have you heard of Dragon Age?

Yeah, you should check out Dragon Age - it's basically Baldur's gate for the year 2009 (or whenever it comes out).  It should be running off the newest ruleset, I believe (i don't really follow dnd... is it 3.5?).  

Also, if you're looking for a game like that to play right now, have you tried Neverwinter Nights 2 + xpacs?  It's got a huge campaign, tons and tons of classes - including epic classes - and just so much to do.  In terms of dialogue, I still think Bioware does it better, but it's still very good.  In case you didn't catch it from the previous sentence, the game's not by bioware.  This is the game I'm currently playing during my free time.  It's quite enjoyable  

Dragon Age is not DnD game. Bioware/EA does not have rights to do DnD games so they make their own rules. But honestly I am not expecting much from DA, i have my NWN2+expanions and I love it.

I am still waiting to see if someone is going to repeat the masterpiece that was Planescape: Torment. Best story in a game I have ever seen.

So for me, its not that important whether a game is in isometric or 3D - as long as they go all the way with either, Neverwinter Nights 2 was a good example of what happens when you try to sit on two chairs at once. Look at the recent Fallout 3 - I loved the first two games, which were isometric, and I love the third one for its immersion factor which I think you can only achieve with a 1st/3rd person perspective.

As for story length, it seems the game companies are still in the "oooh shiny pwetty" stage where surface glitter is preferred to inner substance. In other words, they spend millions on new rendering development, animation and other visual/audio stuff and only a small portion of that goes to quality storytelling. Couple that with the unwilingness of risking such massive investments on radical gameplay experiments and you get the today's cookie-cutter game industry, where only a few are bold enough to step outside of the envelope.

Ah, thanks for the correction, I was mistaken.  But yeah, I really enjoy NWN2+xpacs - especially after thay fixed a lot of the game breaking bugs... uncompletable story quests suck

I know KotOR wasn`t isometric in perspective, just citing it (sloppily!) as one of the last Bioware games I enjoyed. Everything I`ve seen of Dragon Age says third-person to me. Perhaps I haven`t seen the right videos, but it looks third/arcade, not iso/rpg/action.

As for a fixed camera, I *did* mention Supreme Commander technology; simply being able to zoom out considerably would go far in rejuvenating that approach. Nonetheless there is an ease of use with an isometric perspective - to go from A to B is easy with drag selection and a click. Abandoning that for the more user-input-heavy third-person isn`t always what I`m looking for in a game. Sometimes when you blur an rpg with a light fps (or third`er) you get a dilution of both.

By everything they've said and shown in their Dragon Age gameplay videos it'll be horribly dumbed down. Spell variety, combat dynamics, everything is incredibly shallow so they can indulge in their fantasy of "spell interaction", which comes down to fire+oil is defeated by ice spell.

Not to mention melee combat will be utterly pointless because it'll depend on 15+ second long grappling animations. There's no room for tactics when your melee fighter is comitted for ages.

I think there are a lot of misconceptions about Dragon Age.

http://pc.ign.com/dor/objects/682217/dragon-age/images/dragon-age-origins-20080820104142047.html

isometric views are definitely possible

Yeah, it seems like they do that with every game now. GTA IV was bad like that. Every screen shot was up looking at Niko's face, or in the camera view. Who plays in Camera view all the time?!

p.s. I've got questions for you in my "Ideas" thread! ahahh

All the while destroying the flexibility and tactics that turn based combat makes possible by trying to appear more and more real-time. See the gimping of the parry mechanic by trying to tie it to the animation system in the NWN series, or the grappling-multi-character-animations of Dragon Age.

"I know KotOR wasn`t isometric in perspective, just citing it (sloppily!) as one of the last Bioware games I enjoyed." [quoting myself]

It sounds like Bioware needs to bring out a demo for Dragon Age... will investigate...

Well Planescape:Torment was obviously geared towards mages. Some of those top-level spells were the most awesome ones I've ever seen in a game.

Tactical combat wasn't exactly present in Baldur's Gate either. Unless you call lobbing fireballs at the edge of your vision tactics, or making your fighter pick up all the aggro and then run around in circles while the others shoot the monster full of arrows like a porcupine. Oh, or how about making your party invisible and setting up a gazillion traps around a neutral dragon, then poking it in the arse with a sword? First time I ever saw a dragon essentially killed by a beartrap.

And there is always killing Drizzt via the "summon so many kobolds he can't move and then proceed to porcupineize his dark elf arse" stratagem. Used up two rods of summoning on that. But the swords were nice.

I agree, but that's a blight on pretty much every game genre these days - they simply don't make them as challenging as they used to. Hell, I remember the original Warcraft and the damned alarm when I would spy the other side hauling a catapult towards my army - now that was a game which was truly challenging to win.

Its the money - the game industry is toobigshot these days - back when games were made by a handful of guys coding on computers in someone's garage, they had little to lose and could pursue their vision with tenacity and without a board of directors looming over their heads and expecting them millions of dollars to be paid back. So nowadays, only a few dare to risk "upsetting the gamers", most do not realize that you can't upset a gamer by making a challenging game. But then again, gamers have to do with games as much as roleplayers have to do with MMORPG's...