el pinko grande

The dwarf ranger is surpringly sexy in the wallpaper. I am okay with this.

Well, I donated my extra $8 ages ago, but I've never been able to think of a title. But I thought of one! Could I be a Void-Touched Master of the Obsidian Order, please?

I know that feel, bro. Personally, I really like swords, but I'm tired of the way recent games dumb down weapons to like two or three categories. Like, I love spears and pole arms, but we hardly ever get them anymore in CRPGs. And if we do get them, they usually suck. Bring this dark age of melee weapon diversity to an end, Obsidian! Bring us the glaives and naginatas and pikes and guan daos that we have been yearning for! (sorry, I just got back from lunch and I probably had too much caffeine)

CRPGs. Hmm. There's a lot of good memories. Vampire:Bloodlines. Fighting that Tzimisce boss a bunch of times and getting my ass kicked, then turning to the flamethrower and kicking his ass in about three seconds flat. Then later the pants-****ting terror when I realized that the flamethrower did nothing to the werewolf boss. Mass Effect 1. Wasn't that big a fan of the game overall, but talking Saren into shooting himself instead of fighting me was surprising and gratifying. Other people have already mentioned Dakkon and his personal story, so I don't have much to add other than that was awesome. The relationship with Kreia in KotOR 2. Awesome. The whole Dark Ritual thing in DA:O. I had been reconciling myself to the necessity of my Warden dying, but that twist felt like something an inspired GM would pull out of their ass in a tabletop game. Caught me completely by surprise. Keeping Dogmeat alive throughout the final dungeon in Fallout 1, despite his suicidal determination to run into those energy fields. Realizing I could clone as many +5 swords as I wanted in Secret of the Silver Blades by exploiting the bank vault. In my defense, I was like ten at the time. Invading Dormund Kass at the end of the Jedi Knight story in SWTOR. Also, impersonating a droid with my Imperial Agent. Also, refusing help from my friends and soloing Darth Baras at the end of the Sith Warrior storyline. Fighting Kefka at the end of FF6. I'd spent hours leveling all of the characters I didn't use in that stupid dinosaur forest, just for the sake of completeness. Then realizing that the big epic boss fight was going to use all those characters and I hadn't wasted my time was awesome, and then it was a good fight on top of that. The Paragon path Jack relationship in ME2. The end of that story was more satisfying than anything involving the Collector base. Star Wars Galaxies, spending like 90 minutes mindlessly butchering Sand People in Fort Tusken with dozens of people I don't know, then building a huge awesome ranger camp and playing music for them while everyone sat around chatting afterward.

I'm in favor of limited ammo, and I say that as someone who abused the hell out or ranged weapons in the BG games. I'd also like it if the ammo is weighty, but I imagine a lot of people would find that aggravating, so I'm okay if Obsidian keeps it weightless.

Just one? Ok.....The Kangaxx fight. You either had to guess correctly, or else you had to come online/use the strategy guide to get the step-by-step How-to. if you didn't, you lost one party member per round, until there was no one left and it was Game Over. I still don't get why is this bad and should be fixed. Kangaxx fight was awesome. Personally, I find it immersion-breaking if you can't improvise your way through a fight. If you need to do a fight a dozen times to learn exactly what an enemy is going to do, how would the characters realistically ever survive that encounter? I realize that's not a concern for everyone, but it annoys the hell out of me in games.

25 years but you never played a spellcaster. kind of narrow minded don't you think ? how do you know you hate it if you never tried it. I hear the first time is painful but then it gets better...gotta' pop that cherry eventually. Who says I never played a spellcaster? Hell, my second character when I was playing Red Box as a kid was an elf. My dislike of the Vancian system specifically comes from my experience of having used it with my characters.

A thought occurs that it might have been prudent to change the system for a different one long ago. GURPS, maybe? I play lots of different tabletop games. GURPS is my favorite, specifically with the Ritual Casting option for magic, though I also play lots of White Wolf games, HERO, and Savage Worlds. There's a specific kind of gameplay that works best with D&D, though, and I don't think any other game really comes close to capturing it. Unless you count Pathfinder as a different game, of course.

How old are you? Old enough to have been playing D&D for twenty years or so. Which, it turns out, is plenty of time to develop a deep-seated hatred of Vancian magic. Okay. Just curious. In the early 80s I dont recall too many alternatives for PnP fantasy RPGs. So if you hated them then you pretty much hated PnP RPGs. just because he says he's been playing for 20 years don't make it true. people may lie on the internet don't you know. I've been playing D&D for 25 years. I also hate Vancian magic.

33 Favorite RPGS? Fallout, Morrowind, Final Fantasy 3/6, ToEE, DA:O

Speaking as a fairly old-school gamer, someone who started back in the 80's with Red Box D&D, I would love to see Obsidian discard Vancian magic and never ever look back. I'm not specifically a fan of cool-downs or anything, but I'm an aggrressive hater of Vancian magic. To be fair, though, I'd also probably do away with classes and levels if I were running the project, so I doubt my tastes would be to everyone's liking. Regardless, I do not want a game that is a clone of Baldur's Gate in terms of gameplay. I want a game inspired by IE, but I also want the model to evolve. There seems to be this assumption that any deviation from the old model is a concession to the idiot masses of Xbox-wielding frat boys. I don't think that's true. The IE games weren't perfect. They did some stuff better than modern games, and some stuff worse. And modern games aren't all bad. If Obsidian want to steal something from an Elder Scrolls game or a Bioware game, I don't think P:E will necessarily be worse for it.

@D3xter, what exactly are you arguing? That 3d games don't look as good as the concept art that inspires them? Because that's not a position anyone is going to argue with. If you're trying to extrapolate from that that 2d games look better than 3d games, you're going to need something more substantial than some screenshots from 15-year old games.

