Starwars

Yes, either turn off "Peaceful Follow" in the Behavour tab for your companions. Or simply push "V" and choose "Attack". I control it through the "V" key, I like having Peaceful Follow on so party members don't run away when I don't want them to.

I believe you failed a sarcasm check Zoma. Game is still awesome, I'm having a great time with it.

Llyranor is pretty much correct. If you don't have time to spare and don't care all that much about fancy area creation then NWN1 is probably a better bet. However, as someone who never modded before, had no idea about anything basically, I could still get into NWN2 modding via using some of the excellent tutorials on the Neverwinter Vault. The supposed complexity of NWN2 is *really* overrated I think, it simply takes longer to create the mods because of the increased powah (mostly due to more possibilities in area creation). There are definetely people still playing NWN1, no doubt about it. However, it might be harder to make a "splash" if you release a single player mod nowadays.

And also, even if you do have all skills available to you in the party. In a conversation it often you means you still have to make a choice which of them to use, since once you choose one, you often don't get a chance to use the others. This is not always the case, but quite often it is. The game is fun as hell, I'm having trouble tearing myself from it. Definetely old-school though.

Playing SoZ and liking it a lot baby! After that, either the Icewind Dales or A Vampyre Story.

The reason they've changed the camera is because people keep bitching about it. All the customization you need is there right in the Options menu. As for now, Character mode is the close up third person view (which I don't think fits this game very well, I also think it's the worst option), Strategy mode can be configured to work more like the IE games where you can move the camera around a bit. The new Exploration mode is basically how NWN1 worked if I recall correctly, and it's also the one I'm using (and have used since I started playing since you could always configure it). It's not perfect but it's perfectly workable. The reason they added Exploration mode is AFAIK because of the fact that people whined that the camera wasn't like NWN1. They added the camera buttons on the interface so that people would know the options were there (instead of having to hit the * key). EDIT: Also, the game just pwnd me right up the butt.

Yes, via the new party conversation system we can have big orgies with everyone joining in at once. It's AWESOME!

Diogo, I've not actually played the Icewind Dales yet (quite likely that I'll play them after SoZ as I do own them) so can't really compare directly. But yeah, it really feels like an old-school D&D game. One missed opportunity though... While the game seems to be much more low-magic than the OC and MotB, it doesn't exactly feel as if money will be a problem. I've already got quite a lot of it and I've only played for a few hours. I suspect it will make the trading system feel kinda unnecessary unless there are other rewards to reap. Also, I kinda take back my earlier comment about many encounters. It does seem that way, and it would likely hold true if you don't have a good leader for the Overland map. However, you can avoid a lot of stuff fairly easily. I've brought along one cohort (I suspect most people will take him along for the first playthrough). He's definetely good to have around. So far, he definetely does *not* babble off in long conversations like in the OC and MotB. Once he joined, he becomes a part of the party entity so to speak, though he sometimes have unique dialogue options written for him. I think I've read somewhere that party members do pipe up if you do something that is completely against their character, but I believe it's rare.

My first impressions from another board: I went out and got it first thing this morning (friend of mine works at the gamestore), ran home and played the opening segment. It's a lot of fun judging from the early bits. I actually got my ass handed to me pretty badly in the first fights until I got my **** together. There are an assload of skill checks in the dialogues, and the party conversation interface works really well. Many skill checks are more for flavour than meaningful consequences though, but again... There are a *lot* of them and it really helps the dialogues actually. The writing is a completely different beast tonalitywise than MotB but it's still quite good. The areas I've seen so far are very well designed and it feels like a nice "visual uprade", just like MotB did compared to the OC. I briefly ran around on the Overland map a bit and I really like how it feels. I can definetely see some of the complaints about there being to much encounters coming true though. Of course, if you got good skillz (I'm using my Rogue as party leader on the map) you can probably avoid a lot of them. Fighting everything will probably get tedious because of loading times. So yeah, maybe slightly less encounters would be a good idea for a patch in the future. Haven't really played enough to say. The music is a lot of fun as well, very adventurous and quite beautiful. Voiceacting so far hasn't been quite as good as MotB but not bad. Volothamp is pretty funny, I enjoyed the intro a lot, hehe. This looks like something that can really suck you in and get you addicted. Just don't go in expecting a MotB type of game.

