WorstUsernameEver

Eh, this reminds me that I'm kinda wondering how Obsidian will solve the visibility/clarity problems that will eventually crop up. It's pretty obvious that they don't want to go for the whole "strong silhouettes" school of thought, and equipment will be relatively down to earth.

Andrè Wallin's artwork was there to wow people, not to really set the visual direction for the game. I don't even like Wallin's style (way too contrast-y, crashes all the detail away), but many people do. That said, my complaint* wasn't really about how polished the concepts are (they're not, but they won't be used in game, so it's okay), but rather about the stylistical choices for clothing, equipment, and even the new races' look. It seems to take inspiration mostly from other common fantasy artwork, rather than from historical pieces of clothing, and, most importantly, you don't really get the sense that the characters are wearing what they're wearing due to the reasons people do in the real world: practicality, fashion, cultural mores, etc. I realize I'm not doing a great job at explaining it, and this can be argued to be partially just a gut feeling. Still, I thought it was important to bring this kind of feedback too. It's exactly because there's a lot of time to polish that Obsidian's artists should hear about what people like and don't, and read examples of games with successful fantasy art direction, so that they can improve on this foundation. I still think the environment they showed earlier during the Kickstarter was very good by the way. There are layers to it, and a sense of a culture, both old and current. It's a place where people have lived, where people now are adventuring. You get all of that with a glance. It's not super-original, but neither are Dark Souls or Skyrim or The Witcher 2**, and being "original" shouldn't even necessarily be the point. Anyway, what I'm basically hoping is that when the game will be released, character artwork/models will be on the same level of environments in terms of direction, if not in terms of polycount/3d detail. * you weren't quoting me so I assume it was more of a general address to the people of this thread, but I still feel important to better explain my reasons ** overpraised a bit in terms of art direction, IMO, but still very very solid and occasionally stunning.. I'm just hoping that they stop with cleavage armor for the third title, that's just all kinds of silly

GAF is prone to exaggeration, but if the gist of it is that the art direction so far has proven to be uninspired, then I can't say I disagree. I understand that the devs are shooting for familiarity, but the concept art is indistinguishable from tons of other fantasy universes. I don't need super wacky, but I'm seriously hoping that they'll polish it up. It pales in comparison to titles such as Dark Souls and The Witcher 2 (titles that could be argued are set in a generic fantasy universe, but certainly recognizable at first glance), nevermind that so far, it doesn't even look on par to Icewind Dale, Baldur's Gate or Skyrim. It's at least better than Oblivion, though.

The Kobold's absence from the Nashkel cinematic is strangely conspicuous. It felt like *the point* of the original to me.

Who said that indies don't make isometric RPGs? What about Eschalon, the bulk of Spiderweb's work, the upcoming Underrail, Dead State and Age of the Decadence (though both are likely going to appeal to a small subset of the "old-school RPG" audience), not to mention titles that arguably do tactical turn-based combat in a pitch-perfect way (though are lacking in other ways) like Knights of the Chalice*? * Recommended only if you're a real turn-based/D&D lover, story and presentation are "OH GOD NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO".

It's not "the makers of Demon Forge", though, McComb more or less made it clear that it would be the same writing team that worked on Wasteland 2. Theoretically, that's a pretty good team, but I'd wait to see the results in Wasteland 2 before trusting them with making a Torment-like.

As opposed to consumable scrolls that tell you the details about one weapon, only one, and then disappear with a *puff*? You have weirdly arbitrary boundaries for what feels artificial and what doesn't.

Torment successor likely in the works at inXile, won't be a Planescape title (and most likely won't be D&D either). Considering Fargo's fondness for Kickstarter, I'd expect this to be a KS-funded project too, btw.

The dislike I see on this board for DIshonored confuses me a bit. It's a pretty worthy successor to the Thief mold, though the challenge was moved from "accomplishing objectives" to "accomplishing objectives in certain ways" and "experimenting". So, in other ways, there's no challenge for grognards *, which understandably might be disappointing, but it's certainly not a shallow game. I have one single big problem with it which would be the moral system implementation, which was an interesting but failed attempt to tie the narrative with the gameplay. (I saw a video that did a pretty great job at elaborating on all of my gripes with the game, but I can't find it right now. Previous sentence is the gist of it, though.) * using the term neutrally here, I think I'm a grognard for certain genres myself, though certainly not shooters or "immersive sims" (that seems to be the term that is used for the genre? at least according to RPS)

Have you disabled smoothing in the options?

If you endure the first sections of the game, The Witcher 1 becomes fairly easy later. The combat is never really varied enough to become interesting imo, though, and there are parts of the title that are fairly combat heavy, so ultimately it's up to you. The Witcher 2 is generally a much better game (although less of a PC game, though that's really only a problem if you're interested in that) though, so I'd recommend you to pick it up eventually.

The original or The Witcher 2? Both have bad combat, imo, but for fairly different reasons. The second is definitely a lot more enjoyable and involved though, although the difficulty curve follows a Gothic-like progression where at the beginning you get repeatedly beaten up and brutally murdered, and by the end even the final boss is a breeze.

