Morgoth

30-40 hours is quite decent for today's standards, considering that NWN2 will probably be more complex in terms of dialogs and whatever else choices/interactions available, therefor creating a more complex and fun game world, and therefor increasing replayability.

Yeah, that's certainly unpleasant in RealLife.... but didn't the Game Uni teached you that yet? In video games, wading around with a shiny paladin in smelly mud is teh fun! It's teh ultimate Roleplaying experience! :cool:

Sure, people who only use the toolset and do not have the knowledge/talent/software to create custom assets could profit from With-the-game-shipped-sewers. Still, the NWN community is awesome, and it's probably just a matter of days/weeks till you can download a gallery of sewer-haks of any....uhm mud-level available.

Just because Obsidian doesn't add sewers-assets doesn't mean the mod community won't make any. Just create Sewers-like Textures and Geometry, place the sound- and light sources right and voila, here you got your sewers.

You won't be disappointed, just make sure to get the English versions.... it's a game about Silver/Golden Age Super-Hereos after all! And Germans imitated by American Voice-actors always ends up into hilarious amusement. (w00t) Just in case you can't scare them up, you can try your luck at www.dschungel.at or www.gameware.at, they still should have English versions available for a relatively cheap price and deliver within 2-3 days to Germany.

Go buy them both, Herr Nameless, they're awesome! There're also playable demos available, though they don't reach the full version quality. You can also find a bunch of reviews at http://www.gamerankings.com/ Though, keep in mind they aren't RPGs a'la Baldurs Gate, more like story driven, mission based, squad based tactical whatever strategy blabla games.... Edit: Oh, and don't forget to get the English versions.... because I heard the German dubbed versions are a catastrophe.

Gamecloud interview.

This Ken Levine is not just a dude, he's imho one of the (although still too unknown) smartest people in the industry. People are always raving around Dave Gaider, J.E. and MCA, but Ken is the Creative Director behind Thief1, System Shock2, Freedom Force etc, and his thoughts/opinion about modern game design (if you follow all interviews and forum posts) are teh awesome. So he (and in fact the whole Irrational Crowd) is one of my top-five game-makers... and Bioshock is (apart from Starcraft2 and Dragon Age) the game I'm currently most looking forward to. I think this takeover was a good move, considering the fact that 2K games has lots of other studios with strong portfolios, but without interfering on the creative side. A stronger money-pad now can only mean a better Bioshock.

Nice article. Very appropriate for the most part, but it doesn't tell me anything new, other than I didn't know that such a horny Island like Japan has problems with kids-supply.

Always keep your original works as PSD with all the layers, adjustment layers, etc. Difference between BMP and TGA? Well, the BMB only saves the Color information (24 bit), while the TGA supports Alpha channels as well (24bit color + 8 bit Alpha = 32 bit). HTH. Edit: For printing, you might want to use Post Script (*.eps) and try to adjust your colors via Color Proof, because Printers usually use the CMYK color scheme.

Voice overs surely cost a bit, but you don't need to hire some rave-kings or a Madonna to speak some silly lines, and good voice actors are able to imitate more characters anyway. I think Gothic2 used only ~10 voice actors, but still did pretty well. Don't ask me how much voice actors Outcast used - those Talans were all the same, but that didn't break the mood. Dreamfall uses by far more (~50 different voice actors. You can read Ragnar's rants here: http://www.ragnartornquist.com), but it's still rather a smaller, independent project. FFv3R was mostly spoken by the devs themself, and somehow it worked. Anyway, there's no deny the costs rise, but with some good organizing skills and other "creative solutions" it's still possible for smaller, independent devs to stay on track with quality and quantity of voice overs. Gothic 3 won't be cutting edge when it comes out, but people still will buy it. Smaller devs like Irrational games don't use the UE3, instead they're using Gamebryo (FFv3R) or their modified UT2004 Engine (SWAT4, Bioshock) and still are around. Those devs are known to deliver substance, not some silly talk about shiny Parralax Mapping/Pixel Shader 3.0 etc. a'la Bethesda, and the community knows that. As long as you keep the team small, organize the costs smart, and build your fundament onto your strenghts, you don't need to have 2 million sold copies to stay alive. Just look what happend to IonStorm/DXIW: Nice engine, nice (useless) shadows and all, but they forgot their strenght, their roots. They screwed their fans, and now they're dead. Not sure about that 1.5 million USD (last I heard it was only 500k, but that might have been changed now), but I heard Unreal Technology was always known for being very adaptable. Bio and Obsidian are using this technology too, and I don't think they're going to make an UT2007 clone.

Agreed. This is basically not true. It's just that the Big boys like EA, MS etc. want to scare out the smaller development houses with saying nonsense like "Games are gonna cost 30 Millions+ USD!!!". That's probably true for EA, who only rely on production values, but no substance. Smaller development houses like Piranha Bytes or Epic use cutting edge technology, but make enormous games and can keep the costs still relatively low. A Piranha Bytes with ~20 peoples who don't need to have a Ferrari for each employee obviously can put the ressources more into more productive tools, rather than a 150 people EA team that puts it's money into licenses and supermodels. And although there's still too much emphasis on graphics today, better technology also means more productive (art) tools and better standards. I just got used to work with ZBrush, which is a 2D/3D hybrid-sculpt-software, and it's incredible how fast and accurate you can create models, textures etc. with it. So, surely people get more demanding in the graphics department, but the tools also get better and better. And as long as I see small dev's like PB able to do ambitious games with cutting technology and as long as I see a community that buys such games, there's no real fear that only EA type like companies will rule the gaming market. There's always some place for the creative ones..... because those are the ones who actually bring some progress into this industry - they're inevitable. Even the big boys must understand that.

