Gromnir

"As far as the story goes, you weren't "supposed" to feel anything specifically about the twins. They weren't written as bad guys or good guys, but as antagonists. I knew that some people would feel sympathetic for them and some people would think they were buttheads and I thought that was a good goal. " why you think that were a good goal? regardless, you leap past ambivalence and went straight to apathy. with iwd2 you not got no nameless one or exile for the player to get emotionally attached to. you gots a Party of up to six adventurers with necessarily ambiguous backgrounds and motivations as your protagonist... which is just fine if you manage to fill the void left by absence of an identifiable and memorable hero. do that by making us care 'bout npcs... 'specially the villains. yeah, these is crpgs and in a perfect world the player should be able to be the hero of his own story/stories... woulda', shoulda' coulda'. lots of gameplay choices ain't 'nuff. gotta give the fans some reason to care 'bout your game/story beyond simply the next opportunity to level... and as far as we can tell, you can't write great dialogue for a generic good or evil party... at least we ain't seen anything that makes us think otherwise. in absence of a identifiable protagonist, iwd2 shoulda' made the villains more compelling... not less. btw, writing compelling dialogue is necessarily an exercise in ego. you gotta take risks to makes good dialogues. if your main concern is trying to avoid sounding hokie or clich

am not going to abuse the obsidian folks with our content complaints further... they has suffered enough, even if they deserved to suffer. however, we recently attempted to replay (well, not actually "replay" as we never finished it before,) and the damned thing has such terrible slowdowns even on a relatively fast machine that we just couldn't endure a second attempt at a game we thought were mighty under whelming. and yes, all our drivers is updated. am simply disappointed at how clunky the game is. HA! Good Fun!

indeed...I think that aging and forced retirement (mind you, Pirates! has you retiring at about age 35 IIRC, which is pretty realistic) is THE solution to the open-ended problem. now, if you like Morrowind just the way it is then I'm not talking to you. but if you think open-ended games need some sort of mechanism to complete the experience (WOW, I retired as a governor this time!), then there is nothing better IMO than aging and forced retirement. It is the best way to introduce opportunity costs in an otherwise unlimited playground. if you don't like unlimited playgrounds without some sort of opportunity cost and balancing mechanism but refuse to play a game with aging, then linear RPGs are for you, not open-ended ones. <{POST_SNAPBACK}> the same ends can be reached w/o forced retirement. forced retirement is hardly the best mechanism for preventing 10075 and exp farming in a crpg. random encounters and respawns is how folks get uber powerful in games... going beyond reasonable and rational limits envisioned by developers. heck, even the bumfuzzled d&d developers considered this problem and largely put it to rest in 3e. kill kobolds as a 1st level party and you get valuable exp. kill kobolds as a 20th level party and get... nothing. so, we got a problem? nope. 1) cap random freaking encounters so that they is rational. & 2) get diminishing/0 exp for killing easy hostiles. no meeting up with demi-gods in the woods simply 'cause you is uber level, and make sure that after you kills your 50th wolf or cliff racer or kobold or whatever that ain't getting any experience for doing so. if you wants aging in a game, then add it... but play a 40 hour game and be forced to end up enfeebled is just ridiculous... and unnecessary. now, as to have voluntary aging with some benefits and handicaps... we think that such is a good idea... but forced retirement and quicksilver geriatrics is a horrible way to enforce balance.... like time limits and level caps. is options for those developers w/o

Wow. I think you are the first person to admit watching and liking this "film". Ever. It is known as one of the worst movies ever made. <{POST_SNAPBACK}> and yet it were better than the new underworld movie. don't get Gromnir wrong, seeing kate neeked were all well and good, but that should not be the only positive recollection one takes away from a movie. ok, there were one other positive. went to see underworld at suggestion of, and in company of a woman... call it a date if you will. the absolute horribleness of the movie had our companion apologizing to us over and over. she owes us. *shrug* HA! Good Fun!

am building a budget/mid-range gaming desktop. decided on the msi k8n neo4 sli mb, now that msi seems to have worked all the kinks out of it. seemed like a good board for Gromnir as we only got limited overclocking interest. however, we got absolutely 0 experience with msi boards, and we is trying to decide what heat sink to be putting on an amd athlon x2 3800+ cpu... preferably a quiet heat sink. usually we uses zallman, but the one msi socket 939 board zallman not seem to have any recommended heat sinks for is the one i am using. have stuck zalman's on non-reccomended asus mbs in the past w/o difficulty, but as this is our first msi board we don't wanna take the risk. any thoughts? HA! Good Fun!

obviously Gromnir communicated something badly. need not be (and rarely is,) simply a matter of gameplay v. story... one or the other. oh well. HA! Good Fun!

