~Di

Oooooh. I see! Thank you! The rest systems were way different. In NWN2 (and the NWN 1 series as well), resting consisted of a 5-second break with no real time impact. Made it wonderful for mages. We could fling our entire inventory of fireballs, rest, then fling them over again at the next wave. I'd have never made it through the Crossroad Keep siege with the MOTB system, which was a full 8-hour rest, time sensitive (in order to further screw with your depleting Spirit Energy), could not be used between battling groups of enemies or inside a half-cleared dungeon. Bah. I hated it. Mages were useless again.

At least you had the courtesy of responding to my post as a whole instead of yanking a couple of out-of-context sentences from it in order to scold or mock me. I thank you for appearing to take into consideration tthe most important line of my post, which I had bolded: If the tone of the article correctly describes the tone of the game... Of course that's a big "if" at the moment. However, this is an AP developer speaking, stressing the sexual content and describing in-game females in a less than flattering manner. I'm sure guys find it all exciting, but trust me, most females would be insulted by games in which an entire gender is portreyed as nothing more than stereotyped sex objects. The Witcher was really over the line in that regard, with the exception of the 3 main female characters. I'd hate to see an Obsidian game follow suit. It makes me nervous when developers give interviews that stress the sexuality of the game, not in a romantic sense but in a "woot! you can nail all the women!" sense. At least one comment issued under that interview agreed with my take on it... and that comment was from a male. Edit: I just checked the interview comments section again... the majority of comments are put off, and more than one has pointed out the juvenile aspect of how the game is being marketed here in the interview. Like I've said, I'll have to wait until the game is released to see if this interview was just an isolated incident that didn't really reflect the majority content of the game, or if it's something else.

Hmm. There were some wishes for more interesting companions... but are there even going to be companions? I thought this would be like IWD, where we create our own party. I for one would like resting to be implemented as it was in NWN2. For the first time ever, mages were flat worth the money in NWN because they weren't relegated to flinging bullets and buffs after blowing their spells in the first few minutes... or worse, saving all their big spells for "when they are really needed", which usually means they are never used because the player knows as soon as they're gone, the mage will be useless again. People who don't want to rest don't have to rest; but if resting is disabled, or turned into a nighmare of having to run back to an "inn" and spending 8 hours to recharge (one of the most annoying things about BG/BG2, and the reason I never, ever played as a mage in those games), those of us who don't find that tedium to be fun have had our choices taken away. I was really, really disappointed when the rest system that had been in place throughout the entire NWN series was suddenly changed for MOTB. If the hardcore "permanent death, no rest, friendly fire so your mages become equal-opportunity killers, turn it from an RPG to a tactical combat game" crowd gets its way, I'm sure they'll be very happy. But it won't be an NWN game, and only the hardcore gamers will be buying.

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Out of curiosity, what kind of games do you want to play? What does appeal to you? Well, all the games I listed, of course. High on my list of faves have been BG, BG2/TOB, IWD, Gothic I & II, Planescape:Torment, among others. For tactical games my all time favorite is Jagged Alliance 2, but I liked the early Civilization games as well (Civ 3 I hated). I'm not a FPS fan, but still loved Deus Ex and No One Lives Forever. I'm not into war games, games about kicking old ladies to steal their purses, games about mobsters and hitmen or vampires. Just not my thing. Drooling aliens and sex-machine spies are not particularly appealing premises to me, but the finished games may surprise me and make it onto my "love it!" list. Everyone has different tastes, and I just don't see any other games coming down the pike at the moment that I would consider myself to be "looking forward to."

Because the PC has the ability to sex it up with some female character? No, since most of the games I've enjoyed the most have romance options. But it is hardly romance when developers are stressing that basically every female in the game can be nailed if she's manipulated correctly... and some will go "bats*t insane" if they aren't manipulated correctly. And even if you dislike the idea of assassinating some poor bastard, you might just want to do it anyway if the female who requests it is "really hot!" If the tone of the article correctly describes the tone of the game, it sounds as if females are treated more like mission tools and sexual targets than capable individuals with real personality. That's not what I consider a "mature" theme. Just the opposite. Again, I'll have to wait until the game hits the shelves and the reviews are out before I decide, but this article is far from a selling point for me. I didn't buy The Witcher for months for that very reason, until I spoke to gamers I trusted who assured me that despite the infantile Geralt-the-sl*t options, they could be avoided and the game was otherwise very good. True, the game was otherwise very good... although I still ended up with trading cards because there were scripted scenes where these "ladies" jumped his bones without asking permission. And of course, nearly every female Geralt talked to was willing to do it for a mere bauble. Not a particularly respectful way to show an entire gender. It added a really adolescent feel to an otherwise excellent game, and only the fact that the most important female characters in the game were portrayed as strong, competent and important individuals otherwise saved it from being a total misogynistic pig-fest. Let's just say I'll be waiting to talk to my trusted gamer friends before I spend money for a game that ends up making me want to dump the DVD in the toilet and scrub my hands until they bleed.

