Stephen Amber

Arcanum. A game which I never got into back in the day but have picked up recently.

Think a Beamdog dev made some comments about NWN/NWN2 remasters, and how they were basically impossible because of the Neverwinter MMO. An MMO which they could have named anything else... I'd be more interested in an Obsidian rpg, with a toolset, based on the Pathfider rules at this point.

The word "Lich" was used extensively by Clark Ashton Smith as well, back in the pulp era, in his short tales of necromancy. Pale master is the closest thing to a lich I've played in a crpg. Pillars has most of the stock arch-type classes, though not sure a necro apotheosized to lich would fit amongst them.

Road Warrior edges it out imho. So many brilliant scenes and characters in the road warrior... max eating a can of dog food, giving it to his dog, and the gyro-captain getting scraps at the bottom. The feral kid with the boomerang, who ironically becomes a leader in later years, as he narrates as an old man. Fury Road bristles with guns. There were only two firearms in the whole of the Road Warrior: Max's sawed off shotgun, which starts out empty(he only gets working ammo towards the end), and Lord Humongous' bad ass hand gun. This brought most of the combat down to a medieval level with hand weapons... and the occasional x-bow thrown in. Road Warrior is ultimate post-apoc movie as far as I'm concerned.

More contracts should be incentive based like Hardy's. It's a "behave or else" contract. On the subject, while his exempt status was justified I don't think Peterson's was. A muscled martinet perhaps overzealous with the lash, he was merely disciplining his own offspring. "Spare the rod spoil the child." His intentions were good. Yet he gets placed on the exempt list, along with Hardy, and a prime season was taken away from his career... a hall of fame caliber career. People act liked he killed someone, which was nearly the case with Hardy, as it was borderline attempted murder. It's just so wrong....

what if the replacement were Adrian Peterson? rumor is he wants to play in Dallas.

I don't have the same objection to 'in-house' as I do to fan contributions. Rightly so. VO produced by Obsid in house would likely be waaayyyyy better to listen to then some stuttering shmuck sittin in ma's basement whispering into a pink plastic microphone.

I hope someone over there is paying attention to the Cairo national museum this go-around. A museum broken into during the last revolution and which houses, literally, billions of dollars worth of ancient artifacts. The gilded treasures of King Tutankhamen alone are virtually priceless. We do not want a repeat of what happened in Baghdad and it's museum which was sacked during the '03 invasion.

We played Keep on the Borderlands in '86 or so. I was a wizard and got less xp as all I was good for was a once per day sleep spell.

lives are at stake here...

Obsidian has taken different approaches to this in the past depending on scope of project. From Fallout:NV which had a lot of stars to something like Swords of Zahir, a relatively minor NWN2 expansion which did not use SAG(screen actors guild) actors. In fact, I believe Obsidian's audio director did the voice of the central Yuan-ti figure in that game, so at least some of the vocal work was done "in-house". HonestIy, I couldn't really detect a drop off in quality. Considering the SAG actors charge 100's of $/hr to bark out work any bloke off the street could do, look for Obsidian to go primarily in-house again.

I wouldn't place too much emphesis on slashing/bludgening/piercing damage types as it can be taken too far... I remember a NWN item called the greater swordsman's belt that had huge slashing resist and essentially made you immune to most attacks in the game, what with swords, daggers and other such slashing weapons being the most common. However, an axe having a bleed effect is good. Or knocking someone over with a huge maul... like Sulik in Fallout2.

I'd have preferred turn based, rather than yet another IE type game, as there have been only a few notable turn based rpgs in the last 15 years or so... toee being the last. Also, as Trent Oster seems to want to re-release every old IE game ever made a true turn based game would have been a nice complement to those efforts. I just hope this new game can make some improvements over the old IE model... especially the fog of war which I really couldn't stand.

4e is cookie cutter, but it's not munchkin compared to 3e and it's unrestrained miscible classes, combined with prestige classes, for some over-the-top combined abilities. I'm sorta glad they brought back Dark Sun and that could potentially make for a really cool crpg.

I actually watched the exorcist when I was 6, 7 or so.... freaked me for years. That's #1 for sure. The Shining ranks right up there for me... maybe Nicholson's best work.