Tigranes

Yes. This better not fizzle just when I return. Maybe people can post all the times on Friday they are available. I am okay for all of Friday (EST) except after 22:00.

It was broken because it wasn't designed to be there.

Given the same amount of time to test a smaller quantity of things, would you not naturally do better at it, being more thorough? (and no, there's no upper limit for being thorough.) It was never the excuse. It is simply an effect. On the rewriting business, you just have to make sure you don't fall into the trap of thinking that everything to do with engines, or toolsets, are exactly the same. There are different kinds of things done that go into all sorts of technicalities. E.g. if you change how models are handled, you can't start any graphics work before that's sorted: but maybe you can wait if the shaders aren't done yet. 'course, on the graphical side I dont' know much. Ultimately, my point was that we won't know if the OC is "too short", or how "cut" it was until we see it. If it was horribly butchered, we will know, like in KOTOR2 - it is often blatant.

SP: precisely. All intros have that effect which is to the detriment of its memory.

But Candlekeep was super-boring after a few runthroughs. I would always give myself some xp and gold then go see ol' Gorion.

Oh Shiiiiiiii- :ph34r:

Nope, but I like Indian with my ice cold water.

Wrong. alanschu said: This was what you replied to. No, this does not mean that QA is "incapable" of testing a 40 hour game. Have you EVER seen a 40 hour game with no bugs? It's like getting a QA to do 40 hours and get 80% bugfree, or 20 hours and 95% bugfree. Both are valid choices. Your talks about "capable" reduces it to "succeed" and "fail" black and whites for QA. Nobody said the QA would "fail" at 40-hour, it would just do better at 20-hour. Logical, no? You don't need to say any more stuff about "Engine does not have to be finished" or "Graphics aren't necessary". Nobody said they were. We are in agreement on that.

All 25 of them, sure, on that project, on level design, sure. Because that was NOT a sarcastic remark designed to point out your own logical fallacies? Yes, I'm sure I was devastatingly honest in claiming such was said. I am not talking about the graphics engine, you dinosaur. Because the story was exhausted and it would be too much of a stretch? Because 20 hours may mean nonlinearity and 20 hours to just follow one branch? Because they wanted a higher level of quality than other games? Because they had to cut and redo large parts of the game due to errors or misdirection in design? Who knows. But we both know it's not due to not using toolset wisely. You brought up a non-point, so I fail to see why you're still dangling to it. No, in this case you were saying "why not use the NWN Aurora Engine". You'd have a lot of porting over to do, whether at once, or in incremental steps as you suggest. Either way it's a lot of work, so would take some time anyway. So you actually agree with me then???!??!?! LOLOLOLOLOLIPOP [/volo] Jesus christ, I NEVER SAID ENGINE HAD TO BE FINISHED. I WAS NEVER EVEN TALKING ABOUT THE GRAPHICS. Stop replying to your invisible friend.

I believe most of the complaints regarding the Irenicus Dungeon was that it felt so separate from the rest of the game, could not be rushed (or you'd end up dead, fast), yet for people who have played the game multiple times it was both easy and boring. (Mephits??) Which is why most mods either make the combat more difficult, or simply skip it. I think that happens with ALL prologue sequences - Oblivion's sewers, KOTOR's Peragus, and so forth. Also, alanschu is right.

Well, cutting Korriban wouldn't have helped, it would have taken about a day to make.

It does, and that's why I was asking. However, I rather suspect both figures were rough estimates, and they wouldn't actually cut 33%. Who said they were not capable of this?? Stop repeating yourself. Anyway, then you spent the rest of the post ranting "GRAPHIX HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH LEVEL DESIGN" - uh, you did read MY post, right? Camael: Possibly. This is, after all, OE's first full-fledged project (by that I mean Engine -> Design -> Internal QA), and I always thought the company's rapid growth in numbers may be a little premature if not handled right. We won't know till we see the game though, if they really cut so much from the OC we will be able to tell.

That's why they aren't hired for the first 2.5 years, at least for that project. Knock knock, Brain. Where did I say 2 years? Neither you nor I know the exact date, you'd have to have specific knowledge of this particular project as a whole to give an estimate. HH, Meet Reading Comprehension. I said a significant degree must be finished, at least the basics. I strongly suggest that they did NOT have 2 full years to do their OC based on this fact. Perhaps you disagree. 1/ Using a toolset wisely has nothing to do with making longer games. Your logic is nonexistent. Of course OE knows how to use toolsets wisely. Your point? It's not THAT which has impeded them from making a long game. 2/ Therefore the entire paragraph becomes irrelevant. CRPGs are different from FPS. What is essential to test your levels in FPS? Recognisable floors, walls, moving blocks labelled "ENEMY A" and something that fires projectiles. Balancing according to different guns and physics can take place after, because the primary concern in FPS level design is navigatibility and atmosphere, which can be estimated with a pac man engine. CRPGs require dialogue systems, inventory systems, character building systems, magic systems, a more complicated combat system, etc, to be in place at least. None of this is in regard to graphics, although that certainly helps. Which you can't use for NWN2. They could make "drafts" and port it over later, yes, but then you could just make "drafts" on paper. "Port it over" pretty much means, "make the whole thing again". You seem to be saying that I believe an engine/etc needs to be FINISHED first. I have stated repeatedly that this is not my argument. My argument is that it needs to be finished to a reasonable degree, and without knowing how much work/editing went into Electron and the NWN2 Toolset you cannot give callous statements such as "they had 2 years to work on the OC". I would suspect it was a lot less than that.

