Rhomal

>Doofus, it's not about Rhomal being a Bioware fan. The whole point is that he'd prefer the NWN2 boards to be here at Obsidian. So would I. Correct on the last part. As for be being a 'bioware' fan... if anyone accuses me of being a fan boi to them they have not been following events as of late. I am not going to air dirty laundry in public, not my style, but it is fair to say a couple of my recent op eds got under their skin as well as some of my critical observations in the forums. I am not on their, nor ever was, top 10 list of fav forum peeps. I was tolorated as a mod and more or less the same now. If anyone says otherwise in this topic they are talking out of their arse. > Once again, Vol can't comprehend a post and yet responds to it. In V's defense, hes posted ~70 posts on the nwn2news forum. Every one of them was well thought out and interesting read. Not one generated any complaints. *shrugs* I suppose my point is when he wants to, he can read and understand quite well

Ditto Althernai's comment. That aside it is a dead horse. Not going to happen. Get over it and lets move on to something productive. You just seem to want to whine for the sake of whining. My 2 coppers

Im drunk right now... I feel the need to share that. that and a certain someone is bought and paid for whore of bioware. but mainly im drunk. wwwwwwoooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo!!! *does a ric flair strut*

Note that wasnt my intent. I was simply a little annoyed the biozombies (More refined then 'dweebs') were jumping all over me and on the 'bioware is great, can do no wrong' bandwagon. I just wanted a little show of support other ppl appreciated these forums as well.

I am in a little spat with Robert from DLA about how horrible (in his eyes) these forums were while hosting nwn2. Needless to say I am defending obsidian/these forums. Granted hes bought and paid for by Bioware so its not a shock but thats prob a stone best left unturned. If you want to post in support that would be nice, so it does not look as if I am the only one defending these forums. http://nwn2forums.bioware.com/forums/viewt...460696&forum=95

> Not at all. We do a lot of work with indies, which I have developed further and I regularly enjoy them over "commercial" titles. However, broad-based mainstream sites like GameSpot would give low scores to many indie titles because of the low production values - eliminating them removes some lower scores and potentially shifts their average up. Fair point and I dont disagree. However I can only go by what they give me to work with to base the numbers on. If they choose to only review games they know will generate high scores as to not upset publishers then thats another entire can of worms. > Your article says something like the "last couple of months" - I just wanted to clarify exactly what time period. I list the time frame under each specific site. To sum it up here I looked at the last 8-10 weeks of reviews for each site. Which boiled down to the last 37-40 titles per site.

No , but I cant say I remember them fondly. Of course in the DOS days there were no platforms that ran comparable games. <{POST_SNAPBACK}> Depending on your prefered style of game the console is either very good or very poor. With a PC you can pretty much play any type of game. and I dont understand what issues you have PC gaming. once w2k (and now XP) came out all the issues of win9x went away and its been a pleasurable situation since. For me at least.

> Your premise is predicated on each of these sites having reviewed every game that came out for the period, across all categories. But they don't. They don't review many indies, smaller games or Euro titles - this automatically removes the bottom tier and leaves you with professional titles that managed to secure a US publishing deal; most of the real crap is already eliminated. So your stance is every or most AAA titles are a 80%+ game and every indie game is bottom of the barrel by default? > It would also be nice to know what period you counted. Sorry, I dont understand what you are asking. > I don't know anything about Madden - don't play sports games. But... is this it? If you are refering to the op ed from the INQ I quoted, you will have to ask that editor about the hows and whys of his article. I just quoted the part of his article to show what got the gears going in my brain on this topic for me. The source of my interest to explore this topic of you will.

As you may have seen a few days ago I posted an Op Ed article from the Inquirer about the possible implosion coming up in the console market. But one aspect, that affects all gaming, stuck out in my mind. And that was this part of the article: "There is one way out though, read reviews before you shell out a day's wages for a potential stinker, read anything you can on the game. Remember when I said in the old days there was a co-opting of magazines, that was in the pre-web 1980s? Well, now it is worse. The pestilence of flash aside, most gaming sites and magazines are so far from publishing a real review it is laughable. If you want a good example of this, take the new Madden game. Go to the major sites and look at the scores they gave it. Read the reviews, and compare that to the numerical scores. Then look at sites that put reader ratings next to the official scores. Notice a discrepancy? For bonus points, find me a major ratings site that regularly gives out a score of 6/10 or less. Once again, they are owned" This got me thinking, looking at the major online PC gaming sites, I am hard pressed to recall more then a couple games within the recent past months that had a below average rating. Now unless we are going though a new golden age of PC gaming shouldn

As it should be <{POST_SNAPBACK}> An Elysium paradise. <{POST_SNAPBACK}> Indeed *Goes back to working on his full moon ritual* On a side note, the patch fixes all the bugs I noticed including poor video playback for the wonders.

Thank you! Wow the tremere pad is HOT! I went from a hole in the wall to almost penthouse level! Thanks for the tip how to get this place. I assume the tremere cant get both the tremere haven AND the one assigned to you by the prince? I ask because the prince didnt offer me a new place even tho I was nice to him and compleated the dane mission w/o killing anyone. Is the new haven given to you by the prince as nice as the tremere?

