nikolokolus

I tried to go Linux only gaming on PC back in the early 2000s when Loki/Occulus was doing ports, id was making Linux friendly ports, and Neverwinter Nights and a ton of other stuff would run on Wine/WineX ... and then tons of modding tools needed .Net and the Loki went out of business and I had to swallow the fact that I needed a second partition for windows if I wanted to continue to be a PC gamer. Maybe with Valve's support and engines like Unity it'll stick this time? I'd love nothing more than to be able to go full time Manjaro and still have a reasonable expectation of being able to play most of the games that I want.

You're right, you're the only one that cares about the game. I never said that. I was talking about all the backers that do not participate in these forums, all these people that already have forgotten about this game because there is no exposure at all except a few screens and 2-3 articles. More people are excited about a Dragon Age 3 right now than about pillars and why? Because they have seen the game. They have seen and heard developer talking about the mechanics while showing gameplay. Audio Visual concepts are way more exciting than some screens and tons of text most people will not even read to begin with. But yeah lets wait till Thursday and look at the comment section of these articles. With maybe 100 or even less comments. Because many people just do not care without video footage. The backers have already paid all of the money they are going to for Pillars of Eternity; what difference does it make if Obsidian gets that group excited? I mean, sure, we'd all like to see more and feel like our money was well spent, but getting us excited doesn't translate to exposing the game to a wider audience. As for your assertion that DA:I is more anticipated than PoE because there's more of it to see in the form of trailers and splashy videos, I think you're missing cause and effect. DA:I is more anticipated because it is much larger franchise, built for a wider general audience. Obsidian could release all of the gameplay videos in the world and PoE would still be a small, niche game with a much different target demographic.

I can sort of understand the impulse LC is expressing, but this whole "changing the industry" thingy sounds way more like Brian Fargo's schtick than anything I read or heard coming from an Obsidian developer. They said, they couldn't get an old-school, isometric RPG funded by a publisher, so they went to kickstarter and got the money that way. So I guess I'm not sure how I'm supposed to feel betrayed. Obsidian laid out their backer rewards in the kickstarter and have done a pretty damned good job of keeping backers in the loop about design decisions, progress and internal stuff that we never get to hear about in a normal game development cycle, so 'transparency' gets a check mark. As for marketing and press demos, that was never part of their pitch. Yeah, I guess it's nice to be first, but this is a for profit company making and selling a product and they need to go to those things and build buzz about their game if they want it to get covered and attract more customers. As a backer I'm concerned mainly with two things: 1) A great game that is fun to play and scratches my RPG itch and 2) a successful game financially, so Obsidian can keep on going making more RPGs that I want to play. If anybody thinks for profit, game companies are in it for the social justice and sticking it to the man, then I'm sorry, but that's never been my impression.

Good first post. Very thoughtful.

You're going to get several stories from gaming sites in the wake of the show ... Just like any other game. What else do need between that and the regular updates we get here? All we were promised as backers is a game and a chance to get a much deeper look at the development process, no one ever said we would get unlimited access.

The only thing that every drives me nuts, is the "are you sure you'd like to do X" prompt.

Not a single mention of Pillars of Eternity in the OP. Why does this thread exist here?

Somebody remind me, what was the special KS-only a-cheese-ment? I hate a-cheese-ments. Perhaps I can gift you mine?

I've played plenty of RPGs that were long on quantity and short on quality (*ahem* Two Worlds, Neverwinter Nights OC, etc.) but I've also played some RPGs that had both great content and an enormous amount of stuff to do (Baldur's Gate series, Arcanum, etc.) so I don't see the two as being mutually exclusive. If I were forced to pick, I'd choose a short-ish game (~20-30 hrs) with deeply engaging gameplay and/or great writing any day of the week over a mediocre slog.

Totally. I mean, like if my warrior can't like totally bash in some dude's skull and watch him go flying across the room, I like can't get into it man. If PoE doesn't play like Tekken I'm like totally gonna be mad bro.

This isn't a 3D game, so how the hell are ragdoll physics supposed to work exactly in a 2.5D environment with nothing to bounce off of? As long as the death animation is somewhat believable my "immershun" will be just fine.

