Tendo City

Well guys, Fable is almost here. It's crazy to imagine, but it's finally almost here. And thus the reality starts to set in.

The reviews are in, and Fable seems like a great game. However, it's easy to understand why so many people (myself included, to a lesser extent) are so disappointed and disillusioned by the game. It set out to be the most innovative RPG since the creation of the genre, with insanely ambitious ideas and incredible-sounding concepts. Unfortunately, most of what Fable sound so damn amazing was taken out of the game in the final product. Now I understand why this happens, but what irks me the most is that the developers said basically nothing about almost all of the removed features and I had to find out about them from reviews of the final build this morning. Aside from the stuff that we already know is gone like multiplayer, enormous environments, and being able to have children, a number of things have been taken away that have only just been revealed, and only by the reviewers. You are no longer competing against other adventurers, one of the coolest features of Project Ego. That's gone. Kids won't copy your hairstyle, something I was looking forward to. I don't think if that extends to copying clothing style (I really wanted my awesomely bad fashion to become the rage in Albion), but I assume it does. You can no longer take clothes from people you've just killed or knocked out. I have no idea why, even Morrowind let you do that. The gorgeous (but much smaller than the first screens showed) environments seem to be completely blocked off for the entire game, meaning you cannot frolic through the woods or meadows. That to me is the most disappointing.

It still looks like a great RPG and if I knew exactly what to expect and didn't have such insanely high expectations for it, Fable would still be on my most-wanted list. I know I'll be able to appreciate it for what it is eventually much like I did with Shenmue and KOTOR, but right now I can't help but me disappointed on so many levels. I'm mostly just mad at BBB for keeping so much of this from us. I'm still getting it September 14th, just not with as much enthusiasm as I did a few months ago.

Discuss.

The problem with hype... you better live up to it. Molyneux's last game, Black & White, also had ridiculously high expectations and also failed to live up to them...

Well for me the main problem is expectations. I expected key lime pie but am getting cherry pie instead. If Nintendo had claimed that Metroid was going to be a space shooter where I travel the galaxy collecting bounties and buying ship parts, I'd be extremely disappointed with the final product. However, I knew what to expect and really loved it because it delivered on those expectations. That's the biggest problem with Fable: no matter how good the final product is in its own right, BBB and Molynuex (sp) ruined it for so many people (at least initially) by claiming it to be something that it is not. They should have told us how much was changed. Hopefully I'll get over this before I pick up the game on September 15th.

Yeah, they should say these things... but games almost always end up pared back from the initial designs. The difference is that often developers won't tell all the details about games until they are reasonably certain that that is a decent goal... and even then often things get cut. In big games especially some feature cutback should be expected. But it is dissapointing when it happens, certainly. Especially when the scope is as big as it seems to be in this game.

Nintendo never does that. In fact, they keep even the most basic details secret. :D

It's all that Molynueuxylx's fault. His hype ruined the game.

Molyneux, OB1... :)

And as I said this isn't the first time he over-hyped a game... his last game was the same...

Quote:Nintendo never does that. In fact, they keep even the most basic details secret.

Well that's the other way to go. :)

Yeah I know, but I never payed any attention to the hype for his other games.

I looked at Black & White (in previews and stuff) and unlike a lot of people was left unintrested, so I never played it... though he has made some great stuff -- Dungeon Keeper, for instance, or Populous...

And Fable will be great in its own right. That's not the problem.

Though Fable isn't really a Molyneux game.

Well..

Everyone knew this was going to happen.

Even stuff that they did include in the game that are supposedly big features sound decidedly uninteresting and gimmicky to me, but hey..

It sounds like fun at least. :)

And no longer competing against other heroes sucks. :(

That's really dissapointing to hear about all the things they've taken out and even though some are small every one that's been taken out will make the game slightly less awesome than it would have been. I'll still get it of course, but that doesn't mean I have to like it. :)

Why get it if you're not going to like it?

Quote:Why get it if you're not going to like it?

:shake:

*Shake Shake*

Anyone remember these quotes?

Quote:You know you can drop an acorn and watch it grow into a tree

Total level of freedom..hey you could even kill kids

Hit a kid with a sword and scar him, In a few years not only will he still have a scar but now he’s a fully grown man and now holds a grudge with you.

