Fardragon

mispost

I see Deck 13 has announced a "distopian Sci-Fi Action RPG". I'm not to keen on the "action" part or the "distopian" part though. "Action" is usually a euphemism for "rubbish story" and "distopian" is a massive cliche. Interestingly, "Tomorrowland" has something to say about the current obsession with distopian fiction.

Hylea doesn't necessarily want her dead. I picked up a superb staff somewhere around Twin Elms. It has freezing lash, but you could always change that through crafting.

Whilst the supply of Sky Dragon eyes is very limited, there are more weapons to be found that are already "superb".

If you have auto-level-up turned off, you should be able to choose anything you like for companions. If I remember correctly, Eder defaults to "Ruffian", Pallegina chooses "Soldier", Sagini and Hiravias "Peasant". The others don't choose anything. Durance is best suited to using an Aquabus, give his staff to someone else.

Yeah, there are a lot of spaceship battle strategy games out there now, and it's pretty much impossible to know if they are good or not without actually playing.

How about this scenario? As an Officer in the Galactic Patrol, you are in pursuit of a deadly GELF terrorist. The GELF flees to the planet Van Buren, where many years ago a colony was started, but all contact was lost, apart from a warning beacon that deteres anyone from approaching the surface. Missiles shoot down both the GELF and [CHARNAME] and they crash onto the planet. Initially assisted by android companion JK-E, [CHARNAME] must track down the GELF (who can also become a companion), resolve the conflict between the surviving transhuman colonists, the pure strain humans, and the artificial intelligence that was originally intended to oversee the terraforming process, and uncover the deadly secret at the heart of the planet - a secret that revels corruption at the heart of the Galactic Patrol itself!!!

Connected to inXile acquiring the Van Buren trademark? Did Chris work on the original?

Pallegina's accent isn't Italian. More Bulgarian if anything. But I'm used to listening to European accents, living near London, so it doesn't sound unusual to me. American accents, I only hear on TV. The thing about learning languages though is most people do it at school in their own country. So I learned to speak French with an English accent because I was using it with English speakers, not French speakers. But if you first learn a language by being immersed in it, and you are good at language acquisition, you will learn to speak with the accent of the people around you. About the only way to tell that such people are not speaking their native language is their pronunciation tends to be a bit TO good*. Native speakers get sloppy. I used to teach at a college for overseas students in London, so I have quite a lot of experience in working with people for whom English is a second, third, or fourth language. *Idiom can also be a bit of a givaway. The words "lend a hand" translate easier than the meaning!

You are kind of missing my point. Sagini most definitely does have an accent. It may be that you aren't hearing it because her accent is very similar to you own local accent, but she sounds very foreign to me. I didn't think Pallegina had a particularly strong accent. You seem to be expecting mistakes in pronunciation - which intelligent, well travelled people tend not to make, unless they learned the language from non-native speakers in the first place (or it's an affectation, which I find many French are prone to when speaking English).

I notice inXile have acquired the Van Buren trademark, although the obviously can't do anything Fallout related with it. It occurs to me that the name would quite suit an RPG set on a desolate planet with a failed colony. You could incorporate some Falloutish stuff, but with a lot more advanced technology about. Genetic Modification, GELFs and Transhumans would fit in well to such a setting.

That would be quite the challenge to write a nuanced RPg with black and white alignments. I guess right in the squaring a circle league. You could do something on an Owellian theme, in which a fantasy Thought Police arrest citizens on whom they "Detect Evil".

Sagini is SUPPOSED to be well educated. It's turning the cliche of the primitive barbarian from the unsophisticated culture on it's head. Her culture is just as sophisticated as the Dyrwoodians, if not more so. The accents in Allo Allo and DA:I where overdone. The difference is, Allo Allo was SUPPOSED to be a farce!

Is it worth mentioning that the reason female Reindeer have antlers is because they are useful for digging through snow and frozen topsoil in search of food (and also so Santa has somewhere to hang bells)?

I think there is enough demand to make specifically romantic adventures, but I would rather keep it out my games, thanks. If it where DLC, I wouldn't buy it.

This is a really harsh attitude. People with legitimate phobias don't just "get over" them, particularly if those phobias are really strong. Someone who has panic attacks, like the OP writes, when they even see a depiction of spiders isn't going to "get over it". But people can have "legitimate phobias" to pretty much anything. What is so special about arachnophobes that singles them out for special privileges?

I figured Sagini has a light voice because, as a dwarf, she isn't very big! And she definitely doesn't have a non-accent, she sounds distinctively North American. Call that Dyrwoodian if you like, but as an intelligent, sophisticated person, she would speak a foreign language with the accent of the people she learned from, not some broken pidgin.

I liked that Sagani didn't have some fo-ethnic accent. I couldn't take Dragon Age: Inquisition seriously because all the stupid accents. It reminded me of 'Allo 'Allo*. I was waiting for Leliana to say "Leesten very carefully, I vill say theese only varnce". * An old British sitcom set in occupied France during WWII, in which all the characters spoke with deliberately fake French and German accents.

I didn't really dislike any of them. Which made a refreshing change from the NWN2 OC, where I disliked ALL of them.

People who appear to hate everything: what they actually hate is themselves.

They don't need to be superior, they just need to not be inferior. As it stands the joinable NPCs are worse than anything a player can design from scratch. Very much worse if they are allowed to auto level up and you don't encounter them early on. Eder can be a passible tank because (A) you encounter him early on, and (B) his stats where tweaked in a patch to make him less sub-optimal. But It's still easy to create a much better tank from scratch. Many of the BG companions where weaker than player designed characters too, but the made up for it with special abilities that the player simply couldn't get. They didn't have to be powerful abilities, just unique and interesting. There was some attempt to do that in PoE, but in the end the unique abilities are all so timid that they don't have any noticeable effect. On the other hand, PoE is better than the NWN2 OC, where the NPCs where not only weaker than player created characters, they also had personalities that you would cross the street to avoid.

I think we should have a mod that removes all dungeons for people who are claustrophobic, all outdoor areas for agoraphobics, and all ladders, mountains and deep holes for acrophobics.

Would any party member be able to equip the healing device and become a healer though? In which case it turns your party into a bunch of blank slates to equip as you choose, which rather detracts from the personality that makes NPC companions interesting. And why would we be expected to craft such a device? One of the characteristics of the modern world is people tend not to build things themselves, if they want something they order it from Amazon.

Then you are making a gear based game, which is okay single player, but makes characters too undifferentiated in a party based game. You could take the approach of "must have tier 3 Heavy Weapons skill to use a bazooka" "must have tier 1 Armour skill in order to equip a hazmat suit", and so on. But still need a bit of "space magic" in order to do things other than inflict damage and protect, such as devices that buff team members, and that kind of thing. And if you don't have them, the game becomes tactically rather limited.

The way I see it, the biggest problem with doing a KOTOR style game is the 3D 3rd person viewpoint effectively limits the size of party you can have. Three is pretty much the maximum, and I would prefer a larger party. It's not a deal-breaker though. If you got rid of jedi, what would you replace them with? The KOTOR games only have three non-jedi classes, and they don't play very differently to each other. The reason games like Mass Effect have "space magic" is to give characters something to do in combat other than shoot guns. Even if you go for a classless system, you still want to give characters a good range of abilities to choose from.