Humanoid

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

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.