Starwars

Except that the group is still around, and with plenty of people in it, and with work being done on the mod. Don't get me wrong, the project was way bloated and suffered from enormous scope creep during Monty's lead, and after he left for OEI (making most of the rest of the team scatter) the mod was grossly mismanaged when (in my humble opinion) they should've pushed towards a quick release instead of aiming for a superlarge mod. But yep, believe it or not, they are still active on the mod. Again, if I had been in the charge of the project, I would've opted for cutting stuff at this point instead of adding. But it's alive unlike the Team gizka one where there was afaik only one modder left and he hadn't done any work on the project in several months. And what the current has done well is that they haven't as far as I know set any release dates for a full release, unlike the old team which set several release dates when the mod wasn't even remotely close to being finished. What's with the insults though? We all know that most or many modders *are* amateurs and haven't worked in the gaming industry and they do this stuff in their free time. Perhaps they are fools for undertaking such a huge project, but better to encourage them and giving constructive criticism since there's the possibility of getting good and free content. And modules. Fairly newly release Live Forever was really nice and interesting (though rather linear). I'm beta-testing a really nice little mod called Trinity at the moment which has some really nice choices in it and I would recommend people play that when it comes out (shouldn't be too long).

I haven't had any problems running it either, but yep, some people are definitely having crashes. Anyways, fun stuff. The demo starts off an an easy note but gets a lot harder as it goes on. Combat success has a lot to do with the luck of the roll here but as the player you can heavily influence the chance of success your way if you play smart. Opponents are set up very differently, so depending on your own build, you may have a harder time with an earlier opponent than a later opponent. The fight with the three Barbari took me quite a few tries to get through. I'm using a Strength heavy, sword and shield type of build so far. I'm using fairly heavy armor and a fairly heavy shield. No helmet though as I want to keep my attack chance to hit fairly high. First time I tried to mix it up by raising Dodge even though I was a heavy armor fighter. Quickly dropped that and decided to solely go with Block instead and it worked much better. Quite surprised as I've found myself using all the combat options fairly extensively. Normal attack and Fast attack are kinda the "staple" attacks, with Fast attack useful against lightly armored opponents. Power Attack seems to be useful versus more heavily armed people. The Whirlwind attack (which I think is only available to certain types of weapons) is a bit of a desperation attack or maybe if you have several opponents that are all heavily injured. For the aimed attacks, aiming vs the head appears to be deadly but really hard to hit. Aiming vs the arm is very useful in some fights since a successful hit disarms the opponent thus costing him AP to re-equip his weapon. Haven't used aim vs Torso yet but looking at the combat demo guide it appears that it could be quite useful (has a chance of lowering the DR of the opponents armor). Also haven't used aim vs the legs but I can see it being very useful if your character uses ranged weapons. It's pretty dynamic for being a turnbased solo game.

God Jul. It's now evening here in Sweden and I feel like I'm about to explode. Too much food and too much drink. And I got even more drink in Christmas presents.

You can control immigration if you build and staff an immigration office. But yeah, housing is generally very hard, if not impossible, to be keep perfect. Also, I recommend Tropico 3 if you like the first game. It's a really fun upgrade of the game, though a bit easy.

Yeah, I do get that much of it will be "rock paper scissors" in that certain things are very useful against other things (which is fine by me). But what I mean is that there appears to be good uses for all the equipment in the game. I found the various reports on the combat beta very interesting, and it was really exciting to see how people tried out really different builds. I like that the combat builds really appear to have different feels to them. But I'm sure many, many people will be frustrated as hell with the demo judging from some of the beta comments.

I agree here. While I think I'll spend much time with this demo, I think (even if there are disclaimers all over the damn thing) people will form the wrong opinion of how the final game will be. May be wrong though. What Jora said. Still, what intrigues me (otherwise I honestly wouldn't be that interested in this demo) is that they seem to have spent a great deal of effort on making different weapons effective instead of one particular one being the win button, as is often the case with these types of games. And I don't know if we'll be able to hit people in the groin but I do look forward to being able to toss spears, that should be cool.

Let the bitchin' about grafix begin anew!

Replaying the NWN2 mod called Asphyxia. A small fishing village in Icewind Dale:

Where's the second screenshot (with the statues) taken?

Nice view of the skellies there, hehe.

We need a teaser trailer over here.

Hehe, that is awesome.

Bugs typically don't bother me too much unless it is crashing issues. This makes me not particularly fond of Bethesda as I have had pretty severe crashing problems with both Oblivion and Fallout 3, though probably more in Fallout 3. I hope OEI can figure out whatever causes that before they release New Vegas because it is extremely annoying. I do hope New Vegas can at least be shown off a bit fairly soon.

