Amentep

Yeah I'm trying to minimize what I find out about the story myself.

I may be in the minority, but I'd rather pockets of unnatural darkness effect the characters and not me. *I, the player* didn't get hit by a blind spell, why should *I, the player* be blind. While its a bit understandable in a first person game where your eyes are your character eyes, I'd rather they solve the issue differently for an isometric game. Characters who stumble or can't find targets, etc. than blinding me. Only if there are grues afraid of the dark. *Casts frotz on grue*

Well it really depends on how 'finicky" magic is. With magic in the setting seeming to be tied to souls, it might be that everyone has a little bit of magic. Technology usually springs up around need. If a cheep magical lantern exists, or a magical-poo-away loo, odds are there won't be a motivating factor to create a technological solution to the problem. In fact, as its set out in the game (as I recall), the guns seem to exist primarily as a solution to the problem of magical shields. Will there be a need to move it past that in the setting? Hard to say.

Using Crystals opens the way to people saying "think of the power of crystals!" and then we're back in the 70s listening to New Age music while sitting cross-legged under a pyramid symbol, surrounded by crystals while meditating and frankly no one wants that. I kid, crystals would be a good solution as well. Or giant fireflies and glowworms as pets*. *this could lead to awesome dialogue like "You arboreal menace! You've slain my giant glowworm!"

Icewind Dale is part of Forgotten Realms IP which is under D&D IP, which owner is Wizards of the Coast, who is owned by Hasbro. I was talking about the IWD brand which i think belongs to Obsidian. However, yes if they want to use it they must license D&D by hasbro Only ones that I could find belogn WotC http://www.trademarkia.com/icewind-dale-85043957.html and Atari, which is abadoned http://www.trademarkia.com/icewind-dale-77380064.html Ok, maybe i was wrong. I swear that i read somewhere that Feargus had the rights My memory is that Obsidian bought the assets used for IWD/IWD2 - like the art and portraits - from Interplay.

Given how annoying that can be, I don't see any reason why they wouldn't make torches implicit. Although it might be interesting if there is a "Light Source" slot on each character, so that you can either leave a default torch there or add a magic torch, magic light, or other light source there. It'd also be interesting if stuff like lanterns could be used to change the light circle into a cone of light, or other shapes. I liked how Dragon's Dogma did it; you had to equip a lantern that hung from your belt. It used oil when equipped and always took an inventory space (as did the oil). But it meant that it was hands free (other than the seconds it took to pull it out, light it and hang it on the characters belt). A lot better than torches, IMO, which I don't think tend to translate well from P&P to video games).

Try hitting the X2 icon between quotes. Seems to force a half-space/space between multiple (separate) quotes. Why exactly I'm not sure, and how reliable it'll be for that purpose, I don't know. No solution for the weird deletion issues while in default mode tho. I've been keeping it in coding mode 98% of the time since the update, because every time I use the DEL key now, instead of deleting one character at a time, it deletes whole paragraphs instead. Yeah I've had it delete sentences and paragraphs, and sometimes not even in the paragraph I was on.

Yeah, my biggest problem with Kingdoms of Amalaur was that I didn't ever care about what I was doing. I just felt disconnected. I think I played about 20 hours before I just kinda...stopped playing it. I was doing a bunch of quests, and I was leveling up but I really couldn't say I was having fun. EDIT: That's not to say it wasn't well made. it was. But for whatever reason I just never connected with what was going on with the game.

I just finished XCOM: Enemy Unknown. Pretty fun I thought (but having never played the previous X-COM games including the one this is a remake of, you can take my opinion with a grain of salt).

Uncle Sargy's here! ...and that percentage continues to go downward...

Her hardline stance singlehandedly extended the "Troubles" in Northern Ireland for over 10 years (a generation of IRA members joined up because of her, according to a number of BBC commentators, reporters, and former IRA members themselves,) she destroyed the British coal industry, she was a passionate backer of big business special interests, her Hayekian economic policies put the British economy into a recession that would have seen her ousted after her first term were it not for the Falklands War, etc. I guess it may be too late now, but if you'd listened to the BBC's coverage and retrospective on her life, you'd have gotten a longer laundry list of reasons why "x" populace or faction despised her. I understand why people dislike her. I'm not sure I understand celebrating her death as - to me at least - there are very few people we should celebrate the death of (if any, I waffle on the point).

I think "plausibility" in this sense is consistent with your take on internal consistency; in essence do the events logically follow from the set-up be it fantasy, realism, science fiction, horror, etc.

We should strive for a 100% awesome composition. Aren't we at 95% right now anyway? I'm still posting, so it's got to be lower than that!

