Merin

Mostly I've seen digs at BioWare and digs at pro-romance people needing to "go out and meet a girl." And, yes, the eminently quantifiable "never been done well." Straw man. Many pro-romance people actually have enjoyed romance in many games. I listed a whole bunch I enjoyed. Selective quoting is selective. And here is the boil-down to "I mock BioWare fans." You don't like romances in game, you think they are cheesy, and you don't think they've ever been done well. Don't the previous two points all but demand the third point be true? What I'm seeing is mostly one side saying they'd like to see something, they feel said something fits in the game as much as most any other one thing... and the other side mocking and ridiculing them. Mostly. Based on strength of arguments, you've at best got opinion versus opinion. At worst, you have attempts at reasoning vs. personal attacks.

Not precisely. I am one who voted yes on all three, but that doesn't equate to me not wanting romance in the game. It means I don't want the game, overall, to suffer just for the sake of romance being included. By that I mean that if Obsidian's view for Project Eternity includes no romances, and they have character interactions and plot points and such planned out a certain way, I don't want them seeing some poll saying that enough people want romances added that Obsidian decides they have to rework everything they did force romance into the game. That's it. If they are still in the proto-planning phase (which, effectively, they are) and they are trying to decide "do we want to deal with politics? do we want to include siege warfare? do we want to have romance sub-plots?", then I vote for romance being included. Don't play with the numbers just to get it to mean what you want it to mean. By whom's opinion? I found the romance in Savage Frontier done very well, as did I the one in Krynn, and, yes, I am someone who enjoyed the majority of the romances in most of BioWare's games. They've never been done properly... by who's standard? What measurable criteria? That you and some other people on these forums didn't like them and don't want romances anyway? It's hard to accept the judgment on the quality of something by someone who is predisposed to hate said something already. 1 - It only cuts out content if the content was already THERE. Cutting out "potential" content is a ridiculous argument... that's not cutting out, that choosing to implement one thing instead of another. Get more precise which your language if you want to be taken seriously. Obsidian is in the process of deciding the details of the game they are making AND they are soliciting ideas from the forums. You can't paint this as including romance at this point is at the lack of inclusion of something else - ANY one thing added can be blamed for ANY other thing that isn't. It's not like Obsidian is sitting there with two choices before them - "Do we include romances OR do we include AWESOME STUFF EVERYONE WANTS INSTEAD?" 2 - It is horribly presumptuous of you to assume that you know what everyone (who voted opposite of what you want) knows or doesn't know. Some of them would be quite ecstatic to have fewer spells or weapons or some other game content in favor of romance.

Sounds like several good choices, and Obsidian continues to hit it out of the park with their Kickstarter. Once we get the "fun new tracker" going I'm hoping to see an increase in rate of pledges. Here's hoping inXile and Obsidian, since they are both using Unity and both using Chris Avellone, can share assets to make both games even better!

I know my logical fallacies quite well. The poster was asking for in game romance. You responded by mocking them for "sticking things in the holes of your party members." Straw man - you set up an argument that is easier to knock down, even though it wasn't what your opponent has said ad hominem - your attempts to win said argument were made by insulting your opponent instead of focusing on facts - you are in effect calling your opponent sex-crazed or perverted. You've been doing the ad hominems repeatedly. This could also be considered poisoning the well - you are trying to dismiss your opponents by making them seem incredulous or undesirable to support. --- Using logical fallacies proves the weakness of your argument. Your discomfort with romance in stories and games is your own issue. Stop assaulting others for enjoying it.

And of course, sticking things in the holes of your party members is even more important, right? Okay, this is getting ridiculous. Stop the ad hominems. He never said anything about sex. If he WAS asking for realistic, mature sex in the game - that still wouldn't be wrong, and you still should be mocking him for it - but he WASN'T. You are setting up a straw man (saying he's asking for sex with the companions) and attacking his character. Knock it off. Already reported.

I don't choose thievery options, personally, but I like the idea of multiple ways to solve problems. Love combat? Kill it and solve the quest. Prefer sneaky? Snag the quest item (or, as mentioned above, the quest reward and ignore the quest!) Rather be chatty? Convince the target to give you what you want, or talk the quest giver into just giving you the item without doing the quest. Options are good. A game should frequently push a player outside their comfort zone, but generally allow them to solve problems the way the want to.

The smugness of the anti-romance people is becoming stifling. Dial it back a bit, perhaps?

I'm for being able to talk your way out of almost everything, but would think there should be instances where you can try but there is no way to completely avoid conflict or gain a solid alliance. There are matters of degree - and you should always be able to lessen (or increase, if that is what you are looking for) hostility... but not necessarily always be able to end (or incite complete) hostility. Used to be I'd play every cRPG that would let me as the super-smart, super-charismatic guy who try to think and talk his way out of any fight. I still like doing that, but I ran into too many games where it allowed you to talk but not talk your way out and I had to adjust. So, yeah, let those who want diplomatic, pacifistic characters to go that route. At least to an Alpha Protocol level if not a Fallout level.

