Patrick K Mills

I'm expecting obnoxious teenager. Am I wrong? You are wrong.

Cooking my level to the devkit takes about 2 minutes, perfect for a quick post after-hours.

Me, or the ghost? The mission that screenshot of is actually all about gathering intel, but no more details than that for now. Well, except that the intel you gather you can later leverage in negotiations with a rather nasty fellow, and that it's an optional mission. I hope that gives you a tiny taste of what we're trying to go for with our mission structure.

He's standing funny because he's transitioning to ragdoll. That m'fugger's dead.

Interestingly, that's the level I'm working on right now. What's actually about to happen in that shot is Mike is going to fire at the guy and he's going to shrug it off and continue his patrol because for some reason he's invincible and doesn't respond to anything Mike does. I heard someone else refer to him today as "the ghost." I'm currently trying to exorcise him. What should happen in that particular scene is if you pull a gun on that guy he'll either try and shoot you or run for help, depending on his current AI state. But nothing is final 'till it ships.

For those who have asked, those are all screenshots, none of them are renders, and they are all from core gameplay except for the one with the three dudes standing around talking, which is obviously our dialog system.. The only fiddling that's gone on is some camera manipulation. A half dozen screenshots all taken from the gameplay camera would get old pretty fast.

haha. Probably not! Hint: no it wasn't the unified ammo or the lack of reloading or lack of leaning. Where we go with this no one knows! Without trying to derail the thread, I'll give my simple answer: Overall poor level design (possibly due to unfamiliarity with the engine) and a lack of reactivity between the cities. I could go on, and even say some things they actually did pretty well, but I don't plan on it. There are only so many times that conversation can be had before it gets extremely wearisome.

I've got the 7-series, will my bird's cage do the job? In any case, at least we know it's not a final decision. No decisions are final until the game ships, but that's not what I was trying to imply. This has been in the game for a while now and it's made the game a better game, it's a core mechanic we base a lot of other stuff off of, so it's extremely unlikely to change. Keep in mind something about that last point, though. This is a core mechanic that is part of our vision for the game. We know what we're doing, infinite ammunition isn't a slapdash decision we made to patch a failure in our design, it's where a lot of our design comes from. I can't be too detailed about any specifics, and again, nothing is final till it ships, but our guns aren't wimpy. Another of our core goals was to make sure that the guns felt powerful and dangerous, and they do.

This is partially my call and I'm willing to fight to get it changed, but first you must defeat me in a steel cage match AND buy me a a 7-series. In all seriousness, you'll have to trust us on this. We're RPG gamers too and we all played Invisible War and know very well why it stunk (though you'd probably disagree with me.) I've been playing our game a lot today, mostly because I can't figure out why one of my levels is broken, and I'm actually having a lot of fun. If any of you have ever worked in game development you know that's saying a lot. And I'm not easy to please, I'm only slightly less nitpicky than, say, Saint Proverbius.

I want to see the trailer too.

For me it was a combination of having a long history of mod making and knowing someone who could give me the heads-up and a foot in the door. After making a few mods, including Action Quake 2 (which rocked your face!) I went to school for Anthropology. After realizing I suck at science I switched to philosophy, at which point it became clear that it might not have been science that was the problem, but school in general. I dropped out and worked on mod projects while making nearly minimum wage at a bookstore until my friend Nathaniel Chapman, now a designer on Project Whateverstatenamewe'reuptonow had just gotten a QA job at Obsidian and informed me that more positions were open for production testers. For those of you who don't know QA, production testers are the QA guys who sit with the developers and do engine testing and stuff... Honestly, I'm not exactly sure what the real difference is, I never did regular QA and I got shuffled on to scripting in about 6 months, doing a lot of the spells and abilities in NWN2. One trick to getting that scripting position was to lie a teensy bit. When Josh came to me and asked me if I knew NeverwinterScript enough to handle some small tasks left by a designer who was leaving the company, I said yes- which was mostly true. Of course, the designer who left was also not telling the whole truth when he said he only had a few minor tasks he was leaving behind, it turned out that I had to modify or re-script nearly half the spells and abilities in the game for reasons that I can't even remember now. So, long story short, I learned scripting as quickly as I could, made a lot of mistakes but made a good enough impression that I got offered a designer position after the project was up. So: 1) Play a lot of games. 2) Drop out of school. 3) Lie about your abilities.

Yes, the line was taken out of context. You can bag all the chicks but, like, one or two. It should have read "You can totally bag *most* of the chicks."

Well, I disagree with Josh on this, at least from your interpretation of his argument. Regardless, the weapon Mike is using in the pictures isn't *actually* an XM8 anyway. It just looks like one because it's a cool looking gun. In a lot of games (and I'm sure you guys have noticed this) a weapon may look very familiar but have a name that isn't. While that may look like an XM8, it may actually be a Samael Heavy Industries AR7 Mk II. I fully believe that weapons should have a history and background, be it a magic sword or a sniper rifle, it makes no difference. A bit of fluff text can take something "cool" and make it "awesome." Just look at Games Workshop.

I don't think you will be disappointed. The world is a complicated place and even though this is a video game and a work of fiction, this is something we hope to present thoughtfully.

Never said they were exclusive. Two great tastes that go great together.

Personally I enjoy violence and sex.

Well, as someone who was pushing for the XM8 to be used (and was fully aware they they never entered production) the reasons I liked it was because it had a very strong profile, a compact design with a lot of flat surfaces we can stick mods on, and it doesn't show up in a lot of other shooter games so it draws a clear distinction between Mike the super-agent and Soap the SAS. (What kind of name is "Soap" anyway?)

Remember that there is a certain amount of customization for Mike's appearance, additionally Mike's "press" face has changed a couple of times, you can spot it if you look at a few of the screenshots closely.

Mike Thorton is such an awesome super agent that they started the XM8 program back up *just for him*. If not weapons for the sake of coolness, then what? That's a serious question, I'm not being snarky.

This is a campaign commercial waiting to happen.

Do you guys work for the Bush administration?

holy ****ing ****

I don't know if this can get any creepier.

Oh yeah, I guess I should contribute. I make flow-charts and excel spreadsheets that let everyone else know what order the player will encounter the crates and how touch they will be when they get there.