Azarkon

Oh, and to answer Walsingham's original question as to what would make me support the troops, I think it's pretty obvious where my perspective leads - If they're fighting a war that I support, then I can fully support them. But then, if such a war existed, I'd probably be fighting in it, one way or another.

Then they are tragic characters, deceived by the nation that they were trying to serve. That does not garner my support for what they're doing; it merely makes them all the more tragic. I think you're confusing two concepts - support of the troops in the sense of wanting to help them as individuals, and support the troops in the sense of supporting what they're doing. This ambiguity is intentional - it's the basis for an entire military stratagem built upon appealing to the public's sense of duty to the troops. But I draw a line between what I support and what I sympathize with. I can sympathize with the troops' plight. I can exonerate them as individuals. But I cannot support the war they're fighting - and therefore I cannot support them. Not for a moment. Feel free to disagree. I don't expect to speak for the "correct moral attitude," as I don't believe that such a position is possible in this context. To me, supporting the troops while not supporting the war is an impossible position - a contradiction at best, hypocrisy at worst. If you take this position, then we are in fundamental disagreement, and I do not think that this is a disagreement that can be resolved on this board.

Lack of support comes from lack of caring. The war in Afghanistan is fraught with indifference. When you go around asking people these days about what they think about the war in Afghanistan, their first response is usually "what? We're still fighting in Afghanistan? I thought the war moved to Iraq." Very few people know - or care - about what the soldiers are doing in Afghanistan. Their eyes are focused on Iraq where US support wanes by the day, where sectarian violence and bloodshed has led the country to the brinks of civil war. When you say, "support the troops, not the war," what I hear is a contradiction. It's not possible to support the troops and not support the war. You can pay mouthpiece all day long, but at the end of the day if what the soldiers are hearing is "we hate this war, and we hate the administration that carried us into it," they won't feel support. If what they hear is, "we support you - please come back home safe" they won't feel compelled to keep on fighting. And of course, most people don't even attempt to mince words. Who here, I wonder, would argue against supporting the soldiers? Who here would ever stare into the face of a soldier and tell him that he's wrong to fight in the war, that he's a bastard for going there? I doubt that this is the problem; ask on any major public forum and what you'll get is a gushing, feel-good litany of "we support the soldiers, but not the war." But that's the problem - you can't truly support the soldiers unless you support what they're doing. You can't tell the soldiers that they're doing a good job, and then turn around and condemn the bombing of civilian buildings and the death of thousands of Iraqis. The two facts are inseparable - it might be in your mind, safe as you are at home and free to argue over the morality of war, but in the minds of those who are doing the killing, who are doing the bombing, they are inseparable. What any fighting man truly wants to hear is that he's doing the right thing, that he's out there - fighting and dying - for a good reason, a just cause. If you can't tell him that - because you do not support the war, for example, or because you do not think that the Bush administration is doing the right thing - then you can't really support him. You can tell him that he's doing a good job, that he's fighting for the country, etc. etc. but at the end of the day when the polls drop and the war condemned the soldiers feel a sense of abandonment. And why wouldn't they? They sacrificed years of their lives fighting the war. Years that could've been spent bettering themselves and in the company of friends and family. They sacrificed comrades, close friends, and in many cases limbs and the very ability to thrive in civilian life. And all for what? To be remembered as the fighters of an injust war, the defenders of a corrupt administration? This is not a conscript army we're talking about. A conscript army, especially one conscripted against the people's will, can be satisfied with putting an end to the fighting - because they never supported it in the first place. But what we have today is a volunteer army. They made the choice to fight in this war, and it's this choice that they want to see validated. If you can't support that choice, then you can't really support the troops. That's my take, at least. And let me end this by saying that I don't believe that there can be a satisfactory position - and that the lack of this moral safety zone is a good thing. Wars cannot be reduced to struggles between good and evil, and one of the most problematic aspects of the modern mentality is the fantasy that they can be - that the goods and the bads of a war can be compartmentalized and treated as separate entities. That you can support the troops all the while decrying the "evils" of war. This is blindness. This is naivete. And I'll argue that it's exactly this sort of attitude that's caused entire populations of normal, relatively good-intentioned civilian populations to be deceived - willingly - by the atrocities around them. War is not something that can be minced and packaged into acceptable little chunks. I've never made it a secret that I disagree with the war, so I'm not going to cower now and say that "but I support the troops!" I might feel sympathy for the troops, I might consider them tragic characters who should not be blamed, and I might respect them and their choices as individuals, but I won't - and do not - condone what they're doing (that is, fighting a injust war). And therefore, I cannot support them. To do otherwise would, in my mind, be hypocrisy.

