oDDity

No, but I played the first Zelda game when it was released, I was in my mid teens then, and Zelda was a new concept in gaming. You kids can't appreciate it these days, since you're so used to massive RPGs. It was also nowhere near as cute and childlike as the N64 Zeldas.

Ha, which book did you get thay one from, HArry potter or Teletubbies have a Picnic. OoT was released 10 years ago, so if you were a kid 10 years ago, and I assume you played OoT several years ago, you can't have been more than a mid-teenager.

When your partner dies he comes back to life as a zombie and attacks you.

So you're a kid then, no wonder you like Zelda and Final Fantasy, they are games aimed at your age group. Why didn't you just say that in the first place. You were 7 when OoT was released.

They're not famous in the pop star sense, but within their own circles they have a cool job. You can't seriously think that anyone who genuinely cared about games and wanted to make quality products would want to work in a modern game studio where they are nothing but an invisible cog in a shit-making machine. No, they'd be much better off getting another job for the money and making a game in their spare time - but that doesn't' seem to be happening, you just don't see large conglomerations of ex-professional game developers working in teams to make free indie games for the pure love of it.

It doesn't just look and sound cute and childish, the story is like a nursery rhyme, and the gameplay consists of silly little puzzles, most of them extremely obvious to anyone but a 9 year old, it's like a grown man sitting on a train with a puzzle book for kids with join-the-dots games in it, and drawings to colour in with crayons, while everyone else is playing sudoku. Don't be ridiculous, you can't learn a language by reading a foreign book, unless you have some pre-existing knowledge of the language, or some kind of rosetta stone for transcription purposes, such as a copy of the book in your own language as well. How could I learn Russian only by reading a Russian novel, I don't know a single Russian word, and never would no matter how long I stared at the pages. You obviously had many other resources available to you for learning English, and reading English novels did nothing but help straighten out your grammar a little. I accept you're quite a strange person, but don't go too far. I consider people like you who sit in their bedroom obsessively playing a game like oblivion, writing their own great history as a master wizard or wha tever and fantasising about it, to be one step away from the sort of people who go on the rampage with a gun, because they think they're getting messages from aliens. When I play computer games (which is very rare these days) it's on a very superficial level, since I realise they're nothing but a mild distraction, a way of passing some time for people who can't think of any more constructive ways of spending it. The quality of graphics do not bother me, Thief for example had pretty bad graphics, but it's the style of the graphics that count, and both Thief and Gothic had great style, even if they were technically not very advanced. Zelda had quite technically advanced graphics for that time, but the style is stupid, to fit in with the generally kiddie feel of the whole game. That's the Japs for you though, those guys can't get enough of cute little cartoon anime figures of children, and even make sex cartoons with them. I don't share any tastes with the Japanese, which is no doubt why I hate games like Zelda and Final Fantasy. *sigh* It wasn't an advertisement, it was part of the in-game tips that appeared on loading screens. NWN was already in the works before BGII was finished, and was being planned at that stage as a sequel, and so I judge it as a sequel, and a very poor one. The fact that halfway through development they decided not to make it a sequel does not get them off the hook. The fact that I don't like FF makes me better than people who like FF. Stop right there, that's all I need to know, you actually hang around IRC channels talking about starcraft, and no doubt various other games. You are clearly some sort of game-obsessed weirdo. Exactly just how much of your life have you wasted playing, or fantasising or talking about computer games anyway? 1/2? 2/3? You talk about games in a serious way, as if they actually matter. Anyway, I can tell you're quite a young person, so I'll assume for your sake that you'll grow out of all this nonsense at some point in the future.

Yes, I believe that disagreements are best conducted in a heated and temperamental fashion. That way, even in the remote circumstance where I'm in error, I can still beat the other person into submission, and distract everyone from the real issue. IT hardly matters, since we're not exactly discussing how to bring an end to world famine, but simply engaging in silly meaningless little arguments, and so they should be treated as such.

