Zoraptor

Said it elsewhere but I think the best approach would be generally Fallout style- 'isometric' (probably proper 3d though as it's more flexible), classless, focusing on the stuff Obsidian does well like skills and storyline/ convos. That would be adaptable to a lot of different types of play- TB/ RTWP/ PB/ RT are all plausible- and it would have good scaleability for graphics and the like, for budget flexibility depending on how much could be raised. I don't think additional programmers would be the big cost though, it would be additional designers/ artists as more areas are added or graphical fidelity is improved. Most of the programming (presumably, assuming Onyx were used) would be geared towards integrating gamesystems and the like, and that would have to be done pretty much whatever budget were being looked at or attained. The main exception would potentially be things like releasing dev tools or a sdk which really is in genuine bonus territory. D20? Don't actually know what it's status is to be honest, but it has been used previous and is/was free? Given the history of the people at Obsidian I wouldn't imagine it would to too hard for them to come up with a good custom rule set in fairly quick order though, were it necessary.

NWN +expansions sold 3 million*, at least according to Bioware's old website, same for KOTOR. Up to their sale to EA they had sales figures on their site for all games (except those which sold poorly, like Jade Empire, where they just talked about how critically acclaimed it was). BG1/2 5 m NWN (inc expansions) 3 m KOTOR 3 m Jade Empire a bit over a million, given its NPD figures. ME1 2 mill (would have been after ~six months, so probably around 2.5 m lifetime) (DAO 3.5-4 m ME2 2.5 m DA2 1.6 m ME3 2 m+ after a month) Really though, all of the BGs/ NWN and KOTOR would have been highly successful financially. *Best guess for NWN2 would be 2 million+. Certainly sold more than a million in 2006 as 1 million+ was cited in their results by the german investors who kicked in a lot of funding (BVT; not quite so successful with their Arcania funding). Everything I've seen suggested that Bioware abandoned D&D because they hated the new morality clauses and nannying from Hasbro and had pretty much decided on Dragon Age being their owned fantasy franchise same as ME became their owned space fantasy franchise.

You can both be right, due to pipelining a lot of people doing art/ objects and the like would be moved (to DA3, presumably) once the initial stuff is done. 150 people total working on it over the 2+ years is feasible, but a lot of them would not be on it for anything near the full 2+ years.

Does Sega even have any money to do marketing? Last I checked they weren't that much better off than THQ and almost entirely dependant on Sonic/ TW/ FM churnware.

I think we need to get one thing straight immediately. This is probably the only time I will say this: Volourn is right. He may be using made up numbers which completely invalidate his 'ME2 sold 3 million copies r00fles!!! FACT!' shtick but on the important stuff he is right. ME3's sales are very good. Retail only, US only. You can approximately double them for worldwide and digital sales, especially since digital ~ 2 retail copies return wise. So 2 million+ inside a month, and crucially they're sold through copies (so there aren't 100ks sitting around in warehouses), since that is what NPD measures. ME2 sold 1.6 million including digital and PC, worldwide, in a quarter- 3 months- for a direct like to like comparison. It won't reach DAO's numbers but it will certainly outdo either previous ME title by a fair bit given it's already close to their lifetime totals. That's 40+ million in revenue, plenty more than enough to cover the cost of the game, though not really enough to justify the ludicrous prive paid by EA for Bioware in the first place. It ain't Halo or GoW or CoD or GTA numbers, but if you use them as a yardstick for success then there's maybe two successful releases a year and everything else is a failure.

Eidos/ Squeenix presumably, as Eidos bought Ion Storm.

Personally I'd quite like a Fallout style (~isometric, skills, probably straight TB or JA2 style combat, non post apoc) AP successor which I think would be feasible as a kickstarter type project. But I was more making the point that anything directly related to AP could not be on the cards kickstarter wise. Exactly what could be got away with- Omega Methodology, featuring a cameo from Stefan Hades and the evil corporation Telburton!- I really would not know.

I really do think that Bioware has a very large problem with planning, and it's a good point that it's more apparent as they have grown larger. And it's not just internal planning of the titles themselves leading to a certain amount of inconsistency verging on incoherence at times but of the series' storyline as a whole. Much of the background stuff is actually good quality and reasonably consistent over all three games- such as the whole Geth/ Quarian and Salarian/ Krogan issues- and it is telling that these are perhaps the best overall story bits of ME3 as well. The main storyline on the other hand seems to have been to a large extent made up on the spot one game at a time with major plot points (crucible/ catalyst) appearing from the aether at the start of ME3 with no foreshadowing previous. The whole plot of ME2 is only tangentially related to either of the others so much so that it might have been better as ME: Renegade rather than ME2* and while I do not have a fundamental issue with that, good storytelling does dictate that you really ought to set up important stuff relevant to the continuing plot in the previous title(s) rather than springing it with barely more than a "hey guys!" one mission into the final game. Even that refugee from a bad Dragonball Z cosplay might be a bit more palateable were he introduced better and it's not like ME2 lacked for potential interaction with Cerberus operatives. *And use 'ME2' to expand the build up to war more so that you start off with more war assets and with the Crucible under construction before the reapers hit.

