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So, what will be Obsidian's excuse from now on?

Lutte

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NWN's D&D 3E ruleset is great, but the actual gameplay implementation is terrible. Slowest and most boring RtwP-combat ever, no companion control,
This had heavy decline implication in the design of enemies and levels by the way. Because the game allowed you to create any type of character, and while you had a single companion party member, that one was garbage AI controlled crap, everything had to be tuned down to allow for even the weakest of character build, like a character that only levelled as a Fighter class, to take down ANYTHING in the game. So you never end up meeting anything that could truly hard counter you. And level design doesn't have particularly deadly traps and the likes.

It also induced the need to rest constantly if you played a pure caster type. It's a major shift over IE games, where you can rest every 10 seconds to get all your spells back if you want to.. but you don't HAVE to. You do it if you're a faggot who can't play the game without constantly casting nukes. But the gameplay loop can be fluid and less interrupted if you don't rest all the time and have a decently varied party of adventurers.
It's particularly obnoxious during the first hour of gametime in NWN.

D&D ultimately is about party of adventurers conquering varied challenges and using multiple tools to face the unknown. It just doesn't work in a game that forces you to play as a single character.

NWN was a mistake.
 

Cael

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D&D ultimately is about party of adventurers conquering varied challenges and using multiple tools to face the unknown. It just doesn't work in a game that forces you to play as a single character.
DnD has always explicitly stated that a single member of the party is not supposed to be able to take on all roles. That is why DnD has always been a party game. In fact, if you lack players, 3.x recommends you use gestalt characters to cover roles.

NWN's single character style violates that very principle, and that is why NWN ended up with you gettings stacks of potions (in case you aren't playing a divine class), idiotic things like +10 thief tool kits and healing kits, and the like.

Not that you really need them, of course, since you can rest to fully heal as much as you rest to gain your spells back. Basically, NWN became like a proto-4.0 in that you can regain all your resources back after every fight by just resting anywhere you wanted. Even BG sometimes throws things at you that interrupted your rest, but not NWN, unless you are within sight of the enemy. And IWD2 is nasty with it on certain maps (3 ice trolls doing nasty things to your REMF 4 out of 5 times you try to rest? Oh, yeah. Welcome to the Frozen North, bitches!)
 
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Obsidian fans' excuse has always been lack of budget, but is that a valid excuse?

First, you can see examples of modern studios working with likely much smaller budgets that what Obsidian has had, and producing much better quality games. Piranha Bytes with Risen 1 and ELEX comes to mind, or CDRProjekt with Witcher 1.

Second, think about old Golden Age RPGs. Everyone always says that games cost a lot less to make back then. But they always say it in a way that implies it's impossible now, which is silly. There was nothing preventing Obsidian from making a 2D isometric RPG with no voice overs. They could've done that for pennies, and spent all their money on content (writing, quests, C&C, systems, etc). Instead, they chose to go with crappy modern engines, which killed them in about 20-30 different ways. But why? Their games (other than maybe New Vegas) were always going to be niche, and whatever advantage in sales they have gotten from having 3D games with voice overs was lost from all the bugs, and other issues. I am betting they could've had just as much commercial success with old school type games, and they would've had much more success when it comes to quality.
 

Invictus

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How is it that Troika in less than 7 years made 3 arguably classic games and Obsidian has one truly great one (New Vegas) and has pretty much burned all their bridges with every single publisher they had ever worked with? They were never “great” they had potential and made some good stuff but now the cupboard seems pretty bare and waiting for Saint Tim and Leonard to save the ship
 
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How is it that Troika in less than 7 years made 3 arguably classic games and Obsidian has one truly great one (New Vegas) and has pretty much burned all their bridges with every single publisher they had ever worked with? They were never “great” they had potential and made some good stuff but now the cupboard seems pretty bare and waiting for Saint Tim and Leonard to save the ship



I liked NV but I'd hesitate calling it great.



That really was their only good game though, rest are either bad or average at best.
 
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Sacred82

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Back in 2002 those graphics were really good for an RPG. I don't know at what age you began gaming, 2010 or so i suppose, but 2 years earlier from NWN we were happy to get 2D DND games like Baldur's Gate II, and 3rd person action games looked like shit. Go play some other RPGs from 2002 and tell me that anything had better 3D graphics than NWN.
"NWN has great graphics" was a forced meme from game journalists. Morrowind had better environment art, Gothic 2 was more palatable, Arx Fatalis beats them all. Granted, NWN was limited by the necessity of using tiles for easier level creation, they still made some bad stylistic decisions.

