Azarkon

5.7 from Gamespot... http://www.gamespot.com/xbox/action/advent...ll_review_image

But you don't need to keep a PC top of the line for 4-5 years to play the games (for instance, my PC from ~3 years ago run HL2 just fine with a $300 vid card upgrade). Plus, any upgrades to the PC will also help just about everywhere else you use it, since a computer/laptop is indispensable in this day and age (as a result, buying a console would be an added price ontop of the PC, equivalent more or less to a high-end graphics card). My point though is that it's very doable if it's one console system, not very doable if it's two or three, which then forces you to choose the "best" to stick with. Sometimes, that decision maybe simple (ie perhaps in your case, with your preference of J-games). Other times, it's not (like in my case, since I want to play both the vast array of PS games and Bio/Obs/etc.'s new Xbox games), and becomes prohibitively expensive as a result. I mean, it's much easier to convince yourself that your computer needs an upgrade (and a ~$500 computer nowadays can run just about any game on the market at moderate settings) than it is to convince yourself that your gaming hobby deserves a $500-1000 downpayment for the next 4-5 years (for two consoles, that is). And that's just for the system.

With the current price tag I probably won't be getting any of them at launch. The price is... Prohibitive, to say the least. Moreso because there's a split between the markets with Xbox having various exclusive-titles from ex-PC (and current PC) developers, while the PS3 has the majority of Japanese games as well as a considerable number of NA/European games. I do think that the PS3 has more value in terms of game catalogue due to backward compatibility with the more or less gigantic pile of PS/PS2 games (both Japanese and not, since back in the day before Xbox picked up speed it was all PS), but with Microsoft willing to lose money to keep the Xbox afloat, I'm also quite sure that dominance among American developers isn't out of grasp for MS, and American games have always appealed to me just a tad more (though not on the console front, which is another factor to consider). Anyways, back to the price problem: I can't see myself buying more than one console till the price tag's well below $200, and that I think is one of the problems with the console market at the moment. Sure, the rich people will have it all, but I personally would rather buy a PC for school, work, home, and play than to buy a PC for school, work, home, and then buy 2-3 consoles for play, which is the reason, after all, why I'm still cheering the PC on against the odds. Here's to the hope for more cross-platform development - though likely it won't happen with all the new exclusive titles and what not.

Guild Wars' style of PvE combat bores me to no ends (too similar to Dungeon Siege in terms of what you're expected to do during combat), but I do enjoy playing it with friends who would've never gotten into any MMORPG with a monthly fee.

I suppose it's a matter of semantics, as I'm not really saying that one should attempt to build a game purely on imagination - as that would be a non-game, a mere blank screen. What I am saying is that each time you establish any kind of fictional relationship with a NPC, it is an imaginary one. No one actually believes that the relationship is at all meaningful, but there's a point when a player's immersion within the game is deep enough that he can come to care about the NPCs therein. It's the same as if you were reading a novel and begin caring about what happens to fictional characters. The relationship is never real, merely a creation of the mind that willingly suspends its disbelief, causing the character in question to become an actual entity rather than a set of 1's and 0's. That's what I mean by imaginary, and it's very much applicable to the distinction you draw. That is, the distinction between a good and a bad NPC can sometimes be as simple as the fact that the good NPC invites the establishment of an imaginary relationship, while the bad NPC simply serves to remind the player of how artificial everything is. These attributes are often a result of detailed representations vs. shallow ones. On that note, you can of course always approach games with an attitude of disbelief and never become immersed, choosing instead to be always "above" it all. But that's not, I think, what draws people to RPGs. What's shown on the screen becomes important through its ability to actively immerse you within the world - the creation of the imagined immersion is the purpose of well-designed NPC and world interactions. They must not, as you said, be merely assumed to be a result of imagination on the player's part, though in the end they are ultimately exactly that, since a couple of pixels on the screen is nothing close to being an actual character, but nevertheless is in the player's imagination, assuming everything is done right.

The statistics need to be hidden, as they are in dialogue trees. The trick is simply a matter of giving off the illusion of reality. Dialogue trees are, after all, no more than statistical systems themselves - why are they, then, superior to any other forms of statistical systems, given similar "masking" interfaces?

