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Althernai

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Everything posted by Althernai

  1. Althernai
    Do we? You may like it, but for me, the rest system was definitely one of the weaker parts of the IE games. The problem is I that I cannot think of anything better -- but if Obsidian can, then they should by all means try it. The one thing I believe there is more or less a consensus on in this thread is that there should not be cooldowns in the sense of not being to cast the same spell twice in a row without waiting a long time (as in Dragon Age: Origins). "Make it an option" is a solution to everything controversial, but it doubles the work the developer must do. In this case, an option would mean two different systems each of which must work throughout the game. I highly doubt they have that kind of resources to spare.
  2. Althernai
    No, you are not wrong. Backtracking when necessary is how I played the first time through (except in Throne of Bhaal which had the rather handy Wish spell option). In subsequent playthroughs, the player is naturally prescient by virtue of memory.
  3. Althernai
    There are no publicly available counters like with Kickstarter. We'll just have to trust Obsidian to be honest about the total funding and the number of backers.
  4. Althernai
    Their language is imprecise. The dungeon will be part of the game so everybody who buys the game will get it even if they never heard of the Kickstarter.
  5. Althernai
    This is one of the few topics where it is borderline impossible to tell the difference between a competent troll and a naive newcomer. I'll give you the benefit of the doubt. Every single game you mention is much, much simpler than the Infinity Engine games Project Eternity is modeled on. The reason they are so much simpler is because the console interface is very badly suited to something like Baldur's Gate or Project Eternity. Because there exists a pause functionality, the IE games would be playable on consoles... but it would be a pretty awful experience. To make it not so awful, the game mechanics have to be drastically simplified (as they were in, say Knights of the Old Republic). The reason so many people are excited about Project Eternity is that it will have the complexity of the IE games. Thus, it will not be ported to consoles.
  6. Althernai
    Because this kind of scaling cuts into suspension of disbelief. A low level bandit makes sense, but why would a high level bandit still be a bandit when he can singlehandedly subjugate or destroy entire villages? I strongly agree with the original post: don't just scale the level of the enemies. Either replace them with more powerful versions or increase their numbers or both.
  7. Althernai
    That poll is biased enough to make politicians blush. If the choice you give people is between "I want to be treated like an adult and won't start crying because a dragon kills me when I'm level one. I also want to feel powerfull at the end of the game." and "I want to be the centre of the world. Everything must kneel before me and scale to my level." then of course 90% of the people who will bother to vote at all will pick the first option. There is nothing in what Obsidian said that implies this will be different from the encounter scaling in Baldur's Gate 2 which was perfectly fine. Of course, they could do it wrong, but the same is true of practically every other aspect of a game that's just getting started so I don't see any reason for concern here.
  8. Althernai
    You've excluded two of the four I could think of. The third one is to have a large city, like Athkatla from Baldur's Gate 2. I think this would fit well at $3M (unless you were thinking of doing it regardless). The last one is more translations, but only do that after you add the Paypal option and gauge its effect. The impact of the French/German/Spanish translation stretch goal was statistically negligible, but this might be because Kickstarter does not accept the payment methods used by most Europeans. I think the expanding mega dungeon is a great idea. Have more unmet stretch goals visible at a time. You've added crafting at $2.4M today, but that just balances the very rapidly impeding meeting of the $2.2M goal. Having the big goals should help with this.
  9. Althernai
    I despise cooldowns. I realize that balancing spells and abilities is hard, but cooldowns strike me as by far the laziest way to do it. I would be very happy if Obsidian left such mechanics to MMOs and came up with a better way.
