AGX-17

Are you still using a 500mb hd from 1995? Have you tried using a bootdisk?

Stochasticity http://www.radiolab.org/2009/jun/15/

...Project Eternity is not a Dungeons & Dragons game. The ruleset is one of Obsidian's own devising. You're addressing a nonexistent concern.

Eh? That's not actually KotoR (which takes place thousands of years before the original films,) and wouldn't it just consist of a jedi sitting around on some backwater planet hiding from the Empire?

How does a normal person kill something that doesn't exist, and never existed in the first place? If people and fictional fantasy races in P:E are all as realistic as you guys want (ergo, humans are the only race in the game,) how is this anything but an exercise in save-scumming? Any dragon worth its salt (and we're making this a realistic simulation, remember?) would just fly overhead and blast you with fire, roasting you alive in one go. Since all your arrows are at best steel-tipped and fired from composite or longbows, they're probably going to just *doink* bounce off the dragon's scales, and you've already implied that nothing but a supercritical hit to the eyes as in Fallout is going to do the job. Similarly, what dragon would go to sleep in a place easily accessible by humans wearing full steel plate clanking around carrying all manner of supplies, weapons, trinkets, ingredients, potions, etc.? Much less with its head right under a giant, precariously balanced boulder that sits atop a rising tunnel/stairwell for quick and easy access for people to drop it like a Sword of Damocles. Since this is going to be a realistic simulation, the physics of soundwaves obviously have to apply, meaning anyone who is well-armed and armored would wake up the dragon, assuming they could climb a mountain or dive blind into a cave underground wearing 65lbs of steel plate armor. Besides, what if this is an Eastern Dragon, how can your band of merry ordinarymen kill a being on par with the gods, which lives in "the heavens," either literally always in flight, or even in the heaven of spiritual belief itself? How do you make an accurate phsyics simulation of heaven? Obviously your realistic party can't fly anywhere because airplanes haven't been invented yet, and magic isn't real or realistic. Will the tallest mountain in the Project: Eternity simulation be equal to or greater than Everest? If you want to make a falling attack on Qinglong the Azure Dragon, guardian of the East, you need to climb to the top of this mountain and wait for it to fly by, if it shows at all. Now, of course, you would have died well before the halfway point due to the thin oxygen, exertion and low temperatures and the lack of modern mountain climbing equipment (as this is a realistic reflection of real human capabilities.) Even if, somehow, your party of clanking steelmen made it to the top, they'd die even faster because all of those factors would be greatly multiplied. And no, rogues can't "stealth" past the weather or climate. How would that be realistic? This is a simulation!

An abstract concept. And I don't do "it."

Might & Magic III or IV. I moved on to HoMM and never really looked back.

Yes, Slavic racial/ethnic superiority and nationalism are more valid basis for translation than potential sales revenues. Obviously superior to dirty american western mongrel races who make eternity projekt game. Play soviet anthem now. There is, almost literally, no market whatsoever for this type of game in Japan. It's true that Fallout 3, NV and Skyrim have been rather successful in Japan, but they're not IE games. Compare this to the Dragon Age games, the closest thing to IE games to be made in the last 8 years or so, which bombed there. Maybe it was because of poor localization (the same goes for the Mass Effect games, Zenimax/Bethesda has done full Japanese dubs for all their games since F3, EA just provides Japanese subtitles,) maybe it was because of the gameplay style, but there's no way to know without some kind of market research. Either way, the fundamental truth of the matter is that they didn't do well.

I haven't checked this particular product line of threads in a while, is this model year still mostly people looking for real world realistic armor and weapons? i.e. steel plate armor being the apex of defense despite guns easily penetrating steel plate armor? No fictional materials, alloys or forging methods providing weapons and armor stronger than steel allowed? Appearance must conform to real-world examples?

The highest level items being the purple? Orange is the most rare/highest tier. But level is a bigger determiner of quality than rarity. A level 40 orange can easily be inferior to a level 45-50 blue or purple. Obviously, level 50 oranges are the best. In theory. Because their stats and properties (as well as appearance in many cases,) are randomly generated, two people can have the "same" weapon of the same level and rarity but one can have better stats and/or elemental effects. i.e. One person might have gun x with no elemental effect but slightly higher damage, but the other player has one with slightly lower damage but a Corrosive elemental property, which makes it better overall due to the increased damage to armored enemies and damage over time effects on all enemies.

I can't argue that Russia is not a land of leather panty-clad men wearing women's footwear. I'll take your word for it, Obyknven.

Every aspect of game design and mechanics is "cause and effect." Every aspect of reality is cause and effect, excluding our current understanding of quantum mechanics. How is this a helpful idea or improvement? You don't have a game without cause & effect. All you've got here is some rambling, weird idea to complicate the existing fundamentals of game design with pointless extra doodads stuck on.

