Ulminati said:
Let Obsidian write the story and quests, bethesda make the landscape and put bioware in charge of facial animation and voice acting. Under no circumstances should you let Bethesda near quest design nor allow bioware to write dialogue for player companions. That goes double for female party members. Triple for Carth Onassi. You'd still have to find a company to code a decent engine for the game and someone to write a compelling conflict/combat/character advancement system though. I'd play that game.
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Thinking about it for a bit, I might be convinced to let Blizzard do the engine and have a say on combat mechanics. Their game engines are usually pretty good at what they set out to accomplish. But not until they purge themselves of darkness. (AKA throw off the shackles of Bobby the Jew)
This I can agree with... to a point. If we wanted to put together an ideal super-developer company:
Bethesda does the marketing, and the marketing only... and even then, not until they sign a "we will not sue" agreement because they're a bunch of money-grubbing sue-happy pricks.
Obsidian does the fleshing out of content within the game (World design, quests/story/writing, gameplay mechanics, etc.)... not necessarily because they're great at it, but moreso because they're at least not horribly incompetent in this area.
Blizzard (or even, dare I say, Nintendo? Hmm...... naaaah... don't need any spikey-haired androgenous pre-teens in my games) builds the engine and does the play-testing. Should eliminate script-related bugs. I considered including the the gameplay mechanics (i.e. "ruleset"), but they haven't really done anything past combat mechanics... plus it'll be stuck in a permanent "still being tweaked" state until they finally give up 8 years later when newer projects demand more of their time...
Granted, Blizzard's graphics aren't the greatest close up, but they're satisfactory, IMO. My philosophy on graphics is that as long as I can tell the difference between a 6, 8, and 9 without straining, and any artwork looks finished and smooth rather than blocky and half-colored, I'm good. To make an analogy to HD video, it's nice to have, but at the end of the day, not being able to determine if the big-titted milf getting plowed on my screen shaved her pubes the day of the shoot or the day before isn't at the top of my priority list.
Bioware gets left out because they're in never-never land right now-- the "identity crisis" argument someone made probably fits best... I'd say they should build the engine, but they've even had trouble with that lately... though that could possibly be more an issue of DX9 vs. DX11.
...... Or, we just wait to see how AoD turns out, and potentially vote ITS as new king of RPG-land... I'm reserving my official opinon on this after putting too much faith in DA:Zero being "the spiritual successor of Baldur's Gate" before it was released and being given a single-player MMO. Even if AoD does turn out to hit the benchmarks set by FO1,2/PS:T/ BG with 10 years of advancement added onto that, I'm not convinced they won't sell out to a bigger company and start making money-grubbing AAA-slam-dunk-box-office-super-smash-monkey-movie console-tard shit afterwards.
On topic: Bioware started going downhill with KOTOR1 (NWN1 at least had the toolset, otherwise I'd have said that), and Bethesda lost my favor with Morrowind and later fueled my hate for them with FO3. I won't give either my money again without having played their games extensively first.