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I had Qara buff up my PC before the battle and then used Word of Changing right after talking to LoH. Her Knockdowns simply bounced of my Horned Devil's 32 STR and the 5hp/round regeneration pretty much negated any damage she managed to do. Still, it took me a long time time to defeat her because she seemed to have several uses of Lay on Hands for some reason and thus kept healing herself to full health over and over again. <{POST_SNAPBACK}> So the horned devil deal works? When I tried that spell with Ammon Jerro, it didn't work terribly well for him. I was thinking of investing in the negative energy eldritch blast that drains levels, but it wouldn't work against undead, and LoH might have immunity.

I thought he was saying that NWN2 crashes during the Reaver fight "the program of Nwn2 is shutdown by force." But... yeah. I think you might have the answer there.

If they're bitching about it on the bioboards, they've made up their minds. Josh would only be stirring the pot. He might persuade a few people, but he'll piss off more. So what's the use? Just let him answer haters with his craft. Besides, you might as well keep him here, where he gets his internets

AT LEAST! Someone gives a logical answer on these boards! What's wrong with you guys? Just by reading your posts, I notice that most of you are pro-deathpenalty and such... You are no better than this guy, ya know... Tchh, I am happy to live in Europe <{POST_SNAPBACK}> Why should we give this guy the same consideration that we would give somebody who doesn't kill children?

I don't hate love in game stories; I just hate reducing love to shallow, masturbatory fantasy indulgence. Maybe that's all love is to some people, but I think that's a pretty narrow view. Ego-stroking is very popular in CRPGs, which is one reason I don't feel comfortable doing CRPG writing anymore. I appreciate that people wanted more romance options in NWN2, but sometimes I think that people want there to be romance "victory" conditions for all companions. I think that can diminish some characters. For instance, if Shandra and Qara had their own romance plots, I think some people would still want Neeshka to be "romance-able", regardless of how Neeshka's author felt about the character's place in the story. That bugs me. I don't like the idea that you can "win" everything or get everyone on your side. I'm also not fond of the idea that romance always has to resolve with a "fade out" to implied coitus, but that's another issue. I'll re-state what I wrote before: I want romance to receive either less or more attention in games. Anything worth doing is worth doing well, especially when it's something with so much emotional potential. But I certainly don't want to go the route of harem anime, which is total fantasy indulgence and gross pandering. <{POST_SNAPBACK}> I hope you realize I wasn't being serious and I agree with you. Romance quests have been pretty lackluster when it comes to recent RPGs. And romance would be the last thing I'd want or expect from an Alien game. It'd be a bad idea, especially with all the movie love interests dying. But if I had to choose, I'd put more of an emphasis on romances in RPGs. I realize how often it devolves into fan service, but that aspect of a game really helps deepen it, if it's done right. The easiest and best way to give depth to a character that spends 90% of his / her time getting into fights is to have him / her show affection for another character. It doesn't always work, but when it does, it does. *edit - I liked the part where you hit that blind guy with a wooden board :cool:

Yeah, I like video games too, and I don't want to see them censured out of this, but really, that's at the bottom of the list as far as concerns that arise out of this incident are.

Just patched up from the beta (finally) and I'm having some problems I didn't have before. For some reason, enchanting isn't working (it won't recognize the base weapon / armor to be enchanted when it's put on the bench) and the ore deposit found at the Sydney Natale encounter isn't registering as mined, even though I found it (got the xp for it, too) and sent the miners after it. Question: I'm playing a warlock, and I've liked it up to this point. But I'm getting my ass handed to me by Light of Heavens I don't know if I can take her on twice more. edit - added spoiler tag

I don't know. BG2 had 3 possible romance options with a male character, which seemed fine to me (never really dug Nalia as a character much anyhow) and the female options were sorely lacking in comparison not only in choice (a romance with Yoshimo or maybe Haer'dalis would have been nice, and maybe a romance with Keldorn could have had some Viconia-esque character consequences) but in the fact that the female option was Anomen, who was possibly the most annoying character in the game, even if you didn't like Aerie's naivete act. KOTOR2 continued that tradition, as I generally liked both the Handmaiden and Visas, but the less said about Disciple, the better. I'd chalk up NWN2's restrictive romance options just to a tight CNPC pool. As bland as Casavir is, he's pretty much the only viable female romance option out of any of the male characters, what with the warlock being geriatric and the ranger being a creepy **** and the dwarf being... a dwarf. As for Elanee, who else? Qara? Neeshka? A gith? No thank you. Please, please, no. It's my opinion that what's really required for a good romance is good writing, characters with some semblance of depth and enough gametime to flesh out the process of, uh, RPG courtship in a way that doesn't feel forced or contrite. BG2 had all those things. At least in its current incarnation NWN2 had those things, but didn't focus on the romance aspect much at all. For all we know, if an expansion is released that continues the shard-bearer's story, they might flesh out the romance a bit more, but it'll be hard.

I wonder if they'll go for a romance in the Alien game, if Josh Sawyer is such a -hating scrooge?

Oh yes. One of my favorite shooters of all time. That and the original Unreal. Have you played the expansion pack as well? I finished that a while ago and it's pretty good as well. Not quite as good (the story elements don't quite hold up, but the gameplay is just as fun) but still loads of fun. <{POST_SNAPBACK}> Nope, no expansion yet. I've heard it reaaaaaaaally messes up the story.. I mean obliterates it... any truth to that? :ph34r: <{POST_SNAPBACK}> God, I hope so.

Yeah, we had some difficulty at first getting used to the cover system, but we got the game at 6 PM and my friend left at 11 PM, having completed the game. Now that I finally figured out how to install the BGtutu modifications, I'm starting a game as a sorcerer. I'm still psyched about BG1 and BG2+ToB becoming, in a sense, just one long BG.

Wow, it took I and my friend that amount of time to get through the whole game. What difficulty level are you playing on?

Turn that frown upside down.

As for eliminating text from games, I think it'd just be a better idea to have toggled subtitles, if not just to accomodate the deaf. That seems like a good enough reason to include subtitles with anything.

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?