Its a game, Mr Khan. I don't want to care, I want to play. Not that they have to be mutually exclusive to be sure, but given limited time to spend on implementing all of a game's features, I'll take gameplay over characters anyday. Give me some plastic cut outs, but just let me have fun with them. If I want to care about some characters, either fictional or non-fictional,I'll read a book. <{POST_SNAPBACK}> perfectly understandable. pong were a great example of a game with addictive gameplay and 0 story. you not need story to play game. *shrug* unfortunately, pong and madden football and so many other games gets awful dull awful fast if you is simply playing v. the computer. play larry, curly or moe and maybe you adds the element o' competition, but otherwise the experience of pitting yourself v. the computer gets old fast... which is why so many adventure and crpg games throw in story elements... 'specially since these games is made so that 12 yr olds can beat 'em w/o too much difficulty. is not like you is really being challenged in any way as far as gameplay goes. nevertheless, if you is content simply to play game to watch your character acquire more points in strength or to be getting more valuable 10075, then more power to you. is a perfectly acceptable approach and gaming developers would love it if everybody were just like you. oh, and books ain't really the same is they... 'cause you is simply an observer when you is reading a book. crpgs is making you an active participant in the story... so the book option ain't really analogous... not at all. HA! Good Fun!

"Oblivion intends to create a realistic fantasy world" oxymoronic, no? oblivion is gonna have to pass the larry, curly and moe test before Gromnir purchases... gonna need for three of our friends to be buying and recommending 'fore we even consider purchase, 'cause as of right now it still seems like the folks at bethesda just don't understand how important character development is in a crpg. all those nifty features is just so much fancy make-up on the oblivion sow w/o a dedication and understanding of morrowind's fatal flaw: no heart. it were so damned difficult to care 'bout what were happening in morrowind 'cause the character's dialogues were as flat as their faces. after morrowind we asked for heart, and instead we is getting pork soda? unsolicited advice: suppress your urge to buy oblivion until your own larry, curly and moe is giving positive feedback.

we know a couple of folks who might be able to help eldar out... seriously. will see if they can email or pm him with info. ... heck, did you think of pming josh? he seems to get pretty elaborate with his halloween costumes. maybe he got some "ins" someplace. HA! Good Fun!

you is kidding right? eldar announces that he is gonna do some burton and taylor "taming of the shrew" anniversary motif and you want folks to stay serious? am sorry, but if eldar paints a bull

quality:posts = ____ how can somebody say so much and yet say so very little? ... then again, when Gromnir stops and considers some Justice c. thomas opinions we has read... maybe vis should get into law. seems like every third guy we meet nowadays is a lawyer. heck, our dentist got a law degree from some local night school law program. J. vis? HA! Good Fun!

if you listen to the troika folks (or the codex folks,) the REAL story is that the Suits at activision got a look at bloodlines and were utterly taken aback by it's fantabulousness... the activision folks were so daunted by such a complex and well-crafted crpg that they were moved to destroy it. after all, such perfection could not be allowed to exist in the universe... and in any event, the average gamer would be so overwhelmed by playing a complete and finished bloodlines that only two results were possible: 1) the tiny brains of us average lowly fans would overload after playing some few hours of the game, and we would experience grand mal seizures by the hundreds of thousands. 2) the dozen or so educated and enlightened fans who managed to "get" bloodlines (all the regular codex posters,) would find that their lives were now complete... or at least their gaming lives would be complete, and they would never have a need or desire to play another computer game ever again. in the case of possibility (1) activision were looking at a billion dollar lawsuit... and with (2) activision would be losing a source of important future revenue (the dozen or so regular codex posters.) as such, the Suits at activision decided that they would have to kill bloodlines before it reached the gaming public, so they used every means at their infernal disposal to delay and handicap bloodlines w/o overtly violating their contract with troika. and if the Suits did have to abandon subtlety to wreck bloodlines, then so be it,

little megan, the girl down the street with the lemonade stand, has more business acumen than did the entire troika brain trust. ego is what killed troika. timmy and co. shoulda

checked enworld archive. lord only knows how you find anything with that thing. they do not appear to archive articles so much as threads from their forums... and it is a dmaned disorganized format for searching. bah. tell us who is new at wotc would still tell us little. HA! Good Fun!

press releases not tell us nothing. if we wanna get spun we will go to a carnival and ride the tilt-a-whirl... or whatever they call it nowadays. HA! Good Fun!

is not like times gone by for Gromnir. we got 0 sources at obsidian or bio or wotc. perhaps ferret is just parroting the company line as spoken by fergie, and perhaps ferret genuinely thinks that wotc is a swell bunch of guys to work with/for... but Gromnir is in the dark on this. HA! Good Fun!

save yourself an afternoon, and throw speaker away now. honest. only the most hardcore osc fans like(d) speaker. HA! Good Fun!

the following is lifted from some interview linked at the front page of the obsidian site Strauss: What kind of input has Wizards of the Coast had in the story, mainly on the protagonist and the hero? Ferret: The story and the protagonist

check out the old twilight zone episode, "an occurence at owl creek bridge," or read the short story of the same name. both were better than jaccob's ladder... an not simply 'cause they were the source material. HA! Good Fun!

