alanschu

I've heard this excuse several times, and it doesn't wash for me. As far as we know, there are 12 possible party members, and of them, only two are mandatory. That means that the other 10 may or may not be in a specific play-through for a specific player. And how many of them would have had a significant past with the player from the previous game? Would people be content with Kaiden/Ashley having the same roles as the other joinable NPCs in the party? If so, then is it really THAT big of a deal if they aren't joinable NPCs? Having said that, I'll be very surprised if either NPC does not exist at all in the game. Do you by any chance have a list of the NPCs? I'll concede your point, although the situation you describe is possible (and possibly even common, especially in my first playthrough) WITH mandatory NPCs in my party. You're right, it does. It's all about determining whether or not the investment is worth it. I don't know the metrics, but increased content through higher quality sidequests, especially when sidequests were such a knock on the original game doesn't strike me as wasted resources. In fact... Numbers man is right. I should just call you queen of the Strawman. Look CAREFULLY at what I called a weaker investment of resources, before you start going off and saying random, and incorrect, things. In fact, look carefully at the entire sentence. At no point did I declare that optimal use of resources would be a completely linear game, as you seem to be implying.

Yup, always a joy to see placeholder text hehe. The placeholder visual effects and whatnot for GUIs are usually quite entertaining too I find. Drawn in paint by a programmer, waiting for the GUI artist to make it all pretty

I'm looking for a mate!

I can't imagination localization issues costing that much for Australia. Just sounds like the market there is more expensive. Sucks for them

I think it's cool but given what I understand of game development, I don't expect a whole lot of the things you do to have more than a superficial effect on Mass Effect 2. Though IMO, even if it's a subtle change such as motivation because say, the Council is dead instead of alive, I still appreciate those changes. I mean, it makes sense that you can't have too much involved with Ashley/Kaiden given one of them might be dead. It's easy as consumers to say "well write it in differently to make it work," but when you start creating large amounts of dialogue for characters that may never even possibly be in a particular playthrough, it starts to become a weaker investment of resources. Not just in the time for the writer to write dialogue either, but also in terms of voice over, which is very expensive. Top it off with localization issues that have you doing voice overs in 10+ different languages, and suddenly it's pretty expensive! This is a lot like KOTOR 2 which had a lot of different dialogue options to determine what had happened in KOTOR 1's timeframe, but ultimately the game is still almost identical. I expect (I have not touched ME2 so this is just a guess) that the decisions made in the previous game will open up small subplots and whatnot, similar to how your backstory in ME would lead to different optional sidequests, as well as the occasional difference in line of dialogue. Little things to acknowledge the choices that you made, but nothing too drastic because it's just a poor production decision to do so. Anyone expecting more than this is being unrealistic IMO. If you wanted a significantly different game experience based on the previous choices that you made in the earlier game, then you're being unreasonable. You can complain about this all you want, but would you prefer it if the game simply ignored your previous decisions and just assumed that your Sheppard saved the Council when he actually didn't?

Their BG stuff was generic too.

Those Chinese certainly seem to be much worse off because of it. I know it was dreamy before hand. But hey, I'm the one that's woefully ignorant apparently. Coming from the one that can't be bothered to check the facts of the propaganda he spews, I find your assertion quite humourous.

I bet China is a dream as well, sharing North Korea's practice of giving the people all the power.

Based on what?

I'm just curious to those that are quite outspoken against the art style and voice overs: What is it precisely that is bad about it? Be honest with yourselves, if you saw those videos and it was all about KOTOR 3, would you actually be unhappy?

I think people are expecting Deus Ex style wandering around when not in a safe house/non-combat scenario.

I remember loading things onto the old 20 MB Hard Drive on our Mac Plus. And I was never gonna fill up my 1.2 GB HDD.

Meh, they all look like Star Wars. http://pc.ign.com/dor/objects/816935/biowa...pc1_082109.html There's 4 gameplay videos.

Haha, kind of hard to say at this point, isn't it?

I remember when Obi-Wan was originally going to be for PC as a spiritual successor for Jedi Knight, then they canceled it for PC, and we ended up with a much better Jedi Knight 2 anyways. At first I was disappointed that Obi-Wan was console only, but it didn't take long for me to get over it.

The combat takedowns are great. This is the type of game that can't go on too long though, unless they mix and match the speed bump encounters with some creative puzzles and/or more challenging foes.

Combat takedowns ftw. Personally I like the simplicity EDIT: Asumming I was posting in Batman thread...

Heh, I'd be skeptical if he said any more. He already said a lot as far as I'm concerned.

Honestly, I dunno. I think Im fixated on it now, lol. Im more curious if it was a design decision after the NWN2 conga-line-to-the-mage-while-ignoring-all-else mini backlash. Trust me, mages are not automatically ignored simply because they are mages

No, it's like this:"OMG you desecrated our most holy relic!!!uno11!" "Yeah, coz I'm too lazy to carry it to our fortress for safekeeping. We need to destroy it so the Blight doesn't get it. And if they don't use it, then why should our army?" "Oh, okay". Okay okay. You don't persuade them that their religion is wrong, instead you convince them that the urn has to be destroyed so the Blight doesn't get it. As I remarked above, makes no sense to me either. But maybe there will be a good reason why you can't just take that damn thing with you. Oh wait, the Blight can. And use it too, like it's not a hostile god's holiest artifact. I must admit a sick pleasure in watching all the suppositions of what happens at this point, and the motivations/reasons for it

Nope

They don't show you the entire plot in that video. A significant amount of time passes from when you first hear of the Urn and when you can actually get it.

I believe the strong opposition from the party members stem from the urn being a highly sacred object (likened to the Holy Grail) and the PC destroys it. Meaning, they dont go ape over every little thing but one huge one and watch out. Also, the dragon ignored the mage again. Is the Dragon ignoring the mage, or is the warrior successfully keeping the dragon's attention? I don't recall having issues with the dragons in BG2 attacking my mages unless they saw my mage first.

To be clear, I'm not coming in crapping on people's ideas or desires for KOTOR 3. You won't find me coming in and telling people that are keen on discussing KOTOR 3 ideas and what they'd like in the game, or even their hope that it will come out. You will find me rolling my eyes and commenting on posts that lament the lack of a KOTOR 3 being made in conjuction with the decision that Lucasarts and BioWare made with respect to making SWTOR.

No one was expecting KOTOR before it was announced either. Having said that, the rumour mill of BioWare working on an MMO, as well as Lucasarts wanting to do an MMO, had been around for some time. Trust me, I'm a real KOTOR fan too. Simply because I'm not bashing SWTOR doesn't mean that I don't want a KOTOR 3. Heck, I hope and pray that SWTOR is as much like KOTOR 3-7 that BioWare is hyping it up to be. Because THAT would be super sweet. If it's just WoW with lightsabers, then that is less interesting. I'll take that as a compliment.