Althernai

No, of course not -- as I already said, I fully expect the companions to speak up when the player says or does something that is relevant to them. However, the fact that they have a personality does mean that the player cannot speak as the companion. For example, suppose the companion is a priest of some faith and the player (speaking as the main character) decides to torch some sacred site of this faith for some reason. If the game is well written, then the companion should disagree with this decision and maybe even try to oppose the protagonist. However, if there is no main character and the only party member left is this companion, then there is no sane way for the player to enact the same decision. Now, in theory, they could script for this (i.e. allow decisions based on which party members you currently have), but the combinatorics of this are monstrous and there is simply no way they have the resources to do that. I think most people will not lose companions to random deaths. It's only in Trial of Iron mode that this is a serious possibility -- other than that, people will just reload. It is virtually impossible to tell a good story without well defined characters (there are a few exceptions, but they are mostly not for mass consumption). Western RPGs mostly work around this by having one character defined by the player and the rest defined by the designers. I don't see them deviating from this because it almost inevitably results in a weaker story. Look at the Infinity Engine games: there's a reason the Kickstarter promised the combat from IWD and the writing from PS:T. It's much easier to do a great story when you mostly fix the protagonist (a-la PS:T) than when you only have a "hook" (a-la the Bhaalspawn in the BG series) or with nothing at all (like in IWD).

I don't mean that Obsidian has explicitly said it, but it is pretty clear from the other things we know (i.e. the nature of the companions). There is absolutely no doubt that players creating their own party will miss out on a good chunk of content. As you can read in the page you linked above, a lot of the effort in making a game like this goes into writing the companions. If you choose not to interact with them and make your own party instead, you will miss out.

I am fairly certain that we do know how the game will play and it will be like BG and PS:T. The basic idea is to have a player-made character and companions with personalities (yes, there's the Adventurer's Hall, but the game will not be designed around it). All of the characters will no doubt chime in to conversations, but the player can only speak through the protagonist. It would not make sense to have a character with a personality written by the developers and at the same time have the player speak through that character (well, unless you were trying to produce the impression of an insane character).

Actually, the main character is mechanically different from all of the others and that's why I'm almost sure that his/her death will mean Game Over (unless it's scripted). Think about it from the point of view of the people scripting the various conversations and events. Mechanically, the protagonist is the interface by means which the player interacts with the world. If he or she dies, someone else has to become this interface. Even if the character is not irreplaceable (i.e. if the game does not revolve around a Bhaalspawn or a near-immortal or something of the sort), there is no good way to do this if all of the companions have personalities. It would lead to absurd situations because the player's choices may be at odds with this personality. Of course, a scripted death (i.e. at a predetermined time and place in the plot) is different -- Chrono Trigger did the most extended version of this. Jade Empire did it too and (debatably) so did Baldur's Gate 2. However, a random death in battle will mean Game Over.

That depends. In the case of a DRM-free game like Project: Eternity, you are right: it's exactly the same product. However, in the case of a game where the legitimate copies have annoying DRM and the pirated copies have successfully removed the DRM, the latter are the better product independently of the cost because the DRM-free version does not require the user to have a CD in the drive or contact activation servers which may or may not be down or uninstall completely unrelated software which the DRM takes a dislike to or anything of the sort. I think it was a mistake to start this discussion with DRM. The key sentiment here is that most people who donated to the Kickstarter would like people who did not donate to buy the game when it is released so that Obsidian can make the expansion and other games of this kind. If the initial post had been framed along these lines rather than railing against piracy and suggesting the implementation of DRM in non-Kickstarter copies, it would have done a lot more good towards that end. The entire debate about DRM is unnecessary here as P:E is extremely unlikely to use it. Here are my thoughts about convincing people who might pirate the game to buy it. It's important to make a distinction between two groups of pirates. 1) People who might have bought the game, but they can't afford it. This includes people from developing countries as well as children, teenagers and the very poor from developed ones. It is disingenuous for companies to count piracy by these as lost sales because even if they were somehow prevented from pirating the game, they would not buy it -- they simply don't have the money. It does not make any sense to try to convince them to buy it for the same reason. In fact, it is probably counterproductive even to try to guilt them into not pirating it. Children and teenagers grow up and developing countries eventually become wealthier (hopefully...) -- it's better for these people to get a taste for this kind of game, even if it means that they're currently freeloading. 2) People who can afford the game, but choose to pirate it. These must somehow be convinced to buy it. I think the best way is to explain to people that the "publisher" for this game is not a multinational corporation, but ordinary people who love this kind of game and that the developer needs to be paid for them to make any more games like this. The latter is actually the fundamental premise behind intellectual property ("To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts..."), but the idea of IP/copyright/etc in its current form has been tainted beyond any hope of redemption by its abuse and invoking it as a moral argument merely invites controversy. Thus, if the subject ever comes up on other forums, it is better to apply the original argument (i.e. Obsidian deserves to get paid so that they'd make similar games) directly to this game rather than appealing to national law or general ideas.