There would be a patch for the game (NWN2) regardless if SoZ came out or not. And there will be many more to come after this. Continued support is one of the main ideas of the NWNs. Appearantly the cohors do have some dialogue and personality to them, but like they've said from the start, focus is on different things for this expansion. There are voiceovers. I'm guessing you won't get to listen to them ramble on about their lifestories and then help them solve their past problems though. I wouldn't buy the game if you want a game with deep interactions concerning the partymembers. It's like Icewind Dale in the sense that it's fairly combatfocused and also partybased. You get to choose which one of your partymembers does the talking, and you create a party at the start of the game. However, the Overland Map seems more reminiscant of a game like Darklands or something. But yeah, definetely don't buy the game if you want a deep and ruminating story with many and lengty conversations with your partymembers. That was MotB, they're taking this one in a different direction. And I suspect quite a few people won't like it much.

I'm sure they'll be high-fiving each other at the office when they hear Marcus from the forums bought it. Anyways, I'm waiting on my copy to arrive. Think it'll be a fun old-school experience.

Just played through the A Vampyre Story demo. Will be getting this, seems like a really charming game. Also finished up the last houses in the NWN2 Halloween mod. There's some really awesome stuff in there, and some of it is really messed up... If you play it, make sure you see Johnny Ree & Lisos house, it's absolutely insane.

It's out for digital download on Atari and D2D for those of you who like that kinda stuff.

Based on my experience with Fallout 3 (endless crashing, "dead ends" in quests where they stay unsolvable, NPCs killing themselves etc etc), I wouldn't be so sure actually. Vanilla NWN2 was very buggy of course but I've not had any gamebreakers or constant crashing since around the time MotB came out. Still, much of the bugs and whether you'll get them or not is the luck of the draw nowadays I guess, heh.

Local shop I went told me they though it'd be in early (earlier than the 21st which is the EU release date). Hopefully I can get my filthy paws on it before long, so I won't have to listen to the US bastards about how cool it is.

I think you can get this as soon as your Dad dies. You have to wander in the vicinity of Vault 101 though. I think it's probably one of the better quests if you ask me, behind The Replicated Man. Not much to see there except a load of raiders, a caged Behemoth and a trader.

Yeah, it seems to be more of an early impressions. But WHATEVAH!

Review from NWN2 site thieves-guild: http://www.thieves-guild.net/index.php?pid=277 Soon it will be in my hands, mwahaha.

This was certainly true for me. While there are plenty of things to complain about, I had fun on my first playthrough, except for the later parts of the main quest. I'm struggling with my replay though, the character build doesn't feel like it matters much and thus the experience is rather "samey" even though I pretty much flipped my original character concept upside down. But yeah, definetely good for a playthrough at least.

Part 2: http://rpgvault.ign.com/articles/930/930117p1.html

Oh yeah, don't get me wrong. I think having the ghouls take over the tower despite the fact that the player tries to accomplish it "peacefully" is awesome and most definetely Fallout-ish. It's definetely one of the best resolutions in Fallout 3 I've seen. It just gets a bit weird since the quest kinda "stops" like that.

Yeah, but it kinda feels like the situations "stalls" in a way that feels a bit... unsatisfying in terms of playing the game. One can "solve it" by killing the ghouls afterwards of course but it just doesn't give that sense of justification since... Well, I assume the game won't "recognize" the action. The content sort of ends there. Tenpenny Towers will stand forever dormant, you know? I think a better way of handling this would've been to have the ghouls move in and live peacefully while the game goes on, and then talk about how Roy eventually killed the tenants in an ending slide.

Yes, but you get the exact same thing if you help out Megaton. Same functionality too. For all the good it has done Bethesda to include choices in their game, there aren't a whole lot of consequences.

He probably got tired of us cranky bastards when he was doing the Fallout bible. One of the better interviews though, thanks for the heads-up.

The whole karma bit is a bit stuffed up I think. The Brotherhood Outcasts seems to be regarded as evil (I believe they carry teh evil fingerz11!1). And I think you get bad karma for killing the ghouls who want to get inside Tenpenny Towers, despite the fact that they kill everyone in there if you do get them to move in. I think that's a great twist in the quest though, and very "Fallouty" so to speak. I do wish there was some sort of follow-up to it where you could "officially" confront the ghouls in dialogue afterwards. Also, are there "evil" ways to solve all quests? I kinda wish more interesting evil solutions to the whole Antagonizer/Mechanist thing (maybe actually help or convince them to mess the town up) or the bit about the Little Lamplight kids trapped in Paradise Falls. Also, the whole Megaton quest seems a bit unbalanced since you actually don't seem to lose out on any content if you disarm the bomb. You can still get into Tenpenny Towers and do the quest associated with it. Whereas if you blow up Megaton, there doesn't appear to be any specific content tied to it.