Tigranes

I still fiddle with the toolset when I can, but I have quite a lot of rl committments at hte moment. Besides, with my skill level it'll most likely stay at fiddlish. What happened to Volo's mods?

Can't find the ye olde trailer link, but I assume some more publicity material will be up once Purgatorio is nearer completion. Rest be assured I'm another anxious to-be-fan. I assume the UI is getting a Tormentish overhaul as well at some point, if it hasn't already?

Yes they did. Oftentimes they do it in 'anticipation', and even have buttons for preorder, though I don't know what happens if youa ctually preorder and the game never is produced or announced. Anyway as Volo says a NWN2 expansion is extremely likely sooner or later, and it might well bear the name Legacy of the Gith- but it may not. Once again, we wait. Don't worry Tasaio, at least now we can have a nice speculation about Gith in an xpack.

What he means is, Tasaio, that ebgames and other retail outlets have put up pages for unconfirmed or totally nonexistent games before, with fake names and sometimes even fake box art. So until we hear something more, it has to be writteno ff.

Pfft, bow to my superior user number. Except I disappear all the time and lack that zany personality to enter the hall of the vets, but ah well.

It happened with Halo, it happened with Jade Empire. Microsoft doesn't care about the sales lost by diehard PC users waiting two years for the game to be ported; that does not come into their considerations at allw hen they sign these 'exclusive' releases. I am very sure we will eventually see ME on PC if it is successful.

I'd respond to DR, but that seems rather pointless. Llyranor, the thing is the idea of 'unwinnable' battles, or rather battles with different outcomes than simple victory or the annihilation of the enemy, is infinitely possible despite the current conventions of gaming: but to prevent or discourage reloading is much more tricky. I do th ink some older conventions need to be brought back - i.e. it's ridiculous that in NWN series you can save in the middle of a freaking battle. Rest rules shoudl apply to saves; no savingduring battles or near hostiles, and probably no saving in particular areas either (i.e. a mine that is collapsing and you need to escape - no saving unless the sequence is something like 30 minutes long.) But in saving/reloading in general.. to go back to save-points of the old CRPGs is rather silly, and I'd love to see if there is a suitable solution here. MC: I think his point is that one of the focal points of the whole original idea by Cantousent et al is the fact that not thinking about how to accomplish your objective and blindly rushing in will cost you; you will learn from your mistakes; and there are multiple sollutions. All these can be compromised if the player goes "I'll try A, then reload, and try B, till I get the outcome with the most loot." This effectively makes a mockery of the idea and the player eventually 'railroads' himself, using the logic of I'll do whatever to get the most rewards then move on to the next story-node. That was one of the reasons i think Cant said some choices should not have their outcomes revealed instantly, but a long time after. If you give a homeless man some money, in today's games he'll ususally turn out to be the man with the solution to your problem or help you in the next story-encounter. But if that man actually turned up rather later, then most people would not reload. So two things - don't make it possible to save anywhere, and when possible have some long-term consequences; even this won't prevent people from reloading when they like, but that's their prerogative in the end.

Sorry, I skimmed your posts. Anyway, Cantousent seems to have done the hard part for me, which is nice - I don't need to waste breath trying to explain then. We are all indeed in agreement that 'unkillable' artificial scripts are stupid, but presenting alternative outcomes to battles is good. I was pretty much trying to get a bit more specific and present specific methods. On STB's point, I recognise it but tend towards to MC's view more, in that the player will quickly pick up that this game is different, after a few early hints and demonstrations. If you have ONE creature in the world who is magically unkillable then it will confuse you. But even in existing games there are enemies who cant be killed until you've done specific things, especially in JRPGs, so it can be done.

