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newc0253

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Everything posted by newc0253

  1. sorry, but i don't think there's many japanese schoolgirls that hang out on the obsidian boards.
  2. eh, battle is painstaking. you have monsters to fight, and then you have the members of your own party to fight as well, trying to make sure they don't trigger traps or run off down the corridor past the three monsters that are ganging up on you to engage a whole new set of enemies...
  3. yeah, i miss turns. utterly artificial but great for tactics. TOEE may have been a thoroughly flawed CRPG in many respects, but i loved me the turn-based combat. the only time i use party-AI in a CRPG these days is for minor encounters. otherwise you risk your spellcasters using all their most powerful spells on some mid-level chode. that plus friendly fire will wipe out half your party. micromanaging may be a chore but it beats watching AI wreck your party.
  4. How to keep this thread on-topic? uh, so is Storm of the Zohan gonna come out before or after Mysteries of Westgate? Because i was actually looking forward to playing the latter ... last christmas or something.
  5. yes. games like BG or PST that lock your character in to a particular background have their own strengths and weaknesses but they at least have the virtue of making that background integral to your character. MOTB doesn't even have that virtue. the PC wasn't the soul eater before the game, and has no natural connection to Akashi's story other than that the PC has a conveniently shard-shaped hole in their chest... again, being the soul eater might have been more interesting if Akashi himself had been more interesting. But he wasn't so it wasn't. Despite apparently sharing bits of each others' soul, there's nothing interesting about him or your connection to him besides the soul eating and the awkward interest of the bald chick. yes, tragic. but also oddly uninvolving. no, i caught it. but since the sword seems to be the universal key for half the bloody quests in the realms these days, it didn't make it feel any less like shoe-horning it so obviously was.
  6. I found Akachi to be an interesting opponent, because he was partially you, or you partially him, so you were fighting a part of yourself. An anwanted one, but none the less. This is an analogy to Planescape: Torment, and not the least of the reasons I loved the game. i at least agree it echoed PS:T, but in an essentially uninteresting way. yes, the PC is apparently partly Akachi. But not in any intrinsic way, like being the son of bhaal, or the latest amnesiac incarnation of an immortal being seeking to escape his doom. You aren't suffering for the sins of your father or for yourself, you're suffering for the sins of some random stranger who centuries ago lost a big fight and got punished for it. By itself, Akachi's fate might have been tragic. But his fate isn't just on him and his loved ones, it's on you the PC as well. Akachi, in other words, is the ultimate cosmic mooch, dumping you with his frakking problems like a frakking bum. Although MOTB has some explanation for why the shard-bearer was an ideal choice for becoming the soul eater, the truth is that you're partly Akachi for no other reason than the developers needed you to be to move the story forward. The interest of the Red Wizard which irritated me no end btw. Apparently there was no polite way to say "listen lady, you seem nice and all but i don't dig the bald chicks"... Returning to the idea that the PC is partly Akachi and Akachi is partly the PC, how did Akachi reflect anything about me the PC? Not only was Akachi a spectacularly dull as a cipher, but he was spectacularly dull as a mirror too.
  7. Sarevok may not have been terribly complex but he was definitely memorable. Melissan, the main villain in TOB, was probably the weakest in the 3 BG games but still more memorable 7 years on than MOTB which i played about six months ago. Malak was like Sarevok, memorable as a foil even if his motivations were entirely stock ones. And, like Sarevok, he became more interesting once his true connection with the PC was revealed (i.e. your former student in Malak's case, your half-brother in Sarevok's case). merely ok, eh? as CRPG villains go, i'd say he's one of the better-written ones to date. I was thinking of the Sheriff and LeCroix: not villains of the moustache-twirling variety per se, but the game's ultimate antagonists, even if you didn't end up fighting them. Again, LeCroix's a fairly typical villain, only interested in power. But he was a lot more engaging than fixing the plight of poor, dull Akachi.
