AGX-17

The game is tentatively slated for a 2014 release. Given the fact that they're licensing a ready-made engine, that allows for more than a year of dev time without many worries about technology (I doubt they're aiming for a January 1st release date.)

Since character creation is my (oddly) favorite part of any RPG, anything works. Rolling the dice is self explanatory, and it feels more arbitrary than the others since players can just keep rolling until they get the optimum build. Manually controlled works well, although it is vulnerable to metagaming and min/maxing. But RPers can still make choices to fit their character rather than ease of play. Choosing narrative answers is the most immersive, and can be a lot of fun, but can also be quite opaque, leading to frustrating, unintended builds and forcing players to repeat CC until they figure out the "right" answer for what kind of character they're shooting for (unless you have quick and easy respecs available.)

And couldn't magicians just come up with spells that have effects similar to, or greater than, any realistic "drug"?

I see your Queen... and raise you Queen!

Having grown up in the 8 and 16 bit eras, melodic and catchy songs are what do it for me. Japanese compositions seem to fit the bill better than anything else. I feel Western video game soundtracks try too hard to stay in the background, but as any playwright or film director can tell you, music can be just as vital to a story as dialogue and imagery. I honestly couldn't hum a theme from a western game other than the elder scrolls theme, Deus Ex, Halo or some tracks from warcraft 2. Right now this is all I need: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hCUeVmboXtk

If you like a challenge, toss everything and rely only on what you find on.... THE LONESOME ROAD. Really, the various forms of Riot Gear are better than any non-powered armor you can get anywhere else in the game. I once ran the whole thing naked starting about lv3, right out of Goodsprings/Primm, it was the most fun I had in NV from a pure gameplay perspective as someone raised on FPS'. Tragically, the main game and other DLCs were comically easy as a result. But it taught me that the H&H Tools Nail Gun and the flare gun are miraculous tools woefully overshadowed by unique anti-materiel plasma gatling bluhbluhbuh guns. RPing was kind of tough with skills too low to meet most checks. I actually had a lot of problems with getting pickpocketed by nonexistant pickpockets. First I'd get the lost caps notification and start killing everyone in a tan hoodie I could find, but none had 100 caps on them, so I finally just started using console commands to re-add the 100 caps.

Is it there? Of course it's there. The relevant question is whether it will stay alive so long as it's left unobserved! You seem to have made a thread in response to a claim that was not made (as the originating post of the thread was the response to the unmade claim.) Regardless, the point still stands. Information, from a scientific standpoint, "exists." The "game" is an abstraction of the human mind. Information exchanged between human minds. I haven't seen any post in the thread arguing that games are real life or that imagined characters in said games are living, breathing, physical organisms (or cold metal robots, for that matter.) I have seen a whole bunch of befuddled users. And one suggesting that you have dysentery. For which should probably seek medical attention as soon as possible. You know how many people died on the Oregon Trail of dysentery? Neither do I, but I'm pretty sure you don't want your tombstone reading "pepperony & chease."

I think I'm off my meds again, could somebody translate? His entire post is a logical fallacy, so I took it to a logical extreme. If a video game can't exist simply because its characters are imagined, how can anything imagined exist, by that measure? If you imagined a method of transporting water, you could then plan and construct it. In Prosper's world, no such thing is possible. I chose the ancient transport of water as an example because I thought it would be funny to say he's just died of dysentery as a result of the logical paradox he created.

I don't want my companions jumping into my line of fire, either. I don't want them jumping into my line of fire, either.

What do you mean by "exclusive in-game content"? Are you suggesting PE will be rife with material plagiarized from other intellectual properties and that the controversy is original content produced by Obsidian?

I hope that there are no cosmic entities in existence to hear your wishes, or to agree to grant them, for your wishes are a travesty against all of mankind. Aside from you.

Drugs of all kinds have been small and large parts of cultures across the world throughout history. It wasn't until relatively recently until a natural painkilling chemical derived from such plant sources as willow bark was isolated and dubbed "aspirin." Egyptian heiroglyphs suggest that beer was a more prized commodity than the grains from which it was produced (and Egyptian women were the master brewers!) Bread that can be stored long-term as a drink which doesn't carry disease like unboiled water just happened to have bonus effects. Absinthe was wildly popular in the late 19th century, especially among the "starving artist" crowd. Why? It was a dirt-cheap alternative to wine. It was banned in France (and elsewhere,) because of lobbying by the French wine industry and a campaign of misinformation. There are many drugs that are dangerous when overused, but that's exactly the same truth of anything you can imbibe. If you take too much tylenol, your liver will go kaput. If you ingest too much sugar, you'll get diabetes. Too much fat? You get it. Many "illegal drugs" are even approved by the FDA for medical uses. Cocaine and Methamphetamine both have legitimate medical uses and can be administered by a physician given the correct circumstances. So yes, there should be drugs.

If it's meant to be an early renaissance-equivalent setting, shouldn't the music reflect that? No need for "ancient" music (not that anyone knows what that sounded like, musical notation didn't exist back then.)

