Humanoid

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

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.