alanschu

Oh god you're right. Well, no art asset required then. Should be even easier to do.

So much yes. You should just make the NPC a Six foot tall Rabbit to boot.

Though a complete lack of Deraldin responding has in fact made me an emotional wreck

Note that it IS possible to use steam as a delivery and have the game be DRM free. Paradox games have been doing this. You don't need Steam to be running, and can just run the executable directly. Frankly you'll need to wait for official dev confirmation if this is your line in the sand, because even simply Steam exclusivity does not tell the whole story.

I actually have little issue with "player centric" romances given that, if done properly, they are only inconsistent if you're applying meta knowledge. For me it has little difference if they are or aren't, but I do know that a good number of LGBT people are very grateful for the effort. So given it doesn't affect me much, it mostly feels malicious to hope that they are not done that way. Having said that, I loved the way romances were done in New Vegas, since they were so subtled and nuanced and just damned believable. I also have zero beef with no romances at all.

No worries Josh. Frankly I hope you (and Wasteland 2) are hugely successful. And that after you are, you share how amazingly successful you are. I'd love to see some "data points" that show this type of gameplay is indeed valid and highly in demand. If not though, deliver to your contributors. We'll contribute to the next one Cheers! Allan

I would hope that something like this doesn't actually require us to make the required donation.

I have far too much ego to not check back on the thread I created.

Since I didn't see a link.... http://www.gamebanshee.com/interviews/109456-project-eternity-interview.html

Just wanted to bounce back and wish you guys luck! Super stoked for the project! Contributed! Cheers. Allan

I'm still not sure how that pertains, because we did provide a better solution than currently existed in DAO. I won't dispute that my statement was a statement of the obvious. But sometimes it just needs to be said it seems. The reason why I said it was because we did improve the system. Obviously not to Gromnir or Tigranes' liking, but in that regard, the solution that we came up with is not good for everyone.

You do have a relative idea. As a mage you can put a point into Magic, and you can see that your attack score increases, as well as the damage your standard magic attack. You can also go to your spells and see that the damage of your spells has also increased. I think that you are hoping that the rules for this game would line up very nicely with the rulesets of games such as pen and paper RPGs where progression tends to have much more discrete stepping due to the fact that, as you allude to, there is no computer able to instantly calculate the numbers for you. I'll agree with you that it should be sacrilege in a P&P RPG when the players themselves are adjudicating the rules systems. If you do find yourself struggling for where to allocate your attribute points Adding to the GUI is the easiest way to have the information be accurate. We've all experienced manuals that are inaccurate at print. The manual is actually locked down before the game goes into cert because of turnover for translation and editing. Ah yes, the simple check box. It's the solution to almost every issue people have with many games. Eh, if people think it's patronizing I suspect it's either because they're making assumptions about software development, or they are looking for it to be patronizing. Or some combination thereof. My comment wasn't intended to be, though I suspect those that think I am being patronizing will continue to believe so irrespective of what I say. It wouldn't be a trivial amount of tables, given the amount of spells/abilities existing in the game and how high attribute scores will be, and displaying mathematical formulas would not be an ideal solution either. If resources such as computer memory, as well as time, were more infinite, I'm sure there's a lot more that game devs in general could do for their games. Huh?

It is probably somewhat nebulous because the GUI would start to get loaded with a lot of information. I increased my magic score by 6 and saw one spell go up by 19 points of damage, another go up by 14 points, while another went up by 4. Adding the coefficients for stuff like this to the GUI starts to bog the users down with TMI. Some of the stats like attack and defense also do not scale linearly. The marginal increase derived from incrementing one attribute point increases as you focus more points into your primary combat attribute. I suspect at lower magic scores, increasing my magic score by 6 could very well have smaller increases in the damage of those spells. At the same time, cunning, for example has a clearly marked derived stat of Critical Damage, and when you allocate points to it you can see that it is increasing how much bonus damage your critical strikes do, as well as your character's defense score. Same with your other primary attributes showing the specific increase in health, damage (with DPS), defense (with percentage), attack (with percentage) This solution won't be ideal for all, but no solution would be. The improvement, at least, is that you can see the damage values of your abilities, on top of other effects that are applied (stuns, slows, class combo effects, and so forth) in the description of your abilities now.