So Tale, you are saying that there is a rule everyone should follow for it to be RPG'ing, and yet a huge section of RPG's ignore this rule? If you want to play the same game you have always played, and abide by the same rules of CRPGs you always have followed, then of course this idea seems anathema. But bear with me a little here. (I realise that the later parts of this post overlaps a bit from my earlier one. Basically I'm integrating ideas of 'hugely difficult but not artificially coded to be unkillable' and the increase in immersion that this actually provides.) The idea of making something unkillable, by adding an artificial 'unkillable' tag, so that even if you sat there chopping at his skull for 60,000 years he would not die - yes, that is rather stupid, and detracts from immersion and roleplaying. However, JUST as bad for immersion and roleplaying is the sense that the player can kill anything and everything. Why should it be possible for a player to defeat 6,000 goblins all by himself in a non-magical setting, for example? Is it raelly fun, and roleplayish, to leave every area completely devoid of sentient life before you move on to the next? Let us take the example then, of the goblin invasion in IWD2. The invasion is deliberately neutered and toned down by scripts to make it winnable for the player. The goblins each have a specific area to attack, and if the player is tardy and all the NPCs are killed, the goblins, instead of proceeding to advance, simply stay there. So it's just harder, but still very possible and much much easier than it should be. The entire series of battles are pre-scripted in order to make it possible, at the expense of realism, immersion and roleplaying capabilities (you're railroaded: fight this bunch, then this bunch..). In the end you are left not feeling that you were part of a massive battle in an open field, but rather that you just went through another dungeon crawl where everybody stays in their room and never moves around. What if the goblin invasion was freed from such constraints? What if A) there was a huge number of goblins, which makes the invasion realistic (as oposed to a "GREAT INVASION" of about thirty goblins), B) they actually moved around, and progressively advanced to the town, so that if you were too slow you would actually be overwhelmed, and C) there were alternative objectives and outcomes such as kill the leader, get as many townies out as you can and so forth? Possibly, if a player was extremely powerful, good at tactics, lucky, and so forth, then he could win the battle. (Thus the idea of the unwinnable battle is rather misleading, I suppose, in this case.) But this is very nearly impossible, as it should be, iun the context of the story. Thus most players would choose instead to kill a little then make their way to the objectives. Sand, a very simplistic comparison here: What if instead of being artificially coded to be invincible, Bloodlines' werewolf was simply 3-4 times as strong as anything you've encountered before? If you were particularly determiend adn skilled, and lucky, you could perhaps after many many reloads, defeat the werewolf; but most would quickly realise that the sensible way is to look for an alternative solution. If the possibilities of such solutions are capably extrapolated in the game itself, then soon the players would get used to the fact that in that game, rushing headlong into the fray is not the answer, and will get used to looking for such possible solutions - or choose to fight anyway.

Well, I guess I"ll just wait for Cantousent to reply then.

