Slowtrain

To me, using spoken language to add to the international flavor of a game, where appropriate, just makes a gameworld more interesting. Obviously, if the game is entirely set in the US, then having everybody speak American English is perfectly fine, but this need to export Americanese into every world environment is pretty boring.

But then it wouldn't have been so funny :D. How did the Monthy Python movies do in the US, btw? Monty Python is niche. Both the TV series and the movies. It has a lot of really passionate fans and a lot of Americans (such as myself lol) can quote entire skits word for word, but still its pretty way out of mainstream US.

I wouldn't criticize the fact that people liked it. In fact, I woudl expect it to do better being a domestic release that probably speaks more closely to AMericans. I was just appalled at the enormous difference in box office success between the two. Hot Fuzz is a good accessible film and the fact that it did almost zero business in the States was really crazy. It just shows how difficult a road non-US films have to travel in the US Subtitles are not the kiss of death in the states true, but they are close. If Hot Fuzz had been a US-made film it would have done much much better. That was the gist of my point really.

Most Americans hate foreign movies, black and white movies and movies with subtitles. As an American, I find it totally embarrassing that the movie Wild Hogs, a completely tedious film starring a bunch of washed up American actors makes hundreds of millions of dollars, while Hot Fuzz, a pretty non-threatening foreign film, released about the same time, makes a handful of pennies and some pocket lint. SO as much as I would like to see a much greater diveristy of languages in video games, the truth is that most Americans would be happiest if everybody in the world spoke with a middle American twang.

donut or dougnut?

I didn't even know the word "dialog" existed.

I would like to see more games that are not so tied to English as the primary language of the entire game. Spoken languages should be appropriate for the location in which gameplay is occuring. If part of a game is occuring in France, then most of the voice actors should be speaking French, not French accented English. One things I really like in STALKER was the fact that much of the spoken language was not English and no attempt was even made to intrepet it for you. It really added to the awesome factor of the game. I would have preferred that all the dialogue in the game have been non-ENglish, but no such luck.

I don't read many comics anymore since most of the stories are so awful (for me personally), but I still look at the art from time to time, though sequential art doesn't interest me as much as it used to. Anyway, I think is Frank Quitely a really good artist. SO there. Especially in a world that hails Mike Mignola as some kind of brilliant artist. Or Ben Templesmith.(I enjoy both of their work, btw, I'm just making a point on stylistic approaches and differences to sequential art) Not everybody needs to draw like Frank Cho. Or even John Buscema. Though they are both awesome as well. That is all.

I agree that Moira's VO actor did a good job, though the voice could become grating -- I think that was the point. I notice this problem a lot with how players respond to voices and accents. I'm a big fan of having crazy United Colors of Benetton casts, but I always want to have native speakers as actors for those roles. If a character is Qu

If you mean anyone can pick up a basic video camera and film some random thing like a horse race, then OK, i would agree. Otoh if you mean that anyone can make an actual movie, using quality cameras and film stock and lighting rigs and editing gear, recruituing actors, writing a script, arrnaging locations and what not, not to mention the technical knowledge of how to set up shots and light them and what sort of shots work well for what effects, then I disagree. Even a very small, independent film requires a considerable degree of knowledge and training and experience to make. Plus a lot of people, time, effort and money. Its not rocket science certainly, but then neither is making games.

Wargames are the ultimate in no-frills game design though and always have been. They've been plodding along in their niche for twenty-thirty years. They can get away with things that pretty much no other game genre could.

Its like a map in the front of one the all-too-many bad fantasy novels. lol.

Were it that simple, and that consumers would be satisfied with an old-school BG3 that had roughly the production values of Galactic Civilizations 2. By and large gamers want to have their cake and eat it too. Yeah, that's a good point and one I happen to agree with as well. Making a game look and sound good is where the niche game developer would have to skimp. And in todays market that would really hurt sales. Until we reach a point where stablizing technology has lowered the cost of creating high production game environments, the niche game is going to be a hard sell to anyone who didn't grow up playing games 10-20 years ago.

