Tigranes

It was a teaser, exactly that. If we expected gameplay or whatnot, I guess we would be disappointed. As a short trailer, hey, it's good. The one thing I would actually complain about is the production value - the sound cues for example I thought were pretty bad - but hey, it looks and sounds like Fallout, so for a short teaser, job accomplished. Nothing more to talk about, yet.

Uhhh... sure. Right. Take a pill. Anyway, looks like it's a bit late. No biggie.

What (if anything) happened/is happening? I can't access forum or site.

Probably, but I liked BG2 art more than Icewind Dale art. Maybe it was because I find snow/ice clashes badly with character models and whatnot, and everything ended up looking too dark at default brightness or bleached. Personal thing. Dunno. You could easily call their 'moving parts', i.e. critters and spell effects, nasty - but A) i dont have as much a fixation on good looking weapons, B) they didnt detract that much for me and C) I've never played this commandos you people talk about.

I see BG2 as the very pinnacle of 2D graphics. The UI was great, critters were decent, spell effects were good but the environment art was stellar, you could take a hundred different screenshots and they'd all make superb wallpapers.

Well, there are specific points at which I think the areas in general were way too easy. The most blatant is the fire giant mountains - you look at that, then the TOB ones, and wow, the TOB ones are harder, no matter how much munchkin epic level abilities you might have. Ammon Jerro demons at Shandra's farm were pathetic too, as were most encounters within Neverwinter itself, the outdoors of Arvahn's Ruins, OOW orc clans...

Silly Gorth, Canberra isn't a real capital. A properly understood Japan Fallout would so, totally, kick ass. As would a Fallout in Africa. Think about it, that woudl be fantastic. Some remote corner of Africa where vast masses of the populace, despite their knowledge of the outside world as a vague concept, are so shaken off by the explosions, that their understanding of that history, and the history before, has been severely distorted - perhaps on a magico-religious concept, perhaps relatively realistic with a hint of eschatologia, etc, etc. Perhaps Africa's landscape has survived a lot better than areas like US with less bombs being struck. Stuff like that.

So... will we get that anytime soon from Obsidian? I think that's really the crux of the matter. Nobody's going to complain, normal or hardcore, if we get that. I understand how difficult it is, but hey, you can at least have multiple difficulty sliders - i.e. Enemy HP, Enemy Save THrows, Enemy Attack Damage, Enemy Use of Buffs, or something like that. With a massive disclaimer going 'screwing with these in a random manner can result in super-funky game'. Actually, it's still tricky to do, but hey, it's our job to dream and yours to shatter some, realise some. As for rest / save rules, they aren't as much a deal-breaker IMO, because you can use your own house-rules or 'discipline' or whatever. I played NWN2 every time only resting in a dungeon if I had cleared that entire level. I wanted to not rest in dungeons at all, but because NWN2 OC designed massive dungeons ensuring you rested multiple times, it became kinda stupid. And in BG series, I liked permadeaths and challenges; but I really, really hated tracking back to res them early-game, esp. because of the loot. I ended up just using Ctrl+R cheat to res them after a battle, 'dropping' the requisite gold in a nearby container and pretending I Just made the stupid 10-minute trip backa nd forth. It's not a deal-breaker for me here. (Although Sawyer, the one thing I hope they really change; if your surviving members run away from a battle far enough, your 'dead' party members come back to life... I think that's silly, since it happens sometimes even if you aren't exploiting it. My thief is running for his life, trying to find some means by which to kill that thug - exciting and precarious - then wham! The fighter comes back to life, comes up behind and cracks him in the head.)

Friend said it was good, Paprika - it's next on my list. Tried Darker than Black up to ep7, I like. It's not great but it's decent and Kanno > *., so I don't mind too much. Hope they don't screw up the Contractor business and make it too gimmicky though, I don't like how in 7 episodes they've already introduced a swathe of rules on Contractors, Moratoria, Dolls, 'the Lost', etc, etc, etc.

Game hype in this sense is entirely worthless because the same kind of comments roshan was saying was depressing, oculd be applied to Oblivion or PS:T or Fallout or TOEE or PoR2 or whatever. Once again we just have to wait and see how they did it. NWN2 was decent in difficulty, for me - nothing really difficult and probably a bit too much on the easy side, but not as much as K2 and overall it was still fun to play. I skipped the middle pages, but um, from the first page, and roshan's quotations, I saw nothing about how they'll make it linear? Expansion stories are nearly always linear anyway, but still.

