Althernai

First, I would like to point out that by your rather strange definition, all good RPGs are toys rather than games because they are designed in a way that deliberately allows the player to define his or her own goals. Want to be a goodie two shoes who pauses a world-saving quest to rescue the kitten of some child from a tree? You can do that. Want to be a meanie who steals the child's candy instead? You can do that too. Want to solve quests by talking rather than fighting? This one is rarer, but in a good RPG, you can make avoiding violence your goal and succeed more often than not. The ability to define one's own goals is a hallmark of a good RPG, whether RTwP or turn-based or something else. That said, let's consider RTwP and your insistence that to play optimally, one must pause the game every half a second or so. What exactly is being optimized here? What is the goal of an RTwP fight? We don't know what it will be in Pillars of Eternity, but I'm reasonably certain that in this respect it will resemble the IE games so what I'm going to says will be based on Baldur's Gate 2 because that's the game I remember best. The goal of the combat part of the game is to defeat enough enemies in a particular section (dungeon, wood, underwater city, etc.) to accomplish some objective (slay a monster, retrieve an item, find a way to a specific destination, etc.) and return to a safe area (your stronghold, an inn, an allied camp, etc.) where you can recuperate. As long as you can do that without losing any characters or wasting non-renewable resources that are best used elsewhere along the way, you have performed optimally. So, back to the question of what exactly is being optimized by pausing every half a second. The practical difference it makes is that you wind up with slightly more renewable resources at the point where you reach the safe area. For example, if I play normally and finish a quest with about 50% of party health and 20% of party spells remaining, playing with maximal care might result in 70% of party health and 30% of party spells. This looks like it's better, but since you return to 100% capacity upon reaching the safe area, it's a transient effect and optimizing for it is completely pointless. Of course, you can do so if you want, much like you can play an entire game without using the Fireball spell or whatever, but this is a goal you set for yourself, not something the designers set for you.

I don't know what "C&C" means, but it's definitely stand alone and it's about as long as the main campaign. It can be quite a bit longer if you try to do everything since it's not as linear. In general, the expansion is just better in every way -- the characters are more developed, you have more choices about how you accomplish objectives, there are manual saves, etc.

Earthlock: Festival of Magic A turn-based JRPG made mainly by Scandinavians. They have a demo; it's in very early alpha, but the combat system is reasonably original for this style of game. There's about 3 days to go.

The architectures of laptop and desktop GPUs are identical, it's just that the laptop versions have fewer hardware resources and lower clock speeds to keep the heat and power draw down. The reason developers say that laptops are not supported is that laptop manufacturers like to put custom drivers on their machines and there's no way to test every single variety of laptop. As long as you got the generic drivers, the games should work just fine. I've been playing games on laptops for more than a decade now (my last three GPUs were the Mobility Radeon 9800, the GeForce 8600M GT and currently the Radeon 6770M) and I've never had a compatibility problem that a driver update didn't solve. At most, some games (like Bioshock 2) will warn you that they're not guaranteed to work on laptops, but they work just fine anyway. By the way, don't be fooled by the RAM -- it's there exclusively for marketing purposes. There's simply no way a GeForce 710M (with its 14.4 GB/s of memory bandwidth) can ever make use of 2GB of memory, at least not while playing games at a reasonable frame rate. More generally, you can find a good summary of all GPUs on Wikipedia; here are the pages for Nvidia, AMD and Intel (the Intel ones are sadly not as detailed as the other two). The most important number is what the wiki refers to as "processing power" (it's in GFLOPS). The second most important is probably the memory bandwidth which is what currently limits the APU (integrated GPU) offerings. The other numbers are mostly correlated with those two. The GeForce 710M in particular can be found here. As you can see, it is the weakest of the 700M cards. To be honest, I don't understand its purpose since the Intel GPU that's built into the CPU of your laptop is almost certainly more powerful.

