Rabain

Well I'm sure in that case they could add a sub-class selection that has absolutely no bearing on anything other than the type of character you want to RP. For example the Monk class could have a Flagellant and Friar subclass, either one is nothing but some flavour text on your character screen. If you choose Flagellant you play the game while hitting yourself and if you choose Friar you play the game while singing some gregorian chants, everyone wins.

It sounds interesting until you start thinking about how it might affect players playing the game for the first few weeks or later on. Most likely everyone will identify everything, whether they have to pay or not for fear of missing out on something fantastic, or later they will just visit a database/guide somewhere to avoid the hassle of identifying everything. It doesn't sound good to me to leave people feeling frustrated because there is no choice except identify everything, gold permitting.

If your company already has a team that handles the logistics of running a group of volunteers this might all be sound but I don't think Obsidian has and to be honest setting it up and running it from the ground up is probably a huge waste of resources as opposed to actually gaining resources to help out. Never mind the inevitable queries players will raise about absolutely anything they dislike after release, what content was volunteer work? Man I hate that stupid quest in Bael Marsh, it was rubbish, I bet some nab volunteer wrote that. That book with all the typos and poor grammar, obviously volunteer crapola. Expect volunteers to receive hatemail if their names are in the credits etc. This is not quite the same as volunteering at your local charity shop or whatever. I regularly shudder to think of some of the npc names I might see in the game from backers who purchased npc tiers. We could see some horrific stuff there if Obsidian aren't fairly heavy handed in their "guidance".

How could you have been immersed if you were so focused on the "level" of npcs. Level doesn't really exist, it is just a game mechanic to define power increase over time. If you find it immersion breaking to see characters at level 10 that were level 5 the last time you saw them in game then you really have a very poor imagination and pretty much everything would break your immersion. Anyway this is one of those things that seems to be 50/50 for and against it being in the game so it is probably a good candidate to be in the Options - Gameplay menu.

Special attacks would be nice, even if they are not mapped to special attack abilities. I'd rather see those than finishers. Your character sometimes doing overhead instead of slash, slamming staff into the ground instead of just waving it about etc. I think they could fit into combat much better.

I think expecting a store prior to the game start is a bit much, wasted development time. Regardless of what race or class you pick the general idea will be you are a nobody who witnesses something and goes on an adventure. You can RP you were an awesome mercenary but you will still start at level 1 so just giving out some basic gear on race/subrace/class basis seems easiest. Most likely it will be like BG1 and we start with only a single weapon and I'm fine with that. I really don't want to start the game with basic armor and weapons from some character creation store and then play for 2 hours before finding a single upgrade. It was neat in BG1 that you could get armor and sword and shield and ranged etc slowly through Candlekeep after only having a staff on creation. It is an introduction to the game and works for both experienced and new players.

Boring fetch quests are fine, I doubt we will have dozens of them. If some farmer wants 10 pig livers I'll be happy to go get them at level 1 or 2, the only thing I hate is when it requires killing 25 pigs to get 10 pig livers, though to be fair we rarely see that kind of grindy fetch quest outside of MMOs.

Create a simple slug/worm animation, everywhere there is a spider replace it with a worm if the Player has selected "no spiders" in the options menu. It can even use the same attacks as well as web etc. Arachnophobia is much more widespread than fear of other animals so the argument that bears etc are also scary doesn't really mean much. Spiders exist on every continent and in pretty much every human environment, bears, wolves, pumas etc don't wander around every town and inside every house.

In Elizabeth Moons Paksenarrion books they had a Snow Cat, (like a huge white tiger type of thing) that had the ability to trap the souls of those it killed (and I guess ate) inside itself. It could use its powers to entrance other creatures who looked it in the eyes, making them easy prey. "The snowcat is a magical beast, like the dragon and the eryx. It lives on both sides of the world, and feeds on both sides. For meat it eats wild sheep, or horses, or men. For delight it eats souls, particularly elven and human, though I understand it takes dwarven souls often enough that the dwarves fear it.* Be interesting to see various soul based as well as soulless creatures in PE.