I think that conversation skills needs to be tapped in the same way combat is for a certain genre of roleplaying to arise that would not depend on physical confrontation for its intrinsic gameplay. The current breed of RPGs is obsessed with combat. When's the last time you played a RPG that wasn't action driven? Yet if you were to ask many fans, it's not the action that they remember, but the NPCs, the plot, and the dialogue. That's not to say that you could successfully make a RPG these days without action, but it's to say that there are untapped veins in that direction. Particularly stories set in the modern day that aren't about warfare, and stories set in worlds that aren't filled with monsters. How would you set about to create the gameplay of such a world? Simply filling it with NPCs with dialogue trees *probably* won't work. So what to replace combat with? I think that advanced systems of NPC interaction, combined with other kinds of non-combat activities, will need to suffice. Taking a cue from games like the Sims, it's wholly possible to build a game on imagined relationships between players and NPCs. But the Sims has other, playing-god features going for it that RPGs probably won't, so a designer would need to seriously think about how else they might attract a player otherwise. This also applies to games where the focus is not on the fighting, like in PS:T, which I think would've really benefitted from having a strong alternative to combat, given how terrible the combat was for many people.

I think the greatest potential I see here is the ability to make conversation more than a matter of choice making, which is basically all that dialogue trees are in today's RPG's. Sure, there's room for improvement even there, but while the level of writing can certainly rise, the underlying limitations of the dialogue tree system are rather obvious. I don't see us getting much further than KOTOR 2's level of interaction via dialogue trees alone because let's face it, KOTOR 2 was one of the most text heavy games in recent times and I just don't see publishers (or game writers, for that matter) going much past that. How many tens of thousands of lines of dialogue can you put into a game before it becomes less a game and more of a book? Besides, there are some weaknesses of the dialogue tree system that you can clearly address with this sort of abstract conversation making. For instance, there are many times when what's written as a sentence in the dialogue tree isn't exactly what you want your character to say. Clearly, the devs can't program every possible response in the world into the dialogue tree, and for that matter, they can't even really program more than half a dozen before it seriously clogs up the interface (and the players' patience reading through them all), so you make do and compromise with 3-4 choices. And you'd have to, as long as we maintain the dialogue tree paradigm. But imagine now that you could combine different textual signals to form meanings (which is what language is, though thousands of times more complex) - now we're talking about improvements that could really lead to full natural language processing. True natural language is an impossible task for the AI of today, but pseudo-natural language processing is not, and what better way to push forward the envelope in gaming conversation than to integrate these sorts of technology? Of course, there's the more important issue of being fun, and as far as I can tell, conversation could be fun if underlying it is a sense of being able to effect change through being a master of language. Rather than simply "making the right choice" via a dialogue tree and being rewarded for that, why not up the ante and make a game out of "saying the right things"? Of course, it can't simply be a matter of a template that you use for each NPC that'll always get you the best results, but it doesn't have to be. That's a design problem, and until someone seriously sits down with a team and tackles it, I don't think any of us can simply dismiss the idea outright by saying that it can't be done, that conversation can never be made fun. That's really why I wanted to tell everyone about what's being attempted in one particular frontier of NPC interaction. Success or failure, it's a departure from what we're used to, and in my book, it's always good to keep an open mind about new things because before you know it, it might just become the Next Big Thing. And who's to say that you can't combine the best of dialogue trees (good writing & personality) with the best of interactive conversation? Now that would be a wonder to behold.

96% is simply an A. In today's schools, inflated grades are the norm, so why not SoA?

MCA seems to have a penchant for writing about either odd and/or dark characters, usually in dark, weird and/or futuristic environments. PS:T and KOTOR 2, the two works I most associate with Master Avellone, are both representative of that, as might Fallout II. Not sure if I'm familiar with any works of his in the realm of high-fantasy. Perhaps IWD? But that was hardly a game of interactive NPCs. Unless I'm seriously missing something, I'd think that MCA has a rather blank slate with respect to matters of medieval fantasy, and as such it would be interesting to see exactly how NWN2's dialogues will unfold...

Indifferent rejection, eh? Why, I better retaliate with a rhetorical bump (w00t)

http://www.silkyvenom.com/forums/showthread.php?t=556 Essentially, instead of dialogue options (which, after all, are passe " to some), what if conversations and NPC interactions were structured as games in and of themselves? What if they were like combat, only words instead of swords, verbal taunts instead of metal jabs? What if we adopt a structuralist's approach to conversation wherein you can mimick the flow of a general dialogue through permutations of abstract conversational tricks instead of actual dialogue? If you're a good Bioware/Obsidian fan, by now you're probably thinking: why, this is kind of like what Morrowind tried to do and they sucked! And I give you that. Certainly, the idea had been tried before, but usually it was underdeveloped (in MW's case, it certainly was more of a trinket than a feature). With the backings of Microsoft and all the multi-million dollars that go into a MMORPG, could it be implemented effectively? Can you think of any incarnations of the system that could appeal to you, given that I locked you in a room and told you to come up with one or starve? After all, despite its previous failings, the system does have positives. For one, you're not locked into preconceived dialogue options, which we know exhibit linearity of construct, which is a hard-coded limitation insofar as technology is concerned (in that you'd never be able to simulate real conversations if all you did was record hand-crafted ones: there is no real avenue for improvement via advancements in AI, so it'll likely never expand past what's possible for a couple of human writers can do in the space of a year or two). For another, dialogue trees have, in some ways, achieved their maximum potential with games like KOTOR 2. Perhaps something new is in order. The details of the system is as of yet unknown, but I thought a post over at fohguild.org/forums (the elitest "RPG Codex" of MMORPGs) thought up a interesting incarnation. Posted by Taggle at fohguild.org/forums:

