Monte Carlo

You need BGTuTu, this is not really negotiable. As well as Tactics, Ascension (etc). Just go to Pocket Plane Group and enjoy. I now play this game one of two ways: 1. Icewind Dale Style - i.e. I make all the characters (multiplayer game cut-and-pasted into my single player folder) and therefore get to try out strange party combos. You miss out on a lot of NPC stuff, but hey, you know all that already. 2. Core party style - i.e. main player character, one romance character and Imoen (i.e. core plot character). And I really hate Imoen. You can pick up other NPCs occasionally as and when you need them, but this is quite an interesting challenge. The last time I did it I made Imoen a sorcerer (there's a little mod out there that let's you switch NPC classes), Jaheira and PC Fighter / Thief. Perfectly balanced party, you're only really missing the powerful insta-chunk undead turning you get with a good or neutral aligned cleric. Daystar helps re-balance this. BG1/TotSC/BG2/ToB, all insanely modded with BGTuTu is a permanent feature of every computer I've owned for as and when each of the games has come out (ten years or since BG1?).

This is the bit I don't get, perhaps a marketing / industry person can enlighten me: Information technology has revolutionised leisure. I live in London in the early 21st Century, and trust me, it's getting a bit like Bladerunner. OK, we don't have androids or floating police cars (not yet) but on the tube train I stand next to an Estonian punk rocker with a Japanese girlfriend dressed like Xena-goes-Goth or something. They are both playing computer games on their Nintendo hand-helds. He's playing some shoot 'em up, she's playing su doku and some brain-training thing. Between them they have i-phones, gaming consoles and a laptop. William Gibson would feel completely validated. My point is everyone is different, and IT and the internet allows everyone to do the different things they enjoy. There must be a zillion micro-markets... for example my three year old plays simple online games themed around his favourite cartoon characters (actually I quite like the Go Diego Go! Aztec pyramid Tetris-clone). Yet.... yet computer games, dominated by the 500lb gorilla that is the console market, are all turning into the same gooey mush. I find this dichotomy a bit depressing. Sport, racing cars or improbably-muscled avatars wielding comedy guns. I suppose it must be development costs. Until technology allows developers to become like dead-tree book publishers and set up independent, profitable niche businesses catering for older gamers, as per the excellent post about the "gaming baby-boomers" (I'm almost forty and therefore older than most of you lot), I think we are stuck where we are. Having said that, Baby-Boomers can buy all their creaky 60's and 70's favourites digitally remastered and refreshed. Wouldn't it be great if they could do that with computer games? After all, CA looked at Medieval TW and said "that game is so great, now we've got better technology let's make it all over again - just even better!" And, lo! A hit game was given unto us. Also, I honestly think that most of the developers I've conversed with over the years are like writers / authors - not actually greedy people - if they could make a reasonably decent living doing and creating the games they loved then they'd be happy. Hopefully more powerful internet access will allow us to download more mainstream games and see more originality. One last word: piracy. Pirates are killing PC gaming. Theft is theft is theft. Until it stops, lots of the things we'd like to see won't happen. You are, literally, taking the food out of creative people's mouths.... not necessarily the big corporate sharks of popular myth who will always overpay themselves anyway. Cheers MC

I feel exactly the same way as the person who started the thread. Computer role-playing games are more or less dead, I too never finished NWN2 and found NWN pointless. Toolsets? Pah. I pay developers to make games - I don't have the time myself. The reason that older games feel more immersive is that for me they actually capture the spirit of tabletop gaming. For example, JA2 or the IE games look like you are moving miniatures on a diorama. And, as TOEE proved, you can make that look great too (shame about the rest of the game). I completely understand the pressure to provide spectacular graphics - I like eye-candy too (Medieval TW2 with all the options maxed out is beautiful to watch - the graphics are definitely part of the appeal). However, a good game is a good game. Chess is a great game played with pieces carved out of plasticene as much as if it's played on a computer with amazing graphics. These older games had this in abundance. I know, nostalgia ain't what it used to be, but as yet another WW2 themed FPS with amazing Tiger Tanks and realistic recoil from Tommy Guns gets released I just yearn for a game that allows for a bit of immersion, quirkiness and (gasp) micro-managment. Seriously, when Dungeon Siege came out all the people on this forum correctly identified that it was actually a very expensive screensaver. A few years on, it now looks like a masterpiece of interactivity compared to some of the dreck I avoid in the games shop. I am now an elderly grognard. I know. For me, only the Total War series is flying the flag of innovative, immersive gaming. A lot of CRPGs are now simply screensavers or The Sims with swords. Cheers MC