"Again, it depends how you roleplay. " no it doesn't... not if we is talking 'bout quality of writing.

"As for the art, Oblivion is a beautiful game. I don't see how it could be considered ugly, by any stretch of the imagination." you not gotta stretch 'magination very far at all... simply look at the flat, vacant faces bethesda has given their characters. bethesda shoot for photorealism, and came up short... landed at creepy instead. am not a fan of blizzard. we don't play wow and got no urge to try. however, we thinks that the folks over at blizzard made the right choice in opting for a disneyesque primary color kinda world as 'posed to trying for photorealism. sure, we would prefer something more dark and more grim than the rainbow hued landscape and peoples of wow, but blizzard seemed to recognize that trying to inch closer to realism were a wasted effort. blizzard instead took art inspiration from cartoons & comicbooks. maybe someday personal computers will be goodly enough to run games that got cgi to rival peter jackson's gollum or Kong, but we think that anything short of that will be tending to look bland or... creepy. HA! Good Fun!

for some, fo ain't a game as much as it is a religious icon. did the holy grail ever exist? ultimately does it matter if it did or did not? HA! Good Fun!

for a long time Gromnir had a 78 cherokee jeep. we loved that car. went everywhere in that car. did lots of stuff in that car. ended up flushing a great deal of money down the drain as we attempted to keep that car in working condition. replace rear differential. replace transmission. replace radiator. replace tires and replace battery and get 12 miles to the gallon if we were lucky. during the last two years we owned our 78 cherokee, we spent far more money maintaining that car than we ever could have gotten for it if we had sold it... and the money we wasted on that car trying to keep it rolling were money we coulda' used to buy a new car. computers get obsolete much faster than does cars, but principle is same. at some point the best thing to do is to take the thing out behind the barn and put her out of her misery. HA! Good Fun!

There are a lot of people who believe that writing an ultra-tight story with minimal amounts of mostly insigificant player choice = role-playing. I know that Oblivion seems to be going very far away from that concept and that annoys a lot of people, but it seems great to me. Bethesda tries to do a lot of experimental stuff in their games. Sometimes it fails (spectacularly), but I like the fact that they are doing it. <{POST_SNAPBACK}> don't hurt yourself beating on that strawman. good writing does not necessarily require that a protagonist be coddled as he is forced down the critical path towards a fulfilling and coherent story. tangential and optional side quests were numerous in morrowind, and each of those tangential side quests offered an opportunity to be seeing how committed the bethesda folks were to exploring development of character and story w/o wrestling the pc into the necessarily confined choices available when advancing the critical path. instead, the bethesda folks introduced a legion of forgettable characters who were offering largely mundane and uninspired quests. in other words, morrowind were dull... 'course, as we know that josh is far too smarty to suggest that player freedom needs necessarily lead to lame characters and boring story, we will ease up on him as soon as he eases up on the scarecrow he is knocking the stuffing out of. personally, we is willing to give bethesda a second shot. morrowind reminded us a great deal of bg1... w/o some of bg's few redeeming qualities... and look how much bio improved the bg model with bg2. however, we dislikes the pov that oblivion has chosen, and the art looks hideous... so they better have overhauled morrowind's gameplay and writing in a big way if Gromnir is gonna be won over HA! Good Fun!

... how many movies is capable of making grown men weep? oh sure, women tear up watching notebook and titanic and crap like that, but how many movies can put that kinda ache in a man's chest? the reason why filmmakers keep making king kong is 'cause it managed to reach those producers or directors on an emotional level as few other films has. unfortunately, the original kong were done in 1933, and it is dated. show 1933 kong in theatres and nobody would come to see it save for a few hardcore film buffs. directors and producers want to share kong... and they wanna somehow become attached to the kong legacy. update so that kids and young adults will pay to see? make your name synonymous with kong? "everyone cries when the monkey dies." real men walk out of "titanic" and they secretly curse their girlfriends for having forced them to sit through that schmaltzy romantic tragedy. watch men leave theatre after seeing kong. more than a few has watery eyes. sexist? bah. maybe jackson's attempt will fail