Gromnir

Yes, that's precisely what I'm saying. Quality should outweigh quantity in every aspect of game design. More isn't always better; is more crap better than less crap? <{POST_SNAPBACK}> maybe this is true for deg, but not for Gromnir. again, a crpg is not simply a nice tight storytelling vehicle. given the recent example of oblivion we is unsure why so few people is getting that. eldar, for example, admits that the storytelling in oblivion was pretty pedestrian... he had to fill in the gaps with imagined content... but he enjoyed oblivion. why? am recalling that he liked the darkbrotherhood stuff and the archmage quests, and he liked to simply level his character and collect 1007. 'nother example? charwood were a single tangential quest from nwn. probably took us a couple hours to complete. maybe we level 1 time. were well written and had interesting characters and it were a bright gleaming moment in the nwn experience... it could also have been very easily a self-contained and independent game lasting no more than 2 or three hours... player mod length at best. so here is the thing, for all you Qua;ity is All that Matters folks... shrinkwrap charwood as an independent product, and then be telling us if anybody would be satisfied with quality alone. people is being kinda odd with this "length doesn't matter" stuff. tell it to your girlfriend if you believes it, but we just cannot believe it is true. regardless, at this point we is as much concerned with carification as we is with the hours of gameplay in nwn2. would take somebody at obsidian less than 5 minutes to find out if fergie actually did give the germans his 20 hour figure. HA! Good Fun!

"It's the demanding or the self arrogant expecation that he will or should that gets me." it is arrogant to ask for clarification? Gromnir is real clear on what influence he gots, and what he can demand. we gots 0 individual influence and we expect almost nothing. how many times has we said in past couple of days that our only real leverage is our purchase power? we got no illusions. but you know what? as a consumer we gots the right to demand all kinds of stuff... and as a Reasonable consumer we should feels obligated to demands stuff. fergie may not wanna answer, and he ain't obligated to answer, but only the worst kinda fool simply accepts whatever he is told. buy a toaster or set of steak knives or hemorrhoid ointment... whatever. not matter what is product. if you as a purchaser gots questions 'bout the product then what kinda yutz thinks that asking those questions is arrogance. some jerk rep. of a co. refuse to answer reasonable questions about a product we wish to purchase? what kinda industry you gonna have to accept such treatment? how many steak knives will i get with your Premium set? I won't say. huh? At Henckels, we have discovered that consumers are never satisfied with our estimates about the number of knives we will include with a given set, so we make it a policy not to actually announce the number of knives we will include in our various kitchen knife packages. wait a second, are you saying that if i want to buy your Premium knife set i cannot find out what knives are included in the set unless i actually purchase a set, or speak with somebody else who has purchased a set? Exactly, and I am personally offended at the temerity you have shown by actually broaching the subject. Good day sir. oh, and fergie is using us as much as we is using these boards. is advertising space. whenever sp or llyranor or somebody else complains 'bout hype surrounding games where you think that hype gets started? one place is boards like this. obsidian and every other game developer uses boards likes these to builds hype... and good for them. is a smart practice. is cheap advertising compared to print adverts in PC Gamer or other similar sources.... but do not for a second thinks that fergie is simply doing out of the goodness of his heart. So why we ask questions?

that would be nice, but it ain't practical. crpg story is not novel writing or short story writing. got relatively fixed resources... and if it turns out that your resources not match your hopes and desires for story, which you thinks is gonna get cut or expanded? looks at nwn2 for your answer. content (possibly relevant or even integral to story,) got cut 'cause quality of game could not be maintained with september deadline looming. just write the story. bah. is not realistic... is not the way a game developer can approach. crpg story is not and cannot be organic. HA! Good Fun!

am not sure why you thinks the fallout example is different than the bio/obsidian linear+ sidequests example? 'cause of the way the maps is designed? all stories is linear... whether you wanna admit or not. you can makes some parts interchangeable, but non-linearity o' story is an illusion. the more you makes some aspects of story interchangeable, the more likely the story is gonna seems incidental to gameplay, but do not deceive self into believing the non-linear myth. optional and tangential side-quests, and their availability, is simply a method to increase the illusion o' non-linear story. regardless, am not seeing how, especially with some kinda basic intro/tutorial aspect of a game, and a coherent concluding sequence, you manages less than 30 hours of game play with a crpg. maybe makes a serial wherein nwn2 is the first 1/3 of story? yeah, we can see that. in fact, Gromnir has suggested this kinda thing in past. release a game with intent of releasing two follow up games shortly thereafter to complete the story... makes a short and incomplete 30 hour game into one bigs 90 hour game. sure. but 20 hours of crpg that ain't simply a linear lead by the nose bit of adventure gaming... HA! Good Fun!

the multiple lives thing for a boss character in ANY game feels so much like a bad arcade game scenario. is lazy design. HA! Good Fun!

besides which, donkey kong is the story of a plumber saving a princess from a giant barrel tossing ape... and that story typically ended for Gromnir in less than ten minutes. "RPGs are about making choices that effect the outcome; not merely side quests. Heck, most RPG sidequests come with the following: accept/don't accept. LOL" oh lord... vol telling us what is and ain't a crpg... HA! as bad as vis is vol sometimes. HA! Good Fun!

am thinking that there is almost no d&d dms who has not cheated at one time or another. low level d&d is too damned lethal. can't get no campaign going if characters actually die as the dice fall. low level 3e d&d is actually worse than ad&d in this regard. criticals = insta death at low levels. in a crpg, with dumb ai to control the actions of an npc rather than a living person, and with the player having benefits of reload, we gots 0 problem with NPCs being fudged. in a pnp campaign... have never had to overpower an npc. Gromnir is the gm for chrissakes and we can stack the damned odds however we want. if Gromnir really wanted to we could gurantee that no player party ever survived even a 1:1 ratio D&D cr encounter. HA! Good Fun!

there is an argument that a good story cannot be told in a crpg format in less than 30 hours. cut out all the tangential side-quests and you not really gots a crpg anymore

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!