Starwars

It's worth noting that the intervie was conducted about a week BEFORE SoZ was released. So the sales and the mixed reception had not been taken into account for their comments. Still, they certainly seemed positive to the idea which is great. I'd love to see another one.

Finished up Torment the other day. Curst->Fortress (after the lame shadow part) is suck, but the ending is just amazing. It's to bad the quality sorta falters from Curst and onwards but luckily the ending stuff is all worth it. What also amazes me about Torment is despite that its so storyheavy, there's a lot of little threads and content which one can miss fairly easy. It's a sort of explorative challenge in this storyheavy game. It's quite awesome. Anyways, moving on to other well-written games, Vampire: Bloodlines is up next. Not sure what character to go for this time, might try a Tremere since I've never played very far with one.

John Doan - Yeats Country Where William Lies

You don't have to care, I'm just pointing out that you are dead wrong. It's especially amusing that you're saying that no roleplaying mattered and then directly saying that you didn't play it through more than once. Bravo!

This is simply false. There is a lot more reactivity in MotB than there is in Mass Effect, and the roleplaying most definetely matters. In fact, its choices and consequences are one of the most celebrated aspects of the game. Just look at the different endings and the variations regarding how you treat the curse, what happens to your companions etc. There are a lot of permutations there, especially considering it's an expansion.

Still playing Planescape: Torment. Made it to Curst, now to make it through the most boring part of the game to get to the excellent ending. Started up Hinterland again which I'm playing a bit on the side.

I think the ending slides is often the best way of showing such things, mostly because it often feels awkward to return to a place that has changed greatly because of your actions and not being able to do anything meaningful about it (if it's negative I mean). A good example of this is the famed Tenpenny quest in Fallout 3. Sure you can kill the bastards after the quest has ended, but that only leaves Tenpenny Tower oddly barren for the rest of the game. Sticking it in an ending slide would've worked better I think. I'm still not sure how to treat the ending in my mod. I find it pretty hard to wrap up the stories and such, but I think it'll come as I expand more upon them. What UI is that in your screenshot Tigranes? Your area looks pretty nice I think. It showcases another thing which I find hard personally, and that is getting "hilly" terrain right. And I hate laying out the walkmesh.

Which seems to be a problem especially in party based RPGs nowadays. They seem to be balanced towards playing them with the AI controlling the partymembers and as soon as you do some micromanaging, all challenge flies out the window. Same thing with NWN2 (except for certain fights). I'm very skeptical about this game based on Biowares previous games. We shall see though.

That's an unfortunately mostly forgotten game.

Gave IWD a try but it didn't grip me. Gonna give it a go again at a later date when I get the urge to play something very partybased again. Started up Planescape: Torment with Qwinns new releases, as well as the resolution + interface fixage mods. The game looks incredible at 1280x1024. Many people have problems replaying Torment, which I can understand given that a replay is likely to be quite samey. But for me, the game never fails to pull me in. It's awesome.

Kate Power - Wild Wind Beautiful music.

Agreed. Though there are a few floating placeables in SoZ, but they're limited to a few boxes, some planks and dead bodies if I remember correctly (maybe the dead bodies were in MotB). Single greatest placeable in SoZ? FLYING SEAGULLS! If they ever do more expansions, I'd loveto see more stuff like that. Animated placeables really help bring the areas to life. Also loved that butterfly placeable effect in MotB.

The main problem I have is that I just become "blind" to what I'm doing after a while, this is especially true of texturing. Where I look on it and say "does this look good or does it look like crap?". Another good tip in the area creation is something I heard from a guy in the NWN2 irc channel. If you don't want to rely on grass to much (and let's face it, it's generally pretty ugly in NWN2), a great way to have the ground look overgrown is taking an appropiate tree, scale it down and placing it so that just the very top of it peaks through the ground. This way your options on bush and plant life are increased significantly and it actually looks really nice. I'm also starting to look into custom content on the Vault. The Robinson Workshop (RWS) stuff is all excellent and greatly expands the interior tilesets. I think I'll definetely want to make use of that. Their Ship Interior will go into the beginning of the mod for sure. I'm also intrigued to see the custom content for Purgatorio. I imagine there will be some more industrial/steam punkish stuff, which would fit my setting also. I kinda wanted to make it in the very early throes of industrialization, but that will have to depend on how much of it is in Purgatorio. Their soundtrack is freakin' excellent though and I think I might make use of some of that music.

My money's on NWN3 or BG3.

Another important thing for your overall look in an area are the lighting settings. What I usually do is snag some lighting setting I like from a module or the main campaigns and then (if I need to) tweak it to my needs. As I recall, H&C had nice and misty lighting... Nice for a sort of "up in the hilly mountains" atmosphere as well giving the sense of late autumn or early spring. Our friend Jaesun also uploaded a lighting pack to the NWVault with lighting settings from many areas in the OC and MotB which is nice. MotB had some really awesome areas to look at. Mulsantir and Mulsantir Gates are my favourites. The Wells of Lurue was also gorgeous. I'm nowhere near the skill level though. Texturing is the hardest part I feel. EDIT: A nice approach is to use the Colour option generously, to paint upon your textures to give just a bit more... I don't know... Variety? I also paint just a bit of black under any bigger placeables since I find it "connects" them to the ground a bit more. It's also useful if you're in a large forest or whatever where you can really darken the ground. Then you can turn some shadows off on the trees to keep PCs from melting.