Well, there's the big case of the Vampire Diaries author who, after a couple decades of writing the books, got sacked by her publisher who kept the rights to the property. http://thewertzone.blogspot.com/2011/02/vampire-diaries-author-fired.html And you have anyone not savvy enough to realize that "work-for-hire" means that you don't own anything you create. Even outside of that, you have publishers dictating to authors that they have to include or delete stuff, that they have to go on book tours, and so on. I'd rather not have the extra publicity and marketing and instead have more control over my work and my life.

Well, speaking as an indie author, I'd be extremely wary of any publishing deal. It would have to be for one project, leaving me more rights than the publisher is probably willing to leave me, and then I'd consider it. Anything more restrictive than that (them getting all the rights to the property, me being contractually obligated to write more for them, etc.) and it's a no go. I'm happy with Amazon and CreateSpace.

I voted yes on all three. I really like romance in cRPGs, just like I like combat, dialog choices, deep stories, making my own party, having companions, being able to craft my own spells and items... the list is long. I don't NEED any one particular item in that list. If one gets sacrificed (or many, usually) for the game's sake, I'm good with that if the game ends up better overall. Romance isn't a must in an RPG for me, but so isn't combat or magic or loot or stats or... you get my point. I'd like it, but if it doesn't fit the game's focus, don't shoe-horn it in.

Hey! I like bards. No being mean to them (I particularly loved bards in IWD...that regen song was one of my favorite abilities ever.) And I love the Bard's Tale series, so... yeah, I'm just playing with how there's a sizable sub-set of D&D'ers out there who love to mock bards.

Well, it was back in February when I posted this - http://ingenre.com/2012/02/a-look-at-kickstarter-is-it-too-early-to-say-revolution/ and in March I added to the thoughts with this - http://ingenre.com/2012/03/a-look-at-fully-funded-whats-next-for-wasteland-2-and-games-in-general/ and a last one of some note on this would be here, where I'm quoting Brian Fargo talking about how this IS a revolution - http://ingenre.com/2012/03/news-round-up-all-kickstarter/ Kickstarter is a higher point in what I've been thinking about a change in direct to consumer marketing from creators to fans since, oh, like 1996-7 when I started to get a feel for what the world wide web was going to make possible. Obsidian and Project Eternity are not the start of a revolution, but one more symptom of an already ongoing one.

Well, I did say this earlier -

Lots of others from me. I'd like to see Obsidian come up with a unique magic system. I'd like magic to not necessarily prelude a "caster" class. So how effective magic is in combat would be more of a class to class balancing system than an overall rule. And no spell combos. It's gimmicky and I never felt like it really offered anything but "limitations" on what spells I should choose for characters.

This isn't a la carte.

I don't know about your clerics, but mine call lots of lightning and cast lots of glyphs, not even mentioning druids, or the evil necromancer ones... I think if you have clerics, their spell selections should reflect their deity. The point is over there. I think you missed it. I'm saying that I, personally, don't think PE will be (nor should be) based on the D&D model. As in "clerics" having "divine" spells. They have said that this is all based on soul, and you draw power from your soul. The magic system of this world is almost certainly coming from internal energies, not external (i.e. gods)... and don't we have enough clues that "gods" have disappeared (sorta like Dragonlance)? But, again, the point is D&D is the game that set the trope of "clerics gain power from their gods, wizards from arcane energies" and, yes, D&D also established that Divine heals and Arcane doesn't. If you ignore 4E and how even non-magic (i.e. Warlords) could heal. And bards, I suppose. But bards are fruity.

I don't know about the others, but IIRC Wasteland 2 is supposed to be on par with Wasteland in length, and that wasn't a short game. The whole idea with these retro projects is that the devs are supposed to be saving money by not targeting "AAA" level production values when it comes to things like 3d environments and full voice for every character. As I said, I don't expect the game to be on par with the truly monster length games in the IE series, but the shorter length games were in the 40-50 hour range as I recall, so that's where my expectations are coming from. Some of the budget tiers should add to that. I just played Wasteland again maybe three-four months ago. I think I clocked eight to ten hours. No, I didn't wander around places, I kinda stuck to exploring set piece locations and following my missions, I could have killed time forever truly - but the game's end came about ten hours of play after I started, at most. Wasteland 2 will also be open world, so you could waste as much time as you want - just like a Bethesda game! If you think because you clock fifty hours gathering ingredients and making potions in Oblivion added 50 hours to the game play, that's your call. But I think most people here are talking neither rushing nor delving, but a "normal" or median playthrough. People finished DA:O in twenty-five hours, others took well over a hundred. The consensus for it came down to being about 40-50. How Project Eternity is built will decide how much wandering and screwing around you can do, but as for story content? You aren't going to see (until we reach higher tiers) more than 20 hours. You just aren't.