Woo just went gold!

That was always my favourite complaint from DAO

Abilities state the damage and effect range as part of their descriptions in the skill tree. Note that the numbers scale with your character progression (I don't know if it's level or attributes or some combination, so that part is still somewhat nebulous), but when picking an ability or an upgrade, a list of its effects do appear.

One concern was definitely the sheer number of skills and talents you would get in DAO. Skill use went from Okay to blah once you exceeded your 6 quickbuttons on the console. It went from okay to mind-numbingly excruciating once you went past your skillbar on the PC. IMO anyways I'm not sure the context of the "buffs fade" message. I have sustained abilities that do not turn off. Some of them might be combat specific, but I don't know if I have seen what yet. Note I'm not a content tester, and have only been playing the game for the last couple of weeks. I don't know how all the skills work.

Tactics is not related to a skill. It is still based upon level (which I think is actually unnecessary), but unless you're the type that really likes to populate your tactics tree, it shouldn't be necessary. My level 14 character had 17 tactics slots, and my level 1 character (that has 1 skill) has 5. Many of your skill points will go into skills that provide upgrades, as well as passive abilities, rather than a new usable skill that would need a tactic. My level 14 warrior has 5 activated abilities and 2 modal/sustained abilities. I have 4 passive abilities, and 3 upgrades (1 on a sustained, 2 on activated abilities). Though this is with me, who I am usually driving and haven't blinked at his tactics page (which has all of 5 things in it). Our chesty haired dwarf, Varric, is currently in my party. He is also level 14, with 17 tactics slots. My tactics setup for him uses 7 slots, with his 6 active abilities and 1 sustained. He has another sustained that I haven't allocated into tactics, with the rest of his abilities put into passive/upgrades. In my experience I haven't run into a situation where I needed more tactics slots, but at the same time I think they could have just as easily given however many you can end up with right from the start. I tend to make hybrid classes though, so for many of my AI followers I find I end up customizing the tactics list somewhat because the presets don't line up as well as I would like. I also tweak them to better take advantage of class combos.

I really enjoyed War in the Pacific. Unfortunately my "Let's Play" of it never really took off simply because I ended up getting so busy The game has a stupid amount of details, especially the Admiral's Edition, but IIRC was pretty pricey. I enjoyed both Silent Hunter 3 and 4. #3's campaign is more interesting (and more challenging especially as the war goes on). When I learned to "shoot from the hip" (no target assistance, but not messing around with all sorts of other calibration issues) in Silent Hunter 4 though, my enjoyment with that one went up immensely. I've been meaning to check out SH5, but the online requirement for a single player game started pushed me off. Though I eventually picked up Conviction, so I might try out SH5. If I do, I'll let you know how it is.

