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for the record, those latest screenshots are consistent with what we've seen in the trailer: good graphics but nothing earth-shattering. i also note that two of the five new screenshots show big-ass magic effects. so much for low-magic, huh?

hats off to you sir! you managed to post another several hundred words, only to demonstrate within the first 50 that you haven't the faintest bloody clue what you're talking about. first of all, The Witcher didn't rely on combat to move the story any more or less than any other CRPG in recent years. You seem to be obsessed with the fact that, because it required you to click at a certain point to intitiate the next stage of combat, it was therefore "mouse-based hack and slash". In fact, it was no more "mouse-based" or "hack and slash" than any IE game or anything made since by Bio, Troika or Obsidian. you mean, in that it had a story? and, in point of fact, one that far outstripped your average CRPG in terms of depth and complexity? That it involved making actual choices with moral consequences in a realistic manner? If that reminds you of Diablo, dude, i'd love to visit the dimension you're living in. No real dialogue system? Man, this is getting silly. But i'm impressed with the depth of your analysis. Also, i had no idea they allowed computer access within the secure wards of mental hospitals. kudos!

i agree but i also think that 'low magic' is most often used in this context to refer to fantasy settings in which magic is rare (even if powerful) rather than a setting in which magic is weak. LOTR is usually cited as 'low magic' in this context, although the balance sheet is more skewed than people realise. For instance, LOTR seems 'low magic' in the sense that there's apparently only five wizards in the entire world, with only vague references to other magic users (the witch king of angmar, neumenoreans practising sorcery, etc). Also, Gandalf and Sauraman don't seem to do a lot of spells, at least compared with your average D&D mage. On the plus side, though, people are familiar with magic swords and even magic rings (otherwise Bilbo's ring would have been identified as a ring of power from day 1). Not to mention the large amounts of 'magic-like' abilities and items, e.g. it's strongly implied that Elrond and Galadrial have significant power, and not only because they are ring-bearers. Elves and dwarves alike produce items with magic-like abilities, whether it's magic rope, magic grow-dust, or magic cloaks, etc. This is kind of my point. When most people say they want 'low magic' what they really want is 'no stupid magic' or, more to the point, 'no barrels with +4 greatswords in them' (i'm looking at you, NWN1). a real low magic setting, say like the Fire & Ice books where magic seems AFAIK virtually non-existent, would - for me at least - be a real bummer to play. if i wanted to play a magic-free setting, why not just play some historical sim instead, like Viking Total War or something?

sounds interesting. sorry that i missed it back in the day.

have you played it then? thought not. i'm willing to predict that DA, whenever it comes out, will have its phat loot just like any game. in fact, i'm struggling to remember any CRPG that didn't. the closest i can get is the Witcher, which professed to be low magic but still doled out the most powerful stuff at the end of each chapter or so. which really just goes to reinforce my point that even games that claim they're low-magic aren't really: they're just less obvious about it.

ah, low magic's a bunch of crap. everyone says they want a low magic game, but they don't really. at the end of the day, every CRPG player wants their character to finish the game more powerful than when they started, and more powerful means - among other things - more toys. it don't matter whether the most powerful weapon in the game is a +2 sword or a +12: sooner or later, players want the phat l00t. the real annoyance in games ain't the power of the magic, but how it's distributed: it's one thing to kill the big bad and take his magic sword, it's another to find a magic sword in a barrel in some beggar's hovel, or find 15 of them for sale by the local merchant, next to the beer & the cheetos. but spare me the plea for low magic in a game. it might work in books, but playas gotta eat.

a Diablo clone? to make that comparison, either you can't have played the Witcher or you can't have played Diablo. either that, or you had surgery and the surgeons mistakenly contacted your trachea with your lower colon, and that's the reason that you're talking completely out of your ass. btw, i get that some folk didn't enjoy the witcher. fine, to each his own. but to compare Witcher with Diablo ain't comparing like with like, other than in the minimal sense of both are CRPGs. apart from that, it ain't even apples and oranges. it's more like apples and frakking brazil nuts. you've got to have rocks in your head to confuse the two.