Christmas presents? You never can go wrong with some bottles of Schnapps! Schnapps is unquestionable the best happy-maker on this planet! You surely want to make people happy at Christmas, don't you?

True. Too bad their games don't manage it to come out to the PC. This Okami game (drawing with calligraphy into the gameworld) just looks too good.

Eh, iirc Far Cry came out of Germany <{POST_SNAPBACK}> Sure, but 2/3 of the employees are from over the world, worked on various titles like Opposing Force, Sin etc. That's an imported experience bonus, so to speak, so it wasn't doomed from the beginning. There're always a few glorious exceptions (like Piranha Bytes) among the crowd of untalentled wannabes, but that doesn't make me think positively about their "game industry" in general. It's also a matter of acceptance from the government. While i.e. in France, England and Scandinavia games get partially funded from the government (here's a great quote from Swede's minister of culture Pagrotsky: "Video games often aid imagination and stimulate creativity and evolvement. Therefor this is a very entertaining and future directed resolution."), in Germany they get beaten from all political groups and described as "killergames", often there're discussions about why not just abandoning development at all. But damn, I digress. Neuro Hunter is obviously made for funky, rebellious kids in mind... not adults. Never ever expect a story for adults from a German developer. Even the Gothic series doesn't offer that. Neuro Hunter is also plagued by unforgivable design weaknesses, i.e. you can steal stuff from characters and then sell it back to them. Do that over and over again, and you'll never have any money problems again. That's just one thing. Later on you'll realise that this is basically just a cheap rip-off of Deus Ex, Matrix, Ghost in the Shell etc. No originality, no maturity, no intellectual substance at all. I congratulate, Herr Lead Designer! Now that was a rant, even Hades would get pale. "

This is a game made in Germany, hence it sucks. Even the German press trashed it to death... but if you don't believe me, try out the demo.... you'll see what I mean.

If I've some spare time to waste then I'm firing up IWD to loot out some dungeons. Btw anyone bought Call of Cthulhu DCotE yet? Recommendations?

They did, and that was mentioned several times by Brian & Co. NWN2's renderer is based on DX9 technology whereas NWN1 is OpenGL based, so Obsidian had to rebuild the renderer completely from scratch.... As a side note, it's actually impressive to see what they were able to do so far with NWN2, especially the graphics and the completely new toolset which seems to work already at the current status pretty well... Looking at the DA forums, you still only get "We've not decided yet what the toolset will look like" crap. Those Biowarians are just too slow.

Dead companies don't count... because they're dead. (duh!) 1. BioWare 2. Irrational Games 3. Valve 4. Blizzard 5. Obsidian

Those weren't previews with anything substantial, just some raving about the DA technology demo, which is now completely irrelevant since the game got a complete overhaul. So basically, aside from the Bio forums, we do not have any official news at all.

A Bio Doctor and a Pandemic Clown are giving an interview. ...Because we guarantee that there's stuff we're going to learn from Pandemic and vice versa. What could Bio possibly learn from Pandemic? Wait.... what I'm talking about? They're one company now! HAHA!

I'm still asking myself what benefits Bio can expect from partnering with Pandemic. Looking at their portfolio, they've only done "blow-it-up" action games, nothing highly intelligent or groundbreaking, neither in gamedesign nor technology wise. I could understand a partnership with Epic (Unreal Technology) or Obsidian (MCA for teh win!111), but Pandemic??? Anyway, I hope the doctors still hold the rein in their hands.

You're right. Reading that article though made me a little nervous. I found a better one at GameSpot. Seems like it should basically stay everything like it is now. As long as the Biowarians have full creative freedom I'm not too worried about that "Supercompany". Riccitiello as CEO though still gives me a bad feeling in my guts. Edit: Screw GameStar, you can read it yourself on Bio's main page now.

I just stumbled over these news from the German print magazin GameStar. I'll try to translate that stuff into into my humble English. Bono makes developer-coalition possible. Bono from U2 can't stop it. After his investment company Elevation Partners didn't manage it to take over Eidos, his second attempt to enter the gaming business seems to stay on a stronger foundation. According to a report from the Wall Street journal, Elevation will take over the majority of Bioware (Jade Empire, Knights of the Old Republic and Baldur's Gate) and Pandemic (Star Wars: Battle Front, Full Spectrum Warrior). The goal is to merge both developers into a huge business firm. The management should stay untouched though: Greg Zeschuk and Ray Muzyka from Bioware as well as Andrew Goldman and Josh Resnick from Pandemic will lead the operative business. The manager director will be a well-known man: John Riccitiello, the former CEO of Electronic Arts and currently partner at Bonos investment company Elevation Partners, is in discussion. The purchase price should be 300 million USD. All in all, ELevation saved about 1,9 milliard USD for investments within media and entertainment. According to the Wall Street journal, a part of this amount should be invested into the development of games. Currently both Bioware and Pandemic together do have around 400 employees located in Los Angeles, Edmonton (Kanada) and Brisbane (Australia). This structure should stay untouched. Furthermore the new company still wants to work together with their trusted publishing partners. A clever move: A sale to a big pusblisher would have meant a loss of independence. In that constellation however, both developers get stronger. How the f*ck does that make them stronger, especially with Riccitiello as managing director?

Nintendo knows very well how to increase the female gaming audience!