alanschu

BW put too much hope on the story of the game, I think. When the game was released, it's end game content was lacking big time and was unbelievably buggy. I'm not sure is there a hardmode bossfight in the game that hasn't bugged at some point. So I don't really blame people who have quit or gone back to WoW that has had. what, 8 years of polishing I agree that it seems the story focus was a risk that didn't pay off.

I played the first XCOM comfy on a couch too.... (my computer was in the basement next to the couch)

Yeah. I used the demo to get a feel for the game, and it's pretty much right in line with what I expected. I think the game will be pretty amazing. For those expecting more from a demo, I think this is exactly what a demo should do. I got a feel for how the gameplay will work, and was pleasantly surprised to be able to run around my base even if in a limited capacity. I am thinking on doing a Let's Play of it as well just for fun.

I'm just biding my time playing random games until this comes out.

Agreed. No sense tossing a stick of dynamite on it. Even when the gold rush dies though, if Obsidian and inXile deliver on the games they want to make, the avenue is still open to them. THere's an important thing to consider is that the contributors are people that are often willing to pay much, much more than the cost of an actual project. If Obsidian's game isn't a runaway success and the contributors feel cheated, Obsidian is pretty much done unless they want to make whatever games publishers want them to make (and even then that might be unlikely). They can't (and won't) listen to every request, but if they decide to add localization support instead of one of their stretch goals, I think it will only backfire. Especially since there's nothing stopping them from localizing the game once they are getting revenues from actual sales. Localization isn't a cheap process, and deciding to do it instead of taking those resources and putting them into the core product is a huge risk. I'm pretty sure that Obsidian is on the record stating they hope to never need to use something like Kickstarter again, but I'm sure they'd rather not burn any bridges and frankly seem like the types that wouldn't want to help burn that bridge for anyone else either.

By my impressions, ME3 has exceeded expectations financially.

No, we're not the financiers of the game. No, Obsidian is not accountable to us. This forum is called 'Speculation and Discussion', not 'Manage Your Investment' ... all your Kickstarter pledge buys you is your pledge reward, which Obsidian can fulfil in any way they please. They can develop the game with $100K if they please and pocket the rest, or they can spend $50 million on it and put in a load of stuff that you don't want or need: a pinball mini-game, an Angry Birds clone puzzle system, a My Little Pony race mode. Pleasing US should be a low priority because we are not future purchasers of the game ... Obsidian already has our money. Wrong. If this game and other games doesn't deliver what the Kickstarter contributors want, Kickstarter dies as a medium for financing games. I'm sure you'd be tickled pink to find out that Obsidian decided to make some Facebook game with the money they requested. They put up stretch goals signifying what is or is not going to go into the game to encourage contributions. They would be flipping the proverbial bird to those that made this entire project possible if they didn't attempt to deliver on what they set out to deliver. Pleasing us is the top priority unless they wish to undermine the effectiveness of Kickstarter for every other developer that doesn't want publisher influence. Chris Avellone doesn't post a picture of a Kickstarter saying "No pressure" to him if they just feel this is a ball of money and that they aren't in some way accountable to the people that provided it. It's a measure of their integrity. You are right, though, that people have no recourse. They could make some **** game and run with the money. Anyone lacking in integrity would be the ones that do that. Deciding that they "already have our money" and shouldn't do anything to please us is exactly what people do NOT like about the big publishers. The thing is, this game could sell zero copies, but as long as the kickstarter contributors are satisfied, Obsidian has a way to stay in business and make the RPGs that they want to make. No one is forcing features down their throats. But their list of things to put into the game is going to be measured against what they committed to doing via the stretch goals and so forth. If they want to put in something like localization, it should come either as an explicit stretch goal, or after all stretch goals have been satisfied (and quite literally be a "stretch goal" for their development, in that if they have the resources available to do so, then they should).

Errrr. Okay? I think this is more falling into the realm of concluding what you want to conclude. I think Greg was burnt out. You seem to think something else.

Haha I chipped in $20.... And I think I did $35 for Wasteland 2.

Errrr, that's nice I'm still not sure how this relates to SWTOR, and Troika wasn't a console developer... Your clarification more confused me haha. I guess here's the TL;DR of my assessment. SWTOR didn't do as well as hoped Team had to lay people off This bummed Greg out (BioWare has never done layoffs before). Not sure about Ray though. His was more of a surprise to me.

