Joseph Bulock

Who are you disagreeing with? I had just stated that my problem with broad amounts of choices is that NPC's often fail to react to anything but the most recent choice that was made, therefore making the world entirely unresponsive.

I agree. The above suggestion is for when the design limits the number of choices to a smaller number. The only problem with a full host of choices every time is that it tends to lead to lots of choices that make it very difficult for a NPC to react to in a meaningful way. If I choose to shoot a person instead of finding their lost puppy, but then walk across a room and give a girl 30 gold cause someone stole her candy, the girl is probably not going to react in a way that makes much sense.

I'm looking forward to Red Star for the PS2. This game has taken forever to get to the shelves (the comic it is based on seems to have died right before they finished the final book ), but I played a test version of it while in QA at another company. If you like the Treasure style shooters or slasher action games, this title has a great dynamic blend of the two in the gameplay and is one of the best co-op games for the PS2 ever.

You are very helpful.

I think my general feeling is that game often include lots of "token" evil choices. It's as many of you say, where the evil you do doesn't every do any greater evil. You stab a guy and take his wallet, and no one remembers after ten minutes of gameplay. I'm a fan of not making players take the boyscout path, even though a majority of players do want to be do-gooders. I would love to see more of the "Evil Plan" approach, where a character's evil options moved towards one goal, whether it was the subtle control of those around him, hiding a set of nefarious motives or just using others to build their own power. I would also love to see a sliding scale of dialog responses to account for players who wish to go one way or the other. For example, in ME, the player always has three options. It would be great if the game actually had five responses it could show the player (Super good, Good, Neutral, Evil, Super Evil), and based on the player's previous choices, they could get choices that fit who their character had become. This is, of course, much more work, and herein we find the main reasons why many games don't offer deep, meaningful choices in dialogs. Subtle evil is not only hard to pull off in one dialog, its nearly impossible to build into a coherent evil strategy at every turn unless doing so is a main objective of the game.

I'd love to see them try to pioneer in the dialog as much as they are trying to pioneer with the system. RPG dialog is tricky, but I'm sure they could switch it up a bit, and if nothing else, hopefully make the "evil" options a bit less psychotic and a bit more subtle than their previous titles.

Maybe these will make a bit more sense when they get set up in the game...

I want to like this game, simply because if it's good, we might see less of the Oblivion clones and more interaction based RPG's and games that allow for better tactical gameplay without going the boring military sim route. So far from the gameplay videos my primary worry is about the shooting mechanic. The footage I've seen makes it seem like the guns aren't very lethal, and have the weird "in the future, guns are worse at killing people" feeling. All the tactical gameplay in the world is a waste if the guns don't pose enough threat to stop me from charging up the middle and dropping grenades at people's feet.

Puzzle Quest is pretty fantastic. Reasonably hard, but the basic puzzle system is solid. Some system bits seem very unbalanced (spell resistance is scary). The story is much better than I had expected.

Pretty good. Working on tasks that I like, and finally secured a copy of PuzzleQuest for the DS, which I have been very excited about. Looking forward to cooking tonight and maybe playing some frisbee.

Either the video quality of that video is bad, or they really need to work on that character model. That facial texture looked like a PS2 model.

I love those beards. This is just personal preference, but every dwarf I made (50+) made me smile, mainly due to the awesome beards. The multi-braid was my favorite.

Yes we made the game, but we did in fact, make a game with a license. This means that every piece of art we made had to be approved by WotC, and had to match up reasonably close to their source stuff. If you compare our elves to the Forgotten Realms guides, you'll see that the art stayed very accurate.

I'm just going to point out that, as others have said, Obsidian's artists made the elves look as close as possible to the elves found in various 3.5 artwork. Forgotten Realms elves are a different ilk than the elves of Middle Earth or other fantasy settings, and as we were making a licensed D&D title, the artists had a lot of guidelines to adhere to, and whether or not you like the WotC art style, I think the Obsidian artists did a great job keeping our models faithful to the source.

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Post the Monk. It's the one class that Iron heroes really didn't touch, and I'm not personally found of the 3.5 version.

This still seems like a very light sentence. Discarding the symbolic (and most likely meaningless) 100 years sentence, murdering four people to cover up the rape of a child seems like a life in prison thing to me. Or at least twenty five years. Ten years seems very light.

I prefer to avoid third party nonsense. It's rarely balanced and usually conflicts with WotC's stuff. Then you're missing out on some very fun stuff. Arcana Evolved seems like a great time (I've read up on it lots but haven't played), and Iron Heroes does some things that really need to get into the next official D&D update (like making your hero an actual super awesome dude and not a guy who is really good at finding magic items).

Last I heard, there were only two proper ninja left in the world, and they were both very old men in Japan...

Drat, late to the thread. Anyways... I play softball on the Obsidian team once a week and teach Jiu-Jitsu twice a week at a local college recreation center. I've played volleyball in highschool and college but don't know of any good open leagues in the area. I do a bit of running just for cardio, though this is fairly new for me...

Pssssh. Slugs have no arms.

I'm trying to figure out if it's intentional irony that "theslug" doesn't buy into the Wii.

But many stores have PS3's on the shelf right now. Sony is having to deal with unsold units already. Nintendo still can't produce them fast enough for everyone who wants one to get one, and this is before the Mario title is even out, not to mention Warioware and Wii Play.

Also, the 360 has units on the shelves. The Wii has actually increased in demand since the holiday season, but Nintendo still cannot get enough units out to consumers. The same is true with the Wiimotes. A Wii owner who has managed to snag 4 Wiimotes is a rare thing.

That seems to be very true Alanschu. I have friends that haven't owned a console ever that are looking for one right now. It offers such a different way to play that captures people who hadn't been into games since the days of the NES. Including Wii Sports in the box also helps, simply because it demos the capabilities of the machine pretty well.