I think you'd struggle to come up with many more duo-type examples that those two, and neither of those really work, since it would be as much, if not more, fun to switch off the alarm yourself, or distract the guard yourself. Mappers would have to start thinking up very convoluted objectives and map layouts just so it would have to take two people to do it instead of one, and I think it would become very obvious and cheesy. It would be forced duality. The only real reasons for going a-thieving with accomplices is so you can carry more loot away (not an issue in Thief) and for protection in numbers (again...not what Thief is about)

You forget the kudos that comes along with doing a 'cool' job like game development. That is much better than accountancy, who are seen as boring grey twats. People get into game development as players of games who think it would be the sexiest job in the world, but the reality is very different. It's just a job. Long hours and bad to average wages, and most of the content they're working on ends up in crap game titles that will be forgotten a few months after they're finished. Most of the staff have no say in what gets made, and the few at the top are under the thumb of publishers and don't make any real decisions either.

Well, TDM has nailed the gameplay, so I think a multiplayer version will be inevitable at some point, and easier than hacking it into Thief. I doubt that guy is ever going to get any serious stable working multiplayer game by means of a few hacks. Personally, I see Thief as perhaps the ultimate example of a single player game.

Doesn't matter what multiplayer gimmicks you come up with, it'll still be a completely different game from Thief which is my point, in which case you'd be better off with Thievery, because hacked Thief multiplayer will never be as solid and bugfree as that, or else just wait and someone can implement a proper multiplayer in TDM. Considering that Thievery never had more than a few dozen REGULAR players at most, you can surmise that any of these multiplayer implementations aren't exactly going to be swamped with players anyway, it's an idea that sounds a hell of a lot cooler that it actually is.

Not my opinion. Fact. In order to do multiplayer you'd have to change the essence of the game, so it would become something else, not Thief. I can't see what point there would be doing a co-op bank job or something where you are both ghosting, or even semi-ghosting, or doing anything other than running around attacking guards. The game just isn't suitable for multiplayer. Multiplayer inevitably entails some sort of adversarial scenario, which is the exact opposite of what Thief is about. Even if you have a 'see who can steal the golden goblet first' mission, you'd end up with people just sprinting around the map full tilt, zooming past guards, or attacking them in a very unthief-like fashion. So any Thief multiplayer is going to be very different from the original game, whereas with other games that include multiplayer, it's basically the same game but against other people rather than the computer. Have we any idea exactly what sort of multiplayer LGS were intending for Thief?

Ahh, I hadn't realised there was any attempt by LGS to add multiplayer. Let's face it though, multiplayer is of very limited value in a slow sneaker game like this anyway.

How can it ever work unless they get their hands on Dark engine source code.

Well I can only feel sorry for you then, a grown man sitting in his room playing games designed for little kids to play. Next you'll be telling us you like Harry Potter and have read all the books and seen all the movies, ans watch kids TV like teletubbies, because exactly the same argument you applied for adults playing zelda can be applied to that. There's no value whatsoever in a big world with a thousand AI, if it's dead. How can anyone derive any pleasure from interacting with what appear to be robots with not a single personality between them, and go hunting in the same cloned cave every 50 meters along the road for the same couple of boring monster types (and the creatures in elder scrolls are the most tedious ever conceived for a game) An RPG that gives no sense of exploration and no sense of interaction with AI is a total failure. Compare those games to a game like Gothic 1/2 and you'll soon see the difference and how a big RPG world like that should be made. Gothic didn't have the same level of detail, but it had what counts, which is an explorable world and AI that made a good attempt at appearing real and alive. Not when they advertised in BGII that you could take you existing character/party and bring it into NWN, the same way you could do from BG1 to BG11. In the beginning, they clearly advertised NWN as a successor/sequel to BG, so it's entirely fair to compare them. Yes, by geeks and those weirdo Japs, that's what I said. It's not recognised by me however, except as something that goes on the bottom of the (gigantic) list of worse games ever made.

They're a list of the worst games ever made. People bang on about Zelda as if it's the best game ever made. All the zelda games, and particularly the n64 ones which are consdiered the best, are clearly childish nonsense aimed at 10 year olds, and watching my 9 year old nephew playing OoT on the gamecube is like watching kids TV. I just find it irritating and so cute and twee I want to vomit. How the hell can that be any sane adults favourite game. Both Morrowind and an Oblivion are total failures as RPGs, due to the lifeless, cloned world inhabited by automations, and only geeks and those Japansese weirdos ( the ones who also play rape simulator games) even recognise the existence of Final Fantasy games or movies. NWN was a pale shadow of BGII, and no better than Dungeon Siege. If it wasn't for the multiplayer aspect it would be nothing at all - but you can't count that, since you're actually just making your own entertainment with multiplayer, the game is irrelevant. The only one of that list Ill give him is KOTR 1, which was at least adequate, though had many problems.

