J.E. Sawyer

I denied that it was verifiable, as not even QA had done proper playthroughs at that time. Certainly Feargus hadn't, nor had I.

Personally, I don't like commenting on gameplay hour estimates unless I feel really comfortable amount it -- usually after I've played through the entire game. So regardless of whether I thought the OC would be "enough" "too little" or "too much" for various people, I did not give out hour estimates when I thought it would premature to do so. Before Ferret left, several areas and some features had already been cut. When I became lead, a few more areas and a lot more features were cut. As far as what was hard and what was easy -- very little was easy. When a game has been under development for a year and a half, there's only so much you can change in the home stretch. Most of the big stuff that was cut was detailed on the Bio forums, usually when I let people know, "Hey this isn't going to be in." You can't find a single laundry list of it, but there's a slow trickle of expectation-killing over several months in various threads.

In reality, a large amount of area content (and some companion content -- poor Casavir) was cut. EDIT: Also, features. EDIT 2: I always thought that, even with the cuts, there would be enough content. My concern was mostly about the quality of the content.

Something tells me that if we put it down to 2 a round (of subdual damage at that) and instituted the FB's chance of annihilating teammates, people wouldn't be so enthusiastic about having things the way they "should be".

Go into Neverwinter Nights 2\UI\default. Open fontfamily.xml in notepad. Edit the pointsizes for NWN1_Dialog and NWN2_Dialog. Save.

The engine is pretty difficult to work with from an art perspective. I can say that although the Jefferson/Van Buren engine could produce some very nicely-lit areas (for its time), the NWN2 toolset/engine is far easier to work with for level building. The workflow is much swifter and it is a lot easier to rapidly iterate through level geometry changes. In TBH, building White Ford took us months and the exterior maps had to be divided into three chunks. Last night as an experiment I roughly laid out the same village on a single map in about an hour. I was able to maintain similar spatial relationships and building sizes with the exact same number of houses, "special" buildings, and better rolling terrain. Outside of its toolset flexibility and the very solid foundation of its RPG game logic, there's little of great merit to the "old" engine. Certainly its graphical capabilities are very outdated and the art pipeline is absolutely terrible.

Pretty doubtful. The Hollows was basically intended to be an "intro to Crossroad Keep". As such, it was very complicated, though simpler than CK. People don't seem to have that much difficulty operating CK and Act 1 is already pretty long.

This state (California) really has a love/hate relationship with fiscal responsibility. I can't believe we voted down three tax-reliant props and passed so many bond-reliant props that we will be paying back ~$70 billion over the next 30 years. Sweet.

But I do get to wear the NW9 armor and hang out with Nevalle.

Not true!

Oblivion's environmental shadows are all pre-baked, not dynamic.

Studios have, and the results are not demonstrably better.

I agree, which is why I feel that romances should either receive less (i.e. zero) time or significantly more time per character.

I didn't get that far in JE, but I remember thinking that the romances were better/more appropriate than most others I had seen.

The prose isn't necessarily any better or worse, but the writing often comes across as worse because I think many people are more sensitive to the context of romance than to other situations. "Oh, [CHARNAME]. I know that I'm a devout pacifist druid of Eldath and you're a halfling cleric of Talos, the Lord of Storms, but... as I stand next to you among this pile of fourteen freshly fireball-charred goblin corpses, I really feel something special between us. It's the sort of bond that could only be felt between me and someone like you, someone with the [PROTAGONIST] tag." 3. Shut up and get out of my face. "Oh... oh, [CHARNAME], how could you? After that one previous node of dialogue where you gave a non-hostile response, I thought I was something special to you! Well now I see I was wrong!" 5. I hate you and hope that the Lord of Storms consumes you with a divine call lightning spell. "Okay, I'll end this dialogue now, but you better know there's only one more floor trigger that's going to give you the option to be my sweetheart!"

They're almost universally poorly written, fumbling attempts at expressing intimacy from shallow characters in awkward and inappropriate situations to a character that attracts the NPC because GENDER=MALE.

Normally I don't get involved in too many political discussions, but I felt the need to make people aware of this on the penultimate eve before American mid-term elections. http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/ http://www.nancyforcongress.com/index.php http://www.wmur.com/news/10239713/detail.html http://www.philly.com/mld/dailynews/news/local/15898729.htm My opinion is that this is indefensible. Thoughts?

To get the item in the fireplace, you will need something(s) from downstairs. You can find the ink for the golem in a place where something is glowing...

I'm sure someone will, but for most people I think they will find it is a "good" length. My playthrough was (I think) in the mid-40s, hour-wise.

Anyone win the game yet or what? Join the WINNER'S CIRCLE.

Anyone who played through Firewine Bridge in the original BG gets a license to kill.

They will be disallowed from selecting those feats as our crafting recipes don't support their abilities.

It's already fixed for the next patch.

This theory is correct!