Fardragon

It's not just a matter of "Improved Cutscenes", there is a lot more to it than that (although to me the story is as important as the strategy). Compared to SC2, SC1 doesn't have "one campaign for each race", it has a set of missions for each race that barely qualify as a campaign between them. I was initially reluctant to buy SC2, because of the high price, but I bought "Wings of Victory" discounted and was impressed enough to preorder "Heart of the Swarm", and will preorder the third instalment.

I'm very forgiving of bugs (hard not to enjoy half of the Obsidian games otherwise), but when you make "improvements" that are amateurish, negligible, and/or recreate what mods have done for years, then charge twice as much money as the good old versions, and then you have some bugs, you really have to ask yourself why this thing exists in the first place. As I say, if they just came out one day and said "we want to make a new IE game", I'd have best wishes and hopes for them. Currently, their track record is money-grubbing through three enhancements that hardly need to exist. I would say the main reason they exist is that: a) Some people aren't old enough to have played them first time around and; b) for the mobile port.

The single player gameplay in Starcraft 2 is NOT the same as Starcraft, where you played each race in turn in missions you could create yourself in the editor, using the same reskinned interface for each race. Each Starcraft 2 campaign has it's own unique "out of battle" interface and gameplay, nor are you necessarily tied to playing as only one race. Did you know "Wings of Victory" included half a dozen Protoss missions? Considering Starcraft earns most of it's revenue through multiplayer, Blizzard put an awful lot of effort into their single player gameplay. Sure, Blizzard games are expensive, in the same way that my Volkswagen was expensive. You pay extra for a quality product. An Obsidian product may be cheaper, but you accept that you will have to contend with the bugs. It's Bethesda that offers poor value, their games are expensive buggy messes.

Single Player games and Multiplayer games are completely different things. You can't design a game that does both well at the same time, design decisions made to support multiplayer will hurt single player, and visa versa. NWN is the perfect example. No one ever called NWN "the spiritual successor to Baldur's Gate" because the single player gameplay is vastly inferior. That is at least partially down to decisions made to support multiplayer, from the lack of a party, to the structure of the OC, to the paired down graphics. Do we need a new Build-Your-Own-Online-RPG Toolkit to replace NWN? Sure we do, but PoE aint it.

Why should party members not block each other at choke points? You never get jammed with someone walking through a doorway?!

Judging by Soulbound Weapons, it is possible to set something to benefit from any kind of weapon focus. Personally, I think that would be a good idea for any kind of summoned weapon.

Pretty much everything launches with hundreds of game breaking bugs these days. BGEE launched with about the same level of buggieness that PoE did. The cut scenes where a bigger loss IMO. IWDEE works fine, but it doesn't really add anything to the original game apart from lots of kits. Sorcerers completely mess up the spell shortage that was a feature of the original game, but then you don't have to play one. HoF mode is just as broken as it always was.

The single player campaigns in Starcraft 2 are more like separate novels in a trilogy. Each one can stand alone perfectly well, and you can play any race in the multiplayer game, which has always been the main thrust of Starcraft anyway.

I just hit him with a sword until he was dead.

If minor blights count as implements, does that mean Dangerous Implements works with them?

The usual internetish hyperbole. The EEs where no more buggy than your typical Obsidian or Bethesda release, they incorporated stuff from old mods because some of the Beamdog team where the people who wrote those old mods in the first place, and the new content, whilst not as good as the original stuff, still managed to be entertaining. I'm happy when ANYONE makes a new infinity engine type game, because even a poor effort is better than the rest of the trash the computer gaming industry produces.

why would a pacifist want weapons upgrading?

The thing with the spider pet is it looks like a figurine in inventory, I didn't figure out it was a pet until I tried to equip it. Not seen the sporeling.

I'm pretty sure the soulbound weapons will be FOUND in the new areas, but can be USED in the original areas. The fact that Weapon Focus always applies to Soulbound weapons, even if they are the wrong type, tells us that there won't be soulbound weapons of every weapon type: i.e. they will be few in number, and hence won't be "scattered" anywhere. Four is sufficient to cover all classes, since each weapon can bind to three.

I have the spider pet. It's in the ruins with all the spiders, surprisingly enough.

Sure, that would never happen in the real world... Now I'm just off to visit my parents, who live in Blackpool. On the way I will stop in and visit my aunt, who live in Thornton, near Southport. I hope the traffic round Guildford isn't too bad... And if they're made well, even the Tolkienesque fantasy names once were of this type, but due to language changes, being in foreign languages, or incorporating personal names, are unrecognisable at first sight.I used to live in a city called something like "Stony Creek". But because the name is of Slavic origin in Germany, most people don't understand its root in the first place, and then it went through several changes over the centuries. And the result is a "fantasy" place name which is another of the "retarded" ones, just mangled by time. For the most part, all place names have origins like that. If your fantasy names are well done, they could, theoretically, be traced back to their rather mundane origins. (And we can safely assume that that is the case with Tolkien's names, even in those cases where he doesn' t tell us outright - Nargothrond sounds fancy, but essentially only means Narog-Fortress.) Sure, it's pretty common for place names to be a mixture of current words, obsolete words, and words from languages that where previously used in the region. Tolkien uses this a lot, but it's also in PoE (e.g. Caed Nua).

