jjc

Sometimes they can, sometimes they can't. They still keep typically keep "half-breed" as the alternative to "full blood," especially if we're talking RPGs and want to determine stat modifiers by race. Racial stat modifiers themselves bring their own brand of trouble, especially in CRPGs: min/maxing leads to a kind of weird system of eugenics through metagaming. How can I argue in the narrative space that race X isn't inherently smarter than race Y when X's INT is always higher?

It's pretty clear that ZeniMax/Bethesda have ambitions to become a major publishing entity outside of Bethesda's RPG niche: a push including Wet/Rogue Warrior/Brink, and now this. Casting Rourke in R.W. and Dushku in Wet is consistent with their strategy of looking for voice talent with appeal targeted to specific genre fans, and I bet they'll want to continue that practice in titles ranging from New Vegas to Doom IV (or whatever's coming from Id.) Fallout 3's marketing was pretty damn successful, but there was also more to distinguish that game from the bulk of available titles than there is for something like Wet. Look at their approach with Wet: they're trying to inject flavor by appropriating appropriated aesthetics from Rodriguez and Tarantino, referencing a film (Grindhouse) that was a colossal box office failure in doing so. This would seem counter-intuitive to many, but they evidently have faith that there's a sizable enough gaming audience who'll recognize the aesthetic and respond (namely, the guys who bought the Planet Terror DVD.) It will be interesting to see how their upcoming action titles perform, but they now have at least three (relative) safety nets (TES, Fallout, Doom) to fall back on.

I've seen this work for puzzle games, platform games, simple arcade games, graphic adventure games. As for complex western CRPGs, I'm not sure I know anyone who's successfully working on that smaller scale other than Jeff Vogel. Otherwise, there are small projects in development whose release dates seem permanently fixed on "when it's done." I don't mean that as a knock against the capability of those guys, it's just that making an Arcanum or a Planescape: Torment takes a hell of a lot of time and more than a handful of people--people who need to be paid if they're going to work on something for "a hell of a lot of time."

Actually, I think that depicting racial conflicts as occurring between fantasy creatures who literally are separate species is an extremely poor analogue to real-world conflicts that occur between members of the same species differentiated only by culture or superficial genetic traits. Regardless of your good intentions, you're reinforcing the idea that there is a physically insurmountable divide between groups of sapient persons that will always tend to create these conflicts; you're turning the perception of otherness into a literal fact. It's a kind of speculation in fiction that may be useful when applied to a description of humanity encountering a really, genuinely alien intelligence that we can't breed with: "lower" apes who can learn symbolic language; a hypothetical species of extraterrestrial. Even then, we have so little real-world experience to refer to in this area that the author, more likely than not, will fall into the trap of appropriating a historical model for the conflict, and then he's right back to filtering history through proxies.

It sure seems to me that all this merging of late is a response to the increased expense of developing for consoles in this hardware cycle and the projected expense of developing for the next cycle. Making games with production values that are up to the standard expected by the XBOX/PS3 audience is a tall order for a small, independent company.

EA might want this BioWare/Mythic hybrid to make something like Mass Effect Online, but BioWare is still producing a highly competitive title for a rival publisher: the Old Republic deal with LucasArts pre-dates their acquisition by EA. I'd be shocked if BioWare had the autonomy to pursue projects with other publishers once their initial commitment to LucasArts is over.

BREAKING NEWS: VALVE MERGES WITH EPIC GAMES WHY DID THEY DO THAT

OVERVIEW The ACID CAVE is filled with ACID PITS and SKULLS and SPINES The goal of this area is to kill the SPIDER MASTERMIND The secondary goal of this area is to locate ammo and health packs RELATED QUESTS Spider Mastermind blood sample can be exchanged with COMMANDER JIM ANNIHILATOR (Barricaded Area, Ruined Shopping Center) for VIRULENT BIO-DEMON SMASHING GLOVES. Then he drinks the blood because he thinks he'll get powers but it just makes his brains melt and ooze out of his face.

Elder Scrolls V: Doom IV set on future Earth during Doom II's invasion by Hell. Expand Doom "universe" by introducing Heaven setting, filled with big musclebound archangels with black eyes who wield katanas.

Are we going to see The Elder Scrolls V: Doom IV? I would play that.

