Tale

I like to think of myself as oriented towards the narrative. I like games to tell stories. Even combat tells a story. Lord of the Rings would be a little boring if it was only walking and talking. My ideal for normal difficulty is being able to look at an encounter and think "yeah, my guy could overcome that without dying." I'd like to be able to figure out the solution without a walkthrough or trial and error. Especially tough dungeons and bosses should telegraph their difficulty, if at all possible. So that you can tell that it's going to be too difficult for you and come back later with an appropriate strategy before having to reload a save. And non-optional battles, I think games should train the players in how to overcome them. Introduce them to the relevant concepts, make sure they know how to identify weaknesses, give them trial encounters so that they learn the appropriate strategies, then you treat boss battles as the big test of all they've learned. But I'm not hung up on it. I've played lots and lots of games that don't do much of any of that. And I've still really enjoyed them. And if it comes down to a choice between having trial and error and having heavy handed tutorial with on-screen prompts to get what I request, I'd probably prefer the trial and error. Hard difficulty can do whatever it likes. Kill me however many times it likes. Then I'm no longer going for a cohesive story.

2.7 million, they include romances. 2.8 million, they take romances back out. But more seriously I would hope for content based goals, like another faction.

Did the final battle of Neverwinter Nights 2 last night. It doesn't have a formal AI scripting system, but it was a pain in the behind for this specific reason.

I'm starting up Mask of the Betrayer, too. Just finished the original campaign. The improvement in area art and presentation hits you pretty quickly.

I'm on Chapter 3 of Neverwinter Nights 2. Tried out Facade yesterday. The parser isn't nearly as good as I heard. Trip kept thinking I was blaming him when I said that "nobody is to blame." And I couldn't even pour myself a drink.

That's now what I've heard about PE's system. What I read had nothing about per day, and even the low level spells can run out. It sounds like a 3E Sorcerer that recovers after each combat.

I don't care what games the COD players are interested in. I wouldn't begin to understand how to care about that. If a game is made in a way that lacks appeal to me, then the consequences are self-explanatory. However, if they're just putting out commercials or ads to appeal to a group, I do not care.

Mission design I found especially boring. ME2 had missions like Haestrom where you have to progress under fire from a Colossus and had three paths to it. Or Mordin's recruitment where there'd regularly be high points and low points giving it a sort of multi-tiered to the area. ME3 just felt even more narrow and I can't remember a single interesting thing in the missions.

This australia? This is fantastic. I heard about UK going after Amazon for books. Was wondering when others might turn up.

It shouldn't be a dog, that's too common. If it's not a dog, then we're entering familiar territory. People wanting different animals for different reasons. People will wants cats for sneaky characters, dragons for powerful characters, spiders for evil characters, etc. The only solution is something thematic or something original. Like an unbound fractured soul. This little blue thing that floats around.

I don't know why I haven't seen any games steal from Star Wars Galaxies. If you were incapped, when you got back up, there was a penalty on maximum health/stamina(?)/mind. And if you triple incapped in a short period of time, then you die. I would be okay with that kind of death system. Maybe they take some serious hit to their HP stat after being downed once. And another serious hit. And by the third, they have no more max HP to hit, so they die. Then there's a strategic consideration. Do I go back to town/camp and heal it? Do I waste limited resources to heal it? Do I just push on and risk worse? You're penalized for the failure still, but it's not permanent until you keep failing. And each time you fail, it becomes harder to push on, so there's a continuing element.

I'm about here, too. However, if we get the Adventurer's Hall, I can see a scenario where I'd actually enjoy death. On a second or third playthrough, I may actually stop reloading from companion death. And use the opportunity to create replacements from the hall.

