Gromnir

let us try to keeps this on topic for a few seconds. "On the other hand, it's only been a couple of days. Maybe he does plan on shedding more light on the situation, but he's waiting for better information or more clarity on his end." to try and get us back on topic... our thinking, such as it is, goes something like this: as other developers has noted, bis/obsidian giving out estimates 'bout gameplay length is doomed. can't win. they has suffered for such hubris in past. fergie ignored this harsh lesson and did a less than wise thing. so, now what can he do? confirm that he thinks gameplay is 20 hours? obviously he not want that given feedbacks so far. is not an uncertainty 'bout hours better than a certainty that we gets only 20? he could also says that he thinks nwn2 gots more than 20 hours of gameplay... in which case he is faced with another credibility obstacle. were he telling the truth to the Germans or to us? fergie not got best record with board honesty as it is. fergie coulds get on the boards and admit that he gots pretty much 0 idea 'bout nwn2 playable hours... admit he were talking out his arse to the germans. unfortunately that solution makes fergie looks like a clown don't it? oh sure, such a response would probably solve most concerns, but it would require fergie to sacrifice ego. fergie probably just wants this issue to go away. already this thread is falling to pieces, and the mod heavy community at bioware doesn't seems to give a damn 'bout the hours anyways... not as long as they gets a toolset. so fergie is probably gonna sit backs and let this thing play itself out a little longer... hopes you people gets distracted by some other concern or non-issue... you know what? Gromnir ain't gonna let that happen. am gonna put the topic in our signature if we have to, but is no way in hell that we is simply gonna let the epidemic ADD we gots 'round here get fergie and obsidian and atari off the hook... 'cause we believe this is an important issue, not just for nwn2, but for future games. not wanna see the next game be 20 hours, and the one after that ends up as 15 or 12 hours. gotta draw the line somewheres... why not here, eh? so, Gromnir would likes some obsidian clarification as to whether or not the codex translation of fergie's comments is accurate. if it is accurate then we would likes to know what fergie thinks 'bout having the nwn2 oc be only 20 hours and if he believes the addition of a toolset makes up for this woeful paucity o' gameplay. finally, we would like to know if fergie believes that 20 hour pc crpgs is a trend, or simply an aberration limited to nwn2 and necessitated by forces unlikely to be repeated anytime soon. we got other questions, and we nots need fergie to answer personal, but we is gonna keeps asking until somebody freaking answers. Got it? HA! Good Fun!

he does wade into the kiddie pool on occasion... but it requires things to be getting out of hand before he is willing to strap on the water wings. ... not that Gromnir is suggesting that people stir things up just to get a fergie response. HA! Good Fun!

am thinking you is being maybe a bit naive at this point. if translation were wrong you is thinking that some obsidian person would have corrected us... not let Gromnir and others spreads our sales dampening gossip all over the internet. am not got no swollen head neither. we recognize that we is just a gnat and that these rumors will still touch relatie few potential purchasers... but if you hs been 'round long 'nuff (and we know you has,) you will recognize that this is exactly the kinda situation in which fergie manages suck it up and jumps into the shallow end of the pool with the rest of us losers. as has been noted before, the chief function of these boards is to advertise obsidian games... feedback to improve games is a nice ancillary benefit, but hardly cause to pay for the web space and maint. no fergie and no denial... just recognition that maybe fergie didn't have 'nuff info to be accurate on hours. so keeps repeating eldar, but sometimes silence IS an admission... ask mr. bonds if you don't believe us. HA! Good Fun!

one cannot assume that Gromnir is the first to purposefully spell your name that way... though we does admit that this last time were simply an accident. no doubt you took some heat for that in school, eh? HA! Good Fun!

you see what we gotta deal with. how can we be expected to pass up a setup like this one? given the 30+ page 20 minutes of nwn thread we gots all kinds of possible responses. "finished during your lunch break?" "sting takes more time to sex up his wife than bullock did to finish nwn." "am hearing that obsidian and dominoes is joining together for a marketing campaign... if you can't finish nwn2 in a half hour you gets the game and a large 1-topping pizza free." "ain't it amusing that llranor and Gromnir spent more time arguing over how long nwn2 might be than it actually took bullock to play the game." etc. HA! Good Fun!

you would name your child wolverine? ... hopeful is Gromnir that you never have the opportunity to name a child. HA! Good Fun!

but a daughter would be ok to name ferret? personaly, we thinks it is a good idea to avoid any member of the weasel family as a name choice for children. weasel, badger, wolverine, ferret, otter, mink, ermine, skunk, zorilla... all is out. ... fisher and marten coulds work we s'pose. any other weasels? HA! Good Fun!

am not sure why woo ever took vis serious 'nuff to hold a grudge. and Gromnir also likes gaider, but the biowarians has collectively gotten a little less recptive to criticism. *shrug* HA! Good Fun!

weasel boy sure didn't move to edmonton for the weather. how longs you gotta live in kanada for you can takes advantage of their second rate socialized medicine? maybe weasel gots a chronic medical problem that is expensive to treat... or he gots lupus and all that sunshine in la is bad for him. what the heck, good for weasel. hope he does good things with bioware. HA! Good Fun!

am older than both of you... and we would be more pleased with 40 or 60 hours of gameplay than 20. that being said, Gromnir admits that we ain't an average gamer neither. am special. HA! Good Fun!