Most of the story based stuff tends to be in localized instances, so only you would actually be able to see it. I haven't had a chance to play much lately (I'm on DA2 and we're finishing that up right now), and I would say that I've only been probably 1/2 or 2/3s of the way through "Act 1." As a result I probably haven't had a chance to see too much regarding reactivity. There have been people in my personal quests that I could have killed but didn't, and so forth, so I do hope that they have a chance of popping in at a later time. If not I think it'd be a wasted opportunity. For more general quests, I don't think there can be too much reactivity. You can proceed through some of them in different ways, however, which is neat. I find these side quests range from standard MMO stuff (go kill this guy for me), but I have had some that I actually enjoyed the writing. Without spoiling too much, I bumped into a situation where my friend and I needed to retrieve something, and when I found the guy that had it, it turns out he wasn't so bad after all and while I had the option to just kill him and take it, he convinced me that doing so would be a greater evil in the long run, and in exchange for his life he did point me to an alternative source for what I was looking for. There was some fun dialogue to be had with that one. But I wouldn't expect that to have too much reactivity though. As to whether or not it's a "massively single player online RPG" or "MMORPG" I think the goal is that people can play the game either way and still enjoy it. One of the things I dislike about MMOs is their static nature, but we're seeing attempts by several companies to give the player the idea that what they are doing has some impact in the world. WoW's old world update does an excellent job of this in my opinion. The landscape of Gilneas, for example, actively changes as a result of quests you do in the Worgen starting area. This is done with phasing and I think that Blizzard does it very well. I can (and have) happily solo'd through the restored old world and very much enjoyed it. I basically play WoW as a light RPG with some fun combat that happens to have other people running around in the game for extra flavour as well as grouping possibilities. I don't think the idea of a "MMORPG" or "massively single player online RPG" are necessarily mutually exclusive. I don't have time to raid, so the majority of group content I experience in WoW is with one or two friends, which is a lot of fun. 90% of my game experience has just been playing through the content with a friend of mine, so I can't necessarily answer these questions in as much depth as you may like. I do enjoy the narrative, and I think a strength of TOR is that it may provide a more interesting solo/play with a friend type experience. Maybe to a fault for "randomly pugging" type stuff. There are those that enjoy just playing WoW by themselves (I think the Cataclysms changes have made the narrative WAAAY better and playing a large scale game by yourself a ton more interesting). With the time restrictions you have, hopefully some sort of trial will become available for you to see if TOR's solo narrative is your cup of tea. I know we are planning on having end game raiding content, but by the same token, there was a Flashpoint (very similar to a WoW dungeon) that I hit at level 10 that balances itself based upon your party size, so I was able to run it both with a friend, as well as in one of my solo playthroughs. I was able to make choices in the Flashpoint, though they also seem to be the most interesting multiplayer content I have experienced, so I don't know how much reactivity there can be because of the MMO nature of the game. In terms of what you can do with a high level character, I unfortunately don't really know. All I have heard is that end game raiding will be in, but I don't know what (if any) plans are in store for the more solo type. It could be that, like a standard RPG, once you hit the end of that story, it's kind of "the end" for that character. Since each character class has it's own unique personal story though, I'm hoping the game is replayable enough to go through at least 8 times (one for each character). Side quest stuff will be the same, which may hinder doing this. How viable this is will ultimately depend on a combination of how well written the side quests are, as well as how much variation there is available. Like many games, the side quests tend to be in the region (or along the way) for the personal quests, which might also help. I have heard some interesting ideas, but I cannot comment on them as I don't know if they will ultimately make it into the game. Sorry There are joinable NPCs, and I know that some of them can be romanced. My main character is a Jedi Knight, and I picked up 2 NPCs along my story (I have a third that seems to have come with my ship. I'm not sure if that's by design or not. The only interaction I have ever seen from him is when he lets me know someone is calling me while i'm on my ship). This is a hard one to really say because there's not much for me to say aside from "I like the other classes too." I'm hoping the unique stories really help in this regard. My favourite story so far as been the Imperial Agent. I also enjoy the Republic Trooper's story. I actually like the close up abilities of the ranged classes, particularly enjoying the cheap kick followed by the pistol whip with the Scoundrel. I'd have to sit down and play with one of them again. A couple months ago we got access to a more permanent test server that let us have access to more content, and it just happened that I started playing a Jedi Knight at that time. Since I wanted to get past the first couple planets, I've stuck with him. I haven't made any such statements, and in fact would go on the record saying I would love to see a KOTOR 3 get made. That said, even prior to being hired by BioWare I still had no issue with TOR being made. Simply because it's not one type of game that I would like, does not mean that I cannot enjoy TOR for what it is. You can see examples of this on this forum with respect to games like Fallout. Fallout 1/2 are some of my favourite games of all time, and even though Bethesda wasn't making Fallout 3 in any way like the first two, I still wanted FO3 to be a fun game for what it was because I enjoy playing fun games. A game that gets released that sucks does me no good, and it's not like if FO3 tanked that anyone was going to make a "real" Fallout 3 in the vein of the first two games. Speaking as a fan for a moment, I have always been very surprised why so many fans think BioWare should step up to the plate and make KOTOR 3. BioWare made KOTOR 1, which in and of itself was a self contained story that wrapped itself up with no loose ends. Obsidian Entertainment made the sequel, and due to the nature of it's ending, has a lot of unanswered questions. Given that these questions aren't even posed by BioWare, it seems like a strange request to demand that BioWare take the story arc that went in a direction set by a different company, and wrap up all the unanswered questions that it poses. Imagine you write a story, then I come along and make a sequel to it that has a cliffhanger, and now the fans demand that you wrap up the cliffhanger that I created. It'd be a really daunting task and I think would pose a lot of additional restrictions on whichever company attempts to wrap it up, because people are going to demand answers to their very specific questions. One of the strengths of KOTOR (and even KOTOR 2) is that it had the freedom to not be bound by the other Star Wars stories because it was set so far in the past. KOTOR 3 doesn't have that luxury, and if it were to be made, I would think the best company to do it would be Obsidian Entertainment.

