J.E. Sawyer

Back up to $10. Still worth it.

Feargus is a face in the explosion, like in the Mummy.

Worth $10, yes. It does get pretty repetitive, and the only active things you're doing are moving and shooting. It's still fun, though.

AoOs create a new tactical aspect to movement. However, in practice, most of that goes out the window with 5' steps. In 4th Edition, "shifting" (taking a 5'/1 square step to avoid OAs provoked by movement) is your entire move action, which seems like a "no duh" change to me. In the D&D Experience module, the kobolds we fought were "Shifty", which meant that they could shift for free. It made them very difficult to deal with.

"Okay I shoot at the guy. Just a sec... " http://www.yetanotherblog.de/media/2/20040...ors3c_neu_3.jpg

You have failed your final test, Alvin. I'm sorry.

That content was begging to be cut for months prior to his departure, much like a gangrenous foot.

Alex and Fryda Wolff work on all of our titles.

For all of the 2nd Ed. books that TSR put out, the majority of AD&D products during that time were setting-related. The setting books did poorly, and the rule books did very well. Unfortunately, the net result was TSR going out of business. Farewell, Spelljammer/Ravenloft/Dark Sun/Birthright, we hardly knew ye. 3E+ books have sold better than any other edition. I'm pretty sure the 3E PHB sold in over 500,000 units in its first few years. But WotC is now part of the Hasbro family, and the scale of Hasbro's sales across its various divisions dwarfs something like D&D. As popular as D&D is compared to other RPGs, it's a big fish in the very small pond of tabletop RPGs. And its mechanics are, fairly or not, compared to those in CRPGs and MMOs, where numbers don't lie and iteration times are decreased by a factor of 10 (number made up, but probably in the right ballpark). Making a new edition is good financial sense and good "mechanical" sense. 3E was still clinging to a lot of sacred cows that were over 20 years old.

No slide tackling in this league, but J.R. has been carded a few times this season for hackin' dudes.

All white dudes with short dark hair and average builds look like me. When I bought Mass Effect the guy at the register said I look like Shepard. I laughed and then punched him out on the spot.

IWD2 was something that Interplay wanted BIS to develop because it would generate revenue faster than FR6/The Black Hound or any other potential project in the division. The Black Hound's engine was still pretty early in development, so the chances of the game being done quickly, much less to a high level of quality, were very low. Fallout 3 was still just an idea. We knew we wanted to use TBH's engine for F3 (and in fact, that planning was invaluable when we actually did), but it was even further away from being realized than TBH. Interplay needed short-term money very, very fast. ASAP. Though I think everyone believed that the returns on TBH and F3 would have been greater than those on IWD2, we also knew that IWD2 was the one thing that we could make relatively rapidly, for a small investment, and a modest return. Icewind Dale 2 did review 3.8% lower than IWD (according to Game Rankings), but that never really surprised me. It was the eighth title to use the Infinity Engine (BG, BG:TotSC, BG2, BG2:ToB, IWD, IWD:HoW, PS:T), and it came out right after Neverwinter Nights. I did (and do) think that 3E and 3.5 are better games than 2nd Ed., but I did (and do) criticize the choices WotC made when they built and revised the system. I think AoOs are pretty cumbersome, I think that even the revised ranger still feels strange in how it is composed, I think weighted point buy has a lot of issues, I think prestige classes do the same (not good) things to the game that kits did in 2nd Ed., etc. It's a big game, and it has flaws. Some are systemic (multiclassed spellcasters) and others are content-specific (Frenzied Berserker). But overall, I certainly think that 3E and 3.5 are the "best D&Ds" we've had so far. 4E remains to be evaluated in full, because I've honestly not had a huge amount of exposure to it.

Someday. I just work on some aspects of combat.

It is... ... a mystery.

The article itself has screenshots that show how the game compares to the concept art/illustrations. Sorry to be vague, but...

