Humanoid

I could see a figure approaching that, if you were to include long-term Paypal pledges: that is, assuming the scenario that contributions will continue to be accepted over the next year. Say it finally closed six months out from release date - i.e. late 2013 - I can see a fair chunk of people "pledging" then as an effective pre-order for a game that should be then be a pretty known quantity.

Need to keep in mind that if these characters we'll be playing will be part of an ongoing series, it'd be best if we don't hit the heights of material wealth just yet. Certainly no lord of the realm stuff with dominion over throngs of serfs. Personally I'd stick to middle class digs with my character.

It was pointed out somewhere else here that it's just the fancy edging obscuring the full text - it's "drowned tombs" as confirmed by Josh.

In an immediate sense, VA is just a matter of trading a large cost for a possible immersion benefit, but that's not a thing I'm really worried about either way. My concerns would be more about implications for the future should the developers wish to expand on content - in this scenario what full VA tends to do is to "show the seams" so to speak, where the addon stuff meets the original content. Even Bioware with there vastly larger budget suffered from this, for example, in ME2, where the two DLC characters had minimal interaction with any existing aspects of the game and were restricted to self-contained comments, because of the practical difficulties in retrofitting any interaction hooks to include this new element. Doing it in pure text would be a relative doddle.

For once I want a myth or legend in a video game to turn out to be false.

I liked the idea, as tried in DA:O, of merging the wizard and the cleric classes, and instead adding the options for diversity to be choices within that class. All the greater shame then that for whatever reason, there needed to be two physical fighting classes. But anyway, my take: Fighter Magic-user Diplomat Tradesman Academic Where's the rogue you might ask? Personally I think the concept of the rogue tends to get split down the middle, the light fighter on one side and the non-fighting sneaky dude on the other. I think that between the fighter and the diplomat, provided enough customisation within each, cover for either archetype.

Thinking about it more, I'd go a step further and eliminate the concept of weight altogether. Instead implement some broad restriction on the bulky stuff you can carry: armour is always worn (had a discussion yesterday in making armour a non-item), and a character can carry a primary and backup weapon at most (Witcher 1 sort of did this). The idea then is that no restrictions need to be placed on managing the weight of various little knickknacks. No more shuffling stuff around just so you can pick up that little potion without getting encumbered. It's something worth experimenting with at any rate, though if it turns out to be an unfun mess I'll be the first to recant.

Yeah, I'd have to echo the sentiment that the middling goals aren't particularly inspiring, but they are at regularly spaced intervals such that hitting them is hardly going to be a big endeavour. Hopefully the new races and classes won't be something they've just bolted on and are at least previously-established designs that may have originally been planned to be non-playable ones. The worst case would be a case of adding a new exotic race with minimal context and making the corresponding companion at that goal level a token character which ends up the only member of that race you see in the world. As in "Hey, you can now play as a Tiger-man! Tiger-men are a race from the very distant south and are never seen in these lands. Oh, except for this cool new Tiger-man NPC we've added to show you how cool they are!" Yeah, that's extreme hyperbole and I don't expect it'll be anywhere near that jarring (unless Bethesda are contracted to implement it), but something vaguely like this is a real concern for me.

name job bye It's not something I feel strongly about in general, but I'd be a bit concerned about it diluting the quality of the dialogue in a game that I expect to be heavily based on it. A keyword system is functional enough in a context where NPCs can be a bit like bulletin boards - Morrowind for example - but having those bulletin board type responses would be jarring in a game like Torment, where you'd have the elegant, flowing "regular" dialogue then a totally out of context rote Q&A session.

I'd cautiously support randomness in areas where it would improve the experience of exploring the game world, and set up some difference in repeat playthroughs. Randomness in terms of skill checks, not so much, though I could tolerate to an extent a minor random modifier (1d4+20 instead of 1d20+4, to illustrate). Specifically though, I'd limit the scope of even the "good" randomness such that its effects can be expected, in terms of balancing, to fall within a fairly narrow range. No random encounters which drop a unique all-powerful weapon, for example (though I can accept an 'interesting' one that might exist as a stylistic alternative to a regular weapon of your level), and any other wealth gain should be dwarfed by that provided by "core" content, to ensure player resources remains within a fairly controlled and predictable range. I'd probably also strongly lean against any of these encounters awarding experience to avoid the grinding issue.

I'm generally opposed to anything that increases the complexity of inventory management. If necessary, the masses-and-masses of currency issue could be just explained away by abstracting your 'wealth' counter as "equivalent in standard currency worth of portable riches", like diamonds and stuff I guess. But even that to me is probably unnecessary.

Sure, but caution needs to be taken to ensure that in doing so, you don't end up restricting yourself in a future instalment because of some side-fluff you've written today. I remember a Richard Garriott interview where he talks about how he sets out to avoid defining certain elements of his story elements until it becomes necessary to do so. In that sense, what I'd like to see then is not just some bulk information dump, but to progress the revelations more methodically: by steps, or degrees of involvement with the actual elements that the player encounters in the game. Obviously the biggest detail would be written about the stuff you encounter in the flesh. Then you have background directly related to it, say a history. Then you have more tenuous links defined more loosely. And beyond that, stuff only tangentially related - you can leave this stuff vaguely defined, almost like myth or rumour.

Would be fun to see the devs bypass the whole human-centric argument by implementing a race where, in a not-uncommon form of sexual dimorphism, the female is physically dominant. Imagine a race where the females looked like ogres and the males looked like gnomes - or for a milder example, orcs and elves respectively. The lack of something like this, given the range of playable species in high-fantasy, has always been a bit of a letdown, though there are some borderline cases: I could buy, for example, male drow being smaller and physically inferior, even if I'm unfamiliar with the "official" statistics: it plays well with the whole spider theme and the image of the female spider devouring the male.