I read all of Death Note in manga some time before people started getting the anime.. yeah, I'd also recommend that nobody bother with the arc after L, really, the first half of the L arc was the best then it went downhill with Misa. The anime is really fairly interesting for the first few bits with the brain-teasers, but that's about it. The characters don't make sense to engage properly. I loved Ouran actually, though somehow I caught it before School Rumble. Yeah, Ouran never does pick up a plot (Though it gets more 'story' in the second half), but really the whole point is to laugh at the antics while getting a little bit of feel-good friendship stuff. It was great. What's the premise of Darker than Black? And by Kanno you mean Yoko Kanno of GITS? Currently on Hayate no Gotoku, Kino no Tabi, Yotsubato! when I can get new ones. Looking for Monster and Jin Roh: The Wolf Brigade.

I think he's saying it's a sign of how we now expect every big game to go multiplatform, or rather, onto consoles. I don't think that's the case here, but I think that's what he's saying. That said, people who eat Rare are animals.

Can you explain that more? What, you design the dungeon yourself, then you go traipsing in it?

Well, I'd probably rather have played the expansion(s) than the main story, but after investing 60 hours into Oblivion I've sort of sucked that world dry - maybe in the future, after a couple of years.

Oblivion was always a nice looking game, wasn't worth buying expansions though. Wistrik, because the camera panning out looked so much like the end of the ending, and I had previously heard about how the ending was incomplete, I thought that was pretty much it. I was dealing with annoying crashes at the time and didn't feel like it. I'll try it again now, though. I understand that the episodic releases now in production will conitnue the story.

..... what, the, hell.

Don't you randomly post pictures from like 2 page ago for no reason whatsoever? Eh? EH?! I don't know about this Oriskany, if it is the same one in the concept art what would it matter? Just that it's DC?

I don't think anybody can fix Gothic 3. It was very enjoyable for me even in 1.00 state though. If you play a freaking game when it hangs for 2 seconds every minute, then it's damn good.

Pretty much, yes. I must have missed that bit about Terran Military etc though, since I only saw "Active", which by iteslf can also mean "current occupation"... Heh.

Technically that's true, but TLJ is still an extremely enjoyable experience. The point is that it could really have worked as a novel, visual novel series, animation or movie. It wasn't too tedious as adventuring games went, either, with its puzzle-y stuff. I never got to catch the inevitable meaningful final sentence in the ending, though, as the game crashed in the very last bit. Wistrik, judging by your screenshots you must be finished by now. is there anything good after the camera comes in through the doors on the beachhouse, the girl talks on the bed, the camera spans out of the house again - is there a lot more after that?

The graphics are frankly crap, except for the explosions and other 'effects', which are brililant. Too good, actually, so that they're out of place with the Play-Doh units and polished plastic grounds. They need some integration and an actual verisimilitude, though one must remember that many, many casual players were perfectly fine with playdoh WC3 / WoW.

In some limited situations in can work - i.e. "Please rescue my wife trapped inside the haunted mansion. You won't steal anything from my home, will you?" Then the game would check whether you told [truth or lie, then whether you stole anything or not (by flagging items). Interesting questions arise from - if you told the TRUTH then stole items, does that mean that you were actually lying to the game (not to the NPCs), and intended this? Or that your character changed his/her mind about the affair? Which one should the game assume and claculate player alignment (or whatever) for? Perhaps you told a LIE then decided to be 'honourable' and not take anything. But this could easily be abused - you could just 'lie' on every sort of disadvantageous promise, once again lying to the game, to try and get, i don't know, "redemptive points". (I decided not to rob this old woman, though when I promised I wouldn't, I was lying! And I 'decided' not to rob this old man even though I lied about that too! Man, I am so born again. Every two minutes.) Essentially it's extremely difficult for the game to tell when the player is lying or changing their mind in-character or just doing it to exploit the mechanic and control the variables in an extremely transparent way. I fear it would have an even worse effect on the verisimilitude if not done properly, and I think Gaider is very correct in suggesting that [T]/[L], as one of the methods we've already seen before, isn't really the best answer.

Maybe that's why Gaider is saying it's difficult to implement this stuff? You just agreed with him, really.

It's just a way of conceptualising what they want their game to be - even simple things like a visualisation of how a gunshot to the head should animate the exploding cerebrum, because that has a multitude of stylistic variations, and such things can shape the 'feel' of the game - which doesn't encessarily have to be like the old Fallouts, but that kind of thing is why it's a good idea for everyone, or as many people on the team as possible, to begin with a similar set of core references. But you're right, it's not 'make or break'. I think the designers have played the old games, and some enjoy them. *shrug*

Maybe because [Truth]/[Lie] is really superficial and changes very little within the game, so many players are not very satisfied with that. It's not like most of the time the NPCs can tell if you're lying or not - which wouldn't make sense anyway if even if you told the truth, whether they would believe you or not was never open to any variables. They'd also want to check if you actually followed up on the lie and went back on that oath later, or if you 'changed your mind' and kept to it - otherwise it would be equally unbalanced.