rjshae

Different world, different trolls. Figure-wise, they look threatening enough. There's no reason at all that the designers need to follow the D&D steroeotypes. What bothers me mildly is their cookie-cutter appearance. All three look identical.

Excellent! Your artwork is unique and creative. I like the look of the foliage in the area shots; the grass looks rich and the trees in general are a great improvement over the old IE games. One question though: will the foliage be animated? I know that sort of thing could eat up take a lot of disk space. Thanks for the update.

It worked for Star Wars...

What's completely discordant about the SoZ world travel system is the lack of any sense of days passing. It should be taking weeks to travel between some of the destinations, but that isn't reflected in the lighting. There's no camping and no changing environmental effects.

There's a lot of board games at the moment, with a few new RPG supplements in between: Advanced Bestiary for the Pathfinder RPG -- This is an update of Green Ronin's 2005 Advanced Bestiary for the d20 system. What's an advanced bestiary, you might ask? Well apparently it's a series of monster building templates. KS succeeding at $25K. ElfWood for Sixcess -- a fantasy setting book for RPGs based upon the Sixcess system. Their focus is on "wonky" game settings that are twisted versions of long established game tropes. Currently at $1K/3K with 35 days to go. Atlantis: Geographica RPG Supplement -- A companion book for the Atlantis RPG. "The Geographica details the people and culture of the antediluvian world once ruled by the kingdom of Atlantis." Succeeding at $11K with 14 hours to go. OmegaZone Instant setting for the Fate Accelerated RPG -- "Post-apocalpytic Los Angeles meets Cimmerian Pulp Adventure with a heavy dose of Gamma World in this new RPG setting." Now that sounds twisted. Presently at $3K.5.5K with a week to go.

Hurray, now the pathological whiners will have more to whine about. Looking forward to the new game though...

Total troll of a title...

NWN2 uses the Electron Engine, not the Aurora Engine. Mask of the Betrayer played quite well in strategic mode ("isometric") in my experience. To me the biggest benefit of NWN2 is that it uses the third edition rules. The engine seemed fine to me--it's getting long in the tooth, but still runs pretty decently. People have their biases, I guess.

Perhaps they could present a choice between: Forced march -- higher wilderness encounter risk and no camp recovery benefits but very fast Cross country -- higher wilderness encounter risk but faster and with camp recovery benefits Road travel -- lower wilderness encounter risk with camp recovery benefits

To do that realistically, the developers would need to factor in the start time to compute the travel time. If you start in the evening, it may take longer than if you start in the morning. Or they could just use days.

I still think the magic missile effect in ToEE was one of the better implementations...

I don't know if its easier. The difference between Fallout and BG travel map implementation is mostly about random encounters i.e. when you click on a location instead of jumping to that location, you'll might get a random encounter on the way. A possible drawback is that it allows to open location through world map exploration instead narrative only, in FO it meant you could take a shortcut which allowed you to finish the game in 15min... IMO It might be nice, but you can get the same encounters without having an exploreable world map. Well it is much easy to implement a point-and-click travel map using the Neverwinter Nights 2 toolset than an overland map. The former just takes a picture, some icons, and control scripts, while the later requires actually building the map in a 3D exterior area plus a whole lot of scripting, trigger areas, transition regions, lists of wandering monsters, placeable models, and so forth.

I could picture a character like some of the work of Diego Velazquez. A phlegmatic noble with a graceful mien, entering middle age, with fair olive skin and dark, well-trimmed facial hair.

Ouch! I hurt my eyes rolling them back into my head...

Yes, nearly all of those CGI-based introductory videos look completely fake. I can't exactly say they put me in the mood. The ones that usually work the best are those that are deliberately simplified, with hand-drawn or watercolor graphics.

Ancient Chinese proverb say: man with two watches never knows time...

I was hoping they would make the portraits and backgrounds tintable so the game could dynamically adjust the appearance according to the environment.

Since they have the original renders for BGEE2, I wonder if the characters and creatures are now anti-aliased? I can't tell with those wide screen shots.

$25 is steep... if you're from North Korea and aren't allowed to use a PC. Otherwise I look at it as blip--a minor service charge for saving me the time of modding up my copy. Plus there's whatever content they added, of course.

1 clown, 2 caterers and a three-man band. With plenty of booze and snacks of course.

It was announced on RPG Watch that BGEE2 is available for purchase from Beamdog or Steam.

I thought there was already a built in limit of 8 NPCs you can recruit from the Hall.

Both portraits look fantabulous! Great work. I like the casual, non-traditional poses, yet they both follow the rule of thirds pretty well. Nice use of light and shadows.

The main concern I would have with this system is whether your reputation is local or global. If you move to a new locale that doesn't communicate with the prior region, then have a reputation for cruelty or kindness still apply may break my suspension of disbelief. But hopefully that won't be an issue.

hand coding HTML is fun but time consuming. Might be faster to use a tool.