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I see where you're coming from (as for Radiohead, Alt Rock by way of IDM). It wouldn't matter to me if I could choose full dialogue options, if my PC personality was preset. That seems conservative even for recent Bioware standards. Would they just have "good soldier" and "bad soldier"? I don't know about any of you (actually I do in some cases) but I've always considered the smartass to be the best character type. But I just don't know. I can't know that this "innovation" will have come at great cost to roleplaying until I've played it. And even then, I might find the premade character to be fun, for a single playthrough.

I dunno, any high-drama parts would be easy. Confronting Sarevok or Irenicus, for example. Confronting the crazy president in Fallout 2. All that jazz. But regular dialogue? rather boring. I'll see how it turns out, though. I might not miss imagining my character's reaction as I think I would.

Hell, I wasn't too satisfied with it either. Go into decrepit pre-war dungeon area X and find parts Y and Z for the failing power plant. It was terrible to DM as much as I'm sure it was to play as a PC. So I cut most of it out, gave them the parts, and had them roleplay with some NPCs. And that's the dilemma I have now. Without NPCs in most of the city, this entire part of the game is going to be that "find and bring back" deal, and some of it is necessary, but I'm restricted to it. I can do fetch quests a lot if NPCs are involved (convince man X to give up Y, or take it from him, etc.) but I can't do this here. So I've realized through experience that this particular part of the game was definitely meant to be rendered by a PC, or at least a more skilled DM who can take the monotony of scavenger hunts. So either I can take a precious PnP DM liberty and change the location so that the salvagers aren't the only NPCs in the area, divert course from VB, or I can drastically reduce the size of the city and see if that helps. So I'm thinking what I can do is, instead of having the salvagers as the sole inhabitants of the city, I could throw in some tribals and slavers (Fallout staples, and Slavers were in Denver anyway) and spread them out amongst the city, and have the groups intertwine with another through quests like the factions in the Boneyard (get quest from Regulators, get the real story from Blades, negotiate with the Gunrunners, fight the Regulators) But if I do that, I might mess up the game more and deviate it more from the source material. That wouldn't normally bother me, but I want to ensure that at least most of the story and the endgame are intact when I play this. Really, I'm just lucky I have dedicated players who are willing to feel through all this.

I have no idea, with the massive debts that Interplay has incurred, how they could make this happen. If they do somehow, you know it's going to be total ****. These are the same guys that thought Brotherhood of Steel was a good idea.

I'm kind of jumping into this, but You cannot deny that it would be very strange for a persecuted people to settle in the land that is persecuting them. Nonsense. Just look at the Jews, for christ's sake. They've been living that for centuries. Back in the Middle Ages, the church's position prohibited christians from lending money to one another, and thus the Jews filled the void in Europe. That's how a persecuted people stays in an area: They own property, are tied to a religious meeting place, gain some sense of pride, and they stay. They were already educated (their standard religious education was light years ahead of christians at the time) and capable, so they became Europe's bankers, which is part of where that stereotype comes from. That's also part of the reason why they were persecuted. Drive the jews out of town and you'd never have to pay back your loans. But most of them stayed where they were until they were driven out by Catholic monarchies. Then a bunch of them went to Poland, and look where that got them. The moral of the story: Stay away from Poland.

The engine does not limit you to 4 party members. In fact, in the game itself you control more than 4 on at least two separate occasions. And you can edit the .ini (or maybe it's use the console, not sure) to allow yourself to have more party members throughout the entire game. So the limit of 4 is a design choice, nothing else. <{POST_SNAPBACK}> You're right, I forgot about those parts. But it was a design choice, as having 6 characters could concievably unbalance the game. My take was that if they had designed the game for 5 CNPCs, all the switching out that you normally have to do wouldn't be necessary, and you could run through the game with 1 set of characters, like in BG. But most people I know adhere pretty tight to one NWN2 configuration anyway.

Tigranes pointed out that the linearity of the game had a lot to do with the party management, and I think that's an accurate assessment. Adding more CNPCs and only including those in the story that you choose (ala BG2) would have been preferrable, but I get where they came from with NWN2, since there can only be 4 party members at any one time (due to the engine?), and trying to make certain characters integral to the storyline. Still, I think the option would have been nice to leave, say, Grobnar out of the mix, or especially.

forget dungeons, use old car factories, supermarket ruins, a heavily guarded ex-school, some severs with mutated bugs, and maybe a supercomputer (digitalized) <{POST_SNAPBACK}> Well, it's Fallout, there are no dungeons. What I mean is, everything in the location is going to be either combat or fetching missions for the one or two NPC-intensive areas of the game. Last time I did a fetching quest, it was terribly boring.

I think you're taking this a little too seriously if you think that. And I don't think NWN2 was oppressively linear. There were plenty of unrelated quests that you could do as you moved along the main path. But the main draw of the game was obviously the central storyline. Fallout was more "free", in that the quests weren't based on where you were on the main story (except for the main story quests, heh), and as long as you found a location you could undertake any of the quests at any time. The sherriff things in Redding being an exception. Part of the greatness of Fallout 2 was that the emphasis on the game wasn't the Enclave, and as such you tended to have more fun going through the quests that had nothing to do with them.

