Pop

Also you guys should totally poach some talent from the HBO shows. From the looks of it they can't catch a ****ing break in Hollywood (see: The stars of The Wire and Rome appearing in Punisher: Warzone) so who knows, they might bite.

As annoyed as I might be by a delay, 3 months is a lot of time. The difference between an AP released in March and an AP released in June could be measured not just in polish but also in actual content delivered.

I know of a few MMORTSes in beta. The problem is that the nature of MMOs make it such that the game moves at a glacial pace, as you grind and grind to get meager bits of experience, and it takes weeks of play to do what you would normally be able to do in half an hour of single-player RTS time.

Oh thank god.

Was he as garishly colored as everything else in that movie?

Bad example (at the 2:25 mark). Better example - Idris Elba, who played Stringer Bell.

No idea. I like to think it dissuades people from posting ridiculous things.

Better they extend it now than in February.

The Metal Gear Solids are done for. Metal Gear will remain to be exploited by Konami. Kojima's right-hand man was supposed to take over MGS a few iterations ago but Kojima just couldn't keep himself out of it. He still might not be able to.

Mebbe. When you turn on google alerts for "alpha protocol" you tend to get either A. regurgitations of the dev diary by blogs (Rorie's doing or natural events?) or B. Reactions to a change in the uTorrent program. Apparently they switched from VOIP to UDP or... something. But the word "protocol" is thrown around a lot and so it gets picked up by the alert system.

Nobody likes Nicole Kidman. Less people like Baz Luhrmann.

I have heard my English compatriots refer to the meat-and-spice based stew as "Chilli". This is not the correct spelling, nor is it an actual word. the word is "chili". Get it right, Britain.

Actually Halo's voice talent I would say is no better or worse than those any other game. Bioware poached Captain Anderson from Halo, after all.

Yeah, it's unfortunate they made the Samarchan ranger a dual-wield specialist. I used her as a crossbowman throughout the game. Couldn't get her to dual-wield without constant nannying.

Breaking News Source Personally if I was going to record dubstep for a game there would be artists I'd go to before BT (as a general rule I think Trance is garbage), but the man's a professional and very slick (he produced "Pop" for N'Sync), so it's understandable. Man can probably work a deadline like nobody's business.

Moira had a decent accent, it was just a terrible VO job.

Right, and that's a good point to consider. Still, for any number of reasons I don't think a shoestring BG3 would be successful. BG2 had the series being described with the word "epic" more often than not. It's been something of a blessing and a curse for Bioware as a company. I seem to remember someone in this thread referencing filmmaking in comparison to making games (did I imagine that?) Making games is not like making movies, at least not making movies as you can now. I'd consider a comparison between the age of the Studio and the current gaming landscape. The internet cuts costs somewhat but we haven't yet seen a gaming equivalent of digital photography, an innovation that both makes starting out in the field easier and lowers day-to-day overhead. In order to make a competent looking and playing game that isn't terribly simple (ie not cat golf) you still need quite an investment of time, money and manpower. I'd argue that the difference between an independent game developer and a major professional game developer is greater than the difference between an independent filmmaker and a major professional filmmaker. Passionate people still find ways to make their games, but it's definitely not something you can just up and do in your backyard. If I'm making a movie independently I can be creative and use what I have on hand and what I can find as tools of my trade. If I'm making a game I have to make everything from scratch, just like EA has to. EA just has more resources. Everybody has the capacity to make a ****ty movie. The vast majority of people lack the capacity to make a ****ty game.

Were it that simple, and that consumers would be satisfied with an old-school BG3 that had roughly the production values of Galactic Civilizations 2. By and large gamers want to have their cake and eat it too.

A few copies, sure. But has been outlined by somebody else here (Grom, I think?) making niche games doesn't make sense when your budgets are the same as mainstream games. People won't pay extra for a good game of a specific type, they'll want to pay regular rates if they'll want to pay at all, so if you're going to go against the grain you have to be prepared for low sales, not hope that you'll tap an untapped market.

If you've never played the original MGS and want to, it's probably easier to play.

Twin Snakes is a lot like Baldur's Gate Tutu in a lot of ways, really. In both cases, elements of respective sequels (for Twin Snakes, it's tranqs and first-person mode, for Tutu, it's class kits) were introduced into the original games. In both cases the additions are initially delightful, but sooner rather than later you discover that the games weren't designed with the additions in mind, and thus they get broken and become much, much, much, much easier. The AI in Twin Snakes is at times hilariously stupid, because your first-person mode allows you line of sight they don't have.

NWN2 has a Mac port, now. Don't know about the expansions.

for frak's sake, am i the only person on this thread who can actually read? he didn't say they would revisit BG or NWN, but "the likes of" BG and NWN. it's a hopelessly vague statement that most reasonable folk would read as an indication that they want to make games like BG and NWN in the future, but not necessarily direct successors to those games and not in the next year. personally, i think it's deeply unlikely that we'll see a BG3 (pointless as it would be) and i have strong doubts about even an NWN3: no developer in their right mind would want to add to the code as bequeathed by NWNs 1&2 and few would want to spend the time to start a new engine afresh. i'm sure we'll see more D&D games from atari and they might even slap an old name on one of them to garner a few more bucks. but before y'all start drinking the kool aid, you might want to re-read what he said, because if you think that's a firm promise to make BG3 or NWN3, i have a bridge on the thames to sell you. Frankly, given what we know about Atari's situation (due to the modest success of Alone in the Dark it's hanging by a thread instead of being completely doomed) I'd sooner believe that use of the term "the likes of" is a grammatical error on the part of the writer than a true conveyance of Atari's intent. If I were running Atari I'd have no problems using whatever Big Names I had at my disposal. Which isn't to say that BG3 would be a continuation of the whole Bhaalspawn thing. It's hard to imagine it would be. They're just going to use the name.

Truth be told I wouldn't mind a BG3 developed by CDProjekt. I've long argued that one of Baldur's Gate biggest weaknesses as a franchise was that not every single one of the female characters was a total, shameless whore. This company has what it takes to take BG to the next level.

True. Nothing says "Baldur's Gate" better than attention seeking, sex starvedpsychologically disturbed female elves.