Monte Carlo

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

Vol, I'm not ignorant, I'm lazy. Big difference.

I can't read those forums, looking for answers amongst all the fawning is especially tiresome. Can you paraphrase for me please?

Agreed, there is stil much to be learnt about how the combat system works. All I've seen is that you have hotkeys for different combat moves on the bottom toolbar - one I've seen is "Shield Bash" where you get an extra shield attack (I'm presuming you lose any Armour bonus that round). In the video the player pauses, chooses this option and charges the enemy. Meanwhile, another character snipes away at the baddies with a bow, peppering them with arrows (archery looks quite powerful in DA from the little I saw - I predict some Legolas style bowmen characters). As we saw in the previous video, magic-using characters got to use grease / fire / ice spells dynamically, which looked well implemented. Features like this are cool. The acid test is how they all balance and integrate into tactical combat. I don't know if AC absorbs or deflects damage (or both). I don't know how strength / agility style stats impact on bonuses for melee. I don't know if there is the light / heavy armour routes depending on DEX-type bonuses. It ain't D&D, it's new and that's all part of the fun. If the baseline is that you can customise characters buy choosing different tactical / feat packages to provide a variety of fighting styles / tactical outcomes then I'll be happy. I'm alreay happy with the GUI / default combat style which is virtually identinal to the IE, just with zoom and up to date graphics. Cheers MC

After a very long fallow gaming period for me personally, all of a sudden these all loom on the horizon: Total War: Empires Diablo 3 Storm of Zehir Dragon Age TW: Empires will keep me going for about two - three years with mods. D3 is a bit of a McGame, but I'll devour it all the same and it will be a sugar-rush two-three months. SoZ will also be a short treat, but I'm hoping the new features will provoke a bit of a NWN2 modding resurgence. As for DA, I see with mods / future content another years worth of fun. All of this will cost me about UK

My favourite is the BG2 mod that allows Romance Junkies to play all of them at once. Imagine one that incorporates them with all the mod romances out there? On the other hand, just don't. Please. It's probably against the Geneva Convention or something.

^ The 3-4 responses / 6-8 encounters issue was aimed at the reality: people are playing a computer game, not a "Dating Simulator" or interactive novel. Of course you could do it differently, but at the end of the day it will involve more text as well as balancing the ratings / maturity issue. I completely understand why people loved the talking book aspect of, say, Planescape, but as many people just didn't get it. Ergo PS:T was a niche product. In the same way that hardcore tactics / combat fans (I put myself in that camp) are often disappointed by the need to mainstream a game for popular appeal, so the "I want to live in a romantic fantasy novel" crowd (I didn't realise how big this constituency was until I had a look at the Bio boards, so obviously they are out there) will be similarly disappointed. Clearly, you can write a romance within these strictures, because it's the template for the BG2 romances, which lots of people enjoyed for some reason. I reckon it's a challenge for any writer to do them well, personally I dumped Jaheira / shut her up immediately with a "get over it" response in BG2 every time that soppy romance muzak came on. Cheers MC

If we're gonna have romances, they really need to put in a divorce arc as well. How we laughed as the NPC (despite only joining the party a fortnight ago) won the right to 3/4 of the gold, all the armour and you only get supervised weekend access to your familiar twice a month. Divorce Lawyer would make a good prestige class. Just to reiterate - Romances in CRPGs are invariably lame. Obviously it's difficult to agree with Grom all the time, but try writing a credible story arc about anything in 6-8 three line encounters, each with three optional response trees. I agree that there's a dichotomy at work - CRPG writing requires haiku-like skillz but it isn't the first choice of the accomplished writer who could be doing TV, novels, movies (etc). Discuss. There are good CRPG writers... they'd probably be even better in another medium! But you can't ask a michelin-starred chef to win his third star in a kitchen with one dodgy gas ring and a can of beans, can you? To make a romance work you'd need to put in a disproportionate level of effort when you could be doing things that everybody will enjoy. Frankly I find them.... laughable. I'm not dissing people who like them, it's just the way I feel on the subject. Personally, making an ally, changing an NPCs mind on something fundamental, persuading them to do something, winning the abiltity to choose their new class... these things are more meaningful story-wise than a 'romance.' FWIW, there's a No Office Romances rule in my adventuring parties! Cheers MC

