Niten_Ryu

Everyone handle their PnP roleplaying bit differently but back in the day when I played, we had much less battles then in any CRPGs. Thus wizard having just 1-2 spells didn't matter that much. Yeah, D&D and AD&D spell systems were truely horrible for computer games. Wizards spending most of their time throwing daggers, darts or sling stones at lower levels Then again, nowadays developers try to reach balance no matter what the cost. Often it leads to rather boring systems and mechanics, where class / skill differences are minimal. Sometimes it's fun to play some old game and find out how unbalanced mechanics can create "interesting" situations.

Yeah, same here. Well, I did plan how I'm going to use spells and that was mostly AoE damage, lower resistance and crowd control. All other utility or self protection were too situational or required too much resting. Generally I only rested if all spells were gone and I didn't have enough health to move on without spells. Best fights happend when you're totally out of spells, only have few arrows left and your health on all characters is bellow 50%

Bioware didn't develop any joinable characters in Baldur's Gate. It strikes you like slippery fish to see that all characters are just few lines of semi-random shouts. I did like Xzar's "Montaron... I ... I never loved you!" when the halfling dies but it's more like Warcraft then later Bioware. I re-played all Infinity engine games this summer (except Icewind Dale), but did it in wrong order. Baldur's Gate as last game was wrong move Edwin / Edwina is great character and I really enjoyed Korgan too on my last run in Baldur's Gate 2. Too bad most of my Baldur's Gate character end up being just NPC in sequel. Tiax dies in Spellhold, you kill Xzar and Montaron is already dead in Harpers Base.

That is actually not far from truth. We were stupid enough to go very far east, then to north and all the way Ural mountains. After we found out that it we couldn't go more north (thanks glaciers), smarter Hungarians moved to west and south and away from massive ice sheet. We finns apparantly wanted to see what's under the ice and thus stayed near it. We loved the frosen wastelands and moved with the ice as it slowly melted away. Again more smarter people stayed behind. So, only fennoscandia and scandinavia remained frosen. Eventually all glacier ice was gone and we finns couldnt move more west because of Gulf of Bothnia. In the north there were Sami people (unfortunately we robbed southen parts of land from 'em) and Barents sea. That area became our home. Europeans generally didnt bother with such long journey and found much nicer and warmer environment to live. As wikipedia puts it - "Finns are a genetic isolate. It could be said that all other Europeans have Finnish genes but Finns don't have all the genes found in other Europeans." Europeans got to live the good life (and Hungarians joined 'em bit later) while we tried to find the golden land. We didn't find anything but cold, dark isolated corner of the world. Serves us right and one of the reasons why we curse so much.

In RL I swear like drunken sailor, a trait not uncommon to us finns. Thus I just love swearing in games, movies, TV shows, books... My absolute favourite scene in any medium from recent years is great dialogue between Al Swearengen and Mr. Wu from Deadwood tv series. Check it out (from beginning till about 2 mins). I'd really enjoy that kind of writing in games done Mass Effect cinematic dialogue style.

Especially on higher difficulty levels (if games is balanced correctly on normal), game mechancis and combat mechanics become very important. Combat is bit like puzzle solving and you need to know how things work or it'll just become trial and error (aka save / load). Baldur's Gate 2 is great example as it's filled with many totally unfair mobs, but at the same time it's great fun to find ways to beat 'em. Kangaxx is one of those type of encounters. In it's Lich form it's rather easy to beat in several ways. On my last run, I just ate all it's spells and healed thru 'em as I had healer heavy party. In Demi-Lich form it gets interesting from game mechanics point of view. It requires +4 weapons to hit it and I didn't have any. It's also immune to all direct damage spells that I can cast (mage lvl 6 spells). Ring of Ram had already been used that day. Demi-Lich seem to like to spam Imprisonment, a spell that as no saving throw and is same as permanent death for my level. Let's see. Aggro in Baldur's Gate is very basic. Most of the time mobs just attack closest hostile. This means Korgan should tank the mob as he still had one Berserker rage left for the day. It don't matter that Korgan can't actually damage the mob. Berserker rage don't last very long and Kangaxx also regenerates. We need to find the way to damage it. Higher level summoned mobs, like elementals, melee attacks seem to count as magical weapons. Summon aerial servant (level 6 priest spell) and 12hd fire elemental (level 6 druid spell) and have Edwin to cast haste on 'em. Kangaxx dies easily before Berserker rage is over. Above example is optinational encounter as it should be.