Christ almighty, but you've got a terrible taste in games. I'm surprised you even like Thief, since it stands out a mile on that list of crap you just gave as your favourites.

Don't be a fucking idiot. The world and AI in crysis are crude and simplistic automatons. It's not interesting in any way to interact with them, any more than the aliens ships in Space Invaders. Your lack of brain capacity is disgusting. I'm not afraid of them, but bored by them, since they're invariably shit, and always will be. Writing a storyline for a game is extremely easy, anyone could write the sort of derivative, predictable stories you find in any major game title. What's the point in a game where the outcome is already set up in advance because the story is already written, and all your given is a few alternative routes to get there. Plot and story do not utilise the potential of the gaming medium at all, but simply stagnate it, locking it to older mediums which are actually designed for storytelling.

I'm not a game developer. You're trying to be, so you should be looking for the solution to that. However, I believe the real change can't come until the near future, until games can be complex enough not to need a plot per se, when the gameworld itself can provide the player with enough rich experience not to need one, and actually generates dynamic content based on what the player does, through the self-interaction of the world and its AI. That's the real potential of games, not these shoddy attempts at emulating movies or board games that we currently see. The games we've seen up until now are only a fledgling start into the real potential of the gaming medium, which is one that is not connected to literature or even movies, but a true powerful medium in it's own right.

But that's exactly what game developers do, they follow in the shadow of action movies and fantasy novel plots all the time. I don't think any game developer has ever sat down and thought out a 'new way' specifically for the gaming medium. I've always said that games are a terrible medium for storytelling, the best you can do it work in a cheap superficial plot of some kind to instigate the gameplay and give the player a direction to walk in and someone to kill (or steal from in this case) and there is a hard limit, and quite a low one, to how well you can do that in a game.

Yes it would. The plot was stupid in the last mission, since Karras turned so dumb that he didn't even guess what you were up to, sends a couple of bots after you at the start, and then just gives up and lets you wander around, and ends up gassing himself. As if he hasn't the whole palce rigged with watchers and would know where the rust gas servants were. Pathetic. That's the problem with games, the plot has to be stupid just so you can manufacture gameplay from it. It wouldn't be much use the if the boss and his minions were so clever and on the case that you couldn't beat them.

The only problem with those sort of independent titles is that they all seem to be the sort of dinky little games you got in arcades 20 years ago. Nothing but a mindless and fruitless way to pass some time. I've moved on from that need these days, and I require something slightly more....substantial. I need an actual reason to play a game, other than to fill some time. I've plenty of other uses for it.

I think too many people (such as yourself) assume that game developers are all good guys who are there because they love games , and admire and worship them. It's not the case. It's just a career to most people. They're doing a 9 to 5 in an office and getting paid for it, the same as someone working in an accountancy firm. Also, only one or two people in the organisation get to actually make the final decisions that matter, most people are just workhorses, doing what they're told to, and are not going to kick up a fuss because they don't think the game is living up to their expectations.

It's hard to say. Looking at my favourite games, they were reasonably popular and sold reasonably well, though none were lucrative blockbusters at the time, save maybe Baldur's Gate 2.. It depends just how much money the publisher is aiming for - if they really don't care one iota about quality content are ONLY going for mass market appeal to sell as many copies to as many people as possible, or they are at least willing to compromise and make a game that will be more appreciated, but by a fewer number of people. This is where the developer really has to stand up to them and push for the latter (assuming that the development studio boss is not just there for the fat pay check as well)

I doubt it, since the bottom line is that they'll be taking x millions of some publishers money again, to make a game that will have to be equally generic enough for everyone to understand and enjoy it. They don't seem to think its possible to cater to hardcore gamers wishes, keep integrity and intelligence and a level of maturity in the content AND make the game accessible and popular with to Joe Average at the same time.