I find it amusing that many people who hate RPG "micro-management" also love crafting. Which is strange, because crafting is easily one of the fiddliest, most micro-managerial and annoying aspect of CRPGs. "Oooh, I've collected three rubies and the Golden Doo-Dah of power. All I have to do is cast three spells on it and I get an item I COULD HAVE BOUGHT FROM A MERCHANT AND SAVED ALL THIS RUNNING ABOUT." I really liked Weimer's Item Upgrade mod. Find stuff. Give it to the Dwarf. Pay him. Bingo! Cool magic item. I struggle with crafting. My heart literally sank when my first NPC in Mask of the Betrayer started explaining about alembics and crafting sacks and essences. If it was BG2 I'd have insta-chunked her with a 120hp backstab and moved onto a less annoying NPC, except of course it was MotB and everybody was trying to go all Planescape on me. NOTE TO DEVELOPERS: Just now and then I want a half-orc barbarian NPC called Xarg who is a 400 hp meat-shield and has interactions that seldom go beyond "Ug! Xarg smash! Xarg kill!" Not a witty bloke with blue hair who looks like he was auditioning for Duran Duran. Thanks. ::sigh:: Sorry, I just had to get that off my chest. Cheers MC

Dave G did a long interview (45 mins long) with Gamers With Jobs (linked on the main DA site). He specifically mentioned that there were side quests and extraneous stuff outside of the critical path. On another thread on the Bio boards about combat encounters, the devs strongly hinted that there were a number of optional fights with other parties, as a nod to the BG series equivalents which many of us loved. He also mentioned the amount of work they've done on the campaign setting, to the extent that there's a guy who's job is to do nothing but keep up to speed with the in-house wiki tracking DA lore. This is cool, and explains my extremely forgiving tone about what we've seen so far. Of course, I am mercurial when it comes to Bio and will switch on the +5 flamethrower as and when necessary Cheers MC

Hi, I thought I'd start a new one. The last one focussed on the announcement / teaser trailer and a fair bit more has come out since then. There is now an excellent gameplay trailer out there, as well as some decent interviews by Dave Gaider (etc). My thoughts, with the negative ones first - * I still think the aesthetic is too reminiscent of LotR, especially the Celtic / early Medieval hybrid in arms and armour (except for the comedy plate armour, with the cereal box pauldrons. Minor point? Perhaps, I concede that the look of the LotR movies was so damn good it colours forever the way you look at most mainstream fantasy imagery. Still, there's no excuse for the Uruk Hai, er Blight-horde. * We've been offered this very different, gritty 'dark' game world. I've yet to actually see it. Mages are frowned upon. Er, OK. What else? Again, I'm prepared to give Bio bucketfuls of benefit of the doubt but I've still not seen enough to convince me otherwise. I hope they've not mixed up "dark and gritty" with "taking ourselves too seriously." * Freedom. The developers are on a charm offensive to push non-linearity, but Dave G as a designer is very interested in the critical path. Fair play, he's up front about that. DA still contains, as far as I can figure out (A) a critical path you'll be channelled down, complete with trademark Bio ponderous cutscenes, (B) A fixed opening role, i.e. a Grey Warden (Jedi folks, that's what it looks like to me, no doubt there will be a Sith, er fallen Grey Warden path) and

^ What on earth is the guy on the right armed with? The Shovel of Dinosaur-Smiting +1? Is he going to hit that 'raptor or dig a hole to hide in? NWN2 also has some of the silliest helmets / masks. My epic-level Frenzied Berserker put on the Mask of Persuasion and it looked so.... wrong. Cheers MC

I tried SCSII and found the scripting a bit cumbersome. So I went back to Tactics instead.