Cantousent

How set in stone is your budget, Kumquat? I mean, you don't want to invest 300 bucks on a decent video card only to fall short on power. Of course, you can just make sure you meet the specs to run the card. Don't feel like you need extra power if all you're going to do is upgrade an old system anyhow. Save larger purchases for when you build a new system. That way, you don't end up throwing good money after bad. So, it all depends on how much juice the 8600 demands.

I'm looking forward to bringing my character over from NWN2.

I recently visited a friend who works for AMD. He's adamant that their product is better than Intel, and, all things being equal, I will buy AMD. However, I think Intel might still have the advantage on AMD. I don't like it, but it, but I suspect it's true. Thanks for responding, my friend.

I'll tell you one thing. My Cleric/Frenzied Berserker/Warpriest still has a difficult time, and i had some pretty good equipment. Clerics are a tough breed as a core class, too. Probably the most powerful. You should have taken a much more scholarly approach, like I did. I think just about any class can have a tough time in some of those areas.

Let me make a point about optimization. If you didn

Well, tonight because I got you mixed up with the other deadlynightshade or whatever. I'm a bit tired. Sorry about that. :Cant's sheepish head hanging icon:

Oh, your post. I thought you were talking about Nightshade's post, which seemed entirely pertinent to me.

When the game ships, I won't write or rewrite another review. :Cant's tongue in cheek grin: However, I'll be in the spoilers area telling folks how to deal with some of the more difficult areas. The system specs I was running at work were... let's see, a quad intel cpu running Vista with one gig of ram (should have been two) and a... 6800? I think. May have been a 6600, but I think it was 6800. Had a huge amount of harddisk space, but the cpu/video/memory configuration was just not up to snuff.

It was the cattle prod that did it.

I

Sorry. I finished about half up in Washington and then had to make the dreadful drive to Las Vegas. I managed to get the wrong directions and I was on the road for over 21 hours. It was well over a thousand miles. Anyhow, I'll finish the review and post it in a separate thread tonight. Fair enough? :Cant's getting ready to pass out icon:

Haha, one of the programmers used to walk up and down the hall kicking a soccer ball between his feet. I thought that was funny. I asked Kevin if I could take pictures of game day. When I took my trusty one-time use camera down to take the photos, however, Alvin pointed out that the photos, do to the layout of the lan(d) would be underwhelming. I know a bunch of folks were going to attend comic con, but I'm not sure how many of them did. The QA department has a QA lunch once a month, which can be cool. Geez, you need an outsider to keep track of your culture at your own damned business. Of course, that was my goal all along, so I guess it's not so bad. :Cant's poking fun at the Obsidians icon:

Aside from making the character's governing attribute much more comparatively useful in using a skill, this also makes it a lot easier on DMs to write skill checks into the module. A lot of you DnDers out there are going to focus on how players abuse the system. For those of us who play with folks who don't crunch the numbers as much, the real treat is that casual players won't be abused by the system. I'm not sold on 4th edition by any means. There are some things that make me ecstatic, such as getting rid of redundant checks for stealth and whatnot. I don't like the fact that governing attributes mean more because I hate virtually all character creation schemes and there is a special place in hell for weighted point buy. That and the fact that, while buying skills is the biggest pain to teach new players, at least they got the idea that training something over time was an important part of character development. Now, the two biggest factors for same level characters are attributes and a one time trained purchase. You may select some at creation and then burn a feat later. I'm not sure I'm picking up the 4th edition books, which is a change from last time, when I purchased 3rd edition almost immediately. In the past, advocates of the cursed weighted point buy system cited it as a way to balance the game. I've argued that they're wrong because things like skill ranks diminished the impact of attributes anyhow. Now, however, we're a step closer to saying that attributes are king. A few more changes, say to feats, and attributes really will be the deciding factor, where they should only be a deciding factor. The way I see it, some of these changes reinforce weighted point buy, but I've never shaken the notion that weighted point buy is nothing better than a player policing measure created by some guy who thinks it's unfair that those (munchkins, min-maxers, powergamers, insert some asinine label here) create characters with high attributes. I tell you what, they should implement a way to make sure that stat increases at every four levels are weighted also.

