Aegeri

That's a different concept than what I originally thought and I couldn't agree more. If you're going to use a system like NWN2s, IMO, it's vastly important to make the combat animations and similar as interesting to look at as possible. Either that, you make the combat hectic and challenging enough that players aren't just sitting there actively doing nothing but watching enemies/characters swing swords at one another for 30 minutes. Edit: Which, incidentally is why I don't like KotoR and why I think BG2 was such a great game. BG2 had hectic, often challenging combat and I was always doing something with my characters (actually, I will praise IWD for the same thing while I am at it). NWN2 and KotoR had lots of combat, but it was brainless and got highly repetitive (because I rarely was challenged and had to do anything in combat), which does expose the flaws in things like overly repetitive combat animations as you stated. I have to disagree. The reason BG2 was "hectic, often challenging combat" in contrast compared to NWN2 and KOTOR is because of the most popular form of party control. NWN2 and KOTOR have your party taking on their roles supposedly independently of the player character. BG2 we all took complete control. We had to set up the attacks for every single character. Something players don't seem to do so often in NWN2 and KOTOR. Because it's not required, because KotoR is mindless in difficulty. If you can tell me how clicking "force wave" every 6 seconds is challenging, you MIGHT start making a convincing argument. But I'm going to suggest that clicking force wave every 6 seconds (or just hacking things to death with dual baragwain assault blades or two lightsabers, doesn't really matter in the end) is not difficult. You never 'need' to control all your party in KotoR because combat is so simple, you wouldn't need to. The only challenging fight in all of KotoR is taking on Bendark Starkiller in the arena as a scoundrel without levelling your main character at all (so as to maximise Jedi levels later). NWN2 just has no challenge either because you typically fight hordes of low level mobs, most of which pose no real threat... there are just lots of them. Often repeatedly one after the other. I think the only two fights in NWN2 that bothered me was Koraboras and possibly the one with the two Black Dragons. That you can of course fight two black dragons simultaneously, while not needing to pay much attention to controlling your characters (as you have just pointed out for me, NWN2 allows you far less finesse in controlling your characters than BG2) just proves my point that there really isn't much to combat difficulty in NWN2. Also, your point is also completely irrelevant. BG2 and IWD are more challenging because they have more varied combat situations, enemies are stronger (and often well equipped) and they use more numerous stronger enemies. The games are more challenging, plain and simple. I cannot recall any fight in KotoR that was more than a speedbump (with the ironic exception of an early game fight while actually powergaming - oh the irony) and the couple of fights I mentioned above from NWN2. Needing to do stuff and not just watch because I don't have to do anything to win, means I don't notice the combat animations so much. If I'm just watching things more or less play out, as in NWN2/KotoR, about the only thing I'm going to pay attention to is the combat animations (what else am I doing?). Edit: Also, I can't really think of where to put PS:T in terms of difficulty of combat. I don't think that PS:T was really that difficult overall, but I played that game pretty much for the reams of dialogue rather than killing things.

That's a different concept than what I originally thought and I couldn't agree more. If you're going to use a system like NWN2s, IMO, it's vastly important to make the combat animations and similar as interesting to look at as possible. Either that, you make the combat hectic and challenging enough that players aren't just sitting there actively doing nothing but watching enemies/characters swing swords at one another for 30 minutes. Edit: Which, incidentally is why I don't like KotoR and why I think BG2 was such a great game. BG2 had hectic, often challenging combat and I was always doing something with my characters (actually, I will praise IWD for the same thing while I am at it). NWN2 and KotoR had lots of combat, but it was brainless and got highly repetitive (because I rarely was challenged and had to do anything in combat), which does expose the flaws in things like overly repetitive combat animations as you stated.

The expansion does start out pretty mellow in the combat department, but it ramps up quickly after that. We put a good amount of effort into revising the combat scenarios so they felt tactically challenging. We tried to find ways to differentiate enemy types from area to area and within each area. Tactical difficulty is usually more interesting than numeric difficulty, if that makes sense. Yes it does. I've been a DM of 3E DnD for years and this is definitely true. That sounds very promising, because I often got the impression in NWN2 that hordes of orcs/rogues/watchmen were used because whoever designed those areas couldn't think of anything more interesting for characters to fight. No. Abstracted combat systems like DnD should be CLOSER to the rules, not further from it. I already find it aggravating that many of the most interesting tactics and skills aren't available in NWN2 as it sort of makes some compromises between the original TB 3E combat and the simulated real time rounds it does have. If they want to make a combat system where the player 'drives' combat, don't make the game DnD to begin with. That simple.

