Humanoid

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 (EDIT2: Sort of withdrawn, see next post)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.

Personally prefer no potions in terms of being a combat tool (as opposed to quest items/macguffins). Setting aside my personal disdain for the inventory management aspect of them, the other design problem is that they also tend to overlap with magic spells, and therefore don't particularly add much in terms of variety there. But if they're around, then I'd take the approach to the other extreme, in that they'd be super-rare but potentially single-handedly turn the battle (see the note about interesting magic effects in the next paragraph, which is the one I wrote first). They'd be things you genuinely save and use perhaps less than once-in-a-dozen battles, when you really find yourself in trouble. I'll fully admit to being very biased against "buff" magic in general, in particular preparatory ones that you leave up constantly to be at your best in combat - it's really nothing but busywork and adds nothing tactically: "Okay, next battle, make sure the Bless spell is on and will last until the end of this fight." What is interesting is more short-term and reactive stuff, like putting up a sphere of invulnerability around a heavily wounded ally, or something that might give you 10 seconds of so of double-speed actions.

Just thinking out aloud of course, but I'm starting to think an even tighter restriction would be justifiable. a) One item, and one item only, of magical nature on your body. Ring, amulet, earring, hair tie, whatever - just the one, but ensure they're very interesting effects instead of just boring modifiers. Armour is a tricky issue - my position at the beginning of the project was that it'd be mostly mundane gear which wouldn't cause problems, but that seems rather unlikely now. Still, I'd rather see armour as something special but not strictly magical in the absolute sense - made from an alloy the secret of which has been lost to the ages, or the cliched dragon's skin, etc. Magic weapons on the other hand I don't really take issue with in terms of how they're usually done. Incidental aside: I've never been a fan of any gear of any kind affecting non-combat skills. Both from an in-game immersion perspective ("No, you say? Give me a moment to put on my Obsidian T-shirt." *shuffle shufle* "How about now?"), and from experience of it not playing well in effect. Combat bonuses are less problematic though not particularly interesting, admittedly. With the "single magic item" design, interesting effects to me as things like converting your fire spells to ice damage, maybe damage reflection, increasing odds of enemy panic - stuff that doesn't make sense on regular gear. I might be convinced that a tangentially non-combat related effect, like 'sense lies' might be passable, but something like "Amulet of making people say you're awesome in bed even though you're not*" is probably not okay. Incidental aside two: I'd also like to see the effects of items tied in a sensible way to the nature of the item. A sword of bleeding wounds, fine. A sword of parrying, fine. A sword of damage resistance, no. I'd expect some contention over a design like that, so tossing out an alternative: b) The magic of such items is contained in an inherently transferable focus - in your typical stock fantasy setting this will probably be a gem or similar - which you can therefore equip in more than one potential fashion. Whether you'd need to find a jeweler or some sort of craft check to do so I'm not particularly concerned about.

I'd rather do away with rings altogether - was always kind of arbitrary why some pieces of jewelery qualify as being magical and others don't. Loot drops, hey a magic item. Why are two rings okay, a ring plus a necklace okay, but two necklaces, Mr T style, not? Why do I have to pray the loot gods drop exactly 12 rings and 6 necklaces for my party? If we're going to have magical jewelery then I'd prefer to just genericise the slots for all jewelery.

1-there will not be random (procedural) generated environments 2-even if there will be a city underground, it would still be a city. I personally considered the underdark in BGII as a big fat dungeon. I'd back the Underdark concept, and would probably play it if designed in such a manner. Otherwise I would most likely skip it altogether as it's not really my style of gameplay (especially since it's quite likely I will be soloing on my initial playthrough). Not a complaint as such, mind you, I regard the whole thing as sort of a bonus feature, like deleted scenes on a movie DVD, nice that it's there but mostly inconsequential at best.

i thought 500 dollar and up tiers do not have shipping costs They don't, and neither does $30 cover a shirt *and* playing cards. Either three decks of cards, or a shirt and $5 leftover for a dev's coffee. Could do a separate $5 pledge on PayPal to make something of it I guess.

Or if it's about the constantly spawning monsters, to just ignore them and run past. Makes it a little better, but it still wouldn't stop me swearing about the swamp, mind.

The default character I use in my first run through CRPGs is usually a thief. Not a bloody rogue, a thief. A thief who steals neither for necessity nor for the thrills, but for the purely rational reason of that it's the easiest way to make a living. Evil? Maybe. Don't know. Don't care. What I do know is that it's almost second nature playing the character now, and there's essentially no pondering of my options, it's usually an instant decision as to which one is in character. If playing an evil character meant ranking options a, b, c, and d in order of least evil to most evil, and carefully evaluating and then choosing the last option, then obviously I'm doing it wrong.

The Yes Man worked reasonably well in New Vegas as a fallback option that could be taken regardless of your game state. Sure, it was a little stretch that he could infinitely assume a new body, but nowhere nearly as egregious as plot armour. Wouldn't be surprised if they managed to squeeze in something similar for Eternity. Aside, the one of my fondest memories of gaming was successfully reproducing the trick I had read about, for Ultima 8, to get rid of the "policeman" Beren the sorcerer, by abusing the pathing and getting him to drown in his own pool. Once accomplished, I was mostly free to slaughter almost anyone in town. Of course, in future attempts, I just turned on the hackmover and placed him over the water manually. Or placed a tile of water under him....

Just did it via the built in function - the activation email took almost half an hour to get through (think it was on my end though) which freaked me out a little, but I think I'm all good now. Assuming of course neither you or any other of the big cheeses tried to send me anything between early 2007 and now. Fortunately I didn't really need any of the functions like PM notification: I haven't received a single one since registering on day dot.