"Wonder what anti-Bio feelings J.E. Sawyer had then As I already mentioned: Reread it..." josh is a pretty cranky guy on the boards. he gots wotc issues and bio issues and he probably gots a "list" of other folks that is gonna someday gets theirs. oh, wait, we were projecting again. HA! Good Fun!

And if they added in the droid-factory for example why couldn't they just also call it "added content"... NOBODY knew it was cut at that time; we figured that out from the ingame files that where left. We would have never figured that out... <{POST_SNAPBACK}> actually, pc kotor came out 4 months after xbox version... and as noted, there were no 4 month cut on the release schedule to contend with. regardless, we imagine that the obsidian developers finds all the baseless guessing to be kinda amusing. HA! Good Fun!

bio had time 'tween and twixt release of xbox and pc version... lots of time. obsidian were struggling to cut content as they had their release date moved up by a number of months. never did get a reason for why the kotor2 release date got changed, but the situations were obviously different. you wanna say with any certainty that the reason bio got more time is 'cause the kanadians is so powerful and obsidian is so weak? is possible. seems as much of a conspiracy theory kinda thing as Gromnir's guess as to ferret jumping ship from nwn2... pure speculation. btw, the material bio added were additional material. obsidian woulda' wanted to add material that had to be cut 'cause of change in release date... would be sorta like lucas admiting that they had a premature release of the game. HA! Good Fun!

every day is a Gromnir holiday. in light of the resurfacing of HoW recollections people is no doubt recalling just how much o' a stinker we were following the release of that game... cause 'nuff right there for celebration. HA! Good Fun!

sidenote: might be a bit misleading to call the yavin iv material a bonus planet. you got 1 hallway and 1 room and a handful of new characters with very limited dialogues. heck, Gromnir can calls his house Planet Crabgrass, but we doubts the US govt or united nations would be willing to recognize our staus as a Planetary Sovereign... but we gots more square footage than does yavin iv. HA! Good Fun!

"A lot can be readded or cut in six months." am thinking the developers would disagree. stuff can be cut, but it is pretty unlikely that anything gets added at this point. you gotta know at what point you have to stop adding material to a game if you wanna get it out by Date X. the total number of areas is probably fixed by now... and adding more quests or other content into those areas becomes increasingly unlikely as each day passes. HA! Good Fun!

"Besides, saying you will not buy a game six months from release because of an estimate given buy a non engineer executive who has no even played a full game seems more than a little childish to me." actually, saying that you don't care what the boss of the developing company making the game has to say 'bout the game 6 months in advance seems pretty darn foolish. again, fergie may be wrong. he has in the past been wrong, but if you simply choose to ignore fergie comments 'cause you really wanna like nwn2, then we sees same ugly cycle the preceded and followed toee and other games. your only real power is in your wallet. HA! Good Fun!

Disappointing paying customers hurts us more. I'd rather someone hear bad things about our game and not buy it than buy it and get angry because they feel they were misled. <{POST_SNAPBACK}> is good advice. josh sometimes gets himself in hot water for being honest. hope this ain't one of those times. shouldn't be. Gromnir will wait and hope for some positive feedback. heck, we weren't gonna buy nwn2 before the first patch were released anyways, as that becames our game purchase policy following the release of the first nwn. no doubt by then we has some goodly notion of actual gameplay hours. HA! Good Fun!

Sure, but after HoW, I can't see the point to a developer ever giving external estimates on game length. If you estimate low, you disappoint people before the game is even out. If you estimate high, you disappoint people after the game comes out. In both cases, it's complete guesswork. Obviously, given HoW and IWD2, the BIS krew (including me) proved they were incapable of accurately gauging game length. I don't think Obsidian is really any better in that regard. <{POST_SNAPBACK}> am agreeing with you complete. as we noted above, the HoW situation were a nightmare and we cannot thinks that you would wanna revisit that nightmare. caution seems the best approach. nevertheless, fergie already did throw out a number. the 20 hour figure is know to us fans, and in the absence of any other information it seems likely that the average potential purchaser will give fergie comments some credence... much as Gromnir and others gaves weight to bis estimates of HoW pre-release. right now all we got to go on is fergie estimates, and given that our only real leverage is our dollars... *shrug* we will hold off on making any final plans regarding nwn2 purchasing, but we knows that reviews nowadays is equally suspect insofar as guessing hours of gameplay. there is an understandable rush to be the first persons to post reviews. as such we don't know how many reviewers actually finish the games they is reviewing. the reviewer estimates 'bout hours o' gameplay may simply be guesstimates based on info gleaned from the developers. what does josh suggest Gromnir do? assume for the moment that we feels that less than 30 hours for a crpg is unacceptable. now given the fact that right now all we gots is fergie comments, what is your honest advice? should we hold off on purchase until somebody we trust plays? sounds like good advice, but that behavior hurts atari and obsidian don't it? HA! Good Fun!

