Zwiebelchen

I really hope for pseudo-cutscenes in isometric game-view just like the old JRPGs did. Imho that's the best way to spice up dialogue and making the player not want to skip it without voiceover. I posted that in the pitfalls thread, but here's a quote for you guys, just because I feel it summarizes what I hope PoE dialogue would be:

BG2/Planescape-esque Walls of text. Yes, I know this goes against the spirit of the IE games and may cause hardcore roleplayers to beat me with their plastic figurines, but with a game that is announced to have no voice-over, I just don't want to read three pages of text for every random NPC I talk to. This does not say I want meaningless dialogue or no choices; hell no! I just want NPCs to threat me like the busy adventurer I am and go straight to be point. A well written interactive story provides narrative by a combination of text, actions, art and mechanics. A game is not a book. I'm totally fine with reading a book when I'm actually reading a book. But a game is an interactive medium that has so many other ways of delivering a message. At the very least, if you have a lot of information for the player to swallow, chop it up into smaller pieces by good quest design. There's no reason a questgiver should give me lengthy background lore on a temple to investigate when I can be presented with that lore in a more interesting way (for example, by solving a puzzle). This is one of the things that old JRPGs just did right. While they suck at making dialogue matter (since basicly, your protagonist auto-talks without any choice), they excel at presenting both lore and relevant information in a usually straight-to-the-point and interesting fashion. I NEVER skipped dialogue in games like FF7, even if there was no voice-over at all. I think a huge part of why JRPGs are so good at delivering dialogue that nobody skips is, that the dialogue is presented in huge letters on the screen to allow them to be seen on the low-resolution TVs of past days. This forced writers to compress information into very few lines and use other means to give information. The most famous one being the "flashback": A lot of old JRPGs did that. Instead of the generic villager telling you that he wants to seek revenge for his killed sister, you actually see a cinematic (with a color filter or something indicating that it's a flashback) of soldiers breaking into her home and murdering her. I just don't understand why modern RPGs totally neglect this way of presenting narrative. And you don't even need fancy 3D cinematics to do something like that. Old console games always had such cinematics in isometric perspective and it totally worked. If 20 year old games can do that, I don't see why PoE can't.

Only two armors submitted? Better one be a bikini mail! *duck*

The thing is, as the game is based on Unity, all the "big tools" will be commercially available for everyone. That's the beauty about Unity: every average joe can have access to them. This is great, from a modders perspective. The release of certain non-license in-house scripts used to create the content by the developers would allow the community to create stuff that is comparable in quality and as such blends well into the world.

Don't get me wrong here: I don't need an actual world editor like in NWN, I just need the tools to convert the files of the game back and forth and actually import them into the game. Tools like 3dsmax or mudbox aren't free. Still, there's plenty of users that got access to them, either through a student license or due to hobby investments. And yeah, there's probably a lot of piracy aswell. And there's always free editors for almost everything. Gmax or Milkshape for modelling, Gimp for 2D picture editing, etc.. As a content maker, I want to spent time on actual content making, not hacking game files or performing stupid workarounds just because there's no tool that allows to port my 3dsmax scenes or Photoshop layered files into ingame models and textures. That requires the developers to be open about how the game works. To give an example, we need to study how animations work on character or beastiary models. Are there naming conventions? Which frame intervals are used for which animations? Are they biped based? What bone architecture is used? What material types are used for the textures? Specular, normal and bump maps? How do armor models work? Do those get linked to certain bones of the character or do they replace the whole character model? Such questions need to be answered to allow making such content. The workflow has to be clean off unneccessary obstructions. Powerful plugins allow converting files into formats that the game can read and handle are the bread and butter of modding. A community that cares enough about a game to fund it with 4 million dollars before even seeing a single moving game footage has enough dedication to craft mod content. As long as the converters and tools exist.

