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Why do you feel bad for them? You just compared them to a talentless hack who had one good idea 20 years ago and then never moved past it. That analogy is apt, but not something worthy of pity.

Hi everyone, My long-in-development Dragon Age: Origins campaign, Thirst is now close to content complete and available for beta testing. This beta is designed to gain feedback from players, to fix any outstanding bugs, and to make tweaks and changes based on suggestions. Thirst is a 10-20 hour campaign containing over 50 new areas, dozens of side-quests, a story heavily sculpted by choice & consequence, 3 companions to bring into battle and interact with, a wide assortment of new items to use, and more. You can download Thirst from the page here: http://dragonage.nexusmods.com/mods/3496/ Please also keep an eye on the patches, as they will fix issues as they are discovered and resolved. Note that due to the size of the campaign and the amount of new content added, I recommend disabling all mods (and possibly even official DLCs) before playing, in order to avoid conflicts. Thanks, and have fun!

I love Arcanum's soundtrack. Some of the themes are insidiously catchy and using minimalist chamber arrangements is something I have never heard outside of games based on Agatha Christie novels. It gives the world an atmosphere all its own that makes it feel distinct from any other game, and it's a soundtrack I can listen to outside of the game as well (and do, frequently).

sup drog (also tell Chris to install the unofficial Arcanum patch, and maybe the high-res patches as well)

Truue, I agree that magic items should be very rare and valuable. The "hack, slash, loot" gameplay loop is so popular in RPGs, however, that I think the tendency is to simply treat looting as something that occurs on a regular basis, and that finding "phat lewt" is an end in and of itself. One thing to consider, too, is to have more (useful) consumables than permanent items. This way you can keep demand for various things up, instead of just giving the player a constant +5 or whatever. Think oils and enchantments that have a time limit - they remain valuable throughout the game, so you won't want to go and sell them everywhere.

I'm not so sure about all that. I don't think adventurers are set to make tons of money by default. Outside of the distorted sense of time an RPG has, realistically speaking it would take weeks or even months to plan and execute a dungeon delve, which obviously is cut out of the game because it'd be boring if that was included. Sure, they might find some incredible artifacts of power and sell them, but in a Baldur's Gate style game that doesn't happen as much as you seem to suggest. Most of your money is made by doing quests and selling the stuff the dead possess - but that could easily be flip-flopped around so that the quest rewards themselves are worth more than the loot. Eh, but 10/10/10 makes sense and is easy to understand. Convention and all that. Most currency systems in real life gravitate towards cents and dollars for reasons of standardization, so it's not unbelievable at all.

I never said to include minigames. I never said these things need to be endlessly repeatable. You can easily tie them in with the story and side-quests rather than things you can abuse forever. And limited goods in the world should help to take care of that problem anyway (only so many sources of X to find). That doesn't make a lot of sense. Why should you get 1/10th of an item's value? That's not realistic unless you have a good reason for why every merchant in the world wants to rip the player off. Now, if it's something like "we don't want those goods taken from our rivals, we hate them" then you could do something interesting with it. Not a bad idea, but ultimately it's still just a way of deterring the player from hoarding everything in the game world. When you play Baldur's Gate, do you pick up every random longsword you find to go sell? No, it's just not worth it - they're heavy and have very little relative value (because in a fantasy world everyone has them). That game didn't even need an explicit explanation, so if you want to give one on the first place, it should reinforce the storyline and universe as best it can (which is why I like the idea of enchanting via soul fragments or whatever). Money sinks suck. Period. Money sinks are a symptom of an unbalanced economy, and are put in place to perpetuate the notion that money still has purpose in the game. A good economy should not have one, unless the game revolves around pouring money into a sink. Crossroad Keep and its upgrades were a good idea, for instance, and handled rather well, but because they come late in the game, it's fairly obvious that idea was kind of an afterthought to give money some more value. Last, maybe this system over-thinks the situation, but let's consider a game with a very well balanced economy: Fallout. You have a barter system in that game which means you often do not need a lot of money (and most merchants have more goods than cash on them anyway). The best gear in the world is hard to come by, but when you find it it is very, very valuable (a rocket launcher should be super-rare and super-expensive after all). Fallout gets away with this because the good equipment is so limited and the merchants themselves only have so much to trade or sell, and things that are actually valuable in a post-apocalyptic world, like healing supplies and ammo, are fairly expensive and don't grow on trees. Fallout is simple, but it fits the setting - supply and demand rule all, and both are limited. From what we know of Project Eternity, it has a more complex world with a more structured society. This implies a more developed economy, and the rules of supply and demand are going to be different. Economics is a very important component of any developed society, so it stands to reason that the economy would also be a more complicated beast in Project Eternity. The standard "sell items for gold" thing works okay in a world where scavenging, pillaging, tomb-plundering etc. are actually viable and logical things to do, but not so well when most people have skilled trades and work for a living.

