Tigranes

What, they couldn't just use concrete?

There are various levels of Securom, so, nya nya.

Body of Lies was terribly flat, in any case, apart from the character of that Arab fellow. I'd hope AP goes a bit deeper than that.

lolwat Ouch, they better not do that with Dragon Age. That'll give me something to think about.

Not really. There have to be certain standards, and alt-tab is something that should work in most cases.

Undecided, cause theres not much info there. One presumes that it woudl work in concert with the rest of the cover and the title, though, so might be fine.

Are they in fact stated as 'unsupported' now? That's really interesting. NWN2 for instance is very good with alt-tabbing considering the state of its engine, and I alt-tab MTW2 as well, which seems to know what's going on.

Bit of a hiatus after I completed my mod writeout, and also moved home. Set up with two monitors which should help immensely. I'm still going to need quite a bit of script practice before SOZ arrives. Maybe make a little quest to find a dog, or something silly. GD I gather that while you've completed quite a few areas, you aren't wanting to show any yet?

Oh, it is. Much better than the film, as per the standard, too.

*drool*

Deraldin is correct afaik, which is why I went for 3GB. You hardly ever need 4 at the moment, though I suppose it's good for the long-term to get it over with now.

Or maybe it sold like crap. That's the widely held belief, anyway, but has anyone bothered tog et some hard numbers on this? Hard numbers being incredibly rare in the public world of video games, but still. With Macs coming back into the fore and attracting more and more users, doesn't it make sense that the Mac games market is ready to be developed as well? Who knows without some figures?

Just ordered a couple of lecture collections, Michel Foucault at the College de France. "Abnormal" (74-75) and "Society Must be Defended" (75-76). Amazon will take up to mid-February to get all the way here, but what can you do (besides pay extortionate prices to upgrade shipping). Dead twenty years ago (under... interesting circumstances), with a pathological aversion to a discussion of contemporary events and history when alive, and yet still more relevant than half the academics out there who make a living participating in pointless scholar slapfights about obscure definitions or writing a load of whatever's in fashion. On a lighter note, recently re-read Norwich's abridged version of the History of Byzantium. Damn thing gets me in a Total War fixation every time. Quite clearly biased, he is, but that dosen't hurt the reading.

SEEEEGAAAAA dududu dudu, dududu dudu, dududu dudu *poink*

Let's get one thing straight here, though. Do we really mean 100 by 100 in this thread? i.e. a game only qualifies as an 'old school super long RPG for the win' if it actually goes into three digits in one playthrough? Because even gigantic games like BG2 and Morrowind didn't really do that. You could do everything in those games, or their console equivalents in mammoth (FFVIII, etc) in 50-80 hours, depending on the person. And Oblivion was surely longer than, say, the Icewind Dales. Personally I would categorise any game with as much content as Oblivion or more "long". It also depends on the type. The KOTORs were actually pretty long and big in numbers, but felt so small because there was no point going back to most areas, the 'side' areas were absolutely tiny, each area had very few people and very few attractions (compare any level in Durlag's Tower to the wastelands that comprise KOTORs' optional planets). Fallout 3 is actually a very big game, but the main quest feels pretty short. I would happily claim DA to have reached the level of length and 'meatiness' some older CRPGs had if it had as much content and as much content spread as Oblivion or NWN2 OC. And games and those scales absolutely are not dead, you'll see twelve year old consolers happily plug through that much in FFXII or something as thick as MGS4. I actually agree with volourn here (oh my God). I was there for both launches and the furore was, on both counts, exaggerated. NWN1 I think suffered from some multiplayer problems in the first 2-3 weeks, NWN2 had performance issues, etc, but by and large they were nothing like, say, Morrowind at launch. It was by far Bio's worst launch bug/stability-wise, but that was a given, NWN being what it was. I doubt DA will release like that.

Reminds me of how half of the variable names, comments and so forth in Medieval: Total War 2 code is inherited from RTW. Can't remember specific examples, but somewhere along the lines of the Papacy being referred to as the Senate. Is there a mod out there that lets you skip the Vault yet, though? It's pretty boring if you have to go through the baby steps again.

