Monte Carlo

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.

Just finished Death's Head by David Gunn. I don't actually read much fantasy or sci-fi anymore, but after this maybe I should. SPOILERZ 100% schlock, a sort of gross-out Starship Troopers on acid. Our hero is an amoral space legionnaire (I thinking Vin Diesel for the movie role) recruited (after being found living with a barbaric alien tribe in a cave who eat his girlfriend - it's that sort of story) into a parody of the SS (I'm faintly reminded of the Gran Bretan legions of Moorc0ck's Hawkmoon series). He then undertakes some assassination missions and finds a talking, semi-sentient gun (Lilacor from BG2 with bullets) before being thrown into a Stalingrad-esque future warzone fighting "The Uplifted" (people mutating into cyborg-computer hybrids). There's a brilliant tongue-in-cheek reference to the UN / Liberal West in the "United Free", an enormously powerful utopian race of politically correct beings who encourage endless negotiations to stop wars without actually doing anything. I couldn't put it down. It's the literary equivalent of a pack of twinkies and a six pack. Congratulations, Mr. Gunn. Just when I thought people were forgetting that sci-fi might be (quel horreur!) fun and jaded you came along. Can't wait for the next book. Cheers MC

:: sigh :: The argument is moot. The new 4E iteration of the rules is so far removed from the origins of the game that it now lives in name only. And Gromnir is palpably right when he says that (1) 3E was initially more streamlined than AD&D and (2) By the end it was as complex as AD&D. Why? Splatbook-mania. It's always been the death of each edition and it'll kill 4E too. The business model demands it... you've got to sell more supplements. I think a brief history less is required to clarify this - 1. Chainmail - a fantasy wargame. Squad Leader with swords. Gygax, Arneson and the rest decided to imbue some units with extra stats to make things more interesting. Gamers took to it with gusto and all sorts of supplements were generated to support this odd little game. Thus.... 2. D&D (the "Grey Box" set, the first D&D game many of us ever played). Again, very sketchy, the rules where all over the place. It was a niche product, and the spirit of make-it-up-as-you-go-along was very strong. 3. AD&D came along in the late 70's early 80's (1st Ed) to (as I said before) attempt to codify all these other rules. Stuff like THACO, dual-classing, multi-classing, race-based level caps, XP tables for separate classes, THACO bonus tables for different weapons versus different armour types, somatic spell components and wandering prostitute tables all came in and gave us nose bleeds). TSR took off, there was a religious furore about the game, it appeared in ET (yadda yadda) and the game became a small but deep footprint in our cultural consciousness. 4. 2E came along on a tide of campaign settings, novels, splatbooks. Why? It was a booming and profitable business. Basic / Expert D&D was launched as a retro "Basic D&D" product. I gave up at this point and played RuneQuest instead. TSR was riven by an epic management battle between Gygax and Lorraine Williams which can be read about in gory detail elsewhere if you Google it. 5. Video killed the Radio Star, or rather the PC killed the pen and paper gaming group. CRPGs saw P&P hit a bit of a glut by the late 80's / early 90's. Gold box games notwithstanding, I'm not joking, whatsoever, when I say that Bioware completely rescued D&D's arse with BG1. Ever since, P&P gaming has borrowed more computer game memes, 4E being a classic example - oh the irony! A CRPG / MMO designed to be played as a P&P game as opposed to a P&P game designed to be played on the 'puter! 6. WoTC had a real drama on their hands in 1999/2000 when 3E was launched. I was a regular on the Eric Noah 3E boards out of curiosity at the time. I think Monte Cook and the others did an excellent job of keeping 3E recognisably 'D&D' whilst making it more elegant and easy-to-use, driving a stake through the heart of the wierd bundles of rules that had accumulated since the late 70's and wouldn't die. I really hoped that this was it: an iteration of the game that would be as popular and durable as 1E / 2E and last as long. 7. But, alas, the curse of the D&D marketing model struck. People had hoped that the cliche ****tail that was the FR would remain a 2E throw-back. Oh no, it returned. So did class sourcebooks, prestige classes, bizarre creature templates so you could create a vampiric Dire Fiendish half-minotaur with Draconic blood (yawn). You could buy an ew ruleset of "Pasta Sauces of Faerun" and argue with the guy who wanted to use a rule from it. It was 1980 all over again. Don't even get me started on 3.5. In conclusion, 1E and 2E didn't make sense. It was a decades worth of compromise on house rules condensed into a system propped up by splatbooks. The exact same thing has happened to 3E between 2000 and 2008, not a disimilar timescale, ergo my view that it's the marketing model that breaks every iteration of the game. I've only touched on the impact of 'puters, and not even mentioned the D20-Borg aspect but that's for another time. Cheers MC