ALL NPC age real time too

There is no loading screens in fable other then the one when you first boot up the game…no loading times between “zones”

Real time ageing watch your character grow and develop

you could have kids and raise them as your future hero when your old one dies from old age.

multiplayer modes ..if a friend comes round all he needs to do is plug in a scond controller with his save on a memory card and he’s in. no menus and no extra fus.

Fable has about 30 to 40 hours for the main quest…that’s if you rush it and know what to do.

Also remember when PM claimed it would be the greatest RPG of all-time?

Sorry, these were posted at another forum, figured I'd move it over here, too. :) 50 cookies to anyone who finds any more PM quotes detailing revolutionary ideas that he promised that were ultimately omitted!

Gah, don't remind me! I'm sure Fable is going to be great once you get passed the fact that it's not Project Ego. KOTOR was kinda like that.

And Molyneux said that the "greatest RPG..." quote wasn't supposed to be taken seriously as they were just a small british developer with zero RPG experience making the game. Basically they aimed really high and ended up with a good game that's nowhere near as great as they were shooting for. Lots of developers do that, but the problem here is that Molyneux told everyone about their unrealistic goals.

[QUOTE=OB1]And Molyneux said that the "greatest RPG..." quote wasn't supposed to be taken seriously as they were just a small british developer with zero RPG experience making the game. [QUOTE]

Did you see when he made the greatest RPG quote? If I recall correctly it was at the end of an extremely long article detailing all the many different revolutionary gimmicks the game had going for it. Not exactly the best moment for a light-hearted off-the-cuff remark that wasn't meant to be taken seriously.. Seems like he changed his mind trying to cover his ass.. ;)

Kind of like MS releasing the XBox. After a few months into the market it's being outsold by PS2 4x and Microsoft announce that they're shifting focus to the next generation as they under-estimated Sony and the PS2, that they released the XBox too late into the generation to beat Sony and next generation they won't be making the same mistake..... then a few months later, all of a sudden they were never trying to dominate this generation, it was all just to gain market and mindshare for the next generation..

.....they was a great example and you know it!

...

...

...

What can I say, the man has a big mouth.

You're damn right he has a big mouth!

I...

Yeah, ok I agree.

You changed your avatar!

All that stuff sounded really cool too...:(

Quote:Gah, don't remind me! I'm sure Fable is going to be great once you get passed the fact that it's not Project Ego. KOTOR was kinda like that.

What do you mean about KotOR? Were they at some point promising more? Because it seems to me from playing it like they took their solid base -- Baldur's Gate --, changed things to fit better on a console yes (with effects I've described in length), but at its heart it is like BG. Except with multiple, quite different, endings and thus a greater impact of your moral choices on where the game goes to. :)

I'm strictly talking about the environments in KOTOR. Most of the screens they released for the game were very misleading, alluding to large environments when in fact where the screens ended so did the environments, pretty much.

Yeah, KOTOR had, for the most part, really small confining areas. Even the desert area on Tatooine wasn't really that big.

I'll be getting Fable this Saturday.

I'm getting it tomorrow or wednesday.

KotOR's areas small? I don't have a problem with them. But then, this opens up a whole huge can of worms... to be precise, KotOR's relationship with Baldur's Gate. As you recall I had a whole list of (to a large part minor) complaints about KotOR and the ways it was inferior to BG. In other ways, it's pretty much the same as BG except from a new perspective. This led to some of things some people might have found more annoyance from that only mildly bugged me. These especially.

-People. Extremely limited selection of NPC character models... just like BG, except they actually vary the bodies sometimes instead of having the same looking people with maybe a different colored shirt five hundred times.

-Zones. Sizewise I'd say that they are quite comparable to BG once you factor in the differing viewpoints... not huge, but not tiny. I'd say that they took BG maps as a strong influence when they decided how large to make the maps. Except maybe they don't get quite as large as some BG maps... but it's pretty hard to judge with the different perspective. It hasn't seemed like a significant difference yet.

-The alignment system. Only speech options and actions related to that affect it -- robbing people blind while they are not home and without getting caught doesn't change alignment, for instance. It was the same in BG. And it's still stupid. :)

In short, I was expecting a game a lot like BG. In ways like those two it was that so I didn't find the 'limitations' as a problem. In others it was lacking so I complained about it. :)

In some other ways it is quite different from BG... see cool stuff like being able to hack into computers and blow up enemies in other rooms or reprogram droids to kill their own people. :)

Oh yeah, and I have definitely found that the best way to play is to mostly ignore your companions unless you have a hard fight that you're losing or something. They don't use special abilities nearly often enough but oh well... with this game design it's just too frusterating to have to control all of them all the time. As I said before I consider this a pretty serious gameplay flaw from the perspective of it being an RPG (and not an action game), but what can you do...