After being used to IE games, NWN looked impressive. Impressive is the word, not good. The colours and surfaces seemed weird, and proportions seemed way off. Your characters looked dwarfed by huge hallways, and at the end of it stood a fucking huge chest. I remember looking at it and thinking "ah, this is another of those 'let's take graphics one step further without giving much of a shit about aesthetics' cases".
 

Lutte

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After being used to IE games, NWN looked impressive.
Not really.
NWN was literally a Day One Purchase for me back in the day. The only thing that impressed me was the lighting system and all the cast shadows.. but I was forced to disable them because the framerate was absolutely fucking godawful with them turned on.

My only other impressions were "oh lord this is so fucking ugly compared to any older game" where older game could be anything from Baldur's Gate 2 to Diablo 2.

If you want to mention a game that truly felt impressive in the days of early 3d, you need to mention Outcast. It was still aesthetically off, but that sense of.. scale. Wonderful.
 
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Sacred82

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After being used to IE games, NWN looked impressive.
Not really.
NWN was literally a Day One Purchase for me back in the day. The only thing that impressed me was the lighting system and all the cast shadows.. but I was forced to disable them because the framerate was absolutely fucking godawful with them turned on.

My only other impressions were "oh lord this is so fucking ugly compared to any older game" where older game could be anything from Baldur's Gate 2 to Diablo 2.

If you want to mention a game that truly felt impressive in the days of early 3d, you need to mention Outcast. It was still aesthetically off, but that sense of.. scale. Wonderful.

Welp, it's not factual to say something was impressive or not. What was impressive to me was thinking that we finally got some of that graphical jazz in complex RPG's that other genres had been enjoying for some time. It's just that, in this state, it wasn't very enjoyable to me at all. It looked artificial and soulless compared to older games. A fantasy RPG doesn't necessarily profit from too many bells and whistles in the graphics department, NWN opened my eyes in that regard.
 

Neanderthal

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I failed to be impressed by NWN, even in comparison to some games o same time, say Dungeon Siege which were fucking amazing and still stands up today. Course both campaigns were shit, which probably says something I suppose.
 

Lutte

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NWN was graphically dated when it was released and the devs were quite aware of it. It was in a minor case of development hell as the devs are learning.
KOTOR 1, which was released 1 year later, is a lot more pleasant to look at, so maybe that difficulties paid off.
Check this: https://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/131327/postmortem_biowares_neverwinter_.php?print=1

Wow
To combat this issue we laid out a plan to add a number of high-impact but relatively easy-to-implement features late in the development cycle to improve the game's visual quality.

I've got a feeling he must be talking about said lighting system, that was more dynamic than usual for the time, but also a hardware eating thing that could barely run at a playable framerate. It's the sort of feature that doesn't require a complete overhaul of every single asset and it did feel a bit tacked on.

NWN was graphically dated when it was released and the devs were quite aware of it.

graphically dated compared to what?

NWN was released the same year as Morrowind.
gU242tw.jpg

QZRpVlI.jpg


vs

Gd0v0m9.gif


No matter how wonky some things look in morrowind, particularly faces, you can't fucking argue that NWN doesn't look dated for its era. Bioware was well aware of the fact themselves and admit as much in the link.
 
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Sacred82

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Lutte said:
NWN was graphically dated when it was released and the devs were quite aware of it.

graphically dated compared to what?

NWN was released the same year as Morrowind.

I know that Morrowind offered third person perspective, but I'd say TES has always played best from FPP. NWN OTOH, not least due to its UI, begged for comparison with old isometric games.
 

Lutte

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I know that Morrowind offered third person perspective, but I'd say TES has always played best from FPP. NWN OTOH, not least due to its UI, begged for comparison with old isometric games.

Making morrowind into an iso perspective would only improve it visually. Its biggest weakness is view distance, a point rendered moot with such perspective. With its engine being put to use with that kind of perspective you would still have a much more impressive graphical rendition overall and greater attention of detail and less repetitive structures and object placements. Morrowind's toolkit is more powerful and less straightjacketed compared to NWN.

As a piece of technology, the effort put into NWN was dated by the time they could get it out of the door.
 
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Sacred82

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I know that Morrowind offered third person perspective, but I'd say TES has always played best from FPP. NWN OTOH, not least due to its UI, begged for comparison with old isometric games.

Making morrowind into an iso perspective would only improve it visually. Its biggest weakness is view distance, a point rendered moot with such perspective.

Making Morrowind a different game than it is would improve it? Why not. Not my point though.

