Delfosse

- Which came first, the chicken or the egg? - CHICKEN? EGG? L0L! BIOWARE MADE IT CLEAR IT WAS NWN L0L!

I had to borrow money to chip in 15 bucks. Sucks that I won't be able to see those 4 videos from the $30 tier. I won't feel bad for trying to google them though. I really did my best.

That's the first real thing that's gonna be an actual improvement. Although I really liked the old compressed voices in obviously low quality with gurgle noise. There was something about it. Not at all. It was added as an extra feature, and they've said it themselves. It showed too. It was so buggy, the server could never hold for more than 2 hours, at which point memory leaks would lead to constant swap-ins/swap-outs and consequently huge time response, 2000-4000 ms wasn't anything unusual. The server had to be restarted all the time. It also used to just crash all of the sudden, quite often, and then everyone would have to wait till the admin got home. And they couldn't care less. They didn't fix it in their numerous (20? 30?) updates.

The engine is good, the graphics are good, but those monotonous caves that never end with the same "riddles" and the same mobs (draugrs), it's getting old pretty fast. And when it already got old, you've still got 90% of the game ahead of you. Another issue is that even on nightmare difficulty (or how's it called there), nothing is difficult. My character ended up being a bad mother****er in daggers (backstab x32), bows (backstab x8 I think), magic (destruction, healing, summoning) and even longswords with light armor. Basically a character who's mastered all disciplines. If you tried making a character like that in Morrowing, you ended up with a character who doesn't know how to do anything at all. My impression is that the game is oriented towards youth and not Morrowing audience. Replay value is null.

A 360 degree rotating turret equipped with a canon, or minigun if you prefer, would be more effective, as well as simpler to construct, repair and handle through software.

It is being brought back. As an MMO. I guess somewhere around 2015.

Well, it doesn't look like you can possibly be convinced through reasoning. A fanatic then. Okay. Just never met a nwn fanatic before, is all. A weird spectacle, pretty funny, too. It's like meeting a cacao fanatic, running around the office, trying to convince everyone that coffee and tea are disgusting liquids and that cacao sells better too, repeating 'cacao! cacao' on every corner. Okay, you crazy zealot. Relax.

Sure is. Although from the practical point of view, the tail is superfluous. I guess the originality outweighs the unrealistic aspect in this case. Really ****ing cool.

Well even though your methodology is deeply flawed, I decided to google how those two games actually performed. Looky look. Baldur's Gate Franchise Latest Figure: 5 Million copies (2009 \ 2010) Neverwinter Nights Franchise Latest Figure: 3 Million copies (April 2007) http://www.neogaf.co...ad.php?t=447650 Looks like even using your own methodology you failed. Sorry bro. NWN sucks balls.

Your methodology is flawed. If you're going to judge the quality of the game from the standpoint of sales alone, which is an economic method, then in order to remain scientific, you have to adjust for: a) inflation b) the at-the-time exponentially growing PC video game market We know the inflation rate, we can estimate the growth of the market, but we don't have the rough sales numbers. Therefore this methodology doesn't provide answers, because there are too many unknowns in the equation. This method being invalidated, we can move on to another way of measuring the games' success, where critics or the audience would rate the game. In this case, on all sites, as far as I know, BG shows better results than NWN.

Some shards used to be better than any modern day MMO. The possibility of creating mods with user-friendly GUI and scripting with nothing but simplest of the C knowledge, that propelled NWN multiplayer to places where no man has gone before. From what I understand, it didn't create a boom in the West (correct?), but in Russia it was extremely popular. People used to compete at making the best PVP characters and there were some really crazy builds, like a sorc with extremely high AC and tons of Petrification spells, the main strategy being - spam Petrification in order to catch its victim rolling a 1 on a save throw. Or a sorc/pal that couldn't kill anyone, but had a 1/day ability to inflict a thousand damage to evil characters if connects. Etc etc. Tons of drama over some unique loot. Some really tough PVE encounters. GMs creating interesting quests where half people used to die and lose their gear forever. Epic stories of treachery. Those were some good times. Muds and UO were better of course, but NWN multiplayer was good too. Of course the main story in NWN was so ****ty, I never even finished it. Same can be said about its addons.

Can't you see? The character jumps like the original Max Payne, plus you've got "Max Payne" in the title. So there! And the graphics are better, so the game must be better too, see? At least that's what's Morgoth tells us, and I don't see anything wrong with that, because what else is there in a game other than graphics? I mean if you want content, just go read a book, you ****ing weirdo. Games aren't made for aesthetically educated people, games are for school boys who love to shoot **** left and right yo! Don't believe me? Ask Morgoth, man, he'll tell ya, aight?

Well that's a funny joke. I spent at least 2 years just playing on Russian persistent-world shards and there were more ways to get mobs stuck on just a small piece of stone laying on the ground than I care to remember. I don't remember anything of the sort in the IE. Like I said, IE managed badly the fact that someone was blocking the path. Aurora managed badly everything, including texture on the tiles (tiles with teeny-tiny stones could block a dragon and get him stuck forever, it wouldn't be anything out of the ordinary). I remember getting stuck in texture myself a thousand times, so please...

BG, IWD, Planescape, Arcanum, Vampire the Bloodlines. MMORPG-wise, I dream about a hardcore mmorpg (your gear drops when you die, etc) using any D&D edition, but that's never gonna happen. Not in my lifetime anyway.

