J.E. Sawyer

Recently there's been some pushing and shoving about the priority of features and balance. My stance is always the same: core before more.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joanna_Newsom

Work desktop.

Random encounters in Fallout are scripted on a per-square basis. The region determines the difficulty. So, it's certainly possible that you encountered raiders with miniguns, but their "scaling" is fixed to the world map square.

Theory tested. I loaded up Fallout, made a character, and went straight west from Vault 13. I encountered a group of super mutants and a floater. I tried to run away and a super mutant shot me at 15 hexes in the dark for 96 damage, killing me. If that's scaling, I don't think I want to see what those random enounters are like at 15th level.

How did it scale? I don't remember any scaling in Fallout. If I wandered southwest in Fallout 2, I'd almost inevitably run into Enclave troopers who would wipe the floor with me. In Fallout, if I wandered northwest, I'd run into floaters and centaurs, who would also usually wipe the floor with me. Areas most certainly did not scale. If you somehow managed to get into the Necropolis by blowing past everything in between it and Vault 13, the ghouls and super mutants would destroy you.

Great, then let the player deal with the consequences of attempting to conquer an area that is obviously full of great challenges before the character is of an ideal level to do so. I've read Bethsoft designers defend the easily-abused learn-by-doing system by saying that it's not their responsibility to prevent the player from doing stuff like jumping around the world non-stop to build their Acrobatics skill. I don't get why that philosophy doesn't extend to things like auto-balancing. In games like Ultima V, the Phantasie games, Fallout, even Pool of Radiance, the player had many exploration options at any given time. After leaving Tilverton in Curse of the Azure Bonds, you could head straight to the Mulmaster Beholder Corps if you wanted to. Your characters were all in the 5th-7th level range, but hey -- knock yourself out. Auto-balancing effectively removes serious consequence from player choice. As unintuitive as this may seem, choice without serious consequence often makes the player feel pretty impotent.

I really hope they support the Steel Battalion controller. Chrome Hounds looks like the feature list from Line of Contact. Hopefully it will be good, unlike Line of Contact. Which was horrible.

I have never enjoyed any game with difficulty scaling that wasn't by user choice. If I played F2 and areas like SAD scaled to an easier level of difficulty because I stumbled across it at 5th level, I would be pretty disappointed.

Context-sensitive vertical drop-down menus.

We did; we're not using the radial menu in NWN2.

Is this what you're looking for? http://support.lucasarts.com/patches/kotor2.htm

Whoever took that screenshot should go into the .ini and bump up the res to 1600x1200.

We do not. Obsidian just bought the old assets from IPLY.

Yes and yes.

I think a fraudulent interview would be a little more risky in what it said.

Kewl bike. I don't own the pictured bike (Ducati Sport 1000). I just have a baby Duc, a 1999 Monster 750.

You're probably seeing the old Obsidian Server. The new server should be running vanilla at 72.232.0.157. 5:30 PST is the time (5 minutes from now). BE THERE!

I use a 160 gig external Firewire drive for storage of documents/images. I use the Raptor for applications/games. If my Windows/game hard drive bites it, big deal. I can always re-install applications. RE: NOISE It's pretty quiet. Unless you have bat ears, I guess. Seriously though, my digital cable box makes more noise doing nothing than my tower does while playing games.

By the way, my new 74GB Raptor drive flies. The map load times on Battlefield 2 now take less time than the client verification. It's small, but prior to this I was using one 8 and one 12 gig drive.

No, it was vanilla.

ggs Man, that VoIP better be enabled soon!

SERVER UP NOW. Just do a search for "Obsidian". Running vanilla with the 1.2 patch.

Not the same Atari.