If they were doing this they could make it so that you could just tell the store manager to do what he thinks best, this would give the game a heads up that you aren't interested in micro-managing a trade game. The income could be a lot less than if you micro manage well but possibly be more than if you micro manage badly. Just thinking of options, I don't want to be forced into micro management if I'm not interested. It might be interesting to see those 10 studded leather armor you just returned with appear on mannequins in the store as soon as you hand them over.

Personally I think it will be almost impossible for Obsidian to provide alternate methods of achieving an objective in every circumstance, frankly I think that would be silly. Sometimes a bunch of worgs are just a bunch of worgs and you will have to kill them, there will be no sneaking, no talking, not outsmarting. You just have to kill them. I think this will be the case for many encounters in the game. In dungeons you may be presented with various types of enemies; kobolds, goblins, hobgoblins, undead etc and you will just have to kill them. The difference is that in an XP per kill based system you get the XP after each individual kill, in an objective based system a group may be defined and only when the group is all dead will you have achieved the objective and get XP. The objective may never be visible to you, you may not know that 5 or 6 or 4 of the enemy constitue a group and all must die to be awarded the XP. In practice you might not notice the difference between the two systems except in circumstance were perhaps groups have not been defined well and you miss one enemy because it was misassigned to a hidden area or just not spawned due to a bug etc. Then you get no XP from that group at all. Of course that presupposes mistakes and bugs across the game and hopefully that will be minimal. Objectives don't always have to be some thing in the game area or some trigger on the ground, place on a map or a quest etc. An objective could just be that this room with 6 enemies must all die in order for you to receive XP, you can fight them in the room or pull them out back into the corridor you came in from or whatever, they just all have to die for the objective to be satisfied and XP awarded. The objective won't be something silly like "make it to the other side of the room" meaning you have to kill them anyway and then walk across the room, the objective is just killing them all. There may be other places were the objective is reaching a target location and might offer a choice of sneaking or fighting but I'd expect those type of objectives to occur much less often than the "kill" type of objective. Anyway this is all guess work until we see it or get a much more detailed explanation of the logic.

Basically a PE version of Watchers Keep or Durlags Tower. A traditional IE type dungeon just bigger. I don't feel the need to tell Obsidian how to design it, what to put in it or anything else.

I'd not be surprised by an early release, they have done this before several times and they don't need to make an engine. Unity is pretty user friendly, you can download the free version and be making your own 3d areas inside of 20 minutes following a tutorial (I'm not saying that is how fast it will be for PE, just that the engine is user friendly even for a total newbie to it). If anything I'd say it will be writing that will take time, with 2 cities and a bunch of joinable npcs and the main story and everything else....this will be huge.

Unity engine.

I'll put this here because it seems Green Shirt Girl posts are frowned upon in the General Discussion forum Greetings, PE Fan here And today I'd like to tell you a little bit about Green Shirt Girl Do you know green shirt girl Well I do for one thing You see i'm a fan of green shirt girl And thats because I'm green too, you see It's not that easy being green shirt girl Having to spend each day the color of the leaves When you think it could be nicer being red, or yellow, or gold Or something much more colorful like that It's not easy being green shirt girl It seems you don't blend in with so many other ordinary things And people tend to comment on you 'Cause you're standing out Like flashy sparkles in the water Or stars in the sky But green shirt girls the color of spring And green shirt girl can be cool and friendly-like And green shirt girl can be big like a mountain Or important like a river Or tall like a tree When green shirt girl is all there is to me It could make you wonder why But why wonder why wonder I am a fan of green shirt girl, and it'll do fine It's beautiful, and I think it's what I want to be... If you need the tune to go along with this see: She was the real star of the live stream.

If they include the statue, the levels with the statue will pretty much be half the size of the levels above, that should help reduce any chances of content providing too much gear for the player. Also they could just provide a bigger gap between the level of mobs on each level perhaps forcing you to leave and come back later when you have gained experience elsewhere.

Funny that a rabbit wants to know about breeding...

I thought these weren't two separate things but the house was upgraded to the stronghold? The house is where you meet your inappropriate love interests...

Do we have to wait till 2014 for everything in our tier? For example is there any way we could get things like patches and tshirts shipped asap rather than more than 18 months from now? I'd pay via an Addon for that alone.

