Be Excellent To Each Other

Right, so why would anyone bother? I can't imagine it's tricky picking up a D&D license from WoTC, as they're blatant whores, so if anyone wanted to I guess they'd just forget BG, and write an identical game set in Waterdeep, without shelling out any cash for any part of the Black Isle portfolio.

Fine, someone do that then. Please.

Of course WotC will only own the D&D themed bits of the IP - the engine and the rest would have been owned by Black Isle.

Oh, absolutely - but that's why I said you're more likely to get something out of Bioware, because they have a much newer engine that can do a lot more and looks a lot prettier.

Understood, yes. So make Bioware make me a game.

OK. Have you got NWN2?

No. I have 1. Didn't like it. Too much like BG:Dark Alliance. Which was panty pant pant pants.

What? NWN is nothing whatsoever like BG:Dark Alliance. NWN is proper DnD rules for everything, rather than a hit-em-up which DA is.

They managed to entirely hide the proper DnD rules and make it play like a shitty diabolo clone, though. 1/10.

Not sure what universe you were playing in. Full PHB spellbook, magic items exactly as per D&D, character creation spot on....you could even show the dice rolls!

It felt like you were just clicking the goblins til they died. Wheee.

Shitty environments, too.

This is a good point - there's no D&D games on the current gen consoles, are there?

We need one! Preferably one that meets my demands for a co-op adventure experience. But also with all the D&D races and such - making Drow in Oblivion by dragging all the skin tone sliders to the bottom just isn't the same.

The problem with D&D games is that it's tough to make the massive amount of inventory management, spellcasting, magic item creation, and feats work with a console interface. You always end up with a really cut-down version that invariably means having three feats/spells mapped to hotkeys, and never using anything else. They also seem to have the idea that people don't want to use the entire list of spells/feats, so they create custom levelling grids that only give you a small fraction of the customisation that's available in a game like NWN.

Damn. The hotkey spell-wheel thing in Oblivion worked a treat, they should try that!

I hate the spell wheel. I'd rather have loads of hotkeys for spells like I did in WoW, all easily accessible without looking, and very plentiful. I can easily get 25 combinations around my ESDF movement keys using the keyboard and mouse, rather than having to use the 1-0 numbers to pre-select skills then a separate key to cast.