Starwars

Nyeh, actually *seeing* that we get the stances somehow disappoints me even though I've known it for ages now. Me wants classic dialogue options... On the plus side, character faces especially look great. Since Brian Mitsoda designed the characters, I hope for characters as colorful (and yet at the same time believable) as in Bloodlines. Judging from screenshots of characters, it looks like that could definetely come a reality.

Those are good suggestions Soda and would fit well with the direction of the game. I think cutting 85% of the random encounters would be a bit much for my taste, but I agree that they could be made a lot harder. It would've been neat to see SoZ as a full-on game, there's a lot that could be done with it and it's already quite big for being an expansion.

I think there is a bit of a tradeoff in the ammo scarcity. I played on the difficulty above Normal (I think there is Hard and Very Hard if I remember correctly?) and I had ginormous amounts of ammo. Just after leaving the Vault you can have, well... a lot of 10mm ammo and it's just not very difficult to get more after that. I think upping the difficulty to the final step would've changed that, but at the same time it just gets silly when enemies HPs are raised up as a means of difficulty and it's just awkward in how the game plays. I thought the final difficulty in NWN2 has that problem as well (the one above Hardcore rules). Anyways, after playing through the game about 1 and a half times, I have no desire to return to it. While it's a far better game than Oblivion, my enjoyment level played out on a similar curve meaning that I really found the open exploration sort of blinding the first time around, and it's just to explore. But once you've seen it, my interest in the game quickly faded. Like I said, Fallout 3 is a definete improvement on Oblivion, but I still find it waaaay to broad instead of having a lot of depth. I know many would disagree, but I really feel that Beth could've done much better if they had done exploration more akin to the older games, and *really* focused on a few locations instead. Because there are locations in Fallout 3 that are genuinely good and show a lot of promise, but it still feels like it's spread to thin if you ask me. So yep, in the end the game landed in the middle for me. Not nearly as bad as I had feared, but also not nearly as great as I had hoped. I might give it another shot once the construction kit have been released and modders have really gone to work on it.

I don't like it quite as much as MotB, but they're such different experiences that it's hard to directly compare them. Personally I tend to enjoy the MotB style of games a bit more, but I'm also really liking SoZ. I just started up my 3rd playthrough. Overall difficulty could've been pushed up further I think. There are some pretty good encounters here and there though. I wish there were more along the difficulty of the final boss, that's the best fight I've had a in a long time in a cRPG. It's about that level I want "special encounters" to be at.

It is the final battle of the main quest. But you're free to explore and complete other quests once you finish it, the game only ends when you retire.

Nah, it's a format called .bmu. I copy and rip it to MP3 since there's been reports of the .bmu files screwing up and not playing ingame if you listen to them in a media player (might've only been Windows Media Player though). Yep, whole game is like that.

I just ripped it to MP3, mwahaha!

Making it work with the party conversation system would likely be tricky. Plus, many of us prefer the oldschool style, especially for a game which is not really focused on story or long conversations. As for camera, I mainly use the one called Exploration mode with a few tweaks. I control my party most of the time.

It'd be pretty cool to see Obsidian doing NWN3, seeing as they now have the experience of dealing with the community. They've also said that it would be interesting to visit the ruins of Neverwinter after the whole 4e deal. I'm not particularly into D&D but I agree. Definetely wouldn't surprise me to see either NWN3 or BG3 coming from Obsidian. Or maybe Atari just meant that there will be more expansions for NWN2.

I *think* you can get to those otherwise unreachable places by completing the Red Wizards Arcane Nexus task. I'm planning on doing that for my current playthrough. The bards are really hard to find. Have you found the cabin where the guy named Skullcrusher resides? If memory serves, it's west of there. In the middle of the forest, there is a small clearing with some rocks in it. The bards are hiding in a cabin there, but you must get *very* close to it, otherwise the cabin won't show up. Also, there's a funny OEI easter egg in there.

Also, it's worth retireing your party before you actually beat the final dungeon/boss just to see what happens. It's pretty cool. And if I didn't misread it, it kinda hints at... *something*. Exactly what I don't know, but maybe someone in well versed in the 4th edition would know.