This is where you should lose just about everyone, regardless of what they think of piracy or DRM. I've only briefly skimmed this thread so I might have missed this already being said, but let me say it (or repeat it) loud and clear: it makes absolutely no sense to release a DRM-free version and then waste money on implementing another version with DRM. Think about it: the Kickstarter sold on the order of 100K copies (there were not this many backers, but a substantial fraction of backers purchased multiple copies). Some of these copies are guaranteed to be DRM-free because this is what the Kickstarter advertised. The probability that one of them will make get into the hands of pirates is effectively 100%. If you don't believe me, read this thread -- just in the small subset of backers who still post here, there are members of the pirate party as well as people who don't think piracy is immoral. Thus, if Obsidian is insane enough to implement DRM for P:E (I mean beyond Steam as that's more of a distrubution platform with DRM built in at no additional cost), they will have no impact at all on pirates who will be happily playing the DRM-free version. All DRM means in the context of P:E is an additional cost for Obsidian and a nuisance to paying customers. Remember, DRM is not free: not only must they either license some flavor of it or create it on their own, but it also adds substantially to the cost of quality assurance. The reason is that they basically have to go through the entire game and figure out whether everything works as expected both with and without DRM. DRM just doesn't make any sense here.

I don't work in the games industry, but my field is definitely deadline-driven and they serve several purposes. First and most importantly, while a project like this will not have any external authority imposing deadlines, there is still the matter of money. There is some number of people working on it and each of these people gets paid some yearly salary (plus overhead). The budget of the project, the size of the team and the expense of each member define a natural deadline. The project manager must specify these at the beginning of the project and there is very little leeway in getting extra time beyond what was initially planned. Second, deadlines are necessary to keep people who depend on each other working together smoothly. If you read the Update 30, they discuss the concept of a pipeline which is omnipresent in both hardware and software industries. You don't want to have the guy whose job it is to convert art into a format the game understands sit there and twiddle his thumbs because the guy who was supposed to provide him with the art to convert is late. When deadlines are designed and adhered to properly, they allow a complex product made by dozens of people come together into a coherent whole without wasting the time of any of these people. Finally, without deadlines, a lot of people (including myself to some extent) will try to do things in a way that may increase the quality, but probably goes well beyond the point of diminishing returns. This is what is typically referred to as the better being the enemy of the good.

I can give you three general reasons why I would prefer it to be isometric: 1) I have never played a 3D party-based RPG where the camera did not get in the way of combat. NWN2, KOTOR1&2, Dragon Age... it just doesn't work well. Even in single player RPGs (e.g. Skyrim) it's not perfect, but when you have to simultaneously focus on 6 different characters, 3D is more annoying than anything else. It might be possible to make a game where this is not the case, but I don't want gamble on that with Project Eternity. 2) State-of-the-art 2.5D is not worse than 3D, it's just different. People have already spoken a lot about this. 3) I want this game to succeed and 3D unnecessarily narrows the potential player base by jacking up the system requirements. I know people who would have played, say, Dragon Age, but there's no chance of their laptops running it without making the game uglier than the old games.

