WorstUsernameEver

Hopefully it's at least well supplied with Doritos and Mountain Dew?

Didn't Josh confirm he was working on PE quite a while ago?

Multiplied x6 characters, that kind of feedback (the kind you can't easily check when you pause the game, given it's connected to the real-time flow of events) would quickly turn into noise, especially during frantic battles. Basically, even when you add visual and audio feedback for certain things (and you have to be careful that those animations don't eat animation time that your characters could use for something else, like chugging potions or whatever) a combat log would still help a ton for people who want to have a better handle of the situation.

Going from George Ziets' Formspring, Obsidian tried pitching urban fantasy in the past but publishers just weren't interested. Of course they might have access to data I don't have, but it just seems *weird* to me, considering urban fantasy is the most mainstream kind of fantasy and has been doing well in TV ever since the 90s.

The mails have been sent out quite a while ago for backers. Your friend should check his/her spam folder and, in case there's no mail, contact Harebrained Schemes.

They talked about that in one of his kickstarter comments: Interesting. Thanks for pointing out that post. (Though as with every Feargus comment made during the Kickstarter, I take it with a grain of salt as things were very much in flux then. Then again, it's merely production times and not design.)

I don't think Obsidian ever actually talked about how many months they plan to spend on pre-production/production/polish. In fact, I'd be inclined to say you're mixing Project Eternity with Torment here.

The joke will be on them when the fans of the romance inevitably arise and start thanking Obsidian for helping in removing the "bestiality stigma".

Tablets are gonna get more and more support, so it's not surprising to see a Deus Ex spin-off there, but I really have to wonder how the touch controls will affect gameplay, balance, etc. Oh well, ultimately I will just skip this and wait for a full-fledged sequel, no biggie.

Really, really like the dungeon. Nails the IE feel and looks beautiful to boot. Hopefully the concepts for these areas will just get crazier and crazier and more and more visually interesting as the game goes on (yeah, I'm greedy). And I agree with Tuckey that dark dungeons are a perfect opportunity to show off your work on dynamic lighting. Obviously they'd have to be used sparingly, because having to go around lighting torches in every single dungeon will get annoying quickly.

It actually has better level design than the original full game, which is why I have pretty decent hopes for an eventual sequel. Shake up the writing and progression a little bit and keep the same eye for art direction, and I think Eidos Montreal might just have another winner. (Thief on the other hand isn't looking so good...)

Yeah, I think by now they heard the message loud and clear. "Improved bosses" is even a selling point for the Wii U port..

It's actually hard work. You have to deal with people's prayers and wishes and various organized religions' heads, and without the powers of a real god.

Crossing the bridge is something that would have been done in dialogue either way, so I don't really understand your complaints here? It seems to me like you're making a leap and assuming that core aspects of the gameplay will be handled a-là Darklands to save on the budget, but there's simply no evidence of that.

Were I a publisher exec (and I'd be a terrible one), I would look at Obsidian track record and see that they've only worked on one open-world game, on existing technology that they only altered minimally, and that their expertise lies in RPGs. If I were a particularly savvy exec I'd also notice that New Vegas was praised for the elements Obsidian is usually renown for and NOT for significantly improved open-world systems. Ultimately though, who knows. P.S. This doesn't look like a game developed by Obsidian. It's all about agile movement and shooting gameplay in an open arena (I'm not sure if it was supposed to be fully open-world).

Neverwinter Nights 2 had a similar approach to UI and camera, with further refinements with every expansion, and I still don't feel they ever reached the point where any of the options presented was quite natural and okay. Though part of that might have been the sluggish engine, and at least Obsidian doesn't have to come up with a camera system for PE.

The only way it makes any sense to me is if they just had a team doing "parts of the game" rather than working on it full-time under their creative direction. Alternatively, it could have been retooled as a System Shock 2-like, more RPG-y title under their direction (before it ultimately fell through). That's, of course, assuming the rumor is true, though it has to be said that Kotaku recently had a pretty decent track record with this stuff.