Or they can head out West and run into a mutant patrol (unless I'm mistaken and those encounters are triggered by visiting Necropolis, I'm not sure :\) That's the one thing I didn't like about Fallout 2, thematically. The Enclave was present right from the start of the game, in the cinematics and in the freakin' main menu. Had they kept the player in the dark and let them run across things like the vertibird crash, it would have been that much more intriguing to find out exactly what the hell was going on. But the intro film pretty much makes it blatantly obvious what happened to Vault 13. So mr. Sawyer, are you planning to implement these lofty ideals sometime, or are we just talking about them? :cool: that is the main question of this thread, after all.

Does it count if I don't care?

Heh, it's not original by any means, but it's maddeningly effective, especially in explaining the contradiction of the player running a character in a way that doesn't jibe with the character's backstory. You get amnesia, become a different person, yadda yadda.

If they make an expansion for NWN2 hopefully they will implement this style of game play. NO EXCUSES. <{POST_SNAPBACK}> I'm pretty sure Sawyer's made it clear that he's not going to be involved with any official expansion effort. As for the "stupid hero plot" thing, it's difficult to make a game in which the, uh, protagonist is not the hero. You can make some anti-heroes, but generally the PC is supposed to defeat the bad guy at the end. Fallout made it possible to submit to the Master, but the "correct" canon ending was destroying him. I haven't seen many games in which the PC is a straight antagonist. I can't think of any off the top of my head. As for Vampire, it's a noir universe, there are no heroes.

I think the intent of the question is rather obvious. "Non-linear RPG like Fallout 2" is obviously meant as "Non-linear RPG that is good", thus, why the **** is anybody even talking about TES? Judging from JE Sawyer's comments, if he had been lead designer from the get-go NWN2 would have been different and more akin to a Fallout style in some ways. I think it's a given that the Obsidian guys want to make a game like Fallout 2. But given the ever-escalating intricacy of game engines and greater costs in time and money required to make such a game, I think it's a long shot that they ever will. Like it or not, straightforward linear games like KOTOR and NWN2 are likely the future.

Sometimes. My high school had a program in which students would get credit for going out and being aides at elementary schools. A lot of college-age teachers in training do one-on-one tutoring and such. I got to work with 4th graders, who were old enough to have a concept of personal space and didn't hug.

I think you're all forgetting what the real draw of Splinter Cell is. QUAAAAAIIIIIIIDDD!!!!

And speaking of Mark Morgan, I've added a whole mess of Fallout songs to the gallery. I can't seem to track down the Vault City theme, so if anybody has it and wants to upload it, that's cool, I'd appreciate it. There are a few songs I didn't put up, so if there's one that somebody needs I can upload it by request.

Uploaded some Aphex Twin stuff. Aphex Twin - Heliosphan Aphex Twin - 25 Aphex Twin - Match Sticks I'd include the songs that Mark Morgan ripped off for the Fallout soundtrack (he couldn't have made it more obvious) but they're too big to upload. Oh well!

I... did something?

Perhaps, but this isn't Bethesda. Bioware has made good games before. This is undeniable. No reason they can't buck a trend or two or three. We could get a Jade Empire or we could get a Baldur's Gate. Without having played the game, I don't see how we could say with absolute certainty that Mass Effect is going to continue Bioware's recent slump (if we consider KOTOR to be of lesser quality than earlier offerings, which I think is safe) We can still be surprised.

Oh no you didn't. No way those are scored using the same criteria.

I would love to see a WW2 themed movie from a japanese or german perspective <{POST_SNAPBACK}> I can't tell if that's sarcasm or not, but if it isn't, Clint Eastwood's about to release a WW2 movie told from the Japanese perspective. If that was your post was nodding towards, then... whatever. The thing about war movies post-Saving Private Ryan (or war itself post-Vietnam) is that "the glory of war" theme has become rather quaint. That's why it's relegated to these schlocky action movies.

Looks like a genre picture to me. Frank Miller's The Scorpion King 2: the 300. Oh yeah. I just wonder if they'll have the balls to show spartan women as they were, no-bull**** militants who trained for battle just like their husbands. Judging from the trailer, the women in the movie seem like the noble feminine-beauty types (the kind of woman a real man would fight for). Kind of a let down. But I realize that this whole Thermopylae thing is a thin pretext for some cinematic professional wrestling + swords. It's to their credit that I haven't seen a "based on a true story" yet.

All flaming aside, this thread is pretty pointless. 99.9% of people here aren't even going to consider going below 8. This is the Obsidian forum, after all. People who come here to disapprove of what the board is about (Obsidian games) by and large are called "trolls". You either like the game, or you don't say anything, or at the very least you have to be willing to kiss Obsidian's ass while you voice your disapproval. You might as well go to the Jimmy Dean boards and make a thread rating the deliciousness of sausage from 1-10.

Well, for one, Splinter Cell isn't an FPS. Its main mode is third person. I wouldn't even call it a shooter, either. It's kind of like Hitman, with more stealth. You go through each mission and complete objectives, and when you complete the objectives you leave. The gameplay is actually pretty similar to Thief, as far as the stealth part of the game goes. As far as the plotlines go, they're not too different from standard Clancy. But it's all about espionage instead of paramilitary stuff. And unlike most Clancy games, there are characters (albeit not very well developed ones) present. I recently played Double Agent, and I thought it was pretty good. There are parts of the game where you can't kill anyone, and you have to remain completely unseen and sneak around. It's also got some semblance of a branching plot, but it's more cosmetic than anything. I also hear the MP is pretty fun.