Monte Carlo

Forced, plot-critical NPCs you have to take with you. Annoying VO 'talent' (most annoying ever? Easily Ira in JA2). Turn-based mass rat fights. The thing that made me give up on Fallout 2. My-way-or-the-highway tactical solutions (cf. unmodded Blitzkrieg / Silent Storm).

As an atheist I find God Games oppressive. Or something.

RTS fantasy games that give 'hero' units names and the odd upgrade then claim that this means that the whole joint has "RPG elements." It doesn't. It has a couple of lame hero units.

Romances.

No, it is not for "free." If I do not like the game I uninstall and delete it. If I do like the game I buy it. Priceless. It wouldn't stand up in court, and it doesn't stand up here. Theft is theft is theft. I know that the rise of the internet and file-sharing has been used by many to try to redefine property rights. However, they've all failed. Intellectual property is as tangible as physical property. You can steal it. OK, catching you might be tougher, but it doesn't change the simple fact that piracy is theft. Cheers MC

Cheers Starwars. After a thre-year gaming drought I'm suddenly inundated with games I want to play, a pleasant dilemma! MC

I'm following this since another poster raved about it a while back. It's a RPG that looks like Medieval TW:2. Cool. I'm picking it up. Also looking forward to Majestic 2. Cheers MC

^ TrueNeutral, I understand where you're coming from and I genuinely agree to a large extent with what you're saying... but... If you look at the sheer breadth of games enjoyed on this forum, many of them are utterly mainstream. Posters here like sports sims (which leave me cold) that are best-sellers. Others dig the wildly successful GTA games (which, incidentally, I find repugnant) which are uber best-sellers. Others, like me, like twitchy crack-games like Diablo 2 or best selling strategy games like the Total War series. People here are, by and large, hardcore enough to see and appreciate games for what they are and what they are trying to achieve. In much the same way that I am an exceptionally nerdy movie buff who loves 1970's and 80's crime movies, sci-fi and horror, I can also appreciate popcorn stuff if it's done well. So although I'm unlikely to pick up Spore, I definitely don't dismiss the opinions of the people here just because they are 'hardcore' gamers. Sure, I take it into account, but look at the sympathetic account above by a regular here, which I think rather proves my point. Cheers MC

Starwars, is there a release date for Age of Decadence, and is it only available as a download? Cheers MC

Re-reading my post I think I was a bit harsh on the gaming press. I actually quite like some of the games journalism in the dead tree magazines etc, it's the 'professional' gaming websites that drive me nuts.

^ Let's face it, all trade press suffers from this, it's part of the deal. I'm sure that "Soldering Irons Monthly" has to get in bed with the soldering iron industry now and then. Having said that, there is something uniquely infuriating about the gaming press - lots of otherwise unemployable twenty-something men in ironic tee-shirts writing about games they're not wildly interested in. Personally, if I were going to be a trade journalist I'd rather be a motoring correspondent and suck up to Porsche, BMW etc and drive really fast. Not play some console dreck and pretend to be excited about it. Cheers MC

Gadzooks! How on earth could any of us impress you? You are magical Volo and we are merely your clueless puppets, here to amuse and entertain you. Mindless foils for your unique wit, wisdom and incisive conversational style.

Just read the press blurb about the tool set -

^ Even wronger. Where, ever, has a four person party been 'typical?' Been playing since 1980. Seen one-player-one-DM games (rare), fifteen-handed dungeon raids (need a big garage and lots of pizza), three players each taking two player characters for a party of six and just about every other configuration inbetween. Funnily enough, the average size of the groups I've played in was six (including the DM).

^ What newc said goes without saying. Also - * Good character generation and development, as customizable as possible and with a tangible effect on the environment (i.e. my decisions are acknowledged) * Exploration / scale of game for replayability * Good NPCs * Humour, nothing worse than a game taking itself too seriously * Crunchy, challenging tactical combat * Nice to look at - that's not meant to mean rig-grinding eye candy but well designed, good GUI etc (Fallout's PIPboy springs to mind, so do the IE game "character sheets" as well as the BG series overland maps. * Mod-able, overlooked but additional content always floats my boat Not asking too much am I? Ideal RPG - The tactics / mission interface of Jagged Alliance 2, the NPC ethos of BG2, the scale of the BG series, the tactical combat of TOEE and the general tone / attitude of the BIS IWD/ NWN2 games. Oh, and as easy to mod as NWN with old-fashioned shoebox size packaging and a cloth map. Cheers MC

^ What the man said, but I'll elaborate. BG was based on a pen & paper games system where you had six-second rounds. So it's turn-based as in "it's your turn." What the Infinity Engine did was basically segue those turns into real-time, i.e. under the hood they were still turns but they were continuous: the game knew what instruction you'd given and applied it then moved onto the next. This gives the feeling of simultaneous combat. Turn-based purists didn't like it, but it was probably the best compromise. It's still not twitchy, really, you have to think. Trying to twitch your way through some of the tougher fights in the high level IE games would be virtually impossible - you have to think. The real time with pause allowed you to go "whoah!" stop the combat, issue orders, resume combat, pause it again (etc). Again, not twitchy. This allows for all the stuff you can do in a pen and paper game like attack, switch weapons, cast spells, drink potions, move, fire a bow, activate a magical item, turn undead creatures, use innate special abilities (like shape-changing etc). Another feature commonly attributed to Infinity Engine games was full party control, which also features in Dragon Age. Again, there are two camps. Some people hate it - citing micromanagement. Some people love it, citing full tactical control (and poor AI which has dogged CRPGs for ever). So if you have three fighters and a wizard in your party taking on two enemy warriors, six zombies and a wizard you would... Pause. Decide what to do (i.e. Fighter one attacks the wizard with his bow, fighter two engages the zombies, fighter three takes out the enemy warriors whilst the wizard preps a spell, say a fireball). Allocate orders. Unpause. See what happens. Maybe pause again and give new orders. Rinse and repeat. That, in essence, is BG / Infinity Engine style combat. Cheers MC

