Humanoid

Depending on the prevailing game society's social norms, I don't see a problem with having a broad selection of 'townie' clothing, much like the real world, some of which may be designed to ...enhance, more than others. Armour though, I favour the practical and low key designs. Guess what I'm saying is that it's a valid and meaningful motivation for some game characters to want to increase their appeal to the player characters or any other NPC. It's a character to character interaction as opposed to a character-to-player one.

And the $5000 tier is sold out, could be an opportunity to introduce an alternative perk at that contribution level too... (And more broadly, about a quarter to a third of the limited $1k+ contributions have been taken up which seems a fair chunk)

U8 was okay once targetted jumping was patched in and the platforms stopped moving. :D My fear though is that LC will end up making a bunch of videos with full-party synchronised aerobics instead of playing the game. In all seriousness though, the problem with having fancy movement modes is that it's hard to implement on a party-scale. In a single-character game it's simple enough to jump over a fence. Having to jump a party of sixish over a fence would either be repetitive micromanagement or trust that the AI won't screw up its pathfinding trying to follow you.

I'd prefer fewer denser areas rather than a fully explorable world because it tends to lend a better sense of scale without the risk of having sparse, repetitive filler plains - consider the 3D and 2D implementations of the Elder Scrolls respectively for the downsides of this. An abstracted overland map like options two and three is potentially interesting but only if there's reasonable stuff to encounter without it turning to the equivalent of finding a needle in a haystack, or combing the whole map methodically looking for that special location - it's potentially interesting but probably outside the scope of this project (and when done badly, completely pointless like ME2/3's manual flying around). In view of that, I'd personally stick to option one at this point. As for horses, I'd probably lean towards abstracting them - purchasing horses reduces the time elapsed travelling between locales, but having to actually manage them would be a bit much I think. Think of a system like FO2's car I guess.

I'd have to say a zoomable (out, in this case) would have made PS:T better though.

But it's also grossly misused in some cases like in DA2's dungeons, er, dungeon.

Volume affects it I guess, but a lot of it is directly related to how much a country's postal service charges for exports in the first place. I shop online extensively, and buying stuff from the US always involves larger shipping costs than say, the UK (which not uncommonly ships free to Australia). I imagine it's just US Postal charging more than Royal Mail. At any rate, $10-15 is roughly in line with what I pay for the average order from Amazon US, and $20 is what I'd expect for the CE given Obs wouldn't have near the volume discount I imagine Amazon has. I admit the $30 charge on the $250 tier hurts a bit though, especially combined with the large gap from the previous tier. I've seen some other projects roll in the delivery charge for higher contribution tiers, which may have been worth considering, even if the net result is largely a psychological one.

Well in my ideal world, the result of such a check wouldn't be binary anyway. Coupled with a personal preference of removing RNG from any of these checks and I'd be supportive of a system where there are degrees of both failure and success, and the performing character should provide at least an estimation of how confident they are and their guess of the likely outcome. You could with good skill, silently pick a lock, with moderate skill you might open it noisily, and with barely-sufficient skill you might get through but damage the lock permanently.

On the other hand, the camera zooming into people's faces in the absence of voice acting might feel kind of weird.

To be fair, the $65 tier is actually two copies of the game, and therefore domestically would be outright the better choice for two people making a joint pledge, and for the internationals, it's effectively $10 more to get the physical copy. Somewhat too late to add early bird tiers now, I don't imagine there's any system to allow for automatically downgrading previous pledges from the corresponding full tier, so just unilaterally adding one is just asking for problems.

Had a relatively recent experience with Might and Magic 7, where choosing to get resurrected in the wrong temple brings you back as a zombie. Not a permanent affliction by any means though.

If the 1.1m figure isn't reached, then Kickstarter/Amazon will not take any cash at all, and they'll have to try again from scratch. If the figure is reached, then the entire total is charged, so the more the better - Amazon then take their cut (5%?) and the developers get the rest. Pledges sometimes get withdrawn or otherwise not paid, but this does not cause a project to "fail" if it's done in the last day or so of the drive. Stretch goals don't exist as actual things in the Kickstarter system and therefore aren't taken into account in terms of actual funding, they're just promises from the developer for certain milestones hit. One thing I am curious about is pledging directly via Kickstarter vs Paypal once the funding goal is reached - who takes the bigger cut? I suspect that the latter is actually more money in the bank for the developer once all fees and charges are accounted for. That said though, in marketing terms, having a high number on the former has its own benefits in terms for the snowball effect, seeing the number crystallised right there.

Well a large part of the problem with Dragon Age Origins was the Origins part of it. By funneling the half-dozen different starting points into one choke point at the beginning of the game, then proceeding linearly afterwards, they reduced the possibility of further personal character development since there were so many backgrounds just squashed into one and struggled to split back out again - like what happens when you mix the colours in your Play-Doh. The player character was overshadowed because the player character was metaphorically short, as opposed to the characters surrounding were tall. That said, points C and D are fine, indeed almost expected features, and I'd be happy to toy around with option B as well.