Based on how long I played 'em. World of Warcraft Team Fortress Classic Asheron's Call Quakeworld Team Fortress Don't like to play multiplayer games too seriously anymore as I get older, my skills get worse and worse. During the quakeworld days I could do alright in difficult clan matches, but these days topping public servers is good enough for me.

To clarify: I'm not saying Mass Effect sold poorly in an absolute sense- 2 million is only failure if you're something like GTA- just that it was hardly as much of an OMG blockbuster!!!11! title as is often implied. It is however probably Bioware's second poorest selling RPG (depending a bit on definitions- going by sku ME360 probably beats the separated xbox/pc figures of kotor; if you add in MEPC it probably beats both bg vanillas but not with xps counted, etc) ahead of only Jade Empire. 2 million copies sold is great number, even today. But in BG days it's was freaking huge. So far in this year there haven't been many games that have sold even one million copies. I think best selling PS3 game, Killzone 2 have sold 750.000 units.

-Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare is probably the game that defines this (console) generation. -World of Warcraft will have it's place in history, no matter if it dies slow death or if the servers crash and burn tomorrow. -Bioshock is game where all the right lessons are learnt from previous generation games like System Shock. Thru careful data collecting, developers managed to find thing that majority of the gamers like and dislike. -The Witcher is cult classic. -MotB is one of best expansions ever. Unfortunately it might remain as such as more and more developers move to boring DLC model. Cult classic. -Fallout 3 is THE Fallout for the majority. Then again, before Fallout there was Wasteland and so on. Every generation needs their mutants.

Have to agree with this. Both games would have been much better with less combat (or perhaps no combat) or with totally different combat mechanics (of course in both cases licences would have made it extremely difficult for developers). Planescape as a world is interesting, some of campaign rules (like chaos vs. law axis or power of will to do things) work great in different mediums but it's always tied to that small squad turn based combat system that is balanced around level 5 to level 12 (your preferred distance might vary). Star Wars game obviously had more options but I guess they went for d20 rules for some unknown reason. I'm one of those rare players who absolutely enjoy first person combat as it's done in DeusEx, Bloodlines and Mass Effect. The random movement of your sniper rifle, the well timed shots, the uncertainty of the hit... I really enjoy the extra challenge. I could rush or exploit weak AI (sometimes that's VERY hard to do) but I view it bit same way as I do roleplaying in these games. Games just feel better if I roleplay and try not to cheese thru encounters. In case of KotOR 2, I really had to gimp my character and use certain NPCs so that combat would have been at least somewhat ok. In Mass Effect stupid party AI made sure that team members slept thru most of the combat but I didn't mind as I could do my own thing.

Your own party members shooting your backside have long traditions in cRPGs Seriously, removing crouching is very stupid. Stand, crouch and prone should be available in any game that has ranged attacks. It's natural thing to hit the ground when bullets (or arrows) or explosives start to fly. ME use Unreal Engine 3 just like Gear of War and that game was basically one big "shoot and cover" simulator. If Biowares braindead combat designers or programmers can't get THAT feature to work in ME2, they should quit the biz.

Heh... Now that would be a plot twist. Mike Thortons ultimate goal would be to organize workers to start up their own factories. Weapon factories of course

I wonder why people make such a big deal out of this. It's just another optional feature in the game, just like other romances or origin stories. They all are waste of development time in one way or the other but Bioware still wanted to include 'em. It's going to make some players who like to project themselfs into game characters happy (along with some hardcore roleplayers who like just about every new feature) but majority don't need to feel strongly about it. You probably missed optional quest, few days/weeks earlier release or few lines of dialogue because of this latest feature.

This is probably the all time low point for Bioware. Bring Down the Sky was released March 10, 2008 and I can't belive that all they could do in 1.5 years was this crappy combat arena. Waste of developer resources and waste of consumers time. Time for developers to move back to creating full expansion packs and leave rest to modders.

This is probably the most stupid thing I've read in this board... or any board.

