Diogo Ribeiro

With Square at the helm, I'd expect BG3 to be even more story driven linear and straightforward than past BG games, with some sad attempt at longevity and non-linearity by including some card game, enemy hunting spots, and secret, deep dungeons filled with phat loot.

If you can, try lowering your graphics card options. I lowered some of the settings in my Radeon X800 - such as mipmap detail level and texture preference. I set these to High Performance (as opposed to High Quality), and also turned off VSync, Anti Aliasing, and Anisotropic filtering. While it won't make the game run at 80 FpS, it can help its performance. It did on mine, but I decided to stick with most of the option on the high end.

Torment is one RPG, not all of them. There are RPGs which both adhere to your description as well as defy it.

Also in this week's edition of Conspiracy Nut, read all about how America is really being controlled by psyched out voodoo midget aliens... From Russia!

I've been fearing it since the 80's.

Patching the game will correct several bugs, but performance issues will remain, unfortunately. I have heard that the problem will basically disappear using 1 Gb of RAM, but I can't confirm it since I only have 768.

Edited for clarity.

Damn right it does

I'm a social parasite.

It's a good, even if not unheard of, idea. One thing that generally puts me off in Star Wars games is being forced to play as a Jedi, when the whole universe and mythos are deeper than that, with many more characters and possibilities.

I'd like to give an actual enlightning response, but the only thing I can muster is the obvious: regardless of what they say, it's still typical Biowarish good and evil, which just means its as simplified as ever. It's a shame that they make the effort of separating the styles of responses in the game, but then undermine it by giving blatantly obnoxious choices to the player. "Smart evil" for Bioware is asking for money in advance.

If only this bit had been written at the beginning I could have stopped reading it a whole lot sooner.

Wasn't the Platinum edition the American version and the Deluxe edition the European one? In any case, I think they are the same thing.

Ahem. ATI rocks. Thank you for your attention.

I find that statement weird, considering Fallout didn't have that many memorable characters (at least not more than several other CRPGs out there), and it really wasn't one of the game's strong points. Most characters people remember are either the ones they disliked because of bad AI (Ian shooting players in the back, Dogmeat getting stranded in map corners) or those with animated faces and forced quirkiness (Harold, Sulik, Marcus). The key difference between TES (Morrowind, specifically) and Fallout, in regards to characters, is that characters in Fallout, wheter major or smalltime don't feel lifeless.

Or ours, for that matter.

While I'm not trying to crush your hopes, I suggest expecting more of the same, ie, single or multi characters being the Chosen Ones. While I agree, I don't see changes to that anytime soon.

We killed it and offered its virgin blood to the great gods of Poor Module Planning, Poor Group Planning, Distance, and It Seems I'd Be Happier Spending My Time Playing Games Rather Than Developing Modules.

"Everything is Possible": Inside the Minds of Gaming's Master Storytellers is a nifty little article over at Gamespot which discusses the importance of stories in videogames, and is helmed by several people in the game development business, from Tim Schafer to Chris Avellone. Not sure if this has been brought up before, so apologies in advances.

Yes, yes you do.

I particularly love that last skill.

I wasn't very interested to begin with. I can't remember Bradley having thoroughly developed anything I liked, and his comments of how Dungeon Lords would be great for somewhat contrived reasons didn't really help. At this point, its gone off my radar permanently. Combat RPG of 2004? Right.

OMG vol u dared compaer a krapy akshun title to teh great fallout !!! I kid, I kid. Good review, but still not interested in the game, though

but OMG WTF ur wrong thats nitpicking game is supah belaive me i know carsten himslef hes god this gaem roxxorz and pwnzorz!!! Or something. I just felt the thread would be incomplete without some heartfelt defense of the game, so I emulated one the best I could. Hey, it's not a great defense, but it seems likely any defense wouldn't be very good either, so...

The game of waiting for the blokes at the tech store to fix my heap o'junk PC.