This was cause of the actual lack of support and tools to mod these games, not due to the lack of willing artists. People that were making mods for IE games usually came from a programming background, as creating content for IE required a certain amount of "hacking" and manipulating game files. Modding was never officially supported by the developers, which meant there were no tools released to allow artists to step into IE-modding. A good mod usually takes both artists and programmers. But in order to get the former, modding must be officially supported, to keep artists interested. One game that got HEAVILY modded in the past by a huge amount of artists was Warcraft III. Even today, there's constantly more 3D art being made from models to high definition textures even after 15 years! This led to a total graphically makeover of the whole game. Recent maps/mods of Warcraft III make the antique graphics look like a completely new game. This is how the actual game - as you can buy it in the store - looks by default: http://www.polycat.net/gallery/albums/warcraft3/warcraft3_08.jpg And this is how a user-based map (made by me) looks - without modifying ANY file of the actual game, just by importing (a supported feature of the game) user-made models by the community: http://www.hiveworkshop.com/forums/attachments/gaias-retaliation-orpg-649/76141d1266881872-screenshots-upcoming-18.jpg http://www.hiveworkshop.com/forums/attachments/gaias-retaliation-orpg-649/126156d1369952511-whats-about-come-next-months-1.jpg And this is an example of a futuristic scenery made by a terrain artist 100% made out of community-made sci-fi models: http://www.hiveworkshop.com/forums/attachments/terrain-board-267/132498d1391365649-lost-omen-lost-omen.jpg You wouldn't believe the expertize in creating 3D and 2D art resources that even non-profit hobby-content makers have. You just need to be (as a game developer) open about how your game works internally and how files can be modified or added to the game and publish the tools used to merge the art and gameplay. A bad example of not caring about the modding community came from the same company, unfortunately, with Starcraft II. They failed to support the 3D modelling community by releasing tools to convert conventional 3ds-max files into the game internal custom .m3 files, completely destroying all efforts by the community to create new artistic content right from the start. The result is that even now that such tools exist, there's still almost no 3D art available even after years of the release. In order to have an alive modding community and to draw in hobby artists, you need to support your community. Allow them to use common tools and common media files and give them the software required to convert them to working game files. Allow your *artists* to creating artistical content that doesn't require a programming degrees and you will get proper artistic resources. To take the IE game example, a simple editor that allows importing a 2D picture as a background and hand-painting the pathing map on top of it (and defining the areas that get rendered on top of NPCs instead of behind) would have sufficed to have hundreds of custom made locations from mods nowadays. But unfortunately, it never was that easy.

Does anyone have the numbers on how many copies Beamdog sold on the Baldur's Gate: Enhanced Edition releases?

I guess so... but then again, it shouldn't be hard for any decent modeller to create such backgrounds from scratch. With free 3D modelling tools and a powerful graphics card for rendering, any decent 3D artist can create convincing background images that could then be filled with a selection of destructable 3D objects that are used by PoE (crates, barrels). From what I've seen from the developement screenshots, they are using an editor to apply basic-geometry cutouts to the 2D background image to simulate the dynamic light and create the pathing map. Assuming the community could get access to this tool (and also the tools used to create and script dialogues, npcs and quests), the modding possibilities would be almost endless. And since we are talking about free modding content made by users and the game created by Obsidian, there shouldn't be a lot of legal issues with using f.ex. using the powerful NWN 2 world editor to create high-resolution background images for those without the 3D-rendering skills (I mean... technically, a print-screen and some photoshop skills could be enough).

I hope so! I feel that quests that take you back to earlier regions or extend beyond the current region are crucial for a classic and immersive RPG experience. It makes the world feel more dynamic and believable, if not everything is laid out so conveniently for the player. Also, I'd love for such cause-and-effect content to not be perfectly obvious. Taking the skinner quest from Baldur's gate II, there's absolutely no hint that the follow-up quest happens in Trademeet. You literally have to stumble upon it. Also, what's even cooler about the skinner quest is, that the secret of the human skin armor is not only covered by a riddle, but also requires you to play the underdark chapter in an unconventional way (killing the silver drake instead of doing her quest in Ust Natha). And even the initial quest is interesting, as there's subtle changes to how the quest progresses depending on what you do. For example, if you happen to find all evidence and talk to the city guard first before confronting the skinner, you will cause him to investigate on that matter, ultimately causing his death. I really love the skinner quest in Baldur's Gate II. It's a perfect example of quest design done right.