Btw, given that we've been mostly talking about Western RPG romances thus far, what are you guys' stance on JRPG romances? Like/don't like? Better/worse?

Yeah, but many guys like that sort of personality. I'm not sure as to the opposite, but I have a feeling women don't typically like submissive men.

Can't say I disagree. There usually is a sense of accomplishment involved - people who like RPG romances tends to think, for some reason, that if you devote alot of time and attention to a character romance should be the reward (I guess it's something of a fantasy for how real life should work?) In that sense it comes down to the gameplay - romances can be a form of gameplay, rather than just ambience/flavor. Course, I'm not suggesting to go as far as those dating games in Japan but... Well, you get the idea.

But then you have people whining about how difficult it is to romance a character and how romances should be something that everyone experiences through the course of the game. Sometimes I think that people want harems of slavishly devoted characters, and there's some truth to that - after all, I doubt by "romance" most people are actually looking for a replay of RL relationships.

Volourn: I think you'll find the amount of people who like romances, at least as represented by board posts, fairly even between men and women Otherwise, there wouldn't be so much outcry over Neeshka. I find myself agreeing, in principle, yet when I look back I can't say that I've disliked them. When I first played BG 2 and experienced the Bio romances, I should not have been impressed - but actually, I was. Simply because it was something I've never seen in games before, and the dramatic possibilities excited me on a visceral level. Little did I know then that I was witnessing the birth, death, and fossilization of Western RPG romances, all in the same moment, as nothing was ever done of this potential. So, perhaps a better question would be - given that RPG romances are, at the moment, so poorly developed, do you think there can ever be good romances in RPGs?

Hey Josh, I just read over at the Bio boards that you disliked romances in RPGs. Would you mind sharing your reasoning as to why? I'd also like to hear everyone else's opinions regarding why romances are bad in RPGs. I think I have a good grasp of why people like romances, but if you don't, I'd really be interested in knowing why.

Saving is definitely something that NWN 2 isn't as keen on as it should be. Given the game's occasional tendency to bug out during quests at times, it's absolutely imperative that players save often and intodifferent slots. Since this game isn't as linear as, say, DM (which has frequent autosave points), the best way to do this would probably be to build in the feature into quicksave. I know that it's a bother because supposedly people should be saving manually into different slots, but my experience with gamers these days is that they're awfully peevish and lazy - and would rather blame the devs than spend some extra time themselves managing saves. Since quick save is so much more convenient (and could be even moreso if it didn't fade into the save screen & back), most people just use that - and the UI person in me says that you want to adapt to people's behaviors rather than depend on them to adapt to yours.

Hope someone isn't getting cut out of the development loop Nah, the more likely truth is that Mr. Scotty decided that ME = next-gen therefore relating to ME = DA IS NEXT-GEN. I guess we'll see how it works out after ME is released.

Preview says very little of substance, but I'm starting to get worried. Saying that the game uses the Mass Effect style of conversation is another way of saying that it's going to have a lot of one-liners and short replies, which I thought was implemented due to the console-controls of ME but apparently Bio is moving towards that direction in general. Also, the combat system, despite the attempt to link to BG, is very much KOTORish, and while KOTORish combat isn't bad it went hand in hand with the simplicity of that game. Here's to hoping they'll innovate ontop of what's already there. Large-scale creature fights sound good, though it's odd they're hyping that aspect of the game. Darker story sounds good, though what that means is anyone's guess. Surprisingly little was said of the game's roleplaying features and NPCs. If they're going to hype a RPG, I'd have thought that this would be where they start... Game coming out in late 2007/early 2008 indicates that its hype storm should hit next summer, so maybe the game's still in an early stage. I hope so, for the graphics aren't exactly spectacular and will be less so next year, especially if we compare it to Mass Effect.

You're going to be flamed. Hard. And for good reason. Criticizing a game considered good/great by most without giving an argument... Is about the stupidest form of trolling you could do.