You have a different view of history than I do. We were working on FR6/The Black Hound, a very faithful 3E game, when Torn was canceled. Interplay wanted us to make IWD2, because they knew that it could be developed much more quickly than F3 (F3 later used the Black Hound engine). The question for us was never "do IWD2 or do something else". It was "leave IWD2 as a 2nd Ed. game or make it a 3E game". We didn't put 3E into IWD2 in "a fit of excitement". We put it in with a very clear idea of what we could and could not do in phased periods of development. We knew we couldn't implement meta-magic feats. We knew we couldn't implement AoOs. Given the responses of pretty much everyone in this thread (other than you and one other person), almost every professional reviewer, and my personal opinion on how the 3E in IWD2 came out, I have no doubt it was the right decision to make. I still don't think you understand the difference. The IE built effects through item properties in the item editor or spell effects in the Spell-O-Matic. In IWD2, bonus types were built into the effect parameters, with types pulled from code and resolved in code (including "unnamed"). Stacking logic was resolved at the code level; it was not dealt with in the parameters or logic of a script, as it does in NWScript. Some armor bonus types are built into the NWN code base, but most of the other effect types are not defined anywhere. Of specific merit, enhancement bonuses essentially don't exist. That's why you can easily get dudes running around with 50 Strength: most bonuses are of the same undefined type, so there's no way to sort them. If applied bonuses in NWN had an bonus type parameter built into them 1) they could have been sorted according to THE RULEZ and 2) builders could still have applied bonuses with the "unnamed" bonus types to produce monstrous 50 Strength 10th level barbarians for their own campaigns.

Brian Menze (who painted the cover art) is an Adidas superfan, but I believe those are two-stripe shoes. And yes I am intentionally not answering your question. Sorry.

PEW PEW THE ALIENS now on Steam. http://www.steampowered.com/v/index.php?ar...&AppId=6290 ten bux

http://www.gameinformer.com/News/Story/200....1155.46802.htm

Obsidian programming superstar Brock Heinz is pals with some of the devs and speaks highly of the game.

Not really, no. Most of the work was on myself and programming, and I didn't spend the majority of my time working on it. The other designers were barely affected by any of the 2nd Ed./3E changeover stuff. As with any game, IWD2 had bugs, but the number and severity of bugs was pretty mild compared to the other IE games. Most of the major flaws in IWD2 were developed during the first few months of the project, when we believed we were on a much shorter timeline. It was difficult to restore coherency or make other large course corrections later on. The 3E implementation was on a three-phase timeline that Malavon and I outlined early on. We never really knew if we were going to hit Phase 2 or 3, but luckily we did. EDIT: A lot of the coherency issues came to light relatively late in the project, when we started doing extensive playthroughs. By that time, we could recognize that there were problems, but we didn't have time to overhaul the areas. For example, Targos and Shaengarne and the Ice Temple all feel very different and had many different problems during the course of development. It probably would have taken a long time to get those three areas to feel "right" and to better establish the story and characters in them. Areas like the Fell Wood and Black Raven Monastery were the victims of vision exceeding grasp -- not because Dave made bad inherently bad designs, but because he kept running into engine and scripting limitations. There were aspects of the engine with which he was familiar on PS:T that were different in IWD2's code base, but he often didn't realize the difference until he had put a certain amount of time and effort into going down a particular path. He was disappointed with how he wound up having to implement those areas.

I moved the discussion about IWD2's implementation of 3E to its own thread in the computer games forum because I am a horrible tyrant. Stephen Amber: Why are we having this conversation? You've been posting on BIS boards and these boards for how many years and you're questioning my impartiality toward D&D because I've worked on (and continue to work on) D&D games? Do you not remember me railing against how poorly the 3E ranger was front-loaded while IWD2 was in development? I've criticized aspects of 2nd Ed. AD&D, 3E, 3.5, and the Forgotten Realms during all of the D&D projects I've been on. If you can't remember me doing that, I'm certain some of the other board members can refresh your memory. By now I really think I've earned enough credit from my comments on these and the BIS boards that people shouldn't question my impartiality toward D&D and/or WotC.