Commandos and Commandos 2 were great. Commandos was perfect game for me as around 1998 I was seriously bored with traditional RTS games (actually many rather good RTS games got released but I didnt feel like playing 'em at the time, including Starcraft and Total Annihilation). I loved how much details developers managed to put in animations of these tiny characters and difficulty curve was just right for me.

I don't know why Bioware chose 12 NPCs who can join Shepards team. IMO one of the better things that games like NWN2:MotB and ME did was to have small number of NPCs who can join your party. One could argue that they were still underdeveloped (especially in ME) but raising number to 12 ain't certainly going to help. Majority of the players do only one run or quit before the end. It don't seem like good use of limited resources and development time to create way too many party members.

I agree. I understand from game design point of view it might be ok to add different weapon categoties but in RL situations I haven't found any significant difference in accuraty between certain weapons. Sure it's easier to hit target 800m away with Dragunov or Sako TRG then with your basic assault rifle but for their effective range you hit about the same. It's just as easy to use heavy machineguns like 12,7 ITKK (NSV) or light antitank weapons like 66 KES 88 (M72A5).

I tested last year how fast I could run certain old titles. All were non optimized but I obviously knew all encounters. BG2 was about 4 hours, BG about 3 hours, Fallout 1 about hour. All still way slower then most optimized speedruns. My first run of BG2 took about 60 hours and ME about 45 hours.

I'd say Obsidian didn't rippoff Splinter Cell enough. Let's take this blog entry. For some reason Obsidian wanted to reinvent the wheel or use stealth the way it was used in AD&D games or KotOR. Far more logical option would have been to use Thiefs or Splinter Cells light / noise meter. It works, it's featured in several games and perks or skill advancements can be integraded into system with ease. Obsidians greatest advantage over Splinter Cell is choices and storyline. They just need to take the leap of faith and trust their abilities in those areas. Rest of the game mechanics could be 100% cloned from original Splinter Cell. PS - I'm just playing Splinter Cell Double Agent and I have to say it's probably the worst of the series (even Pandoras Tomorrow is bit better). I can't belive how many great features they have managed to lose in this episode.

I have to disagree with this. Majority of regulars in this board care only what they want. It's understandable but at the same time it's useless info for the developers. To make matters even worse, this many in this board are interested of niche games or design choices that are financially extremely risky. Budget, development time or resources mean very little for the board members, but are just about everything for the developers. We DEMAND that developers listen to us but at the same time have barely any idea what going on. It's best that developers ignore us.

While I'm not fan of Bethesda games, they have made certain kind of CRPG very popular for the new generation. I've seen tons of "fallout 3 is the best game I'm ever played" comments on popular game news sites and total sales of that game are huge. Better then any of the old skool CRPG. Bioware is still best remembered by Baldur's Gate that started the very popular era of CRPG and Baldur's Gate 2 that ended it. NWN multiplayer was great for some and KotOR managed to bring Star Wars into CRPG. Now Bioware creates it's own worlds (always a positive thing) but it still remains to be seen if the manage to win over majority of gamers. ME was hard sale for me but thanks to multiple runs, they managed to win me over.

Human don't get to lead, but are accepted into Council because of Shepards heroic deeds. You can choose Ambassador Udina or Captain Anderson to take part of the Council. Udina tries to persuade other Council races to give more resources (ships, weapons, tech, credits, soldiers ect ect) to humanity and their colonies. Anderson tries to work together with others and probably has less demands. If you choose to go after the Reaper and Council dies, then Udina will lead the new Council but it still has members from old Council races. I haven't chosen Anderson in this scenario. If you choose to kill Council on purpose and tell it to Udina and Anderson, then Udina will create all human Council, who should lead over weak races. I haven't chosen Anderson in this scenario.

It's interesting how Obsidian managed to take this path and Bioware will go great lenghts to make most of the characters immortal. Writers, like David Gaider, probably want to keep most of the characters alive as killing 'em would make his job harder. I liked how BG2 allowed most of the characters to be killed but Mr.Gaider thinks it's not worth the extra work. This issue would probably make a great discussion panel at the Game Developers Conference. Kudos for taking the different path Obsidian!

I didn't even know there's HD TVs without HDMI. Anyway, there's adapter for DVI-HDMI and vice versa if someone has "ancent" HD TV and/or graphics card.