Linguistic immersion is a matter of taste. Personally, I'm fine with either modern casual (so long as it doesn't have blatantly modern slangs) or Ye Old English, but that's because I rather like old lit and have studied them somewhat extensively. I can easily see how most people who play games nowadays would be frustrated or annoyed with trying to interpret older dialects, however, and that it'd be a immersion breaker for them. I also have no real issues with the UI. In fact, I prefer it to NWN's simply because of the Quickcast/Quickuse bars. I do have an issue with the slowness with which the camera seems to move and what I see as a more-clunky-than-necessary chase camera, however. Still, I don't think the game deserves a 6/10 unless your score for most games average around a 4. Gamespot's review is about on par with what I'd rate NWN 2.

Gamespot's review is pretty fair, I think, relative to the rest of the PC scores (console scores seem very inflated on GS). They did, however, give Oblivion a 9.3, and I found that game a failure on many fronts... But then again, I'm probably not the target audience, and the production values on Oblivion, if nothing else, were higher than NWN 2.

One thing that I'm really digging about NWN 2 is the Quickcast UI. Wonderful not having to click through three levels of buttons in order to cast a spell. I will reserve judgment on the rest of the game until I've finished it, but it looks good so far

Whatever you do, dont post that opinion in this thread or you'll get eaten alive for daring not to like it. <{POST_SNAPBACK}> not possible anyway becouse thats closed elf: <{POST_SNAPBACK}> That's not an elf. That's a human with elf ears

Alas, I must wait till the morrow to get my copy, and can only put a few hours into it even then, for I fly out on Thursday

I can't agree with his assessment of NWN. Personally, I hated the NWN OC and couldn't see how Bioware could've done such a crappy job at the game. Whether NWN 2 improves upon that remains to be seen - somehow, I doubt it could be worse, simply because it'd take a monumental effort to be as bland and uninvolving as the NWN OC.

Hmm. I think character customization is an issue, mostly because NWN 2 is not only a SP game but also a MP game and in MP games, people want their avatars to represent themselves. However, we're talking about the SP here, and the lack of Oblivion-like character customization didn't exactly kill KOTOR, another game where characters take up "1/3rd" of the screen, so I'm leaning towards the idea that the significance of this issue is exacerbated by the fact that many people find NWN 2's models "ugly" and therefore particularly un-representative of their personal fantasies. The increased resolution and lack of portraits contribute to the problem. I wonder what prompted Obsidian to go with this style of D&D graphics, as opposed to giving in to the more prevalent theme, these days, of making characters super models.

Such a dearth of PC games compared to consoles. I hope PS3 fails

If wars can be justified solely by the good deeds done by those who fight them... Then all wars are good. But of course, you must also look at the other side - for every new school opened, how many innocent children were killed? For every Red Cross truck delivering aid and support, how many Abram tanks were there knocking them down? I support good men and alwalys will. But the doctrine of "support the soldiers - and therefore the war!" is bull**** and always will be.

Well, I'm not one to expect PC RPGs to be bugless on release. I just hope that NWN 2 does get the support that it'll need to thrive as the successor to NWN 1. Understandably, that's outside of Obsidian's control as a company, but fans probably won't make the distinction. To this end, all the calls for a guarantee from Feargus, etc., albeit comical, are understandable - people really want this game to succeed in the long-term as NWN 1 did. With such a passionate fanbase, failure can be deadly.

Well, let's put it this way: if Bush doesn't respond "sternly," then Iran gets a free green light on its nuclear program, Japan & S. Korea follows, and the NPT goes all to hell. Course, that might be a good thing, considering that double standards have cost the US more than dearly in terms of world prestige. Thought experiment: if nuclear weapons are indeed the deterrent people claimed that they were, then say that we arm Japan, S. Korea, and India with nukes to counter N. Korea, Pakistan, and Iran - it'd lead to world peace, right, cause no country would dare set off nukes in fear of retaliation so everyone would just play nice? And to think: we'd all have Kim to thank for bringing humanity into a new golden age - maybe he really is the Great Leader

Just because NK has the Bomb doesn't mean it has the means to deliver it. However, this is a bold diplomatic move - I assume that Kim will now walk around as if he carried a big stick. But by pissing off China in the process, I'm not sure if the regime will hold - I mean, the worst they could do now is nuke SK/Japan/China, assuming those countries start imposing sanctions, and I'm suitably confident that a four country alliance will defeat them before that happens. What is most worrying is the US response. I do believe Bush said that the US will not live with a nuclear NK, and in the context of trying to prevent Iran from going nuclear, the US is obligated to deliver a can of whoop ass on Kim's regime, or risk looking like a toothless lion without the means to back up its proclamations.