I've seen this mentioned multiple times by several different people on these forums and I'm genuinely confused. ToEE means Temple of Elemental Evil, right? I got that game as a gift from a friend soon after it was released. Of all of the turn based games I've played, it is most certainly not the one I would bring up in an argument about how turn based games can be good. First, that has to be one of the buggiest games I've ever played. My most vivid memory of the combat was that at some point I used a spell that summoned a moon dog (or something of the sort, I don't remember the exact name) and the creature just wouldn't go away. It could not be killed and it persisted across multiple fights. At first, I thought there was some kind of time limit and reloading later would require a lot of backtracking so I just kept going -- it stayed with me even through the final battle. There were other bugs, I just don't remember them as well. Second, even if we ignore the bugs, I don't remember anything about it would make it the paragon of turn based games. A substantial section of it was low-level D&D with its usual flaws (luck matters a lot and player options are limited). The encounter design and variety were mediocre. I'm trying to think of what aspect of the combat could be considered great and nothing comes to mind -- the game just didn't make much of an impression. Basically, if I compare ToEE to a good RTwP game like, say, BG2:SoA (in terms of combat alone, never mind the story and such), the latter wins by a lot. It's not close at all to the point where it's not something I would consider debatable. Maybe you can explain what was so good about the turn based combat in ToEE?

I don't know about that. I could certainly see that kind of reaction if the game being emulated centered on combat, but this is not the case with Planescape: Torment. The in PS:T is memorable only for the high level spells and even those got tiring after the first couple of castings. The overwhelming majority of all backers (more than 80%) didn't care enough about this to even vote in the poll and another percent voted just to say that they don't care. A little under 10% voted for turn-based and they're presumably not upset since they got what they wanted. It's only the other group of slightly less than 10% who might feel tricked. I agree with you that inXile did pull a bit of a fast one here: at the time of the Kickstarter, they didn't talk much about the combat system so I assumed it would be the same deal as PS:T. However, it's hard to care too much since the combat in PS:T was an afterthought to begin with (that's why I voted "indifferent"). I'll only be upset if the turn based combat more or less takes over the game (i.e. hordes of weak enemies) which they promised won't be the case.

I have one badge, but the K is missing.

You are correct in that it stands and falls with that possibility and, as it happens, it falls and it falls hard. Diablo is a completely different kind of game. Look, it's not nice that some people here are being rather rude to you newcomers... but you have to understand where they are coming from. This idea has been discussed over and over and over again from practically the beginning of the kickstarter and one can only beat a dead horse for so long before becoming impatient. In fact, I'm going to be lazy and just copy and paste my old argument: The console control interface can't handle this kind of game. Consoles lack fast and precise point-and-click functionality and they have fewer hot key possibilities. Think about it this way: Baldur's Gate 2 has 6 party members each of which has on the order of 10 (it's more, but let's keep it simple) actions which can be accessed almost instantaneously via either a button to click on or a keyboard shortcut. This makes for around 60 things that a PC player can do in approximately 1 second after having decided to do it. How would you do the same thing on a console? First, we must select the character. I suppose you could use one of the sticks as a pointing device and a button to click, but I suspect this would be extremely awkward because I have not seen it implemented in any game I have played. Instead, the most common mechanism tends to be to cycle through the player characters. Having done that, we need to select the action. Again, I have not seen an RPG that offers of order 10 hotkeys which means you must typically go through a menu. Menu access is slower than on the PC because instead of point-and-click, it involves traversing an ordered list. Thus, an action that took of order 1 second on the PC takes of order 10 seconds on the console. And this is something that a player will be doing very, very often. Here is another example: imagine positioning multiple characters on the PC. Click on a character, click where the character goes, repeat. Again, it's something that takes of order 1 second per character so 1-6 seconds total. On consoles, it does not appear to be done at all (at least not in any game I have played on an XBox) because now you really must use the sticks as precision pointing devices and this is not pleasant. If you don't believe me, here is the same idea from Chris Avellone, one of the more famous developers at Obsidian:

