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Tigranes

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Everything posted by Tigranes

  1. Friend came back from bachelorette party at midnight, realised she had to finish the translation job for her work by 8am the next day, and she's leaving for Korea the day after to get married. Because I was an idiot, I agreed to help 2000 words in 45 minutes, not too bad. I WANT SLEEP
  2. It's possible to be a juvenile hater, just as it's possible to be stupidly blind: equally, it's possible to dislike or like or remain ambivalent without indulging in stupidity. Keep the personal attacks out people - and may I suggest that keeping blanket polarisations out would also benefit our discussions. I will have to mentally erase whatever influence the Soule interview had on my overall perspective, certainly, making sure that little piece of hoax affects my judgement as little as possible. But certainly there are lots of real info floating about and I think it's enough to make some intelligent guesses about where the game is heading, under the proviso that on release day they might be proven wrong,
  3. On the original Codex thread, which Xard quoted the Soule interview from, someone reports that although the interview is supposed to be from the latest Game Informer, the said issue features no such thing. Probably hoax until we get some more proof, I guess? Thank me guys, I had to look through some random guy claiming he had a personal flame war with Jeremy Soule to get to that.
  4. Sounds like a nice date, bit surprised they aren't projecting Christmas release, but that's a good thing for us, really - and th e devs, who won't have to crunch like a pyramid building slave for the xmas rush. Seems like they announced the title at a nice date, they will dip low for a few months then restart the hype just as the christmas frantic rush fades.
  5. He's just a pretty funny guy. He doesn't have a clearly defined or logical framework to build a perspective about game design on, but for the sake of entertainment borrows from a wild range of cultural tropes - in other words, taking him seriously would be silly (though I wager some would), just suspend and enjoy - and if you can't, you won't enjoy.
  6. I forgot about Total Annihilation, I stand corrected. I never got around to trying Tactics, actually. FO1/2 was darn hard enough to find as a New Zealand high schooler.
  7. Sawyer's right, there is a lot of localisation that goes on - e.g. some scanty Japanese model gets covered up for the North American version, the children of Fallout, the Witcher's content, etc, etc. I believe the funniest one was when a Kirby game was released and the only change the NA version did was to make him frown on the cover. Yeah, Kirby's like, all, radical and ****, yo! I am sure this is just post-processing effects rather than model/texture/etc: probably in terms of HDR/Bloom (remember lots of people that actually liked, or didn't mind, the Great Oblivion Bloom That Melts All? This isn't quite as offensive to the US market as some of you take it as). Sure, I'd probably work hard to get a hold of the European version as well (I wonder where NZ falls into), but it's nothing very bad yet.
  8. Where did you get it from Xard? I'm pretty on the ball with fo3 news and I haven't seen this anywhere. It's quite fascinating actually, becuase most people would have branded the Jeremy Soule style the antithesis to Fallout, if anything (and he has yet to show us that he has more than one style). But certainly, it is very believable that Bethesda would have refused a potential sample on the basis that it was not epic enough. That is the direction they are going in, undeniably (quite removed from whether that's good or not, nobody can deny they are going for contemporary, american cinema-style 'epic').
  9. You install a hotfix by installing the actual mod first, then putting the hotfix in afterwards - like a miniature patch.
  10. BG1's NPCs are a lot closer to Fallout's, in that they are not really 'characters' as much as 'set pieces'. In both cases you very quickly run out of anything new that they've got to say or do, and as such they are defined by a single archetypical characteristic (i.e. Minsc = Crazy + Boo, Edwin = Megalomania, Sulik = Thick Native, Marcus = Intelligent Mutant). The success of each character depended on how distinct you could make that character in so small a presentation, and how much complexity that presentation could imply - for example, Minsc was already a fan favourite in BG1 because of the way he was so distinct, and he was so well presented in terms of dialogue and voice acting (really, voice acting made 50% of Minsc). Marcus, on the other hand, was a relatively simple character, but he was very well weaved into the narrative and setting as a whole, and after you listened to his story, everything you heard about the mutants could be related back to him, and everything you did in that world with him in tow made you think about how Marcus would see things from his clearly defined perspective. The reason I would rate BG2 and Torment's NPCs above Fallout/BG1, on a purely personal level, is because while their character designs are not necessarily better (after all, if Marcus was given the same detailed treatment as Dak'kon, or Dak'kon was reduced to a caricature...), the delivery of the characters and their integration into the story was much, much better - yes, because these games focused a lot more on characters and invested a lot more into them. Even if you don't enjoy or take romances very far, their possibility and the dialogue does present an additional dimension: the character quests are especially well done in the sense that they're not just any other quests you can go and do, but the NPC talks with you and is actively involved all the way through - i.e. Jaheira being spirited away by the Harpers, or Jan with all his talking and his family and past love. Everything is a lot more fleshed out, and fleshed out in a coherent and polished way: even if the dialogues with Minsc or even Sarevok never hit particular excellent 'high's like, say, some of Kreia, the overall effect is surprisingly interesting: designing a game NPC is about making you imagine what he/she would say or think about everything you do or happens to you, and connecting mundame game events to imagined narratives in terms of their personality (which is what happened with Dogmeat) - and BG2 especially shows how this raises the characters to a new level, even if they aren't particularly deep, complex or unique.