Well, the story is that they die basically, lol. Once you feed them to One-of-Many they are gone forever, so choose which cohorts you want to have with you and which ones you want to sacrifice wisely.

Nah, you can't have him join but you can return to him and feed him cohorts. You get some exp for doing this as well as the aura I mentioned (in the form of a feat), which I assume gets stronger the more cohorts you feed him.

I think the ending was good. Not an emotionally striking one of course, but it did give me the information I needed and wanted. Fit well with the game and I've really come to like Volothamp, hehe. On my first playthrough I had the Druid cohort from Samargol with me and I picked up the Captain from the ship at a later time in the game. With my (almost) totally evil party I've got the Ranger from Samargol and Belueth, the Aasimar Rogue/Shadow Thief of Amn. I kinda like what they did with the Cohorts. It feels pretty fresh to not have these people unload on you with their emotional burdens, and the little one-liners that sometimes pop up when you enter areas plus the unique dialogue options give them some personality still. It would've been nice though to be able to ask them about their past a bit. I still haven't found the chicken adventurers, though I did like One-of-Manys role. He's a tough encounter if you want to fight him. I'm feeding him cohorts that I don't want at the moment, and I gained a lesser evil aura (think it gave me +1 STR and INT).

I like Yuan-Ti quite a bit, though the Gray Orc just looks much cooler. My first party had a Gray Orc Cleric/Doomguide of Kelemvor, hehe! A fun thing to do in SoZ is making a party consisting of races with level adjustments and go out looking for the more challenging fights.

For some extraordinary reason, the SoZ installer deleted the MotB voiceovers. You don't need to download the VO file for the time being if you're only going to play SoZ.

I would gladly download a patch of the same size if it made Fallout 3 stop crashing. Also, if it's the one called "NX1 VO fix" or something like that, those are the files needed for the Mask of the Betrayer campaign that broke. You don't need to download those to play SoZ.

Beat it once with a mostly good party and now playing it with this evil party.

Replaying SoZ with an evil party. Consisting of 3 evil ladies having enslaved a neutral dumb-as-bricks Half-orc Barbarian. mwahahah.

Never again will you hear the MotB soundtrack, hahahaha! *goes off and listens to the MotB soundtrack*

Yep, the rare resources thing is a bug and confirmed by OEI. Rob said there'll be patch today or tomorrow fixing the issue where MotB wouldn't play properly, not sure if there'll be any other bugfixes in it as well.

What dude are you using as an Map leader? I *highly* recommend using someone with high skill in either Hide or Move Silently as it will enable you to get past almost all encounters if you don't want to fight them (of course, sometimes you just roll a bad roll). You mean just different weapon types and such? I haven't really investigated this but there are a lot of merchants to be found in the game. Also, crafting is good in this game. Hehe, this is true. I also wanted to rotate the Overland Map. Got used to it after a while though. This is true. Taverns are basically just a place to pick up quests and rest in the game. I'm fine with that, but could've done with just a bit more variety. Hm, I didn't have any problems with this. Also (just in case you didn't know), many quests will add a map marker for you on the overland map (use M key) when you get it. I found level ups at the start of the game to be fairly fast as well but they slow down after a while. Also, if you have fewer party members you'll get more exp (it's divided). Still, I ended up not fighting many random encounters. I imagine one could grind levels that way but it'd be a bit of a pain. I ended the game at level 16 by the way.

The SoZ music is very good though I think I prefer the overall style of MotB more. The SoZ music also had a bunch of different composers working on it including people from Rogue Dao, pretty cool. There's even a tavern song with singers in there, hehe.

Deraldin, I'm constantly getting the urge but I really want to finish the game as well. Or rather finish as much as I can of it since I believe the game doesn't actually "end" per say if I understand it correctly? I believe you'll have to manually end it by retiring and then you'll see an ending based on what you've done I think. Not entirerely sure though. Next party for me will be evil!

No, the new crafting system should take the entire partys skills into account. So you should be able to spread your crafting out over several characters without having to make a single "crafting guy". You made sure you're in the appropiate area (with workbenches)? Check to make sure you have all the requirements and ingredients? What message do you get when you try to craft something?