nikolokolus

I honestly wonder if some of those watching gave a tinkers damn about the project at all?

This is exactly the scenario that a misericord was invented for ...

Is it still OK to talk about easter eggs in this thread?

I want my character spurned at every advance. I want him to contract syphilis and die a gibbering fool, I want my character to be drowning his sorrows, alone in a tavern, lamenting why every person he ever loved died as a result of their association with him. It's gonna be awesome.

Oh so this is a thread where only people who want romancable companions can post? *gets popcorn*

Nope

Eternal Eternity

A full denoument with details about all of your companions and all of the major factions discussed like New Vegas would be great.

Those numbers in the right hand column seem ... low ... like really, really low. Oblivion 130K copies sold? That doesn't add up. Then again, maybe PC gaming really is that piss poor?

Put me down in the group of people that wants a more difficult crawl. Maybe have 2 shortcuts to the surface, but I don't want this to be a Diablo clone.

1. 500K copies... Man, that would be a healthy chunk of change for OE. I am not sure even that much is really necessary though for PE to be a success. 200K copies would mean $4.9 million coming in (assuming a unit cost of $35 and like 30% of revenue going to distributors - just a guesstimate). I mean, if OE gets $4.9 million in straight up profit (before taxes) after all costs have been paid for, isn't that a resounding success for a company of OE's size? How much would they get in a publisher deal, I wonder? If they do get 500K copies sold (which they should after all the buzz us early adopters will generate), thats over 12 million in profit. Crazy. 2. I do NOT believe critics matter in this equation. I have to disagree very sharply on that point. The gaming press mattered during the KS campaign to help generate buzz. Now that is done and the emphasis will shift to how we, the early adopters, react to their product. 200K copies sold might be a commercial success ... sort of? But your original question seemed to be asking if PE will change the landscape of the industry when it comes to these kinds of games. In order for there to be a sea change then there has to be a pretty clear show of consumer demand for PC-only games; that they are viable financially and other developers, without Obsidian's built in credibility, will be able to take a risk. My second point about critical success, kind of feeds into the first point. Games with low scores on metacritic don't sell as well, and if the quality of DFA, W2, and PE are perceived to be sub-standard then it's going to be hard to convince Kickstarter backers to lay out more cash in the future. Just so we're clear, I'm not predicting failure for Obsidian. My cautiously optimistic hope is that the game is an instant classic, sells something like 1.5 million units and makes Obsidian flush enough with cash that they can self-publish like Blizzard does from here on out. Wishful thinking perhaps, but maybe not completely bonkers?

There were some goodies I might have wanted to have at a higher tier, but overall I'm pretty happy with my contribution to the cause ... and the stuff I will be getting.

No ... no we don't.

Definitely expert mode and maybe even "Path of the Damned" too, but like somebody mentioned above I need to be 99.9% sure that the game is stable to live on just one save. This isn't meant as knock on Obsidian because they've gotten a somewhat bad rap for games with stability problems, it's just that RPGs are so damned complicated, that it's almost impossible to release a nearly bug free game at release.

That was one epic beard.

I'll be really curious to see what the final tally is. I'm new to kickstarter, but apparently a lot (or some?) of the transactions don't go through.

OK, scratch #1, I only included it because it appeared to become such a "thing"

600k+ in the last day ... something like 1.3 million over the last 6 days alone. Un-freaking believable.

I'll be honest I didn't read many comments in the chat, I was too busy flipping back to the KS page comments and reading stuff there.

Two things: 1. The game has to sell somewhat well ... certainly not in the multiple millions of copies expected of today's AAA titles, but probably around 500K or so to be a considered a real commercial success. 2. The game needs to be good -- and not just PE, but Wasteland 2, Double Fine, Shadowrun etc. There's a ton of pressure on these high budget (for crowd funding) projects to not only be completed in a timely fashion, but they need to be critical successes.

I suspect the release date may end up slipping a bit, but it sounds like Unity has been fairly "easy" to work with so far which may cut down on the really tedious/time-consuming stuff like replicating animations and prototyping. That said, if it comes out in June 2014 or so I wouldn't be shocked ... and that's OK.

I've got a growing list in my mind of stuff I'd like to see oblique references to in the game from the KS campaign (especially after watching the live stream today) 1. "Green shirt girl" 2. the word, "wooooooooooooo" 3. lots and lots of vodka I've got more, but what do you think would be funny/cool/witty/whatever?

I didn't say all games get it wrong, just that most do. And yes, I played MoTB both "good" and "bad" and it mostly did a good job, given the constraints that D&D's alignment system imposes on behavior paradigms.

By making a guard or NPC immortal after a quest objective is completed, you've suddenly introduced an artificial constraint into gameplay. Why can't I kill the guard? Maybe he looked at me funny? With your "simple" solution, you've created a mechanic many times more intrusive and heavy handed than removing kill experience ever did. Besides, in the objective based system there's nothing preventing you from killing everything in sight if that's what you want to do, it's just that you won't get any in-game, mechanical reward for doing so.

There's two prongs to getting objective based experience to work: 1. The game has to be story oriented and have enough "openness" that you can approach a challenge from enough angles. 2. The developers have to implement enough mechanics in the framework of the game to allow creative and varied problem solving by the player. Assuming those elements are in place, then removing mob killing experience is definitely the way to go, because it implies that the developers don't much care how you "win" and are telling the player that it's up to them to be a little bit clever and to think ... if that means carving a swath across the map because you're character is the reincarnated spirit of Ghengis Khan then so be it. Conversely if you want to be the second coming of Ghandi, then that play style should be equally viable and get you to the end game with roughly the same level as the aforementioned mass murderer.