AP was a cinematic game. And that's what the dialogue system was designed for. It was fully voiced, looking at the characters from cinematic angles, with timers that helped make it more gamey, but also improved the pacing. You take away any of those, and it doesn't work as well. And it wasn't that great for roleplaying, for creating your own character. Voiced games never really are because they're more limited in dialogues and they define a voice pretty strictly. It was good for that, but not in general. Project Eternity needs to be silent, with complex and numerous dialogue options. Voices and stance are right out. And I'm not sure that putting a timer on reading is a good idea. Now, one thing I would love to see, but it is likely beyond the scope, is a sort of merger of Alpha Protocol and Storm of Zehir mechanics. At least in some limited form, maybe not every dialogue. You get your standard dialogue options you'd expect, the ones that allow you to characterize your own PC, but every now and then you get the ability to request an interjection from a companion that might have an effect. You don't get to choose how they interject, they just do it according to their personality style like the AP stances. Say that you're trying to get info from a quiet shopkeeper. He doesn't respond to diplomacy or bluff, and your intimidate is low. So maybe you get your standard options to choose, but you also get a choice to hand it off to a companion. You can pick Aloth, he looks like a pretty abrasive guy, and he just lays in to the guy, scares him senseless until he gives up the info. But if you'd chosen Cadegund, maybe it wouldn't have gone anywhere. Or maybe it could have lowered your intimidate requirement so you could play good cop/bad cop. Just something to bring in the companions as conversation tools while still displaying their personalities.

I don't think they're going to add anything major or remove anything. They may shift some stuff around though. I just don't think they're going to have the luxury of, say in mid 2013, turning around and saying that they want to add a whole bunch of extra companions. That sounds like the kind of problem publishers would have introduced, these big shifts in the middle of development. I'm hoping they're going to keep to their design docs as best they can unless there's something pretty big that gets in the way. And if they have extra money towards they might expand some existing plans, add a new quest, or add another level to a dungeon, add a handful of spells. But I don't see them dropping in a new class and companion in the late stages.

Hey, what's wrong with metrics? It's like science!

Where are you getting race at 2.4? 2.3 has godlike.

Nobody has started doing the reward tier designs yet. Aloth and Cadegund showed up back in the announcement video.

At $2,6 million we will have: 5 races (human, elves, dwarves, godlike and ???) 9 classes (fighters, wizards, priests, rougues, rangers, monks, druids, barbarians, ciphers) 9 companions (edair, cadegund, aloth, monk dude, dwarven ranger chick and 4x ???) They should put this info on the front page of the Kickstarter... took me a few minutes to add everything up. ^^ Thank you for the effort. I had no idea how many companions were planned beyond the first 5.

My opinion is that there should be no hard caps on stats. Multiclass, if the game has it, penalty should just be imperfect synergy. A Rogue Wizard can't sneak attack with his fireball, and his fireball and sneak attack will be separately weaker than a pure class. Maybe some will synergize better, but the Rogue Fighter still will have a weaker sneak attack, even if he has a stronger basic attack.

This is the only package I can find with it anymore. http://www.gamersgate.com/DD-DDNWNC/dungeons-and-dragons-neverwinter-nights-complete Neverwinter Nights complete. Neverwinter Nights vanished from sites around the Atari - Hasbro transition. Seemed to pop up again, then went away again. Though I could have only imagined the resurfacing.

I haven't thought about it enough to second guess it. What are you thinking, enemy adventuring party? They have names.

I figured he was a mage in the wallpaper. In both that and this art, he's focused on some magical ability. He really likes posing with his hand glowing.

My concern is less complexity than it is ending up with an incomplete group as you run off companions. I don't like morale as the way to independent thought, but I do like them disagreeing with choices to the point of abandoning the team. Adventurer's Hall would solve that problem.

Squad broken! If we hit the Adventurer's Hall, I see this being more likely. Someone asked about this level of reactivity in one the Kickstarter Q&As with Feargus, it sounded like they weren't quite set one way or another.

I'm comfortable with the stretch goals we have now. Whatever next is icing to me, at this point. Orchestral music seems like fine icing.