Actually, ME3 is a perfect example of what not to do. A lot of people complained because Bioware did so many things wrong that one of them was bound to strike a nerve for a bunch of people. It's not the lack of a happy ending, it's the fact that what they did is atrocious storytelling. First, don't change the tone of the game at the last minute. For example, Planescape: Torment had a tragic ending regardless of what the player did, but there was nothing wrong with that because the story was written as a tragedy from the very beginning ("You must die... while you still can."). The Baldur's Gate series had a happy ending and there was also nothing wrong with that because it was a heroic fantasy from the start. The ending of ME3 takes a heroic fantasy in space (i.e. a story where the hero routinely defies impossible odds) and changes it to... something rather difficult to classify, but more of a sad ending than a happy one. I am not worried about this in Project Eternity because Obsidian's writers are decent with keeping the tone consistent. Second, if you are going to have choices in the game and claim that they matter, they need to make more of a difference than the color of the final cutscene. This one is more worrying because NWN2 was nearly as bad (the natural consequence of a "rocks fall, everyone dies" ending). More specifically, if there is a prolonged quest/minigame/whatever for gathering an army, that army better be relevant in the end rather than serving as the backdrop to a deus ex machina. Third, the basic, primal reaction to the ending should not be "WTF?! ". Deus ex machina is not necessarily bad, but it should have a reasonable amount of explanation and foreshadowing and it must play by already established rules. Don't introduce something completely new that is capable of things which make no sense in the genre you are working in.

Why? Mask of the Betrayer had a more or less happy ending (assuming of course that you found all of the pieces of the mask). You don't get to make a major change to the nature of the afterlife, but the player character can live happily ever after. I would actually be fine with Mask of the Betrayer method of determining the ending as long as the key factors are a little more obvious than the pieces of the mask (which can be easily be missed even if a player made a pretty good effort at trying to explore). For example, the ending might depend on several optional (but not hidden) quests or may be tied to the mega-dungeon.

If the story is more IWD than BG/PST, then I'm not buying it and based on the relative popularity of BG1&2 vs. IWD1&2, I suspect neither are a whole lot of other people. I don't necessarily mind this sort of thing (it didn't seem to do much harm to BG2), but nor am for it. I've never seen the appeal of playing a story-driven game with BG2 or PST style companions in multiplayer mode. The same goes for playing a real time with pause game in multiplayer. It's certainly possible and a few people seem to enjoy it, but I would rather Obsidian not waste any resources on trying to make this work. You can't make an MP mod when the base game does not support connecting to a network and a bunch of other things. The developers have made it quite clear that it won't be happening in this game. They haven't said much about the expansion, but I very much doubt they'll use it to bring in multiplayer. The best you can realistically hope for is the sequel.

You got a lot more things wrong in this description that you got right. As Tamerlane said, actions don't cost Stamina (see this post). Furthermore, you don't get to choose whether you only lose Stamina or Health as well when hit -- you always lose both. What you do get to choose with difficulty options is if dropping down to 0 Health means permanent death or whether the character is maimed (it's not clear what this means; possibly some permanent loss).

They've discussed this during the Kickstarter and that's not how it will work. The dungeon will be divided into sections each made up of a few floors and the enemy power between these sections will ramp up dramatically so most people will have to leave and come back when they're stronger. Of course, the truly skilled will be able to go further if they want just like people went through Watcher's Keep before going to Spellhold in BG2, but it won't be the intended path. I am not sure what they plan to do with the cities. If each one is really as big and complex as Athkatla, then they are doing something that has never been done before. I suspect it will result in a longer "middlegame" since both the beginning and the ending tend to be more linear than a big city is suited for.

Same problem as tablets: it certainly doesn't have the RAM and probably not the CPU/GPU either.

There might be zoom, but yes, it's an isometric game so you can't rotate the camera or change the camera angle. This was in the first line of their Kickstarter pitch. The reason is that it is a lot easier to have tactical combat with such a view.

No, it will not. You are missing the point of this option: it is to let players who don't fully understand the system correct a character build that is not working the way they expected it to work. These rule systems are invariably complex and with complexity comes the potential to screw up. The option to respect is there to fix a badly broken build. It has no impact on the balance because it is too rare and too expensive to use for anything other than making a generally bad build better. In particular, it is not something that can be used on a per-encounter basis or even a per-boss basis -- you can only do it a few times a game.

If you are at one of a few specific points in the game, you are not playing in Expert Mode or on a high difficulty and you are willing to pay the non-trivial cost associated with it, then yes. Realistically, I don't think most of the people posting in thread will ever use it.

Stamina is not a shield. Health and stamina both take damage when a character is hit, but health typically depletes much slower than stamina.

