Wrath of Dagon

Looking at the first game, I'm not inclined to give them a lot of benefit of the doubt.

I'm a bit skeptical of some of the features. Sounds a bit too good to be true, and very hard to implement. May be some examples are in order. Edit: Some similar claims were made about ME in their marketing campaign, and turned out to be highly misleading. Obsidian does seem to be quite a bit more forthcoming than Bioware, but still I'm wary.

Well, they didn't.

Rare but powerful just means there isn't a Mages Guild in every town. If you're a mage, not only will you be powerful but also feared and respected.

Exactly. Just look how much a little alien ass did for Mass Effect. Also DA was always planned to be M, because it sells better.

Magic is rare and powerful, but I don't recall anyone saying DA is low magic, in fact magic is likely to play a central part. Certainly one of the classes is a mage. They said their approach to magic is to think about how it would work if it was real.

Good points.

You can restart ME1 with a character at level 60. They'll just scale everything to your level. For ME2 they can even let you level up to level higher than 1 to start with, even if you didn't play ME1.

There are interesting aspects to the game, like magic being rare and powerful, different competing religions in the world, gods which do not explicitly manifest themselves, dwarven politics including dwarven outcasts, elves apparently being cursed by their gods or something of the sort, what ushered in the Dragon Age after the Blessed Age. So I don't think it'll be a Tolkien rip off, even if the art style is reminiscent of Peter Jackson. Has anyone ever made a good LOTR RPG in any case?

Unlike KOTOR, ME was planned as a trilogy all along, with the story continuing through all 3 games. But if the consequences are as non-existent as in the first game, who cares? I'd imagine it'll be similar to selecting your background in the first game, where you get a special quest or 2 depending on some decision you made in the 1st game, and a bit of dialog about it.

Yes, that gets asked regularly, but they won't talk about it until they make an official announcement, which will likely be when they're done optimizing, i.e. close to release.

Combat will be rule-based, not actiony.

Link please, or is that the thing from couple of days ago?

Don't see what's generic about it. It's always been medieval-inspired fantasy, the trailer fits into that, that's all.

OK, thanks guys, except for Hurlshot.

No, I meant how do you see what it says, it always stays black for me. I guess quoting the post would be one way.

I was actually pretty excited that there would be a video after all these years of drought. Anyway, the more important question is whether the game will be any good, not Bio's clumsy marketing attempts.

How do you get those black spoiler lines to show up?

Meh, I'm only interested in their historical games. And those haven't been that good lately anyway, although Empires looks intriguing.

The big surprise for me in ME was what Vigil revealed about a certain location. Even there I kind of suspected something already. As far as nature of the Sovereign, that was discussed on Bio forums long before the game came out.

The cool thing about the DA forum is that the developers actually participate.

Oh, I expect it to at least match NWN2, but does anyone know how well it sold? Also I believe J.E. was being sarcastic.

KOTOR was a Star Wars license, ME is a console shooter, not a PC exclusive rules based game. Everything else is ancient history, not something you can go by anymore. Also I think you need to sell close to 2 million (before price cut) just to break even on a big budget game these days.

Oh, I agree. But those are more fantasy games, that's why I referenced Oddworld. For a game that's trying to have a more realistic feel (not actually be realistic) those things just wouldn't make sense at all.