Slowtrain

The game is absolutely insane on the higher difficulty levels... Real test for FPS fanatics. <{POST_SNAPBACK}> I am also still playing the original SiN - it was a real shame this game came out at the same time as HL - it is well driven plot/action FPS. Emergence looks awesome. I just hope Ritual will be able to keep to its Episode instalment hope :? <{POST_SNAPBACK}> I actually bought Sin over Half-Life. The only real problem was the walloping amount of bugs in the initial release version. I couldn't get past the second or thrird mission because killing the boss in the subway car didn't open up the tunnel to the next level. By the time the 80 MB patch was released I was playing Half Life and never went back.

I bet its going to be awesome! I'm ready to order now.

Actually, the first time I played FO I didn't know about the headgear and just waltzed right down the corridor. He messed me up, but I still beat him.

yes, it would, wouldn't it. sry.

You named your vampire Rosa?

deja vu?

showracemenu allows you to work on your pc's face whenever you want. So you don't have to get it "perfect" right from the start.

I tried playing Bloodlines again recently. Couldn't do it. I think the 5 or 6 playthroughs was enough. And I got tired of Fallout out, too. I tried playing it again last year and couldn't make it past Junktown. Course, I have probably played about 2000 hours of Fallout all told so I can't complain. Never finished FO2 though, I suppose I could try playing that one again.

I agree!

My computer would throw up, die, then throw up again. Those screenies look fab though. What do you use to power your computer? A nuclear reactor?

Better AI costs time to develop and takes a lot of procressing power. SO it has a lot of cost associated with it, but at the same time its hard to say that better AI equals more game units sold. So AI devlopment is going to take back seat to pretty much anything else. I remember Warren Spector said that one of the reasons the AI was so poor in Deus Ex was because they simply left it to the end because they considered other things more important and therefore only had a very short amount of time to get the AI working. ANd the result was obvious.

Brujahs are a very good choice for a first playthrough. They are also a good choice for a second and third as well.

I wasn't referring to you directly, just in general. SOme of the most buggy and unplayable games have been some of the most ambitious. Battlecruiser 3000AD and Daggerfall and Falcon 3.0 for example. Now Gothic 3. When a developer pushes really hard for something ambitious often their reach is goign to exceed their grasp. But shsoudl they still be encouraged anyway. Daggerfall ended up being mostly playable as long as you saved a lot. And was a game I enjoyed immensely. Battlecruiser ended up being kinda playable. Falcon 3.0 finally mostly worked after a year or so worth of major patching and became something of a flight sim legend. For the young'uns: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battlecruiser_3000AD http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falcon_3.0 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Elder_Scr..._II:_Daggerfall

In a situation like that does one cut the developers some slack because they tried to implement something amibitious and far beyond the simplicity of a KotoR? Or do you blast them for being so incompetent and making a game which is for all intents so totally b0rked that it won't really ever be fixed? I'm not sure personally how I feel about it. On the one hand I think we should strive for ambitious games like Gothic 3, but if I had spent $60 US on it, I wouldn't be too happy.

You sir, have far too much knowledge to be merely human. metadigital, indeed!

Did you look that up? Or did you just know that?

I don't see why its the big a deal. Just have a lot of the non-critical quests open to AI particpation. Maybe some AI bounty hunters that go track down rogue conjurers for money or something. Loot dungeons. Form into parties and raid the Oblivion gates. Its not like there is a lack of anything to do. There's plenty of mods where the NPCS get killed left and right. I had one situation where a high level conjurer chased my level 1 wood elf all around lake Rumare and killed about 20 guards along the way. After the conjuerer was finally overwhelmed, I went back and collected all the silver long swords and sold them to the Fighter's Guild smith in Chorrol. I made a bundle. It was totally awesome.

I could throw guys through walls all day long and not get bored with it. <{POST_SNAPBACK}> Don't forget hitting them with claymores. It never gets old.

sweet. Is this goign to have a console version?

teppie, dahling, it's been so long! Did you finally get a new computer?