Moddability might be a better term. And I'd be surprised if the game wasn't moddable in some way for the reasons you describe. Spot on with the QA requirements skyrocketing with co-op.

I wish I could afford to drop $265 on a kickstarter :D

Not nealy as much as I once did. After all, I am back Thank Project Eternity (and that guy Deraldin). Well, thank or blame. Your choice! I think TOR's greatest strength is small group gaming for people that want a story. I actually encourage everyone that hasn't played it, but loves the KOTOR games, to give it a try once it goes F2P. If you need people to flesh out the party I'd even join up. It is so much fun to run through with a group of 4 made up of each of the factions classes and to run through the game. Way more than just single playering the game. Heck, we even kept track our our PC's "approval" of other PCs similar to the way the NPCs do just for our own fun. It also meant that during group story content, I was more likely to pull aggro off the guy I liked sooner than the guy I didn't like Loads of fun. But yes, it is disappointing that it wasn't as big of a success as many of us were hoping. The idea of financial automony similar to how Blizzard and Valve can provide for themselves was definitely something we really wanted to have. Oh well. Curious how the F2P model works out for them though.

Then it seems that they actually failed to adapt to their new projections under EA and should definitively quit while they're ahead. I'm not even sure what conclusion you're drawing here. I'm remembering why I stopped posting here XD

Far too much World of Tanks. PM me if you want to join me :D

Greg was heavily involved with SWTOR and actually had been living down there (away from his family) for upwards of two years working on it. Greg always seemed to be more camera shy than Ray in terms of amount of public appearances.

I made it up. All it is is that there is going to be some sort of event that is fired when you kill a creature in order to award you experience.

Still love that guy that said a common response to why people pirate is pretty much "because I can" on top of the more inane intellectual right to have that stuff for free. Wheeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee.

I'm certain that them leaving will have little effect, since their presence in projects has been diminished in the projects since the EA acquisition. My guess is that they were bogged down in the politics ever since then and were just biding their time as figureheads until they could retire. This is pure speculation, though. I think Greg took SWTOR pretty hard (Ray probably did too). Ray's last public communique was the explanation to the ME3 fans regarding the ending. I wonder if that weighed in on it at all. Though Ray's Facebook was already crazy alive with a lot of politically themed posted, so in retrospect I suppose I shouldn't have been so surprised. Greg didn't really surprise me though.

31 PST/Fallout

Why not? You don't even seem sure what that even means. I mean, if you want to split hairs awarding XP after killing a creature is effectively a scripted event. There are likely going to be event handlers set up for the creatures and there's probably going to be some sort of OnKilled() function that determines whether or not XP is awarded.

Because it's just inspired by. I think anyone hoping for a complete carbon copy is going to come away disappointed for anything. It assumes that not only do the devs putting forth a kickstarter have a game idea they're really passionate to work on, it also assumes that the devs are only passionate about doing nothing differently than they had in the past.

Why would gaming commodities behave differently than other commodities in terms of marketing? Furthermore, it all seems somewhat relative. It's not like Feargus isn't going to be getting paid during the development of the game.

Excuse me? It's a single-player game. Yes, and I'm sure you've never seen people say "OMG my particular playthrough style artificially weakens my character." Hell, you're already doing it yourself when you express concern over what's the point of tough combat encounters so that people can be happy that their 95% proficiency in basket weaving is useful. I'll agree that class mechanic balance is a bit less of an issue than in a multiplayer game, but if two characters pick the exact same race/class, if the combat heavy class always ends up more powerful than the designers have undermined their goals of allowing valid non-combat style playthrough. Sorry if you don't like it, but they've pretty much stated that their goal is to minimize the reliance on combat. During bloodlines development, there was an interview where one dev (maybe even Cain?) stated that they found it absurd to reward players for metagaming by allowing a stealthy playthrough, but additionally rewarding the players for still going back and killing the guards that would have provided the obstacle for the more direct, combatitive resolution. In this case, it actually biases against the combatitive playthrough since they wouldn't try to sneak past.

How do you weight when someone uses soemthing passive, like stealth abilities, versus giving xp each time a combat action is taken. Furthermore, does this not still overly reward combat? Heck, it'd actually reward people being all super sneaky to get that xp, and then rewarding them moreso to go back and stab people. People are no longer encouraged to simply sneak (or simply attack) but to do weird metagame activities instead.