I'm fully aware PoE will be borrowing heavily from the IE games and that's fine, I just hope that the game is more "show" than "tell" in the way that it presents its conflicts/challenges and that the end-state is less about achieving some grand destiny and more about multiple paths to very different outcomes - In PnP terms, It's something like the difference between playing in a sandbox/hexcrawl vs. a railroad; player actions creating a story vs. player actions advancing a GM's predetermined narrative.

got a good example o' such a single-player crpg? you know, with no storytelling save for what you interpret from killing goblins and opening chests? HA! Good Fun! Nethack

Frankly, to hell with narration and "storytelling" in games. I'll read a good book for that. The story (such as it is) should emerge from player choices, snippets of dialogue and environmental cues. Leaving me to come up with my own interpretation. Too many frustrated novelists making "games" and not enough game designers.

I kind of doubt we'll get the full list until the game is released - Spoilers and such. There's always going to be the adventurer's hall where you can make your own.

If you don't want the player to know for sure that their character has gone mad I can think of a few ways to tweak reality for them. Pull them aside in a private conference away from the other players occassionally and tell them things like, "you've been getting the feeling that your companions are whispering about you, they seem to be very secretive and fthey requently smile and nod at you when you are talking with them, but out of the corner of your eye, you are pretty sure that you've caught a few sneers or seen conspiratorial looks exchanged when they thought you weren't looking." What else? You could have "gaps" show up in their recollection of recent events: They awake covered in blood that isn't their own, some of their valuables have gone missing with no explanation, etc. I've never played CoC, but I did nick the sanity mechanic from Crypts & Things for use in an Astonishing Swordsmen & Sorcerers of Hyperborea game, and then kept the players' sanity level secret from them. However, it didn't come up as an issue, since nobody ever went bat-poop crazy.

Is Cimmerian a playable race?

So for the uninitiated, is there anybody here who has purchased a boxed copy of a Paradox game? My only other experience with Swedish quality in physical goods is Ikea and Volvo - Functional, and cleanly designed, but "meh."

That picture was D&D for me. It absolutely encapsulated everything that I wanted the game to be: a party of rough and tumble treasure seekers (not necessarily heroes) exploring some weird, lightless underworld, filled with magic and danger.

I think it went beyond just TSR. I wish I could remember which RPG blog I read that had the details, but apparently DAT just turned his back on the whole industry and all of the people he knew from before and wanted to be left alone. Last I heard is that he was actually reaching out to some folk from the RPG community and had planned to attend some small convention before he fell ill and then passed. In any case, I'll drink a cold one in his honor. His illustrations in 1st ed. AD&D were some of the most evocative and inspriational art I'd ever seen when I was just a fresh faced twelve year old picking up those books in the late 80s. Between he, Jeff Dee, Jeff Easley, Erol Otus and Frank Frazetta they made me want to be an artist and hone my own craft. Sláinte!

I received the PDF copy of the Numenara Player's Guide as part of a backer reward for the Torment kickstarter ... it's not my cup o' tea, but if it works for you then awesome.

I'm not sure I'd want to pick a rules-heavy game like Pathfinder (or any other "crunchy" RPG that focues a lot on tactical minatures skirmishing: 3.x D&D, 4th ed. D&D, etc.) to be my first games master experience. In any case if you ever get the urge to sit in the GM's chair again, remember that there are a lot of other game systems out there and some of them might make your life a bit easier on the rules mastery aspects and let you focus more on the creative bits (which is were really good GMing happens IMO).

The Rules Cyclopedia is pretty cool, but damn, it's gotten expensive if you want ot buy a dead-tree copy off of the interwebz. If people are really into it, dndclassics.com or RPGnow.com have the pdf for a somewhat reasonable price. If people don't want to plonk down northwards of $70 dollars, there's also a retroclone project called Dark Dungeons that does a pretty decent facsimile of the BECMI rules for a lot less money ... if that's your thing.

My only exposure to Exalted was SomethingAwful's "WTF D&D" commentary ... Is it as "rapey" as those guys made it out to be?

I saw some similar reports on the Southpark Steam forum when I was deciding whether or not to drop 60 bucks or not. Apparently you have to reload your last checkpoint.