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Of course no temporal power was established by Alexander's conquest. In that he's just like any other great conquerer, be it Temuchin or the Vikings. Besides, I'm pretty sure he did commit a purge or two. What he did bring was Hellenistic culture. Hell, they have greek architecture in India. If there was one thing (I'm aware it was a confluence of things) just one thing that allowed the greek epics and Aristotle to survive past the death of Greece, it was Alexander's Conquest. Culturally, Alexander left an epic legacy.

I haven't played The Longest Journey, but Rojsberg mentioned his idea being like Half-Life, and I imagined the interesting but rather detached Half-Life opening sequence multiplied in length many times over. That's what I responded to. As much as I liked that Valve had the balls to include a quiet beginning to the game, I recognized that it was all flavoring, a prelude to what the real game was (personally, my favorite parts of Half-Life were the transitional phases, where you had a crowbar and a gun with one clip and you had to figure out what the hell was up). I'm saying that if we're going to make a game with a long, quiet beginning, then we have to do a better job than that of making that part just as relevant as the part with all the fire and action. Maybe The Longest Journey does that, but Half-Life surely doesn't.

Ooh, that's harsh. I'm not fond of that "rawk" mix of the song. He mangles the chorus. The original is much better, he doesn't force it. Okay video, though. Better than the other ones I've seen. Buck 65 was apparently a pretty good baseball player back in the 90s. He had a whole series of songs about baseball. Hey look, there's one now! There's one about shoeshining! There's a weird rapping Johnny Cash impression!

What? Big cutscenes? Sure, they were big, but they didn't particularly unnecessary to me. The cutscenes involving Black Garius were obviously written like a novel that shifts between the first and third person. The player is let in on info so they have an idea of what is going on beyond their character without the character being privy to it. I personally found the BG2 dream sequences to be much more annoying than the NWN2 cutscene dialogue. I can't expect NWN2 to not have a lot of text because I can't expect every RPG to be like KOTOR, with full voice acting for every line. That would add a LOT to the already large game. And I read faster than I listen to voice actors. If I can get subtitles, I will. Most of the time I'll cycle through dialogue pretty quick. Not usually if I've never heard the VA before. As for not being able to leave your computer, the cutscenes provide a pause option, they always have. I don't remember that being a required dialogue. And I'd probably hate an RPG in which all dialogue was strictly functional. NPCs are supposed to be characters, and I'm not sure of a way in which to establish a character without dialogue. I think the point of the Blood War guy was that he was a windbag. He was also explaining the context of the game. I don't know if you noticed, but there are several running themes to PST, and the Blood War is one of them. If I had never played D&D and there wasn't a lot of dialogue, PST would have been intolerably confusing from the outset. Hell, it was pretty confusing even with my broad foundational knowledge of the conventional D&D universe.

HL took about 20 minutes to get to the action. After about 40 minutes, most people are going tell you to get the **** on with it. It implies that you don't know what kind of game you want to make, since in most cases the game would be radically different from the pre-apocalypse to the post-apocalypse. If you're an office drone or a tax auditor or something, you'd just move around the gameworld, soak up the foreshadowing or maybe play mini-games till the world ends and you can pick up a gun and all of a sudden you somehow know how to use it and you're off like Gordon Freeman. Even if you can make a compelling tax-auditing section of the game, it would be irrelevant to the rest of the game, and an irrelevant hour and a half is a bit much, eh? It might work if the character is a beat cop or a detective or a soldier, chasing around criminals and getting into firefights and whatnot, and then BANG the setting changes. But then the first part of the game might seem like a distraction to the meat of the game. A stealth-type game, though, that could be cool. It'd be more compelling if you were a weak character or the setting was hyper-realistic, like a Tom Clancy game or maybe Thief. You wouldn't go running around and shooting things, you're just some regular guy under extraordinary circumstances. You'd have to rely on prudence and stealth to make it out alive. No running and gunning. That's how I'd see that going, anyway.

