Drowsy Emperor

This american superiority thing you have going Gromnir is tiresome. I guess the only way for to make thinly veiled imperialism as a systematic policy and a way of life acceptable is to drill ones population into believing they're superior to everyone else. It certainly leads to amazing feats of logic like "We're bombing your country into dust but we're doing it all for your own good".

Btw open world elements doesn't = actual open world game. It could just be a large non linear segment in a linear game.

I trust nothing I hear from Valve until I have the game in my hands.

No, they are not. In any way. Take the "romance" out of PS:T and what do you have? The same game minus something completely innocuous, minor and unimportant. PS:T had romance? I would call some small dialog choices with Annah and FFG romance. ...that and...oh, say half of the main theme / motivation of the whole game (Deionarra). No biggie. Deionarra is not a motivation or even a major part of the plot, she's just another casualty of TNO. There is no romancing to speak of, its just a non interactive story/quest the PC goes through and can give an outcome to. Its very well done, but its got nothing to do with BW style romance.

Its a sort of misconception that seems to spring out of thin air and wishful thinking. Of all the Infinity engine classics only Baldur's Gate II had romances, and it would have been just as fantastic without them. And frankly, even though its my favorite game I can't help but notice that out of the 4 romances it had, only one was decent (Jaheira) the others were simply bad (Aerie, Anomen) or practically comic relief (Viconia). In the end, it didn't matter much because they were a tiny insignificant speck in a huge game. So no, romance is not an integral part of the classics Obs is trying to revive.

It may not be as unique as PS:T but it doesn't sound like its a generic fantasy setting either. Which has resulted in a lot of outcries of its own, I've noticed. So far the only new thing I've seen is the vaguely described matter of souls. I don't consider extending the timeline beyond the usual middle ages to the renaissance a significant change.

Baldurs Gate 1. Baldur's Gate 2. Planescape Torment. See you in a month. PS Don't try to play these games like a Korean

Which just leads me to the conclusion that the BSN are not game related forums but a form of collective therapy.

I must admit I'm disappointed they decided to stick to include the standard Tolkinesque races (although this may apply to an earlier update), I was hoping for something more outlandish or at least not having to see Elves and Dwarfs again. Apparently another game with a setting as unique as PST is too much to expect.

Nothing is a must, and romances especially. Torment is easily one of the best RPG's ever made (personally it stands alongside BGII as the ultimate RPG for me), and it had no player led romances to speak of. Let me list what it did have: a) One love story you could give a resolution to by the time you reached the finale (Deionarra) b) Two attractions that were not about the PC romancing anyone but more about pointing out the strange power of his condition (Annah and Fall From Grace). And the latter was not explicitly stated , just hinted at. All of these combined had maybe two dozen lines of dialog overall. This proves you can have both a good RPG and a great story without Bioware style romance minigames, leading us to the obvious conclusion that romances aren't necessary at all. It also proves you can successfully include love as a theme in the form non interactive storytelling (there was no real player choice regarding Deionarra, just one that gave a conclusion to the matter - towards the end). If the designers feel that love is a part of the story they want to tell they should include it. What they should not do is throw some half baked minigame consisting of a few lines of dialog seemingly lifted from a hentai adventure just to meet the expectations of those who want project eternity to be another Bioware game. Dragon Age 2 shows what happens in this regard when you let unreasonable player demands run the show instead of the designers following their own vision, so lets not have another DA2 hmm?

Rats leaving a sinking ship. Rich rats at that.

Maxis wasn't killed, just fully assimilated. Same now will happen to BioWare. A fate worse than death?

The outcome of EA owning a studio is really more predictable than the outcome of stage 4 cancer. Besides, its time for Bioware to go, they're well past their prime.