Check out Dragon Quest V.

I've seen a lot of this in Japanese games. They did this in Dragon Quest IV and Mother 3, in both cases for the purpose of splitting you between different perspectives to control the rate at which you got pieces of story information. Siren: same idea, basically, and the segments are played out of chronological order. Running into an NPC you formerly controlled as a PC can be weird. The guy you control at the beginning of Clock Tower (PSX) turns out to be the slasher-killer at the end. There's an idea: a sort of Bodysnatchers game where your intimately familiar PC becomes replaced by a frightening NPC drone. Could also be interesting to try something like swapping you through multiple characters in early chapters, roughly defining their personalities based on how you play them, then throwing them all together at the end, their interactions defined by how you "configured" them--like Dragon Quest IV, but with actual roleplaying.

In all three Fallout games there is only one way to end the game in a manner that will start the epilogue--the "victory" condition. A chain of events must be followed leading up to this. In Fallout, for example, you can shift the events on the chain around a little to suit your taste (choose to do the Cathedral first or the Base first.) The basic idea of a checklist of events leading towards victory is the same as the old games, but the chain is much longer in Fallout 3, and more resistant to tampering. In Fallout and Fallout 2, there was a continuity to the way the player could expect to interact with the world. Progression through time and space were dependent on the movements and actions of the player, and this was maintained whether on a basic "kill gang members" quest or a plot-critical one. A major difference in Fallout 3, regarding story quests, is its reliance on heavily scripted sequences: Tranquility Lane, being captured and taken to Raven Rock, assault by Liberty Prime, etc. Once they are initiated, the player is "locked in" to these scenarios and cannot leave without satisfying their criteria. These are sealed bubbles of activity that exist entirely outside of time and space, as time and space can be understood by their presentation in the free-roaming action that constitutes most of the game's content. Raven Rock is a place, but it is not a place in the sense that Rivet City is a place. You cannot elect to go to Raven Rock, even if you explore the map and find its entrance. The interior of Raven Rock only exists during the time you are summoned there by the plot. Similarly, because exit from Raven Rock is barred until the quest is complete, you cannot elect to go anywhere else in the world while you are inside that scenario. What a player can expect a "quest" to be is therefore redefined: in Fallout or Fallout 2, a quest is an objective to be accomplished within and according to the rules of one continuous game world. In Fallout 3, a quest may entail the player's sudden transport to a discrete scenario which is separate from the larger world and may disregard the established rules of that world entirely. Bethesda do this to accommodate aesthetic or narrative choices: they desired a sequence where the player was kidnapped and forced to escape from the enemy's stronghold, a sequence where a giant robot battles the enemy, etc. The consequence of accommodating these choices is the restriction of the player's ability to interfere with scripted scenarios playing out as planned. The result is the sense that the game world's battling factions are driving the narrative, not the player. This could be ameliorated by tweaks to existing scenarios: let the player opt to evade capture and storm through Raven Rock's front door: same enemies, same location, same offer from the supercomputer; let the player control the giant robot. It's a step towards negating the dissonance between the free-roaming world and the confines of the plot. (This dissonance is common to most games that attempt free-roaming on this scale, from The Elder Scrolls to Grand Theft Auto.) I want to emphasize that even "just a step" towards the mainstream adoption of designs that accommodate a range of player choice in an interactive narrative is encouraging. From this weird apocalypse that's led everyone towards XBOX development have come successful games like Oblivion, Mass Effect, and Fallout 3: these are exposing fundamental ideas of the western CRPG to an audience who would never have put up with western CRPGs before. Don't forget the volume of writing that was produced in awe of the fact that you could get a different ending in Bioshock depending on your conduct: this was perceived by some as a radical idea. Alpha Protocol will appear to be a progression from ideas familiar to the mainstream because of Mass Effect. If it is successful, if it is seen, then the audience is able to compare the ideas in both games; now they understand more than one perspective on design. Similarly, one of the most productive functions of New Vegas will be demonstrating to everyone who bought Fallout 3 that an alternate approach to the material exists and is viable. The audience has to understand what is possible before they can make judgments on what kind of design they prefer.

More than anything, I'd like to see more games like Torment that marry the narrative to the mechanics.