Niten_Ryu

I wonder what made 'em to take the risk. In 2nd edition era Dark Sun and Planescape were my favorite campaign settings but neither of those have real commercial potential. Both probably contributed the downfall of TSR.

There are several reasons. Players in general like characters to be at least somewhat familar. Sure, designers and consept artists could go ahead and create volumetric fog based chaotical shaped blob but that character would come right back bumerang style from animators and programmers. They certainly ain't going to spend huge amounts of time to create complite separate animations, shaders, collision detection ect ect for one strange looking alien. Xbox360 was already in huge problems with normal Mass Effect characters. Quote from Bioware's Patrick Weekes "In addition to time constraints, a female version of an alien species is another unique memory asset for an area. So in a place like one memory chunk of the Presidium, for example, you might have: - Male human - Female human - Male turian - Male salarian - Asari - Hanar That's cutting things close, even with the asari using the same skeleton as humans. If you wanted to have female turians, you'd have to cut something else out of that area in order to make room for it. So the area with female turians doesn't have male salarians, for example. Nobody on the dev team is in love with having a universe with a bunch of the alien women off behind a wall like Vera on Cheers, but that's what we've got to work with, for tech and time reasons." It's alright to be critical on graphics and art direction but in the end you have to work with certain game engine and know the limits of some closed system like Xbox 360. Thane is good model because designers and artists know Unreal engine 3 limits and try to do the best they can with resources and time they have. Facial expressions are really hard and time consuming to do and this "next" generation have not done good job in 'em. I hope animators get resources (time and good design tools) they need for 'em in the near future.

I like Thane's design. His face has that Carnevale di Venezia mask type of look going on and it suits great for Unreal 3 engine.

Oh how I hate games that use unibody type of character models. Scale head and torso a bit vertically and give legs a nice spin in the rack. Now it's human character It looks like that dwarf model already has human arms

Yeah, fortune seem to favour Obsidian. Dragon Age, Modern Combat 2 and many other games move to november or beyond.

I'm happy as long as Raphael Sbarge stays away from the game. Not his fault per se but he did the voices of Carth and and Kaidan

Stay away from games biz. Long hours and most likely project will be crap anyway... or get cancelled

Very nice ! Recruit with hard difficulty sound like perfect for me.

I loved this game. It's perfect for us cold war kids. Nixon was my fav character

I'm not a big fan of DLC in singleplayer or multiplayer games. Of course it's great if you get something for free (or for very small fee) but in general developers should be working on some new project. Fallout 3 has several DLCs but I haven't played even one of 'em as I got enough of the game on my first run. Bioware's Bring Down the Sky was ok, but hardly worth the second run just for that. Expansion packs are different as it usually mean that it continues the characters story or is totally new adventure.

WoW and Blizzard deserve all the success they got. Don't put too much trust in SirBruce's numbers (MMOGchart). Some argue that they are better then nothing (as not all companies are publically traded and thus not forced to publish accurate active subscription numbers) but they can be very inaccurate. Numbers taken out of publically traded companies press releases are usually correct.

World of Warcraft probably has the best art direction I've seen in any game, at least outside Korea. First Splinter Cell had strongest art directon in any first generation Unreal games. While iD and it's various engines had all kinds of technical gimmics, both Half-Life games won in art direction. People like Justin Sweet and Jason Manley did really nice portraits (and consept art) for infinity engine games. H.R. Giger is best know for his work in other medium, but he also did great art for 1992 game Darkseed. As someone already posted, Grim Fandango had great art direction (actually most of the old LucasArts games, thanks to Peter Chan I think). Good art direction is hard. Great is almost impossible. I'd say we've well past the point where graphics from techincal matter that much but there's plenty to be done in overall art direction and animation. Damn Pixar and other high value movie companies for poaching all the best talent

So after delaying PC release for months, they still fail to get all 3 versions out at the same time. PC version should be very bug free right about now if QA team have worked all this time.

Not going to bother with the list, but I'm playing IWD 2 right now. For some reason I didn't remember anything about the game and I did one normal run and one HoF run back when game was released. Man, IWD 2 is one boring game that certainly has not aged well. Only positive I can think of that it's challencing (especially if you don't cheese with kiteing or resting after each battle). Especially compared to more modern games like NWN 2 or ME. I'm playing extremely self-interest group of mercs but somehow I end up saving most of the NPCs. I just got to the White Dragon cave and I have no idea why I'm pushing forward. I think my mission was to meet Neverwinter forces. I did that after Ice Fortress. Now I wonder why I continue forward and why haven't anyone payed me to go forward (or give some other reason to give a damn about ten-towns). Even with decreased difficulty, I'm happy that CRPGs have moved forward in other areas.

Great reply Actually I don't envy anyone in US who writes political satire as big part of population can't get the message. Something like Fox News is like 24/7 comedy channel but it's "reality" for the many. Makes it kinda hard to be subtle... Anyway, if game allows me to play Bush jr era poster child, a neocon hero... that'll be my first character.

Geralt is like modern day rock superstar... except rockstars don't have to bother with flowers The Witcher was the right kind of mature game for me.

They must hate money Well, there's nice profit to be made in DS and iPhone turnbased games. Good for skeleton crews anyway as development costs are dirt cheap and you only need to sell relatively low number of copies. It's like c64 days all over again.

I agree that Geralt did it right. First getting drunk on cheap booze, got into barfights and then haveing fun with anything that moves. While I'm strongly against brothels and prostitution in real life, I have to admit it fits great in RPGs. And just about every CRPG have 'em and that's a good thing.

I think developers can troll as much as the any other in the internet, but they certainly have to be more careful on their own boards. Especially MMOG developers attack each other from time to time, creating interesting flamefests. It's much more calm in CRPG area, probably because it's niche genre these days with little to no innovation. I disagree with Mr Gaider on just about everything (he's looking things from writers perspective and I look on game mehcanics POV) but it's fun to read his (often dry) comments on various issues.

Obsidian got lucky with AP. New Splinter Cell is delayed till 2010 and it means better sales for AP if they manage to release it (with no real game stopping bugs) october this year.

Dragon Age Mass Effect 2 Alpha Protocol Splinter Cell Conviction Probably few others from bargan bin in the future. Like Singularity, Borderlands or Wolfenstein. FPS get their price reduced rather fast.

TFU was step down from Jedi Outcast in just about every single way. Especially removing "one hit, one kill" mechanic was really bad choice. I usually try to ignore storyline issues when game mechanics take higher priority but force powers in TFU were just ridiculous.

NWN2, Fallout 3 and Oblivion (non mod) offered only ugly options. Mass Effect hit the sweet spot but for real customization singleplayer games should ripoff MMOG features like in Aion or APB (probably the best customization I seen anywhere)

[quote name='H

Great ! Need more Sam Fisher and entire collection of lolcats