You make it sound more complicated than what we have heard so far. Aeschylus above is basically right, the current information we have makes stamina sound like health bar 2. The only resources you manage in-battle in relation to stamina are anything that buffs stamina: healing or shouts or whatever it will be. It is not like fatigue, fatigue is something that typically occurs over time regardless of what you are doing (even BG version of fatigue sounds better than stamina). When you are fatigued you have some penalty, when you have less stamina you have no penalty, just a lower health bar 2. Imagine there was no stamina and you just had a health bar and you had a few different heal spells, shouts that reduced incoming damage, resistance etc. That is about the same level of resource management we have relating to stamina so why is stamina better, just because? I'd like more information before I'm sold on it. I agree with regard to encounters being the problem rather than the rest or save system in IE games. I don't really like the idea of saying IE games had broken rest spamming and save scumming, for the most part both systems had zero affect on players enjoyment and almost zero effect on combat. It is not like you rest spammed and could abuse combat in some way, in fact many players probably like the fact that you can press a button, wait for a load screen to pass and continue on your way. What was bad about that system apart from the fact that from an RP perspective resting for 16 days looks odd? Hardly anyone even paid attention to the rest length. I don't think the system was abused. It in no way affected peoples enjoyment of the games, it was something most normal players didn't even notice. They pressed Rest and continued to enjoy banters, romances, story and combat. I think we tend to lose sight of that while discussing the functional aspects of how the system worked. Trying to fix something that might have been broken but actually had a very minor effect on peoples enjoyment seems odd. Consider if the IE games would have been as successful as they have been if you could not Rest spam or "rest until healed" (which was an Option you could legitimately choose in some of the games). I'd go so far as to say that the game might have suffered from such a system, players may have felt combat was very unrewarding due to being forced to stock up continually on Healing of all forms and abandon any other spell or potion, they may even have felt the need to grind for gold to buy potions or pay for healing at temples. Gold might not have been abundant because of the cost involved in healing after every fight in order to continue (not being able to rest fully). The fights would have all been rebalanced to account for less Resting, the games would probably be very different.

I don't see how you can do this without extra animations without it looking a bit silly. When you hit someone with a sword, the game has a sword swing animation, maybe even blood splatter. When you dual wield there is combat animation for that too. If you grapple someone without an animation what happens? You stand there looking at them during the grapple? You continue to swing your sword during the grapple? If grapple was a realistic combat option and happened commonly (the way weapon swings do) there might be base for adding it but outside of some wrestling game I can't see it being of much use. If they aren't going to do it properly they should leave it out. There is no point adding something for the sake of it, if the implementation is 2nd rate and lowers the visual quality of combat. When the comment was made about grappling not being in I believe they referenced Dragon Age where some large enemies could grapple the player or party npc and lift him of the ground, swing him around and slam him. That looked awesome in the game and must have cost them a lot of time and development to get right, it happens maybe 5 times in the entire game. Considering what isn't in that game I would have rather they spent their AAA budget elsewhere.

I have been vocal in my dislike for both the stamina system and the objective based xp system however I still have my pledge at the 250 tier because I think even though the system currently announced are not my favourites I think if it works in gameplay I may like it. If it turns out to be a poor system I'm pretty sure Obsidian will know themselves long before they get to showing it to players in a beta and will make adjustments. So I think dlux should just pull his socks up and repledge. Not being around to give feedback on what you think is good or bad is one of the ways the developers find out what people want/like. Not being involved gets you very little in the long run.

He didn't mean a stretch goal for polish, he meant a stretch goal for anything would bring in more pledges and more pledges mean more cash and more cash means bigger budget which means more allocated to QA...and everything else. No stretch goal means some people might decide not to pledge any more and we also get polls like this with people trying to allocate money they think is just going to be floating around with nothing to do.

There are thousands willing to beta test for free I'm sure, spend the extra money on team resources (programmers, designers etc) so that the likelihood of there being lots of bugs is extremely low to begin with.

Feargus already commented that it will all depend on sales numbers, not really on the success of a kickstarter. Think about if a publisher was funding this game instead of via KS, they would be putting up most if not all of the money. Only Sales would get it back for them. If PE sells 1+ million copies in the 12 months after release then publishers might start to think about the effect on their profits.