newc0253

hmm, three things we didn't know about Gromnir, at least two of which we probably could have guessed. btw, i've always thought 'write what you know' was horsesh1t. yes, by all means write what you know if that's what enables you to write well. but if what you know is double entry bookkeeping, i'd prefer you keep it to yourself and write about something that interests you instead. truth is, for every great writer whose stuff was born of experience (e.g. Solzhenitsyn in the gulag), a lot of great literature was written by folk with first hand experience of diddly jack squat. Shakespeare may have been familiar with the ways of the english court but i'm pretty sure he was never washed up on a magical island or fought in the trojan war. Dumas was never imprisoned in the Ch

i'm shocked - shocked! - to discover there is gambling going on in this casino. p.s. can we please have a moratorium on threads with the term 'uncanny valley' in the title?

sounds like they got at least one thing right. also, much as i like the old Vance-style spell system, it's pretty hard to argue that what they had in 3e was still Vancian: substituting spells? sorcerers? warlocks? if anything, it was 3e that was Vance-in-name-only...

Yeah, but why stop at 3 dimensions? I don't just want graphics to look cool and pretty. i want graphics that allow me to fold space, etc. the downside isn't the cost of games either. the real risk is if Azathoth finds his way onto our dimension. then we're really doomed.

yeah, okay, except that's not a model per se so much as super-duper motion capture of a woman's head. impressive but not the same thing.

hmm, i suspect this ain't CG as claimed. i believe CG will get there eventually but incrementally, whereas the first pic - esp the eyes and the mouth - seems quite a substantial advance from what we're used to seeing. so, to sum up, i call bullsh1t on this.

again, why's neverwinter in ruins? who ruined it? besides NWN1, i mean. BAM! ba-da-bing! ka-ching!

why exactly is neverwinter in ruins again? somebody bring me up to speed, i didn't get the memo.

really? because the folk at Tilted Mill sure are keen to talk up its RPG elements - just check out the Hinterland website: now maybe that's just hype to market their game to folks who like CRPGs but it's also the kinda hype that will bite them in the ass, when CRPG fans get burned by a game that maxes out at the 6 hour mark. yes, but five minutes of the greatest RPG in the world is still only five minutes. you think it's a coincidence that the fantasy genre favours trilogies and endless series rather than short stories? or that there's a constant demand for epic levels in games like D&D? CRPG fans don't want to invest time into building a character and following a story only to have it grind to a halt a few short hours later. shorter adventures and episodes have their place, but typically as part of a larger story. Hinterland sounds like a fun way to kill a couple of hours, but it seems like a big mistake for the devs to put the RPG elements of their game front and centre when they know their game ain't long enough to provide the follow-through.

sorry but 6 hours is a frakking short game by any standards, unless it's galaga or pong. 6 hours for an RPG ain't a damn game. it would be embarrassingly short for a frakking premium mod.

yeah, i got a year's free anti-virus from my bank too. maybe we have the same bank? send me your account details plus passwords and i'll verify to make sure.

actually i think they can get the speaking mouth movements right eventually. there's no magic to it, just a matter of time and work. the problem is that there's several other problems they haven't quite mastered yet, as those pics above show. e.g. the eyes? look great, but they don't fool anyone. esp in the third pic, the borders of the eye look clunky and fake. the guy on the motorbike in the fourth and fifth pics? he isn't sitting naturally. he looks like a plastic action figure stuck on a bike. also the backgrounds, while nicely faded out, are otherwise about on par with most games we've seen in the last few years. in other words, nothing special. the second pic is my favourite, esp the texture of the skin and the rain and the detail generally. i'm not one of those folks who say that computer graphics can't ever look more realistic. it may be that they asymptotically approach verisimilititude but they're definitely getting better.

yes, the axe/lynx hotties were memorable.

well, it's the rare CRPG that makes heavy use of the cello for its soundtrack. Arcanum was long on atmosphere and exploration and story and short on, well, nearly everything else that makes a game good. For everything that it did right, it did at least two other things wrong. It kept me playing till the end but it lost my good will along the way.

This is what i meant about classes reflecting the setting. Runequest didn't have classes but, if you think about it, the cults in Glorantha a lot of the same kind of work. Each cult had some or other special skill or spell that was accessible only to followers, and the RunePriest or Rune Lord division were like prestige classes to the extent that, once you met the requirements, you could access the special powers available to a Rune Priest of Orlanth or whatever. But the cults in RuneQuest didn't tie you down to a particular skill set, so e.g. the followers of Orlanth didn't all resemble one another. Rune Priests and Rune Lords of a particular cult would tend to resemble each other more, but could otherwise still have massively different skill sets. And there were plenty of other ways to develop characters without going the Rune Lord or Rune Priest route. The great thing about RuneQuest v D&D was that, despite the importance of cults, there was no silly game mechanic like alignment regulating your conduct. Cults remained part of the setting, not something intrinsically given like classes. The PC might stop being a RunePriest for some entirely non-gameplay reason and might even end up changing cults, but it was played as part of the setting, not as a matter of character skill and levels.

thanks dude. i have fond memories of the original TR & was thinking of buying TR:A. none of the TR games that followed it ever managed to capture what was good about the original: great atmosphere and fun gameplay. looks like TR:A didn't either.

