Althernai

Speak for yourself -- I do like the idea of a large dungeon. In fact, they specifically made a thread in the announcements forum to ask what people want for stretch goals and they've implemented some of the things the things people suggested. If you do not like their stretch goals, that would be the place to suggest the ones you want. And I think their assumptions about their base have been pretty good -- they might have alienated a small number of people, but the overall collection rate tends to increase when they make an announcement. Wasteland 2 is not theirs to give away to tends of thousands of people so they've deliberately put it at a tier where only 1-2 thousand will get it.

On the one hand, I kind of agree with you here -- it's enough that we're pledging for one unknown quantity, but now they want us to pledge for two? Or even three (including Wasteland 2 which isn't finished either)? But on the other hand, it's just audacious enough that I'll probably give them the $165. In for a penny, in for a pound. Be reasonable. Yes, the $20 pledges also contribute something, but it's a rather small something: the grand total contributed by the 25000 people who pledged $20 is only 0.5M which is definitely going to be less than a fifth of the total pledges -- less than a sixth if things go well. One of Obsidian's goals at this point must be to convince these people to increase their pledges -- there are a lot of them so even if a small fraction (say 20%) ups their pledges to the general vicinity of $100, they will have paid more than the rest put together. So yes, they will be offering more stuff at the higher tiers. It's the only rational course of action.

I am curious what kind of character creation will be in Project Eternity. I take it for granted that we get to pick the class, race, gender and probably a couple of initial spells/skills/talents. The part I'm curious about are the attributes (e.g. Strength, Constitution, Intelligence, etc.). What will they be and how are they determined. There are a few systems popular in RPGs: 1) Roll the dice and assign the random numbers to attributes. Examples: Baldur's Gate 1 & 2, Might and Magic II. 2) Point buy: attributes start at some medium value and the player gets a fixed number of points to distribute among them (in addition, it may be possible to subtract from one attribute to add to another). Examples: Planescape: Torment, Neverwinter Nights. 3) Similar to point buy, but the numbers are hidden from the player and the choices are presented in the form of dialog (e.g. "When you were a child, did you prefer playing with swords or reading books?"). The same can be used to determine the class. Examples: the Elder Scrolls games. Do we have any info on what Obsidian is planning? What kind of system do people prefer?

If a system is so flawed that saving and reloading grants a meaningful advantage beyond the completely inevitable pre-knowledge granted by any non-Ironman game, then it is much more important to fix the underlying flaws than to break other things by mucking up the save system. However, if the game is anything like the Infinity Engine, then such hacks will not be necessary. Everything you listed was already handled properly. Yes, you could spring and/or circumvent traps using reloading... but why would you want to when detecting and disarming them gives you experience? Why reload to get better random loot when all of the random loot is roughly the same value and all of the really good items are in fixed locations? Yes, saving and reloading can provide a different path through the game. However, the path is merely different -- it is not better and in fact is almost certain to be worse in a well designed game. People generally resort to this sort of metagaming because they're doing something wrong; there's almost always an easier way that grants a larger reward or at least takes much less time. The only time saving and reloading becomes a valid strategy for a skilled player is when the game stakes a major result on a single roll of the dice that's independent of the player's skill and such luck-based scenarios are avoided by most good games.

Ideally, I would want saving anytime. However, the limitation on saving in combat and dialog is technical rather than philosophical (the game has to store a bunch of extra variables) so I would be understanding if they couldn't pull it off. So? If somebody finds it amusing to reload a dozen times until the dice roll his way, so be it. I really don't care about how other people choose to play since it has no impact on me. Limiting saving does have an impact on me so I say it's not worth the hassle.

Yes, people can lower their pledges in exactly the same way as they can raise them until the very end. If you look at the lowest graph on this page, you'll see that there are a few points where the impact of people lowering pledges is significant enough to result in a negative rate over the course of even a whole hour. However, it is much more likely that most people will raise their pledges rather than lower them -- both the number of backers and the donation per backer have been going up pretty steadily.

Why would it not be legal or reasonable? This is exactly the same thing as what happened with Baldur's Gate 2 and the "exclusive" pre-order item store. It was exclusive for a while, then modders added it in and then it was added officially. I don't see anything wrong with that, particularly since the content here is cosmetic while in BG2, some of those items were the best available even including the high-level expansion.