i don't know what passes for normal in your neck of the woods, but Witcher is a great game. to loosely paraphrase the immortal line from Deadwood: those who say otherwise cuck socks by choice.

hey, there's no question that BG was a distinctive story that made excellent use of its setting. but that doesn't make the setting distinctive or excellent. just the game itself. equallly, it's entirely possible to have a crappy game based on a great setting. it'd be stupid for example to suppose that every game set in middle earth is great just because it's set in middle earth, or that every star wars game is great because it's set in the star wars universe.

then you literally don't know what you're missing. PS:T is a different style of story. Witcher is great in its own right.

proof, in case anyone needed it, that there's no accounting for a phenomenal absence of taste.

Drunk or sober, none of his posts make sense.

yeah, i agree it looks generic. but, if all we'd seen was a 20 second cutscene, BG would have seemed pretty damned generic too. unique? FR is the nadir of derivative fantasy.

jesus, i never thought i'd end up defending anything to do with DA in this thread but some of you folk need to lighten up. seriously, the graphics look fine. nothing groundbreaking or otherwise astonishing, but the art direction recalls the look of BG and PS:T (the rendered bits), which ain't a bad look for Bio to be aiming for with DA frankly. i agree that the Witcher has set a high bar in this department. So did Oblivion, except when it came to anything with two legs. But i think whatever DA's look proves to be, it won't be limited to a bunch of guys wearing muddy platemail in torchlight...

despite what i said about disliking RTS/RPG hybrids on the DA thread, i think this looks pretty interesting.

if Oblivion is what passes for real combat these days, i'd be happier with point-n-click. Witcher combat was good though. i hope this isn't an RTS/RPG hybrid btw. the large scale battles in HOTU and NWN2 were fine but i don't need them to be a recurrent feature of CRPGs. besides, any resources a developer expends on the RTS aspects of a game is typically resources that could have gone to the RPG aspects. if i wanted to play RTS, i'd buy a proper RTS like the old Warcraft, not some watered-down version of it.

*shrug* looks pretty crisp to me. maybe you have astigmatism or something. plus i think the lighting is appropriate to a battlescene with torches. again, it's a battlescene at night. would you really expect a detailed background? my beef with this ain't the graphics. they look fine to me & besides, after playing crysis, i'd prefer a game that looks good without having to fork out for a state-of-the-art supercomputer in order to run it on the max settings. my beef with this is that it's just generic fantasy filler at this stage. i'm sure DA is actually a distinctive game, but you wouldn't know it from watching this brief excerpt. one of the Bioweenies has said it was all in-engine.

you know, i haven't heard them mention a thing about that in years. personally, i reckon they'll have their hands full building a decent 1st person/3rd person party-based CRPG. i think they learned their lesson from NWN about trying to build a game that was all things to all people & i'd bet good money that the whole 'larger-scale' combat thing has been quietly shelved...

yes, it would be delusional to expect in-game footage, for example. oh wait, didn't Blizzard release in-game footage at the same time they announced D3? yes. yes, they did. the trailer looks good visually, though: crisp graphics, art design, etc, but content-wise there's nothing to distinguish it from generic vanilla fantasy at this point. the only thing that told me it was a DA trailer (besides the end screen) was the name Ferelden.

do they also sell emulators to run the really old games?

you mean the forums running on fumes for the past 4 years? strictly speaking, though, i guess 4 years isn't 'endless'. it only feels that way.

I think the better question is: why not? Yeah, I'm looking forward to DA too. The thing is, i've been looking forward to it for ... hmm, 2004? I'll judge the game according to its merits when it's released, it's the endlessly extended hype which is wearying.

yes, i much prefer where i live in south east london, with the poverty and the drugs and the knife crime. it's so refreshing.

actually, i think Bio estimates the baseline intelligence of their customers by reference to their own forums. which, not incidentally, are filled with gibbering fanboys like Volourn. so no wonder Bio treats its customers as mentally sub-normal.