Spider

Does that really matter though? The Black Hound never had anything to do with the BG saga and would have been BG3 in name only. It could just as well have been released as a stand alone. Edit: Added the quote since there were several posts between mine and the one I was replying to.

A friend relayed to me a rumor that MS has changed their mind and that DX10 will actually be in SP3 as well. I have no idea whether or not that's the case, but it's a possibility at least.

Hrm. See what good all my positive postings about the WoD does me. While my group DOES play fantasy on occasion (Exalted), we play more in other genres. It's you who keep bringing up horrid D&D or Eon campaigns all the time.

I'm guessing it's actually a few hours (maybe a day) she is referring to. Ie, release date being announced as 31st but that actually being the ship date. So with that scale shouldn't Fallout 3 be something more like -10 000?

Although if Atari doesn't go out of business, it's a fair assumption to make that there will be some sort of expansions for NWN2 and that Obsidian will be involved somehow. Although I'm not sure a game as ambitious as Jefferson was could be made as an expansion. But if it's possible it would be awesome.

Basically Fizban from the Dragonlance Chronicles then?

So a class that is apparently cursed with frequent memory loss is also tasked with keeping track of a myriad different ingredients. "I wonder if it was the firefly gizzards in the fireball spell or if it was cinnamon..." Sounds like a disastrous combination to me.

I'm not going to start defending Oblivion's design choices. I may not agree with all of them, but I didn't terribly mind the scalable creatures. It kept the difficulty of the game at an even level and me on my toes (although I did definitely feel my character grow stronger with higher skills and better equipment regardless of the scaling). Others hated it, and that's up to them. I do know that I would have hated to fight droves of goblins that fell to a single chop of my sword when I was level 40. As for the similar caves, I just didn't think it was that bad. There were five different types of dungeons and as far as I can tell not two within each subset were identical. Sure, the architecture was the same, but not the layouts. I didn't think it got old until I started tiring of the actual gameplay (which was some 120 hours in or so). One thing I must object to though is the claim that the cities were identical. The cities looked and felt vastly different from each other. The Imperial City and Bruma, for example, had nothing in common. In fact, this is the only fantasy game I've played where cities have actually felt like cities and not just a gathering of houses. The BGs came close though, I'll give them that. So I ended up defending Oblivion after all. But these are just my experiences with the game. Anyway, the point I was making in the first post wasn't really that Oblivion was a great game (although I did put that in there so I got what I deserved) but that it and NWN2 shouldn't be judged by the same criteria because they are so vastly different games. On topic: While there may be more options present (or not, I really don't know) when it comes to character creation in NWN2 compared to the original, I think Obsidian did themselves a disservice when they moved away from the 2D portraits. If I can have a cool looking portrait to represent my character, then the appearance of the actual avatar doesn't matter as much. But if the avatar is the only physical representation of the character available within the game, I would like to have as much ability to customize it as possible. The lack thereof is by no means a deal breaker for me, it just would have been nice. But I do think keeping the portraits would have kept away a lot of complaints. (at least provided they were of higher quality than the ones in the original NWN, those were really ugly)

The thing here is that Oblivion is a very different style of game from NWN2. I'd even go as far as call it a different genre altogether. It's much more of a sandbox game than an RPG really. It is basically a fantasy version of GTA more than anything else (minus the excessive language and violence). From that perspective, roleplaying options, party members and replayability really doesn't come into it. What matters is gameplay and a sense of exploration. And it does those things well, I think. Which is why it deserved it's high scores. It's not for everyone (hell, I hated the previous TES games), but for those into that type of game, it is fantastic. Just like NWN2 shouldn't be looked at with the same considerations as F.E.A.R., Oblivion shouldn't be looked at in the same way as NWN2. Oh, another thing. As far as replayability is concerned, Oblivion's lack thereof is greatly exaggerated. It certainly isn't any less replayable than say the IWD games (or Diablo). It all depends on how you go about your first playthrough. If you run about, doing all quests, learning all skills you can and clean out every single dungeon, then sure there won't be much reason to play it again. But if you mostly follow the main quest and stick to your class skills, then there is plenty reason to play the game again. A stealthy archer plays much differently compared to a savage fighter or a cunning mage. The thing is you CAN experience all three of these styles during your first romp through the game if you want to, but you certainly don't have to.

The registry cleaner I use (TuneUp Utilities) checks for keys that no longer have software associated with them. So far I haven't had a problem with just letting it remove everything it finds. So it'll probably work for you as well.

I also find it interesting that the original NWN got 8.75 (and 9 in the second comment) while this review says that NWN 2 improves on basically everything except AI and pathfinding, issues that (according to the review) was present in the first game as well. So equal or better at everything = lower score.

Or you can get a registry cleaner/defragger.

Not compatible with 2.0 though. I had this before I upgraded and it's very slick and stylish.

I was using BlackJapan, but since that isn't compatible with 2.0 I switched to Noia 2.0. I also have a Halloween theme installed.