And almost as hypnotic as the old disk defragmenter graphic.

That said, if you are going to port it, whether immediately or eventually, it's probably a non-trivial overall cost saving to be mindful of that fact while doing the original development as opposed to disregarding that direction at first and trying to go back and update it after the fact.

As an absolute A or B answer, I'd take the skill based system. Looking beyond the label though, the systems are not as diametrically opposed as they might seem. D&D3-esque multiclassing is, when if comes down to it, essentially a less granular version of the skill based system, where instead of allocating single points, you get what is essentially a preset bundle of "points" - less flexible but perhaps adding more flavour in terms of making distinct characters. Both cater for what I want out of a system though, flexibility to not be permanently stuck to the one predefined development path because of the option you chose way back at the start of the game, and the ability to adapt your party members to roles so that you're not essentially forced to pick based on class over personality.

It's really just setting a baseline of what a level one character is, really. If you're going to apply the level mechanics to every entity in the game, then sure, it would make sense that a level 1 would be your average guy on the street and to bump up the player character's starting level. If the character system is going to be applied only to your party, and perhaps your foes, then it's a doddle to just have that level 1 baseline as say, experienced army veteran. In practical terms, it's a matter of whether you want to have random civilian NPCs attackable or not and whether they should fight back as a fully fledged combat-enabled actor or just have them keel over when you hit them. Having each NPC be fully realised makes for an elegant system sure, but there's also a potential shortcut around some work that largely would go unseen by the majority of playstyles (i.e. non-mass-homicidal ones) in having generic NPCs being simplified objects (with some possible static interactions like merchants).

I think it'd be a bit of an ethical grey area to not spend all of the pledged money directly towards the advertised product. But yes, I'd be in favour of locking down the technical feature set (such as voice acting or graphical fidelity) at the same level, regardless of whether 1.1m or 5.5m is pledged, devoting the stretch goals to gameplay content.

As a former long-term WoW player, I know all too much about the travails of threat management system, right from the birth and development of the threat meter concept which came about in vanilla WoW. It's something I definitely don't want to see in a single player RPG. At the same time though, I don't want to have to micromanage positioning throughout combat, especially given the AI (assuming you're giving it some control of your party) mightn't agree with you about what a sound tactical positioning entails. To an extent you can sort of offset this by either having an active "protect" role for a character you would have act as a sort of bodyguard for your rear ranks, or just implement a passive mechanic for nearby characters. The idea, broadly, is to abstract the effect of a harassing defender on an enemy trying to make a surgical strike on your rear ranks. When in range/adjacent to your mage for example, a hostile would suffer a significant penalty to their chance of hitting said mage if they're currently being hit by your fighter. More generally, the mechanic can simply be applied as a passive effect to *any* combat actor being hit by more than one other actor at a given time.

I want them hidden behind a "Wild Wasteland" toggle so I can ignore them, at least the first time through. Except not have the toggle as something that takes up a trait slot, dammit.

I think the general practice for those trolls was to just switch to any weapon that did a bonus point of fire or acid damage though, but either way I wouldn't really call it strategic or even tactical. Anyhow, I personally recall playing BG2 making extremely sparing use of magic. Party composition was still fairly standard, but the way it worked out, I *never* used the rest function in a dungeon (or equivalent area), ever. If I ever played it again I probably wouldn't even think of restricting myself in that manner, but back then my playstyle was extremely cautious, exhaustive, and well, slow. Anyway, if this post is all sorts of rambling, tangential stuff, it's mostly because I don't really have anything to say about the general subject - I anticipate that the way I'll be playing this game, most likely I will just try to get away with controlling my player character and letting the AI script do whatever it wants with my magic-wielding party members. Magic and music tend to be the least of my concerns with any game, really. That said, I will make one exception where I do feel strongly detracts from a game: "Buff" magic. All this unfortunate tradition tends to be is to end up as a bit of a chore, all you're doing is managing uptime instead of making any interesting decisions. If there are to be any "buffs" implemented, and I sincerely hope not, at least making them passive abilities that are gained just by having a certain party member/class in your group.

It's not so much the resolution as much as the raw size of the screen. DOS-era VGA games look blocky not because the average resolution went up, but because the physical dimensions of the display went up. The game looking sharp on your 30" monitor today (I say 30" as I imagine the average monitor size may creep up towards that over the next decade) will look much the same on the 30" monitor of 2025 no matter what resolution it operates as, whether 2D or 3D. We're no longer at the stage where we'll see a doubling of diagonal measurement (and thus quadrupling of viewable area) in monitors since the limitation becomes one of usability rather than one of technology. That 100" display won't be sitting an arm's length away from you, that's for certain. All that said though, I hope the art for the game is scanned at least to the maximum standard available today, and looking at the near future, 4k would be nice. I'd add that the point at which 3D has surpassed 2D in terms of what is possible artistically has likely already been reached. I haven't played many of the games quoted here, but I'm of the belief that DA:O for example is past that point - it's failure then is not down to any technical aspect but one of art direction (one that seems to treat colour as an enemy).

Fallout 3 was a case of cripping oneself creatively, not technologically.

I'm guessing the point is that real world mages aren't getting offended by their portrayal in video games.

Interestingly it's also only 3.74GBP in the UK. http://www.steampric...madness-returns I can't help though because they're also asking for $12.50 in Australia, albeit in US dollars it's not-being-ripped-off-by-quite-as-much. Looking at top rip-offs for my amusement/rage: CoD:MW2 US: $20USD UK: 20GBP EU: 25EUR AU: $90USD