Aaron Contreras

I see 3dsMax requested more than any other package - I believe it is still the industry standard. You can download a learning/trial version of Maya for free.

The D20 system just isn't going to translate well into a MMORPG.

I enjoyed DNTEL 'Life is Full of Possibilities' more. Same duo. I can't stand Ben Gibbard, though.

No, not at all. Even the more expensive areas - Belltown - are reallyreally cheap compared to somewhere truly expensive. Seattle isn't cheap compared to your average boring-ass nowhere suburb, but it really can't compare to Frisco, New York or SoCal.

A forum dedicated to NWN builders would be far more valuable to you than posting questions here. NWN Community Website

Whoah - Obsidian has/had internships?

Your expectations and goals sound a little unrealistic, especially if you are asking for help with an HTML editor. Take your time, go to college, meet a girl/boy.

Good stuff. Thanks for taking the time to write this up.

- The acting and accents would slip. Maybe the accent thing was on purpose. Too much drag in the first half of the movie. - Adrian Brody's character....eh. Used as one plot device too many. This film really failed for me on three levels: 1. He missed a huge opportunity to draw a direct connection between the Village and organized religion. I appreciate his choice not to do this...but I wanted to see that hammered home so bad it distracted me from the rest of the movie. 2. The big plot twist. Those Elders are a freaky evil psycho cult! What was up with that security guard? Evil continues at the end of the film. Poor kids. They gonna get all inbred. 3. Second big opportunity missed - the experiment of the Village must necessarily fail because evil is not something you can keep out by building a wall. Evil (as personified innocently by the retard) exists *inside* man. I walked into it knowing that Shyamalan would screw me over again...I'm just bummed he didn't scare me more before pissing me off.

QA (no &) testing usually doesn't have much in common with actually playing a game. Even when playtesting you are often focusing on a particular area, class, race or skill inside the game. The job varies from company to company, with some placing more emphasis on checklists and others on playtesting. I really think some internal Obsidian testers who didn't work for Lucasarts would contribute to the project. I say that entirely out of self-interest and ambition. Can you *really* trust 'em? They work for the Man.

I've wanted to do this one for years and years. Big emphasis on replayability - creating a teenager with particular traits and inclinations then seeing what happens when you set them down different paths. Creating a natural football jock (big, strong, common fashion sense, demanding and aggressive blue-collar father) and playing him through *as* a football jock...then playing through the game again and trying to have him fit into another clique. It'd probably be necessary to remove any serious use of sex, drugs and violence...which is a pity, 'cause teenagers constantly deal with those three issues. Maybe a college game would free up the devloper to delve into this stuff?

Postal 3: Coleman Strikes Back. Stiff competition.

Rot3K 9 hurt my feelins'. I *really* liked the ability to just play as an officer, warlord or prefect in seven and eight - I usually don't have the time or interest to micromanage cities as much as Rot3K demands. The difficulty seems far harder as well - I've loaded strong nations with lots of cheap perfect officers and still can't fight off the hundred thousand troops other nations (eg. Cao Cao) throw at you after about an hour of gameplay. The district system doesn't seem to work all that well either..I've had subordinates completely ignore the fact that my main city is under siege. The IF and challenge scenarios are great ideas, and I like the secret character rewards for being a Koei fanboy who has save files from every Dynasty _____ game they've published on the PS2. Some of the hidden officers are little more than time bombs...you let Genghis Khan out of your sight for a second and he'll declare himself ruler and start pillaging. Which makes sense, I guess.

It might satisfy your PvP needs...but don't expect it to satisfy anything else.

I have a love/hate relationship with those sorts of timing meters. In Gladius they seemed to be just as important as actual strategy...and I think I spent too much time nailing perfect attacks. Critical hits lose their appeal (and from a balance sense, their power) when you can pull them off 95% of the time. I think having regular attacks and abilities trigger without a meter would have sped up the gameplay some...save the meter for attacks that use 3+ combo points and make it really hard to get those criticals. It'd set up more of a risk/reward choice for players to make. I'd like to see a sequel to Gladius. Well, I'd like to see more tactical RPG's in general.

1. Yes. As with all gender issues, there are positives and negatives. In the game industry, my experience suggests that the positives *far* outweigh the negatives for women. 2. I also have a long history in text-based games and I don't believe it has helped at all in landing a development gig. As Akari mentioned, it really depends on who is looking at your resume. I would take your text-based experience and the skills you have built up with it and throw that into developing a level or module in a program developers will be more familiar with. I doubt that any prospective employer has bothered to log in to some of the text-based games listed on my resume.

I suppose the picture I painted is pretty bleak, eh? Those sorts of bad experiences are the exception rather than the norm, of course. One last bit of advice - go for a QA department that is tied as closely to development as possible. Working QA for a publisher (Atari/Sierra) won't be as valuable to a would-be developer as working in the same building as the actual team making the game you are testing.

I would stay far, far away from QA if you have a decent career. If you are interested in development, I'd keep the day job and work on mods, maps and writing for the rest of your waking hours. Entry level QA can be very frustrating. Your job is to find bugs - yet you are not allowed to fix what is broken. Your bug reports will invariably be mocked, disregarded or insulted by development - but you are not allowed to even communicate with the developers, let alone critcize their work subjectively. Your own bug reports should folllow a strict pattern and be very clear and precise...but developers and producers will often write up bug reports that are often wrong or incomprehensible. There are reasons for all of the negatives, of course, but the job involves a lot of humility, patience and swallowing of pride.