So... you're saying that video games aren't real, because the characters depicted are imaginary? Thus, the binary information stored in various media in various locations on Earth and accessed by various machines and interacted with by various persons, does not exist? By that standard, it would seem the internet is not real, forums.obsidian.net is not real, and this thread is not real. Your registered profile is not real, and you could not possibly have created this nonexistent thread on this ethereal discussion medium. You have declared hypothetical thoughts to be impossible, so no ancient man ever imagined a way of transporting fresh water across sizable distances via tunnels in the rock, or via tubes made of clay or lead. Prosper, my dear friend, you just died of Dysentery.

If I'm the one crafting the tactics for battle and commanding them, I think I should probably be the one controlling their levelling choices from a purely mechanical standpoint. It would be more immersive if they made their own choices based on personality/combat style/etc., but that might be detrimental to gameplay if it doesn't mesh with the player's intentions or the combat situation at hand.

Rudimentary English education is mandatory in the Japanese school system, but it really doesn't stick unless the student intends to get involved in international business. It's also encouraged among the Chinese who can get an education (something highly valued by Han society, but not available to the impoverished majority of a 1.3bn population,) but, facts being facts, they'd just pirate it anyway. I've seen a few Japanese Let's Play style video series of Fallout and Dragon Age: Origins, So there is a potential market. When it comes to Western games, things like Fallout 3, NV and Skyrim definitely do much better than the classics. Korea's (south, of course, don't want Kim Jong Un kidnapping the Obsidian team to force them to make games for him,) the best bet as far as Eastern translations, if the popularity of genres similar to the IE games is anything to go by. If the money was there from the start, and highly fluent translators available, I'd say go for more Eastern language translations. After all, with a game funded in advance, you don't have much of anything to lose on a risk like Japanese, Mandarin or Korean translations. As far as volunteers go, there can be legal issues, as well as quality issues. It's true that passion can help a lot, but inexperience can also hurt a lot.

The Borderlands 2 checkpoint system is interesting. It autosaves constantly (I don't know the inner workings of the system, but even if you crash or ctrl+alt+del, when you load you'll be in the same state you were in prior to the crash or loss in battle, which prevents save-scumming altogether.) The penalty is the loss of money (fees charged for commercial resurrection services,) often geographic progress, and if you were fighting a boss, the boss goes back up to full health. If the fight was too hard or you didn't have the right gear, the constantly respawning chests and shop inventories provide opportunities to improve your situation. Of course, the Borderlands games are designed with the intention that players should complete every sidequest in order to be properly levelled and outfitted for the next stage of story progression. I don't know that sort of scheme would work in an IE-style setting, but it is something to consider.

Story + character inspired emotional decision making? Either that, or the term RPG has become something that's rather loosely defined in the past years. The term RPG has become as inane as the word "epic" in this era. If any game design mechanics or statistics are visible to the player it's immediately branded a (genre)-RPG, regardless of the legitimacy of the RPG suffix. There's a reasonable chance that either Mass Effect 3 or Borderlands 2 will be declared "RPG of the year" for 2012.

The prescient issue is that they're simply changing the commonly-held definition of the term "RPG" in order to defend the *ahem* "casualization" of their products in the face of criticism from the admittedly smaller, (and thus less profitable,) RPG-focused community, If adding RPG elements actually led CODBLOPS fans to play more RPGs, RPG sales would be up and games like DA2 would be more like BG than a dating-sim set in a complex of concrete cubes. It simply hasn't worked because it was never meant to.

No, thank YOU*, Josh Sawyer. THANK YOU.

A "past-life" choice in character creation conferring some sort of bonus (or penalty,) might be interesting, especially with minor/chargen story hooks not of the "you are the chosen one! only you can save the kingdom with your chosen one powers!" variety. It might also be interesting if you could choose some such "past life" and deliberately act in opposition to it, like a former barbarian choosing to become a priest, pursuing a life of discipline in the face of his or her own (apparent) violent nature. Hell, they could have been a priest before being a barbarian. Chose barbarian last time just for kicks.

The ever-increasing experience requirements for additional levels naturally makes the "x" experience received for the most basic enemies irrelevant. When it takes you 30,000 exp to level up, 10 might as well be the same as 0. On the other hand, from a believably standpoint, after your first 3-odd rats you should be pretty much a master rat-smasher and no longer learn anything about the practice until you encounter the rat king.

How is it going to work? Are we just bringing elemental detritus to a master enchanter, or are we going to have the potential to become one ourselves? Should mastery of such crafting areas be counterbalanced by penalties to combat abilities? Recent experience with what passes for RPGs these days suggests to me that such pursuits should preclude significant combat skill, be it physical or arcane. Thoughts?

Here's what you need: Headless enemies whose arms and legs give them an immediate, dramatically lethal advantage over the players, and who are so tough that they won't be close to dead even after all of their limbs/parts have been crippled.