Times are a' changing if people are bringing up Neverwinter Nights as an example of "deep, engrossing" RPG experiences by jaded teenagers. I still remember NWN's release day, I still remember the hordes of Baldur's Gate fanboys denouncing it as "dumbed down, kid-oriented trash" and complaining of how you couldn't have any tactical depth controlling a single character in a party of two, how 3D meant NWN was just a fantasy-themed Quake mod and how the D&D3 rules had ruined RPG gaming forever and ever.

Me, I'm *real* old school, of the kind that played Wolfenstein 3D back when its graphics were cutting-edge and Doom was nothing but "the next project from the creators of Wolfenstein". And you know what? I've seen that quality is orthogonal to perspective, graphics, licenses, dev houses or publishing companies. Just because a game uses an isometric perspective doesn't mean it's good, just because it's an FPS doesn't mean it's shallow, just because it doesn't follow D&D rules doesn't mean it's dumbed down for the masses and just because it's made by Blizzard doesn't mean it's suddenly the awesomest game evah and we should all sing its praises.

Now if you may excuse me, I'll go play a 2008 videogame that's far deeper than everything ever mentioned in this thread combined and *still* looks fabulous doing so. And then I'll go play some Dragon Age just to spite you all.

He could go and play Hello Kitty Preadator Playground Adventures and I still woulnd't be spited.

In fact why does he even want to spite us in the first place?

I don't think I need to be spited. I don't think anyone else here does either.

In fact, was he using some kind of alternate, sexual, meaning? Cos that would be weird.

And cool.

(Im talking about DA) I love the way they put a boot fetish and some halrious stuff in the brothel stuff. This stuff dosn't get enough light in most games. Everyone should have a fetish that defines them.

I'll bet if brothels were legal everywhere in real life we'd have a much lower crime rate.

Making things illegal, by definition, creates criminals. Also every prohibition of non-violent human desires creates a black market like the mafia during the alcohol prohibition, or the drug lords now, or pimps and gang wars, etc. It's funded and made possible by laws.

Yes, but the crime rate for one item dropping isn't necessarily going to cause a major shift in overall crime rates.

If nothing was illegal, sure, we'd have no crime.  If one thing was legalized, not much would change.

NWN 1 was the last Bioware game that I played (and still use for modding)

Here is a brief history of Bioware that I found posted on their forum:

As fun and unique as NWN is, as a game, it is also the victim of a unique legal situation which probably explains why some of the things which normally happen with still-popular games of this age won't (likely) happen with NWN.

Initially, BioWare had contracted with Interplay to make a D&D game as Interplay had secured the rights to produce and sell one. But BioWare felt that Interplay was shafting them on sub-licensing to other distributors so they filed suit against them. Not the first time they'd had this problem with Interplay, btw. Since the only other company at the time which had secured the rights to produce a D&D game was Infogrames, BioWare soon hooked up with them to produce the game. If BioWare had wanted to produce a D20 game instead of a 3rd edition game, they would have had to produce at least some of the source code for their game on release day which was a risky proposition given the amount of money they sank into development and an option they did not exercise.

So they went with Infogrames who published the game and who eventually purchased the much-more-familiar Atari brand, under which at least SoU and HotU were published, IIRC.

All of that, so far, is a little convoluted but not the weird part.

The weird part is that Infogrames/Atari are competitors with Electronic Arts and when Electronic Arts purchased BioWare all of a sudden you had EA owning BioWare and Infogrames/Atari making money off a BioWare game and EA/BioWare making money (from the premium modules) off Atari, though monies probably flowed both ways between the two due to royalty obligations.

Toss into the mix WotC's recent request to stop all online sales of D&D PDF's (which some believe was more aimed at killing off anything prior to D&D 4th edition than stopping piracy) by independent distributors and Atari's very recent request to BioWare to stop selling Premium modules and (IIRC) "stop supporting NWN and directing all support requests to Atari". Also, might as well toss on the fact that Hasbro (who sold Infogrames/Atari the licensing rights which got Neverwinter published in the first place) is now suing Atari for those rights back.

So, Infogrames/Atari isn't at liberty to, say, put NWN 1 on Steam although they didn't have any problems sub-licensing distribution of NWN 1 in Russia to a company in Russia called 1C early last year. The 1C Russian translation of HotU was not very well-done and didn't use the official localization methods for Neverwinter from what I've read from machine-translated Russian. So, I dunno if anyone at BioWare had anything to do with it. (Hint: If EA/BioWare didn't get a cut of this, it would be the same thing that they sued Interplay for originally)

So both sides want to forget NWN 1 ever pretty-much existed. While each EA/BioWare and Infogrames/Atari want to get a chunk of the RPG market, there's just too much convoluted legal baggage with NWN 1, specifically, to allow either of them to exploit the game.

