Tigranes

It was composed by Justin Bell (I'm having a brain freeze, name may be wrong), the in-house audio man in Obsidian. He may end up being the composer, he may not.

Keep in mind I don't work in their offices or anything. For the most part my information just comes from being around for a long time. Maybe they do have $, but what I described is pretty much how all developers operate, which is the terrible thing about the industry. Interns don't go for much these days. I guess Sawyer could sing for cash.

I'm not sure about the 'financial resources' The whole problem of the current industry model is that very few developers ever have surplus cash in that sense; they live hand-to-mouth. Dev X signs up with Publisher Y in 2012 for a game. The contract says Y will give them $ for X to make the game, plus a bonus if the game does well on metacritic or something. X generally uses all that money to pay their employees to make the game. Game is released; it misses metacritic by a point or something; they get nothing of the profits. They have just made a game that sold maybe a million copies, but financially, they're the same place they started in: no money. Now, it is different sometimes with, say, Valve or Blizzard, or in the old days like Origin or John Romero. But I don't think Obsidian would have millions of dollars to do something like that, not without risking the company's survival. If they release Eternity and they sell enough copies to turn a profit, then that's different. That money will go to them, and we might see a very novel sight - people who made popular games making a profit. Edit: for the length, I'm sure I said this already, but "hours" is a notoriously shaky thing. It took me under 10 hours for Jade Empire; it took more than 20 for others. BG2 is a "100+ hour epic" but can take other people less than half that. What I expect is a little smaller than IWDs or PST, or a similar length if they get good funding. BG2 is anomalous in the history of gaming, and Bioware themselves said it was insane and they're not sure how it all worked out.

If they had to tell us everything about the game every week and get feedback, I wouldn't back the project, because I know it would turn out crap. I know that's not what you're saying, of course - my point is that we are funding them to make the game we want, not to deliver pages of information every day 'because this wouldn't happen without the backers'. I agree they should give us more information than publisher-funded projects would. The thing is, they have already, relative to the stage of production. Wasteland 2 had even less details in the first few days, because they didn't even have an engine. With daily updates coming up, there will be more. I agree they weren't prepared enough and that was a mistake, they really should have known better. But I don't think I even need to answer whether the project was on a 'whim', obviously. They never said they didn't expect to be funded, they said they didn't expect to be funded in 24 hours. I think they made some mistakes in the presentation at the start, and combine that with people trying to adapt to what Kickstarter means, we've got these reservations. But it's mainly at the level of how to handle the flow of information; to suggest that Obsidian aren't invested in this is unfounded, and unnecessary worrying. I think they're on the ball now with the last couple of updates, and if they keep it up it should be fine, and by the end of Kickstarter we'd have plenty of info to make a judgment on.

In IE games, everything was the same, but you got 6 times the XP, since XP was given to the party and even split. So this also balanced out 3-man or 4-man parties. To me this makes the most sense, since it requires no level scaling - and generally, people who play with smaller parties are doing so for the additional challenge.

This should receive more attention. Ausir, let me know when you get it up and I'll link it on the sticky, or give it a separate sticky.

Arkan, you remember Volourn. He's still the same, but not to worry, we're all confident he'll reach a breakthrough soon.

Excellent point, it really is underused in games and can have a great effect. It's amazing how there is a concrete norm where you find out 'The Truth' in the end, all you needed to do was piece together 2 opposing viewpoints, find a material piece of evidence against 1, then realise you have to bash the other side to get your optimal quest reward. (Of course, that's how it worked in a lot of police/mystery TV/films too....) Arcanum's Siamese Twin skulls remains a landmark, and nobody still knows exactly what is the truth, and the player learns he has zero power to actually expose what seems to be a massive conspiracy. You never had a chance.

I want it to be 'hardcore', just in its own way. The general level of 'hardcoreness' in IE games, as Infinitron says, was never that onerous. But that doesn't mean replicating all the features, it's not a linear thing.

Yes. As Sawyer says they're not going to have Napoleonic armies or anything, and having such a rare, disruptive technology around only makes the setting (and gameplay) more interesting.

Indeed.

They are completely cosmetic and bound to posts, yes.

[Edit: It's been far too long since I read anything on the subject, so I should probably not embarrass myself.]

I think even if you do have something like the Throne of Bhaal Deck of Many Things, or something even more extreme, it is worth having in there for the novelty value. You might not end up actually using it often because you don't want it to suck your attributes away or something, or some people might reload 50 times, but the idea of stumbling upon and laerning about such an item is its own reward. What you could do is make the random roll run twice or three times to yield a single result - as if it was a Vegas slot machine - in a single process, so that it's not really worthwhile to reload and reload.