Why do we have to have gear exclusivity = price though? We know that souls play a key factor in Project Eternity. Consider instead a system there where base gear may be more or less powerful, but magic augmentations are the result of soulbinding - instilling properties by tying a part of your own essence to the equipment. This could prevent it from being used by others in the future, requiring a difficult dis-enchanting or crafting process to make it usable again (and removing the magic properties in the process). There are any number of interesting lore reasons one can come up with to justify these sorts of mechanics and the entire game would benefit from them, because it'd take Project Eternity beyond generic fantasy into a realm that is not typically explored in RPGs. Project Eternity is supposed to have a big non-combat skill focus based on what Obsidian has said, as well as multiple quest resolutions. At a certain point that means you have to discard the adventurer motif anyway in favor of something that makes practical sense. All I'm suggesting is that the economic system of the game reflect that as well.

Alright, so a small discussion elsewhere got me thinking about economic systems in RPGs and how they tend to suck. In previous Obsidian games, especially Neverwinter Nights 2 and its expansions, the player would earn literally hundreds of thousands if not millions of gold pieces, and there was nothing to spend it on other than gold sinks such as Crossroad Keep. While this is all well and good, it highlights bad economy design - it's not well-balanced, it's an afterthought to the rest of the gameplay, and it's not at all realistic (not that realism should be an end goal in itself, but a degree of verisimilitude is nice). The one exception was Storm of Zehir, which revolved around trade and featured the player working for a merchant company. This involved establishing trading posts in other towns around the world, finding rare resources to buy upgrades to the player's headquarters, and, story-wise, dealing with three other merchant companies. These secondary gameplay systems tied into the plot in interesting ways and gave the game a free-roaming quality that many modern RPGs lack. The problem with Storm of Zehir is that it was to a large degree undermined by a lot of the staples of RPGs: loot buying and selling. There was very little worth buying in Storm of Zehir, just like the other Neverwinter titles, and furthermore the game featured a lot of Elder Scrolls-style mini-duingeons where you'd kill a bunch of monsters in a cave and get the boss chest at the end. Not bad from a gameplay standpoint necessarily, but it meant that as usual you had tons of useless loot you would never use, and tons of gold to spend. Despite the improvements to the economy brought by the trade system, it wasn't enough. Generally speaking, most RPGs have adventurer-based economies, where the entire world's gold supply seems to be generated solely to provide money to the player. The reason this exists mostly comes down to the fact that the player has tons of loot and needs to do something that feels meaningful with it. Selling loot is another step in the gameplay loop, and it makes the game feel larger and more complicated than it really is, especially in those situations where money is worthless (as in most RPGs). What I'd like to propose for Project Eternity is for Obsidian is to abandon that traditional adventurer-based economy. Finding swords, armors, etc. in ruins should be more or less worthless if you can't actually use that gear. Instead, what should matter is finding commodities that actually matter to people in reality: Sources of valuable resources such as furs, grapes, spices, ore. Locations of and details on important landmarks, dungeons, ruins, cities. Player skills which are valuable for different NPCs and factions in the game world. I don't know if a faction system has been confirmed for Project Eternity yet, but tying them into the economy would be an excellent idea. Consider how selling secrets on locations of resources or key strategic points to a trade company or mercenary company would be extremely valuable to them, but would make enemies with the other factions in the game, as would selling out your skills to a cause that is in conflict with another. This could all be handled more or less using global reputation mechanics, things that Obsidian already has a lot of experience using. Additionally, we know that it's been a priority for Obsidian to make non-combat skills useful in Project Eternity, so let's consider the interesting and valuable ways they could tie in with this economy system: Speech is used for persuading others to give you better deals. Appraise allows you to more accurately judge the value of goods and information you are selling. Crafting skills allow you to perform jobs for various factions, such as smithing magical items for their soldiers to use. These skills could also allow you to train and advise the craftsmen working for them, or even hire more employees. Last, they could be used to break down all that extra loot into base components (iron ingots, magical essences, etc.) that people actually want. Disguise could be used to infiltrate competitors and gain valuable details on their activities in a region. I think you get the idea. Now, the question is, is such a complicated system right for Project Eternity? That depends on the goals Obsidian have, and whether they want to try improving upon the traditional broken RPG economy, or whether they want to put greater effort into other parts of the game. But, I think this is well worth considering because it's a way to add an additional layer of meaning and gameplay consequence to quests, the game world, characters, factions and more.e.

