Tigranes

Except it's not 'easy mode'. Let's leave that to the other thread, since this is specifically about enemy stamina/HP.

Well that's up to you whether it ends up qualifying as worth buying or not for you. That isn't my problem. I'm saying it's neither a standard HP system, nor is it a regenerating HP / everyone-gets-up crap. We have yet to hear exactly how the things will work. What we do know is that an enemy attack doesn't just deal 50 damage and stamina absorbs it. It might deal 30 stamina and 20 health damage. And health will be much harder to heal than in games like BG, because you won't have 8 heal spells a day. You will for stamina, but not for health. So when your health is low, you can die even if you have high stamina. And then, again unlike in BG, Raise dead doesn't cost a pittance of 200 gold, it's either rare or impossible. If your guy goes to 0 stamina and falls over, you don't say, "who cares", you need to watch out that enemies don't hit them in the face while they're unconscious and kill them permanently. So sure, you can have battles where you survive and your party members get up. But you'll have to have done a good job of making sure they didn't get coup-de-grace'd. And the health damage they suffered in that battle will be difficult to recuperate. So in some ways it's less hardcore, in some ways it's more. Remains to be seen how exactly it will work. (Edit: I'm assuming Expert mode is on. Why wouldn't it be on, if you're looking for 'no nonsense'?)

I'd suggest reading the whole quote, yes. 1/ Since getting your head chopped off should be a fairly irreversible activity, P:E says, resurrection will be extremely rare, if at all available. 2/ You have stamina and health, but you don't first lose stamina, then health: you lose both together. It's easy to heal stamina, but hard to heal health (which does not regenerate). you might start a fight with 100 stamina and 2 health because of this, and get yourself killed in one hit, never mind your regenerating stamina. In short, there is no regenerating health, and on harder difficulties, it won't be "oh he's dead whatever he'll get up afterwards" - since they can easily be attacked while unconscious and permanently killed, from which there is no Raise Dead. It depends on how it's balanced, but it can easily end up being more 'hardcore' or 'realistic' than the 'classic style'.

I assume it wouldn't have the same satisfaction in an isometric game as it does in something like Morrowind... where it was, indeed, super cool.

Double Fine did not give a budget breakdown. Double Fine gave a single pie chart explaining how much of the Kickstarter cash is taken up by commissions, failed pledges, physical rewards, documentary, etc. The budget of the game itself was not broken down. As others have said, 1/ A breakdown would not actually show things like "40k per character" or "200k for stronghold". Budgets don't work that way for most of the 'features'. 2/ Transparency, despite what half the internet would have you believe, is not always in all circumstances a 'good thing'. Obsidian need to be savvy about releasing information (or do you want them to tell us everything? That's transparent, too, if they tell us about every fight they have, etc). In that spirit, I think a rough breakdown, like what Double Fine gave, or something of that level, would be welcome. Anything more, I'm not sure it won't just lead to even more uninformed debate. (Revealing the budget doesn't mean everyone's going to understand how game budgets work.) Cue the wailing and gnashing of teeth by the Seventy Thousand.

As I recall, you were a sentient banana with points in streetwise.

Without taking sides per se (because I live in indecision also), I will say one thing: Except in life, you can never live without believing you know the truth. Without belief, there is no living. That is, practically speaking, you need to believe, whether by action or inaction, in something. The most atheist scientist does not believe 'nothing' - he may belive nothing in principle, but in practice, in the everyday, he must trust in the 'truth' of many things. In the end the question, for me, is one of practical reason, not of Truth. (For to live as if there is no God, is in practice to believe there is no God, that is to stake my life on the 'truth' that there is no God. Same with science.) The question is not whether you can get by without practically speaking believing in anything. There is only the choice of what to believe.

Conference call with Danish people at 9am, will be here till 11pm. It is now 2 and the body is already creaking away.

They invented these things called DVDs recently, they're pretty good.

Holy crap! Approach stealthily and hide in the luxurious fur of the sheep, clearly.

Divine Divinity and Divinity 2 are flawed games, but inexplicably very very fun for all their flaws. Definitely worthwhile, DD has a pretty poor start with a Diablo-style dungeon but then the world turns out to be much more than that.

I like the idea, though the obvious problem is people will get around it by deliberately getting the companion killed.

I.... am not sure why that makes powergaming irrelevant. Powergaming does get its kicks from the recognition the game gives it, but it is also a temptation to game the system for the fun of it. After all, you can't remove all such temptation, or you wouldn't have a game.

Volourn, you are timeless. Let's maintain the vaguest pretense of remaining on ME, all.

If only Obsidian got 45 million from New Vegas. I don't know how that image calculated the distribution, but going with the figure, most of the time, that "15%" isn't profit for the developer. Most of that 15% would be swallowed up by the money publishers paid developers monthly (or by milestone) to keep up development. There's very few instances in the history of game development, after the early 1990s, where a developer ends up with tens of millions of dough after a successful game. In fact, there's probably less than five...

I like them all, I think they're really good ideas. (1) could yield us a nice little easter egg reference to Melicamp.

How inefficient, everything but the first two can be substituted with body language.

Not certain why anybody would ever care about anything Interplay says or does anymore. They have nothing and will make nothing in their current condition, for good or for ill. Funnily enough, re. OP, I can imagine a lot of publishers entertaining the possibility. After all, if they can get a dev to sign on, it's great for them.

Parody and meta-stuff is, in the vast majority of cases, only funny or refreshing because it breaks the mold. When it becomes a full-fledged thing, it's rarely attention-grabbing, and more often becomes irritating.

If making console versions was cheap and did not require much extra work and did not change the game significantly, every single game on the planet would be available for every single platform. The simple and incontestable truth is that making a PC-only game into a PC/PS3/Xbox version is extremely (like, extremely) expensive, time-consuming, difficult, and changes all versions of the game from the beginning; the only real way to partly mitigate those costs is to make really, really shoddy ports. So there's only one question. Do you think console versions are still worth it for P:E? Or not? Opinion can diverge there, sure. But there's no arguing with the above facts.

These days it's very easy to adblock or freeze .gifs that you don't like, so I personally don't think it's a huge deal, unless it's too obscene, etc.

I think I might pick up the ME trilogy if it ever gets below $10 for all three games. But I imagine that would take quite a while, though surely ME1 is dirt cheap already?

The concept art is terrible and the devs' track record is meh/OK, but I like what I'm reading in the text. I'll check out the video and updates, would be tempted to throw in $20.

Well, we'll see, since we've had a grand total of few paragraphs on the subject.