Tigranes

I funded $75 for Wasteland 2, minimum for Banner Saga, Dead State and Double Fine. Also forgot to do Expeditions.

I actually think that's a very good point, the way video game communication has worked has always been rather odd, and continues to work that way less for efficiency than for convention. Arguing for MORE DETAILS 3 days after a kickstarter launches isn't the most sensible, but arguing for a different way in which it's all presented so people understand the internal process a little better is eminently sensible.

Sure, they weren't very hard and quite nice to have, if not a big deal.

Great news. Three cheers to brofessionalism, then. I guess the task for us now will be to figure out who the heck is Hades, once all the official Kickstarter NPCs get put in.

I was a bit young for the BIS heyday, I lurked every now and then. I remember Rex Exitium, does that count?

Oh wow, it takes like 3 minutes to get off the front page. :/ Yeah, what differentiated him from some other regular weirdos was that he was willing to say he was wrong (sometimes). That goes a long way.

Let us know how your contact goes, Shadowstrider. Depending on whether Obsidian are willing to help in anyway we might want to think about making this an internal drive with small donations, if required. We do have 30 days.

Well, this idea isn't about bringing any Bio employee, it's about bringing the minds behind BG1 and BG2, right? The thing is, many of those guys have already left the company for whatever other things. Just about the only prominent contributor that remains is David Gaider; and considering Obsidian's greatest strength is in writing, it's not really going to improve things. Add in the practical difficulties and I don't really see the point.

Looks like it turned out to be pretty bad timing what with Kickstarter - I imagine they're far too busy at the moment.

(Responding to Chaos Theory:) For something like Project Eternity that's highly unlikely - for the Ouya console or other kinds of proposals, perhaps. For example, let's say that Eternity gets 50,000 backers, which is quite likely. That's 50,000 customers who won't pay a cent for your game. Now consider that at full price in the first few weeks of launch, Obsidian's titles sold as many as millions (New Vegas), a few hundred thousand (NWN2), or even below 500k (Alpha Protocol). All those were multiplatforms titles, and Xbox/PS3 has higher sales than PC, so you have to cut those figures by 1/3 at least. Project Eternity may sell quite well, but it most likely wouldn't sell millions upon millions. In short, you're not even close to looking at Obsidian walking away with buckets of gold. There is a potential for them to make a profit, of course, because they're taking the sales money, not the publisher (who normally takes 100% minus pre-agreed royalties, if even that). But that's incredibly important for this Kickstarter model to work, because without a publisher, the developers aren't getting any money at all while the game is out on the market. They'd have to rush to start yet another Kickstarter to get enough money to survive, if they didn't have this profit. Also consider that, in Double Fine's case, we've already seen how Amazon & Kickstarter take 5% each, then it cost them something like 10-20% of their earnings (~3million) to make and send out all the rewards, recoup the costs of the Kickstarter campaign, etc. My figures are from memory and fuzzy, but basically the point is, they need all the money they can get if this is going to work.

Yes. After all, nobody's actually paid anything yet, and there will need to be a mechanism by which you identify your kickstarter account with your forum account.

Game length in hours are the same as battery life on gadgets - it's almost an arbitrary number that will rarely correspond to your actual experience. I finished Jade Empire in less than ten hours; it took others thirty. A relatively 'complete' run of BG2, depending on player and other things, can take anything between ~25 hours and, by some accounts, well over 100.

Sawyer's explanations about house stretch goal added.

Merged.

It's not linear. In some cases tech and tools bring the costs down - e.g. creating an exact copy of BG2 would cost a lot less today. However, in other cases, newer technology exponentially increases the labour required - one of the main reasons game development is like a hundred times more expensive than ~15 years ago is because of voice acting, motion capture and 3D art assets. The thing with Eternity is that it's not going to use all the newest bells and whistles, but it's not going to be exactly the same as using the Infinity Engine again, either. I do expect that they can get much more bang for buck than an AAA game, of course, but that's why they can do it with 1 million plus alpha.

I've added this in the info thread, but I think this is worth a read for everyone: Josh Sawyer on the Player House stretch goal Source: Formspring

BG2 was an extraordinary project - it would be difficult for a fully funded AAA game to recreate its scope (though that's mainly because that would use all the latest technologies). Bioware has pretty much said in the past how it was a bit insane and they're not sure how it worked either. I think the size of BG1 - which isn't too far from all the other IE games (IWD1/2, PST) - could be hoped for, since we're likely to go past 2 million at least.

Apologies for the chaos, this thread now contains the 3 current discussions on DRM, Steam & GOG. Just cutting down on the number of parallel universes.

It's those damn video games that do it.

I disagree. If you like Steam that's all fine and good, but if I don't like it, why should I have to use it? Why can't I have options? It doesn't hurt any player that enjoys Steam if I don't use it. However, it hurts Steam's profit strategy. That's all there is to it.

NWN2, of course, had a gigantic budget, and a gigantic campaign.

Wasteland 2 is 3D. Diablo 3 is 3D, and though the viewpoint is not quite isometric, it's close enough for comparisons here. Most relevantly, Dungeon Siege 3 showed us, at the full zoom-out, what Onyx isometric 3D could look like (though the camera was very close).

They are looking into it, so it will probably happen soonish.

One thing I really want to see in Eternity is innovation within boundaries - so definitely, features that don't break the IE formula but make a significant difference in the rhythms and patterns of play. People have of course commented on resting, and that's been the bugbear throughout the NWN series as well. . . I really think Sawyer building the combat / character system from ground up gives opportunities to make changes at the level of combat as an abstraction. Generally, magic is a totally independent effect, self-contained upon the world; the fireball is created by magical rules through magical power, effects the world at an abstracted magical sense (hit points), then dissipates with no other impact. the elements of the combat scene that are made 'dynamic' are limited; systems remain independent. So in a RTwP IE game, yes, terrain and positioning matters, yes magic matters, yes individual character stats matters, but mostly independently. That's why when you try to add things like destructible terrain or terrain bonuses or aimed shots, they are hard to do well, aside from building yet another separate system. . . This is rather unsystematic, but the kinds of things I'd like to see is precisely this greater interaction. E.g. the AOE of an area spell should be restricted by terrain and obstacles, elemental spells should have spillage on ground terrain that changes its properties - take what was in BG1 with lightning bolt or DA:O with spell synergy and take it further. E.g. instead of evocation spells that dissipate after casting and conjuration spells that just create monsters, have summons that are more like static 'sentry' units with an area of persistent effect, i.e. a zone of silence, then have synergies; e.g. a sentry of silence maintains a silence effect in that area but the sentry itself can be taken down; you could overlap it with a immunity to arrows sentry to protect the first sentry from being felled by arrows. . . Obviously we can't suddenly destroy the concept of magic as consisting of singular spells cast by a single user, etc., fundamental things like that, but I'd like to see greater variation from standard dynamics like single-target single-effect no-time spells. There should be more magic that has a spatial, temporal and synergistic consequence, which is organised into general principles so users can understand quickly. E.g. if all fire spells were consistently more effective against leather armour or even forested terrain, and repeated damage had a distinct effect, this introduces a new level of decision-making (fire 5 fireballs or mix it up with another AOE damage spell). Again, some of this was done by DA:O's synergy, which I felt was one of the best things it did, but it could do a lot more - especially if you introduce again already-known things like crippled limbs and terrain bonuses.

Suffice to say that you should make up your own mind about AP. It's dirt cheap now, so pick it up. If it works for you, then it's a wonderful game - it's been the most replayable RPG for me for a long time. New Vegas is pretty much guaranteed to tickle your fancy, so definitely go for that.