Tigranes

Corpse retention is usually limited by hardware, since having all those dead bodies on the screen can be pretty tough. I'd be surprised if it was a Unity problem. I don't even know if they made a hard decision about that for WL2, or if that might change. Edited topic title to make it more specific.

They are worth it, and if you stay away from them that's going to make things even more grindy. They can zap people from across the map and they're pretty easy to protect - unless you're getting overrun and losing a lot of units anyway. Level 5 now and I'm using ancient bears / bears / archmages / bowmen / priests. Generally no-loss.

I loaded this up yesterday too! Much farther along this game than I was. I played it way too late last night. I think I'm close to beating it, but I need a better army. My guy does best with mages in his army, but I'm super far away from any of those. Still, I love the black dragons, not only do they simply rock, they give me the first initiative and I can throw a couple spells and use my book to devastate on the first turn. Haven't gotten anywhere near that far yet. My army lately typically consists of peasants, priests, bears, archers, and thorn warriors. My issue with the game, I am finding, is that I seem to not have much confidence to look beyond "weak" fights to ensure I am not blowing my money on reinforcements, and that reinforcements appear to be finite (which is why I still use peasants). Well, it sounds like you're still very early game. And yeah, especially early game you're looking to pick off Weak enemies with no losses, and gradually build up - though KB is sort of designed to encourage minimal losses in every fight. Trying a Warrior/Hard game now.

I loaded this up yesterday too! Much farther along this game than I was. I played it way too late last night. I think I'm close to beating it, but I need a better army. My guy does best with mages in his army, but I'm super far away from any of those. Still, I love the black dragons, not only do they simply rock, they give me the first initiative and I can throw a couple spells and use my book to devastate on the first turn. Groar. Now I need to play KB again.

Subtle connections are fine - make it too big and you start to create problems. If it's subtle it doesn't need to be explained fully, and the ambiguity becomes part of the enjoyment for the kind of fans who like to work out the lore. If it's extensive then the compatibility between the two different games needs a lot more work, inconsistencies become a flaw, and of course, risks having people who don't play both games say 'huh?'. GIven that P:E is intended to become a franchise, P:E can work with its own leftover strands and characters as well in the future. A wacky person that is kind of plane-touched, and his story remains ambiguous but seems to clearly hint at an experience of Numenera, for example, would be just fine.

TW is certainly doing well enough to keep CDProjekt going, which is all that matters for me. They do have an integrated publisher backing which is a big advantage (like Bethesda), but it's indicative that they're making the kind of games which really need a lot of $ sunk in for art assets.

Random "news website" spouts random crap about Bioware, meh. I doubt DA3 schedule will be effected by TW3 in any way. I'll take a gander at DA3 info when there is any. I have no expectations since they don't make anything I like anymore, but who knows? Things can always change.

Of course the video, KS description, and everything else was done by the mother and/or other adults. There's zero doubt about that, and anyone who believes otherwise I would like to introduce to my Nigerian prince friend. That doesn't necessarily make the KS a hoax or immoral, as long as the money goes towards exactly what they promised. I would never fund this, but that's because (1) the family can obviously afford to support her, (2) if the point was for the kid to learn entrepreneurship, then not writing any of it herself or even appearing in the video means she isn't going to learn much as she hasn't really participated, (3) shoehorned gender schtick, yawn. It doesn't need to be a fake for it to be unappealing.

If Obsidian were to abandon publisher contracted work they would have to radically restructure the company, and probably lay off a whole lot of people.

Looks the same as Bastion, which was fun enough but very simple. Will look and see, hopefully they've done some work on the gameplay.

Brother None was previously a game journalist, mainly at gamebanshee.com; he is now an official employee of inXile, is involved in the Torment kickstarter, and speaks from that capacity. He's been around for a long time round these parts.

Microtransactions can be good, though the basic economic principle of breaking content down into small modular packs is much more likely to disrupt development/design processes than larger sales units. It may not be philosophically inherent, but that's like saying sharpened axes aren't inherently violent. So what? It was pretty clear that in the current climate and given all other external factors, microtransactions were going to do a lot of bad things for consumers, and so they have done. If there are ideas for retrieving the model from where it is now and reforming it, I'm all ears, but usually we don't hear them (probably because it's pretty hard to do it). Instead, we hear about how it's not so bad. Well, that's not really going to convince. Sequels is a bit different - I'm actually pretty supportive of sequels, because (1) really ambitious titles need one or two sequels to really fully develop, which we've seen in many different series; (2) they allow devs to focus on content and improving on existing structures rather than building from scratch every time. I think the problem is the unwillingness to fund and support original IPs rather than sequels themselves.

I get the idea, and I think it could be fun enough for people, but that Kickstarting for such a project is out of the question. There are browser games / parodies pretty much exactly like this in style, features, etc. that are available for free, and moreover, are created with no money spent by the creators - and they've been around for years. It would be at best ridiculous, at worst disingenious preying of good-will to ask for $90k. If you wanted to persuade me that this project should be Kickstarted and I should fund it, I think I would need to be shown clearly (1) why this is different from flash games, etc. that look just like this and have been around in the thousands for years; (2) why this game couldn't exist without $90k, or Kickstarter; (3) and quite apart from that, why this game is going to be entertaining for more than ten minutes like the majority of such parody browser games.