The "gimmick" of Star Wars is the characters are pure archetypes, without gimmicks.

The chest (and the thieves) are near the southeast corner of the docks. I would open it, it is obviously full of supa-powerful magic loot.

I don't think it's possible to get the ability listed on the wiki at the moment. You can certainly side with Wael though. From what Wael said when he appeared to me, I got the impression his appearance was because I had both the "Cruel" and "Benevolent" trait. I hadn't completed all of the deity quests, but I did hide the scroll.

hk were not gimmicky 'cause o' being a droid. his gimmick were that he were a droid doing the meat-bag schtick. heck, even Gaider conceded that hk-47 were a shallow character and the rogue assassin droid in marko ragnos' tomb were added to kotor in part 'cause o' what he could not do with hk-47. HA! Good Fun! Star Wars was quite deliberately built around archetypical characters, and droid intelligence is pegged at about the level of a smart dog anyway, they are not fully independent beings. HK-47 has the "meat-bag schtick" because it was programmed that way by it's former master, as a joke. It is no more a "gimmick" than Eder's desire to pet furry animals. What you actually have something that is very common in it's setting behaving in a way that is perfectly normal for it's type (i.e. following it's programming). What you actually have is forumites making the assumption that any character made of metal that kills things must, perforce, be the same character. the writer o' hk-47 disagreed with you 'bout the gimmick aspect. *shrug* hk-47 were a one-trick pony... a funny reversal o' c-3po. it were a gimmick, albeit an effective one. HA! Good Fun! I don't think the writers on either KOTOR fully understood the universe they where writing in. HK-47 is a reversal of C-3PO in the same way that Eder is a reversal of Minsc (by virtue of being sane). Sure, they are very different to each other, but they still operate within the normal ranges for their kind. G0-T0 appears to operate outside of normal droid parameters, but is, in fact, still trying to follow it's programming, just in a way that was unanticipated by it's creators.

There is always another patch. Game designers can't resist the urge to tinker with balance, add new features, and introduce as many new bugs as they fix old ones. PoE is fully playable now, bugs are rare enough that you are unlikely to notice any, there is no reason to wait.

I expect DoC will have some item slots locked, to make up for decent built-in abilities.

hk were not gimmicky 'cause o' being a droid. his gimmick were that he were a droid doing the meat-bag schtick. heck, even Gaider conceded that hk-47 were a shallow character and the rogue assassin droid in marko ragnos' tomb were added to kotor in part 'cause o' what he could not do with hk-47. HA! Good Fun! Star Wars was quite deliberately built around archetypical characters, and droid intelligence is pegged at about the level of a smart dog anyway, they are not fully independent beings. HK-47 has the "meat-bag schtick" because it was programmed that way by it's former master, as a joke. It is no more a "gimmick" than Eder's desire to pet furry animals. What you actually have something that is very common in it's setting behaving in a way that is perfectly normal for it's type (i.e. following it's programming). What you actually have is forumites making the assumption that any character made of metal that kills things must, perforce, be the same character.

I look at that and just get pissed off we didn't get KOTOR 3... Avellone as lead of KOTOR3 after leaving Obsidan? They're resurrecting Battlefront so I don't see why they wouldn't bring back another wildly popular franchise. Because KOTOR is Legend material and no new material for that old continuity is going to be produced. Expansions for TOR seem to be the only exception. Battlefront doesn't have the same issue. But if TOR draws upon the same material as KOTOR, wouldn't that not be an issue? I could see them re-branding it, perhaps Old Republic Knights or something, but a multiplatform Star Wars RPG in the vein of Dragon Age seems like it could be a big money maker for EA. TOR can only continue because it is supporting an EXISTING game. they could no more make TOR2 than they could KOTOR3. That's not to say that another game set in the Star Wars universe thousands of years before the movies could never be made, but I would imagine Disney/Marvel would want to go there with their comics before they let a 3rd party play in their newly cleaned sandbox. Bioware are supposed to be working on an action RPG (i.e. Diabolo clone) set between episode VI and VII in the new continuity.

How about an Ogre Shaman? I played a half-ogre as my main DnD character for a long time. There are technical issues around including larger sized party members, not to mention credibility issues when the party passes through low doors! In PnP it was quite fun to have to "enlarge" doorways, and deal with issues like having armour specially made, when all the peasants run away screaming. For some, any monster race party member would be too gimmicky, and for others, any human, too boring.