  11. Export function in program?
  12. FO2's NPCs weren't that interesting, for me. Their backstories were better than BG2's (for, say, Marcus), but BG2 did a much better job of actually integrating them into the game, which is really the point - not just romances and quests but interjections played a big part, which NWN2 did a good job of porting over. If you took the BG2 character designs and presented them like Fallout did, they would be pretty darn poor. On the other hand, KOTOR tried to do it, but I felt their characters and dialogues were too weak to begin with. Same with Jade-o.
  13. Let's get back on topic people. And yes, without making Nameless Matt reproduce asexually.
  14. I suspect he's been busy, but it'll be enough to know he's still on it and it's not gathering too much dust.
  15. Sounds like it's time to email Atari again. Another possibility you may now consider is that the installation program on the CD itself is a little funky, corrupted, buggered, whatever - in which case you would want to look at getting it physically replaced.
  16. I thought it was a standard Star Wars plot... about as good as that of Jedi Knight II and Jedi Academy, actually. But then, BG1/2's storylines weren't that far above your standard fantasy fare, either: it was all about the delivery in-game and how the plot was related to what you actually did, in which BG series did very well. In KOTOR it's not quite as strong in that aspect, but it does pull you along nicely. The twist was hamfisted, but nowhere as bad as Jade Empire's.
  17. Got to say I agree here. If, from the beginning of the Playstation generation, PC devs moving to the console took a more optimistic and daring approach, I think the tastes of console RPGers might have been a lot more refined by now - products breed taste, in this day and age, more than the other way round. Look at the huge success of FF7. I'm not going to debate the merits of the game itself, but it made the players do a lot of grinding. It made them look under every nook and cranny for hidden goods. It made them keep track of ridiculously long-term dialogue variables for payoffs 20 hours later in the game. It offered ridiculous sidequests which required hours of careful chocobo breeding, finding that one guy in some remote place to talk about that thing, or stealing that item from that boss before he killed you. The character development system offered some very 'munchkin' optimisations or exploitations that required not only grinding but planning and calculations. This isn't to argue that the game as a whole is 'complex' in the sense that PS:T or even BG2 is: I'm not going into that argument. What I am saying is, the console players were willing to put up with a lot of makework; a lot of meticulous searching; a lot of planning. If they applied that kind of thinking in playing a hypothetical console version of BG2:SoA, would they have been so alienated, so put off? Would it have been such a struggle? They had no problem with turn-based, either. The only real new challenge would have been the volume of dialogue and the choices involved. It's a pity.
  18. For the future, simply use Ctrl+J; after a second or so of lag, your characters will teleport to where your cursor is pointing.
  19. Nice, I'll have to get this one, then.
  20. Crap, you're still updating it? I used 3.71, but currently installing SCS6 on top of that, so I don't know if going back is the best idea (Weidu doesn't seem to like it.) Are my fears justified or...?
  21. Hah, I've been using that one for a few years now, but forgot about it this install - just put it in. I especially appreciated the two weapon style points fix - although it's a real pain dual-wielding with Thieves in BG2 anyway, just because you have to go into the inventory to switch between dual wield and longbows. But it is one of my must-mods. edit: Gah! It's a good thing I didn't start playing yet. The "Thieves now behave less erratically" interest me a lot. Uninstalling mods from Weidu always seems to be problematic though, if it's not the last installed mod. I wonder if I should reinstlal entirely?
  22. I have just finished BG1, uninstalled Tutu, reinstalled BG2, installed Gibberlings Fixpack, Check the Bodies, Gibberlings Tweaks, Unfinished Business, Banter Pack and SCSII (in that order, because I forgot about scs, wonder how much it will break). First time I actually got an un-corrupted download of CtB, so that should be a fun experience for my imported assassin. Also look forward to playing through an entire game with SCS2 for the first time, after Tactis and Improved Battles.
  23. Nice, I could never beat the Tactics Irenicus, but it's because I don't actually build characters meticulously and they always seem to have gaping holes. How did you summon 5 pit fiends without resting, though? Scrolls?
  24. Trying to flesh out the structure to the honours thesis, but planning a 50-page report when you're only halfway done through research is kinda flaky. Just read that in the Korean gov, someone screwed up the translation job of English news media, interpreting reports of a loosening of US policy on +30month old beef as a strengthening of the said policy... which directly affected negotiations happening concurrently. Well done. One of the ten/twenty largest economies in the world, and you wouldn't know it from the way we do politics.
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