First of all, how the hell did you manage that? I played for some 150 hours and while I did do every quest, there were plenty of caves and ruins I didn't do. Doing them all in 60 hours is definitely impressive. Second, I definitely understand the value of a replayable game. I am definitely one of those who can play the death out of a game if it's fun enough. I've played BG 2 over ten times I think and all IE games at least three times. I've started five different characters in Titan Quest (one of whom has completed legendary and one that is halfway through). So I see the appeal. What made me curious was the statement that a game must be replayable to be worth the money spent on it. The only reason I can see behind such statement is that you get more gameplay for your buck, which roughly translates to more hours. And I feel that if a game has enough content (or if the content is of a certain quality, but since I'm comparing to multiple playthroughs, length is what is mostly relevant here) then it can definitely be worth the money, even if it only brings a single playthrough. I can agree that when it comes to a game like Fallout 3 (trying to at least be a little on topic), replayability becomes much more important. Because in a Fallout game I want choices to matter. Every single one of them. How I develop my character, what dialogue I chose, who I side with, and so on. But if it turns out to be something else it can still be a fun game. Edit: Oh, and FOT was a pretty good game. Except for the robots. Man I really hated fighting robots. And I wasn't a huge fan of how they turned the Brotherhood into a fascist organisation (but they were a splinter cell) but other than that it was pretty fun. I couldn't care less whether or not the deathclaws had hair.

It's a hypothetical question so I can understand Dark Raven's position better. So I am working under the assumption that each playthrough changes the game significantly enough to make it equally fun as the first. It's a gross simplification and it may very well be that no such game exists (although I have seen movies that are better the second time, so why not games?), but that's really beside the point.

It was only an example. Multiply the numbers with two if it makes you feel better. Also, it needs to be assumed that each playthrough of the game is just as much fun as the first one.

So by your reasoning a 10 hour game that you can replay in a satisfactory way 5 times is better than a game that lasts you 60 hours but has limited (let's say none) replayability? The games (and all playthroughs) being identical where the fin factor is concerned.

omegadrivers.net is your friend. They make it possible for laptop users to update to fairly recent ATI drivers. It's modded drivers, but I've never had any problems with them.

Vol, if you had quoted the last sentence it would have been taken drastically out of context. My post was a direct response to DR's post directly ahead of mine. Specifically "Nah must be replayable. I wnt my moneys worth gfrom a product. " And all I was saying is that if you like the type of game Oblivion is, replayability is a non-issue because you will have been able to get more play-time in than you'd get from most games doing five playthroughs. The only thing replayability does is add more hours to your game experience, and if you get enough hours the first time, then it doesn't matter. Note that I'm not trying to say that Oblivion is a great game and that either of you two will like it. You know your tastes better than I do. All I was ever saying is that it's certainly worth the price of admission if you like that type of game.

Note how I said "If you like the game". If you think Oblivion sucks you clearly won't get your money's worth of it, regardless of how replayable or not it is.

Replayability in a game like Oblivion is kind of a moot point though. If you like the game, you'll be playing it enough the first time that you will have gotten your money worth. I think I clocked something like 150 hours, which is more than four playthroughs of KotOR. And there were still stuff to be done if I wanted to (didn't reach maxlevel, didn't clear all dungeons, but I think I did most of the quests except the Bark Brotherhood ones). You complain about a lot of things when it comes to Oblivion, but not getting your money's worth isn't one of them.

I actually thought Stewart was very good in Oblivion. By far the best voice acting in the game. Of course he only had what, ten lines? So it's not like he made that big of an impact.

I have the following add-ons: * Adblock Filterset.G Updater 0.3.0.4 (pre-defined blacklist for Adblock that gets updated every now and then, pretty much never see any ads thanks to it) * Adblock Plus 0.7.2.1 (needs no description, except that the plus version is more actively developed than the normal one) * Allow Right-Click 0.4 * BBCodeXtra 0.2.5.6 (I could probably uninstall this, since I never use it. Adds BBcode options to the context menu to make that faster, but I always type them anyway) * DOM Inspector 1.8.1 * Download Manager Tweak 0.7.1 (download manager in tab instead of window? Yes please!) * Full Screen 0.5 (another extension that I could do without since I never use it, but when I do remember it it's pretty nice) * Html Validator 0.7.9.5 (for webdesign purposes) * IE Tab 1.1.1.4 (In theory this is a great extension, but it almost never works properly for me) * IE View 1.3.1 (which is why I also have this, to quickly open a page in IE) * InfoLister 0.9f (compiled this nice list of add-ons) * Sort Extensions and Themes 3.0.3 * Super DragAndGo 0.2.6 (an extension I can't live without. enables you to drag links to have them open in a new tab. This and Ad-block are the first two I get after a fresh install) * Web Developer 1.0.2 (This extension is the reason I changed to FF, from Netscape, in the first place. Essential for anyone who does anything with webdesign)

Except that there won't be a TES game out for it to compete with. At the time of Fallout 3's release Oblivion will no longer be making any money for Bethesda, but TES 5 probably won't be released.