Speaking of David Gaider... You know, I always liked him. He's a good writer, even if he sticks like glue to the straight-ball fantasy formula unashamedly (and he admits it). But, uh, this was very odd. Warning: terrible KOTOR fan fiction I guess this is why he doesn't go gung ho.

True, but I could always accept RadAway/Rad-X as a necessary gameplay mechanic. You could easily do without the Fat Man or the Highwayman, but without the pills? I guess it's all a matter of degrees though.

No getting to you, huh. I could try and explain myself again, but I think everything is already up there, and if you don't look at it as selectively as you have been, that will suffice as a reply. I always wondered what BG1/2 would be like without those partial voiceovers. I think it really helped, because they were able to get some great VO for that limited number of lines, then you could easily extrapolate yourself.

MC: Actually, it's *really* grating when you play NWN2 OC or MOTB, then play mods that use the same kind of 'cinematic' dialogue angles but no VO. I think we've really come to expect it to be there, however mediocre - so if someone has grown up with that, I imagine it will irk. Morgoth: Where did I compare it to 100 hour Halo 3 MP matches? Ironically you appear to be labouring under the imaginary delineation between the pew-pew console kiddie and the RPG-player. People do play Halo AND Oblivion. People do play Wii Tennis then put 100 hours into Zelda as well. People do buy WWF Wrestling along with Final Fantasy. You can't expect anyone to accept blanket comments like 'suicide' that seem to be taken straight from journospeak when you aren't responding to what I am claiming and put no reasoning behind your argument. My point is that you made the claim that Bioware's games are not short, they are only as long as the story needs them to be, without linking that argument to the discussion on more complex production processes (which in fact was argued by Pidesco). In other words, you appeared to directly link the increasing shortness of Bio games to the needs of the story. If that is nto what you had intended, then I think we see eye to eye on this at least. I'm pretty happy with DA, but again, why borrow from journospeak without thinking it through? Consoles are not full of people who refuse to play 100 hour games. Conventions of an earlier era are neither inferior nor superior to modern ones as a rule, and are not guaranteed to fail or succeed. You can paste in words like 'modernised' and 'progressive' if you like, but I balk at any suggestion that games follow a linear progression of awesome. Plenty of people are happy to do this, though, so this is irrelevant.

Phooey. What do you mean, "artificially extend" it? What exactly about, say, BG2 is "artifically extended", unless you be a realism nazi and argue that you should go for Irenicus straight away? Are you saying that they write the story at the very start and say, "this is how long our game will be"? What? Stories like Bioware's (and I say that without pejorative connotations) are very mutable. I haven't played much of ME, but if you wanted to extend, say, KOTOR's story you could easily have fleshed out a few hoops you jump through or add an extra twist or relevant side material and it would have benefited the game. Same with JE. I guess not with NWN1 OC, because there wasn't enough story in there to justify a five minute skit anyway, but still. You have "console kiddies" in the literal sense (young console lovers, love Halo, love GoW, etc) that burn +60 hours into Oblivion happily, so I'm afraid this is a farcical claim. Have you seen the number of hours burned on a Final Fantasy game, as well? In a discussion about a single high-profile RPG game, this is irrelevant. This is actually right on the nail, I think. You could very obviously see their games become a lot tighter post BG2, which is understandable - you can't make a BG2 after BG2, it would be insane. But by JE and ME it had gone to quite considerable degrees, for better or for worse.

Yeah, there's a semblance of reality in the Fat Man, which is pretty amazing. The 'unrealistic' bit about the Fat Man would be, I guess, how tiny and portable it is, and how widely available it is. But then, you could stretch weirder things than that in any Fallout, what with those aliens and whatnot. I think FM is stupid for one thing only - how it trivialises nuclear power, which is so poignant in the setting otherwise. I got by fine without it.

Grugh, Dan Tudge. They keep showing combat in half-a-second-bursts for the most part, where it looks like it could be BG2, but it could also be KOTOR. The game-breaker is going to be the combat for me in Dragon Age, so I'm really anticipating some tactical depth and challenge, but who knows yet. Some lovely blood on those people, eh.

Woah. Might be worth the bargain bin then, possibly. It's on my list along with mass effect for when I get terminally bored.

Now that's interesting, Tale, how did you feel it was different? Everything I've heard pointed to "Fable but better", but I'd be glad to hear it's not.