Althernai

Yes, you can have too much content... but $3M (which is what Obsidian will have left after paying for the swag and giving Amazon, Kickstarter and Paypal their cuts) is not going to pay for it. I'm much more worried about Project Eternity being too short than I am about it being too long.

Yes, Paypal will ultimately count both towards the stretch goals and the dungeon -- they just aren't including it for now as there is no mechanism beyond them manually sifting through the pledges. Unfortunately, the likes under the Kickstarter video don't count for the dungeon (only Obsidian's page does).

Sure -- but you do get XP for killing those (I think this is the third time I tell you this). If you stumble on a hostile creature which doesn't do anything except fight you, you should get XP for killing it and making the world a safer place for civilization. Such mindless encounters generally don't matter much in any case as there should not be many of them

You can still roleplay your character the way you want to. The only difference is that the game will not be rewarding you for doing things for which no sane DM would ever reward a player.

Only if you define quests very broadly. For example, suppose you are stopped by a bunch of bandits who tell you "Your money or your life". I would not really call that a quest, but you do get XP for killing them. In fact, you usually get XP for killing stuff if that's the path you want to take. The only exception is psychopathic behavior on the part of a player who randomly slaughters non-hostile, non-quest NPCs --- but you never got much for those anyway, even in the Infinity Engine games.

That's exactly the type I was talking about when I mentioned mindless animals and such -- you get XP for killing those.

But this is exactly what they are doing -- except of course it is applied on a game-wide scale and the underlying programming might be a bit different. If you are able to resolve an encounter without violence, you get the XP once and don't get it twice for killing. I am sure there will be story-less encounters that can only be resolved through violence (e.g. a mindless animal or automaton or whatever) and in that case, you are back to the XP for killing system. I remember there was a great Neverwinter Nights module (called Tales of Arterra, I think) which implemented this system and it worked beautifully. Combat becomes much more meaningful when you don't need to habitually slaughter everything that stands in your way simply to get the levels necessary to beat the game. I always wondered why it was not more widely used and I'm very glad that Project Eternity will have this element.

Many people have asked this and Obsidian's answer is that they're thinking of how to do this. You definitely can't pledge more via Kickstarter after it ends -- that's out of Obsidian's hands. However, you will probably be able to pledge more via Paypal for a short amount of time (like how Wasteland 2 is doing it).

Nearing the end now. With 37 hours left, the Kickstarter total is $3,167,049 and the latest Paypal update is $89,641. This means we need $243,310 or about $6.6K per hour. It's definitely possible, particularly since we have not had less than $5K at any time in the past 12 hours (even when it was night in most of both North America and Europe).

They are using the version of Unity that supports Linux which I believe to be Unity 4. I assume this is the one you are referring to as currently in beta so yes, it will probably have multi-core support.

Yes, that's basically how I feel as well. I could in principle have them ship it to a US address, but my job involves moving around a lot so any physical goodies will probably wind up sitting at that address together with my Collector's Edition of Dragon Age: Origins. On the other hand, I am almost never without my laptop (nature of the job, again) so the digital stuff is always at my fingertips. That's a pretty good list. However, "how much I can afford" is a pretty fuzzy concept. I live in the suburbs of an absurdly expensive city (most lists have it in the top five in the world) and my salary is adjusted accordingly, so I don't need to skimp on much to get even the $165 version. Come to think of it, it would be nice to have a spouse to limit my generosity for this kind of decision... though perhaps Obsidian would not appreciate it. Yes, I know exactly what you mean. I am ordinarily completely immune to this kind of reasoning -- the only exceptions are computer hardware and, it seems, games like this one.

I have a bit of a dilemma here. I pledged $35 at the beginning (before the $50 tier was even introduced), but that was just a placeholder pledge to get the update emails and such. Given all of the goodies in the $50 tier, I definitely plan to go at least that high. In addition, I would like to give a copy to my sister who loved Baldur's Gate 2, but hasn't played these games since. So that's basically the $80 tier (well, I could do $75, I suppose, but the difference is small and I would rather not bother with the ambiguity). Now comes the problem: once I am at $80, it's only $30 to the $110 tier. That gets my name into the credits and a nice badge for the forum which I kind of like (there's also the beta access, but I don't care too much about that). And if I do pay $110, it's only $55 to the $165 tier which is a pretty reasonable price for Wasteland 2, the first expansion and an audio-book (yes, they're probably somewhat cheaper separately... but not much). So $165 seems like a good deal, but it's more than twice $80 and it's more than I planned to spend on this. I'm curious, which tier did other people here choose? Any ideas or advice or arguments for a specific tier?

You have an unpleasant, but nevertheless valid point here: Obsidian doesn't exactly have a track record of games universally acknowledged to be nearly flawless masterpieces. However, there are a few reasons I think that they should be given a chance. 1) Nobody makes these games anymore and Obsidian includes some people who have made the best of them. If you have been wanting a game like this and complaining about the good old days for a long time (as, for example, I have), it's time to put your money where your mouth is because there just aren't any better companies left that can make it. The others are either gone altogether or transformed beyond recognition. 2) Obsidian's games have not been perfect, but much of the trouble clearly stems from the publisher forcing them to release it too soon in order to meet artificial deadlines. This will not be the case here: there are no publishers so their only constraint is money and they got a lot more of it than they initially asked for. We do have to trust them to budget things properly and not overreach, but that's a relatively small risk. 3) This one might be difficult to understand for people who don't work in creative fields: such work can be divided into categories. The first category is stuff you do because people are paying you for it whereas the second is stuff you do because you really want to. If you go through all of the updates and promotional material, you'll see that Project Eternity falls into the second category: this is the game the various Obsidian employees have really wanted to make, but they've been stuck with designing console games because those are financially viable. In my experience, people who are working not just because this is what they are paid for, but because this is what they want to do are much more efficient. Thus, it's not unreasonable to expect a better game than Obsidian has ever made.

