newc0253

In a game where you follow hawks to jump off the highest buildings possible and land unharmed in shallow haystacks, your biggest problem is that dying people can utter a few words? Genius at work. an adventure game in which you leap off tall buildings into haystacks doesn't stretch plausibility. but a stealth game in which you the assassin hang around for several minutes to listen to the dying speech of the guy you just killed in full view of two dozen guards? you don't have to be any kind of genius to see how badly that breaks credibility.

um, when i described the dialogue as 'tedious' and 'pretentiously bad', i was referring to the stuff during the crusades. i could also add 'long-winded', 'heavy-handed' and 'dull beyond all human belief'. what made it worse was the voice-acting for Altair himself. the other voice actors were actually pretty good, which made Altair's super-wooden qualities stand out even more. by contrast, the stuff in the modern day was pretty standard fare: Kirsten Bell was given some fairly dud lines but nothing too terrible (i'm ignoring the content here btw). yeah, i really liked that too! it was soooo realistic that after i'd stabbed a guy in full view of twenty guards and a hundred bystanders that i'd have the opportunity for a two-to-three minute heart-to-heart with him as he lay dying. it really added that personal touch for an otherwise impersonal assassination! i also really enjoyed hearing their side of the story, especially seeing how it was always some variation on "yes, i know i look evil to you because i'm enslaving all these innocent people and torturing them, but trust me it's for their own good in some unforeseen metaphysical way that is in no way explained by the time you reach the end of the game". it kinda reminded me of those wall street bankers explaining why they just spent $30,000 on a wastepaper basket despite losing 2 billion dollars last quarter. except it was a cutscene in a stupidly-designed game!

sorry, was confusing Eidos Montreal with Ubisoft Montreal for some reason. although since Eidos is apparently looking for buyers, it'd be a smart move for Ubisoft to use the Assassin's Creed engine for a Thief sequel. although, otoh, a Thief sequel made by the folk who wrote Assassin's Creed fills me with dread,

Assassin's Creed looked incredible. also running, climbing and jumping over rooftops was fun. and it had Kirsten Bell. these things were almost enough to overcome endlessly repetitive quests, irritating combat, a bloody silly story, and unskippable, tedious cutscenes filled with pretentiously bad dialogue that made you long for death. almost. if Eidos had any sense, they'd scrap work on a sequel, fire the folk who came up with the story & dialogue and instead retool the engine to make Thief 4.

really? i always had the impression that games like IWD & BG were the products of much larger developer teams than any of the expansions for NWN, particularly as NWN already has the toolset frontloaded, hence making it easier for a smaller team to produce modules. whether or not that's true, the comparison between SoZ and IWD points to another problem with the NWN expansions: the constant expectation of new features at the expense of things like story. partly because the original NWN1 engine was such an experiment and only late in its development adapted for the single-player experience, it seems like an awful lot of development time has been taken up with making a weird beast of an engine into something workable: not simply the usual trick of adding new classes or races but really basic stuff like unlocking the camera, being able to organise your cohort's inventory, adding a controllable party, adding a spirit meter, adding party dialogue, an overland map, etc. (another reason might be NWN's emphasis on module-making itself: making it easier for the nerds at home to making a module with the toolset raises the bar for the developers themselves. since the professionally-made module will have the same basic look as the thing you make at home, the developers have to go further in adding shiny new stuff so that folks ffeel like they're getting their money's worth). IWD, otoh, didn't seem to add an awful lot to the functionality of the BG engine (on the surface at least, i have no idea what work they did under the hood). and besides adding some new monsters and items, it didn't really need to. tweaks aside, most people were happy with the basic package. even if it's true that IWD and SoZ were made with similar budgets and resources, i'd hazard a guess that much more of the time in making SoZ went to adding bells and whistles than IWD did.

is SoZ as good as IWD? it seems a strange question to me: IWD was an entire game whereas SoZ is just an expansion. it's a legitimate compaint that SoZ could have done more with the encounters dotting the map, that they were underdeveloped, etc. but to compare it to a game made with (i presume) far more time and resources strikes me as a little unfair. it also seems a bit funny to criticise SOZ's story, dialogue and characterisation in the same breath as praising IWD. IWD was great as an old fashioned dungeon crawl but i don't think it won any awards for dialogue, etc. again, SoZ was a small game rather than a big one but i thought Obsidian deserves plenty of kudos for the party-dialogue system: for the first time, there's a decent mechanic for single-player CRPGs to recreate the party-based dynamic of D&D without resorting to pre-written NPCs. i ain't gonna spend much time defending SoZ in other respects: it may be more a work of craft than of art, but better to have good craftwork than mediocre art.

feh, this is a very silly argument. print publishers spend millions too - check out how much it costs to print all those copies of the latest John Grisham novel or copy of the New York Times. yet nothing stops you from reselling your book or your newspaper (assuming you can find anyone willing to shell out for it). hell, in London, Rupert Murdoch is spending over 40 million pounds a year to produce a newspaper that he gives away for free five nights a week. there might be good reasons for the business model adopted by software publishers, but trying to justify it by reference to production costs is foolish.

the original FEAR was entertaining enough as a time-filler between better games: silly, silly story; repetetive level design but otherwise a decent shooter with a nice atmosphere of dread & some good scary moments. but it wasn't enough to make me want to buy the expansions & i can't see myself buying FEAR 2 unless and until it's a very rainy weekend and there's nothing better to do.

finally finished this on the weekend & liked it more than MOTB - no "epic" storyline, just good old-fashioned D&D fun. i particularly liked the overland map - the shame of things is that the NWN engine is so creaky and old, we're unlikely to see another expansion, because it'd be great to see that developed. i guess the owls of minerva really do fly at dusk.

reading this thread is like business management for the insane.

uh, let me get this straight: EA closes down a fledgling Pandemic branch in Brisbane, Australia and you guys start discussing whether Bio is gonna fold? jesus. we ain't even comparing apples and oranges at this point. this is apples and those tiny little grapenut things they put in cereal.

for frak's sake, am i the only person on this thread who can actually read? he didn't say they would revisit BG or NWN, but "the likes of" BG and NWN. it's a hopelessly vague statement that most reasonable folk would read as an indication that they want to make games like BG and NWN in the future, but not necessarily direct successors to those games and not in the next year. personally, i think it's deeply unlikely that we'll see a BG3 (pointless as it would be) and i have strong doubts about even an NWN3: no developer in their right mind would want to add to the code as bequeathed by NWNs 1&2 and few would want to spend the time to start a new engine afresh. i'm sure we'll see more D&D games from atari and they might even slap an old name on one of them to garner a few more bucks. but before y'all start drinking the kool aid, you might want to re-read what he said, because if you think that's a firm promise to make BG3 or NWN3, i have a bridge on the thames to sell you.

Dragon Age: Origins: Originer? i believe the sequels to Dragon Age: Origins will be Dragon Age: Heroes and Dragon Age: Villains, in which the main characters from the first game forget their motivations as characters, and engage in increasingly silly subplots involving time travel and eclipses.

What else is so disappointing about SoZ? the lack of ritalin. after all, if i can't buff up on the overland map, then i become distracted and wander off.

hey, you know what doesn't run out after 10 minutes? ritalin.

wait, am i? yes. yes, i am. either they didn't know or didn't have enough time to fix it, or maybe they just didn't think it was important because - y'know - casting a 10 minute buff spell for the sake of a 12 hour journey is kinda silly really.

maybe. or maybe it's just more realistic that a buffing spell that lasts maybe 10 minutes tops wouldn't be much bloody use in an overland journey that may take the better part of a day.

so the inability of buffs to transfer to the overland map means buffs are useless? and therefore wizards and clerics are useless because they're only good for buffing? why stop there? if wizards and clerics are useless, then surely the whole game is useless. and the game is on my computer, so my computer is useless. and if my computer is useless, i may as well just use it as a doorstop. but it would be too big to be a doorstop, so that must mean my door is useless. so, thanks, Obsidian: you broke my fricking door.

Bethesda releasing DLC for Fallout 3? it'll just be Shivering Isles with Guns!

the camera's still not perfect, but at least they have hotkeys to switch views easily enough. the only actual glitch i've encountered so far is some slight jumping on the overland map, but it's pretty minor and infrequent. it certainly doesn't take away from the map, which is great. otherwise bug-free so far, and certainly more stable than FO3 (though, as pool noted, SoZ takes longer to load and delivers less graphically). the game looks pretty though, i really noticed it with the water reflections in the . so far i like. not heavy with the drama or anything but well-written nonetheless. and fun.

i thought we'd moved past the knee-jerk anti-bethesda bashing. oh well. the other two seem a little meh but The Pitt sounds cool.

really? i think they could have amped up the goofyness in Fallout 3 a little more. they got the ultraviolence about right though.

yeah, i'm planning to climb Mt Kinabalu & do some diving in Sipadan. although probably not quite in that order.

forget broadband, they don't even have dial-up where you live? really? i don't mean to sound harsh, but where the frak do you live that don't have dial-up? seriously, i've been to darkest africa and the mountains of nepal and found ratty little internet cafes run by petrol generators in both those places that had access to the internet (not you'd necessarily use them to download patches, but still). i'm heading to borneo early in the new year and, even there, i expect to stumble across a working internet connection sooner or later... i know dial-up ain't perfect. hell, my broadband is pretty crappy (but then i buy it from a billionaire tyrant). but i'm genuinely fascinated by folk who lack regular access to the internet in this day and age, especially anyone who plays CRPGs with any regularity.

why would anyone live outside a city? only savages and cannibals live in the countryside.