At this point, only Fallout 3 and Dragon Age are on my "must have" list. Other games I'd be interested in haven't even been announced... Jade Empire 2, Mass Effect sequels, KOTOR 3... so there's no sense in really "looking forward" to games that may never be made. I would be anxious to see NWN3, because I loved NWN2. However, the expansion made so many drastic design changes (most of them incredibly annoying) that it barely resembled the original game, and the next expansion (though it may be fun to play) will apparently bear more resemblance to IWD than NWN, so I honestly can't imagine what NWN3 would look like if it were ever made, which at this point I rather doubt. I don't know enough about AP and Aliens to decide whether I even want to buy them, let alone be excited about them. Neither premise appeals to me at the moment. I'll have to wait and see what happens after they've been released and I read the reviews. Rather a lean time for the kind of games I personally want to play, actually. Maybe some exciting stuff will be announced in 2009.

Well. Shades of The Witcher. I wonder if it will have trading cards. So much for my hope that it would be the "spiritual successor to Deus Ex". Sounds more like every adolescent's fantasy game. My interest has waned substantially.

They still increase your character's power, if only by enabling him to access a greater variety of weapons/abilities (versatility is a power increase). Okay, here, I think I've got it: RPG: A game where a "currency" (skill points/experience points or whatever) is used to gradually increase your character or characters' (all the ones you directly control) power/ability in the game. This currency can be used to permanently increase the powers/abilities of individual characters, which includes (but is not limited to) all the characters under your direct control. It is not gained solely by progression through the story. The currency can be used to increase your human or anthropomorphized character

Agreed. The most important part of any game is not its category; it is how immersive and fun the game is to play! I'm looking forward to learning more about AP.

Not to be argumentative, but in what game does the character make choices on his own without player input? I mean, choices are available for character action or dialogue... but in the end, who decides what exactly the charaction will do or say if not the players themselves? My only point is that in any game where the player controls a main character, that character will throughout the course of the game have choices of action and dialogue. Thief certainly did, and it was no RPG. No One Lives Forever certainly did, and it was no RPG. Gothic did as well, and I didn't consider it an RPG... just one man's journey, which is what Deus Ex was and many other excellent action games. I suspect that in my view Alpha Protocol will be the same. Now clearly I'm a big fan of some of these non-RPG genre games, like Deus Ex, so if Alpha Protocol is along those lines I very well might love it. However, if it's more the spiritual successor to, say, Hitman, I'm fairly certain I won't be buying.

Well, with that definition Duke Nukem could be considered an RPG. He made choices. Any war game could be considered an RPG. You make choices there, too... choices with consequences. Name any FPS out there, and the player has choices to make, choices that affect gameplay and/or story. That doesn't make them RPGs. System Shock wasn't an RPG in my view either. It was a FPS, subgenre Thriller, that had variable skillsets. No, taking a single-character through a story, whether it be Deus Ex or Thief or The Witcher, does not an RPG make by my definition. All those were great games, but IMO they were not comparible in role-playing qualities of Mass Effect, Jade Empire, NWN2, KOTOR1/2 or even the Elder Scrolls games (no, you don't need a party for an RPG... and simply adding a party does not an RPG make; Jagged Alliance 2, for example.) Anyway, people can pin a title on any game based upon any criteria they think up. Heck, you can slap a label that says "cat" on the butt of a pig... but that doesn't automatically turn the pig into a cat or vis versa. Y'all can call any game anything you wish, however. Arguing the nuances between what makes an RPG versus any other genre is not winnable because nobody's mind will be changed. So basically it's a waste of everyone's time.