Moar sole dominion of the "Music We Listen To" folder. I would have thought more people would have partaken. Anyway, I've been forced recently to find "wintery" songs. Black Rebel Motorcycle Club - As Sure as the Sun Editors - Open Your Arms

I sorry, honestly, you lost me here. Can you break down that argument? Not kidding. I'm just missing it. <{POST_SNAPBACK}> Well, "there is no absolute truth to ethics" is an ethical statement (we are describing ethics) and thus we can rephrase that statement accurately as "the absolute truth about ethics is that there is no absolute truth to ethics". We are, in effect, saying that something is both true and false at the same time. How can it be absolutely true that nothing is absolutely true? It's like saying the truth is false. The truth can't be false, it's true. It's a contradiction. That doesn't strike you as a bit odd?

Killing someone in the defense of others or in self-defense isn't murder. <{POST_SNAPBACK}> That's true. But there's no contradiction. Tarna says Which does not presuppose killing in defense. For example, tarna might want to kill a father who beats his children every day such that they are in constant danger of being killed. and Metadigital says which supposes that tarna's intent to kill, regardless of good or bad reasons, is tantamount to support of murder. I was trying to point out that this was not necessarily the case.

If morality is subjective then it doesn't matter, as you're essentially defining the question away - "it's all a matter of perspective." But that's unacceptable. Moral relativism leads to dead-end arguments like "it's just as valid to kill a person as it is to hug him." For a moral system to be legitimate, it must claim to be - at least for the most part - objective. <{POST_SNAPBACK}> Claim to be? I claim to have a Lotus in my driveway, that doesn't make it so. Neither does declaring something unacceptable make it untrue. The only way for morality to have a base is for it to be agreed apon by a group with the ability to enforce it. It's still subjective, however. <{POST_SNAPBACK}> There are plenty of reasons why relativism doesn't work even as a theory, though. The primary reason being that it contradicts itself. "There is no absolute truth to ethics" is itself an absolute statement. In effect, it's saying "there is absolutely no absolute". That's like saying "this statement is false". On a deeper level, though, normative relativism preaches tolerance for other ethical points of view, but it contradicts itself further in that it preaches tolerance for intolerant practices, so long as those intolerant practices are accepted by a society. Of course it is difficult to create an ethic that applies to all people (I don't have one), but it doesn't necessarily follow that an account that could can't exist.

If you're talking about realpolitik, it's a term that is german in origin. Even if it was latin, I don't see how it's being used to win any argument or make anyone look smarter. We should be winning arguments using our reason, not our language. *edit - Ah, n/m. Nevertheless, I'm still a bit confused as to this whole discussion. I'll have to look back on it from the beginning. Gimme a few.

I don't get your definition of realpolitik as a "moral system". If anything, realpolitik requires the lacking of any moral considerations. But I don't really know if acting on what's "right" by our own standards is really an option. If that were the case, we'd be "liberating" North Korea and Iran, and thus putting ourselves at some risk of nuclear attack, which isn't very wise.

I don't know about that. Generally, if you want to illicit terror (and I'm assuming that's what we're looking for with CoC) field of vision needs to be restricted. You shouldn't be able to see what's creeping up behind you, you should feel like you're trapped. If an isometric perspective does anything, it's give the player visual room to breathe. I don't think System Shock would be nearly as effective if the PC could see 360 degrees around him. So I'd endorse either a tight over-the-shoulder view ala Resident Evil 4 (a kinda-Lovecraftian game as it is) or a first person view, and that's been done before.

