happyelf

It sounded like they're considering something like this for outdoors/indoors as quoted above. It would basically be down to workflow, which they can manage if they're doing things in-house. I don't see why they could no set up key scenes with a different angle, even if the differences were mainly subtle. Their mention of outdoors views puts me in this mindset, since I suspect one of the reasons they're playing around with such ideas is to put more of a vista on a single screen view, instead of requiring more scrolling and panning to take everything in. I doubt the 3d character models will be limited in their ability to be positioned relative to the camera. One would assume they want a full set of 3d models that can be used for a versatile set of animations, positions, and postures. For instance, put simply, they're probably going to want to knock a model head over heels, allow it to do backflips, ect, ect, especially if they're including monks and similar characters.

Honeslty, most depictions of death present them as a kind of balanced keeper of the dead/ect like you're asking. Everything from diskworld to DnD has presented death gods in the way you suggest. If anything a more original option would be if the god of death that was an evil bogeyman all dancing around going "AHAHAHA YOUR ASS IS MINE ONCE YOU'RE DEAD BOOOOO BOOOOO" Or perhaps another option, like the god who presides over your death depends on how you die- at sea, in battle, ect, ect. An evil god seeking sacrifices would work pretty well in that context, as would a more positive deity that oversaw people dying from natural causes.

A God of Supremacy Each race/culture has their own version of them- their faith teaches that their race or culture is superior, and deserves to rule the world and dominate the lesser races. Only. . . by this stage in history, there's substantial evidence (as much as there can be about any god) that each of these Supremacist-Gods are in fact, the same entity. Think of how people would react to learning such information. Many might decide that this deity is actually secretly a deity of conflict and discord, trying to stir up wars between different races and cultures. Others would argue it suggests that gods are simply manifestations of the beliefs of their followers, blind to such a contradiction. Others would of course see it as a reason for a holy war to tear down all the 'false' churches of their god in other lands, or perhaps, decide their god it testing their True People, with these false churches.

There are a few ways you could have a stronghold linked to a city or incorporated into it. Your influence over the city would not have to limit access to the city content, but could be expressed through a few key features. For instance as governor of the city, you might fund the city watch, and determine it's armament and level of training. However, that could still impact on the aesthetics and style of the city in ways that could limit design, when we consider things like belief and culture. For instance, if the city is a religious one(not that far fetched considering the lore to date), having an anti-religious pc as governor or lord protector could be an interesting plot option, but it could also come across as contrived, or run contrary to the narrative that the devs imagine for such a city. An alternative would be if the fortress was in a particular Ward of the city, which the pc could then build up along with it. Imagine if the city had a run down 'old wall district' with a bunch of hovels and an old fortress in it. Fixing the wall and fort might be the priority of the pc dwelling there, but they might opt instead to enrich the district and attract commerce and other parts of city life into it. On balance however, I think a frontier fortress is more likely- even if it is itself, the beginnings of a town or city-state. Another way to link the fortress into the cities in this case would be if acted as a link between them- a midpoint for land trade, and a place where their leaders could meet and negotiate. Merchants from each city might appear in caravans at the fortress gates from time to time and you might play a pivotal role in conflicts between the two regions.

New stretch goal- suburbs. For each extra 10 g's, obsidian will remove one row of tacky mcmansions from each of the big cities.

Whatever the conclusion of this discussion, I vote that the thread title become the new 'So I kicked him in the head until he was dead, haha".

I ike how it looks, but i'm wondering about layers. For instance, there are bushes and other partial obstructions of the camera in the shot- I kindof assume you can walk 'behind' them, but it's hard to tell from a mockup.

Weapon types are just a way to screw non-spellcasters. Unless you do the same with damage/energy types, it's just going to make playing a guy with a sword more of a hassle. There are also a bunch of problems that variable damage resistance adds to a system like this. A better option would be damage triggers. dnd4e did some cool stuff with this, as did some older monsters such as golems. Use a cold attack on a water creature, and it slows them down. Use a fear effect on vermin or cowardly goblins, and start a stampede. Even better would be if such options came with a downside as well as an upside. Smashing a skeleton with a mace does more damage, but you also take some damage when it shatters in an eruption of bone shards.

It sounds very much like they're making them a melee caster + Warlord type class, which is a pretty cool take. It's also really good to see them doing new things with old concepts. It's telling that they found a place for the Warlord.