Alpha Protocol doesn't strike me as an RPG at all. Preset protagonist... no companions... only the ability to hone various skills, talents, and choose different methods of solving various missions. Welcome to the spiritual successor to Deus Ex! Now I loved Deus Ex, and still play it occasionally... but no way was it an RPG. It was an FPS with a skill-set and choices. Being an RPG junkie, I'm a little disappointed. I'll wait for a while after release to get a better feel for the game and how it's received before I decide to buy or not. For some reason I just expected an Oblivion game would naturally be an RPG. Shows that one should never make such assumptions, lol! Anyway, whatever it is I hope it is a success for Oblivion... but not so big a success that they stop making my RPG's!

I frankly am not a MOTB groupie. I found too many design decisions (and changes from NWN2) just plain annoying. The whole SE concept and implementation left me flat. *shrug* There was a lot of good about it, I enjoyed the quests, the companions, the overall story... but when I recently completed a replay of NWN2 and automatically exported my character to MOTB, I felt nothing but drudgery in dealing with all the SE machinations and dreary black-and-white stuff. I just didn't bother to finish it a second time. I know most folks on this forum adored it, but I'm pretty sure I'm not the only one who thinks it isn't exactly a "masterpiece". I'm hoping the next expansion will return more to NWN2's roots... but we'll see. Edit: Wow, I just watched the trailer. Graphics look great, overland map is intriguing, and creating our own party... shades of IWD! I'll miss the fully-developed characters and interactions that provided, but I really loved creating my own party in IWD so I'm getting kind of jazzed about this expansion. It'll be different, that's for sure. Should be interesting.

Just tell them you are considering several options, and give them a date by which you will make a decision. If they try to pressure you, that says a bit about what it would be like working for them. If they respect you enough to allow you a reasonable amount of time to get back to them, that also says a bit about them. Good information either way when you finally make up your mind. Oh, and tell Norway the same thing should they fast-track an offer to you. Either way, sounds like you are heading up in the world! Congrats!

Well, I can guarantee that if a 15 year old smuggled a grenade onto his high school campus, pulled the pin and threw it into a group of students resulting in death and injury, that 15 year old would be tried for murder, most likely as an adult. And he would most likely be convicted. When my kids were 15 (and when I was 15, for that matter) we all understood the concept of deadly weapons inflicting massive and frequently fatal injuries. Nobody is going to convince me that this particular kid, who traveled halfway around the world specifically to fight and kill people, did not understand that concept. As I've said, I have more compassion for his victims than I do for him.

I tend to think that a 15 year-old Canadian bright enough to travel halfway around the world and join a war in Afghanistan had a pretty good idea of what "kill" and "dead" means. I also tend to think that when he threw that grenade at a patrol of soldiers, he wanted to killl those soldiers dead. Sand, you are describing the mental capacity of an average 8 year old, not an average 15 year old. This boy knew what he was doing. He wanted to kill soldiers, had the means to do so, and he did it. I'm not feeling particularly sorry for him at the moment. I feel a hell of a lot sorrier for the soldiers he killed and maimed.

Here's a nice post from Bioware's DA: Origens forums about magic http://forums.bioware.com/viewtopic.html?t...44&forum=84 (scroll down a bit to see what Maria Caliban has to say) A few highlights, though (for the lazy ones, like me ) Magic is going to be very dangerous and rare. The Church and the religion in Ferelden, the place in which the games takes places are against magic, any magic. Mages are born. Period. You're a mage or not. Period. As soon as you show any talent for magic...well, you get taken away to...ehm...another place. Mages can cast mind control spells. It is forbidden to do so. Anyway....when did stop someone... Mages are feared by the common people. Magic does not include summoning, teleportation or resurrection. There will be no healing potions or healing magic. When you're hurt, you're hurt. You need to fight your way back to base camp to get medical attention. To me, this is looks far better than the system used in D&D... It will definetely not be a Tolkien rip-off at all. Maybe it will blend some RTS elements into the RPG environment? Maybe the highlighted quote is contained somewhere else in the thread, but I didn't see it in Maria's post. I did see where she said " Instead magic can cause rapid regeneration," and that "There is an advanced magical class that focuses on healing and buffing". That makes me a bit less uneasy. The idea that if anyone in the party is injured, the entire group has to "fight their way back to the base" from the middle of a mission sounds pretty danged tedious and unfun to me, so there certainly had better be a natural regeneration rate that allows gameplay to continue without constant interruption. It'll be interesting to see how Bio has decided to handle the balance there.