Sorry there wasn't any hot dwarf on dwarf action to Emotionally Engage™ you. Might I recommend the Mass Effect series? I hear whispered in dark places that some people actually like game mechanics. Yes, sadly, some actually play games in order to experience and enjoy those mechanics. Shocking! And some of those crazy, deluded individuals... why, they even think that the biggest loss in modern RPGs compared to the old ones has been how game design has gradually morphed from an approach favoring large systems-driven interactions within universal rulesets, to highly scripted, story-driven gameplay. Heretics, burn them alive!

Limited ammo of all types, if only because I think it a) acts as a gold sink b) adds to inventory management c) opens crafting possibilities as an alternative.

First off, I want to thank Josh for taking the time to participate in this discussion whole-heartedly. It's really nice hearing from a developer directly. My thoughts on cooldowns and encounter design were already stated by Alex earlier, so I'll sum up by stating that individual encounters should not be the be-all, end-all decider on mechanics, balance, and so on. Long-term consequence for misuse of character abilities is a staple of classic RPGs, and while it works well in a tabletop setting where players are subject to the whims of other players and can't just rest every ten minutes to get their spells back like in Baldur's Gate, in videogames it is a different problem entirely. Even if you were to try to replicate that same tabletop feeling by making resting inconvenient or awkward (with ambushes, for instance, or simply not allowing any resting except for in town), it still wouldn't really work the same way because combat also behaves differently in a videogame - i.e. more encounters that individually take less time to complete. Cooldown mechanics are able to provide short-term punishment to players by preventing them from using a spell or subset of spells for a given amount of time after casting. When put in the context of a real-time combat system, cooldowns actually make a lot of sense, because the relative time between spells, attacks, movements, etc. is one of the most critical and important things to manage. Missing a spell and losing out on it for 30 seconds can mean the difference between a battle lost and won. In this respect I have no issues with them. Where cooldowns don't work, at least on their own, is in creating gameplay where attrition matters, not just in the immediate 30 seconds, or 2 minutes, or even 15 minutes. If I cast Fireball and miss, that's 30 seconds down the drain, but once the fight is over, those 30 seconds are basically meaningless and might as well just disappear. However, since real time systems tend to be balanced in such a way as to promote the use of abilities on a per-encounter basis, losing out on that Fireball for, say, 15 minutes would be a huge blow to combat effectiveness far out of proportion with the benefit it provides when it is successful. This was mostly (though not entirely) averted in D&D by providing the player with lots of spell slots. At level 5+ the player should still be able to cast a dozen or more spells from each caster, many of them able to turn the tide of an encounter. In this respect mages are basically a risk:reward proposition whereby you are leaving out much of the direct damage a fighter could inflict, but making up for it in utility. Different flavours of mages (wizards, sorcerers, warlocks, etc.) provide a way to fine-tune play-style, so for instance, if you don't like memorizing specific spells only to run out of one you like at a critical moment, you can play a sorcerer but give up the breadth of your capability. Without cooldowns, some of this risk:reward of mages as a class disappears. What also makes spell memorization interesting is that players are liable for their success or failure before-hand. Do I take 3 Fireballs or 3 Cloud Kills? Depending on the situation, any combination of spells could be appropriate. In tabletop gaming, this is effectively meant to be a way of testing the player's strategy, knowledge of the game world, and mechanical aptitude. In D&D, you're expected not to just rush into every combat encounter, but to ask the local