J.E. Sawyer

A game that allows and facilitates the player's ability to establish and express different aspects of a character's personality. Further, these choices of personality expression have different/branching effects on the other characters in the world and upon the state of the world. The problem with classification is that people associate older games like Bard's Tale with RPGs. In part, I think this is done because the systems and mythologies in Bard's Tale and Phantasie are so obviously torn from pen and paper RPGs. But those games didn't really allow you to do very much in the way of developing the personalities of your characters and allowing them a variety of ways to impact the world. In my opinion, Bard's Tale and Phantasie are tactical combat games in fantasy settings. Fallout is an RPG. I would consider The Sims to be an RPG.

In my opinion, any number of units at any price constitutes "bad sales" if it fails to make a profit. God of War sold decently, but given the costs of development, marketing, and distribution, I and many other developers with whom I have spoken are skeptical that it has broken even, much less become profitable. The Bard's Tale sold abysmally, but apparently it made a small, tidy profit. The development costs were very low and the sell-in was enough to make InXile some money. I don't know the exact figures of Jade Empire's development, marketing, and distribution costs, but the sum is probably pretty high. I don't know if 500,000 units makes the title profitable. I don't know if that's necessarily true. The majority of BG players I have met are not pen and paper role-players and frequently say that they don't play any tabletop games.

Considering the apparent success of the DS, this is pretty surprising. I am very worried that the Revolution is going to alienate even more people than the Gamecube.

Can you give an example of how you have been changed by this discussion?

Why, so they can be apparently ignored as "just another opinion"? I haven't seen anyone budge in this thread, just the continual thrashing of opinions up against each other with the meaningless disclaimer, "It's just my opinion" or "It's just your opinion". What's the point of exchanging opinions if the opinions and all of their underlying justifications are reflexively attacked or ignored?

If you really believe it's just a matter of opinion, why discuss it at all?

I'm sure most companies can deliver finished working games under favorable circumstances. Their ability to create those circumstances fluctuates.

I wear random sandals for lounging and Kenneth Cole/Reaction shoes for pretty much everything else. Oh, and Adidas fencing shoes, ASICS running shoes.

Porsche was very closely linked with VAG for a while, but most of those ties have been severed -- sort of. As in the beginning, Porsche is still dominantly controlled by the greater Porsche family. Ferdinand Porsche developed the VW Beetle for Hitler and his son, Ferry Porsche, developed the 356 Speedster. Descendants of that "line" have had a lot of control over VAG and Porsche for quite a while. Ferdinand Piech, the nephew of Ferry Porsche, was the head of Volkswagen for almost ten years. Anyway, specialization can work for a developer, but it can also lead to blandness.

I think you mistook "need to" for "should". If it were a matter of necessity, this conversation wouldn't have emerged.

Statements like this fly against what most Splinter Cell missions required. Either you didn't like the games and are simplifying them to the point of absurdity or you saw/heard about someone else playing the games and are making shallow observations. In the first Splinter Cell, I remember a room that was very similar to a science lab. The room prior to it was a well-lit small chamber with flourescent lights overhead, but had no guards in it. The lab had six to eight overhead lights, a large flickering floor lamp, and computer monitors that gave off a tiny amount of light. A pipe ran from the near door to the far left-side corner of the room. About five seconds after either entering the room or using an optic cable under the door, three guards entered the next room (a sort of cryogenics area), spoke for a few moments, and entered the lab. They all made one pass of the lab, stopped, spoke some more, and then entered a new movement pattern. One guard left and the other two stayed, walking on new paths. If you just tried to plow through the room, they would see you pretty quickly and possibly kill you. If you fired your silenced pistol at the lights, they would hear either your pistol or the glass breaking depending on their position. In the tight quarters of the lab, they would often find you. If you hopped up on the pipe and just started shimmying non-stop, they would hear you. To get through the room, I opened the door and before they came in, shot out a far light. They entered, talked, noticed the broken light, searched "over there" and went back into their routines. I climbed up the pipe, did timed shimmying across and did an inverted shot at a far light to distract them. I dropped down in the far corner (where I had shot out the first light) waited for one guard to walk by, and knocked him out. Then I crept into the second pool of darkness I had created and knocked out the second guard. Other people handled the area in different ways. I know this area very well because it took me about six tries to successfully pass it. Also, I don't know if you played Chaos Theory, but there were actually multiple divergent paths to complete many maps. The bank is a good example. Which Splinter Cell games did you play, and to what extent?