Walsingham, using just those two mods is extremely unlikely to cause any compatability issues. I don't know if there is a BG1 fixpack / Baldurdash, but if there is the usual drill is to install it after the official patch but before any other mods. If you are a mod virgin and decide to go for more check out one of the many mod compatability guides on the Pocket Plane or Gibberlings Three forums. I routinely use about fifteen-twenty mods for BG2 (from Redemption / Ascension through to the Wes Weimer mods, PPG Unfinished Business and Quest Packs etc as well as tiny ones like the 1PP BG1 asset art mod). Getting the installation order as optimal as possible is critical, a fresh BG2 / mod install takes me about three hours but it's worth it. Funnily enough, I've tried a few NPC mods but other people's ideas of a good Joinable NPC aren't necessarily mine. So I seldom use them. Kelsey is probably the best and most polished, plus you can't really go wrong with a sorcerer. Note to BG2 modders: For those of us who've played the Yoshimo saga to death (literally) and want to feed Jan Jansen into a shredder, can we please have a single-class, combat-orientated thief NPC? Please? Cheers MC Edit: If the Widescreen Mod works for BG1 then for the love of god get it. Awesome. You'll find it on Gibberlings Three. BG2 looks great on my 22" flatscreen at 1680 x 1050.

Ha, Grom's probably not too far off the mark. After all, nostalgia ain't what it used to be. Having said that, the good old days weren't actually too bad. The lack of rules from the original D&D days was all part of the fun. Yep, people did spend inordinate amounts of time making up their own house rules for just about everything. No two D&D groups at my Sunday morning games club could actually play together (the first three hours were a UN Security Council style house rules negotiating session). 1E AD&D was actually invented as a sort of sop to the home-brew rules brigade (which is why 1E has a table for everything). The one thing it didn't have a table for was your campaign. Remember Rule One? My beef with new D&D is the corporate sameness of it. The rot set in with collecting campaign settings with 2E AD&D. Sure, everybody is encouraged to do their own thing, but let's be honest the business model is and always will be selling splat books to collectors. 4E is the apogee of this. I implore anybody really interested in pen and paper gaming to: 1. Find some like-minded gamers 2. Read some rules from some books you bought for pennies on ebay 3. Ignore the ones you don't like 4. Have fun, for chrissakes The best gaming fun you will ever have is beer, pizza and using a shoe brush to represent a carrion crawler because you don't have the right miniature. You really don't need three hundred dollars worth of splat books and supplements. As I said, nostalgia ain't what it used to be. Cheers MC

I guess the next 4E D&D game could be comfortably set anywhere Pokemon is set, seeing as they are now virtually identical. 5E will be a trading card game. From the ashes is the good news: 6E D&D will be a game played using 15mm metal minis using stripped-down rules in small samizdat-style booklets full of random tables. They'll call it Chainmail. The biggest problem was D20*. They tried to make it the Windows Operating System of pen and paper gaming and look what happened. Cheers MC * I like D20 and 3E, BTW. That's not to say I want every game to use the same mechanics.

^ Actually, I finished the original and rather liked it. It's heart was in the right place. There was lots of strange crafting (putting weeds in bottles and stuff) and books of utter generic fantasy nonsense, but there was enough charm, exploration and quasi-Diablo type combat to keep it going. I'm still not interested in who the blacksmith is enjoying relations with, though. 2009 is going to be the Year of Dragon Age / Diablo 3. So it was written, and so it was. I'd not bother releasing a fantasy CRPG to go up against either of them because it will be squashed like a tiny bug on the windscreen of destiny. Cheers MC

1. BG2 It's not dead, Volourn, I'm playing it this evening and people are still modding it. It's one of those few games that accomplishes almost everything it sets out to achieve, mainly via the generosity of spirit shown by the developers. 2. Medieval Total War (1 & 2) An epic achievement, for me the strategy game equivalent of BG2. 3. IWD2 Controversial pick, I know, but I've played it to death, love the tinkering with the IE and the bravery of making a hardcore game for the fans. Great VO and music, BIS squeezed every last gram of functionality out of the ailing Infinity Engine. I salute you! 4. BG1 Nothing more needs to be said. 5. Jagged Alliance 2 Once upon a time developers were allowed to make games without marketing creatures, focus groups and console junkies telling them what to do. So Sirtech created one of the coolest games ever made. Tactics, humour, an adult video store with a hidden armoury and an ice cream van. Respect. 6. IWD Just enormous dungeon-crawling fun. What games should be like. 7. Doom / Doom 2 The only FPS that has hooked me and kept me hooked. Atmosphere, excellent level design, pretty scary monsters. Shame about the movie. 8. X-Com: Enemy Unknown Turn-based sci-fi goodness. 9. Fallout: Tactics Love it to bits. Played it to death. A game that allowed me to go seriously tactical and play with all the toys, even a tank. Grossly underrated. 10. Rome: Total War When modded, an excellent game (Total Realism) that I played to death. Honourable mentions: Blitzkrieg 1 & 2 Silent Storm Diablo 2

