Slowtrain

my god. those screenies make Farcry look like a child's crayon scribbling. I hope the gameplay is at least decent.

Agree totally. And Humor and madness together is even trickier. Given Bethesda's writers are limited at the best of times, this is my biggest concern. I have no interest in playing a crpg that's filled with stupid humor.

IIRC, you only get the humanity point from dancing if you are humanity < 7.

I think its a pretty good idea for an expansion. An interesting way to create a stand-alone story-arc amdst the huge world of Oblivion proper. Sheogorath is the most interesting of the Daedra, in ES lore Sheogorath is always considered sort of "apart" from the other Daedra. There's some potential there for an interesting adventure. Also, dealing with the realm of Sheogorath, gives the developers a chance to pursue some non-conventional quests and happenings. The trick, I think, is to make sure it doesn't devolve into some sort of three-stooges meets Alice in Wonderland sort of shtick. As Pop accurately puts it: sinister rather than zany. My biggest concern is that its just going to be some kind of zany comic-releif farce. No thanks, if it is.

Ah ok. I get it now. Here's a bit more explanation: http://www.elderscrolls.com/forums/index.p...howtopic=615911 The Daedric realm of Sheogorath the Mad.

Is that accurate? The lands of Mania and Dementia? wtf? That sounds like somebody's idea of a joke.

estimated wait 11 minutes. no. Doesn't matter, I'm still looking forward to this game regardless.

loopy. The lot of you.

That's just loopy. HL was ultimately another health and armor pickup run and gun shooter. Not much else behidn it. SS2 was a far more varied and interesting game.

What. Seriously though, there was more suspense in the Blast Pit than in all of FEAR put together. That having been said, a lot of people regard BGtutu as being a step up from the original game (especially when one further modifies it) what's the difference here, really? We could get the same effect. <{POST_SNAPBACK}> I'm not saying FEAR was great or anything. I'm just saying its a graphically enhanced version of HL. And while you may have found suspense in the original HL, how much suspense is going to be in the remake since you've already been there, done that. Duke Nuke'em 3d might be worth a remake though. Oh wait, we have to wait for Duke 4 first, don't we? Nevermind. lol. Nice. I would sig that G1 if it had more context. Sweet.

I don't see any reason to get excited about remaking an old fps with better graphics. I mean, all fps games are for the most part are graphical enhancements of the same gameplay that's been around for years. If we now have FEAR, why do we care about a remake of HL? edit: I could understand remaking Deus Ex with much superior graphics since DX was one of those fairly rare games that is never really duplicated. But HL? Weird.

^_^

Hopefully the derailments have run their course. Anyway, here is a nice mod for people who want to eliminate some of the more well known problems of Oblivion's original design but don't want the huge changes of a mod like OOO. http://www.bncomputing.com/ob/adventurers.html The adventurers and super/adventurers for Morrowind were probably the best Morrowind overhauls available and this Oblivion version appears to stand up nicely. No more bandits with daederic weapons! Among a bunch of other things. I am starting a new game with it and will see how it goes. Note: Despite the version 1.0 marker, there were several pre 1.0 play testing versions released and this should be relatively bug free. Its also a tiny mod at only 777k.

I am not saying I find Oblivion a perfect game play experience. For example, I do find the ability to "be everything", as you put it, asinine. What is the point of making choices when you select your skills if everythign ends up the same in the end? Morrowind has that same problem as well, and I was hoping it would be corrected in Oblivion. Alas. However, we have to be careful here, bceause that it is verging on a subjective judgement on what we like versus dislike. the more important question overall is not about "being everything" but about does the skill system as implemented in Oblivion work? I don't think it does, and one of the reasons is that its pretty much irrelevant what skills you choose as major and what you choose as minor. Some of which ties into the "learn by doing" approach of the skill system in ES games, which is really hard to balance without setting a bunch of really artificial constraints on skill gain which then is totally counter to the intention of creating a more freeform skill system in the first place.