It's a huge mess, but you probably picked that up by now. It's a shame, too.

Just for the record i used to be a big fan of Bioware. They consistantly made good games and i played almost all of them.

I loved Baldurs gate. I really likes Knights of the old republic. I thought Jade Empire wasnt bad.

I didnt really like Neverwinter nights.

I thought Mass Effect was a good game for its genre, an RPG/Shooter hybrid.

I thought, compared to what was promised, that Dragon Age was a monumental let down. Dumbed down levelling, standard story, lacking locations etc. But i still marginally enjoyed it.

Mass Effect 2 was dire. Absolute rubbish and has put me off the third in the series.

The changes said to be in Dragon Age 2 and the official comment from Bioware have fully put me off them. In my opinion they have 100% sold out. They cater for the masses trying to give everyone what they want and havem anaged to repeatedly make games which are worse than the last.

So no, you are not alone.

Now you're just trolololing.

Nesrie, if I attract you in some way let me know. You cling to me like a moth does to a lamp. Do I turn you on?

And I'm genuinely curious how the second highest rated game of the year (next to Super Mario Galaxy 2) is a piece of rubbish.

Sorry if I offended you but you can't leave anything I say alone. Its as if you take personal offense to everything I say.

My thoughts on all this:

1. Planescape:Torment still has the best writing and story of any CRPG ever made.  Not only that, but dialogue was part of the game.  If you got to big defining conversations (like the one with Ravel) then the dialogue options you chose closed paths off, and affected the flow of the dialogue.  It actually seemed like a real conversation.

Modern CRPGs have lost this.  Your conversation choices don't matter, and what you say doesn't matter, because you can just scroll through all the options in any order.  Its just a menu of things to knock off one by one.

No-one else has done this, because they haven't invested the resources in writing staff, and because they refuse to design conversation trees where you can't access all the content.

I do not blame the developers for this much, I blame the consumers.  I do not think developers are wrong in their gamble that the big market is in games that can be played on consoles, and that don't require a ton of reading, and where the dialog can be safely clicked through and ignored without missing anything important and affecting the plot.  Those of us with the patience to read do not represent a big enough market.

2. I loved Kotor1.  The big Reveal moment was one of my Favorite Gaming moments of all time.  NWN2 was fantastic too, in part because of modability.  This is something that the latest games (Dragon age and Mass Effect) have dropped.  Some of the user-created campaigns were as good as the main product.  [Go play the Sublety of Thay, for example.]

We don't seem to have this with the new games.

3. The biggest weakness of the latest crop of games is that they are designed to be console games too.  Console gamers are a very different market for PC games.  This is at the core of the new game design.  Modding is unimportant.  Text is less important.  Combat is more important.  Real character decisions are gone  - the moral decisions in Dragon Age are of the "Do I kill and eat the kitten, or not?" variety.  Mass Effect 1 was a bit better in terms of a few "pro-human/pro-alien" things (I liked the final decisions about whether to save the Council at the cost of human lives), but not much.

Graphics have become everything.  This has driven the Fallout3 games; the games look great and they're fun to explore, but there are few interesting decisions to make other than "where shall I go today" and the combat has lost its tactical elements and any real difficulty.

4. Bioware is still probably the best studio out there.  They're making good games, better than other players out there.  These games are fun.  But not great games.

I suspect that as long as the PC RPG market is as small as it is, relative to consoles, we're unlikely to see more games like those we idolized.

The other culprit is MMOs.  These are driving RPG development.  This is where the players are, and the money is, as far as PC RPGs.  Why develop a game with a fantastic plot, when you can develop an online monstrosity and keep people playing it again and again, without caring that there is no real plot?

5. I do think we do over-state the greatness of some of the games past.

Torment was still largely run on rails.

NWN2 didn't really have any particularly deep moral decisions.

Kotor2 just wasn't finished.

Icewind dale plots were very dull and formulaic.

Honestly, what I'm most excited about these days is the new Deus Ex game.  But I'm not holding my breath.

*edit*

I found Dragon Age fun at first, but rapidly got old.

I like the origin stories.  They were fun, they had good writing.  But then things got dull.

The ending was terrible.  No plot twist, nothing unexpected, one of the most boring villains ever.  The whole game has the villain who is a big monster who can't even talk.  No motivations, no personality, no character.  Blegh.

If you guys can't get along, there's no reason for this thread to continue.