There are 4 days and a little over 6 hours left, but it's near noon right now in California so from Obsidian's perspective it's 5 days.

I could be wrong, but I think your language here is imprecise. What you mean is that everyone who pledges at the $165 tier and above will receive it for free, right? Not just the people who had pledged $165+ at the point where this update was released.

Yes, it can. The Kicktraq projection is pretty simple: it's based on the last day with some error bars that they then multiply by the remaining number of days. It does not try to account for last minute surges or anything of the sort. We are actually not doing so badly right now as far as the big city update is concerned. If you include Paypal, we are at about $2.8M right now ($2.75M on the main page and $50K Paypal). This means that we need $700K to get to the big city at $3.5M. There are 4 days and a little less than 14 hours left to the Kickstarter which means just a little under 110 hours. Thus, we need an average of around $6.4K per hour to make this happen. If you look at this page, that's roughly what we are getting -- we just need things not to slow down and for the final zerg rush to make up for the time when most backers are asleep.

This usually doesn't work for a couple of reasons. First, it's hard to convince a player that an encounter is truly impossible because one of the conventions of a CRPG is people telling you "This thing is too powerful -- our greatest warriors have died trying to defeat it" which really means "Quest here: go and kill the thing". Second, in a game run by a human, you generally only get one shot at the enemy so it's possible to have a fair fight where the party is overpowered. In a CRPG, you get to figure out what you are fighting at your leisure after which you can prepare accordingly and seemingly impossible battles become very doable. For example, assuming you get past his normal Lich form, Kangaxx can be beaten by a couple of low-level arcane casters with a few Spell Immunity and Melf's Minute Meteors spells each (i.e. the standard Liches are harder than the Demilich). Now that we have the Adventurer's Hall, I guarantee you that if you try to make an "unwinnable" fight, somebody is going to construct a party that can beat it. The only way for the computer to reliably win is to cheat, whether through minHP items or through cutscenes. Thus, I am generally against such fights, although I suppose once or twice per game is OK.

It's going to be close. The burst from today's update will probably take us to $2.7M or maybe even a little bit further, but we really need the zerg rush at the end to have a chance.

The $65 tier (where the boxed copy is initially introduced) explicitly says: Since the higher tiers duplicate the rewards from the lower tiers, I believe the boxed copy and the downloadable copies always come with different keys.

Not in the first game. Maybe in a sequel.

The Old School RPG (which finally got a name: Shaker) now has most of that -- the problem is that they didn't have it to begin with. Here are the first few lines of Obsidian's initial pitch: I remember that this was there from the very beginning because they basically had my money after those three sentences. The video and details were cool and the subsequent updates will determine how much I will ultimately pledge, but the game was already sold after those few lines.] Now, here is Shaker's current pitch: I think that aside from a poor understanding of article usage in the English language, this is actually pretty good... but that's definitely not how it was to begin with. For one thing, it didn't even have a name for a long time. I think that was a pretty serious mistake -- it makes it difficult to spread the word. It also took them a few days to establish that this will be a mix of fantasy and sci-fi. And they still don't mention any games that this game will be like in the opening lines. They mention what they worked on before at a later point and it is possible to guess from this and the description, but it doesn't grab people like saying the names to begin with would. I think they still have a chance of making their goal, but they won't get far beyond it without some huge announcement.

Иван Снег (Ivan Sneg) is better, but still bad because words like Снег are not used as last names in Russian the way they are in English. You would indeed have to make it Иван Снежный (Ivan Snezhnyi) which sounds OK, but has the drawback of no longer being even vaguely related to Jon Snow except to people who speak both English and Russian. It's also hard to reconcile Ivan Snezhnyi with being the son of Eddard Stark and half-brother of Robb, Sansa, Bran, Arya and Rickon Stark. It's not impossible, but, as I said, you are really asking a lot of the translator (particularly in Martin's books as he has a tendency to use old and/or altered English names together with names that are just plain weird).

On the one hand you are right (except that Snow is in the North, not the Vale). But on the other hand, I tried thinking about this in Russian and it just doesn't work. Jon Snow left alone would be Джон Сноу which makes it obvious that this is translated from English, but sounds OK. Jon Snow translated would be Джон Снег (Jon Sneg) which both looks and sounds awful.

As a general rule, non-English threads are frowned upon because neither most of the moderators nor most of the developers can understand what you are saying and they can't be bothered to run every post through Google Translate. Regarding the actual topic: if you want names to have a different pronunciation than that given to them by Obsidian, you are asking much of the translator. Some translators do it, others do not and in either case, somebody is going to be angry at them. It's really a personal preference.

No, there will not. The only difference is that the boxed copy grants you physical items whereas the $165 tier gives you Wasteland 2 and the expansion. It means that Brian Fargo and inXile are grateful to Obsidian for helping with the Wasteland 2 Kickstarter (take a look at the daily pledge graph; that jump in the middle is the announcement of Obsidian's involvement) and they're willing to donate on the order of two thousand Wasteland 2 copies to the Kickstarter. The money does not go inXile, it's just their way of helping out.