Not true, since I did just that both times. <{POST_SNAPBACK}> Which is of course the big issue with time limits and npc competion. SOme players simply go faster in particular gameplay areas than others do. How does a developer balance for that.

I dunno about that. The Fedex quest required to enter the thieves' guild was in competition against NPCs. As I remember them, one was an idiot that did nothing, and the other knew exactly what to do and made a beeline for the needed item. It was an adequate feint. The point of the quest was to lift the item off of the successful thief, not get to it before her. The PC couldn't possibly do what he needed to do (in this case, bribe the location of the item out of local bums) in order to complete the quest before the competitive AI, who didn't need to investigate anything. I metagamed past it to avoid hassle, since I wasn't that great of a sneaker and thus not a good pickpocket. But if that's what Radiant AI meant to most of the gameplay of Oblivion I'm glad they took it out. It wasn't really all that dynamic or exciting. <{POST_SNAPBACK}> I didn't like that quest either. But that is more an issue of bad quest design than an AI issue. Frontloading the NPC with total knowledge of every item and its location and then forcing the player to essentially learn through trial and error what she needs to do to beat that NPC is really really poor design. The NPC should have to go through extactly the same steps as the player, with probably a bit of an intentional slowdown built in so the player has time to make a few mistakes. ANother reason its bad is that it is a guild quest that the player has to accomplish in order to achieve access to a significant part of the game. Its one thing to make the player rush to collect nirnroots or face failure by not getting a particular potion; its a whole nother thing to make a player rush or face failure to gain access to an entire faction quest line. Also, just on a side-note, if you do fail that quest you do get at least one additional quest to try. You might even get two more. I can't remember.

Interesting points. WHich I kinda agree with, although with qualifications: On the idea of NPC competition and urgency: 1) If urgency is enforced with a hard-coded time limit to beat the entire game: then no, I wouldn't like that. 2) If urgency is enforced through a hard-coded time limit on a specific quest and I am aware the time limit is going to exist before I take it, that's fine. 3) If failing a hard-coded time limit results in GAME OVER, that's awful design and I would hate it. 4) If failing a hard-coded time limit results in missing out on a particular event or prize or a loss of influence, that's fine. If the failure resuklts in something major, but their are in-game ways of recovering from such failure, that's also fine. 5) Urgency created through a sense of competion from NPCS seems preferable to me than a time limit. And as long as there is a way to recover from failure, losing to NPCS is not a problem. In Wizardy 7, if you were slow solving the locations of the map pieces, there was a good chance an NPC quest solver would get their first. If that happened you had to track down whatever NPC had the map piece and deal with them to get it. It created a nice sense of balance between a feeling of urgency but an understanding that there were ways around failure. If losing a competion to an npc results in loss of a less-important item that is not specifically neccessary to finishing the game, then there's no need to create means within the game to recover from failure. You simply fail in that particular area and the game goes on. On NPCS doing your quests: It depends on the game. If there are only a small number of quests and experience gain is essentially limited to completing thiose quests, then NPC competion isn't really possible. But in a game like Oblivion in which there are many minor quests, many of which involve finding or killing stuff for people which is not too unique or interesting once you've done a handful of them, plus an essentially endless supply of Oblivion gates to close, I think there's a lot fo room to have the NPCS really pursuing their own agendas at the expense of your own. Game-critical path quests would most likely have to be closed to NPCS however. Like I said, its too bad the Beth devs just killed it, rather than harnessing it and implementing it in a lot more places.

Well, to be fair, Shadowstrider has remarked that the Oblivion AI was actually completing quests and closing Oblivion gates on its own. I think that's pretty cool. Too bad Bethesda simply nerfed the AI so it wouldn't compete with the player rather than trying to harness that ability. Wasn't in Wizardry 7 where the AI actually had NPCs that were competing with the player on the main quest, and if the player took too long to find Map pieces, the AI npcs woudl often get there first? Imagine how much more interesting looking for Nirnroots would be if there was other npcs gathering them as well, and if you took too long, oh well, no prizes for you. Instead we get: Hi! Good Day. I saw a mudcrab today. Annoying creatures. Their claws are sharp through. Indeed! *clears throat* Goodbye.