Another thread ruined by OB1 and ABF! (a.k.a. 2004 Goron Game Awards!)

[A Black Falcon]

BG's art is crap. I don't care how you put it, but it's in the same category as the immature goth-kid style that id uses for all of their games. Your tastes need to grow up.

You make no sense. This and Doom? Huh? Their art styles have nothing in common! It's about trying to be high fantasy as western high fantasy has always been drawn. And I see absolutely nothing wrong with that. It's a great art style.

Also, you need to grow up and realize, like many adults do, that their view of the world is not absolute... people who don't realize that don't act as grown up. The way you constantly insist that your way is the only way that could ever be right is not acting like an adult. This discussion is a case in point.

I don't understand why you hate D&D artwork so much... so it is influenced greatly by past fantasy. So? All fantasy is! It's not the most unique graphical style ever but very few games are truly unique... but what I really don't get is what you want from the graphics. I'd say that making them very well done fantasy artwork should be the goal and they succeed at that. And it's not like D&D has nothing unique... lots of the monsters are unique to D&D! Sure stuff like Orcs, Trolls, and Goblins are all over but D&D (and, to be specific, the Forgotten Realms) have all kinds of unique monsters... Illithids, Beholders, Gelatious Cubes, etc, etc... and anyway I think that basing your artwork on high fantasy as we know it is the right choice. D&D IS high fantasy, so any other choice would be kind of silly I think...

It also depends on what you mean by 'art'. Do you mean character art or backgrounds? I think the monsters are fine and the backgrounds are fantastic for the most part, but I'd admit that the character (and NPC) art could be better in the BG engine... in that respect KotOR probably wins. But once I look beyond the characters and look at the world as a whole I cannot give it the victory. BG's backgrounds are just so much better looking than the mostly mediocre 3d environments in KotOR... as well as larger (or larger seeming at least) and more varied.

But as I said in the previous post the biggest problem here isn't that, it's how you ignore everything I say. I talked about so many issues and you pull out this one that has been beaten to death before... why? Don't want to bother to actually 'think' about what I was saying? And it doesn't really work in other ways too... after all, that segement was primarially about KotOR, not BG (yes I was comparing the two, but it was as much about KotOR as BG...), which you would have known had you actually read it.

Like I said before, you don't know what good storytelling is.

I'd love to hear why you think you are oh so much more knowledgable than everyone else about this... but I understand storytelling just fine. And BG has a decently done story... but as I said, it has problems with slow pacing (that is, how the story is quite drawn out and you get it little bits at a time interspaced with lots of gameplay). I don't mind that much because there are all kinds of people to talk to and new places to go, but when I compare it to BGII I understand what Bioware meant when they said that BGI's story was a problem (and the result of a freshman effort)... BGII's is much deeper and more complex and keeps moving at a much better pace.

As for the optional reading books, I guess you are comparing that to Metroid Prime and your opinions on story there, but it doesn't work, I think. Prime's optional reading directly explained the game's backstory. The vast majority of the BG optional reading (books and scrolls) does not do that. They tell self-contained tales that have no bearing on the game and are just there to read for fun if you wish. That isn't bad storytelling because it doesn't really have an effect on the overall game's story!