There are two general trends one can follow with regards to equality. One moves towards the equality of strength. The other towards equality regardless of strength. Common sense dictates the triumph of the former, but social progress is dependent on the latter. Thousands of years ago, in the heydays of human barbarism, common sense dictated that males should rule, simply because they were possessed of greater upper body strength. That practice lasted as long as human beings valued physical power above all else, and while exceptions have existed in the course of history - as they always do in the biological world - these exceptions must be taken with a grain of salt. For compared to the norm of countless generations of rulers, they are the proverbial pins in a haystack. In the search for encompassing trends, such deviations are usually thrown aside, and for rational reasons. In the gaming industry, it is no different. Rationality dictates the triumph of male-centrism in many genres of gaming, because males tend to buy more such games. Whether the chicken or the egg came first is a interesting question, but like the proverb, its answer is only philosophically relevant. The problem of stimulating female interest has been tackled several times, and almost every time the results fit the stereotype: the Sims (and RPGs/adventure games, some might argue) were the kinds of games a vast majority of women/girl gamers liked, not shooters and war games. If rationality had its way, the most efficient method of representation should then be adopted: that is, in genres where females make up less than a certain percentage of projected players, that much less time should be given to craft their content. The standard rules of statistical error and market exploration of course apply, as one must first probe such percentages before assuming them. And that has been done, as most genres have at some point taken to introduce "female" elements, even shooters. Yet the results have been decidedly mixed: some genres garnered more of the female audience; other genres less. The decision remains in the hands of Reason: equality should be based on strength. If women, in today's world, were as strong as men on the scales we use to measure strength (which in modern times is far more based on brain/appearance than brawn), then they should be alotted the relevant benefits. If not, then they shouldn't be. The same idea holds for race: since skin color was overthrown as an accurate gauge of biological superiority, the situation has leaned towards equality. But it is a equality built upon the foundations of rationality: if non-whites had in fact been found biologically inferior, the issue might have turned out very different. In the gaming industry, this translates to a similar mindset: so long as women do not make up half the player base under a certain genre and there are no immediate prospects for them to become so, they shouldn't be catered to as much as males. That is the theory behind equality of strength, anyways. But there is a different theory for equality, a counter-theory, that has always existed as an alternative - for some more acceptable, for others less. This is equality irregardless of strength. This is the driving force behind principles such as disabled employment, subsidized coverage, affirmative action, Communism, and even animal rights. It is the counter-force to natural selection and a thorn on the side of rationality: for who would consider it rational that systems should be led by people who are not best "bit" for the job? Who would rationally place a mundane, average, and disabled individual above a 4.0 genius in admission to a position of power? Yet this form of equality allots for all these things, and in its most extreme forms, would consider humanity better off if we erased all forms of government and lived in a platonic Utopia where every man was equally poor. I had before mentioned social progress: here are its beginnings. For a society that is based only on equality of strength can never be considered socially progressive: merely responsive, and in particular to changing factors of nature and technology. That the cave man now must value his woman because his physical strength has ceased to become a point of superiority is not a step up the social ladder: it is merely an adaptation to changing circumstances. Social progress is more fundamentally based on the principles governing society, and in this case the state of mind behind the idea of social equality. For equality irregardless of strength, the point of departure is always the same: it doesn't matter if you're strong or weak, dumb or intelligent. You deserve the same. Naturally, with regards to the gaming industry, this would mean that developers should spend equal time catering to male and female interests - and a wide variety of other interests, at that - regardless of the audience of their games. After all, the few, the minority, that actually do play should not be compromised simply because their numbers are less. Under this philosophy, democracy cannot become a dictatorship of the masses - and the "white man's country" argument often used in pre-civil rights times to justify American white-centrism is a load of crap. Minorities of all types must be treated equally, regardless of their numbers and regardless of their biological - or, in this case, buying - power. Under this philosophy of equality, society would progress simply by virtue of moving away from the cold rationality of nature's determinism. But progress is not always a good thing - or at least, not by the measures of those who are left behind, longing for the good old days. Therefore there is tension, therefore there is conflict, and our modern would is shaped not, as a result, by the extremes of either forms of equality. Instead, we have bowed to equality of strength as the realistic goal, but looks to equality regardless of strength as a possible ideal - unachievable for humans, perhaps, but desirable nonetheless. And we have made efforts to integrate some of that ideal into our system, despite its conflict with rationality. Through that, we have made social progress. And through it, the gaming industry will similarly make social progress. For it is true that, despite all the talks of equality, there are biological differences between man and woman - that is undeniable. These differences in turn lead to differences in experience, which in turn lead to differences in perception and taste - or otherwise we would not be having this discussion, for all would be universal. This schism then makes it seem common sense to concentrate on one or the other gender, depending on the kind of game you want to make, as it seems naive to believe that women will ever enjoy shoot'em bloodbaths as much as men. Yet inherent in that is a conceptualization of human development that is missing a primary ingredient: the dominance of culture. That cultural "thing", which has been alive since the dawn of human history, has been behind almost every major leap in human civilization, and is indeed as important to human evolution as biology. For what is a human being without culture? Experiments have shown that children growing up in isolation become mentally retarded: sinking back, perhaps, into the native instincts of those primordial ages when mankind was no more than what is now considered animal. Yet culture, unlike our genetic make-up (at least as of yet), is wholly malleable by human powers, as history has shown in its numerous movements of the arts. And in this respect it is relevant to this discussion, because what is the gaming industry if not a sub-culture? And what is the male-female gender divide but a figment of that sub-culture that maybe, perhaps, reshaped? I come to no greater revelation than anyone else has in this thread - I simply took longer to get here . But the bottomline really is simple: the gaming sub-culture is dominated by the vibes of male-centrism, which rose because of the culture at the time. But that can change. Yet the change cannot happen merely be reinforcing existing stereotypes: all that will lead to are separate industries for what men and women want, which is no different than things are now (after all, you can label shopping/talking on the cellphone as the "female game" and then wonder why this discussion ever took place). For true change to occur, change in the sub-culture of gaming must ultimately challenge attitudes in the dominating culture, or vice versa. There exists a world where women *are* be able to enjoy shooters and war games - perhaps never as much as men, due to biological differences - but nevertheless in far greater numbers. But that world must be a world where the female sex is not considered a equivalence to pacifism and an aversion to violence. Culture defines much of what we find desirable - that much has been learned by the sociologists and psychologists - and it is within that context that a true expansion outwards maybe made on the part of interactive electronic entertainment. Well, that or what I said above: a female-headed gaming industry independent of the male-headed one, which would simply reinforce the existing schism, but might not be all that undesirable, if you believed my arguments about the nature of balance between the two forms of equality.