My personal view is that there is a stereotype that the Scots are rock hard, occasionally small and wiry in stature and refreshingly plain-speaking. This has morphed into the classic Tolkein-esque take on the fantastical race of dwarves. Nordic / Scandic myth is also linked to the East coast of Scotland (as well as the Northeast of England). Dwarves feature in that folklore too. I also suspect that, as an infantry officer in the First World War, Tolkein observed Scottish infantry regiments on the Western Front. Speaking as an Englishman, Scottish soldiers have a hard-won reputation as being extremely tough and aggressive in combat. I wonder if this influenced his take on Gimli (etc). Maybe a Tolkein mentat can enlighten us. Cheers MC

At the moment, the Chillblast Fusion Juggernaut (ha ha ha!) is beginning to have the edge over the Dell. Some tec-savvy friends are quite impressed with the system specs and price and suggest that I'll enjoy at least three years top-end gaming from it. Apparently, Crysis runs very smoothly on it. I'm not a FPS fan, but allegedly this game is a notorious systems hawg. Can anybody suggest any custom options that I should go for, as the rig is slightly under budget? I'm thinking of 64 bit Vista. Lastly, will I be able to play old IE games on Vista? Does it have a compatability function like XP? Cheers MC

The Vista issue is interesting - almost all off-the-shelf top end machines come with Vista Premium, except for one of the very expensive Dells which is still running on XP which seems to validate Krezack's point. Does anybody have a view on either of the two systems I linked to? I would appreciate a view. Hint - will be playing Fallout 3 with everything maxed out and want it to run as smooth as a smooth thing covered in olive oil. As for Apples - hmmm that's a religion, not a piece of IT hardware. I'll stick to PCs. Many thanks for the replies, MC

DN, although I of course covet an Alienware rig, I have to ask myself am I really getting more bangs for my buck compared to these other machines? My experience of Dell customer service has been positive, no problems there. Also, Vista? 32 or 64 bit. Discuss. MC

Alternatively, what about this one? Chilllblast Fusion Juggernaut Of course, the issue here is how do I ask for a "Chillblast Fusion Juggernaut" over the phone and keep a straight face? MC

In essence, what is required is a snowy, cartoony-guys-with-axes IWD "Team Fortress" mod for awesome multiplayer akshun. Bagsy the Scottish dwarf. MC

Hello. Apologies for not posting for so long, I was abducted by pirates and have only recently escaped. I am now covered in tattoos and speak in an unconvincing West Country accent. I digress. My trusty Dell XPS is now 3.5 years old and struggling to keep up with simple functions like not crashing on the hour, every hour. Don't get me wrong, I've had good service out of it but it is time to upgrade. My rationale is that I like to spend a bit on a new rig to future proof it. I am a busy person with kids - I do not have the time to tinker with computers when I could be gaming. I have only a cursory knowledge of IT so I am looking for a pretty vanilla, off-the-shelf product in the region of UK

IWD2 comes with a load of pre-generated parties created by the developers. They're very good, try one out. My evil party was only four strong: Sorcerer, Barbarian/Fighter, Cleric of Mask and Ranger/Rogue. With a sorcerer it's almost easy, for more of a challenge swap him out for a vanilla wizard. My good party was (Aasimar) paladin, rogue, fighter 4 / bard 'X', barbarian and druid. No problems whatsoever. Cheers MC

The game will be half finished. Tim will blame the publishers who, in turn, will blame Tim. Rinse and repeat. Whyohwhyohwhy are people still making MMOs? WHY? Of course, I'm not the target audience but I'd rather stick pins in my eyes than play one.

Maybe I'm lucky but I've had quite a dramatic performance improvement, much less jerky than before *and* I'm running on settings a bit higher than my rig should really be handling.