Movies have a lot of markets to get revenue from; while both media offer world-wide distribution, movies have multiple markets - theater, home, premium cable, basic cable and broadcast markets to play with. I know games have a home market, and I guess online downloads could be seen as akin to basic cable, but I do wonder if low budget/low-to-mid return video games can find a niche in the market that would make them worth producing? Most low budget movies are either niche movies (like low budget horror) or they're prestige pictures (lots of drama) or their locally produced. But its cheaper to shoot a low budget film, I'd think, than to develop a game beyond the very simple. Although thinking about it, maybe those ad supported web games are the equivalent to low budget production. Be an interesting question to have answered. Movies also cost more than games to make (usually) and games usually cost a lot more to purchase as retail units. SO comparing them to directlty probably isn't that useful. However, on a larger scale, making niche products is a completely viable strategy for generating revenue. Although less glamorous than making a blockbuster product, I suppose. One simply needs the discipline to set a realistic budget in accordance with sales projections.

The other approach is to not budget all your games as triple A titles that have to sell 5 million copies just to break even. Even Hollywood isn't that dumb.

I think a game that includes combat as a core or even major aspect of gameplay has to account for character death in some manner. Without death, the struggle for life loses its significance, even in a computer game. The trick for developers is to make the act of character death significant enough that it is worth working to avoid it, but at the same time when death happens, it is not a tedious and reptitive process.

But even with the absence of death - and the inclusion of a chance to retry at almost zero cost, such as the time necessary to jump back into the fray - you're still left with goals to overcome, which may be intensive or not within the framework of the game. If you're close to saving someone from being killed but die yourself in the process, for example, that's still demanding of players. Possibly. Its sort of akin to a minor setback in forward progress. a la Bioshock. But, speaking specifically about Bioshock here, for me it was not enough of a penalty to make death something that mattered. AFter the first level or two, I grew tired of maintaining the illusion that the death of my character was significant and spent most of the rest of the remainder of the game running up to Big Daddies, emptying my shotgun at point blank range, getting "killed" then running back to finish the job, repeat ad nauseum. Really, it seemed to me just as tedious and repetitive as endless saving and reloading. Ultimately, there was no reason in Bioshock to avoid dying, say why bother trying to do so. True. And I am not really knocking Torment per se, since the lack of a standard permanent character death is a big part of the game. But it was a poor design choice to include generic combat gameplay in a game where the main character can't die. A slightly more adventure game approach to TOrment's design would have strengthed the game immeasureably.

Death mechanics in games needs a lot of thought. The save anywhere/die/reload/repeat mechanic is pretty tedious and is more an exercise in pushing the save game button than anything else. Using save points only can help by adding a real Ouch factor to actually dying, but if the save points are not well balanced it can lead to incredible frustration. Otoh, simply removing death from a game a la Bioshock or even Planescape really takes a huge chunk out of the urgency to stay alive, which really hurts the intensity of gameplay. Ultimately, I think the key is for a developer to create a situation where death results in a significant in-game penalty, a penalty that is meaningful but does not (neccessarily) require a reload. Exactly how or what that penalty is or should be implemented really depends on the type and nature of the gameplay. This of course only relates to games in which character death is a part of the gameplay.

Last I heard their next project was going to be an original IP, more rpg/less action. That was some time ago though. So things may have changed. Apparently they are working on 3 projects, so that might be console RPG, The Witcher 2 and a new IP. I heard they weren't really interested in doing a Witcher 2. Is that confirmed? I mean, it's cool if it is. Just hope they don't trot out mots, for the second go around. Between The Witcher (Regular) and The WItcher (ENhanced), I think its time for some new gameplay stuffs.

You are very brave to subject yourself to this game, MC.

Last I heard their next project was going to be an original IP, more rpg/less action. That was some time ago though. So things may have changed.

That was only funny because it was so bad. Maybe that's the point?

Wasn't that thing finished a year ago or something?

Those sound fairly substantial, almost like x-packs. Sure beats Horse Armor. lol. Awesome on the SDK. The mods will be awesome. Guaranteed.

I used to farm those things. I would load up in one of the vehicles and take all my spare crappy ammo and drive my team around until they used up all their lousy ammo on random encounters. IIRC, the only ones that are tough are the supermutant ones, but I had strategies for those. Can't remember what those stregies were anymore though. lol.