That's basically how Fallout 1 & 2 worked. The problem with that was dearth of locations and the ability to blunder into Enclave Patrols and get exploded with one shot by a Gauss Pistol at level 1-2 with only a 0AC, 0DR, 0DT Vault Suit for "armor."

It just occurred to me. Cipher. Psyker. Derp. "Just a coincidence," i'm sure. Made out of what? Unless it's meant to stab people in the brain and **** up their thoughts. Also, as appealing as the costume is, not very effective in terms of armor. Should have responded to this a long time ago. So you attract the attention of enemies by opening the door that you need to get through? Doesn't sound helpful. You'd already attract the attention by opening it normally, and you'd still get the advantage of using it as a chokepoint, assuming the enemy AI is smart enough not to charge toward the door (which you imply they will as a result of this psychic version of something you can do without wasting a cast.)

I thought it'd been established that there will be healing magic of some kind. Besides, on the subject of "technology," modern medicine can't "cure" most diseases. And I can't think of a single disease that can be treated with "technology." Pretty much every disease that requires significant medical treatment is treated with biological remedies or chemicals of some type. Yes, it frequently takes technology to synthesize or isolate these substances (radioactive isotopes and chemotherapy chemicals for cancer treatment are injected, as are vaccines.) For the most part it's about alleviating symptoms and aiding/boosting the patient's immune system. They don't have machines that just cure disease. It ultimately falls to your own internal biological processes to solve the problem of disease. If there are disease, there ought to be a certain degree of disease resistance associated with various attributes (a high constitution, i.e. good health, would grant higher resistance to disease, for instance; or a background of living in a disease-ridden area in which the people have adapted biologically and pass on antibodies from mother to child, thereby granting increased disease resistance,) preventative remedies (possibly primitive vaccines, but unlikely,) and the solution to them would ultimately be to rest until the infection has run its course if some kind of treatment is unavailable. Ignoring the need for rest and recuperation would result in the disease worsening due to exertion (your immune system is at its strongest while asleep, and it's generally a given that rest makes illnesses go away faster and physical exertion makes them worse.)

Sandbox and IE-style don't mix. A sandbox game (à la Minecraft, a pure sandbox, or GTA, a mostly sandbox,) is more about dicking around and making your own fun, not story, companions and combat depth. Doesn't have to be one or the other, hense what I said about too many variables to track. I've seen it done in other games, but I don't see the dev-time/dollars to make it happen with PE. What game? I'v yet to hear of an IE game or IE-like game with sandbox gameplay.

Gandalf doesn't die. He's an immortal angel. Wizards in Tolkien are immortal angels sent by the gods to aid mortals. From Tolkien's personal letters, as cited by wikipedia: "Tolkien refers to Gandalf as an 'angel incarnate'.[13] In the same letter Tolkien states he was given the form of an old man in order to limit his powers on Earth. Both in 1965 and 1971 Tolkien again refers to Gandalf as an angelic being.[14][15]" Unrelated to that: As for the topic at hand... A normal person with realistic abilities fundamentally limited to realistic abilities can't kill a dragon or cast a spell or so on. Real people don't have tangible "souls" that have "powers." The fact that the majority of poll respondents want P:E to be a true-to-life medieval combat simulation (except with wizards, trolls and dragons, even though real world arrows and swords could kill you with a single blow in a world without wizards, trolls or dragons,) is absolutely befuddling. As is the terrible spelling of the poll. I may have said this all before but there's too much wall-of-text here for me to look back.

So... you just want 3-6x more dialogue options? Also, for the record, you shouldn't be hired to write the dialogue.

How is this a good idea, precisely? An arbitrary stonewall to progress? And how exactly is the game meant to progress once "you" have rag-raped some NPC? If "the ragman" is "you" then who are "you" once "you" have rag-raped some NPC? Once you're that NPC how are you supposed to become "you" again? It sounds more like you're just expressing your fantasies about being tentacle raped like a Japanese schoolgirl.

If you can't make it concise it's probably not a very good idea. Plus all I see is you're proposing to just bring dice rolls back and proposing a bunch of peripheral ideas that don't actually address the core mechanics of speech checks. You're also making the fallacious assumption that most P:E players are going to be unfamiliar with die rolls and RNG outcomes when that's been the dominant mechanic in video game RPGs for decades, from cRPGs to JRPGs. Fallout 3 blatantly told you your percentage chance of success in a speech check, meaning the mechanics were clearly presented to generations and groups of people who otherwise may not have been aware of the concept. And idea of having to use your Tricorder on every NPC in order to access skillful dialogue options is just stupid extra work. Unless your character is an autism spectrum "new Sherlock Holmes" incapable of reading people's emotions and body language it's a nonsense idea and the sort of wasteful extra step that the old IE games were overpopulated with.

