newc0253

If Oblivion is anything to go by, we'd best prepare for people who talk like a phone directory: "thank you for asking me about <THAT TOPIC>" "i don't know anything about a <WATER CHIP>" "they say the <BROTHERHOOD OF STEEL> is willing to pay good money for rad scorpion tails"

sure, but that just goes to show how schematised the whole inventory thing is. after all, most CRPGs allow you to access any inventory item during combat, but how realistic is that, given that all those scrolls and potions are laying in a heap in the corner? i think only BG made this vaguely realistic, by not pausing combat during inventory checks. i'm not making a plea for inventories to be more realistic, mind. i'm just pointing out there seems to be an unhappy balance between games that give you unrealistically silly amounts of space and games that make you spend your whole time playing inventory-tetris...

the rad-lime and the rad-scorpion venom may be imaginary, but judging by your post i'd say that the gin is most definitely real.

you guys saw this article, right? i think it's on the money: on the one hand, being able to carry unlimited amounts of loot is silly. on the other, it's kinda dumb to make carrying your gear such a major part of gameplay. as the article points out, most story-driven CRPGs approach it more sensibly, by having weight limits tied to character strength. but it still comes across as kinda arbitrary sometimes, e.g. you get DEX penalties for wearing a certain kind of armour, but no penalties for hauling fifty scrolls, fifty scrolls, two staffs, two swords, three shields and twenty library books into combat...

because it reminds everyone vaguely of the Heroes spin-off called Heroes: Origins that never made it to air because of the writers strike last season? i dunno. 'Dragon Age' is about as generic fantasy as it gets, but 'Origins' hints at an arc going beyond the first game (that much-vaunted 'epicness' the muppets on the Bio boards are always demanding: "can you make it epic? epic is kewl! i need a game with 50% more epic!") Kinda like adding 'Episode IV' to 'Star Wars'. p.s. the hype for a trailer announcement is classic Bio: after all, why give the fans actual details when you can pawn them off with cryptic hints and the prospect of a brief glimpse? after all, they've managed to run a Dragon Age forum based on a name, three concept sketches and a couple of screenshots from their E3 demo in 2004. if they can run an entire forum for four years based on that meagre level of info, dribbling out tidbits like a coma patient, why would they go to the trouble of full & frank disclosure now?

BG1 a big stinker? i couldn't disagree with you more but i congratulate you on your completely heterodox opinion. judged from a purely SP perspective, NWN1 was easily Bio's weakest game but the toolkit still deserves major points for innovation. also, HOTU redeemed its crappy OC.

nonsense, the hardcore comic fans (among which i count myself) loved Iron Man. if Dungeon Seige were a movie, it would be something crappy directed by Uwe Boll and starring Jason Statham. oh, wait.

that's just frakking stupid. video game classification authorities are bloody idiots, a bunch of condescending snobs who wouldn't dream of banning a shakespeare play because of the violence (c.f. titus andronicus), but who believe that video games are inherently a kid's medium and therefore they have to act as moral guardians for the frakking nation. frak them. frak them in their stupid asses.

nah, carrots are bloody useless for whipping. god knows i've tried.

*shrug* looks fine to me. i agree it doesn't look much like a real city in terms of colours but, really, who cares? they seem to be going for hyper-real rather than gritty realism. and, hey, it could be worse, it could be flat-out speed racer cartoon-anime bubbly art direction, the kind that gives you ADD.

when was he Bio's CEO?

i'm working on the perfect existential video game, which encourages you to desist from all action on the basis that the material world is an illusion. it's so zen, you don't even have to load onto your computer. i'd make it available for free download, but that would involve action and thereby negate its non-purpose.

great trailer. my only question is the GUI: all that running & jumping looks cool, but it could end up maddingly infuriating if the nuts & bolts of jumping blow monkey chunks.

will there be space donkeys?

actually i wouldn't be surprised if there was some internal structure that gave Bio a significant degree of autonomy. such things are not unheard of, see e.g. publishing imprints, specialty film divisions.

ha! but Dungeon Siege did have some good points: pretty graphics a donkey to carry phat l00t. okay, so two good points. everything else about it was complete and utter pants, a giant turd sandwich with turd filling and special turd sauce. i have no reason to think Space Siege will be any less excrable than Dungeon Siege. even the name reeks of stupidity: laying siege to a dungeon is one thing, but how do you lay siege to space?

i haven't seen any evidence of EA pulling the strings, preventing Bio from doing their own thing. (then again, Bio have never been known for being particularly radical or avant garde, so maybe EA has no need to) either way, it seems to me that EA is pretty comfortable letting Bio do what they do best. after all, Bio might not be a golden goose, but it's got a solid track record of producing popular, market-friendly CRPGs. what would be the point of EA frakking with that?

sorry but aren't consoles inherently a better platform for sports games? i think PC gaming is alive and well but there's some types of games which seem to me better suited for consoles and sports is one of them. not because of the code, etc, but simply because they're almost always 2-player games, right? p.s. sorry to take this off-topic but until we have some actual DA info besides tree-frakking-villages, i figure this would be more interesting.

you mean, like say the elf tree-village in BG2? sorry to be cynical, but how frakking different can tree-villages be? you got your ewok tree village, your gelfling tree village, your elven tree-village, your stephen donaldson tree people tree village, etc, etc. there's only so much you can do with the basic concept. i'm not doubting that Bio have put a lot of work into making their elves and dwarves different from elves and dwarves in other settings. i'm just saying oooh, tree villages, woop-de-frakking-doo.

*yawn* great, except i never said anything about DA being 'exactly like' BG. i simply said that DA was the 'so-called spiritual successor' to BG. to which you said 'not really'. until i provided you with the direct quote from Muzyka... and it's a shame you can't read.

oh, sure. p.s. i have a bridge on the river thames for sale. interested? really? then why did Ray Muzyka say to IGN that "Dragon Age is the spiritual successor to Baldur's Gate."? indeed.

definitely? you know that fo sho, huh? yes, i'm sure Bio has been planning this marketing push for months (possibly even years), and that E3 is also a huge factor. but that don't mean that Bio ain't keeping a close eye on Blizzard. after all, Diablo 2 and Baldur's Gate 2 were released within 3 months of one another in 2000. you think it's pure coincidence that, 8 years later & within days of Diablo 3 being announced, we're suddenly getting a whole lot more info on the so-called spiritual successor to BG2?

well, there's a shocker! thank goodness Bio is taking such big risks.

so you know what the 'prestige' classes are then? oh, you don't. in other words, you don't know the full class list, like i originally asked? yeah, thought so.

*shrug* who said anything about hating the game itself? i'm just mocking Bio's info strategy.