Actually, I think it is overstated. AoOs are an integral, and contested, part of 3E combat. Not necessarily "great". They work reasonably well in a tabletop turn-based environment. They work less well (and make a lot less sense) in a real-time CRPG environment. For an example that supports this, NWN's handling of AoOs felt very haphazard due to when they went off and how they were executed. They were great in ToEE because they were modeling the tabletop environment very closely. Not to mention how feats like Power Attack and Combat Expertise worked in NWN vs. IWD2. Or skills like Parry and Discipline in NWN, which had no real basis in 3E. Similarly, knockdown in NWN was not mechanically modeled on the 3E rules. Or how spontaneous healing was handled, cleric domain spells, etc., etc. Unless you're willing to criticize NWN for the same types of things you level against IWD2, I think you're making unfair criticisms. IWD2 missed or changed a bunch of 3E stuff, as did NWN. I still don't think either felt like "rush jobs", despite the relative development times of both games. I really have to question the sanity and sincerity of people who say, "You know, I hate IWD2, but what really would have made it awesome are attacks of opportunity." It would be kind of like saying, "You know, I hate BG2, but it would have been a lot better if they took out all of the Spell Compendium content and put in the racial bonuses that 2nd Ed. characters should get." Fundamentally, the things from 3E that we did put into IWD2 made it a lot better (in my opinion) than if we had just rolled on with the IE's 2nd Ed. implementation, which was still lacking in a lot of areas -- both from a general system perspective and an implementation perspective. That is, 2nd Ed. was terrible and stupid compared to 3E AND ALSO, the way that some of those 2nd Ed. elements were integrated in the IE was terrible. A kit is the same as being able to make a barbarian/ranger/rogue or a monk/wizard? I don't think they're equivalent at all. 3E multiclassing in IWD2 allowed you to mix virtually any combination of four classes and levels. In BG, BG2, and IWD, you couldn't even make certain class combos because of how the class tables were set up, stored in data, and referenced in code. Arbitrary meaning it was up to individual scripters to check for effects across the various ones used in the game. Effect types and stacking rules were not explicitly built into how the effects worked. It's very easy for someone to add a new script applying an effect that modifies a stat and never checks (or is never checked for) other effect states on the character. To be honest, I think it's pretty weird that you like how NWN's stacking rules work. Considering that stacking rules were almost universally seen as a positive thing for D&D, and that NWN's ability scores (especially) got incredibly out of control because there were virtually no stacking elements in place for many things, it's an odd thing to support. When we brought the stacking rules to the attention of WotC during NWN2's development, they were very much in favor of switching to an implicit no-stack system instead of continuing with NWN's method of implicitly stacking most things.

If you think it would have been better to stick with 2nd Ed. than to change the engine as we did, I cannot disagree with you more strongly. There's stuff that BioWare never got working even according to 2nd Ed. rules (and, in fact, would have been very difficult to change given the code base) that we got working properly according to 3E rules for IWD2. For example: multiclassing. On a personal level, I feel the incomplete 3E in IWD2 was still better than the incomplete 2nd Ed. in the other IE games. Based on the reviews that sites and individuals gave to IWD2, I think that the general consensus was that the use of 3E was one of the things that made IWD2 very appealing to many people. Our content in IWD2 was very uneven, but I feel that the gameplay was great, and our implementation of 3E was a huge part of that. ToEE got 3.x gameplay as good as it can get (though again, some bad content). NWN and IWD2 both really had good 3E gameplay (though I am biased toward IWD2), but neither was a "complete" 3E implementation. And then we have PoR:RoMD. PoR:RoMD was rushed out. NWN and IWD2 were not, and I don't think their gameplay felt like "rush jobs". NWN doesn't have a system for stacking; its various spell and item scripts arbitrarily check for the presence of other effects and occasionally suppress them from stacking. That's the opposite of systemic. It's arbitrary and was vulnerable to (a great deal of) human error.

Without seeing the full system, it's hard to say one way or another. I do feel that combat moved much more quickly, regardless of "net complexity" vs. 3.5.