Humanoid

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.

Hahaha, just noticed as a result of this that my e-mail address on this forum is to an account that's been dead for over 5 years.... D'oh.

I actually was planning on building an AMD Trinity based system next year anyway in a miniITX HTPC build. Shame that it can't be shipped overseas but I get why with the warranty aspects and such. If not for that, it would have been right where I wanted to spend. Off to work now, so I'll neither see the end-of-drive party nor be able to sneak in a last minute increase, but have added a little more just now for another T-shirt and the playing cards.

I wonder if the site is being hammered. Keep trying? Went to add the cards and a shirt to my pledge and the confirmation page 404ed on me. Seems to have gone through okay though.

The Kickstarter ends at midday for me, and I'm off to work, like, right now.

1) Early work has started on it, and an early estimate of April 2014 was provided a month ago, when the expected budget was approximately $1.1m. While the estimate has not been revised, it is expected that development will take longer since the budget, and therefore the scale of the game, will now be 3-4 times larger. 2) Provided your pledge is $25 or more, yes. Pledges below $25 are considered good will donations.

Increasing the number of books needing to be signed from ~500 to ~2000 might stall the game development when all the devs develop carpal tunnel though.

Or is it? We'll sprint to the $4m castle, managing to hit it right before the time runs out, whereupon inside we find Feargus, wearing a mushroom hat, informing us: "Thank you backers! But our game is in another castle!" Consequently the current Kickstarter will be cancelled, and a new one set up with an initial target of World 2-1Goal 2.1.

It's only a model. On second thought, let's not go to that castle, 'tis a silly place.

If anything, PSU fan swaps are easier than messing around with video card coolers. After all, cheap standard parts lead to lower parts costs for the manufacturer. Don't know about your specific circumstance of course.

Even with home theatre setups, the quality of upscaling is pretty variable - optimally you'd find which component in the line did the best job, and make sure it and only it is set to do the scaling. It may be the playback device, the receiver, or the TV. But I digress - on pixel density, sure, I can't say I wouldn't take a smaller dot pitch, but with qualifications - I believe a colour photograph is no more than a few hundred dpi. I note that even the vaunted and cleverly marketed retina display is not currently handled by MacOS meaningfully, other than scaling the entire desktop 2x - you can't set the desktop to the screen's full resolution. And yet sharp details are perfectly fine on it. I believe it's a red herring to pursue dpi presently: the issue with older games is not so much the pixels, but the large increase in viewable area, or more accurately, effective viewable area. I do not believe an increase of the kind we've seen over the last decade and a half will ever repeat, since the issue is no longer one of technology, but that of ergonomics. With that in mind, I believe the most important thing needed are fairly simple forward-looking elements - making sure UI elements are not fixed by pixels like the titles of yore, and making sure the game can peg display area to screen size instead of screen resolution. The art itself is not an issue, any reasonable scaler will not degrade the quality. That said, it's unfortunate that the cheaper end of modern displays seem to lack reasonable scaling options - to the point of not even being able to leave the input aspect ratio well enough alone, or even just display the input pixel-for-pixel. This however is a hardware problem, not a game problem.

Wouldn't have been all that profitable for me since there's only two EA games left on GoG that I want and don't already have: Syndicate and Theme Hospital, which haven't been put on sale since they appeared. As it stands, I have 18 of the 26 non-free EA-GoG titles.... Out of all the stuff that was gettableon Origin, I only have ME, ME2, The Sims 3, SimCity 4, and DAO; but even if I could pick any of them up for free right now, the only one I'd really consider is Spore, which I've never tried.

Some time ago I believe there was an issue with the Australian Origin store where a handful of games (about 10) all got marked as being $0. Those 'purchases' were honoured too, so I guess it's precedent of a sort. Though back then, it wasn't any shenanigans to do with discount codes, fake addresses and cookie wiping, it was just a plain pricing error. While I had caught word of the latest problem shortly before it was fixed, the list of products it worked with - bearing in mind the code was specifically written and coded correctly to not work with new release games - was pretty underwhelming, so it's not really a huge deal. The list:

It can occur when your narrative starts to repeat itself, which makes it more of an issue of writing quality than of absolute length. In the same way there are some movies that feel too long at under two hours, yet others that can grip you for four or more hours. So there is a point, but it can, with increasing difficulty, be pushed forward indefinitely. That said, probably best not to watch the entire ~15 hours running time of Berlin Alexanderplatz in one sitting.

Probably easiest to think with a game designer's hat on. What are those hypothetical adventurers doing to have been put into the game? Maybe they have a quest item on them, even if you don't have an official quest to retrieve it. Maybe they're on a quest of their own, which you now know about and can now do in their stead. Or maybe it just turned out they were public enemy number one in a neighbouring region. In any of the above, or any other, cases, the encounter would have links to some future outcome (they may be the beginning of a chain, or you may have blundered into a chain midway through), not just something placed there for the hell of it.

It's just a simple observation of what's missed when the argument of "doing something" needing to inherently be worth XP is made. I certainly don't back it, but it also illustrates the flaw of the argument that balancing doesn't matter in a single-player game. And while it's not a point I had intended, it's interesting to me now to observe that reducing the XP reward for a hypothetical repeat-sneak is sort of double-dipping on the penalty, unless as a parallel, the second kobold you face at level one is worth less than the first.

Just thinking out aloud, I'm picturing a scenario where to get between two different area, you must navigate a tunnel full of foes. There's no real point to the scenario, just that the concept of it amuses me. You sneak through to the other side, 1000xp You kill some or all of them to get to the other side, 1000xp At this point nothing is contentious, what is, and what the topic of this thread is, is whether you can claim both of those XP blocks in the same playthrough. But that discussion has come and gone for me, what mildly amused me is the image of you then sneaking back through the same tunnel to get back to the first area. Now "realistically", this "should" be worth another block of XP, the quantity doesn't matter. Maybe after enough repetitions it'll become like taking candy from a baby and award nothing. But I wonder, would a "traditionalist" who claims that on the basis of realism, you should be rewarded for killing those enemies after they've been bypassed, see anything wrong with the notion of repeated XP rewards for sneaking past those same foes? After all, you're doing/accomplishing something and should be rewarded for it, no?