sage about the monster's weaknesses and prepare accordingly, or buy items as contingencies, or scouting ahead. Most videogames, meanwhile, emphasize action over exploration and problem-solving, and furthermore even some of the best CRPGs out there do not do a good job at giving players hints on what threats they will face and how to deal with them. This means that spell memorization feels less like a reward for playing well and more like an unnecessary annoyance, even though the problems come from the design of the rest of the game and not the spell memorization itself. Where many modern games also get it wrong is in consolidating everything. Don't get separate spells, but upgrade them instead. Don't have five fire attacks when you can have one. The quest for simplification utterly necessitates a cooldown-centric model because the variety that is the lifeblood of regular spell memorization systems simply isn't there. If your only way to win a fight is to spam a couple of spells over and over again, limiting them in an arbitrary way is just unnecessary. These games do are not created with any attrition in mind and tactics rarely enter into the equation, something which I think is not at all appropriate for a "proper" RPG. However, cooldowns, as I've said, are not the problem in and of themselves - it's the implementation of the cooldowns and how they operate within the rest of the game systems that matter. As Josh has said, we have no hint that Project Eternity will have any sort of cooldown system in place that resembles, say, Diablo III's per-skill setup. For all we know, there will be cooldowns on each school of magic, or on specific powerful abilities. This is why I am hestitant to say cooldowns are the death of Project Eternity - done right, they could actually be made interesting and fun, and might fit the real-time setup better than the Infinity Engine games' system. Let's remember that an original ruleset and universe means that a lot of problems can be fixed (or created) by Obsidian, and many of the issues users have with cooldowns (i.e. lore-breaking, skill-spamming) can be averted by not having to adhere to expectations of the fanbase. There is one lingering question I have, though - given that cooldowns might be implemented on a more global basis, i.e. per spell school or for all spells, why can that same functionality be transferred over to a mana pool of some sort? Whereas cooldowns tend to be non-interruptable, a mana pool can be refilled by a variety of means. Some games even have multiple types of mana resources. Some games have mana that doesn't regenerate on its own, meaning there is long-term consequence to misusing spells. And, on top of that, mana also tends to be more lore-friendly than cooldowns, which can come across as overly gamey. If you want to keep separate mana and cooldowns, why not implement a stamina feature instead to accomplish a similar goal? Addendum: the topic of consumables was brought up, with the issue being that potions/scrolls were never used by players because they never knew when it was a good idea to use them. I think comparing this to spells is unfair for a variety of reasons. Spells and scrolls tend to be less effective and decisive than spells cast by a mage Spells and scrolls have monetary value and they can be sold; the magic a mage has available can't Mage spells are not replenished in the same way as consumables I think that consumables make an excellent supplement to spell memorization systems, and they serve a very different role. Using this as a justification for cooldown mechanics just does not work - it's like saying you won't have weapon mods in a shooter because the player can get different types of guns. Even then, some overlap between two systems is often advisable if only for reasons of verisimilitude (i.e. "I want to be Aqua Man").

But I do agree, the injury system worked great before I learned all the tricks of the combat system and how to minimize the injuries. My guess is the way they balanced it is that their play-testers were probably quite sloppy and had lots of deaths, so they made injury kits plentiful and injuries less harmful... I don't think Eternity needs to make the same sort of consideration for mainstream audiences.

