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I'll let you know once I've got the first beta completed.

Nah I'm really just pulling from the Unapproachable East 3.5 sourcebook because my dude's from Aglarond and the specific year that BG2 takes place in is on the Aglarond timeline. So it's just a matter of disregarding everything after that point. **** a bunch of continuity grognards if they've got a problem. The FR setting is such a beautiful mess it's hard to care about that stuff and BG isn't canon anyway. So **** it. I feel for people who try to make a good NPC mod, I really do. People underestimate how hard it is to write dialogue as good as Bioware's (which isn't that great half the time). Add to that the MAXIMALIST tendencies of the FR setting and the fear of making a bland character and most NPC mods end up overcooked and / or hijacking the story (Saerilith's Gate II: Shadows of Saerilith, etc.). Plus there's the romance thing which doesn't do anyone any favors. I plan on taking my time with this. But it's gonna get done, believe.

'spose I could, but this BG2 mod is something I've always wanted to do, since all the NPC mods I've really enjoyed have either died on the vine prior to completion (thinking of Fade specifically) or are Kelsey. So I'm making my own. Plus I always wanted a Monk CNPC but didn't really want to start a phantom LAN game just to create a mute one. Plus it gives me an excuse to nostalgia trip on all my old 3.5 Forgotten Realms flavor books, which were, in retrospect, of exceedingly high quality. Mostly.

So now that I've graduated from college and thus lost the last little bit of self-respect and dignity I had, I've decided to start an NPC mod. Incidentally, if anybody wants to give it a spin, just give the say-so! God help me.

The game industry in general has a high rate of turnover, and this round doesn't seem as bad as the post-Aliens cancellation thing. Good luck to everyone who lost their jobs! Sucks. I would like to see more evidence that Virginia is dead / in jeopardy. Do we have confirmation that it hasn't stuck to a publisher?

Given the preview for Old World Blues in the next Qore it seems more likely that they were working on multiple DLCs simultaneously, so the long wait may not really translate to larger DLC.

38 and Big Huge are apparently connected somehow - A press release announcing EA Partners publishing 38's first game is hosted on Big Huge's site and there's no real mention of Big Huge.

Fallout Wiki dates Honest Hearts for April 19th (without attribution). What the **** ever.

VGChartz has sales figures. Comparison between first two weeks of DA:O and DA2 sales -

Doug Church (aka the Deus Ex guy nobody talks about) hired at Valve. Sweeeet

Play TM claims Honest Hearts will be revealed in... 5 days. Pretty obvious bull****. But I could see it being an announcement date.

How does the job market feel at this point? I would imagine it's been hit pretty hard by the recession.

Wasn't DA:O's lead working on a game that was eventually canceled prior to his resignation from Bioware? Maybe it never actually entered production and thus couldn't have been canceled.

Yeah, from the sound of it they repackaged it under a different name (through Sony I think) to get around the court order. I've got it on pretty good (hacker) authority that the SecuROM should be only for release date checking in non-EA Store copies, and completely missing in Steam copies. If you were somehow daft enough to get a copy from the EA Store, you probably have the whole SecuROM experience going right now. I've compiled this of EA PR over the course of DA2's development cycle. The climber is EA. His parents are gamers.

Also hey hey hey guess what EA included Securom on DA2 despite being under court orders not to do so! And it was never mentioned in any game materials! :D :D :D Have at 'em!

