AGX-17

Without being given a high damage focus it's hard to justify rogue-style clases without rethinking the concept entirely. The only thing that comes to mind for me at the moment is as some sort of skirmisher, in terms of combat, but that doesn't quite fit in a CRPG so much as a strategy/tactics game. Rogues are most commonly associated with non-combat skills once you take away high critical chances, damage and backstab-type techniques. I guess the concept in general is "smooth-talking, dirty fighting," but unless it's a one-on-one fight that loses a lot of value. Besides that, any kind of sneak-thief or assassin is probably not going to be hanging out with a bunch of flashy wizards and shiny knights in plate if they want to be stealthy in any way. But I doubt PE is setting out to redefine the rogue any more than one would try to reinvent the wheel. It's not safe to assume Obsidian intends to follow MMO design as a guide for designing PE. There is simply no evidence whatsoever for that. An interesting if questionable idea would be to, say, have a rogue infiltrate an enemy faction, gang, etc. and then sabotage it from the inside and betray them once the fighting starts, if at all.

Project Eternity is isometric, try looking back at the pictures in my original post and imagine it from an isometric view <3 We are lucky that P:E is isometric, this means that creatures, enemies and everything that opposes us can use much more ground to move and be more versatile and flexible (have more mobility). A Giant Anaconda could slither diagonally into us from the south whilst another is coming diagonally from the north. A Monkey Beast could perhaps harass us, jump in quickly and attack us only to dodge/leap a step backwards. In Skyrim this mechanic (having more "living" enemies and monsters) is more of a difficulty because you've got control of your character from a "First Person" view. I wasn't referring to game design or mechanics, I was referring to the "an army of dragons has returned after a thousand year absence this should be in PE!" idea, which has been used in both Dragon Age (to a lesser degree) and Skyrim (to the extreme.) It's trite, it's unoriginal, it's unnecessary. Obsidian has repeatedly talked about exploring mature themes, "derp here comes the evil dragons army" does not strike me as fitting that intention.

But this is a game designed by humans for today's technology and not for an unimaginable future supercomputer capable of flawlessly simulating an entire universe, so your options will always be restricted to what the designers can create.

Speak for yourself, I plan to record all my experiences with those natives and publish it. How are you going to publish it without a printing press? Obsidian has specifically noted that the aforementioned machine does not exist in the world of PE. Journalism requires mass media to exist. They didn't have newspapers or pamphlets in the time of scribes and quills.

True and I never expected a level of storytelling close to PT - but they made a very rich and interesting background for their stealth game, so interesting in fact that I was a little disappointing that it wasn't used and explored better. I was left with so many questions after the game and that was great - but I really wish they'd dug as deep as they clearly wanted to. http://penny-arcade.com/comic/2012/10/10

It's a game that has (or should one say had) a lot of potential that isn't realized. The flexibility is great, you can possess people for a short time and yourself sneak in or them out that way, you can crawl through pipes and on rooftops or just go ballistic and hack everyone down.. But the story is a little too linear and a predictable, the setting seems absolutely fantastic, but you never really explore it outside of a few books, notes and some dialouge, but you get a real sense that there's a well thought-out world underneath.. The mechanics are good and it's easy to control, the powers are fun to use and abuse. So in short it's a game with a big heart that's wasted on a rather bland narrative (the ending is a little too abrupt for my taste too). Definitly worth one's time, but wait till when it's on sale. It should be clear from the start that the story and writing are not the focus of Dishonored. It was never being advertised as "a wellspring of lore comparable to the Elder Scrolls" or "the next Planescape: Torment." It was being marketed as a stealth/assassination game with broad freedoms and myriad approaches to achieving a goal and that's exactly what it delivered, and well.

The world design (narratively) and justifications in F3 are terrible, but that's neither here nor there. I can write of paragraphs of complaints about F3 in this area, but the topic here is the basic size and scope of the game world, not how the end result is narratively justified. Most of Fallout 3's locations are based on the real DC area, not just randomly sprayed accross a randomly generated map.

You're saying Skyrim was better for doing something no different from F3? What you're talking about is random encounters between locations and you find a lot of cool little things all over the capital wasteland. At least Fallout 3 had a then-unique setting and interesting locations and destinations, for the most part. Skyrim's level of cut & paste caves, abandoned castles, nord ruins and dwemer ruins is a lot more monotonous. Fallout 3 did a great job with environmental storytelling (though not with written/narrative storytelling,) especially because it's a much more relatable setting. A skeleton in a dungeon in Skyrim is just another skeleton in just another dungeon in just another medieval stasis fantasy world lousy with skeletons. A skeleton on a soiled mattress locked in some sewer utility room is a little tragic story of the Great War's aftermath.

Writing in a journal is not journalism. There will be no journalism in PE as the infernal machine does not exist in PE's world.

This poll makes some assumptions I find fallacious. i.e. That a given type of armor can only provide damage reduction from a single specific source (either melee or ranged projectiles, but not both.) A standard bow and arrow is not particularly effective against a suit of plate, just as a standard slashing sword is not. A musket, on the other hand, is so effective that steel plate was abandoned in favor of brightly colored cloth costumes (because in the face of firearms, why bother?) I imagine the penalties for boresighting to target your spells from inside the tank are going to be huge. I don't really care what the bonus for a specific armor is. Be it +50% damage resistance, +6 to sheer badassery or +25 anti-meta-spell-penetration-resilience, as long as armored spell-caster builds are going to be viable and competitive I'll be fine with it. Isn't it a given that this tank is fully fueled and armed, if not crewed?

