yeah they did. they decided to scrap everything and move over to unreal engine 2, but i think since then they scrapped it all again to move up to unreal engine 3. which is fair enough because 2 is getting on now. hell, before long 4 will be available for licensing. 

Like they used in Prey. 

I am an informed gamer and I know what I'm talking about 

it's a bespoke engine, specially optimised to provide a fast path towards rendering characters that happen to look exactly like grown-up, homosexual versions of Bart Simpson. 

...you've pre-ordered then Kinn ;) 

Bleh.

Played the Velaya mod for Gothic 2 (an English version is in the works) which used the original world excluding the mine valley and tells the story of a female hero some time after the events of G2. Nicely done for an amateur mod, good quests, well tied-in with the Gothic story, good voice-acting for the most part. Very enjoyable.

Crawling for more, I soon had to find out that this kind of RPG must be fairly unpopular, at least measured by the amount of games available.

I then tried Neverwinter Nights of which I played the first chapter a couple of years ago. And what a boring game it was. I wonder why I even bothered to finish it. The first chapter is okay, but it gets so repetitive and tedious afterwards (during too), because the levels aren't particularly well designed and there isn't much variation, especially regarding the dungeons and caves. What made it worse was the gameplay. I dislike this kind of top-down horde combat Diablo games. Everything felt so shallow: average story, text-based dialogue with close to no variation (as in hardly any unique NPCs), mostly stupid and useless henchmen, xp and levelling system that seemed utterly ineffective, and hordes of monsters everywhere. The monster design was somewhat nice and varied, though.

Then Fable, ostensibly "the best RPG in the last few years." Well, fuck it. This isn't an RPG, it's just some mediocre consolized action game. Calling the missions quests, using a rudimentary skill increase function and adding an awkward inventory menu doesn't bridge the gap. The game consists of small and confined (yes, sometimes you can't leave the path even if there is no visible obstacle) levels in which the enemy hordes respawn every time you return. At least there are teleporters. Again a dull story and both story and regular quests exclusively focus on getting through the levels by killing everything, and if just to ensure the survival of the dumb-ass NPCs. Speaking of which, this game felt as lifeless as NWN with its unresponsive NPCs and whatever it was the developers and press creamed about concerning the choice of good and evil, I must have missed it since none of my actions seemed to have any considerable impact. Everybody liked me regardless of how many times I farted/threatened/killed them. After defeating some boss. Jack of Blades, in an annoying fight which took me around 50 (!) health potions, I quit and uninstalled. Again, I should have done that a lot earlier.

Then tried Oblivion only to realize that it indeed mainly focuses on first person view (third person being awkward at best) and how poorly the NPC models look. Uninstalled it again after ten minutes.

So yeah, I guess games suck more than I expected. Total Speedyism atm. An impatient search for RPGs similar to the Gothic series/Morrowind/Ultima 9 even/etc turned out there are hardly any. Pretty dismal, though I guess I should have known.
I don't really care for the upcoming G3 addon as it doesn't seem to offer anything too special (using the old world, albeit modified), so it's G4 then or the new PB game? Who knows. Until then, I keep on hating a bit :) 

For programmers:

http://www.gameroo.nl/games/light-bot

For negke:

http://rephial.org/

I couldn't really get into it, but I haven't had time to give it a decent go yet. 

cooool ! 

i had a lot of trouble enjoying the NWN 1/2 games. i never played the dungeons and dragons game when i was a kid, but i don't think the gameplay from the dice game works at all in a computer game.

some of the shit in there is downright retarded, ie: getting instantly killed from a spell? o.0
trying to slog through the NWN2 addon, mask of the betrayer, and it's just even more annoying.
the fights are downright impossible unless you spend 30 seconds before every fight using every possible buff you have. buffs should only help tip the odds in your favour, not be required to even be able to have a chance at winning.

also, what is the deal with wizards only being able to cast a certain number of spells before they have to 'rest' again? especially in MotB where you'll fight maybe a group of 5 guys and they all have maybe 400hp. a wizard type character needs to rest every other fight because even the most powerful spells only do maybe 25% damage. this is all on easy skill to, btw. 

