J.E. Sawyer

This is a fantasy game, but speaking strictly about what happens in the real world, this almost never happens. Women who wind up wearing armor do need sizing that accounts for their (typically) smaller size and (typically) different body shape, but it pretty much has the same form factor and function as what the men wear. In most cases, it is literally the exact same thing the men wear. It's only recently that body armor has been designed for women, not that you would be able to guess that by looking at it. No effort is made to contour the shape. Instead, they just change the proportions. This was also true of Joan of Arc's armor, which looked virtually indistinguishable from a male knight's armor except for size and proportion. Fantasy outfits are styled to be, well, stylish, but actual people who put their lives on the line almost universally err on the side of safety rather than attractiveness. http://www.kpbs.org/news/2012/sep/21/army-tests-body-armor-tailored-female-soldiers/

Cadegund does use a melee weapon as well (a military hammer), but we chose to leave it out of the illustration. What she's wearing on her head is an arming cap (though with more hair exposed than you would normally see).

It's the consensus of armorers that because breastplates are already layered on top of significant padding and because breastplates are designed to slide blows cleanly away from vital areas, that designing a steel breastplate to follow the contours of breasts is unnecessary and counterproductive.

No.

To be clear: we're making a game in which story, setting (i.e. exploration of the setting), and tactical combat are emphasized in more-or-less equal measure. The options we're talking about are present so you can tune your particular flavor of gameplay elements, but we're not making a game for people who inherently dislike these gameplay elements. E.g. I enjoy some RTS games (especially historical ones). I am not particularly good at them. I really like the gameplay, but I have never been able to reach the level of being even moderately skilled at any of them. I like it when devs give me more forgiving gameplay options so my low-APM brain can complete the scenarios in a way that is still enjoyable and challenging for my skill level. I wouldn't understand the point in giving me options to skip or avoid the scenarios; I'm playing an RTS because I actually enjoy the mechanics.

When we talk about adding races, we mean as races that can be played as the main PC.

If you are turning on Expert Mode at the beginning of the game, you're permanently (for that game) setting all dials to 11. You don't need to do that, though. If you start a normal game, you can manually turn on/off the options of Expert Mode that you enjoy at any point in the game. If you want combat to be standard but you prefer having companion influence messages turned off, you can just select that feature (and/or other story/dialogue-based elements).

It would be pretty weird if compound German nouns were translated literally, z.B. Augenblick as "eyes look".

That's a concept for an actual character. Not all characters will be as subdued as him (like I wrote, he's specifically trying to look unassuming), but we're in the ballpark as far as proportions of characters and gear go.

Edair is a man who does not want to draw attention to himself. I wanted his design (specifically) to be subdued.

It's funny you should mention German; I've had German translation teams in the past be extremely aggressive about translating both common (e.g. Brigit) and fictional names into different versions. I didn't really (and still don't) understand why.

Our backgrounds will be pre-rendered from high-detail 3D scenes and then touched up by hand as in the Infinity Engine games. Our characters and certain other objects (where it makes sense) will be rendered in 3D. Temple of Elemental Evil uses this type of combination.

That depends on how we structure our advancement system. It should be possible.

It's worth noting that 2nd Ed. AD&D (which all of the IE games other than IWD2 were based on) did completely segregate combat and non-combat abilities (other than spells). It gave thieves and bards the ability to allocate skill points among their roguey skills, but weapon and non-weapon proficiencies were gained and spent separately. In 3E, skill points were still earned and spent separately from other currencies. The only difference is that feats are a pool from which combat and non-combat specializations are pulled. Even so, the class-specific bonus feats are typically narrowed down to a specific type of applications (e.g. fighter bonus feats and wizard bonus feats are pulled from specific lists [combat and metamagic/crafting/spell mastery, respectively]). You're still going to have to make specialization choices within each category. Having a separate currency for non-combat abilities doesn't mean we're designing them so everyone is good at everything.

I want to follow up on this because I think it's important. If you've played Icewind Dale II, consider Targos. There are virtually no unnamed characters in that town and a bunch of named characters with specific personalities and issues. I like that community and the way we wrote the dialogue in it. I liked it then and I like it now. Important information is easy to get to, characters talk about things they care about, and lore/information is (typically) presented from their perspective. I'd like dialogue to be structured and presented in a similar way.

My post there was part of a larger conversation.

Yes. F:NV's dialogues usually do this. In the thread being (partially) quoted, I talked about asking Trudi for directions to New Vegas. She doesn't just say, "Yeah it's north of here see ya."

Getting back on topic, I (non-scientifically) noted that for DS3, criticism of Katarina's character design far outweighed criticism of Anjali's design despite the fact that Anjali spends half of the game effectively naked. I think this speaks to the question of, "Does this fit the character?" and how people look at different designs.

Thanks for that information, Auxilius. It did start in the "High" Middle Ages, but those inquisitions were usually targeted reactions to heresies like Albigensianism and Waldensianism. Its slow transformation into something that targeted "Satanists" peaked well into the Renaissance. Humanism did the victims of witch-hunting no favors (see: Jean Bodin's De la démonomanie des sorciers/On the Demon Mania of Sorcerers). The number of women tried and executed varied by location. In some places, it was, in fact, as high as 90%. Later witch-hunts invariably skewed toward a more "egalitarian" (if you can really call it that) representation by sex because inquisitorial procedure that "discovered" a witch also often resulted in the subsequent search for a coven. I.e. admission of guilt by an individual did not end pursuit; it simply began the search for his or her (still typically her) fellow conspirators. Yes. Many of the witch-hunts = women-hunts writers (I hesitate to call them historians) were also responsible for inflating these estimates almost to Black Death levels. It's actually pretty easy to chart population growth in Europe following the spread of the plague. If witch-hunts killed as many as some of these writers suggested (and with 90% of them women across the board, as they suggest), a constant 50%-60% infant mortality rate would not yield the reported population growth. Also true. The HRE was the center of the later hunts. The Malleus Maleficarum was actually poorly received by the church, but it caught hold in popular imagination (thanks, Gutenberg). It was a case where the church was actually pretty reasonable but the populace went nuts. In Austria it was actually the Empress Maria Theresa who called an end to the hunts. Many individual magistrates were already throwing charges out by that time, but she basically said, "Yeah this is all a bunch of B.S. knock it off." The consequence both of hysteria and of inquisitorial procedure that suggested that where you found one witch, others were also present. The consistency of trial transcripts in many of these cases is likely due to the fact that interrogation subjects were asked to confirm or deny loaded, very specific questions. Once you admitted to being a witch, you had (unknown to you!) implicitly admitted to being part of a coven. If you denied being part of a coven, you clearly needed to be interrogated more (in case it needs to be said, torture was a common element of interrogation in OLDE TYMES, usually carried out by secular authorities -- witch-hunting was not unique in this regard). EDIT: Whoops, massive derail. If someone wants to start a good-ol' witch-huntin' thread in another subforum, I'll carry on the conversation.

I don't want to derail too much, but the early inquisitions were a reaction to a) willful heresy (e.g. Catharism/Albigensianism) b) widespread unconscious subversion of Catholic doctrine through the maintenance of folk beliefs (e.g. I believe the Lord Jesus Christ is my savior. I also believe that the Green Man lives in the woods, that babies are often switched with changelings, and that these herbs have magical powers). Straight-up heresy was often promoted by men, but random folk magic/beliefs were typically practiced/spread by women. A particularly interesting case study of one dude gone off the rails of personal heresy can be found in Carlo Ginzburg's book Il formaggio e i vermi / The Cheese and the Worms. E: Also, a nice pop history book on the Albigensian Crusade is The Perfect Heresy by Stephen O'Shea. Catharism as it manifested in Languedoc/Occitania (i.e. as widespread cultural Albigensianism co-existing just fine with Catholicism) undermined the authority of the papacy and the Catholic church in general. The northern "French" nobles like Simon de Montfort who participated in the resulting crusade were pretty much just in it for the territories/holdings promised by the pope. Modern France owes much of its shape and culture homogeneity (e.g. the slow decline of Occitan) to the aftermath of the crusade. It also paints an interesting picture of Dominic de Guzmán aka St. Dominic, as he conducted pretty chill, level-headed debates with the Albigensians that were entirely dissimilar to the papacy's hamfisted efforts. It's really striking to read about his interactions compared to those of his spiritual followers in subsequent centuries as the go-to inquisitor order, the Dominicans (jokingly called "domini canes"/ "Hounds of the Lord"). Both authors of the Malleus Maleficarum, which was incredibly hostile and hysteria-inducing among the populace, were Dominicans.