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Avellone and Sawyer have produced a game before, chosen to include homosexual characters and successfully done it without having it detract from the story. They chose this and did it in a way that everyone agrees was perfect. I ask again, has anyone here even PLAYED New Vegas? But it's barely story relevant. It's no more story relevant than a guy saying "hold on, let me ask my wife, she'd know. I'll meet you back here in an hour." It's no more story relevant than some guy being black and that's that, with his skin color having no plot relevance or story importance other than it just being who he is. So why have it? Really, such homo correctness terrorism is hilarious. Same exact concept here. Homosexual characters should be included because this is the world we live in. We don't live in imaginary fantasy worlds and they don't have to correspond with the real world in regards to anything. The argument is nonsensical. Should we put in George Bush then? That's also the world "we live in"

Besides, who would be so shallow that their sexual identity is the most important defining characteristic of their person. If I'm gay that doesn't mean anyone else has to be? jesus

A gay person can't relate to heterosexual notions of love? What are we, a separate species?

Did you play Planescape Torment? Exactly how many characters there were similar to anybody on this forum?

I said this would happen. WTF now, how many topics do we need on romance in general and homosexuals in particular and they havent even started making the game yet. If there is a terrible and pressing need for a character to even display a certain sexual preference then by all means, let them put in whatever they want. But why would there be? is this a coming out of the closet drama? In my entire life I don't recall a total of 10 minutes of conversation regarding someone's sexual preferences. Its the sort of thing you know/find out if you need to know, otherwise you neither know nor care. Why the hell is this even relevant for a fantasy RPG? Its a fantasy game it has no reason to be representative of anything in the real world, quite the opposite.

What I hate about these discussions is that the pro romance people are incredibly pushy about the issue (in particular about the homosexual romances) so much that they spam the developers with requests until they cave in and implement these features over their better judgment and all we get in the end is crap. Like Dragon Age 2 for example. I've seen it on the Bioware forums, and I'm sick of it as its a gross misrepresentation of what most people want. The fact is most people couldn't care less about romances and given the option of choosing either romance or another quest they'd drop the romance without thinking. It took what, one day (?) since the opening of this forum for this whole, very vocal minority to step in and start a flame war over the issue without any knowledge of what the devs are attempting with this game. We get it that all the disgruntled Bioware fans want romance, however this is not about making a new Bioware title but about resurrecting a ten year old gameplay model and goddamn it, romance wasn't integral to it, in fact it was thrown in "just because". Baldurs Gate wasn't great because of romances, it was great because of an epic story in huge world, populated with cool characters. Those are priorities FFS and it would have been just as great without the romances. And we could say the same about Torment. I don't even need to mention Icewind Dale in this regard.

...Or we could all just wait for them to tell us what they're planning in this regard and then strangle each other over it. So far the majority is for romances, but the voting is fixed in favour of choosing such a response anyway with three (four actually) options in favor and one against and lacking the one that would surely get a lot of votes "I'm only for romances if the developers feel they are integral and important to the story they want to tell".

Hey I want it to be a 100 hour game, I just don't think that's gonna happen.

Its possible to make the player care about an in game character (even inanimate objects, like HL2 companion cube), but to make a convincing love story between the PC and an NPC is next to impossible. PC and Jaheira in BGII had something of the sort but that a very small part of a very large and long game and it made a sort of sense considering how much time they spent together and how much time a player spent actively playing the game - the romance would only pop up occasionally and not be a bother. They're not going to make a 200 hour game. Its probably going to be around 20-30 hours and every romance in that short a span will feel crammed in and rushed. @Casa. I don't. None of Obsidians writers have shown interest (a prerequisite of being good at something, because it assumes practice) in writing great romances. Avellone is more into philosophical themes, the rest, well, I haven't seen any particular preferences among them.

Because the inclusion of pointless romantic plots directly limits our gaming experience by taking away resources that could be quests, clever dialog, and using them for something that's to us useless. Besides, in RPGs romance (with an exception or two) = minigame to get sex.

Ah, romance topics seem to be spawning like zerglings. No. Enough of this idiocy with making every RPG into a hentai date sim. BGII may be my favorite game of all time but at this point I'm sorry they included the romances at all. What Bioware passed of as romance post BGII is about as realistic as the possibility of opening your wardrobe and stepping into Narnia.