Yeah, I have no idea what I was typing there. I think the main complaint I was trying to get through in that particular quote was the difficulty level of escaping the vault. Where you, as a 19 year old kid, easily dispact the Vault security and runs away. While Fallout 3 isn't an extremely hard game, it still clashes with the rest of the game I think. This is obviously due to it being the tutorial area, but the tutorial is still the start of the story in Fallout 3. I mean, you can punch your way through basically even if you haven't put anything into Unarmed. It sets a weird tone for the story's plausability right from the beginning. But you are right in that I don't mind tutorials that are a seperate entity and not vital to the story (I know, I basically said the opposite in your quote ). But I do mind when the tutorial is integrated into the story/the game overall, and in *that* situation is a very seperate entity in terms of gameplay and feel. But yeah, I'm not a fan of the tutorial in general. I guess it can't be avoided these days but I much prefer it when you have the information in the paper manual, in a pdf manual and, best of all, available in-game somewhere where you can quickly check up info if you need it. I find it extremely annoying to go through the "press left mouse button to fire your weapon" stuff. I've played games for quite a while now thank you, they are generally not hard to figure out. If new players need to go through it then I'm sure there must be good ways to present the information to them without slowing down the experience for everyone else.

I wish I had that fog in my apartment. Would help cover up the mess a bit.

Good stuff.

I think I actually prefer the NWN2 way of doing it, even if it is indeed rather "fiddly". It could've been better presented probably, with a better overview of everything. I can see that Fallout 3 tried to improve the system of creating a character but I just don't think it works well, and I didn't think it would before the game was released either (when it was revealed that the tutorial *is* the character creation). I mean, gaining familiarity with the vault is a good idea, but I just have such a hard time going through the "OK... now carefully push the W button to move forward. CONGRATULATIONS!" stuff. I think the NWN2 tutorial was well-done because it presented the player with the option to play it fully, play it without the tutorial pop-ups or skip it all-together. While the tutorial itself wasn't the epitome of fun gameplay and/or story, I really wish more games would use that basic "setup" so to speak. But ultimately, I prefer it when the game really starts right away. Give me a well-presented character sheet to fill out at the beginning, and send me on my way. While it's not a RPG (nor does it have a character sheet), it was so nice in STALKER in that the game just sends you away on the first mission right away with a few brief, easily ignorable, floaty text pop-ups on controls. And that mission could very well kill you. Same when you replay something like Fallout 1. Sure, I guess the rat caves could somehow count as a tutorial area, but the transition from starting a new character to that character entering the gameworld in full effect is very quick overall. I never liked this notion of the tutorial sorta being seperate from the rest of the game, and it being super easy (which is the case for most tutorials). Like in Fallout 3 where you murder a bunch of guards *really* easily when you escape. It just starts the game off on a weird note. I do agree with Josh on how to design the attributes and all that though. Asking stuff like "What is this gameworld? What should the player be able to do in it? What is the lore? How technically advanced is it?" is an excellent start when designing the character system.

Yeah, and the screenies are prolly a couple of years old now as well I'd guess.

Still so disappointed that this was cancelled. Could've been a really interesting RPG, bleh. Anyways, shots don't look amazing from a technical standpoint but the lighting is really nice. That and the architecture are definitely evocative of the movies.

OEI: Start up your PR engines please. I'm ready to see more now!

I think Dead Space was okay, but it wasn't scary in the slightest which really hurt the experience overall. One of those games that just made me wish I was playing System Shock 2 instead. Some of the environments are extremely well done though. Also, did anyone think that this game had some of the most annoying monster noises ever? God I hated that gurgling noise the first enemy types did.

I've wondered sometimes if Mitsoda (and later Annie Carlson) left OEI because they were maybe unhappy with the changes and rewrites to Alpha Protocol, and the many mentions of them in interviews is Avellone and co being diplomatic. Complete and pure speculation of course, but hey, it's the internetz.

Just in case anyone missed it, Chris Avellone put up a blog post that talks a bit about Alpha Protocols production cycle. Pretty interesting: http://forums.obsidian.net/index.php?autom...p;blogid=1&

I didn't find the DA love scene (well, I only did one so far) that weird to look at though they still seem a bit out of place. The screenshots are always kinda hilarious though. Anyways, I finished up Storm of Zehir and then I've looked through some of the many cool area prefabs for NWN2. Those Yuan-Ti sure have good interior designers. As a sidenote, I love that you can sneak through this entire place and get the recognition for it: Mwahahaha: Screenshot from the prefab called 'The Ascended City': And another one:

Skullcrusher and Ribsmasher having a conversation: Oh god... It's... It's him!: Some more Dragon slaying: Peeking into the Sensory Stone after helping out the Genasi Sensate: