newc0253

you own shares in Atari, vol? because it's otherwise hard to see how that matters.

the fiasco is that they originally announced it would be released by thanksgiving 2007. then they pushed it back to until the next NWN2 patch, then the patch after that, then the patch after that, etc. now, every time they release a patch for NWN2, they basically announce a further delay for MoW. truth is, MOW has been ready for release for nearly a year now but is being delayed because Atari are insisting on the latest copy protection. in all likelihood, we will end up getting SoZ - an expansion announced after MoW - before MoW ever gets released. like Tigranes says, i'm sure we'll all play it once it comes out, but it pretty much kills the willingness of other developers to make premium mods for NWN2 if Atari's gonna d1ck them around like they did to poor Ossian.

yeah, the IE games were visually stunning and had great gameplay. but wondering why developers don't make 100 hour+ CRPGs with a 2D engine anymore is a little like wondering why nobody builds gothic cathedrals using medieval construction techniques anymore - they're a ton of work and the industry that makes them can't afford to live in the past. 2D may be fine if you're a small independent developer making a CRPG as a labour of love, but to anyone seeking a broader audience, 2D is commercial suicide. imo, NWN2 still looks pretty good - a helluva lot better than NWN1 ever did. now, i think it's safe to assume that SoZ is the last expansion pack and the fiasco surrounding MoW makes me think that that will be the last premium mod. but between those and the handful of better community mods that are likely to follow in their wake, i think we'll all get our money's worth from NWN2.

so i've got loads of colonies now and been to the centre of the galaxy and fought the grox. now, i'm kinda bored. there's a whole lot more of the galaxy to conquer but the game feels a bit samey now.

wait, let it die? better to ask people to stop poking the corpse. it's been dead for quite a while now. and, besides, where do exactly do people think the BG series was going? you were a god by the end of ToB, they couldn't have wrapped up the story more completely. sure, you could always engineer some silly way to return (it was, like, the biggest level drain ever) but who wants to end out the saga with some sh1tty crock like that? it'd be the godfather 3 of CRPGs.

If you're a vicious carnivore pirates attack less. speaking as a vicious carnivore, though, i still get pirated reasonably often. it's a pain but it doesn't actually inhibit gameplay too badly.

it does, in a minimal kind of way. you get some bonuses depending on how your species developed, e.g. combat bonuses if you killed everything, etc. but i can't say i've noticed. in the first four stages, it was for me mostly about the killing & conquest but in the space stage it's more varied. i'm enjoying it so far but am sure i'll get bored with it eventually, like i do with all god/sim/rts games.

my species ended up converting the other species instead of killing them. apparently you can also negotiate alliances and trade deals, etc, but i don't know how you get a win from that.

At least play through space, in order to make a true impression of the game yeah, space is definitely fun. so far, it's been a good mix of exploration and colonisation and blowing sh1t up.

game endings are usually less successful: in some ways, it's easy to make a good intro. like gromnir said, the intro is part of the marketing for the game so it's tempting for the devs to keep making promises about the kind of game you're gonna get (see e.g. the huge disconnect between TOEE's dynamic and story-driven intro and the stilted atmosphere of the game itself). but an ending only works because it's built on something, i.e. the game you just played. if the game sucked or disappointed, no amount of polishing is gonna make it any less of a turd. also awkward are good games with mediocre or cop-out endings: endings which say, "hmm we really didn't know how to finish this" (yes, KOTOR2, we're looking at you). the great endings that come to mind are BG2 (Jon Irenicus in Hell and a bunch of dudes in cloaks talking about how to kill you) and Half Life 2 (everything blows up, freezes & fades to black). Although i thought it was a very successful ending in itself, ToB deserves a certain amount of blame for becoming the template for CRPG endings: a hokey montage showing the fates of you and your companions... the ending to IWD was also pretty silly, trying to be a clever riff on the great opening that really don't make much sense if you think about it.

yeah, that was some excellent v/o work and visuals. also props for the MASH reference.

yes, this and also those phony urgent quests. these are both sins of game design, but particularly egregious in CRPGs which stress exploration.

so i bought it after playing with the free editor. am up to the tribal stage, which seems a little too RTS-ey for my liking. but the first two stages were fun and it's clever enough to keep going.

inability to skip cut-scenes. hey game developer! i know you put a lot of work into your kewl-looking cut-scene. man, those graphics are amazing! and, wow, that dialogue is better than shakespeare's 10 best plays combined! it's like truth and beauty and a car chase and explosions all rolled up into one! but you know what? it gets pretty boring to have to sit through it every. single. time i restart the quest or whatever. like they say, familiarity breeds contempt. so, here's a thought, why not have a button that the player can press to skip it second-time-around?

i agree. Assassin's Creed is an excellent example: state of the art graphics, cutting edge design, yadda yadda, but nobody thought to include 'press A to skip' to avoid all the endlessly tedious dialogue? in fact, 'cardinal sins of game design' deserves its own thread so i can b1tch about this some more.

the only thing they've done is apparently change morphine to med-ex. i doubt many folk will be hakking the game for that fix.

i can't remember, were there ever any references to real world drugs in Fallouts 1 & 2? besides maybe coffee?

the graphics in Gothic 3 seemed fine, the 10 minutes i played. it was the blandness of the setting, art direction and gameplay that failed to grab me.

BG and Fallout. i also liked TOEE's - if only because it was great to see the battle of emridy meadows visualised. everything went downhill from there. Oblivion's wasn't bad either - that sweeping shot of the imperial city worked well.

what's draconian about it exactly? other than that it's DRM i mean. i'm not saying it isn't draconian, i'm just wondering what makes it more draconian than usual.

why not? indeed, why don't you? silly how? sillier than the music industry? sillier than the movie business? because those are some pretty silly industries right there. they also have a turnover in the billions and involve more than mere craft. i think a lot of folk in the games industry take their work as seriously as musicians or film directors, and i think a lot of gamers take games every bit as seriously as music or film. certainly most of the folk on these boards seem to? so the games industry has to address the Holocaust, otherwise it ain't serious? that's a pretty frivolous pov. so? books are meant to be entertaining. so is music and film. we take criticism of those seriously, why not games? really? then why do so many non-professional reviewers do such a good job of serious criticism? don't that negate your earlier point that magazines can't afford to do proper reviews, because they'd compromise their relationship with publishers? now you're saying that serious review is impossible? bizarre how far you're willing to bend over to defend professional game reviewers for doing such a sloppy, lazy job.

lowest common denominator reviews, huh? classy. hmm, correct me if i'm wrong but i'm pretty sure they had professional film critics before Godfather 2 came out. it seems bizarre, though, that you're prepared to wait until the gaming industry produces a Godfather 2 before we have a decent bunch of professional critics. especially seeing as it took cinema 70+ years to produce a Godfather 2. after all, if people are gonna make a living out of criticism, why shouldn't the paying customer expect more from their critics? [NB: i'm not claiming btw that the only worthwhile criticism is or should be done by professional reviewers. but it's a sad reflection on the industry that professional criticism of games is so venal and craven, that most of the best reviews are done by non-professionals] [NB: i also don't think that games need to produce a Godfather 2 in order to warrant serious criticism, at least insofar as it involves the false assumption that games need to be more like novels or films to gain credibility.] ha! first of all you claim that a game deserves praise (a 7.8 or 8.3) simply if enough people enjoy it. secondly, you claim that games aren't good enough to warrant serious criticism. and now you're claiming that serious criticism of games isn't important because .. what? it isn't commercially viable? so what? we should give up on the enterprise of decent professional criticism because the market can't afford it? how frakking pathetic is that? and how pathetic are gamers for being willing to swallow such a crappy state of affairs? seems to me if the market can afford to pay individuals to write reviews, it can afford to maintain a semblance of journalistic integrity. it's the foolishness of the game-buying public (and more specifically the game-publication-buying-public) that keeps the level of reviews as cripplingly low as it is. no Gone with the Wind? really? dude, have you ever seen Gone with the Wind? it's not a great movie. it's a just a famous movie, the box office sensation of its time. maybe games haven't acheived the same artistic threshold as Citizen Kane but they've certainly acheived the mass market appeal and commercial success of Gone with the Wind.... huh? why are you confusing mass appeal with quality?? your average arthouse movie makes less money than your average AAA game, and is probably seen by less people too. you think that stops cinema from being subject to serious criticism??? it's truly amazing the excuses that some folk will make for accepting the lame state of professional game reviews.

i didn't say that they're all taking the money. it's just a sad combination of payola, industry pressure and the tyranny of low expectations among the editorial staff. after all, in terms of journalistic credibility, writing for a gaming site ranks somewhere between writing for your high school paper and your supermarket's weekly bulletin. gamers can't complain about games not being taken seriously when so many sites and mags are just pimps and shills for developers and publishers.

there's your problem right there. many people enjoyed 'Meet the Spartans' - does that mean it deserves between a 7 and an 8? and if a movie like 'Meet the Spartans' manages a 7 or 8, what do we give 'The Godfather Part 2'? after all, if we're gonna be assigning numbers between 1 and 10 to represent quality (which is a pretty debatable exercise in the first place), why should a merely 'playable' game score a 7? gamers should demand more from reviewers. instead they're content to swallow whatever pap they get fed, then regurgitate it on the boards, e.g. "OMG Crysis got a 10/10!!' that might be fine, if you're actually 7 years old. but if the average age of gamers is close to 30, it's more than a little sad.