did go too far. Imagine AP spending less time getting its guns going and more time with hitman-style disguises and wires, etc... But yes, I think there's no hiding its great qualities or its bad ones. I'm glad we got it, really.

Accepted PhD offer at Pennsylvania. Had to turn down LSE, Warwick, Goldsmiths and some more, which is a pity since I'd much prefer to live in England. God help me I will find somewhere that does a proper curry.

I've returned to Alpha Protocol as well. Actually, I loved it way too much when it first came out and blazed through ~5 playthroughs, now I'm better able to see its flaws as well. It really does look quite poor in various places (all of which are accentuated in the opening Greybox area, unfortunately), mouse IS annoying for those who get the stuttering, and larger sprawling levels would definitely have made the fun factor go up exponentially. Nevertheless I still think it gives you a unique and very enjoyable experience, especially if you don't abuse Chain Shot, play at least on Hard, and go with the pace of the game instead of fighting it (in conversations, in exploration, in fighting). There's a lot of fun to be had in trying to ghost levels, use various gadgets creatively, etc., and theres some insane C&C going on.

I like the gog preorder so I'll stick with it. Hopefully they keep up the promise of no DRM though, or I might rage-cancel.

I can't remember with certainty whether they do the shipped=sold thing, but for papers the whole thing works mostly in reverse - because in so many cases 1 subscription would actually mean more than 1 reader (1 for a family, etc), they've traditionally done something like tripling their circulation numbers (i.e. the actual number of subscriptions) to gauge their actual readership. Obviously that's also problematic, but in that case it's because it's nearly impossible to keep track - that's more comparable, say, to guessing what the ratio of pirates to buyers is for video games. In this case, it is possible for companies to actually keep track of how many copioes sold to the dot. The only question is how much to trust extrapolated, estimated figures, and my point is that if you build in a healthy margin of error as is only reasonable, then the figures are only useful in specific situations, and this isn't one of them. (i.e. unless anyone's wondering whether DA2 outsold Starcraft 2...)

What I mean is a company says 'x shipped' and it gets reported / spread as 'x sold'. But yes, a company's official reports to shareholders, etc. are the most reliable sources of sales info - sometimes we get them and tahts the hard numbers.