You can also find the similar symbol in the Wheel of Time, in alchemy, and well, all over the place. The ouroboros is a common symbol. It's not my favourite logo either, though. I mean, being called 'Project Eternity', you'd assume the game would get a proper name at some point, and maybe a new logo.

I can imagine there would be logistical challenges with offering any combination of items. Look at AAA publisher games having trouble offering 3-4 different versions of their product. Double Fine had similar tiers to Obsidian and it cost them hundreds of thousands of dollars to make and ship it all to everyone, especially because developers don't usually handle that sort of stuff. It's not as easy as having it all in a big warehouse and ticking off a checklist. That said, they said they were looking at digital tiers so maybe they would end up being a little different.

I guess my point would be that I find both of them not particularly interesting, because they don't really tell me very much about what they will actually look like in the final game, or what kind of characters or settings it will be. It just gives me very little information. Obviously, not all concept art is like that; Icewind Dale's full colour landscape concept art, or Torment's detailed main character drawings are examples. But in this case, I think it's just basically taking a tiny piece of non-info and making stuff up and panicking. I would think that the dwarf ranger art posted in Update #3 is a better place to start from, though it's equally uninformative. (Is it a portrait? Concept art? Is that how all dwarves are? What?)

*shrug* you never know, with games like these 2-3 hours is never enough to properly get into it. I was very, very bored with ME1, FO3 and DA:O introductions, and DA2 intro (assuming it was the same as the demo) was like watching a really bad 80's action movie while mashing some buttons in between. I was bored with the K2 intro too, but then I think with big RPGs it's not usually the level design or plot of the intro that gets you, it's the feel of being in the world and wandering aorund picking up quests and interacting to discover the UI, rules and setting. I liked how I could do that pretty quickly with New Vegas, at least - in FO3 every bloody time you play you have to spend half an hour in a Fast-Forwarded Life of the Most Uninteresting Pre-Adult Life Ever. In any case, aside from the fact that it's different for everyone, I think if you really want to give a game like this a good go, whether Skyrim or DAO or New Vegas, you get to the point where you have freedom to wander around and do things.

You really wouldn't be able to see much difference with 'fat bodies' or painstakingly edited 3D head 90% of the time, though.

Multiplayer / co-op is very difficult and time-consuming to do; Bioware remarked after Baldur's Gate that they probably shouldn't have done it. I have no idea how much it would 'cost' as a stretch goal, but it's probably a tough thing to put in.

None. I have no problems with the idea, but the implementation in pretty much every video game has sucked. A lot.

Justin Sweet is excellent. Icewind Dale portraits conveyed more than the character that the portrait describes, it gave depth to the atmosphere and the setting as a whole. That's the mark of good game portraits.

I'm curious as to why Kickstarter comments make you afraid for those things. Obsidian will choose to listen to fan feedback at their discretion, but there is about 0.1% chance that they would do things like change real time with pause, 2D Isometric, or add full voice acting, multiplayer, Bioware staff, etc. The original vision they communicated to you remains the same; give us support, and we will make something our way, in this spirit. They never promised to do a 'democratic' everyone-designs affair, which would be terrible. Anyway, we're at that kind of stage in time - give it a few days or weeks, they talk a bit more, and their idea of the game will set hold amidst all the excited talk.

Information is a tricky thing. Often you can't just tell people everything because (1) they haven't decided yet; (2) they might want fan input before deciding; (3) it's not ready yet; (4) tell the fans everything there is about the game, and they'll just speculate themselves into a messy puddle of goo on the floor and not necessarily form good judgments. There's nothing worse than telling fans everything about your game every day or every week, then asking them "what do you think". All that will do is increase complaints and incorrect speculation and panic. Actually, Double Fine and Wasteland 2 were pretty much the same. There's a lot more info now for W2 because it's been developing for a few months, but initially, it was all the same - this is us, this is our big vision, help us and there shall be marshmallows and fluffy bunnies in the skies. W2 didn't tell you what engine (they didn't have one), etc. I would like more info as well, since Obsidian probably do know what engine they are using for example, but it's been 3 days, and for KS you can back out or change your pledge at any time for the next 30 days. They should and I'm sure they will provide more info in that time, but I think it needs to be at their own pace and discretion.

http://www.rpgamer.com/games/dnd/bg/art/bg018.jpg http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m71y1bpTMG1r67733o1_500.jpg