I play vanilla MTW2, like most fans, on VH/ VH (non-TW people - very hard strategy and very hard battles). I breezily set the Total War: Kingdoms mod to Hard / Very Hard and set up a game as England. Twenty turns later I was totally check-mated by a boundlessly wealthy Scotland, a resurgent Ireland, a Pope that clearly hated me and French sniping. I gave up. I like a challenge but this was silly. I've discovered that Medium Strategy and Hard Battles is a good challenge, unless you are one of those people who open an Excel spreadsheet for your resources and do the maths every turn to see if you can afford that squadron of hobilars. Crusades are now what they should be - a major drain on resources, a politically charged chore undertaken only when well-prepared and resourced. In vanilla MTW2 you could just kick one off for sh*t and giggles and loot your way across the near-East. Am currently playing the Mod as the Teutonic Order, sweeping all before me with flying columns of armour, awaiting a high medieval uber-showdown wirth the Horde, prior to conquering the Americas. Cheers MC

^ Thanks, that makes sense. I suppose the term 'writer' to me conjures up someone with more direct creative and editorial control. But in the terms of the different parts of a computer game what you say makes sense. My only concern would be "a-camel-is-a-racehorse-designed-by-a-commitee" syndrome. I'd want to be a crop-headed Prussian movie director, complete with jodphurs and a whip barking orders and wanting everything my way. Which is why it's probably best I don't work in creative, collaborative processes. Cheers MC

A question for Dave, if he returns (and thanks for coming BTW)... I was very interested in your comments about art direction. If I'm reading you right, you create something, pass it to the art department and they choose to draw / create / conceptualise it? Because, if I as lead writer, wrote "The darkspawn horde look like malformed beasts from a Bosch painting - men cursed with the heads of animals, or with their mouths in their chests, or with no eyes in their faces, wearing scraps of armour and carrying crude staves, spears and axes..." I'd expect the art guys to give me that. I wouldn't expect them to go "Er, I know Ed, lets draw some orcs in Medieval themed mail and plate, OK? That writer dude won't notice." Is it like a movie, where the guy who wrote the damn thing gets locked in a trailer while the directors and producers violate the whole thing at their whim? It's interesting. I read in the GwJ interview that you write areas and let the designers populate them / create combats. Because I don't work in your world I rather imagine that your job was a bit like writing a big PnP module, just with more dialogue and plot branching... how compartmentalised is the process? Cheers MC

Sorry mate, but that was exactly what put me off. It isn't a stupid criticism if you don't like eye-bleedingly small text full of pretentious (thought I'd get it in for you) mumbo-jumbo. When it comes to writing, sometimes less is more. OTOH, the slightly creepy, viscerally-scored, "WTF? - fantasy?" and generally awesome PS:T trailer was I understand why so many people loved PS:T. For example, I thought the NPC concepts were superlative. Some people really dig all that extra-planar what-type-of-pasta sauce-they-eat-in-Sigil type stuff. However, it is a deeply flawed game for those of us who don't like interactive novels about meta-physical drivel. Personally, I didn't play 2E AD&D mcuh so I wasn't up on the Planescape setting. However, planar jaunts, Githyanki, hell and psionics are easily my least favourite parts of fantasy / D&D, belonging to my mond more to a science-fantasy type milieu. Ergo it was never really going to be for me. Cheers MC

Yes, the religion thing is interesting. I've referenced the amount of world-building Bio have done on this project. People want to discuss the writing mechanic behind romances instead, what can you do?

^ Hmmm, there has been some generic Bio-scepticism but no more than you'd reasonably expect from this forum. I think that my opening post was more than reasonable and fairly balanced and sort of says what your saying. People are trying to reconcile the stated intention of the developers / writers versus the rather generic look of what we've seen so far. And, yes, the overt LotR style visuals are part of the issue there. Of course, Dave G could be the sneakiest person ever and use the whole vanilla look as a trojan horse to smuggle in some searingly radical stuff. We wait and see. I've been up front: I'm looking forward to DA immensely, will buy it and most probably enjoy it. However, if you are a gaming fan and post on developers boards then I think you're bound to be looking beyond the hype and want to know what's going on under the hood. Cheers MC

Be honest, how long have you been waiting for an opportune moment to deploy that gag?

Looking at the overland map demo in the video, I'm expecting to see some interesting builds for wilderness recon / point-man, i.e. a Ranger / Barbarian / Rogue-type with high INT & WIS. I'm not really good at 3E uber-builds, and my first party will be venture capitalists pirates, i.e. "Wilderness Rogue" (as above, Bbn/ Rog or Rngr/ Rog possibly a Tiefling), a hard-to-kill Fighter-themed assassin, a high CHA spokesman / sorceror and a Cleric / Battle Priest. Cheers MC

Tony, fear not. I love it already and I haven't even played it. Cheers MC