Gromnir

fair enough regarding josh post chrisA departure. nevertheless, such an observation does not diminish the initial point that you implied that taylor's knowledge and opinions were more easily dismissed 'cause he were limited to tech on fo. taylor carried same job description on fo as did josh regarding vb... post chrisA departure, and regardless, the notion that you would even suggest that a developer o' the original fo games would have diminished capacity to speak to the spirit o' fo is unfortunate and misguided. btw, we saw comments from taylor (multiple places... including nma.) he sure didn't sound as dismissive or unrelated as you would paint him. gonna try and blame publisher arm twisting or something similar. perhaps thorton has a point, but am not certain that a sorta internet napoleon complex is enough to explain. HA! Good Fun!

heck no. sw fans is wacky... but we were referencing games specific. "the hardcore fo community is, in our experience, one-o'-a-kind. no fans o' a game franchise is more inexplicably proprietary... no game fans we know has a similar sense o' entitlement. " there has been far more bad sw games than good, but sw fans not react to games with near the nuttiness and vitriol as does fo fans. is also worth noting the sheer number o' sw fans compared to fo fans. the existence o' sw crazies is expected given the reality that hardcore sw fans probable number in the millions. thus, the fact that fo produces a greater number o' game zealots than does sw is... odd. HA! Good Fun!

oh come now, Gromnir has witnessed game developments involving both star wars and star trek. is nowhere near the frenzy we seen from fo fans. is maybe one or two freaks showing up on the kotor and kotor 2 boards (some guy offended by obsidian implementation o' the basilisk war droid were amusing) but such folks were nowhere near as vulgar and irate as were fo fans regarding mere announcement o' fo:bos and fo3. and your comments 'bout taylor is sorta silly. taylor were lead designer on fo and had significant input on fo:t. you thinks the average fan had more understanding o' the Spirit o' fallout than did a developer who worked on the project? josh, if our recollection were accurate, were pretty much limited to technical aspects o' combat mechanics for VB. no doubt josh input regarding VB is easily dismissed and surely less enlightened and educated than feedback from the nma and codexian hive mind. HA! Good Fun!

Dear god.../hug/ hahaha! Well I knew the job was dangerous when I volunteered for it. But my that was...a very different weekend. Still didn't really justify some of the stuff people did IMO - angry over the announcement or not. It did answer the age old question of how quickly users could post animated gifs of FOBOS producer Chuck Cuevas having horrible things happen to him, though. the hardcore fo community is, in our experience, one-o'-a-kind. no fans o' a game franchise is more inexplicably proprietary... no game fans we know has a similar sense o' entitlement. bg fans were disappointed by the announcement o' dark alliance. dark alliance ii announcement may have been received even more poorly, but the reactions weren't anything likes fo fan reactions to fobos. how many horrible d&d games has been made? didn't see the d&d fans (who has been 'round much longer and in greater numbers than fo fans) rise up en masse to complain every time a new d&d fighting game were announced. am also remembering how the fo fans reacted to the Violation of the Fallout Setting that were fallout: tactics. the fact that Chris Taylor, the lead designer o' the original fo were the guy violating the setting didn't blunt the attack by the faithful one bit. heck, am recalling the horrible trolling that went on by the Faithful when bethesda first opened up their fo3 boards. is... odd. HA! Good Fun!

vol, as is his norm, misunderstands. we do not thinks your opinion that the console version o' da is superior makes you unique. there is numbers o' folks who believe as does vol... just not for the same reasons. da:o on the xbox 360 (but less so on the ps) is more stable and less likely to suffer some o' the endemic performance issues claimed by many pc players. it is odd that you not mention the most common and most reasonable justification given for da console superiority. as for your actual reasonings... "I did'nt claim it was commercially successfull, and critics did love it." doesn't matter... unless you is suggesting that critical appeal w/o commercial success could/did resurrect the genre. not even the critics who loved fo ever equated their approval with the resurrection o' the genre... 'less you count the guys at nma and codex as critics o' note. HA! Good Fun!

*Nods* Never saw the acronym before. And VB? Wow, you dug deeply there. Was still just a lurker over there back then. My definition of grindy is just... lots of combat, plain and simple - but it's certainly not helped if they're repetitive aswell. I do well remember gathering money by sleeping in the area around... the city after Candlekeep. And selling the equipment. I think I just felt the DA: O grinding due to the fact that it was more recent and I had "already" started to get bored with combat. didn't have to dig deep. we has link saved 'cause we gots so tired o' having to correct fo fans regarding their estimations o' the commercial success o' their fave game. bri were a black isle developer, so folks were more likely to believe him than Gromnir. and is not that fo were unsuccessful, but there is a very good reason why black isle and interplay kept trying to squeeze more blood out of the iwd franchise as 'posed to developing fo3. iwd were a better seller and a far less costly game to develop and publish than were the fo games. fo were loved, but it didn't resurrect anything. and vol... well, vol is being vol. inventory, camera, resolution and controller issues aside... *shrug* am having a hard time believing vol played da on the pc, but if he did, it is showing just how... unique is vol. HA! Good Fun!