Weird to think that this might be the first Bio game since NWN1 that I don't finish with my first character. There are just so many little things - it's the death of a thousand papercuts. Nothing in itself is really awful, but every unimpressive thing taken together sums into a really disheartening whole. The impression that I'm getting is that this game really, really needed another year of development time. The gameplay would be imminently forgivable had the narrative and characters been good, but aside from Varric and Aveline (to an extent) I'm not warming to any of the characters so far, and all I'm missing at this point are Isabela and the Scottish DLC Prince. The biggest thing is that DA2 seems to always tell and never show, especially in the first two acts. DA:O and ME benefited from a choice of character backgrounds that centered the Warden / PC and gave context to the way they acted. Hawke, on the other hand, is a total cypher. We only catch glimpses of his / her story - The in media res opening is exceedingly problematic from a characterization standpoint even with the "it's a story being told" handwave. When you transition from Act 1 to Act 2, there is literally no sense of time having any real meaning, even though it's a central aspect of the storytelling mechanism. The grief of your family over the events of the prologue is as hollow (more, even) as Fallout 3's father-child dynamic, because you spend literally less than 5 minutes with them before you're asked to become emotionally invested in their bland, trite lives. It keeps coming back up and you think "oh yeah, that thing that happened". Then you get to Kirkwall, you spend a year working for some ill-defined group, the game resumes at the end of the year, and Hawke has "made a name for himself" despite the fact that you never see and are never really told exactly what you did. There is no sense of progression or accomplishment. You run into people who Hawke apparently knows but all they really say is "Oh hey Hawke I haven't seen you since that last time I saw you you sure are making a name for yourself heh heh have a look at my wares". Add to that a severe lack of direction despite the linearity of the game (you want to get to the Deep Roads apparently but it's never explained exactly why you want to, besides the fact that the plot wouldn't work without it) and everything else that seems half-finished and you have a seriously disorienting game experience. I'm really hoping it'll tighten up in the next acts, but from what I've read (even from pro reviewers operating on the 8-10 scale) the ending is pretty terrible. There are times where the combat is good, at least! Specifically in Act ! there's a quest in a mine where the cheap respawning doesn't occur (and it's actually challenging!) and there's a beach area fight that's well-laid out and manages to be fun even with the standard "wave" combat template. There have been a few instances of potentially interesting choice & consequence, though I won't know how well they'll follow through until I manage to drag myself to the next act. And I have to give special attention to how aggravating the influence system is. Everything about it. They characterize everything as point gain ("Varric rivalry +5", "Aveline friendship +10") despite the fact that friendship / rivalry is one axis and thus, point gain in one is point loss in the other. It seems actively deceptive to me. Like, just call it what it is - DA:O's influence bar with benefits for low scores. And it's still a ****ty system! Characters aren't consistent! Merrill is against slavery, but you'll only "gain rivalry points" with her if you choose pro / neutral slavery dialog when it refers to locking up mages. Every other time slavery comes up she is unperturbed in a hard, numerical sense even if she protests in dialog. Seriously confusing, seriously shoddy work. It's really flabbergasting. By the by, Merrill is far and away the worst character Bioware has ever created. The general backstory of Tali circa ME2 + the mannerisms, temperament and personality of Aerie = Merrill. Awful, shameful, derivative nerdbait. Like every otaku's goddamn hyper-feminine schoolgirl fantasy given tribal tattoos and a Welsh accent.

When you've the creative lead or production lead or whatever on a AAA game like New Vegas, you're in a much better position in the job market than most people. Seems like there have been a lot of people who "transferred up" after working at Obsidz, so it's not like it's a bad place to work.

PV (hurr hurr) could also be the original IP Josh and MCA are working on. Hard to say if that's the "Sauron won" fantasy setting, but it could certainly be. They also seem to think that the "Can't pass up" IP is the Wheel of Time game we already knew about. Ferg's been talking to Atari about IWD3 but seems to indicate it's not in the cards. He also wants to make an Ultima game.

There were Honest Hearts art assets in the folder with the Dead Money graffiti, so it was a safe bet.

Two things: 1) Are Virginia, "Defiance", and the licensed game all different or are two or more of them the same? 2) Doesn't Obsidian only own the art assets to IWD? I didn't think they could make another game in the series independently

Flash game is my guess. The Dragon Age games did it, so.

I wasn't necessarily yelling at crytek, but at the PC publishers in general who seem to have decided that Demo's are just not worth it, or ONLY for multiplayer value as a beta. My comments weren't aimed at anyone in particular.

When the relationship between PC developers and PC gamers starts to mirror a hostage situation, it's time to get out of the market. To wit, pinning the blame on Crytek for this is breathtakingly stupid.

Something Awful pointed out this errant tweet from DE:HR producer David Anfossi: No idea what it really means, but he seems not to have followed it up with anything negative over the last few days.

Is DDM helping to peddle "Project Virginia" for release this year?