Tigranes

Unfortunately, I'm pretty sure it will. I can see a Xbox/PS3/PC version of Eternity costing over 3 million. You could port it over afterwards, but if you had made the game initially with PC in mind, you'll need to make a lot of changes - or you just make a really crappy port. Yeah, I'd say getting a computer's the best option here. It will probably use the Onyx engine, so you will likely need a decent but not top of the line computer.

I actually like class systems for party-based RTwP combat - it could be a flexible party system, sure, but a no-barriers system like SPECIAL isn't necessary when you have 6 slots in your party, and helps give more immediate shape to your team. Or you could have a classless system where each character's progression is incommensurate - e.g. every NPC is so story-bound and has a unique 'soul' that they have their own path, a la Torment. That's not bad either, though that way tends to limit customisation and thus replayability quite a bit.

Aww, you're just saying that.

Porting costs a lot of money. That's one of the reasons they could offer an initial budget of 1.1 million - PC only. You add in licensing fees, additional Q&A, development, etc, etc, and I wouldn't be surprised if the 'porting' budget would be larger than the main budget. 'Dumb down' is a separate question. It's 100% true that having to develop for consoles changes many fundamental parts of your game from the very start; whether for good or bad is for you to decide, but it does add to the difficulty.

But by doing both, they really will make it Arcanum 2! It's a pretty fundamental thing and I doubt it'll change. I don't mind, I enjoy good TB and good RTwP, and there's Wasteland 2 for the former.

NWN2 already did the "I level up in the inn getting drunk because you're getting zombied in the face" thing, so I expect to see it here too. In my mind the best explanation for party size limitation is that non-active guys are doing investigation or some other thing anyway.

3 is too small, 8 is too cumbersome, 4 or 6 would hit the spot.

Stick around, man. You know it'll be cool.

The Gamebanshee interview seems to give much more detail - the Kickstarter itself is fairly vague at the moment.

I like the $140 option at the moment, we'll see if I can afford more, but there's no way I can't go up to the 4-digits, so

I agree, just that I find many of those alternatives more boring than epic fantasy. I'm fine with people saying I want a nice sci-fi game or whatever, but let's not pretend it's any less common or generic. I'd take a good, well done D&D game over a Mass Effect any day (while others would say the opposite, which is fair).

I wish it was so easy to increase my intellectual credibility. It would probably help my career quite a bit. 'Tis as Zoraptor says, and there's a lot of interviews where Obsidian state their plans to use Onyx in upcoming titles. But sure, it's not a 100% thing.

Can you provide a source? Obsidian invested a huge amount of resources with the precise aim of developing a multi-purpose engine that they can use for the foreseeable future; it is versatile enough to support DS3, Aliens RPG (cancelled), 2D South Park, etc. It's common sense; there is no way they would use anything else unless it was a licensed sequel/spinoff a la New Vegas, but given that Obsidian is doing the pre-announcement hype that is highly unlikely. For the same reasons, it was obvious from early on that this would in no way be DS4 or Fallout.

Watcher is a pretty damn common word, you could tie it to just about any setting. Engine will be Onyx, and Onyx is a very good engine, so no problem with that. It could do an IE-esque game just fine I think, if that's what they were going for.

I found Torchlight reasonably worthwhile, but I only paid $5 for it. Normally, the sequel would be good "wait for a sale" fodder for me, too. But I figure that if early adoption leads to an evening or two of quasi-social entertainment with a few folks whose company I enjoy, the price premium is rather insignificant. (This is, of course, in the context of my particular economic circumstances-- a dozen years ago, things would've been different.) Well that was my reasoning for Diablo 3, but that turned out well. Now some friends are bugging me for Guild Wars 2, but I don't know how long that'll last.

TL1 wasn't worth the money, so I've been cool on it; I'll watch the post-release impressions.

I volunteer my nose for motion capture.

I remember Oblivion hype being on a similar scale? Though it's obviously hard to make fine judgments on something like that. I agree Skyrim did a great job of it all.

Yeah, the D&D situation is even more complicated than normal. The project itself might be a puddle of poo, but Beamdog pulled off a great job getting the rights to make BG:EE. IWD2 ironman isn't too hard... if you've played it far too many times.

Actually, that is the case quite a lot, despite the stupidity of it. There are lot of IPs publishers just sit on and do nothing for years, but as soon as you ask them "can we buy it" they get excited and quote big sums. Arcanum sold like 300k or something ten years ago, you don't see Activision (Activision, right?) giving the IP away even though they will never do anything with it. Rather silly, really, and that's why developers should be the ones to keep the IP, but that's all shoulds and oughts.

Morrowind was a very important title in bringing Western CRPGs to the consoles, and did a huge amount to 'bring them to the general public's attention'. If Skyrim feels like it did it more, it's just because it sold more copies due to the accumulated brand value, it's just happened so it's fresh in our minds, and Web 2.0 is brimming with more 'evidence' of that popularity. (Given that Bethesda has continued to work on building their console audience through Oblivion / FO3.)

There's zero chance of them actually using IE again - as Enoch says, the 2D hires are still for Onyx games. The question is whether Onyx 2D could deliver something similar to IE, and I think it could, though obviously with design differences.

Yep. Again, it's not Fallout.

Nobody would ever put in a release date in the initial announcement.

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