http://www.nma-fallout.com/forum/viewtopic...ighlight=#23414 also, am thinking our definition o' grindy is different than some folks. if combats is undifferentiated and repetitive, we considers 'em grindy. as such, bg combats were far more grindy than the combats in any other bio crpg... save maybe kotor. da ain't anywhere near the level o' bg grind. how many functionally identical hobgoblin, bandit, gnoll and skeleton attacks did you face in bg? yeah, some o' the darkspawn encounters in the deep roads got repetitive, but the mindless repetition o' near identical bg encounters were diabloesque... and the fact that such encounters were simple hack and slash did not reduce the grind. HA! Good Fun! ps jnpc = joinable npc. in a crpg, all characters NOT the player's is npcs... so jnpc refers to party npcs.

they know their customers. coming up with highly differentiated combat encounters AND creating non-combat alternatives requires more effort and resources than does spamming repetitive exp and 1007 drops. diablo, the game credited with resurrecting crpgs, were nothing but repetitive combat encounters punctuated by a few boss battles. bg, the game that put bio on the crpg map, were a game that kinda bridged the gap 'tween the hardcore role-play purists, and the new wave o' diablo fans. bio has never gotten too far removed from their crpg roots... and why should they. grindy combats, particularly in bg, nwn, kotor, me and me2, hardly hurt the biowarian bottom line. HA! Good Fun! ps keep in mind that there is some practical considerations for making combat compulsory and frequent. Nerm the Magnificent, and his loyal party o' jnpcs, struggled through all four trap and monster laden levels o' the Dungeon o' Doom before encountering the Vampire Queen and her evil minions. took 15 hours o' gameplay to reach the Vampire Queen, and the final combat with her highness took another 30 minutes and a half-dozen reloads. now, as a developer, try to achieve a similar 'mount o' gameplay w/o combat.

there is many crpg fans who endure the combats w/o taking any enjoyment from them. nevertheless, even some o' us old-timey tabletop war-gamers who have a hard time imagining a crpg w/o tactical combat would like to see more non-combat options introduced into the games. HA! Good Fun!

rather than reducing or simplifying da combat, we would prefer that existing ratio o' combats were kept while adding tactical and strategic complexity. HA! Good Fun!

WAT. Proof that Volo indeed does live in a parallel universe but his internet connects to ours somehow. is simple vol syllogism. vol played da:o on a console. vol liked da:o on the console. therefore, da:o is best on the console. HA! Good Fun!

To be fair Gromnir, most of the 'typical anime' you're talking about doesn't bill itself as 'mature' as Dragon Age does. anime maturity = the depicted girls being sexually assaulted is at least of middle school age. anime notions o' maturity is far more skewed than biowarian efforts. HA! Good Fun!

Right, blame it on anime. Again. Because the west never had big boobed scantily clad women, oversized spiky shoulder pads of doom or anything of the sort. you are right that it is unfair to blame anime, but that doesn't change the fact that such nonsense... sucks. not matter if is anime inspired or not. mature & dark as described by developers on the bio boards has quickly become something o' a joke. mature= exposed b00bies, and dark = arterial spray? is not anime's fault, but whenever we sees animated storytelling that suffers from shallow character development, a ridiculous plot, and a visual "style" that inspires groans/eye-rolling, we cannot help but draw comparisons to typical anime. thankfully da characters and plot ain't as horrible as anime standard. darkspawn ain't the result o' Nature punishing mankind for his environmental transgressions... and the Hero ain't a teen-aged girl with superpowers, or a milquetoast middle-school boy with a big heart destined to save the world/galaxy/universe with the power o' love. nevertheless, the look o' da is creeping ever closer to typical anime excess. HA! Good Fun!

the pc models looks more detailed than the da:o versions... the ogres appear less detailed. am also not pleased with bio's attempts to "hot rod the art." dragon age... to the extreme! dunno, but adding big spikes and pitted metal to makes edgy and kewl would not have been the direction we would have chosen. HA! Good Fun!

duh. am surprised that you not also point out that games cost a fraction o' what cars does. so what? your rationale would have you happily purchasing and playing pools of radiance (the ubisoft release). a few moments to check on stability o' a game post release is a bad thing... 'cause its a game, not life? *chuckle* there is game killing and quest killing bugs in awakenings that is linked to the order in which you do quests. for someone like Gromnir who does not wanna have game spoiled, that means we is either having to take the risk o' a game killer bug, or we wait for patch... and we is not near as blithe (or as addicted to games?) as hurl when considering an investment o' +20 hours o' our free time. HA! Good Fun!

just 'cause we never had cause to use the airbag in our car does not mean that we wants to drive off the lot with a car that has a faulty airbag... whether we is aware of the problem or not. unlike hurl, who maybe didn't notice that he got cheated out o' a small number o' quets and suffered from numerous bugged spells and items, we does not choose the ignorance = bliss route. instead, we always wait for at least the first patch o' a game to be released before purchase... saves us money and we get a more stable game too. that being said, we never imagined that it would take 4-5 months to get a patch for awakenings. HA! Good Fun!

