Lord Niah

Sounds like entering combat or conversation in Fallout. The problem is not that they are using minigames, but rather the style of the mini-games. Your traditional audience for CRPGs and turn-based strategy has always prefered games that involve: #1 learning complex rule sets with deep possiblities for combining the rules in creative ways #2 Using long range planning (i.e. strategy) and/or shorter range planning (i.e. tactics) #3 Some sort of emotional appeal and immersion (this last one is more important for those who like CRPGs) The combat "minigame" in most CRPGs involves an exercise of #2. The character building mini-game (which is related to the combat minigame) involves #1 and #2 (i.e. long range planning). The Oblivion lock picking minigame involves twitch (or the skeleton key )

100 years war could be good. I would also love to see something set in a low magic world (or real world) something like Europe of the 8th-10th centuries. Good times. You've got your Vikings. You've got your Carolingian Knights. You've got your Saracen pirates. You've got your Anglo-Saxons.

I don't usually post here, but this is an interesting thread. Personally, I don't like mixing fantasy and scifi. I also think that the whole nuclear holocaust post-apoc thing is getting old. So how about something slightly more relevant to our times... 50 years from now... Global warming has led to the melting of the polar ice caps, inundation of coastal areas, runaway pandemics, and general economic hardship. In an attempt to stop further damage to the environment a group of ecoterrorists develop a genetically engineered bacteria that eats petroleum, reducing it to a useless sludge. Stressed world economies collapse and anarchy breaks out around the globe. Flash forward another 50 years... The player starts life as a farmer living in a small rural community under the "protection" of a warlord. His village is attacked by a mysterious raider (yes, I know it's stock CRPG plot at this point) who murders most of the men and enslaves the women and children. The player (be he male or female) is one of a few survivors who escapes, and is forced to seek the Warlord's aid in freeing the prisoners. The Warlord has different ideas, though, and "recruits" the player into his army...

Oh yeah, back to the original topic: which will be better? I think that Dragon Age is probably going to be the winner because Bioware has more manpower and more time. But I am also looking forward to NWNII. Btw Hades, KotORII was more open-ended than the first one. Also, the game with the best balance between story/interactivity was the Fallout series. I love the idea of a game that you can either fight your way through or talk your way through.

Peter Molyneux (spelling???) is a brilliant game designer, but he just doesn

I finished KoTOR last Friday. My overall impression was that it was very good, maybe better than the original in some ways, but the level design and story fell a little short of the original. As I understand it, Obsidian had to rush development a bit, and you can clearly see this on some of the levels. Other levels were fantastic, including Onderon (my favorite), Telos (the surface), Korriban, and the entire ending sequence. But there were also poorly written dialogues and bugy quests that I think probably would have been rewritten/smoothed out if Obsidian had more time. As for my list of best games, it's totally my opinion. I am basing it almost completly on how good the story telling/writting was, and then the rest is going to things like interactivity and quality of action. What I see happening in the game industry is a slow rift developing between what we traditionaly call "games" and what should be more properly called "interactive entertainment". Games from Bioware/BlackIsle fit more in the second category. Troika and Obsidian seem to have taken over from the now defunt BlackIsle.

To this date in time, there are only a handfull of true RPG masterpieces. They are: Baldur