Regarding option 1, I think it might be more the other way around. I was floored at how much Gamestop was offering us to include custom items for their preorders of DA2.

This doesn't demonstrate whether or not the advertising itself is effective, but an appreciable number of people do validate the codes they get for this sort of stuff. I suspect it will still be the same for this cross promotion.

DAO is a functioning product without Shale. It's not like we shipped DAO with part of Shale and then people had issues with the game being broken because they couldn't access Shale. So I don't understand the perspective of the "Shale fix." Stuff gets cut from video games all the time, and as you claim to be in development I'm sure you can understand that going through every single conversation in DAO to make sure that we actively delete the lines of conversation that Shale had would not be a very productive use of time. The option came down to "Cutting Shale outright" or "moving Shale to DLC." The time and budget of DAO meant including Shale would have only compromised other aspects of the game. As for our maintenance budget, we prefer to use that to fix issues that people have with the actual game, rather than ignoring those to add some extra content for a character that was cut from the game. This argument is too simplistic, because you can boil down to "Why does anyone buy the game at all, when you can get all the content for free anyways." From the standpoint of the developer, it's a tricky situation because neither situation you just described has any money going to the developers of the game. Having said that, The Stone Prisoner DLC (the one that came free with a new copy of the game) was actually a very successful DLC. The only people that would consider this DLC as a purchase are those that obtained the game second hand (either as a gift from someone, or buying used) or (oddly and hilariously...) someone that pirated the original game.

I think if we reach a modularization of this level it would need to also come with restructuring the price of games as well. So the real dollar cost impact becomes obfuscated. Has there ever been a DLC that required another DLC on either the 360 or the PS3? I don't think so and I think there may be restrictions against that. At the very least, this should help control excessive modularization if it requires that only one piece can be the "core piece."

I don't think that there is any way around this unfortunately. If your premise is true, then it is possible to turn any reward mechanic for one group into a punishment mechanic for the group not rewarded. Preorder sales are highly valued (I don't even know all the reasons, I just know that there are several). The primary advantage of large preorder sales is that it creates larger orders from retailers. This gets significantly more copies of the games on store shelves, full displays set up at prime spots in stores, which provides latent advertising, more accessibility, and so forth. However, preordering games is actually a risk. You see it as them spending the same amount of money as you, but it's not quite the case. Someone that preorders has virtually no other resources aside from company history and game hype to support the decision to purchase a game. If it is really the same cost, why didn't your pre-order it? I think the fact that, as you point out, there are people that "don't normally like to pre-order" indicates that there must be some sort of additional cost to pre-ordering the game. If there wasn't, everyone would have just gone and bought the signature edition since there'd be no logical disadvantage for not doing so. Unless you're also of the mind that sales for products or "buy two get one free" type stuff is also a form of punishing customers that don't take advantage of it.