What management failures / project breakdowns are you referring to? It's hardly any surprise for things to be "cut" along the way. Or do you mean that they recently cut from 30+ hours to ~20 hours?

QA is designed as a stopgap for any unforseen errors that emerge, not a reliance as part of game development. This approach will work but will produce more errors. Given OE's past friendship with bugs, do you really want that? As I said before: it is not impossible, but it hurts continuity, consistency of quality, polish and design linearity. I believe one game where they kept updating engine/toolset was Torn. Heh. You know about Torn, right? That's because for a game to be CALLED alpha, it has to have gamecode/mechanics and everything else. That has to be the most illogical argument I've heard from you in this thread. The Toolset/Engine may not have to be 100% complete, but they must be completed to a reasonably high degree. This rules out your "But they had 3 years to make the OC!!!" argument. If you think they could use KOTOR's toolkits, or the infinity engine to make things for NWN2, you are an idiot. Yeah, why dont' we just go and make those NWN2 levels in the Source Engine? I'm sure it'll be real easy and not time consuming to port all that stuff into the NWN2 Toolset when it's done. You don't have to give a diatribe about what devs do and don't do, it's common knowledge. Missing textures is not a problem. Textures are one of the last things to be created graphics-wise. Now answer me this: from the status of No Engine (or NWN Engine that needs to be rebuilt from ground up), how much is there before Textures? Already addressed above. You have to hit a certain level of dev. with engine/toolset, which means more than 2 weeks, before you can start any serious degree of level design, especially in CRPGs. This would imply that such things did not undergo significant change in the way they are coded.

HH, do you have any idea how game development works? Actually, I suspect you do, but there's an odd mix of knowledge and illogic that is confusing me. When you modify engines and toolsets to a great degree, you can't just bomb forward and make the campaign at the same time, that's like trying to write on paper that is still in the factory being converted from tree kaka. You're going to have to go back for things, to check for thigs, to change things, to add things. It's called, Shortcut to Bugs and Inconsistent Quality/Design. Also: Uh.... no. What "other toolsets"? They don't make more than one "toolset" for a single engine and game, now THAT would be a premium waste of time. If you mean the version that is not "slightly modified for users", again, you think it took them only 2 months to get it up to that level? You have to finish the engine first, THEN you have to finish the toolset. Then you do the campaign, amongst other things.

So we are ultimately agreed that alanschu is, indeed, fat.

That's right, Baley. Don't you try to flatten our groove!

Rarely do bugs manifest, and when they do in the same fashion, across all computers and users for PC games. If we accept that there WAS a problem, as alanschu claims, for SOME users, then if we consider the evidence he has posted, it would seem that there must have been a significant portion of users that were affected by this problem. And since the devpost takes the line of "incomplete feature" rather than "bug", it would seem to me that the HOTU devs simply had "QA and Adjust for MP" very low on their priority list, and as a result a significant portion of the fanbase, excluding AKJ and Volo, experienced the problem. Or Alanschu could be a big fat liar out to fool us all with conspiracy theories.

He was. But were you, who did not feel the president was significant, satisfied by the Frank Horrigan Is Boss ending?

Lacky of who? And he still can't be more of one than Horrigan himself.

Yes, but I didn't give a titty about Frank Horrigan - for me he was just part of that 50's postapoc style / primitive Bond that dictates a huge baddie must always come when the ship is about to blow. The president was the satisfaction for the 'hero'.

Well, what IS your complaint with Volo's shaman then? I do seem to recall you called him up on his claim that it had no supernatural element, then labelled it a generic one. I suppose you could simply have beef with what you see as an artificial and illogical character, but I might note that one could take apart nearly any character and slap 'illogical' or 'implausible' or 'unbelievable'.

1/ How representative do you believe is the online gaming community in general of the overall marketplace right now, and do you see its vocal and productive nature as a valuable part of the culture and of Obsidian's game design / production? 2/ The Infinity Engine, notably, integrated the strategic nature of D&D into RPG combat, especially through full party control - while others strived to bring out the more 'personal' side of combat (TES). What parts, if any, of the former direction do you believe are appealing and desirable in future CRPGs?

Agrees With Eldar . It's very easy to say, "who cares?" and indeed, who really cares about a message board which has less than a hundred persistent posters? But that's precisely one of the reasons the online community fails to receive serious treatment yet. You would be very surprised to see how many 'respectable', 'traditional' media / academic / political institutions use internet surveys and the vox populi online to gauge reactions of the society as a whole in South Korea. Granted, that country is much more internet-crazed, but we should really set ourselves on that path. That said, we shouldn't criticise Fergie yet - by 20 hours does it mean simply to get in there and clear out the MQ? In which case it is perfectly reasonable, that could very well apply to BG2 and that was one of the biggest CRPGs in recent memory.