Yeah, so don't do it. I can't speak for everyone, but I for one don't want some male pig's haha females joke character in a game I helped pay for. I should point out that "haha females" is so far away from the point of the character. Just because she's a joke does not mean the joke is at the expense of women, or that the character is what I think women are like, or whatever. I've always been very careful to play her as a character who is ludicrous in ways that everyone in any gaming group can find enjoyable. The ultimate joke of the character is that she's utterly shameless about her shallow, hedonistic nature. Think Troy McClure meets Paris Hilton meets Divine. Not that this should even matter, which is why I didn't bring it up earlier, but you should understand that I created and evolved this character in a game run by a female DM, in which more than half the players were women. I mention this only because it sounds like you are under the impression that I created her to make a bunch of misogynistic dudebros laugh at how lame chicks are. That was not, is not, and has never been the case. I'm not going to argue that she couldn't seem sexist to someone; my acute awareness of the potential for miscommunication is what led me to post what I posted originally. But I absolutely did not create her to laugh at women. Many of the friends I wanted to amuse via her inclusion in PoE are women. The people I intended to (and did) entertain originally with the character are those same women. Half or more than half of my friends outside of that gaming group are women. I am a feminist. I state all these facts not to imply that I am somehow exempt from being sexist; that's honestly not my call to make. I'm as good at putting my foot in my mouth as anybody. But my intent is never to be sexist. The worry I had about putting the character in the game was that I was unsure if that intent would be easily communicated through a short description of her, or if she would just come across as a sexist caricature out of context. And I suppose you're wondering why I didn't say this when you originally called the character sexist. It's because I wasn't sure if you grasped my intent with the character until you confirmed you didn't with this latest post. And that's my fault, to be clear. I obviously didn't communicate the aforementioned intent well enough in my first post, which led to the same misunderstanding I worried the character would provoke if included in the game. This is why I ultimately decided to go with another character that represented my view of woman less ambiguously. I guess to secret to creating such a character in an interesting way is to accept and take the expectation one has about these tropes and twist/play with them and surprise the audience like that. It's often the simple and cliché characters that leave the biggest impression when intentionally designed that way just to ridicule and disappoint those expectations in the end. In case of a supposedly bimbo/gold-digger sorceress, play with that expectation and come up with a moment that really makes the player think "Wow, I haven't expected that. Looks like I was totally wrong!". Think about the psychological aspects behind such a superficial design. Are there inner demons or weaknesses that she might just want to cover with such a behaviour? In my RPing history, I also played with a bunch of people where one of the players had a very similar character that clearly seemed an overpowered joke-sidekick gold-digger cliché sorceress at first. Until you found out that she actually wasn't being able to perform any magic at all, despite being considered a powerful sorceress, which ultimately would be her downfall, as all the lies and manipulations suddenly break apart. Put that together with her being strangely over-protective of children, you'll eventually find out that she's just an average girl from an orphan shelter just trying to make money for her friends - at all cost. Turns out that her looks and being a charismatic liar are the only real skills she had when she was younger, so everyone was kind of *expecting* her to be what she was. And if everyone is pushing you towards a certain corner, at some point you'll simply HAVE to embrace it to protect yourself from mental damage. Five days after finding that out, we found a note on the campfire and all stuff/gold gone. "If you dig below the surface, make sure there's something to dig." Boy, was that a total mind****, especially as the player behind this character could never be sure we would actually *find out* that carefully laid out fake-backstory and put 1 and 1 together, just to assume there is depth behind a character when there was actually none! Meta-gaming at it's best.