In my opinion, all three Splinter Cell games were more well-executed and polished than any of the Baldur's Gate, Icewind Dale, Fallout, or Neverwinter titles. They have a small scope, but UbiSoft (both Montr

Baldur's Gate, Fallout, Darklands, The Magic Candle, and Pool of Radiance (the original and the newer one) weren't shining examples of stability and bulletproof implementation, either. Bugs have always been a problem. As software becomes more complex, the volume of bugs rises proportionally.

http://us.imdb.com/title/tt0439829/ I think most RPGs would be lucky to reach B-movie status. Splinter Cell stories are modern day "what-if" spy fantasy tales. As such, the amount of implausible or absurd stuff in them is generally a lot less than, say, a Forgotten Realms RPG. Sam, Lambert, Redding, and Gr

I tried to be clear about what I was and wasn't defining in my first post. Sorry if that wasn't successful.

Before going too much further, I'd like to state my opinion on stories in recent games. God of War has a great story with good voice acting. Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory has a well-developed story with great writing and voice acting. Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater has a melodramatic, complex story -- but for what it is (a Metal Gear game), it is well done. If you want good stories, there are plenty of games out there with good stories. If you ONLY want a certain type of story in a very narrow framework of a specific type of RPG, okay, I guess things have been pretty thin lately. The CRPG gamer, average or otherwise, is a subset of the larger gaming community. When people bemoan the lack of stories in games, I think they need to be reminded that "the average gamer" isn't a CRPG enthusiast. To extend the car analogy, Porsche used to (essentially) develop one car with a few variants: the 911. It was a sports car for sports car enthusiasts. Recently, Porsche realized that they had a very narrow market so they started making the Boxster. The Boxster is significantly different from the 911, most obviously in price. Even more recently, they introduced the Porsche Cayenne, an SUV. They all hit their markets very well, and all appeal to different types of people. Old 911 enthusiasts long for the air-cooled days and believe that the development of the Boxster, Cayenne and (now) the Cayman detracts from the purity of the 911. To a certain extent, the 911 owners have a point; you'll see more Boxsters on the road than 911s, and a surprising number of Cayennes. But not everyone is able to have exactly what the 911 is, and Porsche survives and thrives by appealing to other markets. Similarly, the gaming market has grown and changed. CRPGs used to be a strong market with a large representation among the greater gaming crowd. CRPGs can still sell well, but they aren't the powerhouse they once were. Developers might survive on CRPGs alone, but publishers cannot. And with many developers, they have to either differentiate from the competition or be "best of breed". Development costs are too high now for devs/pubs to do otherwise. In summary, if you want good stories in games, I believe you can find them all over the place in many different genres. If you want good stories in a specific type of CRPG, you are going to have to look through a huge number of titles that don't qualify -- because a lot of people like playing those "other" games.

I know everyone here would like to blame teenagers for where money gets spent in the gaming world, but the average age of gamers has been rising through the 20s for many years now. Many gamers are adults with disposable income for entertainment who have limited chunks of time for gaming. For a variety of reasons, they can't sit in front of a monitor or TV for twelve hours at a time to play through an intricate 80-hour game. As a result, games that have high production values, appealing main characters, and a shallow learning curve often do better than games that lack these things.

I think handhelds are pretty boss, and are one of the few places where turn-based combat games like Metal Gear Ac!d can do well. Also, games on both the DS and PSP are getting pretty good looking.

Can't say that I did. Due to my strong dislike of baseball, I never saw Bull Durham. Being a lead can sometimes be very rewarding. On a day-to-day basis, it is stressful. Leads have to focus on the game as a whole and have to keep in constant communication with the producers and other leads. It is uncommon today for lead designers to ever actually complete levels they may have a hand in designing. I never finished my levels for IWD II. Dave Maldonado wasn't able to design any levels for BG: DA II. I don't have a great track record as a lead, so for me it has been more disappointing than rewarding. Sometimes it is nice to have a solid set of tasks in front of you to complete. Of course I would like to be a lead again someday, but for now, I honestly would just like to help finish something in a subordinate role.

The team already has a pretty solid plan for NWN2. I'll just be helping them with that, not launching into a furious barrage of requests for changes.

That's a pretty tall order for anything intended as a persistent world. Anyway, I'm not going to Obsidian to jump in and start crescent-kicking people in the face for rule changes. Ferret, Frank, and the other peeps know what they are doing. I will be happy to work on area design for a change.

Senior designer.

What more needs to be said?

A lot of that sounds like stuff you can already do in WoW.

Vocative is used in direct address, but that is not the role of Rome: Total War in the sentence. In Latin, "Play" would be in the present active infinitive, imperative mood, and "Rome: Total War would be a noun in the accusative case. Although, I did fail Latin.