KOTOR's areas are tiny. They could have been large but were broken up into dozens of tiny sections.

'Dozens'? Okay, I haven't been to all the worlds. As of now I've been to Taris, Dantooine, the Yavin station, and now I'm on the water world. The only minor nuisance from my perspective is how often they take the same area and redo it with different characters to make a "new" zone, but that was a frequent occurance with rooms in BG too... not with city parts, though, so it is a bigger issue here than there. But it's not exactly a new thing so I put that under 'things BG had too'. And like BGII it has a great pre-marked map for the major places so it's hard to get totally lost. :)

So the cities are broken up into zones. So? They are in all the Infinity titles too, after all... sure, in that engine you HAVE to do it that way because with that engine you are making drawn maps, which can only be so big. Plus you are only mapping parts of the cities and not every square foot... in a 3d engine I guess you could do things differently, but I am not exactly going to blame them for doing things the same way they always have and breaking things into more managable chunks. As I said I'm very used to it across the PC RPG genre and I don't have a problem with it here. So there are loading screens inbetween the parts of Dantooine... so? It's not like the loads take more than a second or two!

That said, it WOULD be nice if the male Twi'leks could be other colors than green. ... on that note, alien voices... it gets really irritating how they just repeat the same things over and over... and obvious move to save money on voices when all the major characters speaking common have to be fully voiced, but quite irritating (and of course not in previous games, which didn't have voice except in key moments).

Quote:So there are loading screens inbetween the parts of Dantooine... so? It's not like the loads take more than a second or two!

I see, so it would make no difference if your backyard was fifty acres big with trees and meadows all over the place and you could see the end of the backyard from the other side, than if those fifty acres were split up by tall fences every 50 square feet? It doesn't matter how large the environment is as long as the sum of the sections is large?

That's retarded logic even for you, Brian. Come on now.

My point is that I expected things to be that way, given how it was that way in all previous Bioware RPGs that I know of, so when it was exactly how I expected it to be I was not exactly annoyed. :) Why anyone would expect anything else is the real question, honestly. It's a Bioware RPG after all! I'd fully expect the gameplay system to be based on their previous RPG gameplay systems, which were all topdown games. So things carrying over from topdown games like breaking areas up into zones should be fully expected.

And anyway, why is it such a big problem? It's a game. Not real life, a game. That necessitates a certain break from 'reality' and this doesn't hurt that very much more than anything else in this or most any other game. In the contexts of a GAME, yes I would argue that the fences don't matter all that much if the total whole is large.

In a top-down game it does not matter because you're only able to see a small section at any given time, but in an over-the-shoulder third-person game, having a hundred tiny environments versus having a few gigantic environments that let you see very far away, making the world seem that much larger, makes a humungous difference.

But this logic cannot and will not be comprehended by you since you seem to be alien to the concept of open environments, preferring to stay inside small, confined areas like your house.

Quote:In a top-down game it does not matter because you're only able to see a small section at any given time, but in an over-the-shoulder third-person game, having a hundred tiny environments versus having a few gigantic environments that let you see very far away, making the world seem that much larger, makes a humungous difference.

But this logic cannot and will not be comprehended by you since you seem to be alien to the concept of open environments, preferring to stay inside small, confined areas like your house.

Small? They aren't small! Some are pretty large, actually... okay, so there aren't huge open rolling plains in KotOR. There are broken up zones with pieces that are about the same size and Infinity zones. But still they are good sized. Generally they are long in one direction and smaller in the other one, but that allows you to go for a good amount of time to get across zones or fight things... they don't need to be any bigger, honestly. That'd just lead to tedium if you had to fight as often as you do when you go across zones for the first time. This is for outdoor areas of course, cities are quite different... but for the outdoor areas, breaking it up is actually better than some of the alternatives if you have multiple zone enterances -- and most of the zones in this game do -- because it lets you take multiple paths to your target than one big linear zone...

