14th August 2004, 6:30 PM
(This post was last modified: 14th August 2004, 7:10 PM by A Black Falcon.)
Okay, one more thing. They actually give a seperate notation for dialogue options marked 'Persuade' for ones that are activated by your skills? What in the world are they thinking? That is so stupid!
As for performance, framerates are fine at 800x600. Though in the graphics screen I can't enable anti-aliasing, soft shadows, or frame buffer effects... probably need a better graphics card. :) I might want to see if it can run well at 1024x768... maybe.
Fine, so you probably want something more concrete on the good side other than 'it's a really good game'. Okay. Just about all the spoken lines (as in lines characters in the game would speak) are actually voiced. That's a first for one of these RPGs, for sure... the older Bioware games had just as many disks (this is a 4 disk game, BG had 5, BG2 4...), but that's because of those massive graphic maps (the level map drawings are very large files), not because of voice. I'm sure that as a tradeoff people have somewhat less to say, but it seems like a reasonable amount of conversation, so it seems a relatively minor downside. In previous Interplay-style RPGs only major dialogue lines at big plot points (or voiceovers during chapter beginnings) would be spoken, and the rest of the games would just have to be read... it's very nice to see it all given voice. And it adds to the immersion too. :) Oh, and it's very cool that the aliens speak in their languages and not in Standard.
As for the graphics themselves... they are good. Not great, but good. Everything seems to be lacking a bit in detail (texture detail and variety, for instance... the poly count itsself is fine...)... perhaps as an effect of it being designed as a console game, where that isn't as noticable? It looks nice, and definitely looks like Star Wars, but it's not as good as it could be and not so great that it leaves me thinking 'no way would this be as good in top-down'. Which helps explain (if you want more explanation) why I think that it'd be a better game topdown and with drawn backdrops (though 3d characters might be nice... they are probably easier to make and animate than 2d ones and they look great. Certainly better than the sprites of the Infinity Engine, which looked good in '98 but were getting old by the last few years... now if they could do everything with Disciples II-quality sprites I might think that they (if they were doing another topdown game) should stick with 2d, but it really depends. Either way works, honestly. I just want it to look good. And the KOTOR characters look good, even if they do lack somewhat in detail and complex texturing. :)
On another note, Bioware's next PC RPG is Dragon Age. It's not D&D or even d20 this time. It's a RPG with a totally new setting and ruleset. 3d, but it'll be a topdown, party-based RPG. Just what I wanted to see them make. Well, not *just*. I'd rather it was D&D, really. But this is pretty good.
http://www.bioware.com/games/dragon_age/
As for performance, framerates are fine at 800x600. Though in the graphics screen I can't enable anti-aliasing, soft shadows, or frame buffer effects... probably need a better graphics card. :) I might want to see if it can run well at 1024x768... maybe.
Fine, so you probably want something more concrete on the good side other than 'it's a really good game'. Okay. Just about all the spoken lines (as in lines characters in the game would speak) are actually voiced. That's a first for one of these RPGs, for sure... the older Bioware games had just as many disks (this is a 4 disk game, BG had 5, BG2 4...), but that's because of those massive graphic maps (the level map drawings are very large files), not because of voice. I'm sure that as a tradeoff people have somewhat less to say, but it seems like a reasonable amount of conversation, so it seems a relatively minor downside. In previous Interplay-style RPGs only major dialogue lines at big plot points (or voiceovers during chapter beginnings) would be spoken, and the rest of the games would just have to be read... it's very nice to see it all given voice. And it adds to the immersion too. :) Oh, and it's very cool that the aliens speak in their languages and not in Standard.
As for the graphics themselves... they are good. Not great, but good. Everything seems to be lacking a bit in detail (texture detail and variety, for instance... the poly count itsself is fine...)... perhaps as an effect of it being designed as a console game, where that isn't as noticable? It looks nice, and definitely looks like Star Wars, but it's not as good as it could be and not so great that it leaves me thinking 'no way would this be as good in top-down'. Which helps explain (if you want more explanation) why I think that it'd be a better game topdown and with drawn backdrops (though 3d characters might be nice... they are probably easier to make and animate than 2d ones and they look great. Certainly better than the sprites of the Infinity Engine, which looked good in '98 but were getting old by the last few years... now if they could do everything with Disciples II-quality sprites I might think that they (if they were doing another topdown game) should stick with 2d, but it really depends. Either way works, honestly. I just want it to look good. And the KOTOR characters look good, even if they do lack somewhat in detail and complex texturing. :)
On another note, Bioware's next PC RPG is Dragon Age. It's not D&D or even d20 this time. It's a RPG with a totally new setting and ruleset. 3d, but it'll be a topdown, party-based RPG. Just what I wanted to see them make. Well, not *just*. I'd rather it was D&D, really. But this is pretty good.
http://www.bioware.com/games/dragon_age/
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