Among other things, they were mentioned in inXile's update to Torment backers. This is what convinced me to back them and I suspect quite a few others -- including Paypal, Torment had more than 75K backers (i.e. people willing to give money to an RPG on Kickstarter). I've seen this done several times and it's hard to guess the motive. It could be somebody who, as you say, was genuinely willing to give the $10K if it was needed and withdrew it once it became clear that the project would succeed without it (though this interpretation is not viable for Deathfire which doesn't look good right now). It could also be somebody who was genuinely going to give the $10K, but changed his or her mind -- the long timeframe of Kickstarters allows for a lot time for buyer's remorse to kick in. On the other hand, it could also be somebody who doesn't actually have $10K to spare. It could be that such a person is trying to help the game by misrepresenting the amount of support it has or, it could be a simple troll who doesn't care about anything other than the attention such a stunt gets. It's impossible to say without more information.

Yes, but that doesn't mean that a turn-based system is going to be necessarily worse than a RTwP one for a game that does not include large numbers of weaker enemies in its combat. It is true that the latter style only works with a real time system, but how many games have made it work well? It requires a lot of work put into encounter design which very few people are willing to do and even fewer are good at. For every Baldur's Gate 2, there's a Planescape: Torment and something even worse (consider the atrocity that constitutes 90% of combat in The Old Republic MMO). It's entirely possible that whatever it is they do with their Crisis system will work better with turn based (provided they're willing to eliminate most of the weaker enemies as they said).

Exactly. I want the equivalent of the information in the Baldur's Gate 2 manual. And the mechanics should have numerical values. I absolutely hated how Dragon Age described spells with things like "Arcane Shield: Grants a bonus to defense when active" -- the descriptions for half the mechanics were practically worthless until people dug into the code and got the numbers out. Don't just tell me it increases defense (it's obvious from the name), tell me that it's by 2d6 per level + 10 or whatever.

I voted indifferent. I generally prefer RTwP, but the system they are describing sounds like it was designed with TB in mind and will probably work better that way. In any case, the two are basically neck and neck (the difference between them is 10 times less than the indifferent vote) so inXile might as well just go with what they want and basically disregard this vote altogether.

Except that the game did offer a tutorial. The review is hilarious because when I first played BG2 (at the age of 15 or so), I was in the exact same position as the reviewer: I had not played BG1 and had absolutely no idea what D&D was. Yes, a lot of the details took some time to sink in (I distinctly remember discovering the utility of Stoneskin and thinking "Why wasn't I using this all the time before?!"), but the game was neither incomprehensible nor very difficult. The reviewer is either trolling or he did not make any attempt whatsoever to learn the rules (i.e. he did not look at either the in-game tutorial or the manual).

It should not matter, but I can tell you from extensive experience that it most definitely does. For the past 8 years or so, I have been working in a large, international collaboration in which people have no choice but to work with others remotely. We have state-of-the-art videoconferencing software as well as special rooms equipped with microphones and cameras. It's certainly possible to work like this, but a group would have to be insane to choose to do so. Videoconferencing is just not the same as being in the same room with someone -- you can get the content across, but the body language is missing, facial expressions are harder to pay attention to (particularly when there are multiple people in a conversation) and the timing is off. We actually take the time, money and effort to have a large fraction of the group meet in person every few months despite the fact that this means transoceanic flights for many of us. Long story short, "long-distance" work is possible and there are plenty of organizations which make use of it because we have no choice, but no sane company would go out of its way to court it.

The level 1 difficulty issue is a generic problem with literal translations of D&D to CRPGs. At higher levels, the damage dealt to characters before death is a function of many dice rolls so you quickly run into the central limit theorem and can strategize accordingly. At level 1, the battle can be decided in a few rolls so there's much less strategy -- the outcome is much more likely to be based purely on luck. The "difficulty curve" is a side effect, the real problem is that this is a lousy mechanic probably intended to be mitigated by a human DM. Since Project Eternity is not using D&D, I don't see why they can't avoid the root of the problem and give characters enough health and/or stamina for the central limit theorem to be applicable throughout.

Yes, I'd back it. However, unless this was after Project Eternity was released, I would only pay the minimum amount that gets me the game.