  10. Althernai
    Except that there are currently only 3 more companions in the game than there are companion slots (and that's assuming that we'll hit the 2.2M goal) which makes companions rather precious from both a story and a gameplay perspective. Think about Planescape: Torment which had roughly the same ratio of companions to party slots. Suppose Fall-From-Grace gets injured. Now, I rather like Fall-From-Grace and not only that, but she is the only healer in the game. I would personally do the obvious: reload. People less familiar with RPGs would probably play on and then come to the forum saying "I am at [boss fight about 3/4th of the way into the game] and this is just impossible." After half a page of posts, it would be discovered that 4 of the 6 party members have serious injuries and this player has very little chance of getting anywhere without reloading a save from 5 hours back. I am not against some sort of injury that cannot be healed in the field (i.e. you need to go back to town) or effects like disarm, but mechanics that permanently weaken the player must be rare and tied to the story, not random things that happen in combat. I suppose they can put them in for one of the special modes (particularly the Trial of Iron one since there is no reloading), but it seems a lot of work for something that by its very nature cannot be used in the regular game.
  11. Althernai
    Their constraint is money, not time. There are far more people at Obsidian than there will working on Project Eternity. Obsidian has already said that the final size of the development team will be determined after the Kickstarter is over. Thus, there is no real reason to delay the game. All of that said, I would estimate the odds that the game will come out more than a month after April 2014 to be greater than 75% -- simply because I've never seen a game of this kind properly completed at the originally estimated time.
  12. Althernai
    The spell and ability descriptions in Dragon Age: Origins were the single greatest flaw of the game, narrowly edging out even the bog-standard "slay the dragon to save the kingdom" central plot. Consider Mind Blast: "The caster projects a wave of telekinetic force that stuns enemies caught in the sphere." What in Baator does that mean? What is the radius of the sphere? How long does the stun last? Can they resist? What influences the resistance? There's no way to know whether this spell is any good or even what situations it might be useful in without either selecting (the DA:O selections are irreversible) or going to look for a better description on a wiki or something of the sort. Please don't do that. Give us Baldur's Gate 2 style spell descriptions with a bit of story and a numerical description.
  13. Althernai
    No need to be mean about it. There are a lot of people who are much less into combat than they are into the story. I have absolutely nothing against making the Easy mode as easy as necessary for such people to be content with it, particularly since we now know we'll get the harder modes.
  14. Althernai
    The forums always have more hardcore gamers than the general population. I would be extremely surprised if this game was harder on Easy than the Infinity Engine games -- if you managed to get through the Baldur's Gate series and Planescape: Torment, you'll almost certainly be fine.
  15. Althernai
    Yes. He is also one of the writers for Baldur's Gate 2 (wherein he is notable for working on the Ascension semi-official revised ending for Throne of Bhaal), Knights of the Old Republic and several other BioWare games. I would assume he's talking because he knows Chris Avellone and wants to have some fun.
  16. Althernai
    This is hilarious: Well, I guess that saves Obsidian from having to dedicate 4 NPCs to being love interests.
  17. Althernai
    Both Planescape: Torment and Baldur's Gate 2 had this kind of scenario (the Pillar of Skulls in PS:T and the test of the Selfish demon at the end of BG2). However, it must be used very sparingly because for a lot of people, much of the gratification from the game comes from the quest rewards. Also, if you do it often, you will have game balance problems.
  18. Althernai
    600K copies sold would be a massive success given the initial investment. Regarding the long term: I am not sure what you have to back up that "fact". It is not implausible, but it's far from a certainty. It's entirely possible that most of the people in continental Europe who would buy this game already speak English and while a version in their native language is nice, it has little impact on whether they would buy it or not. As a stretch goal, the translations have failed quite miserably thus far (no noticeable impact on the rate of either the number of pledges or the money pledged). It stands to reason that there is some correlation between the number of people interested in a certain of feature who contribute on Kickstarter in response to its inclusion and the number of the same people who will ultimately buy the game depending on the inclusion of this feature. This does not bode well. Baldur's Gate II was a AAA, cutting edge game for it's time and not only that, but it was the sequel to a very successful game. Poland is a little bit special because of CDProjekt, but based on that number, I would assume 10-20K copies sold tops.
