Tigranes

It's exactly like people modding in Halo suits in Fallout 3 / NV. Yep, that's the industry following the audience there.

It sounds interesting, and in some ways harkens back to older RPGs where you had runic languages or such and you combined the words to cast spells. As long as they handle having a separate ability other than spells right, so that they're not just spell duplicates or ridiculously powerful things that make you Godlike. Of course, my optimism is somewhat tempered by... Thanks, brown-nosers, just in case we didn't know about your cozy deals.

OK, that was... really convoluted, but yes, you're right that it's surprising a company like Obsidian isn't offering character customisation, and I agree that it couldn't hurt to offer some basic options. I'm assuming that they have some reason along the lines of having the writing tie in with those characters a lot, perhaps voiced PCs, etc. Certainly the Nameless One shows that predefined characters are perfectly fine if they are bloody awesome characters. I'm a bit skeptical of that happening in an ARPG though. To me it's a minor detail but yeah, it will probably rile up some people, so I wonder why they did it, too.

Ironman is when your party dies, your adventure is over. The Obsidianites nearly got wiped out at a couple of points in my IWD runs, that would have meant a start over. To be honest, I was relatively confident that at Core difficulty a wipeout wouldn't happen...

What? Ironman is game over when your party dies, not two hours. Or does TOEE have NWN1 OC-like resuscitation? Arcanum was fantastic and there's no doubt that Troika had the talent to make great, if buggy, games. I just can't understand why they picked this project to begin with. Did they really think it was going to sell well because of the 'brand value'? Maybe in 1987. It just made zero sense, and after the lacklustre sales of Arcanum it was like jumping on a suicide train. Glad this LP will let me see how it turns out, though.

Interesting notion. I might be able to find someone who looks like you, though. I'm probably a bit fat. Unless this was your angle on arrival. "I thought you were English European!" "Oh. Weightwatchers, you know. Side-effects etc." Unfortunately, The Great Bureaucrats have decreed that a round-the-world trip for one interview was probably a bit of an overkill. Skype shall be used instead. Praise the Great Bureaucrats!

You *can* set number hotkeys to weapons. I had 1 for stimpack, 2 for main gun, 3 for gren, 4 for melee option, etc.

Despite everything, this is post of the year.

We will see, but This sounds really, really, bad. Everything else is either speculation or sounding good-ish.

Several hours, several reloads and several restarts of Realms of Arkania 2 - now I *think* I know enough not to get the party diseased and killed within a week, but certainly not enough to work out what the hell I should be doing.

Yeah, I think it was too hastily put together and they're catching flack for it on their forum. I think Vince & co have done a lot of things right as an indie developer but sometimes they're too concerned with doing the "we listen to the fans" thing. I guess I just like seeing the stuff since I'm sold on the game already, but it's not very good presentation.

Nothing earth-shattering but sounds fun.

4), because there's not enough near-death experiences in this LP yet. Never got into TOEE and I'm not regretting it yet, the writing is pretty horrible and it just seems like such a silly project for Troika to have done - they could have done the faithful tactical TB D&D combat thing in a more original setting. This sounded cool though.

Probably because I'm a FPS moron, I can't really tell what's changed in terms of the actual shooting mechanics. You've got charging, visor visuals, grenade hotkeys and dynamic crosshair, but what else, does stats come into effect less now? In which case I'm not so interseted, but they certainly did a good job of making it look more like a slick FPS.

Heck no. DX1 was, if anything, too long, I'd probably put that one at 25 hours from memory. Not too fussed about length if it's well paced.

King Arthur is for some reason $5! I thought it was on sale before for Christmas, too. Anyway, SOLD. edit; Seven freaking gigabytes? Fine, buy now, play next month

In fact, it is not true, full stop. Retailers are known to just put any date up when there is no official date given by devs/pubs, just so that they can get preorders. They're also known to change those dates willy-nilly. Some are even known to lazily put up "next March", then when next March rolls around, realise it's still 6 months away, and then make up some other date. Anyway, it looks more like Summer '11 or even Fall, with each passing day. I don't mind. Bit surprised at how long a delay DX3 got given that it's had a pretty concerted hype rolling, but it's such an anticipated game it will probably survive it.

My Bloody Applications Saga (MBAS) continues smooth-ish. One pretty good UK uni is going quite well, I have a supervisor, he thinks I'll probably get an offer to study, but not as certain about funding and I'd have to go to the UK for an interview before that gets decided. For reference, a UK-NZ plane trip costs at least two grand (USD). Not sure why they can't do video conferencing... Wals, want to go disguised as me?

Thanks for the clarification, anything that improves animations in RPGs is long overdue and good news.

Nuh-uh!