You don't want to be like a cat on a hot tin roof, do you? Burned once and never sets foot on it again, even in the cool evening hours. Well there are many reasons why I completely despised those areas. The first was how verisimilitude breaking it was to literally massacre half the city watch and have nobody react to that subsequently. It was just ridiculous. I must have (at a rough count) killed 50+ members of the city watch, maybe even getting up to 100 and nobody cares? I can wander around the city and the remaining watch is like "hullo sir, please don't chop my head off" or whatever. The orc caves were just insipid on every level and clearly had no other purpose than to drag the game out. Oh no, I am perfectly serious that I have zero interest in another warehouse massacre-a-thon or orc cave thing. I'll have to see. If combat is more Icewind Dale than NWN2, that would be a really good start for me. The docks war was fine. The warehouse massacre was not.

Hmmm. I'm still not entirely sure on this game yet. The orc caves and warehouse have left a really bad taste in my mouth and I really don't want a repeat.

I skimmed the last page before I read this post, so I guess I don't have a fresh mindset. Let me say that MotB has a great deal of combat. Like Monte, I like to have a lot of combat in a game, and I find that fighting serves as a prominent feature in most PnP DnD games I've seen as well. However, I feel you in terms of the orc caves. Personally, I combat is interesting there, but is sometimes excessive in that the plot doesn

I'll spoiler this, because I find it was actually hard to even discover you could do it: .

I'd also point out, that the optional battle with one of the demons from that wonderfully executed demon dungeon, was really really really good. It was easily more challenging than 90% of the game combined, actually used the monsters abilities to make it difficult rather than screw with the DnD rules heavily and was very satisfying. More of that please. Definitely more of that.

Whoah, brother! D&D is a broad church. Personally, I love mindless dungeon crawls. Absolutely love them. No, Icewind Dale is a great dungeon crawl with excellent set piece battles and a good level of challenge. Hacking apart orcs and then for some reason, half the God damned city watch (which incidentally, nobody apparently cares about) is insipid, reality breaking and stupid. In that order. ... like? Did we play the same NWN2? The best part of the whole game was the trial in Act 3. It was so incredibly well done, so well executed and written, I couldn't believe the same group of people had me slaughtering the entire city watch and running around Orc caves for a billion years. Then it's back to hacking things apart! But at least it was entertaining from that point on. The Dungeon with the demons (I forget now) was well done. Basically, more of the Demon dungeon, less orc caves and definitely no warehouses.

Cant: One question, you mentioned that combat in MotB is much more difficult, is this because fights are better spaced out and generally better planned? So can I look forward to NOT having mindless dungeon crawls like the orc caves and city watch warehouse? I still cannot play NWN2 again to this day because of how literally terrible those dungeons were. I would however love the idea of fights being significantly tougher and without the 'filler' nature that those above two areas gave me the impression of being from the original.

Yeah, because other 'journalists' are so much better who don't even seem to understand basic things about the original Fallout games? I'm sorry you want to read nothing but the brainless PR hype machine and don't exactly want to read what is a level-headed description (considering this is from NMA, I was surprised at how generally reasonable they sounded, they could have been a lot harsher) of how things actually work. I guess you much prefer reading the endless previews that talk about "awesum blood effects doods!!!" and such. Obviously that's far more useful.

I thought this was the best preview I had actually read about the game, because it actually described how things actually are about the game and how things worked completely clearly, without the usual PR spin certain sites put on things [OMG THE XPLODIN HEADS R SO AUWSUM!!!!]. It actually answered a lot of the things I had already thought quite clearly but it also gave me a good indication that, at the very least, this game will be better than Oblivion (mind you, I don't think terribly much of Oblivion anyway). mkreku: I really find you hard to take seriously when you just attack the site and not bother trying to actually find flaws in the descriptions and information given in the article. You're the one coming off as a complete twit.