You don't need full branching plots to make choices matter. There are a lot of ways a game system can support those choices in an evocative way. Consider just one example- wandering monsters. Who are those jerks who keep attacking you in the forest in game 2? Well obviously, they're the remnants of whatever faction you anihilated in game 1. Whatever side you took in game 1, they're what's left of the other side. They're bitter survivors of your rise to power, with no place in the new status quo- and so they've fled to the deep woods, to wage a resistance. You could get a lot of mileage out of this idea for a managable resource outlay: *Each of the potential factions filling this role would be comparable in art assets- humanoid, standard combat animations, relativly common voice set. *Distinctions would be great within that set of resources. Their uniforms and race could be different. Their party composition would be distinct, but well within the existing content- elves might have archers and a pet wolf. Magical foes would have a wizard and some conjured bodyguards. *Minor plot events could mention the diferences. When you're given bounty hunting side missions, these guys get you extra gold. A wounded soldier you meet in a house of healing has a (one line) story to tell about those vicious renegade wizards/elven snipers/dwarvern sabotuers. *Assuming there are wandering monsters, and regions, the region encounter likelyhood could be tweaked. If you pissed off the dwarves in game 1, you're more likely to cop a dwarf attack in the mountains, in game 2. *You could toss in a unique npc for each faction, and place them based on game 1 outcomes. Is that young wizard an ally of yours, or the leader of the arcane resistance? Do you meet that dwarf warrior in a friendly training bout, or is he part of one of the late game party battles with the forces of your new opponent? These represent relatively minor outlays of resources, within the versatility that an rpg has to have, anyway. And this is just one way a new game could be tweaked, to reflect what happened in the games before it.

Dumping a bunch of weapon using clases into subclasses would just lead to interesting concepts being given less time than they deserve. It's not only spellcasters that should be given a lot of time and care in their design. One of the weaknesses of older versions of DnD is how little support warrior-type classes are given compared to primary spellcasters- PE shouldn't repeat that mistake.

I was very happy with the new vegas DLC's, especially after the FO3 DLCs were mostly so ordinary. But if you want to see what Obsidian can do with an expasion pack, look no further than Mask of the Betrayer,

I don't really think there's much value in feedback from fans who will trash anything that isn't a clone of BG, which they clearly view through thick, rose colored glasses. PE shouldn't be a slavish clone of BG, it should be a further improvement of the style of game. There are several things that DAO did a lot better than the BG's did. DAO certainly stands as decent attempt to improve the format- and despite serious flaws, so do some parts of DA2 (such as the core combat system, which was an improvement in many ways, but was let down by very poor encounter and monster design). Notably, DAO made an effort to put real positioning into realtime combat, while in the BGs it was nothing but a farce. It certainly wasn't perfect, for instance it needed a better defender mechanic than aggro+taunt, but it's clear progress was made.

Also keep in mind, there are people who might want to support the project, but cannot afford to give more of a pledge. If anything, a simple option such as facebook promotion gives peolpe a way to show their support even if they can't offer, or update their pledge.

It actually did extremy well, especially since it was the first version of dnd with a full subscription service in addition to the magazines. It's just that people compared it to the d20 boom era of 3e, which is about as fair as comparing 3e's sales to the mega-sales in the original DnD craze. The claims of it doing poorly are often stated, but have never been that well supported. They're often linked to dubious claims, like the oft-cited sales numbers comparing 4e to pathfinder- in a 3 month period where 4e had hardly any releases, and pathfinder had several. The reason 4e is a failure is that a bunch of people threw a huge tantrum about it, and WOTC decided it was vital to get those people back, instead of support the fanbase it has. It'll take a few years for people to realize what a bad idea that was. While the mechanic may have had good intentions, the implementation was immersion breaking at best. For decades Players had been trained to equate HP's to Health, and reduced HP's to wounds through myriad RPG/CRPG systems. The Healing Surge mechanic just made people think Characters were just healing themselves, which just draws impossible mental images. There's no immersion breaking involved- you just don't like it. It's not fair to say 'it breaks tradition, hence it breaks immersion'. That may have broken your immersion, but for plenty of people, it made way more sense than the 15 minute adventuring day. Second, it's completly false to claim that hp have been equated to wounds. In that case, why is it that fighters can take more 'wounds' than wizards before dying? Are they walking around with missing limbs? Hit points have always been an abstraction, a combination of wounds, luck, willpower, and more- and the rules indicate this across multiple editions- it was often stated in the magazines and books. This is a common example of how people who trash 4e tend to creativly reinterpret the old rules and texts to suit their criticisms. You may feel that way, but you clearly don't understand the system very well to reach this conclusion. In 4e, clerics can heal people, and wizards can't. You're completly wrong. Straight up. In 4e, you can normally only heal one surge in battle without the help of a Leader, like a Cleric, or Warlord. After battle, you don't need them, but the post-battle heal-up was always a waste of spell slots, or a matter of wands being used. In battle, where it counts, it's a Leader- notably clercs, who get people back on their feet and keep them fighting. Clerics are still well and truly healers- and wizards are not. Clerics are not the only healers in the game, but they're the best straight healers by far. For instance, they're one of the few healers who have a lot of healing powers apart from their basic healing word. They often give people bonus hit points healed on top of their surge value, for instance. What 4e did was make them fun in other ways, and give people other ways to heal. This made classes like Warlords viable, and if you turn up your nose at warlords, then I pity you because they're awesome and they fit perfectly into the DnD style of game- assuming your group is not stagnant and dogmatic enough to reject anything simply because it's new. Nor was there any duplicated functionality, since wizards in 4e are solidly in the Controller role, with zones, offensive blasts, and a lot of horsepower- maybe too much. OTOH, clerics are leaders who's powers tend to focus on that, and while later classes were a bit more coherent in that role, it's still a very different class. PE could do well to look at 4e to see how classes can relate to different roles in combat. Without considering such roles, you'll end up like 3e, and 5e- a few showy, powerful classes, and a lot of trash that doesn't get to do much.