As for cities, I think a better thing would be making it clear that these are just parts of the city and not the whole thing, like BGII does -- with how the zones in the city are clearly non-contiguous. Because they aren't exactly large enough to represent whole cities. At least with BG I/II you have the excuse that that clearly isn't the whole city... but with this contiguous zone structure you could take it to be the whole thing and that's deceptive. And kind of stupid. With this many cities I'm not expecting every one to be as great as Amn, but these things are just too big to make credible Beregosts.

As for being able to see far, generally in one of the two axes at least a zone will go about as far as you can see... in the other yes they are frequently quite narrow. Oh well. But that's why they put vistas of being able to see far into the zones... and it's also why areas are often so large and open. Topdown wouldn't have had those massive long terraces on Taris, for instance... Dantooine would probably be similar, though, if somewhat different looking (ie missing the views into the distance that you get with third person).

So, as I said, my complaint isn't about zone size. It's about variety. As in the lack of it. As in how they copied giant areas so much. Sure, making actually unique areas for each zone would be hard. And yes, BG has lots of copy-art in buildings and the like. But all of the outdoor areas are unique in that game! 3d let them get bad habits of how easy it is to copy, as NWN indellibly shows... now it may not be as bad here as it was there, but it's a definite problem when I visit a new city and you've got multiple large areas that are identical in all but who resides there, I think. As I said they should have just restricted it to inside buildings and stuff.

On that note, where are the houses? There aren't any non-essential homes! Sure, in BGII they went well on the road to making every building count for some quest, but BGII has a massive number of quests to you still have a huge number of buildings... and some aren't relevant to anything. In KotOR you have a few of such buildings in some cities, but not nearly enough, IMO. Especially once you consider that it has a much more normal quest-load than BGII. :)

So yeah, the fact that areas are broken up into multiple zones just isn't a problem to me. My problems are with other things. Clearly it is to you. So we disagree. How shocking! :D

It be like if GTA was broken into a bunch of small zones and the game had to stop and load every few blocks, it mess the pacing of the game up completely. It's not quite the same for KOTOR, but the basic idea is the same. It detracts from the game having to load a bunch of small areas. Like on the planet with the Jedi academy, when you left the academy there were a few large open areas connected to each other by small "passages". I think it would have been a bit better with just one huge, open area for you to explore.

Exactly, GR. Like I said, ABF doesn't even know what a large environment looks like.

Anyway, I just got Fable this evening. So far it's a lot of training so I can't give a really good opinion of it yet after playing for only an hour. A really cool part, though, was when I ratted out a husband cheating on his wife, and then followed the wife to watch her give him the business.

People keep calling me the Chicken Chaser because I kept kicking chickens in the game... :meat:

Damn you guys, it's not out here until tomorrow.

Quote:It be like if GTA was broken into a bunch of small zones and the game had to stop and load every few blocks, it mess the pacing of the game up completely. It's not quite the same for KOTOR, but the basic idea is the same. It detracts from the game having to load a bunch of small areas. Like on the planet with the Jedi academy, when you left the academy there were a few large open areas connected to each other by small "passages". I think it would have been a bit better with just one huge, open area for you to explore.

First, OB1, I do know what a really big open area is. I've played some (free) MMORPG. Not a lot, but enough to definitely know what a huge area you can explore is. And you know what? KotOR isn't a MMORPG! It also is not Morrowind. It isn't, it isn't trying to be, and it SHOULDN'T be. KotOR is a different type of RPG. And for this type of RPG, zones like this are just fine, IMO. Sure, you could combine all three zones in Dantooine, combine the various parts of Kashyyk, have Manaan be one city instead of five parts, have Tatooine be one big desert (with some kind of blocks so that there are only a few paths to the east part and you need the map, and so that approaches towards the Sand People base are greatly restricted)... would it make the game dramatically different? I would say no. Not at all. It'd be slightly different, a bit more open, but not to any dramatic extent. I just don't understand why you find this such a big problem.

And anyway, the areas aren't THAT small. For the most part they're about as big as I'd want them, given how the game is constructed... I wouldn't want the Tatooine desert any bigger, for instance! And it makes sense to have the three seperate sections as one has to be restricted until you acquire a certain item and the other has the Sand People base, which really isn't something that should be visible from the enterance to town. So, what would your solution there be? Having some massive expanse of desert to cross? Honestly, I would not want that desert any bigger. Getting across it takes a long time as it is, and bigger would not be good for an RPG of this type (ie not a Morrowind-styled game, but a console RPG/Baldur's Gate hybrid).