I guess there actually is a game with pretty reasonable level scaling imho done right. Jagged Alliance 2. While maybe not being perfectly balanced at all times, I think the level scaling in this game (which definitely exists), is masked pretty good and feels immersive. As Jagged Alliance 2 is completely non-linear and could technically be beaten by just straight rushing to the final town with a set of initial mercenaries, it just REQUIRES level scaling. First off, to analyze how the game did it right, we need to check out how the level scaling works. JA2 has three destinct layers of encounter progression: 1) progression of area ... the more you move towards the southwest of the country, the more soldiers you will encounter. There are more patrols roaming the wilderness around the areas, there's bigger weaponary used by the infantry. There's even tanks around the capital city. 2) progression of story ... the more towns you free, the more special forces you will encounter in your playthrough. Deidranna actively sends out counter-attacking troops to your towns the more you progress, forcing you to hire more and more mercenaries and splitting up teams in order to defend all hotspots. 3) progression of time ... the longer you take, the better armed the soldiers you encounter will be. While at first most soldiers are just armed with pistols and MPs, later enemies will come with automatic weapons and even grenades/rocket launchers. These three mechanics combined make for a highly believable and realistic design. Leveling never feels pointless, as the progression is never directly tied to your levels, but instead tied to mechanics that just make sense lore-wise. If you decide to directly rush towards the capital to just assassinate Deidranna, you will notice that the capital is a lot less defended than if you freed all other towns first. Still, the defenders will have automatic weapons, compared to those in the north-eastern towns that only carry MPs. You will still encounter tanks and occasional grenades and with your weak level troops, it's still painfully hard to kill Deidranna to end the game. But the point is: you still can with exceptional tactics. If you decide to take it slow, build up your forces and free the towns one by one, you will eventually notice the game difficulty to make a huge leap upwards. The reason for that is that playing it too slow will make the time component kick in, which means that you will face more and more soldiers with stronger weapons, whereas your party might still be under-leveled and (due to your slow progression), your income might be too low to hire more experienced mercenaries. However, if you manage to kill those heavily armored foes and get their weapons, you might still make it. It's never unfair because of that. If you decide to build up two teams, you are actually able to free more towns at a faster rate. But this also makes it harder to defend them, as you need time to train the reinforcements defending the towns. The counter-attack troops will still have to be dealt with, but the soldiers will be weaker in equipment once you encounter them. These mechanics can be applied perfectly even to semi-linear RPGs. Have there be a mixture of static encounters (it makes no sense for a dragon to be weak at the beginning of the game - the same as it makes no sense for the head of the city guard to suddenly become a demi-god by the end of the game), dynamic events along the road and dungeons scaling over time (again, not bound to character level, but actual time progressed) and event-responses based on what and when you complete quests. The De'Arnise Hold is a nice example here. It would just feel right that the trolls grow in numbers the longer you waste time around the city before moving to the keep. However, it just doesn't make sense that rats suddenly become demons just because you're level 10.

I guess one of the biggest problems of customer oppinions on any product developement is that what the customer needs and the what the customer wants are two different things. You know what happens when customers do developement decisions? The http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Platypus. That's why a good game developer asks for community feedback and considers it, but still always sticks true to his own intend. I also come from a modding background (and I'm still doing it today; I made a very successful Warcraft III RPG map called "Gaias Retaliation" with over 100.000 downloads) and you wouldn't believe what some people suggested to me to implement at times. As a rule of thumb: if the whole community can agree on a matter, then there's definitely something true about it. If there's an argument about it, however, then it's better to follow your own intentions. And then there's features that nobody asked for to implement. I had that in the past where I simply made those because I thought it would be a cool feature. And in the end everyone liked it. There's nothing wrong following your own intentions. Crowdfunding is not like being an investor, where your voice matters. It's about trust. If you don't trust a developer to make a game you would enjoy playing, then don't fund it.

I guess level scaling can not be avoided for open world games like Oblivion, unless you want to restrict the player in some of their choices. That being said, I guess you can ship around that problem in a cRPG if you design the game to have bottleneck events. This could either be by traveling to a new environment or by doing time jumps. In Baldurs Gate II, the idea is that the money you'd have to spent to get to spellhold limits you from going to spellhold too early. In theory. I could still get the required 15.000 in copper coronet alone if I wanted to, so the actual implementation somehow failed on that. Another idea is to have quests that actually change the world. For example, once doing a specific quest for a guild, makes you enemy with a hostile guild. This will create several new NPC camps throughout the country. You might now encounter a couple of headhunters in a tavern that you already visited. Or a guild camp around a campfire that would be abandoned if you hadn't completed the quest the way you did. Not only does that effectively help combating the outleveling effect (wolves and kobolds in that area will still be totally outleveled, but that only adds to realism, imho and adds to the feeling of power, which is important in an RPG experience), it also makes the environment feel more "alive". I'm not totally against a certain amount of "progression" on encounter difficulty depending on how long you take to reach it. But it should be explained and have some kind of underlying narrative and make sense, not just adjust for the increased party level. If you, for example, battle a group of mercenaries in a quest to free a stronghold, but it took you five weeks to go there as you got distracted with other sidequests before, then of course the leader will say "Hah, fool, do you really think we wouldn't prepare ourselves?" and have a lot more mercenaries at his side than if you go there right away. I'd say scaling encounters bound to the player level is a bad choice in general, as it makes leveling feel pointless. Scaling encounters on ingame-time or game events, however, does not only serve the narrative and immersion, it also makes leveling still feel important. And also gives a player a reason not to rest on every single battle to get that one level 7 spell back. It actually adds an interesting gameplay aspect of choice: "Do I rest here and risk the bandits growing stronger in numbers, or do I attack right now, when they might not be prepared for it yet?".

