Humanoid

I remember, I had the lasagna.

The stated design that general encounters outside the main path won't be scaling ones probably sinks the idea anyway. If they want to have the BG-esque high-level import for people to abuse then I won't complain of course since it costs nothing, but should be a completely unsupported way of playing in terms of balance.

Y'know a heavily narrative-tinged flight sim from Obsidian might actually tempt me.... Think Strike Commander but with more out-of-****pit options and interaction.

I was a bit confused too, but the most useful bit of information was hidden in the oft-ignored FAQ section at the bottom. Confession time: I've never played any of the QfG games. I'm familiar with the concept but have no idea how the non-adventurey parts played. I can see where they're coming from when they talk about emphasising the RPG side of it in this new game though, and I support it. Well, to the tune of $35 anyway for now.

Food as a maintenance item is unnecessary, but I have a larger beef (er, pun not intended) with food as a healing item. It's not only unnecessary duplication - I don't like healing potions either but it's the lesser evil - but also makes no sense whatsoever.

I'd point to my sig as to what I personally most associate with fanboyism, but nowadays I suspect most of them aren't so much fanboys as much as interns at PR firms.

The endgame then is when you reach Robert Palmer girl level, presumably.

Backing the derived-stamina and static-health wave here. Further, I'd try chopping out the notion of a constitution stat in the first place and try rolling it into strength. To balance, most hit chance modifiers will then end up as agility/dexterity related. Strength - damage, stamina Agility - chance to hit, avoidance Then you could parallel the mental stats - Mental strength = Intelligence Mental agility = Wits And have them affect spellcasting in a similar way. I'm a bit unsure about the ubiquitious charisma stat. Is it required in addition to wits, or perhaps as a replacement? ...I think I've sailed a fair way off course so I'll be quiet now.

Graghraghagh, let me reset: it looks like the initial link and the specs after don't match - I didn't notice the "R3" in the URL, which tends to happen when I'm posting at 1am. Anyway, the specs you posted are from an Aurora R4, which is the successor model, kinda. The giveaway is the CPU, which is an LGA2011 Sandy Bridge-E CPU which runs on the X79 chipset, where the R3 had a "standard" LGA1155 Sandy Bridge CPU which runs on the P67 platform. So what's the difference? Sandy Bridge-E is intended to be a workstation CPU: the 3820 is the basic one, but most of the range are 6-core CPUs. The 'standard' Sandy Bridge is more consumer oriented and are what you'd typically find in shops. Now here's a catch though: for gaming purposes they perform more or less the same, except the workstation CPU can't be overclocked. Yeah that's right, the CPU in the newer model is effectively *worse*, unless you customise their default spec and pay for the next CPU up, which is over double the cost of the base one. So yeah, best try to nail down the actual specs before you buy, including whether it's an R3 or an R4.

It's a bit tricky to find definitive information about the graphics setup, mainly because the GTX555 is an OEM card which never sold at retail, although I did fail to note that it had two of them running. With that in mind, I'd revise the score to say that in terms of raw graphics power it can keep up, at roughly where a good single card today will do. However the 1GB memory limit will be an issue: I suspect that at 1080p, even 4xAA will be too much in the more graphically intensive titles, and it'd choke badly if you ever went for a 2560x1440/1600 screen, or a multi-monitor setup. Aside from that though, you can keep using it through to the next gen. Basic Googling reveals that a single GTX555 is about equivalent to a single GTX460: reviews for the latter are much much easier to find if you want to get a gauge on performance.

Can't tell because that's just a skeleton spec, presumably when the system was current the website would have allowed the buyer to specify all the guts of the machine. The only real hint there is the P67 chipset, which likely means it's a Sandy Bridge based system, therefore from the generation just prior to the current one. EDIT: Posted before second post, oops - from the specs It's nominally a high-end system: the CPU is on the high-end of the reasonably-priced CPUs of last generation, and there's a stack of memory. But the graphics setup is utterly ridiculous and should be replaced as soon as practical. It's a very unbalanced system. (EDIT2: Sort of withdrawn, see next post)

The right decision in the end, at least in terms of my own selfish interests. Even when they started to flesh out what they were doing, what I didn't see was a genuinely compelling reason as to *why* I would play this over anything that came before. What improvements are they bringing to the table given all that's possible now that wasn't possible in the past? Now I acknowledge that for some, the promise of a new game just like the old one may be enough to get them to commit. I tend to come from a different angle from a lot of traditional RPG enthusiasts in that for the most part, I don't have particularly fond memories of most design aspects of those games. They're invaluable from the perspective of being a signpost, but *not* as a manual as to how to make a new game. And I certainly don't exempt the Infinity Engine games from that view - throughout the last month, the least compelling arguments about the design direction of Project Eternity have been the ones along the lines of "it worked well enough like that in the IE games". The point is that, yes, perhaps the industry as a whole has taken some wrong turns throughout the past decade and a half. Yes, we should retrace our steps to see where we went wrong. But we don't just get back to that point and stop. We forge a new way, different, but forward. So in terms of Shaker, my view is this: we've seen their pitch for the old-school side of their plans, but I'd like to see them regroup and see them show us the new side of that coin.