So, Mickey Rourke?

Can't really lean either way until we learn just how fine grained our control over the NPC's is. Yes, the fighter traditionally doesn't require a lot of micromanagement in this type of game, but whether that's a virtue depends on whether it's the only thing you're doing, or one of half-a-dozen actors you're directing. Mages having the wand autoattack in DAO was something I liked in this context, as opposed to the babysitting you'd need to do in the IE games.

And the sound quality. For audio obsessed people like me. FLAC Though providing multiple other formats both lossless and lossy should probably be done for the less tech-savvy people.

Actually makes me wonder whether it's just a screenshot of a scrollable map, or if those are the hard limits of the world as used in the game. Will the cloth map be an exact facsimile of that image, or show a wider perspective? In terms of a playable world, what we see is more than enough, but would be interesting in terms of both lore and aesthetics to have a bit more revealed.

A PC home, as long as it's strictly that (both the PC part and the home part), makes sense in that it gives the player a sense of belonging in the world. But as discussed in the NPC thread, it shouldn't really be a base of operations where your unused NPCs hang out and that, making them into subservient lackeys without lives or agendas of their own. It's just your home, the place you've lived prior to the events of the game. Of course, this assumes the player character isn't some outsider/outworlder shipwrecked/teleported into the setting. But I'd rather not see that.

To be fair, these days you'd probably get more people confused about how one would go about ripping music from a CD than the number of people confused about how to get the tracks onto CD or some other portable media. I'm still mostly CD-bound myself in terms of music listening, but all that an "official" printing of a CD would give is the art on the CD itself. That said, the tiers above $140 are pretty sparse, not talking in terms of rewards for them (since at that point it's really not about value for money anymore), but in terms of granularity. A couple more options - say $200 and $350 would probably both be worth consideration.

Looks like "White March" to me.

I like the descriptive place names over the generic fantasy type gibberish names - as a civilisation trait, I think having the prevailing one having a very literal sense of nomenclature is interesting in itself.

I'd take a design where the only *known* race is that of the humans. The other races may or may not exist, but regardless, have them portrayed as mythical creatures and not known to the civilisation of which the player is part of. Diversity is nice and all, but I feel it detracts from the world if within the first few hours of playing, you've assembled a ragtag group of elves, dwarves, goblins, kilrathi and whatnot. If the other races do exist, a later encounter can evoke a feeling of awe and wonder at discovering such an alien culture.

I'm assuming you can supplement your pledge (or make a brand new one) via Paypal anyway even after the close of the 'official' kickstarter, so presuming it hits the 1.1m target, there's probably no reason to feel rushed about which level you're shooting for.

My concern is not so much how the inventory is managed, but in keeping down the amount of stuff lootable to keep that inventory management in the background as much as possible. While I very much like ME2/3's essentially non-existent inventory, that's probably not suitable for this particular instance - but I don't want to see mundane crafting materials (e.g. spools of twine, non-magical hides, iron buckles) for instance, let alone outright vendor trash like in the Gamebryo games. I'd also prefer no alchemy, if not altogether as in no potions at all, then at least no player-brewable ones from gathered ingredients. Handwave stuff like medical/first-aid supplies away as an assumed persistent 'kit' instead of having multiple consumable ones. If you have to have food, abstract it has having X days of rations instead of having actual food items. Leave quest items out of the inventory altogether. More contentiously perhaps, and as mentioned in some other thread here, I'd also be keen to experiment whether armour could be something that's implemented not as loot but as, say, a character enhancement you buy from the smithy. It'd be something that exists on the character sheet but not in the inventory menu. You could upgrade it, buy a new set, or otherwise change it, but "piece of armor" would never be a thing you could carry. But as for the inventory management, then yeah, I'm happy enough with a party-based pool of general stuff. Anything to keep the complexity of it down.

Tangential perhaps, but I can see a possible design choice to make the majority of armour (and clothing I guess) not lootable at all - rationalise this by reasonably stating that in the act of murdering wearer of said attire, you have also rendered their gear unsalvagably repaired. For one, this will cut down on OCD looting tendencies and prevent the absurd scenario of carrying multiple sets of full plate in one's backpack. I'm also in favour of the angle of having your gear acquisition be more "special" than lucking out on a dropped piece of loot. Back to the nudity thing - I do absolutely support it in context, in that it's pointless having to force the direction to imply it rather than just show it. A comparison would be how the 60s Batman depicted violence (fun as it was). I like how The Witcher 2 for example does it. And in a game setting where a strip club is a reasonable location to implement, it'd be the same. Not sure this new medieval-era gameworld would manage to fit any relevant context in, however - limited as my knowledge of old-timey whorehouses is, I'm not sure you'll find the, ahem, merchandise lounging around unclad in the lobby.