Not even counting immersion issues, I'm not sure a walking simulator ever profits from too large a view distance. I actually don't want to see that shitload of terrain laid out before me too often.
 

Zed Duke of Banville

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How is it that Troika in less than 7 years made 3 arguably classic games and Obsidian has one truly great one (New Vegas) and has pretty much burned all their bridges with every single publisher they had ever worked with? They were never “great” they had potential and made some good stuff but now the cupboard seems pretty bare and waiting for Saint Tim and Leonard to save the ship
Obsidian has proven itself incapable of creating its own well-designed game engines or well-designed settings. They were at their best in Fallout: New Vegas because they were able to use another company's game engine (Bethesda's Morrowind engine as modified for Oblivion and then Fallout 3, with slight changes of their own) as well as the Fallout setting as defined in the original two games and then further expanded with ideas from later projects that never came to fruition but that could be re-purposed for New Vegas. When required to create their own game engines and settings, the results are mediocre at best. Over the last 15 years, Obsidian has been a vast sink of talent, wasting abilities that could have been put to better use at other companies, or even freelance as Chris Avellone has been demonstrating.
 
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Sacred82

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Obsidian has proven itself incapable of creating its own well-designed game engines or well-designed settings.

name a well-designed setting.


Personally I couldn't give less of a shit about setting in a CRPG. They should be concerned with coming up with a robut rule system first of all, as adapted PnP rules are unfit for this medium. And when it comes to setting, I want it to be well realized, not with a thoroughly worked out shitload of lore behind it. The willingness of CRPG players to accept lore instead of a living world boggles the mind.
 

JarlFrank

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Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag.
Back in 2002 those graphics were really good for an RPG. I don't know at what age you began gaming, 2010 or so i suppose, but 2 years earlier from NWN we were happy to get 2D DND games like Baldur's Gate II, and 3rd person action games looked like shit. Go play some other RPGs from 2002 and tell me that anything had better 3D graphics than NWN.
"NWN has great graphics" was a forced meme from game journalists. Morrowind had better environment art, Gothic 2 was more palatable, Arx Fatalis beats them all. Granted, NWN was limited by the necessity of using tiles for easier level creation, they still made some bad stylistic decisions.

After being used to IE games, NWN looked impressive. Impressive is the word, not good. The colours and surfaces seemed weird, and proportions seemed way off. Your characters looked dwarfed by huge hallways, and at the end of it stood a fucking huge chest. I remember looking at it and thinking "ah, this is another of those 'let's take graphics one step further without giving much of a shit about aesthetics' cases".

Back when NWN was new and I was a teenaged graphics whore, Dungeon Siege was also new and looked much better.

I loved Dungeon Siege for its graphics and because back then I still liked Diablo clones. The atmosphere was also pretty good, it actually had a decent artstyle.

NWN, on the other hand, looked ugly from day 1.
 

Cael

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Obsidian has proven itself incapable of creating its own well-designed game engines or well-designed settings.

name a well-designed setting.


Personally I couldn't give less of a shit about setting in a CRPG. They should be concerned with coming up with a robut rule system first of all, as adapted PnP rules are unfit for this medium. And when it comes to setting, I want it to be well realized, not with a thoroughly worked out shitload of lore behind it. The willingness of CRPG players to accept lore instead of a living world boggles the mind.
Britannia circa Ultima 5-7:2.
 

AwesomeButton

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PC RPG Website of the Year, 2015 Make the Codex Great Again! Grab the Codex by the pussy Insert Title Here RPG Wokedex Divinity: Original Sin 2 A Beautifully Desolate Campaign Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag. Pathfinder: Wrath
Actually, Deadfire is quite a good RPG on its own, and especially in the context of the offerings of the last two years, so what I see here is old men with brown spots on their pants yelling at the clouds.
 

Cael

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Actually, Deadfire is quite a good RPG on its own, and especially in the context of the offerings of the last two years, so what I see here is old men with brown spots on their pants yelling at the clouds.
:nocountryforshitposters:

It was a full moon.
 

AwesomeButton

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PC RPG Website of the Year, 2015 Make the Codex Great Again! Grab the Codex by the pussy Insert Title Here RPG Wokedex Divinity: Original Sin 2 A Beautifully Desolate Campaign Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag. Pathfinder: Wrath
Also, Oblivion having bearable gameplay :lol: wish I could see that. Every single Bethesda RPG since Morrowind (I haven't played any of the older ones), has been a turd. This is axiomatic about this company.
 

selkin

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Obsidian needs two things:
1. getting rid of Feargus
2. give Indiana breathing space
 

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