So we don't know much about the game as of the time of this post, but we can safely assume that (a) we will be creating a singular character as a PC and (b) we will be a "Watcher" of some sort.

 

We don't know how the game will start, obviously. It could go one of two ways. One, you have a lot of control over character creation but your past as a character is either fixed and part of the story (BG games) or not even really bothered with at all (Elder Scrolls games, IWD). Two, you show up in media res, a grown-ass man / woman / myconid, and you have some control not just over the appearance and skills of your myconid, but your myconid's background. Usually it's something like NWN2, which were sort of akin to minor Fallout traits, giving negligible bonuses and penalties to stats, and maybe eliciting a comment from someone once or twice. But there are exceptions: The content for each Origin in Dragon Age was pretty substantial, though it has less bearing the more you go on in the game.

 

My personal favorite, though, was Arcanum's system. You went beyond mere socioeconomic and personality-based backgrounds toward the weird and fantastical. You could be a Frankenstein's monster, a magician's assistant, an idiot savant. No original game content was made for any of them (though that could change in a revisitation), but they were outlandish and what's more, they generally affected your stats in dramatic and often unchangeable ways, as well as put you in weird situations no one else would be in (freaking out in the sewers as a hydrophobe, for example). As such, they could substantially change the game.

 

Does the hivemind agree that character backstories are cool things to pick and choose for a character, provided he/she/zhe is not set in stone from the outset? Perhaps you can choose what it is you were doing when you were conscripted into the Watcher role, as it sounds like you were.

I think that the creative lead has said that Obsidian had mulled over the choice between BG- and IWD-style parties and decided to go with the former. So, possibly, but even if you are allowed to make a party, the first one you make will be the one the story revolves around.

I actually believe their April 2014 projection. They're working on no one's time but their own and they don't have the mountains of cash that allow Valve, for example, to stall / experiment with new tech. If it's on Onyx it should be pretty solid, technically.

Josh says the game is in the very early stages of development. In all likelihood they've got sketches and maybe a pre-alpha tech demo, if the tools have been built.

 

Josh also says that he couldn't get the blog post w/ party size clarification and the like done today, it's tentatively out tomorrow.

I don't know but I always think of terrible Canadian "tantric grunge" music

Josh Sawyer is nothing if not brofessional. Peep his formal cargo shorts

On the other side of the coin, I think the armor and weapons should FUNCTION like their real world counterparts as I mentioned above. Meaning that chain mail should not be "less restrictive" then full plate armor, but the other way around. This means that stabbing attacks should rip chain mail like paper. this means the rogue weidling thumbtacks should not be doing more damage then the 300 pound orc smashing things with a giant axe. And frankly what I'd really love to see if different weapons having different effects on different armor types, so the tactics isn't so much "get the fighter over there to tank the dude while the mage readies his fireball," but the fighter is figuring out what kind of weapon he needs to use for the given situation for maximum effect.

I'm sort of curious to know how the team is planning weapon balance, to the extent that they'll try to achieve it. An armor / damage type rock-paper-scissors sort of system is a good a plan as any but it can get impenetrable (good thing the system didn't seem to matter in the BG games, otherwise they'd be incomprehensible). Even though I found The Witcher's combat to be pretty dull, the fact that they had only two weapon types and everything generally corresponded to one or the other made it out to be a good, simple system.

 

Josh's system modifications in FO:NV bode well for this game, I think. They showed a cognizance of remarkably common armor / weapon system flaws, particularly the habit for games to have linear scales of quality and utility (ex. why would you use a dagger when you could use a short sword? Why use a short sword when you could use an axe?). At its core I think RPG system design should push a broad amount of viable player choices, without an obvious "best" choice.

The use of factions and choice/consequence systems (in whatever form) has been a consistent aspect of Obsidian's work going back to before they even existed. Fallout 2 had regional reputation, Planescape: Torment had faction alignment. I think it's safe to assume we'll see that sort of thing in Eternity.

This is an interesting discussion because it has a real and pervasive effect on gameplay, namely what "builds" people can make. Specifically, D&D's persistent bifurcation of "sorcerous" (ie largely damage- and control-based) and "clerical" (ie healing- and buff-based) magics has had lasting good and bad effects on the system. For that matter, the sequestration of consistent magic use to a handful of classes is something that doesn't necessarily need to be repeated in Eternity. We do know that this will be a class-based system, but we don't know how restrictive those classes will be.

It has been pretty funny watching the Codex rage out on Josh's formspring about the base of operations thing.

These campaigns generally garner about 2-3x their initial starting goal, so yeah, $3 million would probably be a good target. Wasteland 2 had what, 60k backers by the time it was finished? At $40 average that brings us another $1 m, roughly, and there's the potential for thousands more.

One thing I would like to see (and this is something I sort of expect what with Josh being a history buff) is uncertainty or possible bias coloring the commonly understood histories of the setting, and the notion that the tales you hear might be serving something other than the truth. This is something that the Dragon Age and Elder Scrolls settings do well, and I always appreciated it.

Has a beta been discussed? I would certainly be interested in getting into it (if nothing else, it helps ease the burden on QA).

I think Sawyer was not big on 'em in 3E DnD (they throw off balance and are hard to DM for a lot of the time) but he's building his own system from scratch so maybe he can pull it off right. Maybe he'll tell us!

WITH THE ACKNOWLEDGEMENT THAT WE KNOW NEXT TO NOTHING ABOUT THE GAME AS OF THE TIME OF THIS POSTING,

 

it appears that our gameworld is a serious, dare I say dramatic one. The snippets of dialogue we have read so far have been suitably portentous. Some might say the game seems "dark" at this point.