As I understand it, verisimilitude as a theoretical construct is about truth (or, perhaps better put, how to express degrees of falseness away from truth). Verisimilitude in writing is about approaching reality (or, more correctly put, in my opinion, plausibility), which could be considered the "truth" that all falsehoods are then removed by degrees from.

We should strive for a 100% awesome composition.

I believe this is the thread you want - http://forums.obsidian.net/topic/135-location-no-age-or-sex-required-yet/ - albeit a decade out of date, apparently. Time for a new one?

http://www.indiegogo.com/projects/grimoire-heralds-of-the-winged-exemplar?website_name=grimoireforever Funny, that link is for a game called "Grimoire", not "Wizardry" (and yeah, I know the history, but Grimoire isn't Wizardry 9, its Grimoire). Really ? I know, right? In other news, the sky is blue.

Unlike InExile who had to get Torment up before Wasteland ships because of how they're doing things, I gather that it might be some time before we see another Kickstarter for Obsidian (as they have already have other projects in their pipeline)

Awesome!

Named for a city in Puerto Rico, apparently.

Yeah...you'd think they'd have realized that conceptually, it was a bust.

Someone complaining on the internet doesn't make it representative nor guarantee that their taking offence is justified. And of course there's the issue that I could tell you anything within reason and you wouldn't doubt me. Now this is a bit of a dangerous line of thought, but in reality unless I give you information that you could independently verify, you really have no way of know who I am beside me. I could tell you I'm a 30 year old man, or a 20 year old woman, or a 50 year old Scandinavian and you really only have my word that any of that is true. So I think that the inherent "you are the image you create" nature of the internet makes many people take them less seriously in regards to anything "serious". As a side note, this is why I've thought boards that insisted on you using your "real" name to be a bit silly. Just because I posted that my name is Roy McCarry or Marianne Hill or Sven Larsson and that sounds like a real name that matches who I say I am, it doesn't make it my real name. The argument usually goes that while everything is playing out on the level of fantasy as you say, the fantasy is defined by the male gaze. While there are women who want to be sexy, their definition of *why* Lara Croft is sexy might vary wildly from men, and thus when Lara is presented in ways that might support the male fantasy but not the female fantasy there is a disconnect created within the viewer. i know a few fans of the character who felt the swimwear / skimpy sexy clothing poster images of Lara really deflated the things that they liked about the character being strong and independent and - yes sexy - but clearly in control of those things. But then she's parading about like an SI model and she's not owning those aspects anymore, they're serving non-character related interests. If its true that we identify with characters either because we want to be them or because we want to be with them, it'd be very easy to take a character whose initial appearance creates a wide appeal and then through poorly thought out choices weed out male, female or all players from remaining interested in the character.

Right there are other ways to do it, but my question is whether doing it via "level scaling" breaks the verisimilitude or not since contextually the level scaling is an attempt to address the "reality" of the game situation

There is that, but I was more just looking at the numbers. I would never estimate a 30:1 ratio of Supporter:Opposer based on looking at comments or forum discussions about it. Of course, at a place like this there's no where near the numbers of people involved in this discussion to even allow a ratio like that. Are opposers particularly vigilant (there's little need for them to send John several emails, but they may feel compelled to make several replies) in responding, so a few people end up being overrepresented when examining post count? Is there something about the way John did this that would facilitate responses from people that otherwise would not (it did go viral)? From a stastical point of view, internet commentary is self-selecting so invalidates itself as being extrapolation to the population (at least without significant margin of error). I'd also say that because its near impossible to eliminate sock puppeting you'll never know on the internet whether 500 people think alike or if one person posted under 500 aliases. However to be fair to the opposers, Walker makes it fairly clear that his opinion is set, ergo it doesn't invite debate from those who disagree with his stance. Why email him you disagree with his position when you know you can't change his mind. I can't help but feel that there may be an "unmeasurable" group that feels there's just no point in registering a disagreement (that's on top of the fact that you typically have to feel passionate to write a letter of comment anyhow; ambivilance doesn't drive writing campaigns).

I'd assume - perhaps wrongly - that would be up to the individual. Don't get me wrong I think your standpoint is understandable and your point well made; but I can also understand those who don't agree with you feeling this is important to bring up. Perhaps it is crusading for the sake of having a windmill to tilt at. I don't know the answer to that. But I don't think its wrong to ask the question, even if in answering it you find that the question didn't need asking. Mayhap there are invisible barriers being put into place by individuals who don't intend to do so that - if those barriers were removed more women would care? Without pondering the question, without examining the system, without thinking about ones actions these unintended consequences can't necessarily be measured.