Scripted encounters that trigger when a player hits a certain skill level, experience or possesses a certain item? The sky is falling on our heads! I have no problem with the actual duels they described happening, it's certainly an improvement from their last game. Mechanically it's just not any sort of innovation or Radiant Revolution. Will we see "Radiant Story" actually deliver new kind of experiences and new kind of mechanisms? Or just help Skyrim do some new things that Oblivion didn't do, even if other games have done similar things? Or neither? The point is that all this Radiant talk is making it harder to be optimistic. I do hope it will be used well in Skyrim, certainly interesting random encounters and NPCs having memories that feed into quest design would rock.

Wrong thread much? But yeah, let's get this to the next page.

If ten people read it, you will get one comment, that's just how it goes. I've caught up now, good stuff. Clearly the predecessors to Tunnel Snakes. Also that inventory screen reminds me - inventory tetris in NWN1 was the worst I've seen, because item swapping wasn't intuitive and there was always command lag. Gah.

Of course GameInformer previewing a TES game is going to be pretty much advertising - they have a cozy deal where they did "World Exclusives" on Skyrim and Oblivion, and they're not going to blow it by being anything other than lapdogs. If we just take the useful stuff from it; -> Engine is designed to have dynamic lighting (almost?) everywhere -> NEW PRECIPITATION SYSTEM THAT MAKES SNOW FALL REALISTICALLY! This will either be awesome, or the same as Oblivion Soil Erosion. Take your pick. -> Radiant AI better, NPCs react to what you do = since they were meant to do that the first time round, we'll see. -> Use of havok animations lauded as a "tippy-top-state-of-the-art". I thought everyone and his dog used it by now? Maybe they're doing something more with it. -> Completely unscripted dragons! Sounds great, we'll see if it's true. -> Radiant Story, same examples about generating quest destinations or storekeeper's daughter taking over (get used to this, they will use this example about 50 more times before they give us any more detail). Apparently storekeeper's daughter will give you the quest if you kill the storekeeper. But then she also remembers what you did and may try to exact revenge? Either that's going to be brilliant or nonsense. -> Oh, a new Radiant Story example - the best swordsman in the land or something might seek you out and challenge you if youro skill is really high. Seriously? That's been happening in RPGs for like 20 years now. Also radiant story gives you random encounters! Whodathunk! (This is actually good news, Morrowind/Oblivion did miss random encounters. Just don't know why it has to be Radiant Story.) So there you have it, we have some cool news, some things that will be really kickass if they really did them but their track record shows they don't, some things that will either turn out kickarse or idiotic, and then some things that everybody else is already doing but they are scamming as revolutionary. Combined it all calls for a brilliant response of facepalm+excitement!

Preorders are very important because it's emerged as one of the key means by which commercial success is measured, and commercial success can be claimed, amongst other things. Again, the DLC system as a whole is above all a mechanism for the maximisation of profit, and more importantly, the cultivation of consumer expectations and habits that are conducive to the maximisation of profit. It makes perfect sense that it would be deployed into enticing people to make pre-orders; it extends the actual purchase process where it's not months of hype and various degrees of interest that knock you over the fence into "Buy" mode on the day, it's increasingly a fractured system where you make microtransactions months after purchase, but also, effectively, BEFORE the main purchase. Now, as the Great Sage Volourn tells us, heaven forbid that companies not be allowed to seek maximisation of profit. To be honest, I don't really think "are they cutting crap out of the main game to make DLCs" is really the accurate way to look at it either - there are a lot of problems with that argument. You can't really prove it, and it quickly becomes a chicken-and-egg deal, as the recent dialogue between alanschu & hassat has again demonstrated. To me it's really more a question of design and attitude. For instance, what differences are there in devs that used to sit down and say "what shall we put in our expansion pack", and those that sit down and say "what shall we put in our DLCs"? If we get an even greater modularisation of game components to the extent that people can, say, choose not to buy any NPCs and play solo, what impact does that have on game communities as a whole and the modding scene (which requires a unitary base of core files)? We're already seeing this with, say, the new Age of Empires online where PvP as a mode might be sold in a separate pack. How does it change the way games are designed if they become so modularised? More immediately, I'd suggest that the key problems are (a) substandard content and overpricing of content, i.e. Horse Armour effect; (b) the greater tendency for people to excuse flaws or gaps in games by promising/expecting DLCs, not just on part of devs but really the media & the community as a whole; © annoying in your face pay us more money DLC solicitations, i.e. Dragon Age. I don't think pre-order special DLCs are really a problem - if they were being sold for $4.99, then you'd be fine with not buying it and not having that content, here the 'payment' is the act of pre-ordering, as alanschu says.