Of course, those 'unwinnable' battles we have seen so far in CRPGs have actually been winnable. For example, you are fighting waves and waves of goblins, and you defeat all of them. A cutscene starts, where sixty more turn up, and everyone decides to retreat. You have no choice in the matter. You are not retreating because you and your character feel it an impossible task to fight them; you are forced to do so because the narrator has decided so. Crucially, the parts where you DID Have control, you were still fighting a 'winnable' battle, and 'won' that conflict. This is done so that the story contains a defeat for the party, but people don't get frustrated rusing headlong into the fray, not realising that there is another option. Sadly, this perpetuates the belief that inv ideo games, every battle is there to be won, every container is there to be opened and every area is there to be explored. Tentative steps were taken towards remedying this linearity when some games decided to give in-game 'hints': for example, a cutscene begins when you approach a band of heavily armed soldiers, and one of your party members speak up: "They look too strong. Perhaps there is another way." The problem is that these messages are often extremely unambiguous (to avoid the confusion / frustration above), and often the player once again has no way to do things differently than one, prescripted, prepared way (i.e. a specific path to sneak through, a specific lever to pull; a specific boulder to drop down a cliff, a specific thing to set on fire.) That said, I don't think it too difficult int he current system to create "unwinnable battles". Firstly, the premise needs to clearly be set that the upcoming battle will be "extremely difficult" (not "impossible". Perhaps some party members arguing; Elanee says, "there are too many, perhaps there is another way". Khelgar says "Nah, we can take them on." etc) , and perhaps objectives are set as to what the player could do. (i.e. The player's primary objective is to kill the mage and drive back as many as he can; failing that he must try to evacuate the townies by sea, burn down the granary and ensure the safety of the local medicine man.) Today's players recognise 'bonus' actions when they see them, and thus they will realise that the aim is to achieve the primary objective and as many of the side-ones as they can in a set time, as the invasion tide washes over them. Some might take Khelgar's advice and try to fight them all, but the overwhelming difficulty of the task would soon make them draw connections between the objectives and the nature of the invasion. In the execution itself, people should be given some hints but should always have freedom to act. Remember NWN2's mission where you are helping the thieves smuggle stuff in that long winding path, and Qara suggests setting things on fire and saying "FIRE!" to distract the mercenaries? Well the problem with that was that you HAD to do it (you just decided who would do it), and it was done in a cutscene. A much better way would be to have, say, a pile of wood off to the side; examined by player, it says "this appears highly flammable." If the player set it on fire, the script would have the soldiers check out what is going on with some float-text (or even a cutscene THEN). If a number of such 'tricks' are prepared either in the nromal game engine or as specific scripted events, combined with the player's freedom to go around doing as much as he can before he is overwhelmed by waves of invaders, the gameplay becomes a lot more emergent, a lot more frantic, and there is definitely a sense of beign run over, and of multiple solutions. That is of course a limited example, inspired from the comment about the initial attack on IWD2. But you see wher eI'm going.

It was already April 2nd in NZ when I read it. I HATE YOU ALL.

Spider's NWN2 examples raise an interesting point. The focus on, say, the Animus Elemental cutscenes was clearly on creating suspense and plot 'pegs' for the viewer, treating the player as a separate entity from the character. The narrative is viewed as a plot that is consumed rather than verisimilitude that simply exists. For Spider, who wants to play his character, truly role-play, in that sense, and derive enjoyment and consumption of the plot from that perspective, this is a detraction because after the cutscene, he cannot immerse himeslf within Qara's character again. It's like being a Gandalf rather than a Frodo in Lord of the Rings. I haven't read RP's piece yet (will do sometime soon) and thus won't offer a general analysis or whatever, but personally I think there were many examples in games Spider mentions where it *was* done well - for example, KOTOR2, Nar Shaddar, when the little rat guy pulls the heist to get R2-D2 out I think, in the warehouse? That was cinematic, brilliant, and brought a kind of swashbuckling feel that was perfectly in tune with the Star Wars universe. I think the main priority should be, cinematic doohickeys are fine, but if there is an alternative that lets the player find out what happened in a more roleplaying and gameplayish fashion, then that is so much better, development time / resources allowing. A cutscene can happen after the player has hunted down the hosttower lackeys to find out the truth about the Animus Elemental after he was soundly beaten a couple of times.

No idea, since mine decides to run at about 15fps in the starting area and everything lags. I'd suggest compatibility modes, but they didn't seem to help me. What's the frame rate cap by the way? I believe going above 30 actually does make things go faster (noticeable if you get to, say, 50; cutscene syncs go out of order)

So has anyone played it? Or will play it, rather? I doubt I can stomach going back to Oblivion but I'd like to know what they did with the story/quests, and if Sheogorath is actually funny.

The assumption that the change of industry trends is along any sort of progressive scale or even that the current trends will last for a significant amount of time is dangerous; we may well find that the current era is a sort of temporary 'bubble' that collapses back into a form of older styles, or that sometime in the future, perhaps not as far off to be irrelevant, we will see such styles come back into viability. Of course this is hopelessly speculative, but I don't think it's too ridiculous for a fan to dream of a 'rebirth' of an older style. For example, the continuing conglomeration and development (in terms of market/capital) in the industry may create stylistic fragmentations or simple niches, or even experience a general backlash against the extremisation of certain postmodern elements in the most popular of games today. Anyway, for my part, I thoroughly enjoyed both K2 and NWN2. K2 was a flawed game, but for me the only flaw that was significant was the ending; perhaps because I'm used to buggy games, but the rest of it didn't bother me too much, and I really really liked the story. With NWN2 I think the game is beautiful - it suits my aesthetic tastes - and I'm also used to playing games with mediocre performance, i.e. 15fps. I loved the parts Obsidian concentrated on, which was the stronghold, character interaction and in general the creation of a long, BG-style adventure. They both lack that extra special bit to make them classics, of course, but I have great hopes for Obsidian.

