ShadowPaladin V1.0

Alien teenagers out for a joyride.

So you choose them later rather than picking one when you complete your training? Interesting. I suppose its wait and see who gets what powers and feats now.

Perhaps they are splitting up the powers to make it more starwars like.

Way to prioritise and best of luck with your studies. Misato ? She's on vacation. The new one is a character from KOEIs new Samurai game.

There are just not enough shock emotes !! Seriously you should try it it's very very good.And probably dirt cheap now as well. (although I havnt played it since a couple of months after release).

<Waves> Hi Kitty. Glad it's all working out for you. http://shop.game.net/ViewProduct.aspx?cat=10249&mid=323665

Thinking about Daves E3 diary still makes me laugh.

Well Canderous was very respectful of Revan despite what he had done to his planet and people. Thats a reflection of the Mandalorian culture. It really dosnt matter if he was a Jedi or Sith at the time.

Yep it pretty much is There is a huge difference between preference and claiming something is right and something else is wrong though. It's moot anyway in most cases because they all have pause functions. FOT being the exception. But then FOT didnt require either great reflexes or great tactics. In both cases the abilities of the characters should be able to offset the lack of ability of the player. But then you still have players who are good at a particular type of game having a very easy time.

Most evil is about power. It's just a case of not worrying overmuch how you get it and what you do along the way.

Thats going to happen in TB too if the AI is that bad. It happened in FO and FO2 if you recall. The only way to solve it was to take away the NPC's burst weapons. Well you can do that in RT too. Thats why there is invariably a pause function either state dependent and or something large and easy to press like a space bar. The whole character stats and skills arguement is flawed. It simply replaces one type of player ability with another. I'm much better than the average person at tactical combat games for the simple reason I am me. As long as you limit either player tactical ability or player reflexes to a reasonable level thats the best you are going to get.

There is an option menu for slowing it down if its too fast for you. Speeding something up dosnt remove the tactical options it just requires you to think faster.

And thus was war averted

You could always add a twist by having siblings (thats very in keeping with Star Wars too). At some point in the story you have to make a choice and your sibling goes the opposite way and either becomes the person you have to stop or the person trying to stop you. As the saying you cant choose your family is true then I dont see any problem giving the player a sibling. Maybe they are unaware of their family at the start and it's the revelation of this that drives them appart. Perhaps even your companions choose sides based on your choices through the preceding parts of the game. Thats likely to make things very personal. I suggest they go for a much less clear cut thing though like the date in FVII where it wasnt obvious at first glance which choices led to which date. That way the companions will change game to game and the player wont have an easy way to just choose their favourites (where is that wicked evil smilee when you need it).

It's true that you had to learn what the symbols meant before you could make full use of the interface. But again thats not really functionality. Having 36 quickslots was rather handy too if you chose to use them. Though the arrangement was a little awkward to do one handed. An interface that uses words instead of symbols, unless said symbols are blatantly obvious is always going to be more immediately accesable. I know this first had from playing games In Japanese. I dont know the words but I can after a while recognise what effect the symbols have.

Well anyone who uses applications on a day to day basis will be used to the whole cascading menu thing almost on an instinctive level. Trust me it wasnt at all pleasent trying to overcome 6 years of Mouse+WASD when playing my first console FPS's. It was both bad because.. Well I sucked a lot more than usual and it was actually physically painful trying to do things the same way. I wasnt overly fussed with NWN's approach either (because I fall into the use cascading menu's every day catagory) but you really cant argue its functionality which was very very good. Both in the number of options and in keeping what would be a very bulky interface off the game screen unless it was needed. Where the IE interface worked for me was in its intergration to the game screen it never felt at all instrusive because of that U shape. Funnily enough if you close in the top of the screen too. Like Arcarnum did it gives a feeling of being boxed in

Not really functionality what it is doing is fighting your instincts. Which is why you feel uncomfortable with it and while it feels less functional. Same thing happens when you give a PC user a gamepad, or a console user a mouse. It takes a little time to get used to and there is a period of adjustment. General design would be. All regular functions on the top layer. Less used functions second layer. Rarely used or non time sensitive functions bottom layer. No interface should ever have more than 3 layers.

It's the one standing next to a refinary tank. You blow the tank and its 50/50 give or take whether it blows up or is just disabled. Out of curiosity did you gather up your mechs in one unit then sweep around the battlefield on most of the missions? Nothing wrong with actually requiring someone to think now and again.