As for Dantooine, there are multiple connectors between each zone so I fail to see the problem. You aren't being railed... not that I'm particularly opposed to linearity. Maybe that's part of why I don't have a problem with it... I actually like some degree of linearity in my games... :)

Speaking of GTA (III, at least), they DO do that. When you go between parts of the city, there are only certain tunnels or bridges and I believe that it has to load... sure, the areas are huge. But my point stands.

Quote:First, OB1, I do know what a really big open area is. I've played some (free) MMORPG. Not a lot, but enough to definitely know what a huge area you can explore is. And you know what? KotOR isn't a MMORPG! It also is not Morrowind. It isn't, it isn't trying to be, and it SHOULDN'T be. KotOR is a different type of RPG. And for this type of RPG, zones like this are just fine, IMO. Sure, you could combine all three zones in Dantooine, combine the various parts of Kashyyk, have Manaan be one city instead of five parts, have Tatooine be one big desert (with some kind of blocks so that there are only a few paths to the east part and you need the map, and so that approaches towards the Sand People base are greatly restricted)... would it make the game dramatically different? I would say no. Not at all. It'd be slightly different, a bit more open, but not to any dramatic extent. I just don't understand why you find this such a big problem.

Because I, like many gamers, like to have big, open worlds to explore in games. That's one of the greatest expressions of freedom a game can have and so very few have it. You may not have a problem with small areas but there are more people that do than don't, I can assure you that. One of the main reasons why so many people are dissapointed with Fable is because they reduced the environments from enormous, rolling hills and mountains to a small, fenced-off world. That was extremely important.

Your points of KOTOR not being a MMORPG are, not surprisingly, extremely flawed. A game does not have to be a MMORPG to have big environments. Bioware made the environments seem much bigger than they actually ended up being when they released their screenshots.

Quote:And anyway, the areas aren't THAT small. For the most part they're about as big as I'd want them, given how the game is constructed... I wouldn't want the Tatooine desert any bigger, for instance! And it makes sense to have the three seperate sections as one has to be restricted until you acquire a certain item and the other has the Sand People base, which really isn't something that should be visible from the enterance to town. So, what would your solution there be? Having some massive expanse of desert to cross? Honestly, I would not want that desert any bigger. Getting across it takes a long time as it is, and bigger would not be good for an RPG of this type (ie not a Morrowind-styled game, but a console RPG/Baldur's Gate hybrid).

KOTOR's areas are tiny. If you can't handle open-ended games with large environments then you should not be playing explorative games of this type.

Quote:As for Dantooine, there are multiple connectors between each zone so I fail to see the problem. You aren't being railed... not that I'm particularly opposed to linearity. Maybe that's part of why I don't have a problem with it... I actually like some degree of linearity in my games...

Linearity in environments in Zelda is a good thing. Linearity in environments in an open-ended RPG is a very bad thing.

Quote:Speaking of GTA (III, at least), they DO do that. When you go between parts of the city, there are only certain tunnels or bridges and I believe that it has to load... sure, the areas are huge. But my point stands.

How does your point stand when your point is false? We're talking about sectioning up large areas in dozens of smaller ones. Your point most certainly doesn't stand.

Quote:Linearity in environments in Zelda is a good thing. Linearity in environments in an open-ended RPG is a very bad thing.

My point is that this is NOT a fully open-ended RPG! If you want that play Morrowind. This is a title that, while it does have some degree of open-endedness and a branching plot, isn't open-ended within each area by design. So you are basing your whole premise on a false thesis. This isn't Morrowind. It's Baldur's Gate for consoles. Those are very different game styles.

If you want a complaint on this subject, don't make it about that. Make it about something worth complaining about! Like, for instance, the impact console RPGs clearly had on the game... I really noticed this in the last few days, much more than before. You have a pretty quick progression. Go to new planet, explore the city there, do the side-quests in said city, then go to the adventure area. Depending on where you are this area is larger or smaller... but generally you'll probably spend at least as much time in the towns as you will adventuring. More town on Manaan, less on Kashyyk, but overall you're mostly in the safer town areas and not in danger zones.