Sounds like an interesting idea that I'd gladly play. If you want inspiration for nice and natural looking environments, check out the areas in the Harp & Crysanthemum mod. I find they contain a simplistic natural beauty. And they present a nice scale to the gameworld. Are you planning on an Overland Map (could be cool for such a mod)?

STALKER Clear Sky: Didn't quite live up to the original for me but was nevertheless a really cool and unique (if somewhat flawed) game. The Witcher Enhanced Edition: Won't be on any top RPG list of mine but it was good for a playthrough. Most enhancements smoothed out the bumps the game had a bit but smoothing out can only go so far. Storm of Zehir: Fun and different direction for Obsidian. Fun to replay. Probably my favourite release of 2008. Hinterland: Good to kill a few hours. There's not a single game I'm really looking forward to in 2009. If Age of Decadence gets released, then that'd be it. I'm interested in Alpha Protocol but not sure if I'll enjoy the gameplay much. Nothing revealed about Alien so far. Dragon Age sounded great to me when they just talked about the project, once we started seeing trailers and gameplay footage my interest for the game dropped like a stone.

I also don't find the NWN2 toolset particularly bad when just comparing it to the NWN1 one, though building a mod definetely takes more time, particularly with the area creation. But I bet you could design a mod with the same visual appeal as NWN1 in a very short amount of time in NWN2 as well. The story is fairly heavily integrated into the setting. In the setting, Gods and Men are quite equal. Actually, the Gods are very dependant on humans. The Gods are supernatural and powerful but heavily outnumbered by humans. They also need contact with humans to function. So Gods often take up a role as a protector of settlements or provider of certain services (like helping crops grow or whatever the case may be). Somewhere along the line of the history of the setting, there was a huge war where humans "used" the Gods in warfare, thus destroying much of the world. The adventure will take place quite a while after this happened. Basically the really big settlements and cities have since rejected the services of the Gods and chosen to take care of themselves instead, forcing the Gods to the outskirts of civilization. The humans in the Godless cities have fared well, crimerates and so on are fairly low, humans are generally quite well off though they are also quite conservative there. In the outskirts, things are different. Poor villagefolk have to rely on the Gods and vice versa. The story hook is really simple. The player comes from a Godless city where a series of shocking murders have took place recently. Suspects are a certain group of people (haven't worked out the details yet, may be a sect of some kind) from the outskirts and a reward is offered to find out more. The player (for whatever reason) have taken this opportunity to have some adventure. The mod will start on a ship that is sailing to the small outskirts town of Sea Kings Port. The first big quest will involve this village and its particular God. It will then move to some city adventuring in a big city called Veil, which basically sits on the border of the outskirts and the... Well, I haven't come up with a good name yet, but basically the land outside is unexplored and a source of much horror to the people living within "civilization" so to speak. Veil will be a city with a thick atmosphere, where people from civilization and the "lands beyond" can safely meet. Not sure exactly how it will look thematically but there will definetely a middle-eastern influence with bazaars and what have you. The mod will be very low on combat (I might try and make it so a diplomatic approach is possible throughout the entire thing) and I will most likely recommend playing the not-so-supernatural classes as I plan on making magic *very* rare. In fact, I might try to make it just for the Rogue to make balancing better but we'll see. Choices are key, the player will always have good choices on how to handle things. Depending on the players actions, they might get a companion to join them (there are two available, mutually exclusive). They are not really your run-of-the-mill companions though, I don't plan on making a lot of banter. What I might do though is have the Party Conversation from SoZ available, and provide special options for these characters where it might fit in. Depending on how building goes, I might also have a small-ish Overland Map for the area between Sea Kings Port and Veil. The mod will mostly be about the players encounter with this (to them) unknown world and how he will impact it. It will not be designed to provide a tearjerking story, though hopefully it'll still be good to follow. I have a fair bit of it written down but it is the building that takes time, especially since I can't really plan my hours well at the moment because of work, studies and music. I'm hoping things will get less chaotic soon. I will really need the time to since I've never scripted anything in my life and I strongly suspect that learning that will be very challenging to me.

I'm in the early stages of developing a mod that I might call 'The Hunt'. Hard to say when or if it will be completed however since work and studies put a damper on it sometimes. Before December I hadn't even touched the toolset since September or so. But I'm mainly enjoying the process. It's pretty fun if frustrating at times.

I'm playing more NWN2. Just finished yet another replay of MotB and started up SoZ again. I know it's probably slightly insane to replay these games as much as I do but aside from them being games I really enjoy, they *really* inspire me to work on my own mod in the NWN2 toolset. Just playing games in the engine (whether it be the official campaigns or player made mods) makes me want to create something of my own, and there are many useful tips to be found while playing them. Aside from that, pondering whether to try out the Icewind Dales for the first time. Also, sneaking in some time with Tropico. Probably my favourite builder of all time, it's a real hoot.

Btw, are there any plans for any custom content/builders resources in the mod?

NWN2: Ripley goes to Faerun

If push comes to shove, he can always enslave Monty, Rob, Anthony, Nathaniel or some other OEI members to help him out. Such are the powers of an Aliens Project Director.

Looking forward to seeing more!

If you use the keyboard (WASD keys) you can move into the room.