One thing I've learned in life is that most people believe they can judge anything, and do.

If you want to be an artist in today's gaming industry, it's best to affiliate yourself early on with the tools of the 3D trade. Maya and 3D Studio, in particular, seem to be used widely in industry. Be more than a modeler: be an animator - animation for games is an art in and of itself, and one in need of much improvement.

Raksasha all the way.

Computer games began as a past time for folks with computers (ie computer scientists). Few people thought at that point in time that we'd have a flourishing game industry, and in this respect, I agree: consoles are more streamlined, standardized, and better suited for pure gamers, and right now the industry's noticing that more and more - hence the drop in games for computers. The problem with consoles, however, remains a fundamental one: a console is purely for gaming. A computer can do alot more. Just about everyone needs a PC these days, but only the hardcore gamer has every console. Thus, in developing for the PC, you can potentially tap into a market independent of pure gamers - and where competition is concerned, that's a good thing. There's a problem with this line of thought, of course, and that's the high req's games nowadays have, which is counter-productive to the PC gaming industry because for the kind of money you'd need to get a gaming rig capable of handling the high-end games, you could just buy every console. Fortunately, at the moment the PC crowd also includes the truly gungho hardcore gamers, who looks down upon consoles because they're not graphically powerful enough. But once the next gen. console hardware comes out, that might no longer be true. I'm not a very good prophet, but I reckon that computer games will always have a place and a market, just not one on the cutting-edge of the industry, unless emulators become popular, or Microsoft's PC-Xbox2 cross-platform support becomes a trend.