Short answer: no. Slightly less short answer: use a barter system instead.

The problem with having every quest being some world-spanning epic is that it can also lead to the feeling of a rather dead, drab and empty world. Just like getting rid of "filler" combat and NPCs entirely, you can easily end up with a game where content is doled out in too restricted a fashion, to the point where gameplay can feel almost on-rails because the player doesn't have anything to do outside of some very core quest lines. You need smaller, quicker quests to give the feeling of a living world. These don't have to be bad. A fetch quest can still be interesting if it has a few neat choices to make along the way, or says something insightful about the game universe. Not everything has to be profound or complicated - sometimes it's just good to have something to do on the way from point A to B. Otherwise, you end up with a game like Age of Decadence, where, while the core quests are awesome and have a million cool choices to make, the gameplay itself is sparse and often uninteresting once you have exhausted that content... and teleporting from location to location is used because there isn't enough additional content, either in quests or "standard" gameplay, to justify the space it all takes place in. You still run the risk of running out of things to do, of course - that happens in any game with finite content - but it can be minimized significantly just by giving the player a few extra side-quests in existing areas which pop up each time the main plot progresses.

Good ideas here. With fixed companions, as we know there will be in the game, death is something that will be very hard to manage on a permanent basis, because once someone dies, that's it. This could make the story get very messy very quickly, and would be a huge amount of work to handle effectively if every possible companion could be dead at any given moment. This would also effectively limit how much impact companions could have on the story. It would also encourage save scumming, because let's face it, almost nobody lives with an important character dying if it can be avoided. So, I think the idea of permanent death is probably unrealistic given the aims of Project Eternity. But what about other options? I think that Dragon Age's injury system was brilliant, save for the fact that injuries had far too little effect (i.e. -3% effectiveness to an attribute). Injuries should be much more severe, reducing effectiveness in combat by something closer to 15%-50% depending on the number accumulated. I think that there should be a maximum number of possible injuries - say, three - before a character is rendered unconscious. Death itself would not be permanent, but that character would no longer be able to fight or participate in dialogue until (expensive) medical attention can be given. Spells could be used to reduce the impact of injuries but not the total count, meaning that you could effectively dull the pain, but characters would still eventually succumb without proper care. One other, perhaps more lore-friendly option, would be to allow for companion death For Real™, but to also allow for them to be revived. As souls, rebirth etc. are a big theme of the game, it makes sense to be able to bring someone back after death. To reflect how arduous a "rebirth" can be, characters could suffer temporary stat penalties for, say, 20-30 minutes real time after being revived, enough to be felt, but not enough to encourage save scumming upon every single death. This could be handled either through a revive spell of some sort of the usual priests etc. in town.