NWN2 is the epitome of a decent but not great party-based old-school-ish CRPG, so that's the game to go for if you're hungering for more in the mold of other Bioware / Obsidian / Black Isle / etc games and you've already played them all. DS3 is an action RPG through and through but it's a weird one. If you have an open mind then it can be a good romp, if you're wanting more of the same of Diablo or even older DS's not so much. If you can get the NWN2 expansions, then those are in a different league. Storms of Zehir is fun and pretty unique, Mask of the Betrayer is one of the best RPGs in the last ten years.

Actually, I think BruceVC is genuine, and that's what scares me. I've never seen someone talk so consistently like an English textbook on polite speech.

They're similar enough that you'll enjoy all of them. The main difference is that earlier games have larger, more sprawling levels which is a lot more fun, but I think TDS is also a very good, very fun game.

I remember saying 'these graphics are awesome' when I played Conquests of the Longbow for the first time. It was a big part of how the game drew me in. The game was released in 1992. I first played around 2010.

Nearly P:E amounts but not quite, though given the lack of data, we're all guessing in thin air.

Have a strong and distinct theme, and push that theme consistently across all game mechanics. Invest in a game which doesn't presume you don't give a damn and you just want to mash buttons for a few hours. That's it, really.

It was solid, but not solid enough.

Is there actually the any sort of breakdown in how the kickstarter funds are being allocated for most of these games? We don't have comprehensive data. Double Fine released a pretty good breakdown of their resource usage to backers, but I imagine it varies project to project. E.g. in DF's case they were very clear from the start that a large portion would go into the documentary, and they've hired a professional filming crew and have produced (backer-only) docu updates often; but we do know from DF's data that you take out 10% for Amazon and Kickstarter; ~2% for failed transactions; then, for reward-happy KS with huge # of backers like DF / PE / Torment, a few hundred thousand dollars for rewards. A conservative assumption, for example, would be that from the $4 million Obsidian received, about a million of that goes into these non-development costs. As for the dev costs itself, I don't know enough about the various factors involved (third party tools, location, etc) to give any kind of reliable indicator - hell, you should be able to give a better estimate than me, alanschu. There was one smaller KS which admitted they screwed up and used their 5-digit KS money and couldn't finish the game, and they released a full breakdown which included a few amateur, but probably well-intentioned mistakes: e.g. hiring a certified accountant. The thing about KS is that despite literally hundreds of millions of dollars having gone into successful projects over the last couple of years, there isn't a lot of good data. KS hides failed project pages from google searches, and is only now reluctantly divulging some general statistics. (Someone scraped the data to show what % of projects fail, etc: http://www.appsblogger.com/kickstarter-infographic/) I wasn't talking of the kickstarter WL2 funds, but using money from 'retail' sales of WL2 to fund Torment. Once WL2 is released and selling on Steam/ GOG/ Gamersgate/ Origin/ Impulse InXile would have those funds to spend on Torment, doing it that way is just less 'convenient' to him than holding another kickstarter and getting free funding. If WL2 sold in the 200k+ bracket those excess sales would even provide more money than the current kickstarter- it isn't, after all, going to go into trust for the starving masses of the world or paying a rebate to kickstarter investors, it's going to be used on future commercial activities. They're making cold, logical economic decisions either way, just as Garriott is. Yeah, this was already a big fat long discussion, and the point (well summarised in inXile's 'Why now?' WL2 update) was that by waiting until WL2 is released, they'd have had to fire many of their writers and artists. As it stands now, WL2 KS funds pre-production; Torment KS funds these same guys to go into Torment preproduction; when WL2 is released, sales revenue (hopefully) means the same guys phase into Project 3's pre-production; Torment's sales for Project 4; and so forth. This is a standard model, one which Obsidian follows as well. You can't just make one game, finish it, then start another with the revenue, unless you're a team of less than 10 people where everyone does everything (which was the case back in the day).

The point is that when you can rely on the profits of your past games (through complete IP ownership) to develop your new games, you don't need to worry about your next KS failing to raise enough money (= you need to fire people), and you don't need to worry about making your pitch Kickstarter-friendly (which can be a positive, but I argue it's not positive if you need to do it for every single game), so on and so forth. A developer which breaks out of the publisher cycle through Kickstarter then combines a self-sustaining, profit-driven production cycle with occasional Kickstarters is much preferable to one where you're hand-to-mouth to your backers every time.

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AjRsTwF0aHv6dFVwaTF1WTI5b24tbGxpQUdQNU1TSHc#gid=1 The definitive Torment $ trends comparison with DFA/WL2/PE. Much better indication of where we might end up at the end; my bet is around 4 million.

He can't use WL2 money to fund Torment, that would make all hell break loose from people who backed WL2 and it certainly wouldn't be enough. I suppose if Fargo is rich enough then you're right, it changes to the question of 'how rich do you have to be to make your KS smell bad'. I don't know...

I agree there were many small differences, but the core mechanics were the same. I guess my thought is sure you can like F3's gameplay over FNV or vice versa, but it's harder to believe that would be a key difference for liking one game and hating another.