I'd certainly hope they're going to address the UI, but I would presume that the UI will not scale with zoom. If it does then it would be exactly the same for all practical purposes as changing the screen resolution. None of that really changes anything though. In a 3d game you would often have quite a lot of redundant detail that can be enhanced by changing the POV/ zoom, if there's a potential 1 million triangles to be displayed yet only 100k are showing you can theoretically get 10x more detail by zooming and you have proper, er, scope for proper zoom for things like rifle scopes. The same cannot be said for a 2d game as a bitmap is by definition a 1:1 representation where 1 picture element displays best as 1 screen pixel. If you zoom into a bitmap you are not actually adding detail, if you try and turn a 1 MP picture into a 4 MP one you end up with two possibilities, a blocky 4 MP picture or a fuzzy 4 MP picture, you don't end up with a 4 MP picture with lots of extra information. In the absence of the original max builds of the levels (so no upping the pixel count via re-rendering from source) it's a pretty fundamental limitation.

For AP itself any discussion of kickstarter is moot given that that interview confirms Sega owns the IP. I'd just hope that they can bring the stuff in AP that worked well into whatever future games are developed

I am sorely tempted to break my pledge never to 'like' '+1' 'upvote' etc anything anywhere by that nailgun ad.

Zoom. That one I really don't get. I mean, it would be useful if there were lots of hidden detail in the backdrops that could be brought out by zoom, as with looking at a 18 MP photo, but it isn't like that. It's like looking at a 1 MP photo on a 1280x720 monitor. You can zoom in all you like, if you find big pixels wonderful. Don't know why you'd want to zoom out further given that BG already has a decent area map and at any modern res stuff is already small. Seems pretty much entirely like them trying to tie the conversion to OpenGL (which is very useful for things like ARM given their relatively weak performance relative to desktop) into something practical for PC. I'm not implacably opposed to the whole project but I am deeply skeptical, mainly because the hype has so far been perfectly balanced to trigger my hmmm? detector on multiple angles. BG3 teasing. Inconsequential (for PC) engine tweaking. Lots of vague promises with almost nothing concrete. At the moment it looks like everything has been done primarily for the purpose of getting it working on iPad despite constant comments about how important the PC is. Basically, I'm not enthusiastic because they've given me no reason to be enthusiastic. That could change if they release more than vague promises but for now I see no reason for excitement, and no reason to buy a game I already own again.

I was pretty sure that the 'trial' at the beginning was going to be used Kotor 2 style to set up important decisions ("Please explain your actions with regard to the Rachni, Commander- (1) Genocide is bad, mmkay? (2) I've watched Starship Troopers") when I first heard about it. Too much effort/ voice recording required maybe? The Reapers aren't individuals, either. They are the same as the Geth were, a collective. Hinted in ME1 (a nation), stated in ME2 (the Geth touched Sovereign's mind and found millions of voices), and reinforced in ME3 (EDI's talk about what makes her different from Geth and Reapers). Individualistic AI- any species with (in effect) telepathy would be somewhat collective in nature. We know that the reapers have separate identites (Sov/ Harb) which for the purposes of Legion referring to himself as I is all that really counts. From what I can tell the closest equivalent would be that individual geth were like cells in a body- they have no effective existence outside of that. They might have different functions like being kidney equivalents but the only difference we had seen between them at all was due to a hardware difference- 'cancer', in the analogy.

Really? WOTC itself holds the BG IP, and Atari does not have the D&D licence for new games as of last year, only for old ones. They'd still potentiallt be a sensible choice as a publisher given their experience, but not given their woeful financials.

Nice dodge bud, but no. I'm not doing the legwork for you (much less on Twitter. Ugh!). I was simply curious whether you really knew any actual details about the new build beyond "ZOMG mousewheel zoom!" or just buying into the hype. Smart Filters and some manual touch ups since Bioware has apparently lost the original art and builds for the levels. Some (maybe one) added joinable NPC. Some new quests. I'm not excited by it, to say the least. Pretty cynical hype machine teasing possibility of BG3 to sell an iPad version, and a PC version with very marginal improvements over what mods have already done.

