J.E. Sawyer

Even worse, I've seen people with virtually identical system specs having completely different performance (one horrible, one great).

Sweet I love it when reviewers get progression breaks. ;__;

That's also a little excessive.

Hilariously absurd. He's criticizing the game for being the thing it set out to be. There are plenty of things to criticize about NWN2, but his review would be the equivalent of me trashing Chinatown because I don't like noir detective films.

That's very strange. Normally performance in the ruins is much higher than in the exterior. Hmm. Sorry I don't have any good tips on how to change that.

If it were ever done, I would want it done as an independent project, not as a for-profit product. It was initially conceived as a project with very little compromise, and my personal desire would be to keep it that way, for good or ill.

Some people have mentioned that the first time they play the game, the copy protection does something goofy (and LONG) at a black screen for about a minute or so. Try waiting it out.

Ross, was that in a retail version or D2D?

If Obsidian has no problem with me working on it as a unsupported personal project (basically like anyone's personal NWN/NWN2 project), I don't think anyone's rights are violated.

Obsidian bought all of the assets for Jefferson.

It would be nice to do as an independent project, but I'd have to find time for it. I don't do a lot of creative writing anymore, so I've been gearing up to participate (and possibly do a miserable job in) the National Novel Writing Month (November).

What is the name of the magazine/site?

Atari sent them out, so I'm not sure. But reviewers almost always use pre-release versions. It would have been better for press folks to see RCs instead of Betas, but oh well.

We already know that some European press groups have received and used our Beta 5 build for previews/reviews. That sucker is far from the quality of RC6e, which was our release build.

Pretty odd that the reviewer encountered so many crash bugs. I played through the entire OC and never crashed a single time. There were certainly AI bugs, UI bugs, and plenty of C and D gameplay bugs in our final release candidate, but a lot of those have also been fixed in Patch 1. In terms of overall bugginess, I'd put this above the original IWD and KotOR2, about a light year above the original BG. It's probably buggier than IWD2 and BG2.

I enjoyed the Dark Brotherhood stuff in Oblivion, though I hope Fallout 3 has more branching plotlines and important player chioces.

No, sorry. Well below system specs.

Spellcasting classes that already have a deluge of good spells don't need more good spells.

Yes, it was actually an original IWD quest in Lower Dorn's Deep. A paladin's soul had been bound into a suit of armor made from the melted-down shackles of hundreds of dead deep gnome slaves -- slaves from Durdel Anatha. When he spoke, he was supposed to speak with all of their voices in a scary cacophony of noise. He served the fallen priests of Ilmater and would repeatedly spawn and beat the hell out of the party before being destroyed. You could potentially expose the fallen priests and this caused the Voice to be released from his bonds. Taking the remains to Sister Calliana in Kuldahar would reward you with one of several powerful items that had significant drawbacks to their use -- mini-curses, sort of. Anyway, the quest was pretty complex and Tom French and I decided to cut it rather than risk it breaking (and breaking other things) all over LDD.

I wouldn't go that far, but I think they are all useful and generally cool.

Gamestopping bugs = the game doesn't ship. That's not to say there will be absolutely no gamestopping bugs, but at this point, they should be extremely hard to create or the result of hardware issues. Most of the bugs I see these days are C or D priority bugs. BTW, on Saturday, I'm leaving on a trip. If you don't hear from me before November, that's why.

Guy, if you don't understand how developing PC RPGs works by now, I don't know how else to explain it to you. They're gargantuan compared to all other genres and types of games and they are full of content that cannot realistically be spot-checked. It's that simple.

It's a difficult question to answer. My great-grandfather came to the United States from Hungary, but the family was entirely descended from Donauschwaben migrants coming out of Baden-W

Camera and movement controls, which are notoriously difficult to tune to the satisfaction of a wide assortment of players. There are some genuine balance bugs, but we've noticed a lot of those already. D&D has a lot of ROOLZ, so there's a lot of stuff that can be broken/poorly balanced/wrong. The toolset also needs some fixes simply for ease of use, which has been a big complaint for many people.