I wouldn't respect some meathead orc incapable of coherent speech unless he had some set of morals or honor.

Uncontrollable combat AI? That is a tremendously bad idea.

I don't believe Obsidian intends to design PE in such a way. They have repeatedly said they want all builds to be viable (try paying attention to their updates,) and that they want players to have equal access to both combat and non-combat skills without being forced to choose between one or the other.

Uh, since when was that a cliche? Gold hoarding, yes. Witty? No. Don't you mean inappropriate? Also how is this a cliche? I've yet to play a game where the romantic interest was the protagonist's sibling, and I have played a lot of Japanese games.

Do you even know what you're talking about? Leather will burn if left in an open flame. And it will burn even faster if exposed to higher temperatures than a standard wood-burning fire. What you're describing is protection from friction not protection from, say, being stabbed. Or battleaxed.

I have family in Maryland, Washington, D.C. and North Carolina, but they've had no problems, so that's kind of nice. http://www.latimes.c...0,7372823.story http://www.nytimes.c...wanted=all&_r=0 One of the Koch brothers (of libertarian "external costs are a lie of the labor unions and children with cancer from polluted drinking water" fame,) funded a climate skeptic's study. The study's results converted this skeptical scientist (one of the very few holdouts in the scientific community; when conservatives and the media say the jury is out and it's still controversial, they're flat-out lying,) into a believer.

http://www.bbc.co.uk...canada-20008687 A BBC poll found that only one country favors Romney over Obama. Pakistan. The very country that we have been throwing American tax dollars at in exchange for a knife in the back. And to our angry Libertarian friend, I am an American liberal and you are misinformed about every aspect of liberalism you touched on in your post. Obama is not conspiring to destroy religion. Obama is not a Socialist. Any Socialist will tell you that. You could tell yourself that if you bothered to read up on Marx. American liberalism (liberalism is what the rest of the world calls America's conservatism,) is not about big government, it's about fairness and social justice. It's about protecting the poor and the weak from the rich and the strong so that the aforementioned poor and weak can get some semblance of a fair shot at success in a system rigged by the winners to keep the losers at the bottom. As it has been since the beginnings of human civilization.

HEY, you leave Trajan out of this. Erosion and human error are the issue here. But the more pressing matter is that this is a fantasy game with fantasy characters, some of whom are going to be intended as swift and agile. But a significant number of players aren't going to be happy when the dice roll and that swift/agile character suffers an immediate mortal wound due to lack of heavy steel plate. Sawyer's already said on Formspring (in response to someone's complaints about New Vegas not being realistic enough,) that a game stops being fun when there's too much realism. It's not exactly a big stretch to make up an animal whose hide is tough enough to act as viable armor, this being fantasy and all. Leather does not protect against heat, it makes you even hotter in the heat. This is the water-impermeable skin flayed from an animal's body we're talking about here. Yes, it would provide limited-duration protection from a not-extreme direct heat source (put on a leather glove, slap that hand on an oven burner for a few minutes and you'd get to tell me about your new burn scars,) but wearing a leather jacket in the desert? Have fun dying of dehydration that much faster.

P:T. It's not like NPCs in an isometric game will have facial expressions or nuanced body language. Plus it will scare off all the Bibliophobes!

Project Eternity does not need to be Skyrim, image-heavy OP.

So... what you're basically saying here is that you're not in any way familiar with the work of any of the writers at Obsidian.

An incredibly vague post which seems to be addressing specifically the actions or ideas of an unspecified individual. A response to something which has not been said. You're responding to nothing. You're acting with the faith that that something will appear before you in response.

Well, the thread title is "music."

They point isn't that what you write is even remotely publishable. The aim is to get a whole story down on paper so you can turn it into something worthwhile afterwards. Take me for example I have a number of "fantastic" and "amazing" ideas. Some of them may even be seen as good ideas by people other than my mother and myself But I am on page 1 with each one of them. That wont get me far. Nanowrimo would force me to get to page 200 and actually have something to work with besides a "good idea". "Novel" being the operative word here, assumes that any given person should be writing several hundred pages of prose, period. Hence my disingenuous implication that this will have widespread appeal to the laymen and women of planet Earth. And it's not like we can just write gibberish (which, by the way, is really hard to do,) that ship sailed with Gertrude Stein at the helm. Sure, you can take drugs or whatever like Hunter S. Thompson, but that's not the same.

Spiders creep me out in real life, but I don't give two ****s about them in games. I find all the people who whine about giant spiders in video games part hilarious and part irritating. Every time a moddable game is released there are always people who come crawling out of dark corners (just like spiders!) requesting/demanding spider-removal mods. Next time this goes down, I want to make a mod and label it a spider remover when it actually turns all NPCs into spiders. Bonus if arachnophobes read this post and start to get paranoid when searching for spider-removal mods.