Why is this a problem? Several things. First, it means that the scope of each planet is limited. I don't have a problem with a zoned game design, but I would like it if there had been fewer planets which you spent more time on... Taris, for instance -- you spend quite a bit of time there and that one is more extensive. Later that changes. Areas become simpler. There are few places that aren't quest related that you can go, if any at all. There are still side-quests, but probably not as many. I think it's obvious that they had to do so many cities that they had to skimp on the details in all of them. I'd have preferred a setup like either Baldur's Gate game where there is one great city and the rest of the places you visit are obviously not in the same class... towns, I guess. That lets them put more effort into everything and make it all seem more like a real place. As it is, once you get past Taris the non-story parts of the towns dry up and become less prominent...

For an example of this, I don't see any normal homes you can enter in Manaan, Tatooine, Dantooine, or Kashyyyk. You can only go into buildings related to quests. Now fine in any design you'd spend most of the time in quest buildings. And these are generally major quests, not the little ones. There are fewer of those as well. It's too bad that the other places fade away... maybe it improves later, but I have doubts. There is just only so much that they can do with so many big cities to design, after all... I think that they tried to make it more like a console RPG, where you have a constant succession of towns and surroundings to visit, and it didn't quite work.

It also has the effect that I started this point with: Smaller outdoors areas. Or more accurately for my point, fewer of them. Now I'm not asking for a Baldur's Gate I with huge numbers of nearly empty and not very relevant zones, but a BGII with plenty of areas to explore as you progress would be great... and I don't just mean new towns. :) Remove several planets and improve the ones that are left. Increase the number of outdoor areas and the amount of time you spend out there -- I LIKE adventuring! Yes, quests in cities are okay, but there are only so many of those you can do before you get bored and want to go elsewhere... and another city isn't always the first thing you have in mind. It'd have helped the game.


... why does this always happen? It's so weird. I came away from playing KotOR last night thinking 'this is great, I should write about something good about it for a change to reflect how I think this is a great game' but again it's one of my criticisms that comes to the fore... oh well, I'll say the good too now I guess.

Party members. Or rather, how extensive their stories are. Now BG has some character background, but it really isn't too much. Most characters have a quest sequence true, but still... this beats that easily. Each chararacter has a well developed backstory that comes out as the game progresses by talking to them. In this way I'd say Torment is a better comparison because there, like here, you choose when to talk with your party members instead it being (infrequent) automatic events. And more like that game you talk with them a lot. Of course it's also quite different from Torment in some ways, but it's a reasonable basis for comparison I think, better than BG anyway. It's a great aspect of the game. My only complaint is the way they went about implementing it...

You: "How's it going?"
Them: "I don't want to talk about it."
You: "Do you have a problem? Tell me!"
Them: "It's personal and private and I'd rather not discuss it."
You: "Oh I don't mean to pry, but maybe I could help you..."\
Them: "Hmm, I don't know..."
You: "You'll feel better if you tell you know..."
Them: "Well okay..."*tells*

It just doesn't seem nice to act like the main character has to to get the information out of people. I know that often it is things that they clearly don't want to talk about, but honestly... it never feels quite right having it put like it is in the game. Making people talk about things they don't really want to talk about like this... it's just not nice! But on the other hand I want to hear their stories. It could have been done differently, I think (for instance, they do it in great fashion with HK-47... :)). But I really do think that the deep character backgrounds is a great aspect of the game.

You're missing the point (surprise, surprise!). When Lucasarts released screenshots of KOTOR they were strategically taken to make the environments seem huge, something lousy publishers do all of the time. Bethesda did it with Morrowind, hiding the low draw distance in every single screenshot. By doing that they created certain expectations that were not met in the final product. They lied to us, basically.

I'd have to see the shots to judge. But from looking at the game I'd think that just about any shot of the outdoors could lead people to think that it would have bigger environments... after all, they all continue on beyond the area that you can travel to with backgrounds that make it look like a whole planet and not just an isolated zone...

These first two shots show seemingly endless fields that go off into the horizon. In the actual game however, the areas are tiny. And this are obvious from an earlier build as the grass isn't nearly that tall on Dantooine, and no matter what angle you take a screenshot from in the final build it could never look like this.




And this, well, this area isn't even in the game. But it's certainly bigger than Kashyyk or any of the other cities.

For the city, not bigger than Taris, I think... maybe wider, but those Taris areas are quite long. Maybe slightly larger but not to a significant degree, if there is any degree at all.