It's not like I didnt ask I could see what was coming a mile off. I wanted "body" targetting from the num pad so it was all one touch. But the thing with targetting is really this. If the game is turnbased then people are not going to notice the extra targetting time much anyway. If you want to run targetting in real time it has to be done in a way that dosnt break the flow of the game. It also has to be useful enough that people will actually WANT to target,maybe even NEED to on occasion. If something dies so easily that you dont need to target, well why bother ? The best example I have seen would be Mechcommander. Targetting specific areas to knock out certain weapons was an incredibly useful feature. FF is a bit similiar but its really confined to boss battles only. In FO targeting really not that important. If you have a 95% chance of a headshot, really little point shooting anywhere else. And in FO getting to a 95% headshot chance, really not difficult. I'd say with some certainty that the thrill of targetting in FO came from the various crits rather than because of any real useful function. I'm a big fan of location based damage too. Rather than simply hitting the body you hit a random area unless you specifically aim at something with the associated penalties. It also allows you to do things like directly damage a weapon, and or knock it from your hand. Few things end a fight so fast as realising your opponent has that sort of skill.

I Like the one KOEI used on Dynasty Warriors IV. It looks like Bioware are designing their games from the engine up now. The KOTOR one did exactly what they wanted it to do for the type of game KOTOR was meant to be (not the type of game people might want it to be). Likewise the Jade engine is looks to have been built with very much with the sort of game Bioware had planned. Perhaps there is greater advantage in that approach than trying to hammer in the features you want into an older engine.

I'd really like to do horror like Ravenloft which was one of my favourite settings. But getting that sort of atmosphere in a CRPG would be quite a challenge. If you dont mange to capture that feeling then the game feels like FR with a different suit on. But I think the same applies to any of the more unusual D&D settings.And I think you are right that because they are less familiar they had more of a suprise value where as FR is pretty standard high fantasy fair with pretty standard high fantasy monsters. Lionheart actually worked quite well in places but was terribly flawed in others. The combat speed was VERY fast and while you had lots of options like being able to target and sacrifice accuracy for speed,tons of spells (which were a pain in the arse because you could only have so many on the quickbar and they needed refreshing every 30 seconds). At the pace LH combat moves, well best of luck managing that on a regular basis. However thats not to say it cant be done. It just requires you to match your control system to your options , something LH didnt manage to do. SPECIAL works perfectly well in real time as can be seen from FOT so it's hardly limited to just TB games. It's simply a matter of getting the pacing right for what you are asking the player to do with the options you give them. SPECIAL is also generic enough that you can adapt it very easily to any setting. But then again if you have a week to spare you can also come up with something just as good as SPECIAL,the hardest part is getting your stats to spell out something memorable . I converted it to work on a d20 a while ago and that didnt take long at all. Want to play D&D using SPECIAL you can do that too so up yours WOTC As long as you dont try to publish that is.

Thanks for the compliment ,however I'm sure there are lots of people who could do a better job than I could. I did some PnP design many years ago but I have great admiration for those who can focus over the entire length of the project. That and my very short stint with 3do pretty much sums up my professional design experience (so its not much). Perhaps after he has had a break to recharge his batteries JE Sawyer will come up with something along the same lines as Jefferson but without the WOTC baggage.

Thats true but then we as DM's dont have to pay an iota of attention to WOTC Also many games are created around the group playing it. So if you do a lot of travelling and play in different groups you will see a lot of DM styles. Mine is generally for very dramatic plots but with only very scant attention paid to the rules (one reason why 3e dosnt exite me at all). And probably explains my apathy when it comes to rules in general. I can say without reservation that 95% or more of my sessions would be deemed unsuitable by WOTC. It's a very good reason why it shouldnt be used. But then games are judged by the market and if the market laps up D&D like candy then people are going to make D&D games. Unless the market changes then there isnt really much incentive unless you have the sort of name that can carry a product in its own right. Bioware possibly with Jade Empire for example. Much of Jeff was deemed unsuitable by WOTC I think at least in initial draft. The difference to this and the BG era was that TSR didnt really have much interest outside of PnP in keeping control of things. This gave designers a lot more freedom to move around the rules.

Thats true but D&D dosnt leave much room for originality either. Anyone familiar with the monster manual (or even previous games) will instantly be familiar with most of the creatures. While you can say the same about FF , it does after all have a pretty established bestiary. They do shake up the abilities from game to game as well as introduce a few new creatures. Where as D&D games tend to be fairly routine when it comes to the restrictions placed on the system and very unwilling to change. Generally though these are the very things that fans of that particular game want to see. More of the same suits them fine and as long as there are enough of those people out there. Developers would be missing out by not catering to them. Obviously coming up with the sort of content that D&D offers from your imagination is quite a daunting task.