...what about if you had a main character you didn't like - Tidus from FFX - but were given a wide array of 'toybox' options inspired by Civilization, the Sims, Pokemon and so on? Would one balance out the other? Assume the designers aren't creating a snotty little brat PC to piss you off on purpose - the target market for Tidus was Japanese teenagers, 'course. Also assume that the player controlled aspects of the game are pushed to be as important as possible without breaking the critical path - stuff that really impacts combat or adventure and might just tweak the ending.

I think this would have worked brilliantly with KotOR. You really only have three alignments to support and you could really reward players who stuck 'true' to their alignment. Especially if the ability to change your alignment was severely limited past a certain point - if you were an evil bastard the entire first part of the game, you get one big shot in a dramatic plot moment to redeem yourself and end up 'balanced' if you played your cards right throughout the rest of the game. Far more interesting and dynamic than the redemption story they implemented. This could really even work in a D&D game - you slide towards a good, neutral or evil ending, with the law/chaos axis present in how you go about being a saint or sinner. If Bioware makes games on one end of the spectrum (the Aribeth Conversation Loop) and Square has the other end of the spectrum....I'd like to see more stuff in the middle. Possibly an almost completely scripted critical path mixed with break points that allowed more free-form play. As Mercer mentioned way back, the designers create an appealing, awesome character and a sexy plot...but you get to determine what that character can do...and how they do it. I'm shameless about desiring the best of both worlds.

Word. I thought Final Fantasy X had a far more satisfying story than Knights of the Old Republic. KotOR - in terms of writing talent and quality of the plot outline - should have taken first place. What put FFX on top was the defined characters compared to the generic conversation options of KotOR. As a player I am very sick of: 1. [Nice guy option.] 2. [selfish money-grubbing option.] 3. [i'm so evil option.] 4. [Wacky option.] 5. [Low-intelligence option.] 6. [Critical Path/Cut to the chase option.] Torment managed to include the best of both worlds - the PC had lifetimes of juicy backstory, but that handy amnesia plot device allowed players to determine who exactly he was. Ultimately, I think it really depends on what sort of game you want to develop. Temple of Elemental Evil and Icewind Dale benefitted from having generic conversation options. These games were light on story and tried to push replayability with different party combinations and alignments. KotOR should really have had less generic conversation options - the only real story difference between KotOR characters is what alignment you pick.

I have an entirely different perspective. I am enough of a Lord of the Rings nerd to wince at the major plot departures in the recent film trilogy. Not snarky forum fanboy upset...but it certainly 'watered down' the films for me. In exchange, I've gotten a pretty awesome visual representation of Middle Earth. Hell, the arms and armor book sitting on my coffee table was probably well worth the Arwen subplots alone. There have been a number of LoTR games - some not so great - produced simply because of the wider audience the movies brought to the brand. It is a great time to be a Lord of the Rings fan. There is a new LoTR tabletop RPG out and tons of young people probably are in awe of LoTR as I was in awe of Star Wars. None of this would have been possible without a wider audience - which might just mean Arwen subplots, Faramir almost jacking the Ring and no Tom Bombadil.

Okay, so KoToR was not a failure. Anyone else excited or nervous about games that aren't targeted towards teenage males?

Diablo and Diablo II were both awesome games. Hell, Diablo II popped up on the top ten charts a few months ago - years after it was initially published. Sure you aren't just being snarky and overly subjective? I may not enjoy the latest Zelda, but it is still a damn good game. **Edit: And trust me, I hate Diablo II with the fervent passion only someone who has tested it can have.**

Got just enough time in between school and work to get into a caffeine-fueled rant. The potential audience for video games (PC or console) has expanded wildly in the last decade. I think this motivates the game industry to do two things: create games that target a wider audience and have the gameplay in those titles cater to the casual gamer. You could also say that the industry is pushed towards taking less risks and pumping out more sequels and clones...but I don't think more people playing games is necessarily the cause of this. Higher cost of development, more competition and industry consolidation is probably to blame there. At any rate, I'm pretty excited about a wider audience. My personal pipe dream is to be involved in a story-based title that appeals to a wide audience and has nothing to do with dragons, dungeons or Mr. Spock. A hybrid Sim-RPG that lets you play around as the owner of a small independent music label, semi-educational products that entertain while teaching history or showcase pieces of art. Or, to flip it around, make the nerd stuff cooler: create a cold war scenario in the Forgotten Realms, or use SoCal punk rock and Flemish paintings as the flavor and feel of a fantasy RPG. Some might say that a wider audience is going to dumb games down. Yeah, BG3 and Fallout 3 were cancelled and replaced - in some way - by the Xbox titles. But as Gromnir pointed out on the Planescape license thread, there is no reason you cannot inject great ideas, gameplay and story into a setting that appeals to a wide audience. KoToR sold well initially because of the massive Star Wars brand and the lack of RPG competition on the Xbox...but it has continued to sell well because it is a good game that people enjoy, regardless of the setting or platform. I'm honestly a little surprised that the game industry hasn't adapted faster already. I think there is a lot of money to be made hitting that sweet spot between art and audience appeal.