  19. Althernai
    I believe they are deliberately setting the threshold for the beta key to be quite high because they don't want too many beta testers. As it stands, there will be around 3000 keys sent out (probably about 5000 by the time the Kickstarter ends) and some fraction of those will play the beta and provide feedback which Obsidian will have to process and act on. They might not have the resources to handle the feedback arising from 20000 keys sent rather than 5000 so the keys are quite pricey.
  20. Althernai
    I think Obsidian will have succeeded beyond their wildest dreams if this game makes $18M total (including North America and all English-speaking countries). It would be a return on investment of about a factor of 5-10 (depending on how the Kickstarter ultimately does). Unfortunately, I find this extremely unlikely and it's even more unlikely that they'll get anywhere near that much from players who buy the game solely because it was translated into the six languages you mention above. Look at the Kickstarter stats. Kicktraq considers the beginning of each "day" to be at 6PM Pacific Time (i.e. the time of this forum). According to the Kickstarter email, the announcement went out at 6:25PM so it more or less coincides with the beginning of the day labeled 9-25. The previous day (9-24) saw an influx of $47,945. The amount collected on 9-25 until now is $19,119. Of course, there are more than 10 hours left and it always picks up towards the end of the Kicktraq "day" so it should be at rougly the same level, but there is absolutely no evidence of the promised translation convincing massive numbers of people to contribute. That said, I still think the translation is a good idea. It's text-only so they don't have to pay four times as much for the voice-acting and it will allow people who are not comfortable with English to enjoy the game in their own language.
  21. Althernai
    The difficulty levels mostly take care of this. Even in the Baldur's Gate series, you could play mostly without pausing on the lowest difficulty. Beyond that, it is not really possible: having scripts (a-la Dragon Age: Origins or Baldur's Gate) is nice and I am pretty sure these will be there, but for the game to be really interesting, it has to force you to think a little bit which, with 6 characters, means that you are either one of those 300+ APM StarCraft players or you need to pause.
  22. Althernai
    In my opinion, this is the most serious of the objections. The issue is not so much graphics as the CPU (for tracking dozens of different AI controlled characters on the screen simultaneously). Even the most powerful tablets are currently nowhere near a cheap Core i5 laptop and I do not believe that they will catch up (meaning, to this same 2012 Core i5 laptop) in one and a half years. Unless what they have in mind takes drastically less processing power than I think it does, the game cannot simultaneously use a ubiquitous PC to its full potential and be playable on a tablet.
  23. Althernai
    Baldur's Gate 2 style (Shadows of Amn, not Throne of Bhaal). Magic items should not be too rare, but nor should there be one lying around in every barrel. However, I would prefer to avoid long sequences of +x items. That is, Rings of Protection +1, then +2 are fine, but +1, then +2, ..., then +9, then +10 are not. Give the higher level magic items special qualities (e.g. regeneration or immunity to poison or something of the sort).
  24. Althernai
    Betrayal at Krondor was a mix: skills improved when you use them, but you could pick which skills improve faster independently of how often you used them. I have nothing against the TES games (I thought Skyrim was the best RPG in quite a long while), but I think the IE system makes more sense here. For one thing, we know Obsidian will be using classes. This already places some pretty severe constraint on character progression. For example, if the class of a Baldur's Gate character was Mage, he would never be half as a good at melee combat as a Fighter, no matter how much you tried to steer him in that direction and Thieving was even further out of reach (the skills were simply not available). Also, XP allows easily granted character progression rewards for quests whereas in learn-by-doing systems this is clumsy at best.
  25. Althernai
    But this is what Dragon Age: Origins was supposed to be and it did not work very well at all. Do you think it was just because the underlying system was bad? I suppose it is possible -- there was a lot of lazy design borrowed from MMOs (cooldowns, aggro, low impact of positioning) -- but I think the camera also played a part.
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