One project probably won't have any significant impact on how I experience other games. However, This would be a great question for the other testers, most of whom have extensive experience in the lengthy NWN2 QA process or earlier. I was mostly focused on other folks during this process. Well, that and the game itself. My review will follow next, but I've just arrived in WA and, as much as I loved MotB, I'm going to start a lanned game of WoW right now. :Eldar's goofy smile icon:

Well, this is probably the tequila talking, and I'll regret saying this in the morning, but I wouldn't mind sharing my thoughts on Catholicism with you folks. I'm just not going to share my views when the very question is framed out of animosity. This thread isn't about creationism vs darwinism. It's not even about religion. It's about how people view and interact with the world. Or at least, that what I think it should be. At my former work, folks were fairly hostile to religion, at least as far as I can tell. That's fine. I've been around folks who were hostile to me as a Catholic pretty much all my life. That goes not only for atheists and agnostics, but also for other Christians. Folks assume some of the stupidest things about us, though. I'm not trying to offend anyone, and I shy away from berating them about my beliefs. ...But I'm not going to be ashamed of my Catholicism. I'm not going to let someone frame the debate in such a way that I have to act as a defendant on a trial. ...But it doesn't even get that far. When folks ask me questions that amount to, "how can you follow such a religion? How can you believe in this stuff?" I just have to wonder why they'd even put the thought in the form of a question in the first place. They might as well just make the statement as an accusation in the first place. Pixies is right. These aren't open discussions. These aren't reasonable debates. They're not even an exchange of ideas. They're trials. One of these days, I'd like to post my views on my religion, flaws and all, and let folks respond. ...But as long as the question is essentially, "How can you be so stupid as to believe in that religion," I'm afraid I'll just keep approaching these threads, when I approach them at all, as nothing better than petty attacks. You have reason to be embittered by religion. Well. So. Do. I. I have reason to be embittered by all sorts of things. We must live through past slights if we are to go forward. Disagree with religion. Speak out against religion. Just don't crusade against it.

I've discovered that, if you add tequila liberally to lemon lime gatorade, you don't really need a blender and ice.

"PC "hardcore" are just as obnoxious, but instead of boasting about things that they don't know about, the boast about things that no one else cares about." I don't really agree that the PC Hardcore always know what the hell they're talkin' 'bout, but that statement was comedy. Literally laughing out loud. hahaha

Oh, I'm sure it will sell well. I'm hoping for more than a cult classic, but that's mostly because I see it as validation of long past design decisions. I will say, hands down, that I prefer PS:T to MotB.

Yeah. Yeah. I know. The check is in the mail. :D

I'm not an Obsidian employee. Moreover, I've no intention of making another foray into game development of any kind. (Well, I might actually do real work on a NWN2 mod, but I doubt it.) I am undoubtedly biased. Nevertheless, I will do my utmost to be honest in my review. There are aspects of which I will be critical. It is not a perfect game. What game is perfect? Overall, however, I honestly believe in the title. I wrote, some months ago, that Obsidian had failed to set itself apart from the pack, that it aspired to greatness but had not achieved it. I believe MotB is a turning point for the company. It's more polished, more finished, and more deserving of critical aclaim than their previous two titles. With MotB, Obsidian will no longer living in the shadow of BIS. As for the integrity of my review, I will let you judge that for yourself. :Cant's friendly smile icon:

I am an unabashed PS:T fanboy. Of course, that assumes that a fanboy is someone who prized the game without insulting folks who didn't share the same level of enjoyment. For the "fanboy" term to have meaning outside of "fan," it should be used sparingly. On the other hand, I don't really take offense. I don't mean any either. For folks who didn't like the amount of text in PS:T, I think you'll have a much easier time with MotB. It's the general quality of the writing that makes it PS:Tesque, as well as some specific aspects of the game. There is less writing, and the writing takes up less of the page. The player can click through dialogue in the same way that he could in NWN or NWN2. Barkstrings, of course, carry some of the weight, and there is a lot of voiceover work that helps move the dialogue without resorting to long passages. Now, I won't say that all of the dialogue is perfect. It's not. However, there are fewer of the errors I thought detracted from KotOR 2, and the writing is, in my opinion, far superior to NWN2. Moreover, there are fewer NPCs in MotB than NWN2. That could be a good thing or a bad thing depending on how you look at it. I unreservedly think of it as a good thing, and the quality of the NPCs is one of the reasons I put it on par with PS:T, even though I think it could have more writing. It also shies away from the same level of pseudo-philosophical diatribe. The story in MotB is refreshingly personal. Any other thoughts I have on this particular issue will wait until I do a full review (carefully using only information available in current reviews, of course). EDIT: I also concur about Nathaniel. He went out of his way to be welcoming to community members. Of course, "community member" mostly means the folks on the Bioware forums over at Obsidz, but we do have some devs who frequent these pages. Maybe not as many... or as frequently. :Eldar's wolfish grin icon:

George crafted a truly excellent story for MotB. Whatever his past, he will make a name for himself with MotB. This is an expansion, but it plays like a full title. I plan on writing the review sometime this week, while I'm traveling, but my take is that Obsidian is quite happy with George's work. If they're not, they should be. Most of you guys will be.

I don

How is the other project coming? The one you didn't enter this time around?

George was involved in LotR online, DnD Online, and Earth and Beyond. That's just off the top of my head. I'll have to go through my notes to see if there's anything else. He did say that MotB is his most significant and challenging project to date. I believe him. :Cant's friendly grin icon: ...And hush, Pixies.