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Eric Fenstermaker

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Everything posted by Eric Fenstermaker

  1. A few corrections for you: David B. Mitchell is the Narrator Cindy Robinson is Calisca
  2. If this is a bug I'd like to get it fixed ASAP. We haven't seen anything like it internally. I'll explain what should be happening. If it isn't happening for you, let me know what you are seeing, and also, if you could, it'd be very helpful for you to file a support ticket and submit a savegame to our QA team if you've got one. Thanks. And bear with me here... the dialogue is kind of a rat's nest, structurally. The way it should play out is, you talk to Durance and he says one of four things (they cycle): [spoilers] "Thought I felt your eyes on me. Now come the words." "And what must you say now?" "Does something ail you?" "Your face is full of need." Durance snorts. "It looks to burst if you didn't speak." Then you should say: "I had questions I wanted to ask you." He responds: "If doubts and curiosity plague you, you're skinning your knuckles on the wrong door." You should have the option: "I had another vision of you. One of the symbols on your staff - it was dying." One of two things can happen after that. If you've already been asking him questions, he'll shush you and you'll need to rest to approach him again about it (using the same dialogue choices). If you haven't asked him anything yet since the last rest (more likely since you just rested), you should get a response that starts: "Durance looks at you, challenging. 'You see many things that aren't there, Watcher.'" At this point you should have one of two options: 1. "It was the Godhammer symbol. I saw twelve circles. Eleven faded away." 2. "I saw a symbol with twelve circles. What does it represent?" If you see option 1 and choose it, you should get a quest update right there and we're good. If you see option 2, it means you haven't asked Durance about the Godhammer symbol on his staff before (so your character doesn't recognize it on sight). When you choose it, you should see: "Durance frowns, and the words come slowly. 'That symbol. The Godhammer.'" You should see the option: "Then it was the Godhammer symbol I saw extinguished on your staff." If you pick that, it should update the quest. There are some other options there, and if you accidentally take them you'll go to other places in his dialogue, but you should be able to get back to either of the above journal updating paths by choosing "I had questions" when it's available (i.e. same place in his dialogue that comes up when you first talk to him). Anybody experiencing this issue, please give that a try and let me know if and where you go wrong, and if you do, let me know what you're seeing instead. Thanks!
  3. My best advice to all of you is that if you are going to have Durance in your party, you are going to want to equip him with a feathered hat of some kind. And probably a gun.
  4. So you're saying all elves look the same to you, is that it? Like they're all just these effete British wizards to you? Not cool man. In seriousness, they share a bit of snobbery in common, but are otherwise pretty different, personality-wise. You'll see when you play - I won't spoil it. Also I don't believe Sand had a proper British accent - just some affectation, iirc. I'm not sure if we've announced who all wrote which companions, so it wouldn't be my place to reveal it. It'll be made public at some point. Chris did not write Aloth - I can probably give you that much.
  5. Don't know.He's on Facebook. Ask him. lol Don't quote me, but I'm pretty sure Avellone wrote Sand. Didn't Eric have something to do with him? Nope! I had very little to do with the writing of NWN2. I did a few side quest characters in Act 2. I was hired as a scripter, so that was my primary role on that project. Didn't do much writing until Mask. Took all kinds of wheedling. Unless my memory is failing me, I believe Bobby is correct that Chris wrote Sand.
  6. When the fight ends (meaning all the cultists in the room are killed), a conversation should be automatically triggered with Aelys in which you tell her what happened and where she should go, and then she should walk off. If this is not happening for you, there's definitely a bug there. If you have any insight as to anything unusual that occurred between Wymund's dialogue and his death - some odd fight strategy, other characters still chasing you, still being in combat, etc. - that might help us track this thing down. Thank you for reporting this.
  7. Thanks for submitting this. Fix has been made for the next beta build. Though I kind of liked the original, which made it sound like Conan the Barbarian was narrating.
  8. Thank you for reporting these. It's a lot of text to proof - I appreciate all the extra sets of eyes. Note that for bracketed text, we've made the choice to have single words not be punctuated. That accounts for the discrepancy between [Leave] and, say, [Kill this jerk over here.] Purely an aesthetic choice - I think the single words tend to look better unpunctuated. Consequently, if you see bracketed single words that are punctuated, or bracketed sentences that are not, those'd be bugs.
  9. Leave it to the Codex to be the grammar nerds. I think this is supposed to be lie. I'm not sure if it's actual dialogue, but I thought I'd bring it up just in case. Busted! No, was just a lazy post - not in the game. Osvir, to your question, I don't have much say over the skill system other than how we do skill checks in dialogue. But our systems guys will be addressing all the beta feedback they can, so I'm sure it'll get evaluated. This kind of feedback is very useful to us - thanks for taking the time.