The portraits so far look pretty good. I guess they fit the "adventurer" type of characters just fine. Realistic looking with a touch of fantasy, not overly sexualized but also not total abominations. What I'm a little curious about though, is the inconsistency in art style between the 3-picture portrait displaying styling variants and the other pictures. I don't feel that these "match". But I don't know if the art style changed throughout the developement and that this particular portrait is maybe older than the others. But I'd love to see more portraits! Even if we can probably mod the game to have our own, I feel a good set of default portraits is important, simply because it's pretty much the only way to customize the appearance of the character in a 2D isometric game. I'm especially interested in the portrait art style for some of the "less human" characters.

I can't believe that this is actually the first post I ever do in these forums, but I just feel the urge to say it: It has been stated that there will be no hard-counters and pre-buffs in PoE and much less randomness compared to the IE games. And all I can say is: THANK GOD FOR THAT! Seriously, as much as I loved the IE games and still consider them as some of the best games ever made, the stupidly overpowered hard counters and the extreme meta-gaming on pre-buffing was just a slap in the face in terms of gameplay. Hard counters are *not* to be mistaken with tactical depth. In fact, when I *need* to buff all my characters with protection from death before entering a battle with a Lich (that I don't even know is there, because it's right after a loading screen that I can not enter with just a stealthed thief for scouting) to survive the battle, then this is not a strategic decision. It's just a penalty. The IE games where full of hard-counter abilities that just made the game frustrating, especially when you wanted to play with certain party setups. I can only shudder if I think back to how useless certain classes became at the end of TOB, simply because a lot of enemies where just immune to most of my abilities in order to not make them pointless due to hard-counters. Seriously, I couldn't backstab even a single enemy at a certain point. Most of the bosses where also immune to lower magic resistance. It was just ridicolous how in the end, TOB was just dispel & summon & beat the **** out of everything with physical damage. I also feel that pre-buffing kills immersion in almost any game. Don't get me wrong: pre-buffing makes sense and is a cool feature if the character knowledge and player knowledge are equal. If an NPC tells me "don't go there, there's a fire dragon there!", then naturally I will buff fire protection before entering the cave. If I enter a tomb, I will naturally put on my bonus-vs-undead mace. What I don't do, however, is expecting that there's a random demon behind the staircase that will immediately stun every single character in my party right after eye contact. What I don't do, is knowing that right after the staircase there is an enemy spellcaster with the symbol of fear ability. You didn't put up protection from fear? Well, pity you, horrid withing! **** like this just ain't fun for anyone. It would be a totally different story if you could actually react to such situations during the battle. If for example the fear ability casts long enough to allow putting protection up. And you would still have an advantage on a reload attempt, now that you know the fear is coming as then you don't have to cast it during combat anymore. I simply don't want to need meta-game knowledge to beat certain encounters. I want to play and beat the game with the knowledge my characters would have. Hard-counter is what destroyed Starcraft II for me. Wings of Liberty was much more about soft-counters than Heart of the Swarm. Battles where much more entertaining without those extreme unit choices and strategies that were all about "either this works or you die instantly". Rock-Paper-Scissiors is not strategic. It's pure luck. And while a certain amount of randomness can be cool and entertaining, the overuse of luck and meta-gaming preparation is just not fun anymore.