Does not matter. There is no way for them to track it. Maybe less than 10% bought premuim mods but the sites that hosted user made modules\haks had no affilitaion with Bioware and therefore there is no way to know what percentage of gamers made use of custom made content. The CEP alone had more than a million downloads. It is an untrackable metric and whoever said it was whistling in the wind. Yes, they were guessing, as I am and I'd say I'm probably closer to being right. <{POST_SNAPBACK}> you got more or less reason to have accurate numbers than bioware? *shrug* this is their business. we bet they has looked at the numbers real close. we might quibble 'bout how they value those numbers, but we is more likely to accept their numbers than Gromnir estimates or vol estimates or gd estimates... much as we accepted fergie's numbers that he gave for ps:t sales. we don't honestly trust fergie much farther than we thinks we could throw him... josh will recall the post 3e ranger/iwd2 fallout and how fergie tried to pull the Mesmer routine on the community... lost a great deal of respect for him... and his credibility went down the crapper, but we do not thinks he lies 'bout sales numbers. we disagreed with fergie 'bout his conclusions, but he tells us that total sales of ps:t is almost double the point-of-sales numebrs we post and we believed him... and that were a situation wherein he had reason to fib. just as we thinks it is reasonable for an average purchaser to believes fergie estimates 'bout nwn2 playing time more than Guard Dog, so to we believes bioware estimates on sp dowloads more than Guard Dog. the developers seems to have more reason and better access to relevant info. HA! Good Fun!

maybe they should wait until christmas... or later. give themselves some more time to replace some of that deleted material. HA! Good Fun!

I'll be waiting regardless... I never get a game until after the first patch is released... well excluding console games of course. <{POST_SNAPBACK}> good for you. makes you a more enlightened consumer than most. as for GD and his question 'bout whether we believe the bio numbers that put the non-oc applications at something less than 10%... am not sure, but we wonders why the biowarians would undervalue their sp download numbers. how would that benefit bioware? "How many copies did Black&White sell. How many of these where due to the name Peter Molyneux? How many gamers where dissapointed? I know alot of people who own Black&White, yet NONE like the game a bit..." b&w did not sell over 2 million copies... and regardless, you and others keep ignoring the succesful expansions that nwn spawned. if nwn were as hated as you thinks, then why were the expansions good sellers? HA! Good Fun!

"So basically you don't care what the actual player-stated length of the game is on release, you're going to base your purchase on what the head of the company (who, like me, hasn't played through the game from beginning to end) says months prior to release? " let us be fair. if we ignore fergie estimates and buy nwn2 and it turns out to be 20 hours or less, then we has wasted what little leverage we got. our must effective means to bring 'bout change is to change the way we spend our dollars. you know that. once we buy nwn2 then we gots but little ways to bring 'bout change... but 'course you know that too. fergie may be underestimating. when game release gets closer and reviews come out we will pay heed... and if the reviewers note that game is short we will feels compelled to vote with our dollars. we won't simply rely on fergie estimates, but he is the head o' obsidian and it sure not seem unreasonable for folks to believe that fergie knows what he is talking 'bout regarding an obsidian developed game. HA! Good Fun!

Where did you get that figure. Not being sarcastic, really curious. Looking at the download numbers of the Vault and Stratics and NWNPlanet, accounting for a majority of repeat customers (single users downloading more than one module) I'd have put that number much higher. Maybe as high as 35-40% . If a player downloads a single bit of content from a user made SP mod to joining a PW they have "used" the toolset even if they did not create that content. I really think more than 10% of NWN players have downloaded something. <{POST_SNAPBACK}> directly from the biowarians when they were explaining why hotu were not gonna be playable mp... and more recent when they were discussing DA... though we admits that they were playing with the numbers when discussing DA. Gromnir kept mentioning their less than 5% figures from nwn, and some developer claimed that our numbers were really off, and that something under but close to 200,000 had used player mods. at the time Gromnir were thinking that nwn had sold 1mil, and this jackarse developer did not clarify the fact that nwn had sold over 2 mil. never trust the developers. HA! Good Fun!

repost... 'cause thread is moving quick. sorry gd, but the nwnvault stuff were included in the "less than 10%" numbers from bioware. sp downloads has been played by a very small number of people compared to total purchasers. yeah, is more people playing sp downloads than is using the toolset to create pws, but the number of folks getting anything out of nwn other than oc playage is less than 10%. end repost. we likes that nwn has the sp mods, but it ain't what has sold copies. HA! Good Fun!