  10. So there is no confusion, let me make it clear that in the final game there is a personal story for the player character and there are fully fleshed-out companions, each with their own developmental arc (and names!). As others have mentioned, these were deliberate omissions from the backer beta because we didn't want the prospect of spoilers to discourage anyone from participating in the beta. And frankly the writing of the companions is ongoing - they're generally one of the last things we implement, and aren't yet ready to be tested. Where we actually fall on the continuum is between BG2 and PS:T in this department, which is to say mostly like PS:T but with more flexibility in terms of the identity of the protagonist.
  11. Totally valid concern. A few things to know about this: - Paying close attention is important sometimes, but for a lot of our "optimal"-feeling options, a skill check will also be involved. So good for you figuring out that some character is susceptible to flattery, but if your Resolve is too low, you won't be able to flatter in a way that doesn't seem hollow. - It's often not the kind of logic that would require a high perception - just common sense in many cases. If you take the Perception option to tell the currier that no woman would ever lay with someone who smells as bad as he does, yeah he probably won't be as forthcoming with you. So maybe you want to think twice about choosing it in the first place even though it says [Perception] in front of it. Looking for some level of thought, not necessarily brilliant levels of deduction. Anything that requires a brilliant deduction will generally be gated behind an appropriate skill check. - I would urge any player to really roleplay his or her character. It's not something I can enforce on my end so much as encourage, but I would want players to choose options based on how they think and what they would say. There are a number of other systems choices we've made here (personality rep and background come to mind, as well as our companion interactions) to try to help the player to develop a character over the course of the story rather than to just play some empty, static avatar. Hopefully it gives a little more meaning to the overall experience. - I have to be careful with my use of "optimal" in reference to quest outcomes. What I generally mean is an outcome that avoids conflict, not necessarily the outcome with the most favorable end result. The idea being, if you're going to skip a fight, we want it to feel like it's a reward for both player and character ingenuity. Otherwise you've just missed out on gameplay. (Which I'll grant you some people prefer.) All that said, if you find that some interaction really forces you to metagame to get the option you want, and requires you to act out-of-character, that's a serious narrative issue, so go ahead and report that as a bug.
  12. I wanted to give a couple notes on some of the choices we've made for the dialogue system here, so it's easier for everybody to distinguish between what's intended and what's not. One choice we made is that a skill check is not necessarily a "win button" for a given encounter. This is a departure from many recent RPGs, and more in keeping with traditional pen and paper, where, sure, you can do a diplomacy check on an ogre, but he might just read that as you being soft and take it as a reason to rip your legs off. Skill checks in PoE open new paths to take in dialogue, some of them beneficial, some of them inconsequential, and some of them ineffectual. On balance they tend to help more than harm, I'd say. But we didn't want players to turn their brains off and just click the option that had a skill check associated with it, knowing it would lead to the best outcome. We want that element of the unexpected that makes the experience more engaging. To that end, we've also tried to include a number of dialogues where the "optimal" outcome is primarily related to the player paying attention to the character he or she is talking to, and choosing to treat that NPC in a way that the NPC is able to relate to on some level. Another thing you'll see, and you'll see it all over the place in the beta, are personality reputation options. These are things like "aggressive," "benevolent," "cruel," etc. These generally do not lead to a drastically different course in a given dialogue, but over time the game keeps track of what kind of character you're roleplaying as, and there will be reactivity to it - a shady character might prefer to employ someone he knows has a reputation for deceit, for instance. Or a particularly honest player might be able to later use that reputation for honesty as a means of convincing people of his argument. (Personally I think it's cooler when we don't display that a given choice is cruel/benevolent/etc., and there is an option to hide them for a more organic experience.) So for purposes of the beta, it's true, these personality reputation options will seem to do little to nothing. Over the course of the game, we are hoping it helps contribute to a feeling that the specific way you've chosen to roleplay your character in dialogue - not just the big decisions you've made - makes a difference to the way the world relates to you. ** minor beta spoilers** The posters in this thread are correct that in the beta, skill checks can get you new information about the missing noble girl - the bartender, for example, can be persuaded to cough up a useful lead. (And actually two of the ways to convince him require a certain level of personality reputation, either benevolent or honest, which means they're probably not attainable in the beta.) The potion seller gives you the same lead without need of a skill check, but a skill check does enhance your understanding of what's really going on. In either case there should hopefully be a journal addendum once the currier Trygil's name comes up. ** end spoilers ** Really appreciate the feedback, btw. And if you find that you're experiencing bugs that are causing journal entries not to show up or whatever, please make sure to report them and I'll make sure they get taken care of. Thanks!
  13. Since a few people asked, most of what I have done for Obsidian is level design, dialogue writing, and scripting. On NWN2 I worked primarily on Act 2, and then on MotB I had Ashenwood and the Academy. I'm contributing to FO: NV in more or less the same capacity. And apparently helping with the windows.
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