Althernai

OK. So it's more like a safe resting area with a very long cooldown. It does not solve any of the problems of the Vancian system except for eliminating rest spamming. You will still have the issue of having prepared the wrong spells for a given environment and you still will not know when the next recharge will come until it is close enough for scouting. And in exchange for getting rid of the save spamming, you introduce a scenario where a player can get stuck. Suppose somebody miscalculates the distance to the next pool or the battle between the pool and the characters turns out to be more difficult than they thought. Having already spent most of their per-rest resources, what are they supposed to do? In Baldur's Gate, you can at least head back to town -- here, it appears that if there is no available pool, you're stuck waiting until the cooldown on the earliest used one expires. I agree that there has to be some manner of resource management between encounters, but I don't see why this should only impact some classes (e.g. spellcasters) and not others. I think Obsidian's system (easy to heal stamina and hard to heal health) is a better solution. Cooldowns as proposed by Obsidian are harmless -- it's 30 seconds from the time you've exhausted a given spell level (not from the time the fight ends). Unless the fights are spaced ridiculously close, most people won't even notice them.

How is your idea mechanically different from plain old Baldur's Gate magic with safe rest areas? The lore is different and maybe they can use something like that, but I don't see the difference between a safe place to rest and get all of your spells back and a recharge pool that accomplishes the same purpose. I think Obsidian's proposed mechanics are more interesting.

It's not quite the same arguments. The problem with consoles is the control interface -- you'll never get a game with the complexity of BG2 to work properly with a controller and the people who use a console with a mouse and keyboard are not worth the conversion costs. Tablets are different: the control interface is more or less acceptable. It won't be as good as a PC because you lose the keyboard, but it's nowhere near as bad as a console since you keep the fast and precise pointer functionality with touch instead of a mouse. The problem with tablets is that the hardware just isn't good enough right now. Sure, they can do Baldur's Gate... but based on that screenshot and what they said about pathfinding, Project Eternity will not be designed for 10 year old PCs. It will probably run on every non-netbook PC sold in the past 3 years (5 years by the time it's released), but those PCs typically have more RAM, more disk space and a faster CPU than any tablet out there right now. Thus, it is not impossible that they might eventually get somebody to port it to a tablet, but there's no reason to worry about it right now since the hardware isn't there yet.

They have said that they are not making tablet versions. It is certainly possible that by 2014, there will be tablets powerful enough to run the game and somebody can make a BGEE-like port, but they're not going to focus on that now.

It will make complete sense if you consider Planescape: Torment. If you have not played it, here is a much simpler example: suppose one of these characters has been almost uniformly a scoundrel in these past lives (sometimes a bandit, sometimes a murderer, etc). What does that mean as far as the current incarnation is concerned? What if the current incarnation somehow finds out about the past ones?

No. It is true that some of those who now have credit will lose it, but you are missing the fact that a few of those without credit will gain it. Suppose a small developer makes an indie game and it is truly awesome -- many more people than expected play it and enjoy it. This developer then asks for a medium amount of money for a somewhat larger game and hits that one out of the ballpark too. At that point, it becomes possible to ask for money on a large scale because there are a lot of fans who love the previous two games and want more. This will not be a frequent phenomenon, but as long as you have a substantial number of smaller projects, there will always be upward as well as downward mobility.

You are using the wrong model. Crowd-funding is not investment, it is patronage. The concept is similar to what the aristocracy did for the arts in most pre-industrial societies, but instead of a single aristocratic patron paying for an entire work of art, there are tens of thousands contributing a fraction of the cost. And yes, there will be charlatans and broken promises and works that do not live up to expectations -- but that is simply the nature of art. The same exact thing happens to modern publishers and it happened to the old aristocracies... but somebody always paid for the art anyway (they just got smarter about whom they patronized). In fact, if you look at the games that got large amounts of money out of Kickstarter, you'll see that "the crowd" is already pretty wary about whom it funds. Tim Schafer, Brian Fargo and the Obsidian three (Chris Avellone, Tim Cain, Josh Sawyer) all have strong track records of producing the kind of game their Kickstarters promised. It is certainly possible that one or more of the big ones will disappoint, but as long as most succeed, there is no reason why they can't continue to get funding.

I just don't see conversation quick-time events in a game with the kind of dialog in Baldur's Gate 2 or Planescape: Torment. They work when the conversation is simplified roughly to the point of Mass Effect, but they'd be ridiculous when you have 5 or more full sentence choices. How would you make the interface handle this? Should the player be able to interrupt the conversation and come back later if something in the background requires immediate attention? Also, it's kind of pointless given that the game is real time with pause.

Wow, this thread got ugly fast. Sometimes I'm grateful for the thread length limits -- hopefully a few more posts should be enough to get it locked.

They could, but why would they? They have collected $4.16M of which roughly $3.5M will go towards developing the game (the rest goes to Kickstarter, Amazon, Paypal and towards making the other rewards and add-ons). This is roughly of the same order as any of the Infinity Engine games. Given that the latter were state-of-the-art when they were made, I don't see why they need more than that. Regarding modern games costing significantly more: yes, they do... but for reasons that do not affect Project Eternity. In this case, Obsidian does not have to deal with console manufacturers (it's $40K just to deploy a patch) and they start with a relatively cheap engine ($1.5K/developer) rather than trying to make their own and paying for the middleware or paying for a state-of-the-art 3D one. They're also not blowing their money on stuff like voice acting. I could understand the idea of going to a publisher if they just barely managed to raise $1.1M, but with three times as much, it doesn't make any sense.