If I'd won the lofty title of "Dragonslayer" (which I presume suggests that you have bested a giant reptillian beast and are therefore hard as nails) I wouldn't be troubling myself with the local blacksmith's sex life. I'd be slapping him on the shoulder, congratulating him on his manliness and comissioning the forging of an even bigger +5 Hackmaster greatsword. He would be tugging his forelock, praying that I wasn't about to have one of my frequent Chaotic Evil moments. I am therefore deeply suspicious of these design desicions. Cheers MC

Care to expand on that? Obviously Xard will have his own view, but he's not too far wrong as far as I'm concerned. Troika clearly wanted to make the game (a) free-form (you can finish the game very quickly if you take certain paths) with the result that the critical path is more like a very faded trail hidden beneath the long grass. They also (b) are pretty faithful to the pen and paper module. Which is a problem. P&P modules, especially old skool AD&D modules, are sketchy. That's done on purpose, so that the DM can fit the story into his or her existing campaign. So the arbitrary monster population of the dungeons is reflected in the computer games which might be part of Xard's gripe with the encounters. Having said that, there are some good battles - the old tower at the start of the game where you fight a load of bandits is fun. That giant wandering about is tough, but then again bumping into monsters and running away is all part of the fun. But, yes, it is the best implementation of any pen-and-paper combat system I've ever seen in a CRPG. I don't say that lightly. Very tactical, turn-based, lots of options and great to look at. 9/10. Cheers MC

Like I say time and again, the challenge is to please the story-junkies and the tactics junkies at the same time. A CRPG without combat is just a talking book. Planescape is a brave exception that proves the rule. My views on PS:T are on the record: My eyes bled and I didn't finish it. Having said that, a brilliant combat engine without a story or atmosphere is also lame - look at Troika's ToEE. The combat was excellent, really really good. The game sucked. Personally, a fantasy version of JA:2, a hundred hours long with some witty NPCs and dialogue would be my ideal game. D&D: Tactics with attitude. Cheers MC

^ I take Josh and Gromnir's points on this completely. Of course you can track how many times Bob the adventurer used Shield Parry, Battleaxe Attack and Open Lock in one pen & paper gaming session. I don't see why you can't use a variant in a CRPG. 1. The "Diablo" XP bar you see going up everytime you kill a monster. Except it doesn't represent levelling at all - it represents your skill bonus with that weapon type and that mode of attack. So you aren't 'levelling up' in the traditional way, you're just improving your skills. 2. How to control this to counter "Mudcrab Murder" syndrome as described by Crashgirl? I'd have a number of mechanisms, i.e. perhaps only certain battles allow for skill experience gain (set a challenge rating - i.e. bashing up rats and goblins earns you nothing). 3. You could build in all sorts of 'hidden' skill advantages / disadvantages contingent on how you play (i.e. somebody who takes repeated hits to the head could get tougher but dumber, someone who prefers light weapons and sneaking could get even sneakier but have a penalty to heavier weapons and armour). The fun is figuring out what they are and how they work. 4. Forget quest based XP... you could 'win' perks, bonuses or experience instead depending on how you completed a battle or a quest. For example, if Bob chooses to hack up the ogre guarding the bridge he gets a bonus in axe use (and a hidden mechanic is tracking his ogre-massacre count to eventually unlock a hidden 'favoured enemy' bonus) whereas if Dave talks his way out of it his reward isn't XP, it's a boost to his dialogue skills and perhaps a hidden mechanic tracking his ogre-sweet-talking skills to eventually unlock a dialogue bonus versus monstrous humanoids. Lastly, Boris does something extraordinarily wacky, unusual and doomed ot failure. The "Heroic Failure" feat timer is activated which might lead to something entirely different happening, maybe a karmic sympathy bonus from ogres bear with me, I'm making this up on the fly). Basically, the mechanics are hidden. Allow the player to play the way they want and let them find out how it develops their character. Probably crazy to code and implement, but I throw it in for discussion. Cheers MC

RuneQuest had two main ways of increasing skills: Training (yep, you could buy an extra +10% in broadsword attack if you had the time and money) Experience (you noted down the skills you'd used in the session, then did an inverted d100 check to see if you improved by a 5% increment - it got progressively tougher the higher the skill level) It worked pretty well.

Arcanum, thanks for reminding me. I thought the premise was intriguing. I even trusted, against my instinct, the groupthink that Troika could do no wrong. What happened. The anti-climax of the year. Even the music made me want to slash my wrists. It was also one of the butt-ugliest games I've ever seen, and I'm not a graphics-orientated person by any stretch of the imagination. Another to add to the list.