Yikes. The DA thread turned into a Witcher thread. No biggie. I liked the Witcher a lot, much to my own surprise. Gerald was such a cool character that I forgot all about my sulk at not being able to play a female. I just hopped on Gerald's shoulder (like I did with Nameless One) and engrossed myself wtith the game, which was really fun for me overall. There was a few design decisions I found slightly annoying, but not enough to override the interesting story and combat that was actually rather exhiliarating! I'm really surprised at how many people didn't like it. And Volo... why would you compare The Witcher with KOTOR of all things? I don't get it. Could you clarify what you meant, please?

Geeze, you guys are a tough audience! Hey, I liked KOTOR a lot; I liked KOTOR 2 more. MEPC was a very good game. Not great, but damned good. I have waited for DA for more years than I can remember. Unless Bio/EA pull something like the "10-day internet recheck" crap on it, I will have DA in my hands within a week of its release. There are only two games on my "must-have" list at this point: Fallout 3 (yes, I know, it will bear little resemblance to the original, but I still gotta see what I gotta see) and Dragon Age. I guess I'm a Bio-fangirl. I've yet to have a Bio game (including Jade Empire) that I didn't have fun with and feel it was flat worth the money. I really don't understand all the negativity and mistrust about a game that has spent long years in development by a company that has never really let its fans down with quality and story-telling ability (if one charitably disregards NWN OC as perhaps the least successful of their efforts, despite the fact that their least successful still outshines the "best" most developers have offered to date). Why all the Bio-hate? I, for one, cannot wait for the release of Dragon Age. I suspect it will outshine BG and BG2 as the new fantasy RPG classic standard. If I'm wrong... well, I'll cry. But I don't think I'm wrong. Be optimistic, people! I think Bio's decades-long legacy of quality deserves that much.

Mega-congrats! This is huge! You've worked very, very hard for a long time to achieve this. I'm proud of you! *hugs*

I think for me the problem was doing console-type things on a PC keyboard that took some levels of the game to monotonous. The decryption mini-game was a nightmare, as my keyboard (and apparently many others) hesitated and stuttered slightly. Shopping was a chore, and for the life of me I couldn't understand why I had to listen to all that danged droning dialogue two or three times just to look at all the categories of items a vendor had. I hated that I couldn't skip past dialogue and cutscenes.... and every dialogue was a cutscene. Those are the things that dropped the game from an A to a B for me. I enjoyed the story overall, loved the Mako, loved the ability to free-fly all over the galaxy, enjoyed most of the characters. The missions were cool, and I think I did every assignment available (although one must admit that there was a sameness to them after a while). A good game, an ambitious game, but with some unfortunate flaws in my opinion. Maybe I can force myself out of Paragon mode and try to be a Renegade... but if Renegade turns out to be a softer name for "evil", I'll get the willies and bail again. Can't help myself. I'm a good girl at heart!

Have you ever raised a child to the age of 13-14? A child that young has a brain that is not fully cooked yet, and vulnerabilities that cannot possibly be a match for an adult on a mission of personal destruction. Would you blame a 6-year-old for her own death if an adult commanded that she stand in the middle of the freeway? Children are not simply small adults. They are incomplete, mentally incapable of competing with an adult mind, and not able to properly evaluate the consequence of their actions. Taking the side of a malicious adult bully who knew this child and her emotional fralities, then took advantage of that knowledge to totally destroy her self-esteem and her reputation among her peers, the most important social group in a child of this age, is spiteful and ignorant, in my opinion. This woman cannot be rewarded for this despicable behavior. You act as if emotional torture by an adult toward a child is simply an okay right of passage. It isn't.

This, however, was a case of cyber-stalking, where an adult woman who knew this child personally, and knew her insecurities, set out on a malicious mission to hurt and humiliate by pretending to be a teenaged boy who first wooed, then rejected, then degraded the girl in a public forum. I'm not saying the woman should be charged with Negligent Homicide; but she most certainly should be charged with, and hopefully convicted of, some kind of felonious behavior here. Just shrugging it off with the idea that bullies will be bullies isn't enough. Bullying has been ignored all too long in this country, and is responsible for numerous suicides of vulnerable young victims every year, and the mental torture of countless others. It should be treated as a crime, in my opinion. Also, this woman should be held civilly liable when the victim's parents sue the pants off her... and I'm pretty confident they will win and win big in civil court.

I just finished my first playthrough of Mass Effect. Good game... not great... and with some design decisions that made gameplay utterly tedious at times. Had no DRM problems, the occasional sound/video stutter, and a couple of freezeups... nothing I couldn't live with. I feel as if I got my money's worth, but there's a sense that for me at least the story didn't live up to the hype.