On the "healing is for clerics, damage is for mages", that's a D&D trope that some other games copied from D&D. It doesn't have any real precedence in fantasy fiction prior to D&D, and it certainly isn't a staple of fantasy. I'd rather have "removed gods" - deities that aren't proven to exist - so faith has meaning. I have no problem with different types or sources of "magic" but I do think the "arcane vs. divine" should stay with D&D and, since Obsidian isn't making Project Eternity a D&D game, Project Eternity shouldn't use that dynamic. My two cents on that.

Well, I don't think I'm very disillusioned (about BioWare, sure, but that's a different kettle of fish)... and I'm fairly certain I've played every Infinity Engine game, most multiple times (I never finished BG1 nor Planescape: Torment, mind you, but BG2, IWD 1 & 2 all got multiple playthroughs.) You aren't really taking money, scale, or resources into consideration. I can't speak to The Witcher - haven't finished it, but I know it used the Aurora Engine from BioWare and, outside of (yes, I'm sure this took effort) doing the backgrounds themselves instead of using tiles, they basically made a heavily-modified module for Neverwinter Nights, based on a novel. I've not clear concept of what that took, so I can't speak to the specific example. But this won't be some AAA release. This is a small project for a niche market. Lower your expectations about the scope, at least until Obsidian tells us otherwise. DFA, Wasteland 2, Shadowrun Returns, Banner Saga - these are all going to be "short" games compared to AAA, publisher backed releases. I'm fairly certain each one of those have said as much.

I'm an extremely slow player (I waste huge amounts of time fiddling with my inventory, amongst other things), so 50 hours for someone like me would be probably 25 for a normal gamer. The game will satisfy me (in terms of length) if at the end I'm not like "Seriously, that was it? I barely just started!". I tend to take longer, myself, so I see a "10 hour game" taking me like 20 minimum. I know a lot of people who finished DA:O in like 40 hours. I took 128 hours my first play. *shrug* Let me also add, however, for those 10 hours I also see like an easily enjoyable two replays for most (probably like five for me.)

Not this. Again. Double Fine didn't have it's first update until a week after it made it's goal. We haven't hit a week on this project and they've given 4 updates and have been making the rounds on game sites and twitter and... You know what?

I realize I never answer the hours part. For the money they are getting and from what they are saying, I expect they initially planned on a game that would probably take (understanding that different players play games faster and slower) about ten hours for a playthrough. Depending on where stretch goals go, they may go higher. Since we hit the 1.6 goal, I'm thinking about 15 hours of gameplay. And if they hit 2.2 I think suddenly it expands a bunch and you might see a 30 or even 40 hour game at that point. But to think that they were shooting for a 50 hour game (again, average run times) with 1.1 million is dreaming. If you need 50 hours, pull your donation.

Donations are not on a "value of the return in gifts to the donator" sense. The tiers of rewards are thank-you's and incentives to get you to donate, not a marketplace where you are picking what you want to buy and are getting your money's value in goods. You could donate and not pick any reward tier, or one well below how much you donate. Everytime someone says something like "thirty dollars more and all I get is a t-shirt" I think "there's another person who doesn't understand Kickstarter, donations, or pledge drives." It's like giving $50 to NPR and getting a mug. No mug is worth $50... and you aren't paying for the mug. Any physical rewards they give you have to be covered by the donation - not just the item itself, but the design of the item, the shipping, and the logisitics of managing all the different tiers to get all those items to people - not to mention Kickstarter and Amazon's cuts... and, you know, the game you are giving money to because you believe in it and want it to succeed. If you think "I'm donating $140 so I want a game twice as long as Dragon Age: Origins" then you are absolutely missing the point. Even at the $25 tier, you aren't paying for your copy of the game - you are giving Obsidian $25 (minus taxes, others cuts, etc.) so they can make the game. Because you choose the gift of "here's a digital copy to thank you for the donation" still doesn't mean you are pre-ordering the game. For you it is almost effectively the same as a very early pre-order that you can't get the money back from, sure... but it isn't a pre-order.

I like this idea, but I also like the idea of having to prepare spells in advance. So, imagine a crafting system where spells need to be mixed before use (by combining magical components), and you can only cast the spells you've previously made. But you can invent new spells by mixing together different components in new ways. I'm not talking about discovering pre-designed spells (like Ultima Underworld), but by having each component and means of preparation impart different abilities - like how alchemy works in Skyrim. Then, as the mage grows more powerful, he might learn new methods of preparation, or might become more effective at preparation, or might gain the ability to use more different ingredients in combination at a time. You know, I really like this idea. You could build a whole game around this. I like it, too. We should start a Kickstarter for a new RPG.