As for Dantooine... I can see how that could be deceptive. I bet that you could reproduce that in the game, or close, anyway, though. Not that grass of course, but the view. Just go to the bottom of a hill and look forward and you won't see the end of the zone... yes it is somewhat deceptive but I don't think that those are impossible to replicate in the game. However, the fact that there are some definite walls on that zone should suggest that there are more... I don't agree that that city shot shows anything different from what we saw in the game (well, excepting how that city didn't make the final game), but the Dantooine ones you have a point. Though as I've been saying people who have played Bioware RPGs should know what to expect... going from 2d to 3d in a game like this would only change so much.


As I've played KotOR more, some things you get used to and/or stop noticing... like how your party members fall behind, how you have to frequently target enemies for your party when combat starts, how you have to constantly refill their queues because they don't remember what action you told them to do beyond that action (and there is no Party AI button that makes them only follow the orders you gave them as opposed to doing things on their own), etc... those are probably 'you'll get used to them' things. Others, probably more substantive ones, only show up as you progress. Here I'm primarially thinking of my big post (that I don't think anyone replied to) about KotOR's cities and how, compared to BGI/II cities, they are greatly lacking in depth and variety...

Quote:For the city, not bigger than Taris, I think... maybe wider, but those Taris areas are quite long. Maybe slightly larger but not to a significant degree, if there is any degree at all.

Taris was somewhat long but very narrow. There's nothing in KOTOR as wide as that.

Quote:As for Dantooine... I can see how that could be deceptive. I bet that you could reproduce that in the game, or close, anyway, though. Not that grass of course, but the view. Just go to the bottom of a hill and look forward and you won't see the end of the zone... yes it is somewhat deceptive but I don't think that those are impossible to replicate in the game. However, the fact that there are some definite walls on that zone should suggest that there are more... I don't agree that that city shot shows anything different from what we saw in the game (well, excepting how that city didn't make the final game), but the Dantooine ones you have a point.

No, you couldn't quite get a scope that large no matter how clever you are with taking screens in the final build. But it is very obvious that Bioware went out of their way to make the areas seem much larger than they actually were. That's a despicable thing to do.

Quote:Though as I've been saying people who have played Bioware RPGs should know what to expect... going from 2d to 3d in a game like this would only change so much.

In isometric games the size of the environments don't mean squat because there is no such thing as a horizon. You only seem from far above do it doesn't matter if the area is wide open or not. Bioware went out of their way to make KOTOR seem bigger than it actually was, and they fooled many people.

If you say so, but looking at that compared to the final game I really do not see a massive difference. As I said in the city I see virtually no difference at all, and as far as Dantooine... I'll go and look sometime, but I really think that you can get very close to that in the final game. Now granted you'd have to be trying, but you could. But as you can probably guess I don't mind that it ended up as it did.

It's so weird that you take this as such a huge complaint while not agreeing with ANY of the things that bugged me... take cities. Did you even read that post I made yesterday or so where I talked about how annoying it was that the cities were so simplistic and lacking in depth and character?

Yeah I agree that the cities were lacking, but we're in agreement with that so there is no discussion. :)

But go ahead and try to take a screenshot from the game that looks like those first two screens I posted.

Even though my point was that they took the screens in order to fool people into thinking that the environments were huge.

How about my complaint about how they handled the player character story conversations? I know it's minor but it bugged me...

The Dantooine screenshots would go partway towards doing that, okay, and if it was systematic on their part they shouldn't have. But I wouldn't take that city shot that way. Sure there aren't open areas that large, maybe, (though in total surface area there surely are) but there are plenty of good sized areas in the cities...

As for cities as I said I think the problem was that they saw that this was a console game and console gamers expect a sort of progression where you go from town to town instead of having one big city and the rest being smaller towns (note that this doesn't preclude a weapons upgrade curve -- just put better stuff in the shops in the city later in the game.). And it ended up with instead of having one great city and a bunch of interesting towns a bunch of relatively bland and lifeless towns that only differ from eachother in graphics to a large degree. I want, and expect, personality! The repetitive use of the same graphics over and over in each area sure doesn't help either... I guess that they didn't learn much from 'repetitive graphic look' being a major complaint about NWN...

That's total nonsense. It had everything to do with the crappy engine and nothing to do with what console gamers supposedly want. In fact, console gamers are usually hungry for big, vibrant, immersive cities more than PC gamers are, who will easily settle for top-down and distant landscapes. Just look at GTA San Andreas which is going to have the largest, most alive, and most immersive game world to date, for any system. The closest thing you guys have is Sim City, which you'd probably even try to argue is the same thing.