I really feel like people in this thread need to go back and read about Van Buren and the Jefferson engine. Wish I could find the old Black Isle Fallout 3 FAQ where they explained why they were going to go fully 3d for the game.

I like random encounters, and I hate level scaling. That said, if there are random encounters, I do want them to be scaled to the level of the region you're in. I don't want to encounter the tarrasque when traveling from the peaceful village of Tutorialburg to Duke Marshmallow's Enchanted Castle. If I wander into some steaming hell-pit of a map, sure, send magma-spewing dragons after me or whatever.

Please no broad, silly humor. I've never allowed myself to say out loud or type this, but Minsc and Boo annoyed the hell out of me. I like humor, but it should be humor that makes as much sense in the game world as out of it. No "Chosen One" protags, and please no prophecies of any sort, unless they're revealed to be nonsense.

Spamming insults now when out of arguments, aren't we? I'm just saying, if you've never been with a woman before a romance in a game is probably more immersive for someone than someone who has been with a woman. What's wrong with that? Not really insulting. It's like the difference between a boy seeing boobs for the first time and the difference between a man seeing them for the thousandth time. You know what? I could just as easily say that the people who are opposed to romance in games hold that position because they're 30-year old virgins who live in their mother's basement and don't like in-game romances because it reminds them of the pants-****ting terror they experience when they talk to women in real life. I don't make that argument because it would be rude and baseless, but that's essentially what you're doing here. It's dickish. Please stop.

Presumably you'll find one of those when you buy a chess set that comes with a decent story. Sorry, you lost me. Yeah, knee-jerk Bioware hate is what all the cool kids are doing nowadays, isn't it?

Okay, story time. When I was playing through Dragon Age, my then girlfriend, who has no interest in games generally, started to watch me play. She thought combat was boring, and usually just read books while I was doing that, but she liked it when I was talking to the NPCs. And she especially liked watching me hit on Morrigan. And she got really really interested when Leliana showed up and I decided to hit on her, too. She started out loving Morrigan and hating Leliana, but slowly switched positions over the course of the game. In fact, she took kind of a sadistic glee in seeing how screwed up Morrigan was emotionally. The Dark Ritual thing completely knocked her on her ass, because by that point she was invested enough in my character that she didn't want him to die, but thought that Morrigan toxic and didn't want my Warden sleeping with her. Once we got to the epilogue, she was relieved to see that Morrigan actually took the evil god baby and left, since she was afraid Morrigan would turn into a crazy stalker and murder Leliana's weird little rabbit thing and turn it into a pair of shoes. So yes, I think that the romance in Dragon Age was well done. My girlfriend didn't care about video games before or after Dragon Age, but she found the romances compelling enough that she formed attachments to the various characters involved and became invested in the story. If it were just fan service, or if it were poorly written, I don't think that would have happened. And just to mine all of the controversial territory I can with this post, the exact same thing happened with one of my friends who played Dragon Age who happened to be a gay man. He was playing, his non-gamer boyfriend started watching him, and both got totally caught up in the Alistair romance. I was hearing about how they both had crushes on Alistair for weeks after they stopped playing.

Presumably the other thread was closed because we already have this one; it's been open since Friday. As for the rest of it, nobody is saying they're necessary for a story to be good. There's lots of situations where including a romance wouldn't make any sense. There's no romance in Portal because, well, that would be stupid. It wouldn't fit. There's no romance in Battlefield 3, either. If romance isn't appropriate for the story, by all means, exclude it. But most RPGs, IMO, don't fall into that category. And if you say right from the get-go that you're going to exclude romance, you're denying yourself a powerful storytelling tool. Outside the realm of video games, in movies and books and television, most stories have romance. Why? Because it's compelling. It touches on some really primal **** in the human psyche. Deciding you're not going to deal with romance in your story when it would otherwise be appropriate is like tossing half the tools out of your toolbox before you start a building project. It's an unnecessary and silly self-imposed limitation.

If that's the way you feel, why are you even posting in this forum? Virtually this entire place is devoted to people asking the devs to include stuff they care about in the game.

Honestly, the only thing I want is that the design of the equipment match the tone of the game. I have no problem with massive JRPG weapons and gaudy armor, but there are games where they're appropriate, and games where they aren't. If the tone of the game is going to be over the top and anime-ish, by all means, give us humungous Sephiroth swords. If it's going to be more realistic than that, which I suspect it will be, then a more restrained aesthetic is probably in order.

I'm still going to pretend that Torn is the inspiration here. I was soooo disappointed when that game was canceled!

People who have healthy social lives often post on videogame message boards asking for the inclusion of romances when they're at work and don't have anything to do.

What does that mean? Essentially, that turn-based combat makes me conscious of the game's systems and their inadequacies in a way that RTwP does not. In a RTwP game, for instance, I can see the enemy mage preparing to cast fireball, and move my party accordingly. In a turn-based game, he casts the spell, damages everyone in my party, and I don't have an opportunity to react. The former strikes me as sensible and realistic, the latter as an unwelcome artifact of tabletop game design. Similarly, the way movement works in turn-based gameplay seems incredibly silly to me. Characters move wherever they please during their turn, even in circumstances where, realistically, someone would intercept them.

See, I actually believe the opposite. I think those who are steadfastly opposed to romances in video games are likely to be the lonely ones IRL. Since relationships aren't a regular part of their lives, they have trouble viewing their inclusion in video games as anything other than masturbatory pandering. OTOH, if you are habitually in relationships, it seems weird that your character isn't in one. I mean, in most games, you're playing a world-shaking hero who is awesomely competent and probably quite rich from all those sweet monsters loots- why the hell wouldn't such a person have a girlfriend/boyfriend?