*snicker* I kid, I kid... I would probably like FPS if I wasn't old and my reaction time wasn't crap most games move so fast as to give me motion sickness I used to love Japanese Role-Playing Games but a lot of the recent ones haven't had the charms of the older games (also a lot of them got kinda over complex for me). I also have to confess as I get older I've grown to prefer creating my own characters which isn't something most JRPGs do. That said I still have a soft spot for the MegaTen games... That reminds me, I've wanted to ask this for a long time now, but didn't know where or who to ask. I've never played any JRPGs. I did play Septerra Core back in the days and loved it, although I'm not even sure it qualifies. Does it? In any case, JRPGs recommendations would be welcome. What are the eastern equivalents of Fallout, Planescape and BGs?

I don't agree. I've got sort of an issue with kickstarter about this. Unknown people come and claim they're gonna make a super game, and everyone gives them money. We'll see how they're gonna handle it, but I think most of them are gonna deliver mediocre results at best. Everyone gets money if the presentation is good, which sort of worries me, but that's beyond the point right now. The fact is, it's all about presentation.

What makes me doubt this as a good source of information at all is that he says localizations cost 400k euros. Unless you're gonna hire some big company and tell them "whatever it costs, just get it done", those numbers are surrealistic at best. There are always freelancers who deliver quality results for 20 euros/hour. If it takes them a month to translate it, it's gonna cost you 10 grand for 5 languages. Voice actors aren't expensive either. And you can get decent equipment for a few thousand euros. Of course you can spend 400k, just as easily as you can spend 2 million on localizations, the sky is the limit when you let others manage it for you and don't supervise the spendings. But had it been supervised, it would've cost 40k euros, not 400k. Likewise with graphics. Is this your only source of info that this is how much it's gonna cost you? 300k? What about outsourcing from other countries, be it Europe, India or Russia? There are professionals in all those countries, yet salaries are much lower in those countries than in USA. Have you considered hiring independent professionals and not big companies? I have serious doubts about those 300k.

Let me remind you that others aren't actors either, so you're not competing with Colin Farrell. Yet they made pretty cool videos and you refuse to even try. It takes creativity to make a good game. if you can't make a decent video, people will have doubts. Well, your loss, especially since you've already made so much and it's a shame to stumble and fall now. Well just know this, you're not doing your best. Take critique as something that can elevate you, don't dismiss it like you just did there. Talk about it with your colleagues, sleep on it, see how others filmed it, think about what could be improved and who could present the game better. This is what's limping most in your presentation at this point.

Not at all. The pathfinding algorithm in 2d is extremely simple, it's called backtracking. It's something you learn in your first weeks of programming courses, it's that simple. The only thing that BG's algorithm didn't manage at all was when the path was blocked by another character. The algorithm considered that path blocked, end of story. However, if the path was blocked by a friendly character that was also moving, the algo shouldn't have dismissed that path. That particular issue caused problems with moving multiple characters through a narrow passage: some of them would think that there's no way of moving through it and would take a longer route, which most people usually solved by right-clicking on the ground multiple times, remember? This particular problem can be solved with a few lines of code. From what I've read so far, Trent is just trying to make it sound and look like they're actually working, so he can ask for money later.

No, it's done through an extrapolation algorithm. Trent what's-his-name mentioned that they're "researching the best upscaling algorithm" (what's there to research? get the best one, see if it works smoothly in your beloved iphones, end of story), which doesn't add more resolution to the image, it just removes the pixelation. Like that: http://en.wikipedia....i/Image_scaling If the image above shows, you can see the difference. The one on the left is just a zoomed version, it's therefore pixelated. The one on the right is enlarged with an extrapolation algorith, hence no pixelation, but there isn't much detail to this object (it became dull), as you can see.

Well, just a quick feedback. When there's a visual message presented by someone in this manner, there's always content (what she says) and there's always an emotional judgment (how she says it). To me, she sounded like someone's mom reading a text off the screen. That's the worst way to do it. She doesn't seem competent, she doesn't ignite interest, the video doesn't show any parts of what is ACTUALLY done, which it should. It frankly seems like she's lying about certain things, like "everything is done". If you could remake the video with someone energetic, DO IT. SHOW that team of designers, scripters etc (ACTUAL PEOPLE), say on what games exactly they've worked (it doesn't matter if nobody knows them, just gives us SOMETHING), then show parts of things that you've already DONE. It may be a very good game, but you presented it as poorly as you possibly could. And it doesn't matter if you did some of what I'm saying in the updates. I honestly don't know if you did. I couldn't bring myself to check it out, cause the video almost put me into a coma, never mind ignite any interest whatsoever. And I'm absolutely the target audience you create this kind of game for.

Or it could be like in good old MUDs where you almost couldn't regenerate stamina in order to move around if you hadn't eaten in a long time. Dying is a bit too harsh of a measure.

The only concrete thing he says is that they're gonna "fix what is broken and that would be multiplayer". What's wrong with it? The only thing I always thought was lacking in BG's multiplayer was to host and play arenas.

half-rotten apple > DAO > horribly stinking garbage > sewers with human waste > a pile of men bathing in it and sexually gratifying each other > ME1-2-3 & DA2

Gee, I hope they make absolutely no "adventure to be played after you finished the game that works as bridge between BG1 and BG2", just cause that would annoy me and I don't care if it's optional and others might find it good, I'm just an ****. Better yet: maybe they'll make BG3 exclusive to blackberries. Or let's make them exclusive to Panasonic fridges with tiny black and white monitors. The least people play it, the better.