G3 Forsaken Gods dude.

G3 totally hits the mark for me despite the combat and bugs. It just feels like a world and never ceases to convince me.

You tried Guild Wars?? Don't have to MMORPG it at all, can do everything with computer controlled henchmen. I found it pretty damn involving and a pretty damn good RPG experience. 

after finally picking up a bunch more ram, i can play this game properly and it's shaping up to be one of the best rpgs i've played in a while now.

combat is a little annoying though. getting stunlocked by shitty wolves sucks. in fact, fighting animals is more difficult that facing a gigantic orc warrior. 

I'm stucked in level 12... any idea to solve it ? 

I liked it, but thats probably because you're right and it isnt really an rpg as I dont really like them (same for diablo2). 

necros: Yeah. And damn those traps everywhere. Felt like I spent almost half the playtime waiting for paralysis, stun or fear to wear off while the monsters happily slaughtered me. At some point I just stopped looting bodies and chests (unless I expected quest items) because of this.. and the 400k+ gold I already had from selling all unusable weapons/armors.

As for G3, be sure to install the latest community patch.

Shambler: I'm going to get Forsaken Gods anyway. Just don't expect much. Apparently they improved the combat system though.
I might give GW a try, however their demo key faggotry isn't helpful. The screenshots look good, but I'm not convinced enough to just buy it without testing.

ijed: Nethack! :P

nitin: There are multiple kinds of RPGs, e.g. Diablo clones (which I don't like either) with bird perspective and party-based horde combat and ones in which you play a solitary character with a close 3rd person perspective, less focus on action and more on atmosphere. I prefer the latter. 

I can't remember where I got up to - the level with the long lines of squares set in troughs and peaks.

If it's there then there needs to be some sort of recalling series of functions so you don't run out of space, but I haven't figured out how to fit it all in yet. 

 

This one you mentionned is indeed level 12, and it is particularly evil: you need to build a function of function, and then it can work according to an office collegue, but I still didn't figure how... He just told that it has to be cut in 2 half part of each segment.
OTOH, he was not able to solve level 13, and I solved it for him...
Globally if you don't see the "obvious" solution directly, you can spend a lot of time before finding... sometime not finding at all :P

Anyway, it is a good puzzle game for programmers for sure :D

Thanks !!! 

I'm still stuck on that one as well - it's the turning inside the functions that's the problem. A third function to call would solve it, or being able to recall the main loop.

I've got a suspicion that you have to go horizontally instead of vertically because then the steps are divisible by two instead of seven. 

to skip straight to a level without having to play all the tutorial maps... 

level 11 wasn't that hard, i had 5 unused programming spaces... 

Completed the game with 184 commands.
Pretty fun. Level 10 was the hardest for me.
I ended up doing very versatile functions, since you can put lots of extra walking in since you can't walk off ledges. 

The Forever GZDoom mod is pretty trippy. Not really playing it much, but the music in data.pk3 is very synth heavy... @distrans.
Screenshots:
http://www.foreverhood.com/d_wal.html
http://zdoom.org/wiki/Image:Foreverhoodscreen1.jpg
Download:
http://www.foreverhood.com/d_for.html

Listening to it again... I had to go and check that they didn't just rip off Tangerine Dream. Music credits are: Marc A. Pullen, Mike Hansen, Patryck Goodsell, CPX. 

interesting TC... i haven't gotten very far yet, the long dialogs make me impatient. 

Which is good, seeing as that's what pays the bills.

Level 10 was by far the hardest, and the most interesting. I used 183 commands, one fewer than bambuz, fwiw :) 

Are there any Zuma fans here? Man this game is destroying my life.