  8. feh, they are if a mage is firing them. i agree with Gromnir about the last couple of NWN villains. the King of Shadows was as about as anonymous as they come & the last minute biographical details hardly made him more engaging. Akachi (isn't that a japanese beer?) was even duller, despite the endless buildup. However interesting the plight of the walled-up souls in NWN2 may have been, the curse itself was boring. In fact none of the villains in either iteration of NWN have been particularly interesting. The best was the Drow villainess & Mephistopheles in HOTU, but both were stock types delivered straight from central casting. the BG series, otoh, always did well for villains. so did KOTOR, Jade Empire, and Bloodlines. however, i somehow get the impression that SoZ will be less ... story-driven than MOTB. from everything i've read, it seems more like an expansion to showcase various cute tricks (e.g. the overland map) than some gripping saga of blood and woe.
  9. so does that mean that devils are just the vanilla kind of evil but demons are the chaotic extra-crazy all-flavours-at-once kind of evil?
  10. zounds! D&D alignment was always illogical, but at least it was symmetrical. this lopsided version seems like a cry for help, like the folk in charge know the whole system doesn't work but couldn't bring themselves to scrap it altogether, so they came up with this nutty halfway house so obviously flawed that even small children can see it don't stand up. on the plus side, at least they've finally eliminated years of useless arguments about 'true neutral=balance' and how chaotic neutral people should act (are they like crazy? or just deliberately random?), etc.
  11. the old D&D planes were hardly models of coherence and the old D&D alignment system only made it one hundred times sillier. but i never had any problem figuring out the distinction between demons and devils: chaotic free-wheeling winner-takes-all evil versus hierarchical, rule-following well-organised-in-a-death-camp-kind-of-way evil. of course, like anything based on D&D alignment, it doesn't bear too much thinking about but i always thought the Nine Hells vs the Abyss was a cool concept and the new 4e cosmology seems even sillier and more arbitrary than ever (and this was building on a cosmology that was already silly and arbitrary). speaking of silly and arbitrary, what has happened to alignment in 4e?
  12. i think permanent death makes sense at low levels. the standard D&D explanation is that raise dead and resurrection are sufficiently rare and/or expensive and/or costly in other ways to put them beyond the means of most people. at high level, there's still lots of ways to deliver permanent death (e.g. torn asunder by cosmic forces) but MOTB tries to achieve its grief-stricken air by telling you that your fellow party members are killed in the most mundane way possible: crushed by giant rocks. to which an obvious question is, why not just resurrect them?
  13. but, dude, watching you chase your tail is the best part! well, even if that were true, which it ain't, i think 'winged chick cleric' is a sufficiently distinctive category in the relatively short history of D&D-based story-driven CRPGs... in other words, you'd think if they were self-consciously seeking to avoid overt comparisons with PST, they might have tried a little more to differentiate their NPCs. but the similarities go further. for instance, they were both earnest, all-mission, no-sense-of-humour types. and, in keeping with hot higher beings, they were both diffident about the PC hitting on them. i agree they weren't identical, and the MOTB one was better drawn, but it was kinda hard not to notice the resemblance. superficial and obvious is what i do best.
  14. i also belong to the "underwhelmed by MOTB" club. don't get me wrong. i thought it was very well done and enjoyed playing it. i just didn't think it was anythink like as brilliant as others seem to think it was. the 'soul eater' device was interesting from a gameplay perspective, but after walking around with a bit of gith sword in my chest in NWN2, i was a little weary of being destiny's b1tch once again. i'd have preferred plain old 'fortune and glory' at this point (which is why SoZ seems appealing). the setting was well-drawn and i always like a bit of plane-walking, but my irritation at being destiny's butt-boy kind of soured the whole deal. i was also less than edified by the bald chick who kept on following me around and falling in love with me following what seemed like the briefest of conversations. i much preferred the chick with the armour and the wings, despite the fact that she was basically a celestial version of Falls From Grace. lastly, i shared the (more general) criticism of the ending. It was probably too much to hope that a high-level character, even an epic level character, was gonna change the face of the planes. Certainly it would have been optimistic to suppose that WOTC would ever allow such a non-canon outcome. But that only made me all the more irritated at what i was getting sucked into: the patent unfairness of the Wall of Judgment or whatever the frak it was was a great hook for a story but why continuously tease a player with the phony prospect of changing things when you know the game is rigged? I suppose another reason why i didn't think MOTB to be the greatest thing since sliced bread was because i actually liked the storyline of the NWN2 OC (despite its own significant flaws, including often painful linearity). it was a cop-out to kill off virtually all the cast from the original (and, really, who dies permanantly at high-level anyway? the apparent tragedy of all my friends being crushed by tonnes of rock was undercut by the thought that: couldn't i just go back and pay to have them resurrected eventually?). although i think MOTB was a quality piece of work, it ultimately felt like i was replaying an echo or a riff of PS:T. i guess it's no bad thing for a game to emulate PS:T but PS:T in the final analysis had a depth and an originality that this lacked. They both had predestined conclusions, but only PS:T's felt organic and earned.