It's certainly possible, but I don't see how this is not just another poor man's mouse. Wrong game. 4K is nice for the few that have the devices to use it, but it is not a good fit at all for Project Eternity. Such frills are good for games with typical big production budgets (i.e. $50M), not the $4M that Obsidian raised. It would be utterly bizarre for them to bother with 300GB disks or whatever for the sake of higher resolution; last I heard, they weren't even going to do physical distribution except for the people who paid for it on Kickstarter. You are confusing several different quantities. I was talking about the CPU of the PS4 which does indeed have 8 slow cores. More specifically, the architecture the PS4 and XBone CPUs are based on is called Jaguar. This architecture is intended for low power consumption rather than high performance. The actual console CPUs will of course be customized so I can't tell you their exact speeds yet, but it would be very strange if the individual cores were fast because the architecture is not well suited to it (in that case, they would have just used AMD's high performance architecture). The 176GB/s that you quote has very little to do with the CPU: it's the memory bandwidth of the GPU. The corresponding value for your GTX 580 from 2 years ago is 192GB/s. Do you have links for any of this? The only thing I have heard of is that independent developers are no longer required to go through publishers to get their games on the PS4. It any case, even your optimistic scenario still involves much more red tape, money and time than on the PC.

But does this thread add that much that is new? Most of the issues with consoles remain. It's true that the new consoles will finally have a sane amount of memory; that's great and it does remove one massive difference. The GPU is also pretty decent. The CPU is x86 (good), but it's bizarre in that it has 8 slow cores (bad) whereas most PCs have 2 or more fast ones. This already might be problematic because multithreading is hard, but Unity doesn't seem to require a great deal of CPU in the first place so I'm not going to dwell on it. The UI issues are mostly the same -- the only major difference is that the PS4 controller will have a touchpad. Not even the best of touchpads can fully replace a mouse, but if it is really good, I suppose you could use it as a mouse substitute (the game has a pause function). If that's the case, the game is more or less playable, although it will be much more awkward than on a PC, kind of like playing on a laptop without using the keyboard. I am not sure that the touchpad is actually that good though -- it looks like just a large button on the controller and the positioning is pretty awkward. The legal issues are almost exactly the same. The PC platforms (Windows, Mac, Linux) have one thing in common: you can install whatever you want on them without consulting Microsoft or Apple or anyone else. This is not true of the consoles. Not only do the manufacturers take a cut of of the money, but they also require the developer to jump through hoops to conform to various requirements. These appear to have been relaxed somewhat (at least Sony allows self-publishing now), but it's still way, way more troublesome and expensive than making the games available on the PC. All of that said, I would not be opposed to a PS4 or XBone version as long as all work on them was done after everything promised by the Kickstarter was delivered. That is, Obsidian shouldn't even think of the consoles while the PC version is being developed. If the resulting game is amenable to porting and they believe that the sales will be worth the cost of porting and of dealing with Microsoft and/or Sony, then of course they should do it. However, after explictly saying that they would focus on the PC during the Kickstarter, it would be dishonest for them to spend time or money on console development or, worse, compromise the PC version for the sake of the consoles.

I suppose it's possible, but I think it is much more probable that they simply didn't bother to define a boundary condition for ending combat while there are still hostiles in the area. I remember instances where there are no enemies for at least 2 turns worth of movement and it is seriously annoying to drag 4 characters around -- more so than even the save system. Is that really the big reveal? I thought the game did a good job of piling on the plot; there are revelations up until the last conversation (although this final one you can probably guess).

Part of the problem is that the game was financed by the purists and some of the inducement was an experience more true to the original than the 2007 shooter. However, the issue is mostly that it wouldn't be Shadowrun without the Matrix. If you look at the source material and the stuff it is based on (going all the way back to Neuromancer), the big action sequences ("runs") usually consist of a combination of hackers in cyberspace and soldier-types in the real world. I liked the one sequence in the game where they tried to pull this off -- it mostly worked. You can tell that HBS struggled with this though (you can read about it here) and what you see in the game is the outcome of that struggle. The Matrix is obviously not supposed to be about hacking some turrets and activating an elevator. However, it is good that it is there since mod-makers can use it.