Everybody is entitled to their own opinion, and as somebody who has the technical ability of a potato, my opinion is that modders are gods in the gaming firmament. As somebody who plays mods for virtually all of their games (BG series, Medieval TW, Close Combat, NWN2, JA2) I'd like to say thanks for all the time and effort they put into them. They are grealty appreciated. Cheers MC

Am I missing something? Looks like any other sci-fi shoot-em-up. What's so special? Cheers MC

Games can be art, and good art too. If half a shark encased in a plastic tank of phormaldahyde can be art then so can a game. That's the way I see it. It can only be a matter of time before somebody enters a game into an art competition, after all it would basically be a digital installation project. A rendering of a Taliban fortress using a gaming engine that you can explore a la Quake has already been entered into an exhibition. As for PS:T, it's subjective, of course. I didn't enjoy PS:T as much as others because the "interactive novel" approach, requirement to understand elements of the Planescape setting (which sort of leaves me cold) and that game's propensity to take itself rather seriously all run against my personal tastes (tactics, humour, hack'n'slash). Don't get me wrong, I think it's great that a game as different as PS:T was so popular and that so many people were inspired by it. It just didn't do it for me. It's musings on deep and meaningful stuff left me cold. Cheers MC

If we create an 'X' and 'Y' curve with 'X' being IWD where tactics reign supreme, with 'Y' being Planescape, which is more about plot and characters and interaction (and eye-strain), I'm putting BG2 in the 65% 'X' curve part of my imaginary chart. For me that's about right. Getting that balance is difficult because lots of people here wuod prefer 50/50 or even more. Problem is that the multitudes prefer, I strongly suspect, my end of the spectrum. Well, there is an answer. The game ships with a nifty toolset. People can make their own Planescape-like RPG or their own Diablo-like hack'n'slash. I am still playing BG2 thanks to the frankly saint-like BG2 modding community (bows extremely respectfully). OK, the game I'm playing bears little resemblance to the original, modded to the gunwhales as it is, but it's all part of the fun. I like developing five or six characters exactly the way I like them, and controlling precisely what they do in battle. I'm sorry, but NPC spellcasters still blow chunks in NWN games. In IE games they don't, and if they do it's my fault. My biggest regret is that the TuTu-like mod that was going to allow BG2 to be played with the IWD2 sort-of-3E engine was never released (IceWind Gate). If it were released commercially I'd pay for it. Cheers MC

Given the small number of real allies the US has left, the criminally inept post-war planning by the Pentagon, the fact that the UK always steps up to the plate and that we have spent considerable blood and treasure in Iraq your comment is remarkably crass and insulting. The reflex "hates freedom" line is especially telling. And bunk. I find it the incipient anti-Englishness of certain Americans. You invoke the Boston tea-party yet expect slavish loyalty. Back to politeness school, young man.

[boardcop] What has this got to do with the topic. Go get a room. [/boardcop]

I have a cult based loosely on Ganstourm the Godslayer's (a mad half-orc warlord-chieftan) twisted take on Trotskyism after he spent a year in the wilderness with Major General Anatoly Susenov and his batman from the Urals, Sasha. The two Russians from the Nuclear weapons programme were a bit bewildered at first, but quickly found that life at the court of Ganstourm was remarkably similar to that of the Politburo, albeit with more horned helmets and drinking out of skulls. Together they harnessed magic, radiation and strange long-forgotten technology to forge the God-Slaying weapon from which Ganstourm would take his nom de guerre. The existence of gods angered the Communist visitors strong atheist views and they enabled the half-orc to possess God-Slaying weapons. Ironically, exposure to the heavily radioactive weapons eventually slew Ganstourm, but not before he declared himself a living god and executed his Soviet friends for heresy. Ganstourm's cult, The God-Slayers, think that by slaying the religious elites of other religions, they will ascend themselves to become divine. The Big Secret is the Ganstourm derived his powers from godless technicians. This is only known to the High Priest of the Cult, who worries about it quite a lot. He's like the Wizard of Oz. But bigger. Magic-Users are very rare and only hail from areas where there were no radiation. Radiation, has, however, begat quasi-psionic powers unto a select few. Both psions and magic-users (even rarer, now only hailing from one protected city state that was relatively unaffected by the blast) are however directly blamed for the apocalypse and are ruthlessly hunted down by grim, uber-religious inqusitors. Anarchists plot nihilistic acts of terror is the basements of alehouses. Adventurers make fortunes hunting pre-war artefacts in long-forgotten dungeons and aboard the rusting hulks of dead gods. In the East, ranks of living dead relentlessly storm a huge defensive wall guarded by vast, mercenary armies. I like all the ideas though. However, I'm keeping my mad soviet nuclear scientists, they amuse me. Cheers MC