Actually, it more or less is. I don't know IWD, but here is how it worked in the other Infinity Engine games: 1) Baldur's Gate: except for the main character (by nature of the plot) and a few particularly unfortunate ways to die, death is temporary. You need to pay off a temple to bring characters back. 2) Baldur's Gate 2: death is even more temporary. In addition to the methods in BG1, you can use a 5th level spell available to all clerics (and Jaheira the fighter/druid) starting in Chapter 2. Alternatively, you can use the Rod of Resurrection which is also found in Chapter 2. 3) Planescape: Torment: except for a few very specific fights, the protagonist will always get up after a battle (even if the entire party got wiped out!) and possibly regenerate to full health. The other characters aren't so lucky, but unless the player was very cursory in exploring the starting location, the protagonist gets 3 castings of Raise Dead per day. Again, death is very temporary. In other words, the old games were nowhere near as hardcore as you are making them out to be. Project Eternity in Expert Mode is arguably more hardcore because death is actually permanent.

They discussed this in the updates during the Kickstarter. Getting stabbed in the chest does not mean you merely lose stamina -- you also lose health which is not easily regained. As the quote says, if a character runs out of health, that's the end of that character (unless you picked the option to only have them maimed; your choice). It sounds to me like they're giving you what you asked for in the original post.

I think your version of xcom is buggy, but never mind. Project Eternity will not have perma-death by default -- it is a setting that you can enable if you want to (although of course it is automatically enabled in Expert Mode). Regarding healing: I think you misunderstand. Obsidian's problem with healing is setting-driven: they don't want every party and every temple to be capable of curing wounds and disease because it doesn't make sense as far as the world is concerned. To avoid this, they split the concept of hit points into health and stamina. Mechanically, there will still be healing spells, they'll just restore stamina rather than HP. More generally, I don't think you really have anything to worry about with respect to frustration in Project Eternity. There are a lot of people on these forums who would prefer the game to be hardcore, but there is another bunch (which doesn't really go into these threads) which cares mainly about the story and characters. I don't know what the relative sizes of these groups are in the general population, but the second group is not small and Obsidian knows this. I very much doubt that the easiest difficulty will be frustrating -- if it was, then there would not be a point to the challenge modes put in to placate the hardcore crowd.

I think there is software that allows you to play games with controllers even if the game doesn't natively support it so there is no technical reason you why cannot play with a controller. However, I don't see why anyone would want to play a game like this with a controller. It is not an action RPG like the ones you listed; it's more like a real time strategy game with pause (think Starcraft II in the missions without base management). Also, I don't see what you have against playing on a laptop. My work requires me to move a lot so I have not had a gaming desktop in over a decade. Laptops have been perfectly fine for RPGs (Knights of the Old Republic, Neverwinter Nights 1 & 2, Temple of Elemental Evil, Dragon Age, etc) and RTS games so I'm sure they'll be fine for Project Eternity.

Your statement regarding real time games is correct, but the one about RTwP is nonsense. There is no reason to have fewer options in an RTwP game, you just need actions to have a characteristic timescale of more than half a second or so (the time it takes most people to pause the game). Once the game is paused, the player has exactly as much time (i.e. unlimited time) to pick and choose as in a turn based game. If a battle is difficult, it is possible to pause the game and reassess the situation after practically every action. What does this have to do with anything? Running around is a legitimate strategy that relies on a significant numerical advantage. There is no rule out there that says you have to stand and fight when there are 6 of you and 1 of the enemy. Yes, of course -- but this has nothing to do with RTwP. Once you pause the game, you are playing without a timer. The only twitch element is physical act of pausing, but since this can be done so much faster than anything happens in the game, it doesn't really matter. With the game paused, you can fully plan out everything out. The only difference is in complexity: instead of planning just one character's turn at a time, you must plan for everything at once (both what your characters will do and the actions of the enemy).

I would still support it, but I definitely prefer real time with pause, particularly when there are as many as six characters.

I did not like the nearly empty areas of BG1 (Mass Effect 1 had exactly the same problem). They felt like somebody got their hands on a map creation tool and went at it without any regard for what would be filling those maps. Thus, they get awfully monotonous after a while. The middle way is fine, but I would prefer it if it leaned closer to BG2.