I can understand the confusion since you did point out that one predated the other in response to her post. we also suggested childhood trauma of the beatles. *shrug* HA! Good Fun!

sometimes it is easy to miss bugs if you do not know how game is 'posed to work. http://social.bioware.com/forum/1/topic/94/index/3074863/1 is some 13 pages following announced patch notes... much o' which is complaints 'bout issues not being addressed by the upcoming patch. HA! Good Fun!

... did anybody take serious? HA! Good Fun!

Good point. I lived in a house with actors and actresses many years ago, and they were ALL wankers. the actors and actresses we has met is, without exception... difficult. we has actual been friends with a few actors/actresses, but am gonna note that we thought they was all damaged or nutty to a lesser or greater degree. not wankers (some were very nice people) but all was kookie. HA! Good Fun! Rather than actors having various levels of mental instability as you suggest, it's far more likely that the common traits of the personalities acting attracts (extroversion, whimsy, impulsivity, driven by intuition and thirst for new experiences) are simply alien to you by virtue of being antipodal to your own personality traits (which would at a guess be introversion, fastidity, compulsion and a conservative approach to problem solving). your not-so-clever attempt to get around tigs warning aside, clearly Gromnir lacks whimsy... HA! similar to walsh, our basis for making comments 'bouts actors is based on actual encounters and relationships with such folks. you base your guessings regarding Gromnir on the postings from a gaming board where we post utilizing a contrived persona... that about it? *chuckle* am not gonna share our full background, but some folks here is aware o' where we went to school and what we did before law school. compulsion and conservative is 'bout 180 degrees from the mark... though we has been called fastidious by folks who has never seen our home office... or our kitchen when we is cooking. btw, we ain't never met a person who became more creative 'cause they donned a tie-dye t-shirt and got wasted. again, actors is frequently nice enough folks (our experience with actors ain't quite as dismal as were walsh's and some others in this thread,) but with one exception, all were... difficult. as a matter of fact, an actress friend of ours warned us to never date an actress. her rationale: "we're all insane." she were only partially joking. HA! Good Fun!

a kanadian fellow won a million or more in lotteries 5 times. the only reason Gromnir is aware is 'cause the guy were forced to sue to collect his winnings. as we recall, he won. HA! Good Fun!

there is a reason why we has said that we will never, evar have any involvement in domestic law. the whole scenario is wacky. it is illegal to make such tapes in ca... can't tape without all parties knowledge and permission. 'course oksana (sp?) weren't acting as an agent o' the police at the time she made the recordings, so criminal charges related to threats made in the tapes is still possible. judge warns mel's ex 'bout release of tapes. then, tapes is mysteriously leaked, but while mel's ex admits it is her voice on tapes, she denies being involved in the tapes release. and the thing is, this ain't the wackiest custody case stuff we has heard of in the past decade. the guys who do domestic law is the ones most likely to keeps a gun in their desk drawer. HA! Good Fun!

supposedly a patch will be released for awakenings within the next couple of weeks. we waited this long... do the main quests in the wrong order and you can get game killing bugs. play as a rogue and your trap finding/disarming won't work. jnpcs can frequent suffer from automatic 100 approval... w/o loyalty bonuses. pick pocket is screwed if you have wardens keep installed, you may gets a game killing bug. if you gots wardens keep installed, some items will appear... wrong (minor). ... is too many bugs and potential bugs, particularly as we were planning on playing a rogue character. HA! Good Fun!

the smurfs predate blue meanies by about a decade... possibly the young beatles were disturbed by the evil little belgian faeries... kinda likes how some kids is 'fraid o' clowns? *shrug* never made the connection. the thing that always surprises us 'bout the smurfs is the fact that they has endured. am not sure what their appeal is. there were a period during the mid 70's when smurf collectibles were momentarily very popular in the US... and then in the 80's we had the saturday morning cartoon, but unlike pogs or alf (and alf pogs,) the smurfs popularity never completely dies. is... odd. "That is why I enjoyed The Princess and the Frog so much. " as is typical, it were hard to complain 'bout disney animation... but it weren't in our top 5 (10?) of disney animated films. still, it were technically very sound. HA! Good Fun!

does anybody take whoppi serious anymore. she defends polanski's actions as not being "rape-rape" and now she public defends mel's comments. is probable a good example o' why mel's career is not in any real danger. hollywood forgives the silliness of its own very readily. HA! Good Fun!