Unforgiving games can be fun, and I actually like situations where I might very well die at any moment. That's what surges do. They allow hit points to swing low and high in a combat, rather than only really being ground down over multiple combats worth of depletion. They mean you can get close to 0, or lower, or even dead in any given battle, rather than only really being at risk once you're out of potions/heals. But at the same time, since you only need a couple of surges to get back to full, a fight where you're almost killed doesn't mean the end of the day- which in turn means each fight can be more genuinly risky, instead of just being filler combat. There are a lot of problems with 4e, but it's rare for it's critics to understand it well enough to know what it's real problems are.

The whole 'only asking questions' thing is a bit of a copout. It's often dressed up as some kind of artistic detachment, but it's really just a way to avoid offending people. If we want these obsidipeeps to be passionate and enthusiastic about the game, they should be able to express their own views or follow the ideas. For instance, they sound enthusiastic about the idea of souls fragmenting/ect and how this relates to various social norms, ect. I would much prefer they just take that idea and run with it wherever their feverish imaginations carry them, rather than sanding off all the sharp edges. Failing that, I request a hamfisted parable for the global financial crisis, with half assed concept substitutions like swapping 'subprime loans' for 'dwarvern armor funding' and 'hedge fund managers' for 'villainous alchemists'.

A DM could also control the players, and thus fix the issue. The idea that DMs can magically fill in the gaps in designs is just an excuse for shoddy, old school design. It also places a lot of pressure on them, and forces players to endure endless DM fiat based situations. Healing surges are far from perfect, but they're a lot better than the old school approach of basically having an argument about it- an argument only the DM can win. And none of that is really notable either way since there is no DM in a single player crpg. And in a single player CRPG, boy howdy would I love to see the end of healing potion spam.

Healing surges are an exmple of a clear improvement. Would you rather potion spam? Or a cooldown timer on your healing potion slots, like DA does it? Surges are a per-day resource, that allow for dangerous fights, that deplete a resource, without making that resource as silly as potions, wands, and CLW spells, that just get hurled around and render the whole thing kinda pointless. When you're out of surges, you're **** out of luck.

4e is a great system with plenty of soul. Most of the bitching about it is purely due to resentment of the new, a backlash that will go down in history as one of the milestones of nerd rage. The PE devs could do a lot worse than to look to it for inspiration, and by 'a lot worse', I mean, dnd3e, and dnd5e. That said, it's clear that PE is a post-4e game. For instance, they've made it clear they're after varying resource scheduals, as opposed to uniform ones. That's certainly more viable in a crpg than a ttrpg, but it remains to be seen wether they do good work ensuring that the non-casters are up to snuff. I certainly hope that obsidian doesn't make the mistake of making spellcasters more interesting than fighters, or turning fighters into dull auto-attack machines again. People with swords deserve just as much time, care, and gameplay content as people with pointy hats. I'll also note DAO and in some ways da2 had some really solid takes on real time rpg combat, including better warriors. Da2 combat was also terrible for other reasons, but iirc it had some good fundamentals and fixes.

I'm hopeful that they'll come up with their own take on overland travel, with a bit of exploration, areas to pass through, and some nooks and crannies to come across. They could even add side quests and achievements based around exploration, one of the coolest small features of the more recent fallout games was getting xp for finding new locations.

If there are skills like diplomacy and persuasion, then an eavesdrop skill could fit quite well in a similar area of the design. Also things like gather information or streetwise could be interesting. There could be certain data you could get about a region- even if it's just a bit of lore and monster info. If the region is wilderness, getting that information could take a Wilderness Survival skill. If it's a dungeon or ruin, it could take something like history of dungeoneering. But if it's in a city or resonably sized settlement? Then a rogue-ey skill like streetwise could serve the same purpose.

People who are offended by left wing viewpoints on issues don't have some special status that the rest of us lack. Nor should people have to apologise for, or hide such views. Labels like 'radical feminist' are just an excuse for an aggressor to pretend that they're the ones under attack. If anything, i'm concerned about the people who might look over this project only to be turned off it by people ranting about gay characters being rammed down their throat. Nobody is ramming anything gay down your throat, get over it. I can just imagine the last youtube update, in which all the devs, dressed in hawian shirts, stuff handfuls of money into briefcases before laughing and runnning off down the road towards the airport.

If it's any consolation, I can think of one set of fan feedback that i'm pretty sure they're ignoring, thankfully.

IIRC, if they maintain their current trend, they will outpace the doublefine kickstarter. That's very impressive.