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J.E. Sawyer

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Everything posted by J.E. Sawyer

  1. J.E. Sawyer
    If you never used NCR $ or (especially) Legion currency in F:NV you deprived yourself of a lot of money. A Legion denarius is worth 4 caps and an aureus is worth 100. Currency items aren't affected by the sell rate of the vendor or Barter skill of the Courier. While I would have liked to have done more with currency in F:NV, I don't regret including the different currency types. I believe they helped further flesh out the world and characterize the factions in it.
  2. J.E. Sawyer
    We're going to show the exterior environment running in game, but gameplay may be limited/absent. We're not as far along in our development cycle as the Shadowrun (or Wasteland 2) teams.
  3. J.E. Sawyer
    We're not going to promote pixel-hunting, but we are planning a lot of optional areas that are off of the crit path as well as multiple ways into and through areas. We will place suitably rewarding items in those locations commensurate to the difficulty required to find them. Optional content, like the encounter with Kangaxx, will not scale by level at all in Project: Eternity.
  4. J.E. Sawyer
    The final plate armors will have similar necklines between sexes. The female plate armors will retain the curve at the chest to help the player distinguish female characters from male characters. This is also why their waists are narrower and why their tassets are flared out more. With the hide armor, we chose to err on the side of a very primitive look to make it easily distinguishable from the leather armor, which looks much more like, well, armor made of hardened leather.
  5. J.E. Sawyer
    It doesn't. The two base resolutions exist mostly to support people running on lower-end/older machines. There's 4x the pixel data in the high res backgrounds. Even with compression, those are huge files.
  6. J.E. Sawyer
    We don't intend to use Blackletter typefaces in the final product. I'd like to use something in the Jenson family if possible. http://www.linotype.com/43708/AdobeJenson-family.html
  7. J.E. Sawyer
    We already have zoom functionality in.
  8. J.E. Sawyer
    The cave level is being developed for technical purposes (developing organic cavern levels) and is small in overall size. The level above it has two entrances (though in this dungeon they are relatively close) and can be explored non-linearly. In terms of labyrinthine layouts, we will generally avoid long dead-ends in favor of loops (small dead-end branches are fine). E: In my own campaigns, I always try to design dungeons with multiple entrances and multiple ways to explore them. I'd like to do the same in PE when the size of the level supports it.
  9. J.E. Sawyer
    His blog entry is pretty short and I think it skips some of the more important reasons why vertical slices can be bad. The badness usually has to do with how they are structured. From the inside of a development team, the order in which things should be done is often clear. It is often not clear to the publisher. When publishers push for a certain order of implementation, they often ignore the developers' reasons for why that's a bad idea. As a result, the team pushes toward the vertical slice in a bad order. Also, the publisher often wants a vertical slice at an inappropriate (too early) time in development. The reason why publishers want a vertical slice is pretty simple: if you don't have a section of the game that plays and looks the way you expect it to play and look, how can you be confident that you can enter production? Production isn't for implementing major features or figuring out big problems. Production is for executing on plans with the knowledge you gained during pre-production.
  10. J.E. Sawyer
    Doesn't the fact that it's concept art imply that it does not show the final style? When our concept artists make environment (or even some character) concepts, color/rendering are usually pretty simple. The environment artists know how to make stone textures and how to build cave walls. Detailed material rendering usually isn't a good use of the artist's time -- usually. Right now, Rob is developing the look for some Glanfathan structures. They use some odd materials, so he's spending more time gathering reference and rendering that look out.
  11. J.E. Sawyer
    All of the water in the scene is already animating, the waterfall included. We're still working on some of the alpha/thickness issues with grass in the scene as well as additional moving elements like trees.
  12. J.E. Sawyer
    Wizards in PE always have their grimoires out and in-hand when they cast spells. They draw in soul energy through the grimoire before releasing it. That sounds terrible. Aside from the concept itself being awful, consider: What happens when a fighter bats the grimoire out of the mage's grasp? What happens when a rogue outright swipes the grimoire from the mage? Or are these maneuvers conveniently not possible? Going from bad to worse if so... Edit: Haha, JFSOCC ninja'd me asking about rogues stealing grimoires whilst I was typing & juggling some other tasks. --- About Engagement: This needs to be an active ability that prevents the fighter from making normal attacks or at least halves the number of normal attacks that the fighter can attempt (rounded up, so 1 becomes 1, 2 becomes 1, 3 becomes 2, 4 becomes 2, 5 becomes 3, etc). Or something. If not, zones of engagement should be *very* small, perhaps about one character width (or one 'square'). Just enough to prevent kiting exploits and block narrow passages. Also, I don't like the assumption inherent in the system: That mobility and defense are mutually exclusive. Iirc, in DA:O, moving around or backing a short distance away from a targeted enemy could be performed *without* turning away from that enemy and thus without exposing the character to backstab/flanking attacks from that enemy. I liked that a lot. --- Apologies if the post seems negative. Just looking to provide honest feedback on these particular aspects. Overall, I like much of what y'all have revealed. Batting away grimoires isn't something we're implementing just as batting away swords, bows, etc. are also not being implemented. Wizards aren't unique in this regard. Engagement range is only a little more than a character width (barring special circumstances). When a fighter activates his or her Defensive mode, his or her attack speed goes down. Pretty much all modal abilities that characters get will have an inherent trade-off, though the tactical application of the mode logically will grant an advantage in the appropriate circumstance.
