Humanoid

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?

I imagine the most that would happen is that they add one of those scaling goals for any amount above $3.5m, a'la the dungeon levels, instead of having fixed binary goals.

I had sort of already decided on how much to pledge even before reading any part of the reward structure - instead it was more or less decided based on how much I wanted the game in comparison to the previous games I had pledged for. So my manner of thinking was, "Hmm, I've pledged $100 to Moebius and Broken Sword, and $150 to Wasteland 2. I'd like a new Obsidian game a lot more than the former two, and a little more than the latter one, so I'll go in about $200." Alas when I opened up the Kickstarter page for the first time, there was no $200 tier, so I waited a bit to decide based on the information going out, whether to lowball it or highball it. Ended up with the $250 mark ($280 shipped). With present information at hand I'd value the game at the low-300s, so I may add on a couple physical trinkets - but I can't stretch for $500, especially as I've just found out a couple days ago that I've cracked the frame of my road bike and will have to buy a new one. I've actually got half a mind to, instead of doing any addons to my pledge, open another account at Kickstarter and make a separate pledge for $65, because I'd rather have a second boxed copy than say, a couple of T-shirts. (The rational - well, comparatively more rational - part of me says that even if I could pledge $500, I'd be better off doing in as two separate contributions instead of going for the $500 tier ....ahhh, that's the silly accountant side of me that I always try to repress)

The point is that you may find the combat approach to be the most enjoyable one. ....just as the stealth junkies play the stealthy way because it's the most enjoyable way for them. ....just as the speech junkies play the speechy way because it's the most enjoyable way for them. If no one finds the combat solution to be the most enjoyable, then the problem is entirely nothing to do with the XP system, but because the combat mechanics turned out to be unfun and should be redesigned.

Aside, would just like to note that we've just passed Double Fine's final Kickstarter-only figure: $3,337,163, over $3,336,371.

No live count as such, one of the project guys will semi-regularly post a manual update in the Kickstarter comments - check the filtered comments here: http://www.kickstarter.com/profile/obsidian/comments

Assuming the Adventurer's Hall works how I imagine it would, it also provides a further measure of insurance against the perils of perma-death - the other being the claim that the game will be at least somewhat balanced with less-than-maximum party sizes. Not sure if it's been answered, but would be interesting to see if the player character is expendable - does the game continue with the rest of the party as if nothing happened? Do you get teleported to the Hall and made to create a new character? Outright game over screen?