Well, the Conference Call is specifically the weapon of choice because when it hits Terramorphous' eyes (the critical spots on that particular creature,) the shots that fire out sideways hit right in that location, with the spread of a close-range shot, effectively tripling the critical damage dealt. And The Bee is dropped by that Hyperion propaganda radio guy. I haven't tried Terramorphous since The Bee's nerf though, so I can't testify to its current effectiveness.

Sandbox and IE-style don't mix. A sandbox game (à la Minecraft, a pure sandbox, or GTA, a mostly sandbox,) is more about dicking around and making your own fun, not story, companions and combat depth.

Cutscenes are non-applicable. The fundamental concept of a cutscene in gaming is a non-interactive cinematic or cinema-style sequence. Anyway, the idea of buffs wearing off is realistic, but not fun. Last I heard they were leaning more toward sustained buffs similar to Dragon Age's than toward a time-limited buff that has to be recast constantly, because they're using a Dark Souls style system of a certain set number of casts between rests. NPCs don't spam buffs while not in combat so far as I'm aware, especially if they have a limited number of casts and can't ever rest to recover the use of said buffs, so it wouldn't be a likely scenario.

Marriage is a socio-economic contract. It originated in ancient times as a purely economic transaction between two families, family groups or tribes. Things like dowries and bride prices existed and still exist in the developing world based on the economics of the loss or gain of an individual and the economic value placed on that individual. What conservatives think is that legalization of gay marriage means big bad government will storm their churches with the national guard and force them at gunpoint to conduct gay marriages (which is idiotic.) Legalization of gay marriage is about the civil, governmental, bureaucratic rights that come with marriage. It's not about religion, although conservatives want it to be so they can force their social values on everyone else on the grounds that it somehow intrudes on their "freedom" to give other people the same freedoms and equal treatment under the law. Just like how the Catholic church wants to dominate the social behaviors even of people who aren't a part of their church by influencing government policies in various countries. Notable examples like Ireland's Catholic-driven ban on abortions recently causing the death of an Indian woman whose life would have been saved by an abortion. No homosexual, contrary to conservative beliefs, "chose" to be homosexual. After all, if anyone believes it's a choice, I ask, when did you choose to be a heterosexual? Do you make that decision every day? Because it only stands to reason that if it's a choice, both options must be equally appealing to you. Homosexuality is a natural occurrence, it has been seen in many species (the most noted example being in sheep, with an even higher rate of homosexual behavior than is known in humans.) From a biological perspective, yes, it is not a "correctly functional" sexual orientation in that it does not, under natural circumstances, result in reproduction and the propagation of the DNA code driving the behavior. Besides, modern society and science have overcome those hurdles in several ways and more are being developed as we write (there is active research into allowing two women to reproduce sexually through artificial means.) And sexual reproduction is not the only method of reproduction. Asexual reproduction came before sexual reproduction, after all, and there are species of amphibians and reptiles capable of Parthenogenesis, which is when a female produces offspring without the involvement of males. While the resulting offspring are genetically identical to the mother, they are still a propagation of her DNA. This occurs in situations where there is a lack of males in the environment, thus allowing for the preservation of the mother's DNA through time, until such a time as sexual reproduction becomes available as an option again. After all, it's better to reproduce in any way possible rather than have your genetic lineage die out, from a natural biological perspective. Even more bizarre/interesting is the fact that there are some amphibians which can change their sex in response to environmental conditions (a severe imbalance in sexes in the community,) with males becoming fully-functional females and vice-versa. All that said, the fundamental issue is that of the law and the rights granted by the law for wedded couples. It's about human relationships and the rights of individuals to certain benefits exclusively restricted to marriage as a legal institution, not a religious institution. I would agree, and while I'm not a fan of governments involving themselves with the headache that is marriage politics, as long as being married is the standard for couples it should be open to both homosexual and heterosexual couples - with both being provided the full rights and privileges that this conveys. Like I said, the fundamental issue is the legal institution of marriage, not the religious one. Anyone can get "married" religiously, with or without an organized religion's involvement, but the government grants certain benefits and rights to people married under the law. A marriage under the law can be undertaken even without any form of ritual ceremony or religious hullaballoo. It's about those legal rights and benefits. Because one of the US government's primary roles is to enforce/guarantee compliance in contracts made between individuals and/or groups of any kind (be they businesses, community groups, private clubs, corporations, governmental bodies or any other that can legally make a contract,) the institution of marriage naturally falls under their purview. Besides, the government's involvement is implicit when you use the term "marriage politics." After all, if the government weren't involved, gay marriage would have no hurdles to overcome (except possible hate crimes perpetrated by social conservatives,) and heterosexual couples would have no special rights or privileges granted to them under the law.