Yes, this. Magical ability always seems to be equal across the genders in videogames. (In fact, if anything, there's more games that tend toward showing the caster classes as women rather than men (which is a trope in itself, but I digress).) Side note: there are some (bad, IMO) history books that equate early modern witch-hunts with women-hunts, i.e. either intentionally designed to attack/destroy women or subconsciously carried out to just grind women into the dust (as if they needed any sort of made-up pretext if they wanted to do that, anyway). In continental Europe and the British Isles, witchcraft was typically associated with things that women do: childbirth, midwifery, herbalism/folk magic, and being caretakers/practitioners of longstanding folk beliefs that syncretized with Catholicism. This is also stuff that a) went wrong a lot (infant mortality was between 50% and 60%) and b) was often associated with "maleficia" (evil magic used to harm other people/their crops/their livestock -- in a world where this stuff got screwed up naturally all the time). Women also were considered more emotionally/spiritually open, which meant that a lot more women became the focus of saint cults as mystics of affective piety (e.g. St. Teresa of Ávila). As the theology and "science" of witch-hunting developed, it shifted from being viewed as errant paganism to being viewed as willful Satanism. Unsurprisingly, the same arguments used to explain why so many women were mystics also explained why so many women were being possessed/seduced by demons. As a result, in most of Europe, witch-hunts typically yielded accused/executed populations where between 70% and 90% were women. The exception was Iceland, where the traditional folk magic, galdrastafir (magical staves), was practiced almost exclusively by men. The German-educated Danes who did most of the witch-hunting in Iceland applied the same continental logic to their hunts, resulting in 90% of the accused and executed being men.

To clarify, some people use traditional armor to augment their arcane veils because the veil itself is vulnerable to penetration. The arcane veil is reactive; armor is a physical barrier.