Based on what they have said and on the fact that the planned release date is still a year and a half away, I very much doubt that they have anything this advanced. In fact, I am a bit puzzled that people get so hung up on every word from Obsidian because at this stage, it's clear that these are just ideas -- they have not been tested in anything like the final product. Because these guys have been making such games for decades, the ideas are probably good ones and the core of them will survive intact, but there are bound to be fairly substantial revisions along the way. Also, a single encounter does not convey a great deal of information because the quality of combat is determined as much by the encounter design as by the rule system. AD&D as used in Baldur's Gate 2 was far from perfect, but the gameplay was fun because the encounters were varied and interesting and played to the system's strengths. Conversely, the system in Dragon Age: Origins was actually not that bad, but it had a few glaring weaknesses and the encounter design fully exposed them rather than covering them up. It was also much more monotonous so it did this for most of the game. "Evil one" is a very strong phrase when you really mean "one who disagrees about optimal RPG mechanics". Again, you can't possibly expect them to have the complete system ready a year and a half before the game is released. They contradict themselves because they have different ideas which have not been made into a coherent whole yet and are incredibly unlikely to do so by the time the Kickstarter ends. I'm also waiting for more information to determine by how much I will increase my pledge, but I'm ultimately paying them because I am curious to see what Avellone, Cain, Sawyer et al will do when freed from the constraints of publishers, not because I expect something specific regarding cooldowns or romances or any other game element.

I don't think so -- it would be really weird for anyone who played the Infinity Engine games to refer to using low level spells in combat as "rest". I spoke of this in more detail in the dedicated thread, but I believe that there is an additional limitation (e.g. something like mana) on high-level spells which requires resting after a while. That is, once you run out, you can still use the basic spells, but you can't cast from the grimoire.

I am trying to understand the magic system and there is one thing not clear to me. Here's what I've got so far: 1) Wizards can learn many spells (like Mages from Baldur's Gate 2). 2) Basic spells can be cast without a grimoire and have no cooldowns. 3) Casting from the grimoire works like the Sorcerer from Baldur's Gate 2: spells are grouped into levels and you can cast some number of spells from any given level before the level is depleted. However, unlike with Sorcerers, levels regenerate even without resting and you can change your selection. Both of these can happen even during combat with the price being cooldowns. Now, here is the question: it was previously mentioned that there will be resting in Project Eternity (see, for example, this post). Does it serve any purpose as far as magic is concerned? It can't just be getting rid of the cooldowns since the duration of the latter is so short that they may recover even during some of the longer fights. Is there a secondary resource used for spells (i.e. mana equivalent) that is replenished by resting?

In general, I agree with you. However, keep in mind that they have promised a DRM-free version of the game and also "to release our file-format information and expose as much of the data in the game as possible for you to extend and edit". Unless they do something bizarre to specifically lock down the Kickstarter content, it's only going to be exclusive until people become comfortable with modding. This is no different from the Robe of Vecna merchant in Baldur's Gate 2 -- it was initially an exclusive, but was then modded in and finally officially added in a patch (or maybe with the expansion; I don't remember). I don't think this kind of temporary exclusivity is a big deal, particularly since the extra content has limited impact on the game (unlike the Robe of Vecna which was the single most powerful mage armor not only in Shadows of Amn, but also in the loot-overloaded Throne of Bhaal).

It was better than its contemporaries, but there were quite a few serious flaws that kept it from being truly great either in gameplay or in story. Here are the gameplay ones I found most annoying: 1) The documentation was absolutely atrocious. The manual provided only vague descriptions of what spells and abilities did (most of which could be guessed from the name) without any quantitative info. Of course, much better descriptions were eventually provided by fans online, but it should not have to be this way. 2) The pre-spell/per-ability cooldowns were a disaster. It's a very lazy solution to balancing that takes much of the tactics out of combat. I am so glad Obsidian is not using this. 3) The positioning was better than in games where it doesn't matter at all, but nowhere near good enough. For example, a fighter could not protect a mage even if there was a choke point between them and the enemy. They replaced this with aggro management which felt unnatural. 4) The encounter design was mostly lousy. There were a few fights where they clearly put in some effort, but a lot of it was just random garbage put in the player's way. The story problem should probably go in a different part of the forum, but the core of it was that the central plotline was as standard as such things get. I was really surprised by this because the origin stories and major side quests were pretty good so I was expecting some kind of twist, but no, it's really that basic.

No. The problem they are trying to address is a legitimate one: in the Infinity Engine, the melee types can deal damage indefinitely while the spellcasters become borderline useless after their spells are cast. This is particularly acute at low levels which is presumably where we will start PE. It's good that they understand the problem and I like their proposal much better than anything else put forth here. I think Obsidian should just go ahead with what they said in the update.

I am not against a button that locks the camera, but it should not be spacebar -- that has been reserved for pausing in every such game I have played and I would hate for it to be anything else.

How do you think chess computers work? Simple as chess is, solving it exactly is not computationally feasible. Of course they use heuristics. And nobody cripples the AI -- we simply don't know how to make it good enough. Do you even know what a neural network is? I have worked with them in the context of separating signal from background in particle physics. They learn, but not in the sense that you are talking about -- they're not well-suited even to chess, never mind something like BG2 where there are dozens of rapidly changing inputs at any given time and a change in even a single input can completely change the situation (i.e. there's no continuity). I was referring to tactical possibilities, not difficulty. A RTwP game allows for much richer potential tactics than a real time one.