Then do yourself a favour and play them, they are consistently underrated, and although they are dungeon crawls (which, for me, is a Good Thing in of itself) the stories and NPCs are obviously much-loved by the writers and shine through anyway. OK, HoW isn't the best expansion pack ever, but combine it with TotL and you have a really solid 2E AD&D adventure. As for IWD2, I though it was more fun than a sack of kittens, couldn't understand people who didn't like it. A solid 8.5 / 10 for me. Give them a go, they are classics. Personally, I am heartened to see devs referencing the Infinity Engine / BG games in their comparisons with this NWN2 XP. This can only be positive, I am currently playing BG2 in an insanely-modded high-level game and loving the tactics. Cheers MC

No, it isn't a shortcoming of D&D per se, it's just an unavoidable consequence of having to shoehorn a tabletop system into a computer game played by thousands of people with totally divergent ideas of what constitutes a cool character. If I were the DM in a game where the guy had created a multi-class Genasai Ftr/Cleric of those levels then the spirit of the tabletop game would almost demand that I create proportionate challenges that don't insult the player nor make life too easy for them. Alternatively, I'd have said "look, in this campaign this isn't really an acceptable character." I actually feel sorry for developers who have to ride the D&D horse over the hurdles of making a computer game. They can't win. The sooner a system bespoked for CRPGs comes to the fore the better. I like D&D on the computer, but I'd happily play something designed specifically for the medium as long as it was challenging, convincing and (above all) fun. Still looking forward to MotB. Cheers MC

^ Ah, The Hands of Fury. Yes, it probably was, but you challenged my inner-munchkin with the 10 DEX rogue and my inner-munchkin won

Hello. Although I don't really play much tabletop D&D anymore, I still tweak my homebrew campaign world. This is mainly because one day I will put it on a website for anybody who wants to take a look at it satisfy their curiosity and maybe use bits of it for themselves. I won't bore you with too much of it. People who talk too much about their homebrew campaign worlds can be a bit like those people at work who tell you about their dreams, which invariably aren't as interesting / disturbing (etc) as your own. It's a pretty old-skool, combat-heavy, low-magic type of place heavily influenced by old RPGs like RuneQuest and Arduin (see my previous post on the subject). However, the central premise, which I know isn't wildly original but is quite interesting is this: Take one relatively vanilla, high fantasy world with magic and orcs and all that stuff. Then get a group of apocalyptic baddies to drop and fifty kiloton nuclear device on it (which they had obtained courtesy of extra-planar travel from a group of Soviet scientists in an alternative 1980's, some of whom came back with the apocalyptic baddies). So, yeah, I've thrown some Gamma World and Morrow Project (MP really reminded me of Fallout before Fallout was actually Fallout) but avoided anything remotely Darksun. The world is a few hundred years after the bomb (which, of course, they didn't realise was a bomb). So, on to the point of my post: What would you expect to see in such a setting, and why? Cheers MC

I have to agree with Sawyer. It's a bit like playing a Close Combat game and complaining that your all-armour battlegroup is struggling without infantry and is getting it's arse handed to it by twelve guys with panzerfausts. Or playing a Total War game and wondering why your all-infantry army is decimated by archers before it closes in on the enemy ranks. I know people here seem to like high levels of role-playing, but a game dictated primarily by dialogue decisions influenced by the appropriate soft skill choices is as predictable as an all-combat game dictated by min-maxing and optimal power-gaming. NWN2, like NWN before it, allows non-D&D mentats to click on a "suggested build" button to create an optimal character with no worries whatsoever. Furthermore, D&D isn't actually that difficult from a tactical POV..... build a single-class character and you can't really go wrong in 3E, it's quite paper-scissors-stone. TBH, all the prestige-class character builds people love to construct confuses me... but I view it as one of those things you can indulge in if you want and ignore if you don't. Why not just have loads of characters that the developers enjoyed playing through the game with as playable builds you can choose right from the start, like in IWD2 where you could choose a whole party. Make them easy / intermediate / advanced. I played through IWD2 with one of the pre-generated parties, but is has to be said not Sawyers which had a dwarf rogue with a dexterity score of 10 IIRC. As somebody who likes the ruleset I'm getting a bit tired of relentless dumbing down to pander to people who can't actually be arsed to understand what it is they're actually playing. Cheers, MC