I generally dislike cooldowns. I think they are a band-aid for poor design in many cases (too big a topic to go into why here at the moment), and effectively the lazy man's way towards achieving a degree of balance. That said, it's worth examining the unique traits of spell memorization and cooldowns to understand what makes them tick. Spell Memorization Requires players plan ahead to be effective. Prevents players from spamming spells constantly. Used in conjunction with spell levels, stops players from loading up on 10 copies of the same powerful spell. Rest mechanic ties in with party healing, making a rest feature more mechanically interesting overall. Time spent returning to town to rest is the real resource, not the spell uses themselves. Cooldowns Require less planning. Makes attrition with respect to spells basically non-existent. Allows players to focus on a few effective spells more easily, rather than being forced to load up with lots of throw-aways. Makes resting less mechanically interesting. Depending on how cooldowns are implemented, cooldowns serve as a limiter on the total maximum output in combat a mage can have, but only on a per-encounter basis. I think both have strengths and weaknesses depending on the game. Cooldowns work great for action RPGs because hiking back to town isn't the same concern in a faster paced title, while spell memorization is much more interesting in a slower-paced turn-based situation, where the entire game design is centered around the player make careful considerations. It really depends on what Obsidian want to do with Project Eternity - slightly more hack and slash combat that's accessible and fast-paced, or slower-paced, deeper and more strategic gameplay. That said, I would actually much rather avoid both of these systems. I think that spells should be some sort of finite resource, but spell memorization only really works well in a tabletop setting where you can't rest at will, and cooldowns are certainly not to my taste most of the time. There are two potential systems that would offer the same limitation on spell use without as many drawbacks. The first is to have a mana pool that recharges very slowly, and can be refilled by resting in a safe zone, visiting a priest, etc. There can be ways of restoring mana in the field, but they should have drawbacks - even if it's just that mana potions are very rare. This system is self-balancing to a degree because players would have to choose between a larger number of weaker spells or a fewer number of stronger ones, but without the same meta-gaming element or situation where you get screwed because you took the wrong spells with you. A fatigue mechanic could work really well to limit mana as well - i.e. the longer you are away from town, the lower your total mana capacity gets until you can get a good rest, which will eventually reduce your combat effectiveness, meaning attrition is still important but you won't screw yourself over by running out of all spells entirely. See Frayed Knights for a really good implementation of this idea. The second is to tie spells entirely to items. Scrolls, staves and wands would be exclusive to mages and would have a limited number of uses. These could be rechargeable through a variety of means, but you'd end up something resembling spell memorization with the added benefit of being able to find more magic in the field. This could also give players a recurring gold sink by making them pay for the consumables. This setup is, in my opinion, more mechanically interesting than either cooldowns or memorization, and with careful tweaking you could even have a rest mechanic remain useful (i.e. a skill that partially restores spell charges upon resting, up to a maximum percentage). The downside is that players can still be stuck without spells just like spell memorization, but this is a bit more flexible Personally I like the mana pool and fatigue setup the best of them, but so long as it's not just straight-up cooldowns ala Dragon Age, I'll be happy. Obviously, the names of the suggestions above would need to change in the game itself, "mana" and "potions" are just stand-ins.

Better add more ninjas to the game. Asian people like ninjas, right?

How about we call them Night Elves instead? Totally original.

Only if it involves a scintillating romance with a poorly-rendered 3D harlequin version of her and her clones. And Jessica Chobot.

Oh Prosper, never change.

Only if it opens the door for more excellent romance options from the fine folks at LoversLab.

In addition to rare magic items, with standard weapons and armor making up 95% of what you use, I'd also love to see more interesting consumables and charge, per-day type items. One thing that I loved about Baldur's Gate was that a Fighter could use an Oil of Burning to unleash a fiery inferno in case the party's Wizard didn't ahve the proper spell for the job, or simply that you could get a lot of cross-class functionality out of various artifacts in exchange for giving up some of that protection gear. Utility vs. ability, you might call it. These days class-based RPGs have such strict limits on what you can and can't do that it forces you to compose "one of every type" parties, which can sap some of the fun of party-building. Sure, your wands and potions are never going to be as good as the real thing, but all those trinkets give you a revolving door of useful loot to find and expend, without giving every single person in your party a +10 Sword of God-Slaying. And if you don't want that loot, you can just sell it - more interesting than finding sacks of gold everywhere.

I love the NWN UI from a usability perspective. it is amazingly easy to navigate, has everything you would need immediately accessible, has a billion hotkeys and quick slots, and you can have as many windows open as you want, in any position on-screen. Awesome. Problem is, it looks terrible. I'd gladly sacrifice a *bit* of that raw functionality if it meant a UI that had much more personality. Also, I love detailed, ornate sorts of visuals - the sleekness of more modern UIs leaves a lot of games feeling cheap and boring-looking to me. As for minimaps, good ones are basically the most important addition you can make to a game and to not have a good, detailed mini-map and full area map would be a major blunder.

As it seems much of the focus of the game is on combat, like the Infinity Engine games, I have to say yes. Besides, you should always have a way to grind XP just in case you really need it. Considering that we already know non-combat and combat skills are not mutually exclusive, there's no reason to not reward combat. That said, I also hope they reconsider that choice. Except Eternity is a party-based game and rogues level up alongside everyone else.