nikolokolus

It's a great talk ... you'll walk away with a new appreciation for how a game that is a real work of art can be created ... mostly it seems to be about letting creative people create and getting out of their way as much as possible (so long as the artist is talented).

It may not be a binary choice?

This is part of what makes games suck nowadays too -- too many cooks in the kitchen. Publishers and marketing hacks think they know what's best and try to take over the development of a game and it ends up diluting gameplay and complexity and the result is a lot of action RPG crap or FPS crap with crap multi-player. I highly suggest you watch Tim Cain's Fallout postmortem at the GDC this year and it will give you a good idea about why it's sometimes best to just let developers do their thing and get out of the way (3D Realms and Duke Nukem aside).

Point Buy like PS:T and Fallout. The catch is making the game use the often neglected stats like personality/charisma in a meaningful way and having some occasional consequences for min/max builds.

I dunno, I guess I want to see the gods that the developers come up with. I don't really have a preference

Make 'em bleed! It shouldn't be soul crushing, and there should be a difficulty slider, but I'm sick and tired of all these recent titles that hold your hand and give you the functional equivalent of a participation ribbon, just for playing.

"reserve" a character name? What do you mean, like you are the only person in the world that can use that player character name? That's ridiculous.

Printing costs aren't low. so I voted no. If you really want the swag all that badly then donate more ... and try not to think of it like a dollar for dollar exchange in value. It's almost more like a pledge drive with public broadcasting, where you get the ten dollar gift for the fifty dollar pledge; you're not exactly getting full reimbursement in those higher tiers, a lot of it is prestige and the warm fuzzy feeling that you played a small part in helping this title come to market.

I have to stop reading this thread, before I get the urge to lob insults ...

The trouble with that is, the TSR folks had already done all the heavy lifting on planescape lore before Black Isle got a hold of it. There wasn't much left to do.

I'm talking about the practicalities of game development when it comes to developing a fully developed cant, or game world colloquial form of speech ... that's takes time and money, something this project isn't going to have an unlimited supply of.

It's a nice enough idea to add flavor, but it seems like it would be a huge investment of developer time and resources to fully flesh it out. So for that reason I vote, "Don't care." If Obsidian goes way over their kickstarter stretch goals and makes something like 5 million bucks then I'm all for little touches, but this feels like asking for sprinkles when you're still short on flour and sugar for a cake.

So somebody please 'splain to me what the hell the big deal is? I think it must be because I'm old and dumb that the idea of getting something for nothing isn't registering correctly.

Why? wouldn't some channel their special "power" into other pursuits besides the arcane? Some might choose to become ascetic monks, some might become swordmasters, some might be dumber than a bag of hammers ... not everyone should be a mage and it shouldn't be universal.

It's got a lot of this in it

Unless there is a multi-class option or some kind of hybrid class where spell casting makes sense then I'd rather not see spell casting warriors. We still don't know the mechanics of how magic work, so wait until the devs address it I guess.

"Bullets do" - Sledgehammer Sledgehammer was great, but I was thinking more of this

Roland of Gilead wouldn't exactly fit in this world, but damn I love those books. Absolutely King's best work.

Guns don't kill mages, I do.

Throw your familiar in front of the gunman.

I'm really, really liking the direction that the game world is taking. It will be very interesting to see how this plays out in game.

I like some 1st person games, but I don't want that here. And fortunately, it won't be.

I have learned to loathe romance options in games over the years, the apex of this loathing came after I played DA2, when being friendly eventually led to every one of your companions (or maybe it was nearly every?) wanting to screw just because you were nice to them. That completely broke immersion for me. If Obsidian does include romance options then please for the love of the Flying Spaghetti Monster, don't make every companion Bi, don't make every companion attracted to the main character and please include unrequited or doomed romances. It would be refreshing to get away from the trope where the world revolves around the PC and everybody bows to their wishes.

What? You mean like use our imagination or something?! Madness I say, madness!

That's true, but that still doesn't answer the question of how resources should be divided in the project to try and include a transgender option. Unless you want the world to react to your player's transgender status (which would be tough to know unless they checked under the hood) what's the difference between a player picking an option on the character creation screen and just using their imagination and declaring, "My character was born a man, but chooses to live as a woman" and then picking the outward appearance appropriate for their choice? If I saw a transgender option on the character creation screen I would assume that it plays a central position in how the game world reacts to me, in the same way that I would expect the game world to react to my character's profession or race, and that means a lot of written dialogue, which means money and time devoted to that instead of other things.