Morgoth

What.

There're two interviews with Ed Castillo on Argonauts, also showing some new gameplay. Part1 Part2

A .22 makes a little hole where some blood comes out. Far from ripping apart a tigh, sir.

Not so fast, punk! He said 8am PST.

At least half of the Kotor2 cast was worthless. Kreia was good, HK-47, that arrogant "Yes what can you do for me" robot....uh, yes, Mandalore were well done. The rest was forgetable. Kotor 1 is still the better of those two. I'm not averse for a Kotor3 made by Obsidian though.

I can't get myself excited about F3 as I'm afraid it will just be like STALKER - A nice first impression that is fading quickly into yawning boredom.

KOTOR-bashers obviously never heard of a game called "Fable".

Oh, you gotta tell me how well the release client will run. All that whining on the AoC boards about performance issues have left me with some mixed feelings.

This Fall is already very crowded, so Fallout 3 can wait for the bargain bin, if at all. Rise of the Argonauts could turn out to be cool, even though it doesn't encompass the "typical" RPG formula.

Why? Should books be replaced by movies too? I mean, today standards and all. It's the inherent nature of gaming to "do stuff", or "changing stuff" through a responsive action. If I want get lost imaginatively, I read some book. But I don't have the patience these days to play some old-skool 2D adventure, or some PST or Fallout anymore, no matter how good these games were back then. The key for good design that makes use of all that advanced physics and AI stuff these days is to make your actions in the game world more plausible and less abstract, and by letting the player able to change it to some degree.

Bioshock, supposed to be a spiritual successor to the Shock series, had better gameplay in terms of better developed combat, a stronger narrative that was better tight into the game, and those sweet mini-stories and quests about those nutjobs that required you to do certain tasks in order to advance. They were very well knit into the gameplay, you achieved something in the game, and you were disclosed with another tiny bit of background story. However, although these improvements made Bioshock the better shooter, it lacked a certain sense of realism. And with realism I mean "Believing that this is a place". That's were the System Shock series is superior, in creating functional and realistic decks on the ship that give the place an eerie aura. Bioshock didn't really convey an oppressive "Utopia gone wrong" feeling, instead it felt like a circus. So, hands down, System Shock wins. Bioshock still had the better gameplay, though. As for PST, it had horrible gameplay. The combat was dull, and apart from that the rest was reading and running around fetching quest items. Perfectly fine for the time being, but for today's standard all going the graphical route, you gotta give the player the ability "to do" what previously you had to imagine.

The sledgehammer hit looked pretty awesome, though. But what needs to be spiced up is the speed when he strikes with the sword, also try to move the hip and shoulder joints slightly, this sometimes works wonders. Last but not least, add strong breathing animations during fighting, just a loop in the upper body would make a big difference, visually. Yeah, visually it was striking. But that's it. Talking about RPGs though, one cannot help but have to agree that developers tend to approach RPGs more "actiony". Twitch-based would be wrong, but I see something like Bloodlines and possibly AP as the right step, merging player skills with character stats.

I'm not an animation specialist (Kaftan may correct be there), but if the artists are using MAX for any chance, you should use reactor's Havok Engine and fiddle around with inverse kinematics. The good news is that Intel will release the Havok SDK this May for free, and PC developers can use it for free. You should look into this, it would really help to spice up the animations. Edit: Yeah, here's the link. Click

So? I consider System Shock 1 to be a classic, but for today's standards it's still obsolete, same for PST. And just because there're a lot of fans who still enjoy old games doesn't mean these games should be remade over and over again. Design ought to progress as does technology with time.

Combat ought to look energetic, expressive, lethal and fast. This video though doesn't have this visceral and brutal element, not to mention the total lack of animation variety and gore effetcs. And the fast music sort of contraticts the slow combat. And yes, that's imo very important. Diablo 2 wouldn't even be half as fun without the excellent death animations. It's just that sort of thing that leverages a game from mediocre to near perfect. Just like there's hardly any developer that can manage to capture this perfectly balanced spirit of Diablo gameplay, there's hardly a game out there that manages to make Turn-based RPGs as fun as Fallout or Gorky 17. Good luck though.

Well, I got a Vista license from my Uni and since I upgrated last month I thought I ought to give it a shot. And I haven't regreted it. It runs super smooth and stable with 4 gig memory, and even though most DX10 games run rather sluggish, I always have the benefit to also play in DX9 w/o any problems. I'm still curious though how Age of Conan and Alan Wake will run with Vista, since these games have been hyped endlessly being heavily DX10 optimized....yeah yeah, we'll see.

I wouldn't mind a handheld device (iFeargus) a'la Condemned, where an icecold but erotic lady gives you directions and humorous remarks.

Fair enough. I'm not trying to downplay the hard effort that the team puts into this game, and in fact I always welcome productive spirit in any way. It's just that I've become such a demanding bastard for production values that I just can't help but feel a bit pity for those clunky animations and the clumsy look of the game. Not to mention that I've no knowledge of the teams design/writing ability. But maybe reviews may prove me otherwise.

Looks pretty boring, but so do most mods/indie projects. I just can't see myself getting excited about something like AoD when some killer RPGs like Dragon Age, Alpha Protocol and Aliens RPG are going to set the standards so high, that this already obsolete Fallout-wannabe stuff becomes even more obsolete. But hey! Just my 2 cents....

Without reading this thread I just wanted to say that I hope Obama wins, because he seems to make a halfway reasonable impression on me. McCain though is the devil, and Hillary is just hilarious!

I wonder how "Avatar", the next big Sci-Fi epic from James Cameron turns out. He's imo totally overrated. And then there's "Citizen Siege" from Lorne Lanning I'm looking forward to. And "Tree of Life" from Malick since he makes these utterly beautiful and weird movies... But I can't think of anything else to look forward to. I don't go very often into cinema these days anymore.... And that Bioshock movie leaves me cold.

I tend to disagree. Ridley is a perfectionist, that's what really counts. After all, Alien, Blade Runner and 1492 are imo his best works and set the standards in many disciplines very high. Also, American Gangsters proves that he isn't all about top-notch visuals alone....

Well, I thought Ridley Scott still makes big films that aren't dull.

Well I don't get the buzz about all the DRM measures lately. You just enter your key, connect with servers, done. Easier than eating pancake.