Rabain

Feargus said on the reddit thing the other day that there will probably be some kind of "fast" option to get out of the dungeon so you don't need to manually run back up the levels you have completed. Whether it will be portals, stairs or just the ability to treat levels like the worldmap travel I don't know.

Yeah the poll seems to think there is another question we need to answer apart from the one we can see.

It could just be one giant mutant rat that when you hover over it says "this appears to be a conglomeration of 68455 individual rats".

Will there be any issues when the KS ends with the $8? How do you specify what it is for as there is no $8 add on or whatever or will there be an option "Obsidian Order" on the survey they send out and it is just classified as a donation? I'm fine with that if it is the case, just wanted to make sure it was being covered.

3.6m goal: All backers are mentioned by name in various books throughout the game. Call the books, Census of Aedyr: 2500 AI (that puts it far back enough in the games history to avoid meeting anyone in particular). If 66k+ names are too much for books in the game it could also be an interactive book, like you click on it and get a dialog screen, to view A-D, C-F etc and then branches to narrow down to your name.

It's the castle that sits on top of the Endless Paths mega dungeon. The road is just an endless path representing the potential infinite sum of pledges, if you reach 3.5m you can still reach 4m, still reach 5m etc until the KS ends.

I would definitely every single time stick a sword in his head if I had the opportunity. Consider where you are, you are in the world of PE were priests and paladins and whoever else have abilities to bring injured (unconscious) allies back into battle. They are doing it to your own allies, they are sticking swords and axes and magic in every head of every one of your friends they can, your allies are not getting back up... So yeah I'm sticking that sword in my opponents head every single time I can.

An Option to switch between Encounter based XP and Combat XP might be possible. Just add up how much XP is being rewarded in total for the Objective system, remove it and spread it at different values over various mob types throughout the game. XP rewarded for quest completion could remain in both systems. Obviously a bit more complicated factoring in XP for skills but you get the idea. Can anyone highlight anywhere in the IE games where you could grind XP that wasn't due to some bug with either respawns or quest hand ins? I really didn't think combat XP worked badly in any IE game.

You seem to be missing the point entirely. In order to be in a position of sticking a sword in someones head, you would have had to be fighting them for some time in order to have "defeated" them and now they are at your feet. You have obviously had plenty of opportunity to stick your sword in various parts of their anatomy in order to put them down in the first place. You have also not had someone standing beside you ready to end your life with a single blow or else they would have done so already while you engaged their friend. Now you have just defeated their friend and have one less opponent attacking you...but suddenly the other guy is ready to kill you with a single blow? You are saying that at exactly that point in every combat you are suddenly surrounded and need to retarget. Every single time, in every combat? Sorry, that is just unbelievable. It might happen occasionally, it might happen even more than occasionally if you assume the guys you are fighting are top 1% fighters in the entire world but no way it happens every time. Also if there is even one ranged enemy around why would that person not target the unconscious and kill them off? I am assuming that is what you will do most of the time if you see some enemy go down, even if it is just stunned you will want to hit it hard while vulnerable. Anyway, like I said, maybe this system will turn out to be different enough to be interesting but the current logic of it just doesn't seem...logical to me.

To simplistic in reality. Most fights are a loud, clashing whirlwind of various combat actions. The best way to eliminate a threat is to stick a sword in its head. Always leaving your opponent unconscious to seek out his friends in every circumstance is unbelievable at best, ridiculous at worst. To me that is too obviously a game mechanic and much less a realistic representation of combat. For example if you know resurrection exists in the world, then killing an opponent and immediately moving to the next target makes sense, because you need to win the combat as a whole to prevent resurrection of your enemy occurring and be able to ressurect your own allies. If you know revival exists (enemies can return unconscious allies to the battle), why would you run to the next opponent and leave a possible enemy behind you ripe to be revived? Stand on his head, stick a sword in it and then he is out of commission permanently.