True, no important features in the game should be sacrificed by any means. IIRC, GUI-guys are something of a niche, so it wouldn't affect the work on the game itself: content, writers, areas, artists, scripting. It's a matter of time and know-how for the GUI-peeps. And given Obsidian's experience in that field, I truly believe they can make two UIs of the kind discussed here pretty fast and cost efficient. They have RPGs under their belt that uses both systems, so I'm very optimistic that they will come to their senses here, as it were. I'm hardly against options, but the risk is having three half-baked UIs that please no one and don't get enough iteration time spent on.

Any impressions? Not exactly a lot of reviews out, and pretty much all from smaller outlets, but they're positive. (You can check my round-up on GameBanshee or Google them yourself.) Also, I think I read some first impressions from another forumite in another thread and those seemed positive too.

NO. Give the option to disable it if you're so inclined? Sure. But I'm fairly sure that a lot of people like to play these games to mess with the rules as much as they do to experience a story, and it'd be really nice for them to actually play a game that doesn't obfuscate what's going on for once. I'm looking at you, Dragon Age: Origins.

Yeah, the scripted sequence artwork and text were really sweet and neat.

The way I see it, minimalist UI ends up feeling more intrusive given that it sticks out from the actual art, while IE games felt much better integrated though they weren't up-to-snuff in terms of usability. Minimal works pretty well with more futuristic games, modern games, as it compliments the art direction more successfully than in a fantasy title. On the other hand, I reiterate that I'm all for some limited forms of customization and updates in layout from Icewind Dale 2 (which seems to be the basic reference here).

Really? They seem pretty self-explanatory: bottom-left: "compass" = open map screen top-left: "mouse with dotted box" = select all characters top-center: "loot bag" = open inventory screen top-right: "quill & parchment" = open journal screen bottom-right: "gears" = open settings screen bottom: "watch hand" = pause/unpause Icons of different sizes and shapes thrown without rhyme or reason in the middle of the UI don't read well with me. That was the point of my complaint, not the actual icons (which have been borrowed from the IE games, so I more or less learned to read those regardless of whether they're immediately understandable by a new player). Hope that makes it clearer.

Few sparse thoughts: UI looks like it could be significantly improved from a usability standpoint, though I like its aesthetics. I like that everything has been kept at the bottom of the screen, though perhaps it could occupy slightly less space. The stamina/health bars stick out like sore thumbs ready to gouge my eyes out. Even if readability is a concern, please consider a solution that is more aesthetically pleasing for those. Also, while I understand that you're aiming for an IE-like feel to the interface, but give us some wiggle room to take out/modify elements we don't need/want changed. Doesn't necessarily have to be as customizable as an MMO interface or even NWN2's own, rather debatable UI, but options like the ability to change the font/make the character in the chat log bigger, make the chat window bigger, etc. I really have no idea what the icons near the center are meant to be. Why are they shaped like some weird Nintendo early 2000s controller? I know it's probably been borrowed directly from IWD2's interface, but it just seems bizarre and doesn't make any sense to me, whether I consider it from a usability or an aesthetic POV. Finally, I don't like the lizardman concept: right now it doesn't seem to fit the aesthetics established by the rest of the concepts nor the excerpts of the bestiary shown so far. Also a suggestion that is likely to sound redundant since I'm sure the team is already aware of it: try to approach monster cultures with the same way you approached the player character races' cultures. I want to fight creatures that feel like they really exist and are grounded in the world rather than generic lizardmen tribals that the designers thought would make for a good pacing break in the middle of a drawn-out investigation quest. EDIT: One thing that can't be judged by the mockup, but that I feel is going to be very important in the final game in terms of how the UI feels, is feedback. In the Infinity Engine games I always felt like the UI had some really nice feedback: chunky sound effects when you click on something (which also reinforced the texture/aesthetic choices of the UI, given you really felt you were clicking something solid) and buttons and toggles that felt like they were actually being pressed (despite just being, y'know, an alternate image that looked like it had been pressed, but whatever). I don't feel you did as good a job with that with Neverwinter Nights 2, and pretty much every single game afterwards moved away from that model, so this is the chance to do it right.