I thought it was pretty good for a $20 game with a toolset and a devoted fanbase. The lack of a manual save system is much less annoying in practice than in theory -- the game autosaves often enough for it not to matter, at least not the way I played it. The story is relatively original and the combat is decent. The main problems are that it is short and linear. I don't mind because it's only $20 and there will be mods. On the other hand, I'm kind of surprised that this is the result of a $1.8M Kickstarter, even if they had to give up a third of that for the license. I certainly hope that the Project Eternity and Torment: Tides of Numenera teams are more efficient so that each game is both longer and less linear. That is, I would be disappointed if either of them had only 2-3 times more content (which is what you get if you scale the funding).

Really? A couple of hundred thousand at $30 per copy is $6M which makes roughly $10M when combined with the Kickstarter. I would not consider that niche. Of course, is certainly not of the same scale as the mass market AAA games which cost of order $100M to make and market and sell of order $1B (when successful), but it is hardly niche -- it's somewhere in the mid-range. Because a $1M+ Kickstarter only works if people already trust you. Think of the people who have gotten big money out of it: Tim Schaefer, Brian Fargo, Chris Avellone + Josh Sawyer + Feargus Urquhart, etc. Every one of them has been in gaming for a long time and has participated in the creation of masterpieces. Other people have tried it (e.g. the rather poorly named Old-School RPG which was renamed to Shaker much too late), but it hasn't worked for them. Now, why Obsidian and inXile wouldn't always just use Kickstarters for medium scale projects is not so clear. It seems like a no-lose proposition for them as long as they can consistently deliver what they promise.

Cut the guy some slack -- his mistake was merely in not qualifying his statements to restrict them to scenarios like his own. What he says makes sense for an indie dev who works with a budget of order $100K, is unlikely to get additional manpower for the task and is unwilling to delay the release of the product. It does not make any sense at all for a company with on the order of 100 people and a budget of millions of dollars because they can hire new personnel or reposition existing ones. The one point that he makes that more or less scales is that the game should be designed from the start with all of the features that it will have. This might apply to some types of games (adding stuff to Tetris or Pong generally does not improve them), but not RPGs where the scope of the game is limited by the budget and personnel.

I think you are failing to make a distinction between "go through an area" and "clear an area". A lot of modern games (MMOs, but also others that copy from them) have quests that explicitly require you to kill N monsters in an area and/or loot X items that only they drop. The Baldur's Gate series wasn't entirely free of this, but it was much more rare. Yes, the basic game mechanism was that you were sent into areas with hostiles, but how you got through those areas was usually up to you. If you so desired, you could cast Invisibility on your entire party and the game would respect that. Very few people did this because, unlike in most MMOs, clearing areas in BG2 was actually fun (and because you got XP for killing stuff), but it was certainly possible. You did usually (though not always) have to fight whatever was at the end of the area, but that's not the same thing as a bounty hunter quest.

You are a few months late to party. Every single one of your issues was discussed at great length during the Kickstarter and most (though not all) of the old-school crowd was convinced to give Obsidian a chance. Also, as was already pointed out, you are misunderstanding most of the issues. There is a possibility of a miss, it's just less likely than a glancing blow. See this update for detail. They actually mention this in the same update linked above. It's not cooldowns in the same way as MMOs and Dragon Age where you can only cast Fireball once and then need to wait some time until it comes back. Instead, it's a pretty complex system of per-encounter and per-rest abilities. The closest thing I can think of is the Sorcerer class from Baldur's Gate 2, except your lower spell levels regenerate between encounters. There is no level scaling, there is encounter scaling which works exactly the same way as in the Baldur's Gate series. I don't remember what the outcome of this discussion was, but I believe that they said they will provide XP for exploring in some way. Again, late to the party. A lot of people actually like the changes and we've already paid enough to make the game.