You know, I've always had ideas milling about in my mind, regarding D&D FR RPGs, since that's the kind of game I favor. Here's one of my ideas, and it's a long one. One of my ideas was to take some relatively unimportant region of the FR (ie any region beyond the Sword Coast), one that is usually in a bad way politically / economically. Mulhorand, Unther, The Vilhon Reach, maybe even Thay. Then you set up a 1930s Germany situation, in which an evil and oppressive nationalist regime comes to power, but revitalizes the country and makes it considerable in a way in which it hasn't been before (at least in recent memory). The game would start off during this gov'ts rise to power, during which time the PC is completely removed from the situation, but hears of it, maybe they make it seem inconsequential at first, and over time becomes involved in it somehow. Maybe you use the old RPG standby, and the agents of the fascistic regime (they're everywhere, you know) destroy the PC's home village. Maybe we rip off BG and put someone close to the PC in the malevolent sights of said regime, and they get eliminated. Somehow, the PC becomes aware of this threat. The Harpers or some other agency recruits the PCs to work against the regime. Nobody (the Lords Alliance or whoever) really takes it seriously, but the PCs see it for what it is. The PCs enter the country, get to the heart of it all, see all this power that the regime has accumulated but at the same time sees that the once rundown nation has been elevated to some perverse kind of glory, at terrible human cost, and while some people recognize that the regime's evil, many more can only see the real promise of security and national identity from them. While the PC is in the country, it starts to act on expansionist ambitions, and other complacent nations are spurred to action. It then becomes incumbent upon the PCs to stop the regime while it is focused elsewhere. The PCs are then supposed to kill the leader of this Third Reich-esque gov't. But the thing is that while this guy is power-mad, he's also a "patriot" (obviously, the evil of the regime is supposed to outweigh this consideration) and he's just a savvy politician, not a formidable fighter or wizard. He didn't have any demonic or supernatural backing, just the backing of a battered & desperate populace. Getting to him is the hard part, but killing him is cake. It would end in a kind of pyrrhic victory. The dictator dies, but the invading armies from neighboring countries come in and bring the country to a level of ruin beyond even what it had subject to before. Perhaps even with the threat of genocide and tyranny averted from the country, the PCs are powerless to prevent the massive bloodshed in the wake of their victory. Maybe if they're evil, they partake in or lead it. I always thought something like that would be good for the relatively black & white D&D universe. Maybe that's just a ****ty idea and I don't know it. I'll probably get some people together and play through part of it in pen & paper sometime, though. That's the advantage of things like this. I've also considered, given some of the FR's parrallels to the medieval real world, and given the presence of a "Bedouin" culture in the Anauroch, one that mirrors arab tribal culture pre-Islam, that some kind of Mohammad figure could arise and create a Bedouin empire, and the Byzantine-Islamic struggles of history could be reimagined, but religious history seems to be unemulated in D&D, and that would never be put in a game, ever, as it is. *edit - Added bold emphasis to the word long. Because this post is ****in' long, even by my standards.

I had 24 bags, found randomly so it seems, it looks like its about your luck...I would have liked more magic weapons or armors instead, but no, i only got bags...and we all know what happens if you try to put a bag into an other bag <_< <{POST_SNAPBACK}> THICK BAGS.

Honestly, I can see why the Bhaalspawn Saga is equated with the Baldur's Gate series. But even if that particular story is told, it seems obvious to me that while the many D&D franchise games share a setting, they don't share a universe, meaning that what happens in one doesn't happen in another, despite that shared setting. Reference is anecdotal at best. I like the Baldur's Gate setting. I like the NPCs, I liked the relatively complex villains (the weakest BG villain was head & shoulders above the mechanical KoS) I liked how it was willing to depart from standard fantasy convention, in many ways. NWN is also D&D, but in all aspects it is stupidly simple next to BG. I have yet to hear a single good argument for the retirement of that setting, since I recognize the dichotomy between the setting and the story that takes place in it. Why can't another story be told from that same setting? If you want, make the other games' stories irrelevant to the sequel, I'm fine with that. I want a game that's made in the spirit of its predecessors, not necessarily in the letter. We're not going to get that kind of depth out of any other D&D franchise. What I'm saying is, BG3 might very well suck, all sequels have the capacity to suck despite their pedigree. But BG is undeniably more fertile soil than IWD or NWN or the ****in' Elder Scrolls. Hell, NWN2, for all its merits, had to be good in spite of a lackluster predecessor. Indeed, it distanced itself as much as possible from its predecessor, it didn't have the advantage of a fleshed out, proven precedent to rely on. It wasn't a great game that came out of a great game. That wouldn't be the case with BG3. We're throwing away potential if we take a conservative, one-story-per-universe approach. There's no reason it can't still be vitalic.

Have you not seen / used the magic bags? There aren't that many of them (going through 2/3 of the game I have 2 bags, a -40% and a -60%) but with the 1.03 patch they can hold something like 143 items each, and stacked items will count as single items. I give Sand the -40% one and he stock all scrolls, gems and reagents he needs in it. I think he's saying that he's aware of that, but general responsiveness is an issue. And he's right. Personally I'd really, really like to see some big changes to the AI, spellcasting and pathfinding and whatnot. I wouldn't be averse to IE-style scripts instead of Fallout-style universal AI settings that don't seem to have a huge impact one way or the other. I'm not holding out a hell of a lot of hope, though.