They haven't announced a composer yet. Justin Bell did the music for the Kickstarter pitch.

Eh, different strokes for different folks, I don't consider BGII's music particularly memorable or interesting. EDIT: Also where do you get the impression Mark Morgan is working on Project Eternity? He isn't.

I assume this means that it's easier/faster to prototype with Unity than Onyx, so I'm going to base my question on that: some game developers, to my knowledge, have prototyped stuff on Unity and then moved to their own engines/licensed engines to work on the game past the prototype phase.. do you see Obsidian adopting this practice, or would you rather Onyx to be made more prototype-friendly? Considering Obsidian is small in terms of AAA development (but too big to be considered small or even mid-size), I'd think prototyping things fast would be a huge boon, but not being a developer (or even particularly knowledgeable in terms of tech) there might be a lot of aspects I'm not considering.

I'll try to explain myself better (and also note that I'm specifically referring to the choices concerning your companions): what confuses me is why we're given the chance to import our save states but some consequences of our choices, which could have easily been sidestepped just by not being mentioned/picked upon, were simply ignored, replaced by an enforced canon. It doesn't feel like a particularly coherent system. I understand fully well that not every choice can be paid off dramatically in a sequel, but then I would have preferred to either see a canon established (not just for a few characters, but for all the story, like in Fallout 1 -> 2 -> 3 etc.) or for the sequels to only mention stuff that would pay off later. I hope this is clearer. As a side note, in Dragon Age: Origins characters don't die, they simply fall unconscious, and resurrection is not exactly commonplace, which lends to a character death (more or less always coming from a bifurcated/binary choice that is given ample cinematic time) a completely different feeling from a character's death in Baldur's Gate. I don't remember the PR campaign for Baldur's Gate 2 (I honestly didn't follow the gaming press at the time), but if I'm understanding things correctly, plot states importing wasn't even ever mentioned in the first place, which also helped set different expectations.

I've recently finished Bulletstorm, since I got a free month of Playstation Plus and it was one of the free games available. I rarely play shooters, so I can't exactly compare it to the other stuff on the market, but I mostly enjoyed it. Right now I'm switching randomly between Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood, a random Ratchet and Clank game which was free and frankly doesn't seem all that good and Costume Quest. EDIT: Ah, there's also the occasional match with The Banner Saga: Factions beta, which so far has been very enjoyable and comes very recommended. I backed it though, so this opinion might be considered inherently biased.

I'm kind of unconvinced by the need to reconcile much about Dragon Age: Origins and II's narrative, since they picked different timelines in different places. I mean, sure, some people would have been annoyed by stuff not being referenced/not having a dramatic impact, but it's difficult to argue about your choices of companions not having an impact when those people are either dead or conceivably somewhere else. I can understand it might be more complicated with some other choices/later sequels, but it was the writer's own choice to bring back some characters (often by changing them completely, which makes you wonder why new characters weren't made in the same place) by ignoring the player's choices, and that, again, was done after putting the players in the condition of thinking that those choices would matter. What's done is done anyway, and that's hardly the worst problem BioWare is facing with DAIII in terms of story/dialogue writing and choices and consequences.

Well, at this point it'd probably be best to not come up with any strange explanation for why she is back and just ignore the fact that she can get decapitated in the first. It kind of confuses me why choices like that were given in the first place if the devs weren't planning on following on them. It wasn't just some accidental death stuff like in Baldur's Gate 1, they were pivotal, scripted moments where you were given the specific choice of whether you wanted to kill a character or not. And then the writing team just sort of decided "we actually love those characters and will keep them alive anyway". It feels very grating.

The basic Morrowind plot was all presented in fairly simple, to-the-point dialogue and cutscenes. Uh.

It doesn't. We actually have a policy against that stuff, but hey, feel free to lower your opinion! It's not like you'll actually check anyway. So you're a member, makes sense. And this is why I wasn't replying to your allegation. When people aren't even willing to check the rules and believe you despite the fact that, when confronted, you never presented proof, what's the point of even discussing this? You don't like that old-school fans dislike Bethesda's interpretation of the setting? That's fine. But it would be p. cool if you didn't make allegations like that. That's all I have to say about this.

It doesn't. We actually have a policy against that stuff, but hey, feel free to lower your opinion! It's not like you'll actually check anyway.

That's interesting, but going from your final smile, I guess I don't even need to tell you that you're probably overreaching

Morrowind was all over the place in terms of systems design, but then again, I think their intentions with the design were different compared to Fallout 3. As much as it can be fun to note the similarities and call the latter "Oblivion with guns", looking at the quest design, etc., you can see that they attempted to differentiate it from their previous work. Not always successfully, but I appreciate that they at least tried.

I found that Morrowind had much more interesting writing compared to Fallout 3. The way the lore in the books intertwined with the main quest, the political situation in Vvardenfell, the meta-aspects of Kirkbride's writing.. I don't think there's anything in Fallout 3 that matches that, thematically Bethesda's post-apocalyptic take was very heavy-handed.