  15. MMORPGs are laaaaaaame. That said, if companies like Bio and Obsidian need to make them to stay profitable, then so be it.
  16. eh? Psychonauts is a fantastic game. one of the very best non-CRPGs i've played. yes, the game involves jumping and, as with any game that involves jumping, sometimes the jumping is challenging and - when things go rough - a little irritating. but to describe Psychonauts as 'just boring platform jumping' is like describing LOTR as 'a boring book about some hobbits'. The true strength of Psychonauts is its humour and its story. If you don't have a sense of humour, you might dislike this game. You might also dislike it if you have no appreciation for great writing. p.s. the items you're collecting are the furthest thing in the world away from 'pointless' - they're all related in a meaningful way to the story. Bioshock is similarly a great game. Pay no attention to the folk who hate on this game for no decent reason. Assassin's Creed? Stunning graphics and great gameplay that's captivating about 90 minutes. Unfortunately, as someone else already pointed out, every quest is structured identically to the first, so after the first couple of quests, the whole thing becomes supremely repetitive. But worth playing for those first 90 minutes or so. Especially the pretty graphics.
  17. I'm looking forward to Neverwinter Nights 2: Don't Mess with the Zehir
  18. The Tomb Raider movies were entertaining fun if you were maybe stuck on a 14 hour flight or an oil rig or something. That first Final Fantasy film was also watchable if you managed to overlook the silly story and focus on the pretty graphics. every other video game adaptation has been at best cruddy and at worst the cinematic equivalent of dribbly diarrehea. i wouldn't rule out that some day someone will make a decent movie based on a videogame. but i ain't gonna hold my breath.
  19. Gaider's pretty much admitting that it won't be 'low magic' as most people conceive it, e.g. the player will encounter plenty of magic. it's just that - in classic D&D fashion - the PC is the exception, dare i say it the *cough*chosen one*cough. i'm pleased to hear though that they're steering clear of the FR as much as possible.
  20. finally, after 4 years, a halfway decent site. looks good.
  21. the vid is a lot more impressive than the pic. i'm still suprised they stuck with the large scale battles thing. seems like a waste of zots in a party-based CRPG.
  22. is that meant to show us that the graphics have improved? because the 2008 one looks like someone's crappy photoshop attempt, especially the uniform rows of identical figures massing in the foreground. i call bullsh1t on that pic.
  23. As they say, poor artists borrow. Great artists steal. The difference between Middle Earth and Forgotten Realms isn't that one borrowed from other sources and one didn't. The fact that Tolkien based his stuff on other sources is something so well-known, it's painful to keep reading it. No, the difference between Middle Earth and Forgotten Realms is that one was the lovingly detailed backdrop to a series of literary works written by a giant of the genre, and the other was unimaginative junk dreamt up by a hack D&D writer because TSR wanted to break from Gygax's (superior) Greyhawk setting. The fact that both borrowed from other sources doesn't mean that one nonetheless arrived at something distinctive and original and the other hopelessly derivative and shallow. I'll leave you to figure out which is which.
  24. that reminds me of the old D&D line about adventurers being a rare breed, in that they could gain levels, unlike those poor 0-level townsfolk schlebs who wandered around with 6 hit points their entire lives (this was before the inanity of 3e and the idea of 12th level grocers and epic-level cobblers). in other words, saying magic is 'rare but powerful' is just another way of saying 'hey, you can do magic! you're special! not like those other poor sods!'.
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