Morgoth

I feel kinda bad now that I sold my PST copy last year (for a lousy 3,50

Bloodlines sold tons, well over a million copies if a google search is to be considered reliable. According to what Ive heard: the problem was that Activision witheld payments to Troika because of some other project(unnamed post-apocalyptic rpg) that fell through, and without income Troika had no choice but to shut down operations. Kind of what happened to GRIN, the publisher just refused to pay up, forcing the studio to close as they suddenly had no income to pay wages, rent etc. In GRINs case it was the publisher not approving a perfectly good milestone for a project in order to wiggle out of the contract. Bloodlines surely didn't sell a ton. By the time Troika went bancrupt, Leon said it sold some 140 000 units. Maybe now, after 5 years, it sold a million inclusind the DD version. The thing why so many companies have to report insolvency is that the publishers pay them too late. That's an outrage, and should be fixed per law.

There's a 45 min gameplay footage from Risen (in German though). Click I haven't watched it yet, but I'm sure mkreku and you other two people are gonna like it.

Concerning the 'exploring' bit, does the game have the kind of 'free-roaming' like in SoZ or does it consist of a series of main missions taking you to a map area where there are dungeons/ruins & side missions strewn about like in Drakensang (with the difference that the area is not locked upon completion)? I hope the bulk of this 40 hours minimum will not be party conversations/interactions but actually doing things. I'm thinking it'll be like Baldur's Gate 1 and 2 - being a 'spritual successor' to them... No way. An important part that gave the Bg games such a distinctive feeling was the Infinity Engine. You can't recreate that with a Kotor like 3D engine.

Well, Kotick is a turbo-capitalist in it's purest form. He only cares about making profit, not about the actual quality of the product. It must suck to work under his wings. The richer you get, the more you're focusing on making money only. I just don't get it. I'd rather invest it in new innovative projects, tech etc.

Mike looks really badass in these screenshots. Can't wait to get my hands on it!

So I played with a bunch of characters, and it's pretty okay. Very cool graphics with DX10. But I don't see myself extending the first 30 free days.

Bloodlines never had a chance. It was a dead born child that stupid Activision rejected from the beginning. Or why did they just chose to relese it at the same day as HL2? No wonder the game went completely unnoticed.

So, it turned out that the two files I was re-downloading were corrupted as well. Of course that wasn't obvious at the beginning, so I started installing the client, and after an half hour or so, it said client_anim.dat is corrupted. "I have had about enough of this nonsense now!" I thought. I was about to give up and just accept that I threw 15

****. Two files have CRC errors. Need to re-download these again.

Downloading client at 99%.

The Kaft, who supposedly wants to become a game dev, steals a game! Blasphemy!

Yeah, I wish there was more of that. I mean most DD only games we see right now are some sort of platformers, puzzle games or some other game-y stuff that I'm not particularly interested in. Alien Breed from Team 17 actually sounds interesting, I'm gonna get this. I heard though that MS makes it very difficult for you to get your game up and running on XBLA. I think MS once said they only want to concentrate on a hand full of premium XBLA games.... that's quite restrictive.

Half Life sold like 6 million units for Valve, that's a lot of profit if you take the relatively "low" dev costs in mind. These days, dev costs are so high that you hardly make enough profit that allows you to develop something like Steam for 4-5 years. So the chances are a lot more slim to have the same success as Blizzard or Valve.

I just thought NWN2 uses s simple DVD check. Hardly intrusive DRM.

It has little to do with "being cool" and a lot more to do with being successful and using that success to stay dominant. I know I know. It's pretty impossible these days to repeat such a success that was a lot easier in the 90s to get started with. Though I still hope that Obsidian once generates enough money to allow them to make their "dream" project with the necessary time frame.

Which makes perfectly sense from a business standpoint. But how high are the chances of an Obsidian published niche RPG, say in the vein of Jefferson? Go Steam exclusive and you get a 60% margin I think, that should still generate enough money to warrant a smaller development team. Unless Obsidian has zero interest in making old-school RPGs anymore.

Well thanks for the answers, I decided to give it a shot so I bought it and now I'm downloading the client.

A company with online verification/monthly subscriptions and a company with its own online distribution system. The point remains valid. Or do I sense a tiny bit of jealousness here? Oh btw... Is the "PC only self-funded hardcore RPG" still a topic for Obsidian?

I think if you worry so much about the DRM that the game seems to be secondary, why even bother buying it?

I'm currently reading the Hobbit, so I'm a bit in the Middleearth mood. Since the game is now ass cheap, and it completely slipped under my radar when it came out, I wanna know from the long-time players how motivating it is, how the quests are, how the combat system works and whether the community is bearable. Thanks.

Sounds like ME2 will be a major improvemnt over ME1. And it's also the first sequel since BG2. So this means ME2 will have a good chance to be win.

Today, I got stucked in Dreamfall, and then I uninstalled it. Then I installed TLJ, played for a few minutes, and then uninstalled it. Same for Starcraft and JA2 demo. It seems like I lost all my passion for playing old games. And there is no new game around that would interest me. Bah.

Well I never really liked Bastilla much, despite the awesomeness of Jennifer Hale. People can argue however whatever thgey want, but for 2003 standards, I think the Kotor cast was for the most part superb.