I don't think the PS:T romances were particularly dark or emo. It's just that the game itself was a tragedy so the romances necessarily did not end well. And I agree with you about "dark and edgy". It worked in PS:T, but that was a decade ago and it's really been overused since then. At this point it would be more original to do something like the Baldur's Gate series.

There are few things in this world that are flawless. I thought the BG2 romances were pretty good (except Anomen, but that might be because I'm male). Also, the writing will be different in Project Eternity because different people are writing it. I'd expect it to be more like PS:T and Fallout.

There is no reason they cannot be subtle in Project Eternity. Tying it to the main story is harder -- it only worked in PS:T because they had a fixed protagonist. To be honest, I don't see anything wrong with the BG2 romances. If they can somehow relate them to the main game without fixing the protagonist, I will be very pleased, but it would also work without that. Not to me, honestly. Certainly not by a relevant degree. Seriously? BG2 is the epitome of the Infinity Engine style, real time with pause games (sure, PS:T had the better story, but I'm counting combat here as well). DA2 is the epitome of everything that has gone wrong since then (designing primarily for consoles, releasing games before they're ready because the publisher said so, etc.). Besides, Bioware of BG2 times was actually Bioware whereas Bioware of DA2 times is just a division of EA.

Baldur's Gate 1 had the prototype of a romance in the expansion. Planescape: Torment had 2 possible romances with companions and one in the past (with Deionarra).

The final update said: Since we reached $4M, it looks like we will get all of these... but what is "developer in-game commentary"? The straightforward interpretation seems like it would be breaking the fourth wall and generally does not make much sense to me (what would they be commenting on?).

No, it cannot. If the dungeon is the entire game, then the developers can level the player's character accordingly and there is no problem with the enemies becoming more powerful as the player descends. Here, the dungeon is certainly not the entire game -- it's probably a side quest. Thus, characters cannot become significantly more powerful by traversing the dungeon alone and either the dungeon is nearly flat power-wise or the player has to leave and come back after becoming stronger by other means. Based on what Feargus said, Obsidian is leaning towards the latter. I think that makes sense since flat dungeons are not fun.

Thanks! Looks like they've come to the same conclusion as I have: it's better to have the player come back several times. Thus, I would assume there are shortcuts at every "tier".

Because it cannot be done well without severely reducing the scope of the PC game. The issue is not CPU/GPU power (that might be a problem for tablets, but consoles are certainly powerful enough to run Project Eternity), it's the control interface. Here's an interview where one of the developers of Project Eternity discussed it: I wrote a post earlier in this thread for people who don't understand why this is the case.

There's actually another thread in the Gameplay subforum asking for exactly the opposite. At the heart of this debate is a design question: is the dungeon intended to be completed in one go or is it something the player will return to again and again throughout the game? Because the thing is so huge (13 levels on Kickstarter, 14 or 15 counting Paypal), I think the latter makes more sense. One of fundamental premises of large dungeons is that things get more dangerous the further down you go. Since the dungeon is not the entire game, you cannot give enough experience or loot to the player there to grow through the entire power spectrum of the game. Thus, it makes more sense to complete some of it, then go do other stuff and come back when you are stronger.

Yes, the last hour's total was higher than any time ever, including the first day. I will admit I did not expect this. According to the live stream, Paypal is now at $150K so $4M is still a stretch, but it no longer looks impossible.

We don't know. My guess is that some of it will be translated and some of it will not, but I can't tell you what exactly. By the way, I've changed my mind at the last minute: after reading all of the posts here, I do want the physical box. So I'll get at least the $65 tier + $20 for the expansion and maybe more...

I don't know, this is getting a little bit insane. At some point, they will have to start scaling down the levels. Imagine something three times the size of Watcher's Keep (which is where we'll be at 15 levels) -- it's probably larger and more complex than the entirety of some dungeon crawler games.

Yes, they do:

We are not getting to $4M barring something truly massive. Right now, we're at $3.44M Kickstarter + $0.1M-odd Paypal for a total of roughly $3.55M with 14 hours to go. We've been averaging slightly more than $10K per hour for the past 30 hours or so. It is reasonable to assume that this will continue and quite possibly even increase to $15-20K per hour in the last 10 hours, but even so that would only take us to $3.75-3.8M total. Basically, to get to $4M, we would need to eclipse the collection rate of the very first day which doesn't sound very plausible.

Oh, come on. Do you really think they'd be spending all of this time on the combat rules and making separate game modes if the combat was annoying and worthless? These guys made Icewind Dale as well as Planescape: Torment. There will be a ton of combat in this game and I fully expect it to be fun. More generally, there are a lot of strawman arguments here. Objective-based XP does not mean that every single hostile creature has to be part of a grand quest in order for you to get XP for killing it. If the only purpose of putting an enemy in the game is for the player to fight it, then it will almost certainly give you XP (although too many such enemies generally mean a pretty lousy game). An objective is not a quest; it can be as simple as "Defended yourself from the wolves."