Thematically it makes sense that taking decision making code from individualistic AI like Sovereign or Harbinger and adding it to collectivist AI like geth would convert them to an individual model. Practically too it's perfectly believable that adding code from an individualistic AI (reaper) to a collectivist AI (geth) would have that effect. That is not a particularly novel idea since things like self preservation, personality and individual identity are often used in fiction as indicators that something has moved from being a sophisticated tool to being an actual 'person'. The real reason for it is, of course, to have an enhanced Emotional Impact but it is not really inconsistent. In that case just replace 'vaccine' with 'nanites' and 'virus' with 'genophage'*- it's still probable that they would have a very good idea of what a potential cure would entail and could tailor a preventative towards that. Nanites would also have the advantage that they could (presumably) be made to self replicate so even if the survival rate in the upper atmosphere were very low you'd still get good effective dispersal. *presuming Bioware just used 'phage' as a cool scientific sounding name, else it actually was a virus

Yeah, it isn't a "rush after the quest compass" game. Take your time, explore, go to other worlds to get new weapons. You can ask most locals for directions and information, and get subsidiary quests from them as well. If you run out of health packs the priest guys will heal you for free. If you run into a lot of enemies just run away. There are quite a few groups of mook soldiers around without leaders (leaders are taller, use different weapons and wear different uniforms) who ought to be easy to take out.

That one at least is explained in game- in the codex, I think, since I noticed it and went looking for an answer. Resigned from the council to prepare for the reapers when the council did it's standard sit-on-hands routine one time too many. Shows self awareness. Certainly not unique: ZEN: -- dysfunction on computer banks three and six. All resources now concentrated on maintenance of teleport facilities. I-- I have failed you. VILA: He never referred to himself before. He never once used the word "I". ZEN: I have failed you. I am sorry. I have-- Also Nordom the Modron from PST, a lot of Borg episodes (wossname, Hugh?) from ST. They'd almost certainly have a good idea in a general sense of what a cure would entail, at least if ME science works at all similar to Real World science. If you were weaponising a virus you'd know with near total certainty that the cure (well, preventative really) would be a vaccine of some sort, for example.

It is perfectly possible to have seen Ep2 legitimately. It has been shown on an HBO webcast, so simply having seen it implies nothing. Book spoiler.

Outcast is awesome, from back when awesome actually meant something.

I'd add that there is a fundamental difference between many games and the more traditional forms of media. The traditional media are almost entirely narrowly deterministic- there is a set, predetermined and constant set of events in a book or movie that will always be the same no matter what. Even in a story sense that is not necessarily true with games, there's potentially a lot more engagement when the effects you see on a story are directly influenced by decisions you yourself have made as opposed to happening only because that's the way the author has written it. Potentially that is one of games greatest strengths, sadly it is seldom exploited as such.

I think I had it down to around 1 second delay for a combo by the end. Could kill endless swarms of mooks almost instantly, bigger ones on the other hand were rather less trivial.

This will be a little bit disorganised, no doubt... A lot of the decline of traditional 'meeting' based systems is directly attributable to the telecommunications revolution- as it becomes less and less difficult to meet it becomes less and less Special to meet so the level of ritualism vs entertainment has to change to keep attracting people. Going to church on Sunday used to be the one time everyone in a community could meet up during the week, for example, now there are alternatives that don't require the extra effort of going to church. In effect it's a competition between the time and monetary costs of Special Occasions vs mundane occasions and staying at home. In terms of gaming I think that- as entertainment vs education- you get out of it what you put in. If you look at the 3 main games Ken Levine has written the stories for as examples (Thief 1, System Shock 2, Bioshock) most people who will have played them will have played them as straight games without anything 'deeper' than that. I tend to view them as not only being good games but having something to say beyond that, about the dangers of extremism- Anarchism from The Trickster/ Viktoria, Fascism/ Communism from Shodan/ The Many, and Capitalism/ Libertarianism for Bioshock. I'd also say that the most important 'philosophical' question from Planescape Torment is not "What can change the nature of a man?" but "Is that your answer?"- because the answer to the first is entirely dependant upon who is answering it. Hmm, now that I think about it the ending of StalkerSOC was quite similar to that of Mass Effect 3 in many ways, almost as much so as DX... On the slightly more narrower front I'd have to echo games like EU being good educators- EU2's more determinist structure meant a lot of historical events lacking in later Paradox titles but I have done things like find out about Jainism (which will never be in an official Paradox title- it's symbol is a swastika) and the like from mods, plus things like SM's Gettysburg for the ACW. Overall though I think most of this sort of stuff is subjective- some people will always prefer going somewhere and meeting people in person, more ritual etc, some won't and some people will get more than just entertainment out of games and some won't. That's not really a very helpful observation though.

Our government had particularly amusing case of Echelon related butthurt. Some peace activists deflated the protective domes over our segment of it and got charged with criminal damage. The jury declined to convict, accepting the argument that it was not vandalism but an act of conscience and hence (tactitly) that it was a tool for spying on us. Government response? Changed the law to remove act of conscience as a defence and sued the defendants in civil court.