@Loranc: Just wanted to say thanks for doing this. Reddit is a nightmare to navigate, they really need a lot more / better filter options. Lowly Serf is doing a good job!

Actually a battle/skirmish is more likely to result in someone getting a sword in the head than a duel would. In a duel everyone is looking at the combat, so if someone is going to die, they could intervene by distracting the person about to perform the killing blow. In a battle with multiple enemies it is easier for individual combats being overlooked for several seconds. Of course in a game that doesn't happen because we watch health bars and press pause to issue orders and respond to every circumstance. But consider the logic of a priest being attacked by an enemy archer, the rest of the party are engaged with multiple foes. Meanwhile the rogue just lost all his stamina and is down. The rogues opponent then ignores the rogue and runs towards the priest or any other party member? And this always happens, in every fight? Much more likely the enemy stands on the rogues head, squishes his brains and then runs towards any other party member. I guess once we see it in action we will get a feel for it, but on the face of it, it seems to me to be a much less realistic system than just having someone die and be resurrected. It depends in every instance on the enemy being stupid and ignoring the unconscious, every single time.

Personally I'd rather have a mix of both, it just feels odd to me to avoid a bunch of monsters in a dungeon, be rewarded XP for reaching some goal (invisible X on the ground?) but still have that bunch of monsters behind me somewhere who, if I go back to kill, reward me nothing? While you might start throwing in objectives like, get the magic orb, or kill the evil bossguy etc you can't really do that for every single group in the game. At some point you start getting rewarded for reaching the invisible X on the ground. For example I would much rather have a system where if you have reached X by avoiding monsters, then going back and killing them rewards less XP than if you just started killing them before reaching X. After you kill them you reach X and get less XP from X. You might say both systems are the same with regard to how much XP you get but one just outright feels better to me, the one where you get XP from both sources as opposed to just one.

I think this harkens to the issue of enemy AI, they just ignore the unconcious? Could seem pretty odd that someone who was beating the crap out of you sees you fall down and is ready to kill you, then ignores you and runs off to fight someone else.

It has the potential to make all combat a particularly scary prospect. Some might consider that a bad thing, I guess it will depend how balanced it is. If party members are constantly on the floor doing nothing it could be a decidedly frustrating system. On another note it also implies that Priests will be much more combat focused than playing the role of healer as is usually traditional. On another side note it seems to me if the KS gets to 3.3m at the 24hr mark we will definetly get the Big City 2 because we have seen 100k per 24hrs pretty consistenly, add in Paypal and we got 3.5m for sure.

This kind of settled my nerves on the whole stamina thing: Though Health is typically lost at a lower rate, when the PC or a companion hits 0 Health, he or she is maimed (in standard play) or killed (in Expert mode or as an option in standard play). Magic may help mitigate damage to Health and slow the tide, but once characters have died (in Expert mode), there is no known magic that can bring them back. So I guess there is no perma-death in normal gameplay mode, you just become "maimed" which I guess leaves you out of combat until it ends much like DAO system. It is only by either choosing permadeath option in an Options menu or moving up difficulty level to Expert that you encounter perma death. In Normal mode: If your stamina reaches 0 you fall down but a party member could get you back up using some spell that gives you back some stamina perhaps. If you get "maimed" both your stamina and health is at 0 and you are out of commission until combat with the rest of the party ends. I'm fine with that.

They will be separate, just like BG games, they are just connected on a technical level with regard to loading into memory or whatever, AI etc.

Feargus actually talked about this on the kickstarter comments I believe. He said certain areas will behave in a Parent/child fashion. For example a town outdoor area would be a Parent and all indoor areas in the town Children. Both Parent and Child will stay loaded as you enter each with no requirement for load screens between them. He also gave the impression there were benefits to this that could be used, like AI running concurrently in both. Not sure what that could lead to, maybe enemies chasing you into another area or having partymembers both indoors and outdoors perhaps.

I agree with you, though I'm hoping a lot of these things will be revised during development and testing. If something turns out to feel bad gameplay wise I'm sure they will consider alternatives.