nah, being "ethical" means that we'd be in a soup kitchen helping the homeless or something. <{POST_SNAPBACK}> Tell that to Ayn Rand Ethical does not necessarily equal altruistic, at least not all the time. Being "ethical" only means that you do what you think ought be done. But you're right in that this seems to be an exercise without much point. Supposing that we come up with a definitive answer to the question posed, we haven't really gotten anywhere. I'm assuming that there's some intent behind the question that isn't being stated, and I'll roll the dice and say that it has something to do with the Bush administration. The fact that this thread is pointless is because it's not applied ethics. "Can a government grant me liberty" is theoretical thics. "Can we execute prisoners of war" is applied ethics. If you want to foster debate, use the latter and not the former.

Uh, well, it depends on where you're coming from. The idea of liberty is one that originates in Social Contract theory. But the conception of liberty is different from Hobbes to Locke, the two ethicists who thought up the theory. According to Hobbes, everyone has a natural right to do whatever they want, but a government's responsibility is to revoke some rights (like the right to murder, or the right to lie) in order to create greater security for everyone under the contract of citizenship. Locke subscribes to the opposite view, that a government's responsibility is to ensure that its citizens have a right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of property, in those words which the American founding fathers poached. It's not that simple, of course, the accounts are wildly different when it comes to their view of basic human nature and the ideal form a government should take, it just so happens that they both subscribe to a "contract" by which multiple people can coexist without compromising their basic rights. But Lockean theory is the preeminent of the two, it's the theory from which Western political ideology flows, as it is concieved in the "representative democracy", and it's the the theory from which this idea of "liberty" and rights comes from. Locke would argue that a government can't take liberty from you, that a government only has power over you if you agree to let it (in other words, if you sign the social contract) If a government restricts your freedom in a way that does not suit you, then it is your obligation to rebel against it. Some might say there are no natural rights that people have by default, or that no one's rights should not trump another's right not to be harmed (the two inevitably come into conflict at some point). I don't know if that answers the question.

eh? If you're using Firefox (I have no idea why you wouldn't) and you have a mousewheel, pressing control and rolling the mousewheel back increases the text size of a site. Might screw with site format, though. As for 2.X, I used to be a believer. It was more archaic, less balanced, had more cred, was more "tru". But 3.X just makes more sense from the standpoint of game mechanics. The edition of a game doesn't obviously inform the quality of the storytelling, it just so happens that the 3.X games have paled in comparison to the better 2.X games. 2.X really works better in IE games, though. THAC0 fit the engine like a glove. I found IWD2 to be awkward in comparison to even something inferior like NWN.

How to not get your ass kicked by the police.

I was pretty interested on the setting they first mentioned, an abandoned complex used by Nazis during World War II. While the setting isn't new to shooters or shooteresque games, the thought of all the Nazi horrors being given new life had me more on edge than sci-fi or even System Shock 3. <{POST_SNAPBACK}> So you... don't like the setting now? The plot still seems to have plenty of nazi-licious potential. All that eugenics....

Jefferson was scrapped, along with Van Buren (Fallout 3) when Interplay dissolved Black Isle. The Jefferson incarnation of BG3 is dead dead dead dead dead. Van Buren lives on in my PnP games. Kind of. Neither of the franchises are necessarily dead, though. It took 8 years for Metal Gear to become Metal Gear Solid. Feargus might be overly optimistic with his hope-fostering for a BG3, but he might not be. I doubt he'd clarify for us. Fallout 3 is now a Bethesda property in pre-production. But to most fans, both franchises are effectively dead. Disagreement arises over whether they would be worth resurrection. I say yes, others say no. Be prepared to hear all kinds of "BG has run its course" statements, if the board decides to respond to you in numbers.

I'm with Gorth on this one. Bloodboil took 1/10 to 1/5 of boss life in my games. It was more cost effective to use a gun. That's saying something about how effective the powers are. The best way to take bosses seemed to be buff powers and a good melee weapon.

No, I agree with your conclusions, and your arguments from liberty. But your argument from efficacy is ****. I've tried my best to outline this, but your unwillingness to renege on faulty arguments because you've got other, better ones speaks ill of either my ability to communicate the problem (and I've tried to remedy that many times over in different posts) or your ability to understand / handle it.

How many lives is a nation worth? How much does honor weigh? What can change the nature of a man? These are the eternal questions.