2 things... First I was told when playing as a malk you hear 'voices' that give you direction during the game. There was only 2 or 3 instances of such during the entire story. So I felt jipped on that that level. But the dialog did somewhat make up for it as the insight dialog wise was more then the other clans in many cases. But the 'voices' would have been better IMO. Also playing as a Tremere what do you have to do, to get the haven at the chantry? Thanks for any help.

hhmmm... chess too cerebral for you?

On nwn2news you will see a new option on the main menu when you login called "Chess". This is a online chess game you can play with other members here, with a rating system based on the international chess ranking system. You can start a game and challenge another member or offer a open challenge. Also you can have the game rated or not. I thought some of you may enjoy this feature, and I beleive if I understand the docs correctly you can also comment and view games even if you are not playing. Hope you enjoy!

I perfer these forums too...

While we are on the topic of Bloodlines perhaps those more versed in the background/setting can fill in a few questions for me: *SPOILERS* . . . . . . . . . . a. I keep hearing ppl talk about other 'havens' yet I have played through the game twice and never had a haven beyond the starting one. what am I doing wrong? (played as a tremere and malk) b. jack is the one who killed everyone on the E. dane, so who keeps sending you those cryptic emails? c. the malk mansion, who/what are those 'people' wandering around? are they vampires or some twisted creatures the malk primogen created? d. I dont understand the whole plot 'twist' of that vamp scholar beckett. hes dismissing whats in the coffin the whole time you know him then near the end of the game he acts like a scared little girl and runs away. I dont get the 180 degree shift when there was no built up to it. Thanks for any input.

V going in his semi-normal 'jackass' mode. Not possible to have a mature convo when that happens. Moving on... oh and I enjoy your selective quoting/replying. It is if anything entertaining

Ok V, change that tampon as its apparently that time of the month for you. Done? Good. Nothing like taking my comments out of context and totally having selective vision to read what you want. As a "whole" the engine isnt compleatly new. NO ONE from Obsidian has stated otherwise and on that level you are 'correct'. They HAVE said the "rendering engine is new" which it is. You fail to understand and fact you can replace entire aspects of the engine without totally re-writing the entire code base. Once again, most commercial programs are writting in a modular format to allow just that. In essence your argument boils down to if someone replaces their CPU in their pc and says "I have a new, better cpu" your argument would be equivlant to "No it isnt, unless you go buy a entire new PC your cpu isnt new/replaced". Its a silly and ignorant stance on your part to be blunt. As for my 'fanboi'-ness. If thats what it takes for you to sleep at night so be it. But a few points. - I have been critical several times of them in the forums on several topics and on nwn2news. But I, unlike you and others, dont need to hammer my issue in 902 threads. I say it once or twice, then move on. They heard what I had to say, repeating it like a broken record is futile and a waste of time after that. - I suppose nwn1 looks good, if you have a TNT2 card and cant play any modern games. Bloodlines/HL2, Unreal 2004, BfME and even Civ4 look vastly better. - You felt the NWN1 OC was up their with dante writing wise. And certainly you are entitled to. But you are in the vast minority and you should accept that by now its not as if my opinion is not the general concensus. If you want to go against the grain on that opinion feel free. But dont act all offended when you encounter such as if it the first time you heard such. Even Bioware finally admited the OC was lacking. Took them 2 yrs to finally have the balls to do so, but thats another topic.

In all seriousness V, its obvious you have never done any programming. So allow me to clarify your misconception. Most all major programming is modular (if written 'correctly'). Thus the rendering (graphics) engine code is seperate from the pathfinding is seperate from the AI is seperate from the game mechaincs is seperate from... etc Thus what they did is pull out the graphics engine aspect (and a few other parts) and put in their own they wrote from scratch. So as a WHOLE you are correct, the ENTIRE engine isnt new. However, it IS accurate to say specificly the rendering engine aspect is new. Hope that clarifies for you.

NWN 2 game $50. Video card upgrade for NWN 2 $225. V getting 0wned by JE? Priceless. Personally I think V has a love affair with Bioware and cant bear the fact someone else can do a better job then them with their own product. I'm just razzing you V, all in good fun

EVERY dev team says that for every game *yawn*. The orginial nwn team said things along those lines and they had FIVE YEARS; and still shipped a lifeless OC and dated graphics engine. *shrugs* The devs have said publicly they feel comfy with the 18-24 month time frame given. So I will give them the benefit of the doubt until I have reason to beleive otherwise.

Opps... my bad Re: "in shambles" Look at the first 2 pages, some ppl are jumping the gun getting all worried over a non-story. I never said anyone used that phrase. As if someone cant move on w/o the company being in trouble. If 5 or 6+ ppl AT ONCE quit then yes thats a alarm. One or two every now the then is expected.

To the person who wondered what the 'purple thing' on the ground in the color shots is, its a dead 'blade golem'. Of course if you kept tabs on my front page you'd have known that weeks ago...

Gangi, who was our orginial mirror for the scanned PC Gamer screens, PM'ed me with this little bit of info. "FYI - In the first 12 hours we've had over 23,000 downloads of those screenshots. We're also now linked by just about every major NWN related site out there lol." Because when you get right down to it, it's just people helping people. :D Thanks again Gangi!