I somewhat disagree with that. I do agree that there is no such thing as total objectivity. Every judgement we make wil be tainted by the personal experiences of our lives. However, I do think it is the responsibility of a reviewer to put aside his or her likes and dislikes as much as possible when reviewing a game. It will be impossible to do completely, but the effort should be made. The reason being, obviously, that just because someone doesn't like something or doesnt find it fun does not mean that something is bad or poorly done. A game shoud be judged on how well it works and how well it does what it attempts to do. Some things can be quite objective: Does the game crash a lot? Is it buggy? Is the sound clean? Are load times excessive? Those are pretty straight forward. The tougher things are reviewing the internal game mechanics and trying to answere the question: Does the game work? Keeping with the ES theme of the thread, let's take a quick look at Morrowind and Oblivion as examples in one particular area: encounter difficulty/challenge. How well implemented is it? DOes it work within the apparent intention of the game? Morrowind: Morrowind encouraged the player to go off on her own and explore: loot caves, fight monsters, level up, get better. That was one of the major design goals of Morrowind. Yet, if the player follows that design goal, the actual quests as presented by the main story arc and the guild arcs can quickly become too easy and insignificant because the player rapidly becomes too powerful for the quests. SO here is a broken aspect of the game design that doesn't work. The quest pieces do not fit with the exploration pieces in terms of creating a continuall challenign environment for the player. Oblivion: A lot of players complained about this broken aspect of the game and Bethesda responded by applying the scaling/level list system to the quests as well. ANd for the most part, it pretty much works. Quests are now generally tough no matter how much a player explores on their own. Those two pieces of the game now complement each other. However, looking further, aspects of the scaling system do not fit with the actual lore as presented in the gameworld. In the gameworld of Oblivion, rare metal weapons and armor are considered "rare" The books in the gameworld even mention this repeatedly. Yet, as the game scales its difficulty, run of the mill bandits show uo carrying gear that they couldn't possibly possess if we take the gameworld at the face value with which we are presented. That is a broken aspect to the scaling system therefore. What would have worked better and been less intrusive would have been to level bandits accordingly, but keep them armed with iron and steel weapons with an occaisonal boss having something a tad rarer. They could still a challenge and the gameworld would remain consistent. That's just one example obviously, but the attempt is to remove subjective judgements from the review. In this case a reviewer should not be passing judgement on the concept of scaling, only evaluating how well it works in furthering the intentions of the game. Some people are going to like scaling, some people won't. Scaling itself has no impact on whether the game is good or bad. That sort of analysis is a lot more conducive to getting a feel for the game, than saying: scaling sucks, I don't like it. edit: Just want to point out that: a) Scaling obviously isn't the only way to address a challenge problem, but it is what the devs choose and therefore what needs to be reviewed and b) scaling as done in Oblivion does have other downsides than just the weapons/armor issue. I was just picking that as quick example.

In terms of reviews there's always going to be a personal side to them. If he felt a personal relationship with characters in the game, then he did. Its not really a debateable point. It's real to him and will factor in to his evaluation of the game. On to the larger point, Oblivion was one of the best games of the year. In terms of putting together a quality product that does what it wants to do, Oblivion succeeds masterfully. It may not be the absolute BEST game of the year, but any list that doesn't have it in the top ten or twenty is suspect. It would be similar to omitting Diablo from best game of 1998 or 1997 or whatever. You may not like it, but it is still a masterful piece of work. Personally, I think Oblivion has flaws big enough to drive an elephant through. Some really bad design decisions as well, that either don't make sense in the context of the game (for example really really fast leveling in a game that is so huge and so filled with things to do), things that are simply broken (the persuasion wheel requires no speechcraft skill to be 100% successful with, lockpicking requires no security skill to be pretty much completely successful at), thngs that are useless (mercantile and speechcraft). etc and so forth. But it still one of the most professional and well-put together games I've ever played

That used too happen, kinda. NPCs used to solve quests and close Oblivion gates on their own. It had to be fixed, because it was preventing the player from doing some things. <{POST_SNAPBACK}> That is totally awesome. That would have added immensely to the gameplay. No offense, SS, and I do think overall Oblivion is a fab game, but the devs made some really weird decisons when balancing Oblivion. Absurdly fast skill gain and leveling Skill system that encourages metagaming Skill system that discourages any sort of roleplaying Social skills that are 100% useless Races that are completely imbalanced Armor skills that essentially end up at the same place. I could go on and on. ANd here I fond out the coolest AI feature of them all is shut down rather than harnessed. Sad.

