Wormerine

That’s great, I am doing bunch of passion/favour gigs as well. But asking people to do work for free, whenever it is voice acting, music or programming is just unprofessional and inconsiderate. I don’t know anything about Obsidians music being recorded for free - I am pretty sure they hired an orchestra for some of the pieces. Are you referring to music recorded for the Kickstarter trailer? Quality of that wasn’t great. Considering how rare it is to see a competent musician or actor - no, I wouldn’t say that there are so many of them. Also in all that discussion we omit the cost of casting. More characters = longer casting&search. Whatever, trying to discuss cost of something we don’t know much about. Obsidian will do what they will do.

Sure, but I am interested more in spells which make use of strength. If strength based mage wont use spells much, that will be disappointing. In PoE1 I mostly used Cipher as weapon DPS/crowd control character, so for that build resolve is not,helpful anyway. There is now choices to be made between weapon and spell damage but in my opinion it’s a boon not a problem (at least in theory).

I don’t know how “might” was pitched originally as I wasn’t following development of PoE1, but “might” has never been tied to soul power within the game. It is clearly described as a stat describing physical strength and spellcasting capabilities + scripted interactions clearly tied this stat to physical strength. Looking forward to creating: 1) cipher 2) high strenght and low resolve mage and seeing if those characters are as useless as some people suggest.

Not all the writers, just the guy who wrote Durance and Grieving Mother And yet those are the most interesting and best written characters IMO. ...to be in a book *interactive book.

It might very much depend on what you like in your RPG and what you value more. I found world, characters, quest design and overall structure more engaging in NV than Fallout3, which after initial “WoW!” moment quickly bored me to death. It is still the only Bethesda title that I managed to play for quite a few hours, but it was more due to the nostalgia than enjoyment of the game. I started to really dislike it recently as it kept me from trying NV for many years, and it turned out to be one of the most satisfying RPGs I played in years. I didn’t touch fallout4. It seems to be filled with many of systems, which could make for a fun game (weapon customization, city building) but I doubt they are fleshed out and polished enough to carry the game. Dialogue system looks laughable for a fallout game and I heard from a trusted source that story is embarrassingly bad. Still, they could make a really good fallout shooter and I would probably still dislike it for wearing a corpse of something I love.

Not all the writers, just the guy who wrote Durance and Grieving Mother And yet those are the most interesting and best written characters IMO.

If I didn’t know that there are less people in my party I probably wouldn’t notice while playing the beta.

Can Obsidian give rewards to investors? I know they said they couldn’t give the game to investors, which they thought it was unfortunate but would cause problems as the game would need to be taken into account as part of financial return.

UFO: Enemy Unknown (1994) - 10 points Mythos Games/MicroProse Thief: The Dark Project (1998) - 10 points Looking Glass Studios Deus Ex (2000) - 10 points Ion Storm Freespace 2 (1999) - 10 points Volition System Shock 2 (1999) - 10 points Irrational Games/Looking Glass Studios Witcher 3: Wild Hunt (2015) - 6 points CD Project RED Bastion (2011) - 6 points Supergiant Games Planescape Torment (1999) - 6 points Black Isle Studios Fallout 2 (1998) - 6 points Black Isle Studios Invisible Inc. (2015) - 6 points Klei Entertainment Baldur’s Gate II: Shadows of Amn (2000) - 5 points Bioware Portal (2007) - 5 points Valve Corporation Gothic II (2002) - 5 points Piranha Bytes Super Meat Boy (2010) - 5 points Team Meat Prince of Persia: Sands of Time (2003) - 5 points Ubisoft Montreal Starcraft: Brood War (1998) - 3 points Saffire Corporation/Blizzard Entertainment Sid Meier’s Pirates! (1987) - 3 points MicroProse Star Wars Jedi Knight II: Jedi Outcast (2002) - 3 points Raven Software Spelunky (2012) - 3 points Mossmouth, LLC Ancient Domains of Mystery (1994) - 3 points Thomas Biskup Heroes of Might and Magic III: The Restoration of Erathia (1999) - 1 Point New World Computing Hitman: Blood Money (2006) - 1 point IO Interactive Mafia (2002) - 1 Point Illusion Softworks Fez (2012) - 1 Point Polytron Corporation Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons (2013) - 1 Point Starbreeze Studios

Being a musician I mostly guess that VO is expensive due to my personal experience in music. First you need a place to record - studios and concert halls are expensive. For a musician a recording session is expected to be better paid than a live concert, because your work will be reused by someone without you profiting. Sure there are a lot of musicians but they spent many years training, often deal with large student loans and purchased instruments worth $10,000-$100,000. Playing below union wage is not in their best interest. In the recording you have musicians and a team of director and audio engineers who will help in making sure recorded material is high quality and later edit it. Recording of 30min-1hour long, high quality demo reel in US usually costed me between $500-$1000 and that was the cost of a small studio with one audio engineer and a very basic ensemble (just a single violinist - therefore not much equipment in use, no balancing to do) and it covered couple hours of recording session, and cleaning up/editing audio (naturally I didn’t pay myself for performing). I would also want to point out that as it was proof of my abilities recording, there was no time consuming editing like putting different takes together, adjusting intonation etc. Sure, I usually recorded for around $120 but the difference in quality was drastically noticeable. while I can’t possibly predict how much a recording of VO or soundtrack for a game costs I expect it to not be a cheap process.