 

What I propose to you is this: Horror elements. I have been starved (starved!) for a good horror RPG for some time. Our Top Dog Programmer Tim Cain made a little game called Vampire the Masquerade: Bloodlines back in Troika day, as you'll recall now that I've mentioned it. That was the last RPG that I remember to feature serious horror elements (for the purposes of this post, I am not counting any of FONV's vault stuff, or Brayko's jacket). I miss it! I was so pumped for Aliens, you guys, it was gonna be 100% straight-up grade A horror, plus it's my favorite movie! But then they sent it upstate to live with a nice family.

 

SO, horror. Not all the time, you know, but I gotta have it. What sorts of horror, you ask?

 

How about THINGS THAT YOU SHOULD THINK about:

- Lovecraft, always. Mad, unknowable things. Small towns with terrible secrets. Hybrid monsters, terrible pacts. Barely keeping away the incomprehensible and unspeakable.

- Cool vampires. Still good, even today. Consider putting a different spin on them, something possibly more brvtal. Seen Near Dark? Curses, gushing blood, impossibly good looking dudes.

- Cults. Normal-seeming people. What do they do behind closed doors? Blood rituals, probably. More hybrid monsters, sticks that are actually snakes, crazy-looking daggers, creepy children.

- Impostors. Body snatchers, changelings. The thing from The Thing. Crazy magic robot people. "That is not my husband". Severed heads with spider legs.

- Hauntings / haintings. Very quiet people staring blankly at you from down long corridors. Stories about the attic. Portraits that move when you're not looking. Creaks and groans.

 

THINGS YOU PROBABLY SHOULDN'T THINK about:

- Normal vampires. Who needs em? Difficult to pull off as short-term antagonists. All about predatory sexuality but really just come off as generic monsters.

- Cannibals. There are no twists left. We see them coming.

- Serial Killers. Mark this as "maybe". The tanner from BG2 didn't work very well, neither did whatever the hell Dragon Age 2 was. But they still retain that compulsive creepy vibe. You just gotta build the mystique right.

- Werewolves. Make them unstoppable like in Bloodlines, we'll talk.

- Zombies. Rename "cannon fodder".

 

CONSIDER IT.

Even so, it wasn't unwise to plan for a long slog to the finish line.

I think in general I am excited by the notion of reactivity in the world, probably something close to The Witcher, much as I disliked that game. To illustrate what I mean, take an example:

 

Say your PC is entering a city for the first time and is going to infiltrate the local thieves' guild (or equivalent) for some other faction. You meet your faction contact but are interrupted by a group of local thugs. These thugs just happen to be racist. If you're an elf, say, they will attack you and you will have to kill them. If you're a human, they'll let you go (or you can kill them). In this case, it would appear that the human got off easy, but as it happens, later on in the infiltration quest the thug leader will show up at an inopportune time, recognize you, and blow your cover (barring some serious slick talking). An elf character, though subject to hassle the human isn't, is saved a major headache in the long run.

 

That sort of thing is something I'd like to see!

I think that Sawyer had said $1.1 mil was the bare minimum needed to get the game they had planned funded and developed. Hopefully once this is all over we can grill the devs about how the KS was planned out - is it modular? Do they have the "core game" at the minimum and then sequester off chunks of content for stretch goals to add? Hard to say. This is one of an early wave of indie game developments - WL2, Dead State, and Double Fine Adventure being other examples - to reach a "mid-level" between the 5-figures-or-less development of typical indie games / mobile games and the $30 mil AAA blockbusters. They're obviously closer to the former than the latter, but we have yet to really see how robust they'll be in comparison to the 90's classics they cite as inspiration.

Feargus has said in interviews that Josh and Tim Cain have been spitballing system designs for a few months, and the concept art / map, while quaint for some, certainly wasn't made on the fly. Sawyer and Avellone have also intimated that at least a few companion concepts have been established (though probably not finalized) I really highly doubt that they would make the map and include locations on it without actually knowing what those locations are and what are in them. They might not have gameplay stuff locked down but there are things to know about this game, otherwise they wouldn't have made the Kickstarter in the first place.

 

They were just blindsided by the celerity of success, that's all. Anyone would be. It's not really safe to bet on $1,009,000 being raised in 24 hours.

I do wonder about localization expenses. This is going to be a text-heavy game. Hopefully something can be worked out!

So on board with this you don't even know

I'm into it

They hadn't really anticipated making their goal in 28 hours (a good number of them didn't expect to make the goal in 32 days). What they probably anticipated was a pretty strong early showing that left them somewhere only partway to the goal. So they had essentially planned to parse out info over the weeks of the Kickstarter drive to keep momentum going until they hit the finish line (which is what I believe Brian Fargo had to do for Wasteland 2, and it's what I would have done in their shoes, fwiw). That the goal was hit so quickly came as a surprise and they had no PR stuff planned or implemented for this early juncture.

 

I know (oh, I know) the reticence to just come out and say something is frustrating, especially given that cutting out publishers was supposed to reduce needless secrecy, but the fact is that there is still money at stake and were I in their position, I'd want to consider what to say about my project before I reveal it.

 

Sawyer has said that he is putting together some stuff for us tomorrow, so sit tight. The thing was just formally announced as a thing that exists less than 48 hours ago. There are 30 days left in the drive. We'll learn lots more about this thing very soon.

It's not really a continent, it's a rather small region.

There could be some sort of mad-scientist race that somehow created another, and the two now live at odds, or perhaps even in harmony. Maybe someone played God and won.