Developing setting and atmosphere are very important to us at Obsidian. We try to build worlds that are believable even when they are fantastic. To do that, we strive to create people, cultures, and conflicts that are both strongly defined and heavily interconnected. In observing community discussion about the game, we've noted two recurring requests for more detail: on the nature of souls and on the level of this world's technology. This update deals less with culture details and more specifically with those two topics since they are fundamental to the way the world works. There's also some information at the end about a new $5,000 backer tier we're excited to introduce. Thanks for reading! N.B.: I know I said I'd talk about mechanics today. I forgot that I had already said I'd talk about technology earlier. Sorry! The next update I do will talk about non-combat skills the nature of classes in Project Eternity. Souls As we hinted at in our pitch videos, souls are A Big Deal in Project Eternity's world. The mortal world has not unlocked all of the secrets of how souls "work" and differing schools of metaphysical philosophy can be found in virtually every culture. What is known is that sapient souls move through an endless cycle of waking life and purgatorial slumber among the gods. Often this slumber lasts for years of "real" time, but occasionally it is brief, with a soul immediately moving on to a new life. Far from being a flawless process, souls are subject to "fracturing" over generations, transforming in myriad ways, and not quite... working right. Some cultures and individuals place a high value on "strong" souls, souls with a "pure" lineage, "awakened" souls that remember past lives, "traveled" souls that have drifted through the divine realms, or those that co-exist with other souls in one body. However, the opposite is also true, resulting in negative discrimination and sometimes outright violence. Through a variety of techniques (e.g. martial training, meditation, ritualistic evocation, mortification of the flesh), some individuals are able to draw upon the energy of their soul to accomplish extraordinary feats. These abilities range from the mundanely superhuman to the explosively magical. Having a strong soul seems to make this easier, but sometimes even people with fragmented souls are able to accomplish the extraordinary. The individual's body seems to act as a conduit and battery for this power, drawing in replenishment from seemingly omnipresent "fields" of unbound spiritual energy in the world around them. Thinkers, spiritualists, and scientists of the world have theorized for thousands of years about the nature and purpose of this process, but others have turned to prayer for answer. Rather than illuminate the presumed higher purpose of this cycle, the gods have obfuscated the truth, at times spreading cosmological lies, pitting believers and empowered chosen agents against each other, and tacitly approving the prejudices of their followers to maintain power. Whatever the fundamental nature of mortal souls is, the people of the world accept the reality of what they have observed: that all mortal bodies contain perceptible energy bound to the individual, and that once they die, their energy will move forward in the eternal cycle that they are all a part of -- that as far as they know, they have always been a part of. Technology The cultures of Project Eternity are in a variety of different technological states. Though some remote civilizations are still in the equivalent of Earth's Stone Age or Bronze Age, most large civilizations are in the equivalent of Earth's high or late Middle Ages. The most aggressive and powerful civilizations are in the early stages of what would be our early modern period, technologically, even if they are not culturally undergoing "Renaissance"-style changes. For most large civilizations, this means that all of the core arms and armor of medieval warfare have reached a high level of development: full suits of articulated plate armor, a variety of military swords, war hammers, polearms, longbows, crossbows, and advanced siege weaponry. Architecturally, these cultures also employ technologies found in Earth's Gothic structures, allowing them to create towering vertical structures. The most recent technologies seeing use in the world are ocean-going carrack-style ships and black powder firearms (notably absent: the printing press). Cultures with large navies and mercantile traffic are exploring the world, which has led to contact with previously-unknown lands and societies and settlement in new lands. Despite their intense drive, these explorers have been restricted from aggressive long-range exploration by monstrous sea creatures that pose a lethal, seemingly insurmountable threat to even the stoutest, most well-armed ships. Black powder firearms are of the single-shot wheellock variety. Largely considered complex curiosities, these weapons are not employed extensively by military forces. Their long reload times are considered a liability in battles against foes that are too monstrous to drop with a single volley, foes that fly or move at high speed, and foes that have the power of invisibility. Despite this, some individuals do employ firearms for one specific purpose: close range penetration of the arcane veil, a standard magical defense employed by wizards. The arcane veil is powerful, but it does not react well to the high-velocity projectiles generated by arquebuses and handguns. As a result, more wizards who previously relied on the veil and similar abjurations have turned to traditional armor for additional defense. New $5,000 Tier Bam! We started with a $5,000 tier that allowed the backer to set up an inn and receive some additional items. Fortunately or unfortunately, that sold out almost immediately. We've come up with a new tier that is aimed toward (but not limited to!) the forum communities that have shown (and continue to show) us so much support. Some of the most fun we've had as players, DMs, and game designers has happened when we got to deal with a group of enemy adventurers -- mercenaries, thugs, whatever you want to call them -- squaring off against the party. This new tier allows you to build a fighting force of extraordinary magnitude to throw at the player. We've also switched around a few of the bonuses in this tier, giving out more digital downloads. We can't wait to see what you come up with. That's all for this update! Tomorrow we'll have some words from Chris Jones about the technology we're using to build Project Eternity.

In reality, in different circumstances, yes, but we're making a game. I don't see value in spending resources to make weapon types (and skills/talents/perks/whatever to use them) that are designed to be inherently inferior in all circumstances. We spent plenty of time making weapons in IWD (especially) and IWD2 that no one used because they were fundamentally bad at a base level.

Linguistic idiosyncrasies can generate a tremendous feeling of difference in a character or culture and I believe it has a lot of value when used for that purpose.