feh, i always hated bards. yes, 1e had specialised classes: paladins, rangers, druids, illusionists, assassins and monks (which i always think of as an unarmed fighter plus some mystic element) plus (after unearthed arcana) cavaliers and acrobats. i don't there's any point in being doctrinaire about classes, or arguing that there's some kind of logical coherence to having paladins but not epic divine chevalier pooh-bah toe-tappers, etc. After all, if Gygax had been more open to human multiclassing in 1e, for instance, we'd never have needed paladins (fighter/clerics) or rangers (woodsy fighter/theives). I believe strongly in parsimony and against the unnecessary proliferation of classes for classes sake: that's why i hate prestige classes. But i also recognise that classes reflect the setting and that it's entirely a matter of judgment when and how they should be implemented. Ever noticed, for instance, that despite Tolkien's massive influence on D&D there's not a single recognisable cleric in Middle Earth? You could no doubt play a Middle Earth campaign using D&D rules but if you were designing a LOTR game, would you even bother to include clerics? Similarly, if you're making a Star Wars CRPG, for instance, Jedi seems like a must. But kinda hard to argue that Jedis should therefore be a class in every similar kind of science fantasy CRPG. I imagine, for instance, you could have a fantasy CRPG without magic users. Seems like it might be kinda dull, but who's to say it couldn't work. All this shows there's nothing objective about which classes there should be, other than what the setting requires. And when i say that classes reflect the setting, i don't mean that every setting requires classes. This goes back to my earlier point about the decision whether or not to have classes reflects the choices of the developers or the designers as to the style of the game and the world. RuneQuest is probably the best example of a classless system i can think of and Glorantha was one of the best settings too... Part of my reason for hating bards in 1e D&D was because their progression was so arbitrary compared to other classes: first they were one thing, then another, oh look, now they have spells, and so on, etc. But i accepted them as part of the setting. Nobody pretended that AD&D made sense, and bards were just one more example of this. But the main reason i hated bards was because bards are so bloody hey nonny nonny and precious to begin with. I mean, bloody hell, who came up with the idea of a fearsome adventurer who kills his enemies by singing at them?

i think the class/classless rules decision is a ultimately matter of taste & has a lot to do with the kind of adventuring style the developers want to promote. both systems can be done well & both can be done terribly. the boundary between the two can also be blurred considerably. prestige classes, for example, seem like the worst of both worlds. 1e offered classes with a very clear sense of identity, but were highly restrictive. 3e kept the base classes but made for a lot of customisation through lifting racial restrictions, multiclassing, feats, skills etc. prestige classes, though, i don't know what the frak they were supposed to acheive, except making both classes and customisation appear ludicrously silly.

NWN1 in general didn't make me weep but the OC was maybe the worst crpg story that i played through to the bitter end.

if a game is lame, i rarely play it for long enough to start weeping. for instance, never having played any of the Gothic games, i bought Gothic 3 to see what the fuss was about. i gained a level after killing 3 orcs. then the game crashed to desktop. so i uninstalled it and sold it on ebay. probably the longest i stuck with a game that blew was Lionheart, but only because the first part was so dramatically better than what came after.

great except how do they manage the complexity of keeping track of the different responses given by different characters? the mayor of the town asks your party to retrieve the jade monkey stolen by the orc chieftain: the paladin wants to take the quest for the good of the town, the cleric has doubts, the wizard only cares about investigating the local ruins, and the rogue wants to take the quest, but only so he can sell the amulet at the next city? does the mayor remember that the paladin was keen, the cleric diffident, the wizard rude and the rogue a liar? could one of the characters do a Yoshimo and betray the others? would it be possible for the different characters to end up in different factions? enemies even? obviously no CRPG could handle that kind of complexity, and it's doubtful that a single player could sensibly roleplay all four characters effectively at once (i've seen PnP sessions with people running two or three characters at once but nobody pretends those sessions were all about the roleplaying...) but if all it means is that you'll be able to swap out different characters for different conversations, so that your dwarven cleric takes the lead when dealing with the dwarves, but your elven druid takes the lead with the elves, etc, then how would that be different from, say, IWD2? don't get me wrong: i like the idea of moving away from the IWD1 approach of a party of 6 player-created characters but with no opportunity to express their differences. i'm just questioning how far it would or even could work in practice.

ah Atari - who knows if anything they say is accurate at this point...

actually that was a translation error. they weren't talking about London's architecture, they were talking about its food. but seriously, in terms of modern architecture, we're actually a little past the international style's standard glass & steel box. most of the stuff that's gone up recently on London's skyline or is proposed in the next few years is pretty cool looking: c.f. the Gherkin. i agree, though, that a lot of the international style stuff was at best bland and at worst soul-destroying. it ain't just amazonian indians who dislike that stuff.

wait, you mean you didn't? i'm also a little suspicious of how they plan to give your party members personalities in SoZ,. i'm assuming it involves scripts of some kind, e.g. 'perky', 'grumpy', 'devious', etc, or background, e.g. parents killed by orcs, parents killed by gnolls, parents killed by ettins, etc.

all the kool kidz are perma-banned from Bio. as a great man once said, you're nobody in this town till everybody thinks you're a barstard.