No, but through the life time of a MMORPG, new players enter and old players leave. It mostly averages out. For instance, Everquest, before World of Warcraft stole its thunder, averaged about 300,000 paying accounts for 3-4 years. That's quite a long profit retention rate - though, as you say, it probably wasn't always from the same people.

MMORPGs solve the problem of stagnant game prices by having a industry-standard up-front cost followed by a long-term investment. Take EQ, for instance: the box price is only $50, but five years of subscription comes out to be ~$720. And that's assuming expansions are considered separate games. They are the only games that I can imagine publishers really throwing out the $$$ for, especially given the latest success of WoW. Of course, successful MMORPGs are also fairly rare, and the ones that don't succeed often bomb hard.

Considering the amount of people interested in games nowadays, I have a feeling that it's also a matter of supply and demand in the job market. Your local evil corporate conglomerate treats programmers bad because programmers are a dime a dozen since the computer science bubble burst. If joe programmer doesn't like it, he can always leave - there are many programmers out of work and plenty willing to work under even adverse conditions if it means working in a job that they think they'd like. But the rate of disillusionment among programmers in the gaming industry is pretty high too, or so I hear.

Why should Lucas innovate if he can milk his success till the day he dies? Admit it, folks, you can criticize Lucas all you want, but in the end it comes down to this: successes on the scale of the Star Wars franchise are rare. If a person can come up with just one such franchise, he/she's set for life. The problem we all face is coming up with that one - Lucas did it, and for that you gotta respect him, regardless of how he acts afterwards.

Come now. I doubt, in the interest of avoiding a Troika-like demise, employees of Obsidian, including MCA, is allowed to say that KOTOR2's ending is a pile of big stinking poo because publisher Lucas Arts didn't give them enough time to finish the game. A Empire Strikes Back ending may simply be the best way of expressing one's discontent without coming out and saying it directly. Reading between the lines, in this respect, maybe necessary...

I don't know about the rest of you guys, but I'm quite excited to see the different approaches/opinions to stories in games. I agree with all five points of view, if that's possible, and I dearly hope that all five sides have their place in the gaming industry. Part of what interests me most about the game genre as opposed to literature/comics and film/animation is that games do not suffer from the dictatorship of the story. In literature/film, the first thing people will tell you is that the story is everything: without a story you have nothing, and so you always start with the story board; film and literature are simply two ways of representing stories: one linguistic, the other visual. This isn't to say that there's anything wrong with this, but it is a limitation because not everthing in life is experienced through stories. Games do not have the same limitations. They may *engage* in storytelling and indeed allow the story to dictate the game, but they can choose not to and still result in a very good game. In this respect, the game dictates the story, not the other way around, and that's a good thing, because in one sense it's a step beyond film/literature. You CAN make a game that's all story - it then becomes a film(or novel, if it's text based). But you can also make a game that has little/no story - that's unprecedented and has no equivalent in film/literature. Therefore, games allow an extra dimension of freedom, and this, I argue, gives it greater potential than either film/literature in the capturing of basic human experiences.

It seems to me that in game design as in art your portfolio is more important than anything else. It's quite obvious why this would be: knowledge and problem solving skills can't often be judged directly (which is why they look at your degrees), but artistic/creative skills often can be. I'm of the mind that the best way to get into the gaming industry is to make a good game/mod, either on your own or with others, to demonstrate that you've got what it takes. This is with regards to game design. I'm not so sure about programming - true, anyone can be a programmer, but to make great games you want more than the average programmer. You want someone who's smart enough to implement cutting edge optimization, graphics libraries, and even R&D his own tech (ie Pixar's R&D team) if industrial equivalents can't be found. Most truly successful game companies do not simply license engines - they modify them heavily, or develop their own, in order to stay ahead of the technology curve. To do this, you need true scientific savvy, true ingenuity, and for that you have to go to the high-class university graduates - and pay them big bucks. But game design? Nah. Although, really, it'd be much better if you had BOTH - technological savvy and game design experience, at which point you're going to be ahead of the guy with just either. In any industry where competition is key, the person who's more "bang" for the buck typically wins out. Who would you pick, if you were faced with two guys who's both made mods/games, but one has a BS degree in CS from MIT and the other has just a community college education? The former you could probably depend on for more than just game design - the latter, not necessarily. As with anything else, therefore, it's good to understand that getting a job is not necessarily about being the best man for the job - as that's entirely too difficult to tell simply from resumes/interview imperssions - but being the *better* man than anyone else applying.

In a perfect world there wouldn't be wars, because we'd have found better solutions to differences of opinion on how to distribute the world we're born in than violence on a mass scale.