Feargus said in some Kickstart comment that the castle on top was added by the artist doing the artwork because he though it suited visually, it wasn't meant to be a level in itself though Feargus did go to say slyly that perhaps they had just created more work for themselves...

I would prefer if the creation of custom npcs was not tied to any quests or involved any kind of unlocking at all. I'd rather it was just a nice way of adding custom npcs inside the game without all the multiplayer shenanigans we did in BG games to get the same thing. If they want to add other content to Adventurers Hall great, I'd love all the quest stuff. Just don't roadblock party creation with a bunch of hoops I have to jump through.

Nobody has said the Adventurers Hall will be accessible immediately either. What if the hall is accessible at exactly the same time you can acquire a 5th party member of the PE npcs? That would be the best system in my opinion because it means players who want a full party of their own don't have to wait any longer than any other player to have a full group. It would be like if the Copper Coronet in BG2 was the equivalent of the Adventurers Hall. By the time you get there you have access to a full party anyway. It's not like this event you witness is going to happen right outside the front door of the Adventurers Hall, otherwise everyone will witness it and not just you.

So what? It was exactly the same in the BG games, player created parties were always much more powerful than the joinable companions. You very rarely see players discuss how awesome their elven fighter X was while you will very often see discussions on Minsc, Jaheira, Keldorn etc. It is player choice, if they want custom party, they make one and play the game. They cannot romance custom npcs, custom npcs won't have conversations with them, won't comment on events, won't have quests etc. There are many reasons to take the Obsidian npcs, just the Adventurers Hall is an option for people who don't want to or want to try something else later on.

Adventurer's don't always get paid. Who is to say that the guys I create aren't just adventurers I met in the Adventurer's Hall who are looking for some pals to go out into the world and adventure with. Who cares what my personal goals are if along the way I can make these guys rich during our adventures. They don't necessarily need payment for that depending on their background and seeing as I make up their background...well there you go.

I think assuming Joshs words on resurrection to mean the same as perma-death is making a bit of a leap. For example he talks of characters going unconscious if their stamina reaches zero. Consider a character being attacked who goes unconscious what does the enemy do? Keep hitting the prone character until he dies? That would seem logical but I can see that being a very irritating mechanic for players to live with. They continue fighting with their remaining characters while the enemy beats the unconscious to death. If I was a bad guy and the guy I was fighting was knocked down and out I wouldn't just run off to fight someone else, I would kick him in the face and stick my sword in his head AND THEN run off to fight someone else. In this scenario going unconscious would always equal death for the character. If it is like DAO were a character goes "unconcious" when reaching zero health and the enemy retargets someone else until combat ends it might be accepted by more players though to me it is less realistic. A simplistic way to avoid permadeath. What would the point be of going unconscious unless enemies ignore unconscious characters? So you have a limited amount of time to save the prone character? Surely realistically a prone character would take a lot more health damage than a character defending themselves, so death would occur much faster while prone? Personally I wouldn't take that system as being set in stone, it will probably go through several changes before arriving at something that works smoothly. I would much rather have some form of resurrection in the game than come up with some cumbersome system involving enemies ignoring unconscious characters or having to play super carefully to avoid absolutely anyone dying and being permadead. Imagine the consequences for a romance if the character dies 80% of the way through a romance, frustrating to say the least and probably lead to excessive use of the savegame reload. Also seems like an annoying system for things like boss encounters were we are probably expected to die several times before we get it right. Should we expect a system where every single party member must survive every single encounter or needs to be replaced? Doesn't sound good to me. Even without magic people can be brought back from death, it happens every day here in the real world with CPR. Are souls not strong enough to hang around the body for the 10 minutes it takes for your body to completely die? Surely someone with knowledge of their own souls existence and some magical ability could have something to hold a soul near its body until healed? Cultures that believe in reincarnation don't always ignore every type of medical aid that can keep people alive just because they believe in reincarnation.