Using the worst implementation of a system isn't an indictment of all such systems in any application. I think it's much more useful to look at the best implementations of a system to judge its potential merits and flaws. Games with weapon degradation fall into two extremes however. You either fail to notice it, so it's a non-relevant gameplay mechanic or alternatively, the pace of weapon degradation is so high it just severely aggravates players (Best example is SS2). I'm not impressed overall with what I've read about Fallout 3 anyway, but at least it has some positive aspects. I'm not giving it a good chance of being a faithful sequel though. It's rather remarkable how hard it is to get that simple concept across to some people.

The only thing I hope for is no orc cave or warehouse like massacreathons. I almost couldn't take it the first time, doing it again would be almost too much for me to actually handle.

I thought this post by "milesforeman" was pretty idiotic. And yet, also very funny. So very hillarious, because just within the last six months Lost Planet (A 3rd person shooter) was released on the Xbox 360 and was one of the most successful games on the system. Med Total War 2 has both turn based and real time strategy components and has done extremely well also. There are numerous turn based games coming out on the consoles, such as Final Fantasy Tactics Advance 2 on DS and such forth. Edit: And also, the best selling recent jRPG was Dragon Quest VIII, which is completely turn based. Edit2: And those forums are a complete and absolute wasteland. It's just so beautiful.

Epic levels Sigh. What I would like to see: 1) No forced NPCs in the story unless they aren't going to contribute to the max party limit. 2) Please, please God, no orc caves or warehouse slaughterthons. PLEASE. Copy the style, pace and dungeon design of act II and act III and pretent act I never existed. PLEASE. I couldn't take another mindlessly repetitive non-sensical hackathon. Edit: 3) I would also appreciate the dialogue not forcing my main character to the front of the party into range of being slaughtered by the nearest enemy. It would make playing a non-direct combat class that much more fun.

I didn't see anyone point this out here, but you'll like the next patch because it is indeed toning down the respawn rate somewhat. I think that will be great, because it is currently way too high.

I agree. I love how I can recognise most of the weapons in Stalker and things are generally firmly based in reality (with obvious exceptions). This improves the games verisimilitude and (IMO) the whole game consequently.

Pickpocketing is rather useless. There just aren't places where you can use it for any great effect and I don't think there are items you can find/buy/steal that are significantly better than items you can craft. I'm still thinking about how to make this skill actually useful, without being a sort of 'fail and reload' mechanic.

It was known to be Harvey Smith's game during development, in fact I remember a dev on ttlg pointing this out, and not in a "it's all his fault" way, rather "give credit where it's due". Also, while DX:IW was a disappointment, to call it "one of the most dramatic failures in gaming history" is completely over the top and ridiculous. How so? It basically ensured the end of Ion Storm, it sold dismally and is the poster child in ANY discussion about how a console port can negatively impact a PC gaming franchise. I think this more than qualifies it as a 'failure', especially considering the critical AND gaming publics approval that the first game derived. To drop the ball so dramatically is an impressive feat for anyone.

Yeah, sure. I would say the same thing to if I was involved with one of the most dramatic failures in gaming history. Considering how much he defended the game after release, such as the "PC gamers didn't get it" comment, I find this remarkably hard to believe quite frankly. You can just massacre everyone in the game, regardless of who they are or who they work for without anyone getting upset beyond a chastising. It's completely devoid of actual consequences for being a homicidal maniac.

At least it's an interesting change of pace for a game to focus quite heavily on the level 1-9 sort of region, rather than trying to go the whole way. I like the plots concept quite a lot.

I'm never ceased to be impressed about how much plain sense he makes when he says things. I really like how this sounds and can't wait to play it.

That was hell, but was a good test of the platforming mechanic up to that point. It wasn't terribly hard, but then again, I'm an obsessive player of platformers (since before even Mario, IE pitfall) and so it's not the worst thing I've ever seen. My friend got driven utterly stupid though. I can confirm such segments are in God of War 2 and one in particular looks a bit harder than the first games (You have to avoid burning planks falling down above you). Yes, that is also present and in fact you even have to swing using the blades from pieces of broken masonry onto them at times. Both of these I've seen in gametrailers segments that they released. I don't think they'll stick to the stupid rotating blades of clippage death though. Edit: I like these sorts of challenges incidentally. Especially because on hard it means the environment is a pain, the enemies are and so are the bosses. I'm glad I never played through God of War on easy/medium first before getting to certain bosses, or it would have ruined the almost 'old school' vibe I got from having to rote learn certain patterns. Good times.

Cupid. If the game has platforming like the first, I might have to pass. It does.