They have said it multiple times. The most clear statement was actually in one of the podcasts, but they've also addressed this in interviews and Kickstarter comments. For example: Regarding the rest of your post: you've given it a lot of thought, but your analysis is severely flawed. So far, so good. Absolutely not. Computers are faster and if the game was played on the timescale of milliseconds, then they would always win. However, if the characteristic timescale of the game is on the order of seconds or longer, being faster does not help them because humans are smarter and learn from their mistakes. Given sufficient complexity and "human" timescales for thinking, a good player will always win an evenly matched game even if the system is purely real time. For example, consider StarCraft. It's a real time strategy game which requires even faster clicking than most real time RPGs because there are many more units (and structures, which you rarely deal with in RPGs) to take care of, but competent human players easily beat the hardest "evenly matched" difficulty and even the difficulties in which the computer cheats are not so hard. The main point you are missing here is how difficult it is to make decent AI. It took half a century of work by some very smart people for computers to be able to beat humans at chess (which is far simpler than party-based RPGs or RTS games). For something like Baldur's Gate or Project Eternity, it's just not going to happen: the difficulty comes from the computer starting with more resources than the player or other inequalities. In a RTwP RPG, the small edge that the computer games from reacting in microseconds is immaterial. You are correct about purely real time games needing to have either fewer characters or otherwise lowering the complexity, but I don't understand why you don't address RTwP separately because the pause functionality completely changes all of that. The only fundamental difference between turn based and RTwP is that turn based has a well defined order in which the characters act whereas RTwP actions are not in an easily predictable order. If anything, this increases the degree of complexity (i.e. in your terminology, it increases the total number of strategies factorially). Now, this doesn't mean that a RTwP game is automatically complex -- the complexity is a function of the rule system, encounter design and various other things. However, there is no reason a RTwP system is less strategic or less tactical than a turn based on.

It's rather late here so I will not reply to this in detail today, but one thing to keep in mind is that Project Eternity will not use "rounds". They were an artifact of translating D&D to RTwP and a system designed from the ground up to be RTwP does not require them.

That would actually make a whole lot of sense -- but I cannot think of who would do this or what they would be doing. We've already covered the Infinity Engine, Wasteland and Shadowrun. What's left? Might and Magic? I'm feeling kind of conflicted about this project. On the one hand, I want them to succeed -- that is not my kind of RPG, but it's still nice to have more variety around. On the other hand, they went about this in a very strange and not entirely nice way. They started their Kickstarter in the middle of Obsidian's with a page that looks like it was rushed and borrows more than a little from the structure of Project Eternity's page. At first, I thought that they saw the massive outpouring of support for Project Eternity (and Wasteland 2 before it) and took it as a sign that people will support just about any old-school RPG (hence the name). If that is the case, they they clearly thought wrong: they are not competing with Project Eternity; more like eating the scraps from PE's table. I just don't understand what they were thinking.

I don't know how many there are total, but I think I do know all of those which raised more than the $1M being asked: Double Fine, Wasteland 2, Shadowrun Returns, Planetary Annihilation and Project Eternity. It is true that the pages of all of the later games (including Project Eternity) borrowed elements from the earlier ones, but I believe the similarities between this "Old School RPG" and Project Eternity go a bit beyond that. Also, I did not and do not claim any expertise regarding Kickstarters -- what I said was merely a description of how I personally feel about certain choices (e.g. publishing stretch goals for more than twice your base goal before the Kickstarter even begins).

I am pretty sure there will be an Italian translation. It's just that making languages a stretch goal did not work (at all -- it made no statistically significant difference whatsoever) so they're working behind the scenes now. I suppose it can still be a higher stretch goal (i.e. $2.7-2.8M or so), but at this point it's just as likely that they'll present it as a fait accompli.

That's the beauty of having a DRM-free version though: it's just a setup file with a key. It has no idea whether you are running it in Russia, the US or Antarctica. Of course, if you want to use Steam, it gets trickier...

If you can run Dragon Age or Skyrim, it is a pretty safe bet that you will be able to run Project Eternity. Keep in mind what the engine will be doing: 3D character models on a 2D background. It depends on the implementation, of course, but this generally should not be resource intensive.

It's not just that I don't know them (although that's a big part of it), but also that something doesn't quite feel right about that Kickstarter. It most definitely is inspired more by Project Eternity than by Wasteland 2 or Double Fine -- they copied much of the page structure. Also, rather than presenting something and waiting to see if people will give them $1M, they've planned out the stretch goals past $2M. It's sort of the opposite problem that Obsidian had (the latter hit their goal almost immediately and had to scramble to come up with stretch goals).

The control interface can't handle it. Consoles lack fast and precise point-and-click functionality and they have fewer hot key possibilities. Think about it this way: BG2 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.

They have explicitly mentioned making the game work with integrated graphics so your chances are around 100%. Besides, the HD 4000 is pretty capable and this game is not going to be about the latest in 3D graphics.