Has to get approved by a Kickstarter staffer before it goes properly live and start taking cash, but all the details about the Hero U Kickstarter are available: For those unenlightened, it's Corey and Lori Ann Cole's successor to their Quest for Glory games.

Or the reverse situation where say, 1.7m is raised on their site and 400k on Kickstarter, therefore technically meeting the overall goal but not being able to actually claim a significant proportion of it. Fortunately it looks like there's no real risk of either scenario occurring given present numbers, but it could have been handled more gracefully, yeah.

Presumably a Witcher game - be it expansion or sequel - since there was a news article 6-12 months ago saying there were multiple games in the works, one of which was a new IP (I assume cyberpunk is sort of "new").

^ Given how early development on this is, I was hoping they'd sneak in an announcement about the other thing they're working on, but alas.

Only real memory of them is basically never seeing them alive because they didn't have enough hit dice to survive the instant death effect of Cloudkill.

Good to see it finally on Kickstarter for some extra visibility. Interesting too observe the backer patterns from both sides: almost a $90 average pledge on the official site, as compared to $42 on Kickstarter. It may just be a timing things: that the big pledges came in early and so went directly to the official site; or it may be the nature of Kickstarter itself resulting in "drive-by" smaller pledges from people with perhaps a more incidental interest in the project. I know I backed a few projects that I wouldn't have normally, except that I was already logged in and spending on other big-name projects. Will certainly pledge pretty big myself, but will probably wait until my card recovers from the Eternity charge. Thinking of more or less matching that pledge.

Freezing would be a function of the browser, not the forum software. I can freeze every gif on this page instantly by just hitting Esc. (Firefox)

What's one level of a dungeon defined as anyway? Better 15 managable levels than one sprawling labyrinth at any rate - both from the perspective of navigability and of division of effort. In another thread I compared it to Berlin Alexanderplatz. As a movie at 15 hours, too long, surely. But that's why it's divided into 14 parts. Looks like that's exactly the approach that's been taken here anyway, there will be leaps in difficulty level between the levels such that you *can't* tackle them all in one sitting. That said, I probably won't be playing it personally unless I do repeated playthroughs.

Ultima 7. By such a margin that I didn't really have to ponder the question at all. Ironic perhaps then, if the thread title is taken literally, since Origin apparently managed to lose the source code for it within months of the initial product release.

Despite the obvious, I don't mind it as general policy: wouldn't be the first place to do it, and I take no particular exception. Indeed I used to run my connection through a software proxy (Proxomitron if anyone remembers it, unfortunately discontinued due to the death of the author) that froze all animated gifs, ironically. That said, having carried it since the opening of the Interplay forums in 2003 (I wasn't special enough to be allowed a custom avatar on the BIS boards ), it's probably more closely associated with my identity here than my utterly generic and forgettable username (which I'm not particularly fond of).

I would say both. To explain, the idea of choosing the best person for the job in most contexts makes perfect sense: your best bargainer engages the merchant, your best orator makes the rousing speech. But I'm also expecting interactions on a more individual scale: intra-party dialogue, for example, would make no sense whatsoever if you could pick the participants. And outside that, there are still situations where a conversation may be addressed to you specifically - if your father is talking to you, it's hardly sensible to delegate the answer to your friend. I don't imagine it would be too much of a task to flag given conversations as player-character only.

As an answer made in a vacuum back at the start of this drive, I would have unquestionably backed the idea of multi-classing. With the class inflation that's occurred over the numerous stretch goals, and as information about the skill system that's being revealed, I have to say I'm doing a complete about-turn and now prefer that it not be implemented. It's not a question of balance or optimisation, it's simply that I believe there's now plenty enough latitude within the individual classes to reasonably represent any character I would plan to create.

This is one of the things that I think sounds very good, but in practice ends up being very dangerous to implement - the reason being that once you reach the chokepoint or funnel where the strands merge, it's exceeding difficult to avoid creating an abrupt-feeling, rather jarring transition to the "main" storyline. Motivations set up in the initial area get orphaned, characters forgotten. By no means am I claiming it's impossible of course, particularly with the quality of writers available, but even then I would still question the relative worth of the addition relative to what I see as a very large effort. I would go so far as to say that this approximate feature in Dragon Age was essentially the iceberg to that game's Titanic in terms of my enjoyment of its narrative. That said, if such a thing were to be done, some of the problems could be alleviated by setting the events of the "pre-game" a significant time previous to the events of the game proper - and I'm thinking years here.