Well, having quality recording and someone who can speak isn’t enough for an engaging performance. It’s like saying that for a good performance in a film you need a good camera and someone who looks fine. Most youtubers would make for terrible voice actors and their setup probably isn’t good enough. Some games used voices recorded by you tubers on their own setups and it’s is very hearable. In addition, You need someone who can quickly craft a character, potentially change accent, deliver lines in a way that they convey something about a character, and they need to do it efficiently. I imagine there are also other people involved like a director. From what I understand actors in gaming industry tend to be under appreciated if anything.

I will cheat, and say that I wouldn’t change stats that much, but go classless. As class heavily defines your character it doesn’t really seem to work well with second defining mechanic of your character aka. attributes. Personally I would like to see attributes be more impactful and visible; Character with high strength and con plays substantially different than a character with high perception and intelligence. As it is now, I really don’t care what stats add what bonuses. I leave it in Obs heads to balance those out.

It’s not that passive regeneration is a bad idea (changers use it) but it’s a drastic change to how ciphers work. To make it work entire cipher skill tree would need to be rebalanced in order to work with changed “mana” mechanic.

I think that would be an ideal situation, and something Obs would probably very much like to do. But it kinda goes against an idea of class based system and makes things much more complicated. Essentially, to really live up to “all builds are valid” promise, Obs would need to design classes within classes with all of them fulfilling at least 4 tank-DPS-Support-healer roles. It might be an interesting approach for something like Dragon Age with 3 available classes, but I am not sure it is realistic in PoE. Maybe if system remained the same through several games and each installement would add skills to every class to expend their usefulness...

That doesn’t really make sense. Someone wanting a game to have a difficulty curve that takes into account players lvl, and making specific challenges by not playing the game correct way are not the same.

If those are not interesting mechanics and they bog down experience, instead of enhancing it, then yes. It’s like saying more writing in game is better. The underlying issue with PoE loot is not that there is a lot of it, but that 90% of it is a junk you have no use for, except destabilising local economy by flooding market with hundred spears at a time.

All we know from recent week was that they planned to release this week but it’s not ready. I would love it to be available for winter break, it we will see.

That doesn’t seem right... maybe bug report?

I found inventory management frustrating at first but in fact it works fine. Beyond what was mentioned above you can also switch between characters using 1-5 shortcuts, which I found to be the quickest way to do it.

Yeas, especially if you could mouse over statuses and learn what they do.

I think I posted about it a while ago. There is one NPC connected to the stolen fruit quest who moves around depending on time of day, however he doesn’t walk - just teleports from one place to another. Other than that NPC seem to be divided into stationary and walking ones, no matter the time of the day. I do hope that the NPC scheduling will be implimented more or less the way it was advertised.

Where did the decision to not include Slow speed come from? JS: Basically, we wound up with three speeds: a Slow, a Normal and a Fast, and we found that a lot of people just defaulted to playing on the Slow speed. And so, we...things were not setup the way they were supposed to be on the Backer Beta but, in the next update, the speed of everything should be about the speed that Slow was in Pillars 1. In Pillars 1 Slow speed moved everything to about two-thirds the normal combat speed. That is what I wanted everything to be set to for the Backer Beta, there were just some data errors and things like that. And also the movement speed had not been adjusted. So, now, yes, 15% is not 33% but, like I said, movement speed is much more sensitive to adjustments like that. The other combat speeds and Recovery time have all been adjusted down so, hopefully, what you will find in the next Backer Beta update is that the speed of combat is comparable to Slow. My hope, and maybe this won't work, is that you will not need Slow speed because the normal pace of combat is slow, and you will use Fast mode when you want to — like if it's just, "Oh, this is a simple fight", "I'm way overleveled for this", "I just about have it wrapped up" — you can hit Fast toggle and just fly through it. BH: And one of the nice things about the change of just reducing the overall pacing of combat: you don't get the awkward, slow motion attacks that Slow mode got in base game. JS: Yeah, that is the other thing. Slow mode actually slows animation down, whereas making Recovery time longer makes the time between attacks longer and slows the overall pace of things happpening down, but the attacks themselves still happen at a — you know, they can still be animated and look normal, not like everything is in slow-mo.

I don’t think having less diserable stats for a class to be a bad thing. If you do a focused build there is always be a dump stat. The issue arises when a stat is useless to a class no matter how you want to use it or when favouring certain attributes due to role playing reasons makes a character unusable.

I think that is very much a possibility. One of the advantages of non recorded dialogue is that you can change it whenever you need. Another possibility is that they recorded lines which they saw as the most important or non changeable. If dialogue has branching paths and they are recording some of it, they will go for lines which always stay the same.

but... but... but... If you voice EVERYONE what about PC?!