  13. J.E. Sawyer
    They have to be durable, which is why they're all inherently enchanted items. Grimoires are not ordinary books. If grimoires were not extremely durable, wizards simply wouldn't be able to cast spells in combat.
  14. J.E. Sawyer
    Wizards in PE always have their grimoires out and in-hand when they cast spells. They draw in soul energy through the grimoire before releasing it.
  15. J.E. Sawyer
    I don't agree that 4E really locks down everyone's movement. I played a warden for a few years and even he couldn't really lock down movement for more than a few characters at a time and that's literally what I built him to do. I agree that 4E does make movement and positioning more important, and that is ultimately the goal. We are implementing our Engagement system with the understanding that we may need to modify elements of it to find the right balance of tactical movement requirements and freedom of movement in our combat environments. In the example of the wizard, I don't believe that's any different than dealing with a persistent hazard, something that comes up with great frequency in the IE games. I do think it will probably require more than one click to move around such a hazard, but I don't believe it will devolve into endless multi-clicking. In the last example, melee enemies moving through melee enemies, moving characters will not trigger Engagement. If two opposed melee fighters rush by each other and they're not stopping to attack, they won't engage the other. Also, if a fighter is not in his or her Defensive mode, he is likely to only be capable of engaging a single target at a time (his or her current melee target). If some of those melee enemies are targeting someone rushing past, they will stop to attack and that will result in Engagement, but that's a typical and intentional result.
  16. J.E. Sawyer
    We're not making a single-character MMO. We're making a party-based RPG. We're making it to appeal to the general tastes of audiences that have played D&D-based tactical party RPGs in the past. Yes, when you play a single character, having that single character be locked down is annoying because your only character is prevented from moving. You have a whole party to use. We're also making this game for an audience that we believe wants increased challenge and will not react negatively to mechanics that require increased attention and player input. There are clearly limits to this, but we are willing to try this mechanic because we believe it is more appropriate for our audience.
  17. J.E. Sawyer
    n0mDePlume, it sounds like you prefer a different type of micromanagement, not that you don't want to micromanage. Users on this forum have consistently (though obviously not universally) expressed a general dislike of standard aggro/tanking mechanics. Engagement is not conceptually much different from threatened area/AoOs, which we already had experience with in NWN2. It's also a mechanic that many tabletop D&D players are familiar with if they've played 3E, 3.5, and 4E. In IE games, you typically don't move full parties through melee. You typically move a few characters to ranged positions and a select number of characters into melee with specific targets. It's true that if you click past melee enemies who are not engaged and run past them, they will engage you. That's entirely the point of the mechanic. I certainly understand if not everyone likes it, but it feels more in the spirit of D&D mechanics as well as mechanics that were in NWN and NWN2.
  18. J.E. Sawyer
    Our plan is to use the selection circles (which all characters have) to indicate when they are engaging, engaged, and the targets involved. The most typical example would be two melee combatants moving toward each other and starting to fight. Their selection circles would increase in thickness when they are engaged and a short, overlapping line would run from the circle of the enemy engaging them toward their circle. I.e., characters who are engaged/engaging are visually linked through their selection circles. We do not want to slow movement because that is not as clear as stopping movement and requiring you to give new input to move the character. We also very much intend for this to require you to be more careful with moving your characters. Yes, moving away from an engaging character can be difficult because of the risk involved, but that's the intention of the mechanic. We don't want it to be overly punitive, but we do want people to be wary about moving around melee enemies. Disengagement Attacks will likely not be animated on the character's mesh. They will probably be abstracted in a fashion similar to NWN2 (though if we can find a higher fidelity solution, such as a duplicate "ghost" mesh to animate those attacks, we would use that).
  19. J.E. Sawyer
    PE's estocs are more in the 5' range and will be two-handed weapons. With few exceptions (e.g. godlike and helmets), all playable races will be able to use all weapons and armor. We're calling them estocs because estoc is a more familiar (and distinctive) term than tuck.
  20. J.E. Sawyer
    Both estocs and brigandine should be in the game.
  21. J.E. Sawyer
    The sword is an estoc and the armor is brigandine. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Estoc
  22. J.E. Sawyer
    For Obsidian, alpha as a general status means that a "thing" (feature, area, quest, etc.) is content complete and fully functional but may still need additional work. As a side note, I didn't have much input into the high-level direction of the RPG advancement system.
  23. J.E. Sawyer
    The climate of the Dyrwood is Mediterranean shifting to temperate and then continental as you go farther East, but much of Aedyr itself (far to the northwest) is humid subtropical to tropical. The Vailian Empire (from which the Vailian Republics eventually broke free) had a wide range of climates, but many portions of it had colder seasons than the interior of Eír Glanfath. The ethnic groups that populated those empires did not necessarily begin a distinct existence in those locations.
  24. J.E. Sawyer
    Hair will probably be subject to the same practical restrictions as facial hair. The lame excuse is that if you don't have a dynamic hair solution, it looks really terrible. When the goal is to make something that looks good, a property that makes it look terrible is something we should avoid.
  25. J.E. Sawyer
    We will probably have a variety of beard lengths, though we will avoid lengths that require separate weighting of facial hair or would cause obvious clipping issues. Dwarves in Project Eternity don't have an inherent racial affinity for beards. Dwarves from the Aedyr (like humans from the Aedyr) typically don't have beards because the Aedyr has a hot climate. Dwarves from the Vailian Republics (where they are more common) or farther south often do have beards. Regardless of where your character is from, if you want to make a dwarf with a big ol' beard, you will be able to do that. We do not plan to have female dwarf beards.
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