It took me 60 hours to complete ~90% of Oblivion. This includes going to every single dungeon in the map, looking in all the towns for quests, etc. Considering the fact that Oblivion's landscape was randomly generated and then sculpted, and that nearly all of their dungeons are mindless and generic, and the gear and creatures are levelled and thus not scripted, I would say that it is not as 'epic' in terms of production as it turns out to be. Now you could take this and say well, Oblivion shows us how we can use new types of technology (i.e. the automatic landscape) to make big games and balance out the time/work demands of new technology. That would be a valid point in general, though of course there are obvious flaws to be sorted out (i.e. genericity). But what I am saying is that Oblivion was created differently and has a different sort of playing experience, and thus you can't take its "60 hours" or whatever the same as an IE game's 60 hours.

When's the second step coming?

Pickpocket was completely overpowered in Fallout, of course. SoA had some nice stuff in areas, but then you could steal the shop's inventory easily. Actually, I would really like to see Fallout / TES style shops come back - a merchant does not keep his inventory suspended in an interdimensional hole, it is always going to be somewhere with the appropriate safeguards.

Personally, I didn't think IWD1 and IWD2 were really that different, in terms of quality or style. Both had a decent, standard D&D stories (although I preferred IWD2's story, because it tried to introduce the questions of 'racial' perceptions and moral ambiguity - the story in the end was flawed, or rather more lacklustre than it should have been, but I'm the one to forgive if the initial concept is grandious enough.), both were centred around tactical squad combat. They both featured their share of interesting and beautiful locations, though one could argue IWD1 had more of that. I also liked IWD2's time-loop portion near the end of the game - quite novel and well executed. Every time I play, I usually have to take a break before finishing, for both games, just because there is so much combat - but in the end they are both fun games. I don't know - every time someone says "this is why IWD1/2 is better", I see it in the other game as well.

A console action-RPG? or was that Aliens?

See, you must find us that game, now. I'm so curious.

I smell marketing / creative management overriding the symbol creator. edit: but then, hey, I love school life anime.

Ugh. That was horrible to watch as an Arsenal fan. It's no secret we're going through a transitional period (my August predictions for this season was 3rd place and no silverware, which seems to be right on target). The team lacks sharpness in general and without the phenomenal Robin Van Persie, and with Thierry Henry suffeirng a million niggling injuries we were always going to struggle for goals. PSV deserved to go through after our wastefulness - some will say we deserved better after dominating the game for so long, but if we really deserved it we'd have scored. It;'s telling that the only goal PSV conceded in those two matches was a fluke own goal by the otherwise amazing Alex. Ironically, Makaay's 9-second goal beats Gilberto Silva's record from ~03 by only a few seconds; and that goal was scored against PSV, during the high period of Arsenal's last 'team'. But then Real Madrid have sturggled for the last 3 or so years and they were never, ever, going to get very far in the Champions League with their performances. The difference is that with Arsenal there is a singular direction and a promise for a 'better future' when we can reclaim the top spots in all the competitions; with Real Madrid, who knows if that will happen, or they will just go back to the drawing board and get rid of Capello? I was surprised that AC Milan took so long to get over Celtic, but I think what it means it that on the whole, the quarter-finals are going to be very, very even. I don't expefct PSV to beat anyone (their tactic seems to be draw, and draw more), and Liverpool - well, I don't fancy them either, but who knows, Benitez has done it before.