I believe that the STEAM version is the standard Jag 2 Gold revision. The 1.12 patch for the gold version should work fine of that's the case. The 1.07 patch which was the final version patch for the original Jag 2 is still around if you need it. edit: It may be a prepatched version though. So just check the revision before you patch it. The final standard revision of Jag 2 gold is 1.12. If that's what it already is, you shouldn't need to patch it. Here is the link in case you want it: http://ja2v113.schtuff.com/ A new full update is due out in January some time. This is the greatest mod I've ever played for any game. Most of the new options and old systems are now user configurable configurable through the new ini file locateed in the 1.13 directory after install. I suggest you look through them, Although you can just take the defaukts and go if you want.

Depends what level you play on. In the expert campaign, you can very defintely lose the central SAM, sectors in Grumm and sectors in Alma to the queens counter attacks. Sometimes, you could lose a few sectors in Cambria early. The northernmost towns were rarely seriosuly threatened. In the 1.13 mod, shortly after you take Drassen, you are counterattacked in the Drassen mine sector by 60 Elites attacking simulatneously from all three adjacent sectors. You pretty much always lose that one. The 1.13 mod is truly awesome.

Was it really the dynamic campaign that made the game so cool? <{POST_SNAPBACK}> It wasn't the only thing, but it was a big part of what made the game so much more interesting than other squad tactics games. Canned missions just aren't very interesting, especially if they are of the pass/fail/replay-until-success-or-death variety. Randomly generated missions a la XCOM are fine, even though you don't get to originate the mission yourself. XCOm missions you could take or pass, succeed, succeed partly, or miserably fail. And yet the game continued. Many times in the early mid game I would lose my Skyranger and its entire complement of soldiers, yet manage to recover and continue the game for a good long while. Much more fun. And more interesting. And in Jag 2 the whole aspect of finance your campaign, take the ground, hold the ground added a great strategic level to the affair. If Jag 3 was going to get new features to offset the loss of prior features, there woudl be room for hope. But that list appears to indicate that features are only being lost not added. rather dismal, really.

Removing the entire sector-based aspect of Jag 2 is like Bethesda announcing that Fallout 3 is going to be released with no dialogue of any sort. Such a fundamental aspect of the game is being removed that it begs the question, why bother? The answer of course, is because it's a lot easier and cheaper to do a bunch of pre-set missions + random encounters than create the dynamic campaign aspects that made Jag 2 so cool.

Translation: We can't be bothered to do a JA3, because, frankly, we don't know how to get the mix right that creates a total greater than the sum of it's parts. Yet another mediocre squad combat game in the horizon. I'm surprised that they didn't throw in real-time action too, just to rub some salt in the wound. Jagged Alliance franchise... <{POST_SNAPBACK}> Amen! The chances of this being good are um low. Even if one just takes it as a squad-based tactical cimbat game unrelated to JA2. JA2 was one of those rare games in which everything just clicked, probably more luck than anything else. JA was nothing special and JA3 wil most likely be also nothing special. Removing some of the best parts of JA2 is hardly a formula for making a JA3. As Gorth says, another mediocre squad-based combat game. At best maybe it achieves the level of a Fallout:Tactics.

I never had a problem with that. That sounds more like a play style issue rather than a design issue.

Good games can be made in any genre, any style. Doesn't matter to me whether they are crpg or fps or something in between. Oblivion for example is something in between. But being "in between" FPS and CRPG is not what makes Oblivion disappointing in some areas. What makes Oblivion dissapointing in some areas is that those particular areas were not designed very well. Bad design transcends genre or style.

I'm playing a new game of Oblivion and doing the Knights of the Nine faction quest. So far it is the best of the faction quests. It starts with the desecrated Chapel of Dibella in Anvil and then a meeting with a mad Prophet.