Gatt9

I'm not a fan of cooldowns, they're too arcadey. Memorization at least has a rationale explanation for it, and reflects a Character's engergy level. Cooldowns are the equivalent of... Party: It's still moving! Quick, cast Fireball again! Wizard: I can't. Not for another 47 seconds. That spell can only be cast once every 60 seconds! IMO "Rest spamming" is a player trying to keep a full complement of spells rather than using them judiciously.

There's alot of assumptions in there. First, you're assuming this creates some hard choice. It does not. Either Armor A is better than Armor B, or vice-versa. Weapon A is better than Weapon B, or vice-versa. There's almost never a situation in a CRPG where there's any reason to have situational arms and armor, and when there is, it's usually contrived. Because most people don't want to figure out what a damage type is, and why piercing weapons are useless against stone golems, any reason to have situational equipment does not exist in a CRPG. So there's never a hard choice here. Second, you're assuming that weighty gold existed for a legitimate reason. It existed because in AD&D 1st edition, gold = experience. Without weight limits, on everything including gold, the PC's would carry everything including sewing needles out of a castle just for the extra 1/100 experience point. It's a level of realism that doesn't add fun to a game unless you're extremely concerned with economic simulation. Third, it doesn't preclude hard choices on what to buy. You can easily do the math on the main path through the game, and the full path through the game, and come up with a median amount of gold most Players will have. From there, you can balance prices. It's like eating, drinking, bathroom breaks, etc. Is it realistic? Sure. Does it add fun to the game? Not one bit, I'd be willing to bet fewer than 1% of the people who have ever played an RPG have been excited by needing to compute the weight of gold. I'd also be willing to bet that's one of the most frequently house-ruled-out rules in RPGs, if not the most frequent.

That's really the D&D system they borrowed. When your character reaches 0 hps, he loses 1 hp/round until he reaches -10. At -10, he dies. A party member can stabilize him in combat (With a skill check in later editions). In some editions, if a character has a healing skill, he can accelerate the healing process while resting. The other option was to have a Cleric heal him either in town at a cost, or in the wilderness at the cost of the Cleric not taking other spells. Healing Potions are present in RPGs, and really must be present, to permit people to create parties that don't have a dedicated Cleric-role. Without that, healing becomes abyssmal. It also lets your Cleric do something other than just memorize every healing spell they can. The alternative is 4th edition D&D, which didn't go over well.

So you think it's better to have vast areas of land devoid of life? Random encounters exist because in an RPG, it's modeling an entire world, and you're not alone in it.

In this era of removing features and dilluting games, this is perhaps the best piece of gaming news this year! I really like where you're going with this Obsidian, I've only heard one thing I wasn't 100% thrilled with.

all systems have as many flaws as they have advantages. the thing is: what system will allow a player to role play without getting penalized for not playing in a particular way? with the xp for killing system, even if you use a different approach to solve something, in the end you will still kill any unfriendly npc that you can for that extra xp and loot, unless you are a hardcore role player with self imposed limits on what you will do and how. a way to solve it would be to make the unkilled enemies useful later or make them disappear immediately after solving a quest in a non violent manner so you would have no way to power play by killing them. in the goal based xp system you can still kill anything after you solved the quest in a different way, but you don't get any reward for it so its easier to role play without pushing yourself to deny a possible reward. in this case however it would take some effort to make it so that the quests you get wont contradict the way you play, or have alternative solutions that fit your style This is a "Root cause" issue. The root cause of your concern is that actions other than killing aren't viable because they don't yield a reward. The solution is to make actions other than killing viable by yielding a reward. For some strange reason, people keep bypassing this, and instead jump straight to "The solution to the problem is not reward experience for killing" instead of "The solution to the problem is to reward experience for more actions than just killing". To be honest, and this isn't directed at the quoted poster, I seriously wonder if many advocates of the Quest-based system don't have ulterior motives. The solution to the issue is extremely obvious and simple, but instead many keep jumping right past it. There has to be some other motivation here, because there's no logical reason to ignore "Make things other than killing viable solutions" and jump straight to "Don't give anyone experience for killing". I strongly suspect there's a number who are just hiding a hatred of people who min-max and want to prevent people from playing that way, even though it doesn't affect them. Seriously, what is so wrong with "Reward experience for more actions than just killing"? What concern is it that this doesn't address? Because it really looks like that isn't what people are really concerned with, it really looks like what people want to do is to dictate how others play.

It's in the Kickstarter update video where they talk about non-combat skills. Wow, thanks for providing the source. I watched that video previously and didn't even notice. I recalled him mentioning you could gain XP by doing non combat activities, but I didn't hear the part where he says all the XP is from quests. As it wasn't mentioned in the written Update #7, I thought he was talking about XP rewards for using your skills. Here is what Tim Cain says: This would seem to present a huge challenge for the developers to design a way for the quest XP to take into account the fact that people can go around the map and do all kinds of different quests in different order. If the game was a linear corridor cinematic game like Mass Effect, it would seem to be much easier to plan how much XP the player will receive for each quest, but from the limited information we've received about Project Eternity, it seems that the game will have a much more open map with more player agency in terms of where to go, which NPCs to associate with, which quests to take on, etc. Now I'm wondering if Obsidian will split up the game world into much smaller "acts" or "chapters," to allocate quest XP in a certain way. They really don't have a choice if they're going with quest-based experience. The system is inherently linear, it's not possible to implement it in any way that isn't a figurative corridor. The only way players can do level 10 quests is if they do level 5 quests. You cannot bypass it in any way. It's a massive error, and knowing Obsidian, I'm guessing they'll switch to a Fallout system before too long. It's one of those ideas that may sound great on paper, but once you implement it and see the end result, it won't look as good. I doubt Obsidian is going to want such a highly linear system. Experience only through questing has never had a viable implementation outside of linear narratives, or systems like ME2 and ME3 where the "Leveling" doesn't actually do anything.

You're 100% right here. A Quest-based system, like Mass Effect 2, rapidly becomes boring. It's highly linear and extremely contrived since you can't progress until performing some quest(s) you may not even be interested in doing, for no reason other than an arbitrary "This quest can't be done until you've done at least 4 other quests!". Railroading the player is always bad. It also makes character progression nonsensical. I can kill 10,000,000 goblins and not get better with my sword. Hand one old guy a marble and suddenly my sword skills impoved. The system you describe here is ideal. Different rewards for different solutions to every situation, inlcuding xp/kill, with varying levels of reward based on difficulty (Killing a dragon for his sword is a whole lot easier than talking the dragon into giving it to you). Your first problem is that you apparently don't realize that LARPsing is enjoyed by a very tiny minority, which is what you're advocating. Your second problem is that you apparently do not understand game design, because one of the fundamentals in game design is the reward mechanism.

A fair portion of RPG gamers hate anything that isn't their personal preference for gaming mechanics, and will not enter into a real debate, nor will they discuss root causes for issues. Xp/kill is a bigger one of the places you'll see that, Vancian magic is the biggest though. But it doesn't come close to the level of "My way only" you'll get in a roomfull of LARPsers. Walk into one of those rooms and fail to speak Olde English and see what happens. Three points. 1. Yes, it does prevent you from killing monsters. Because there ceases to be a point to it. If you have nothing to gain, then why do it? 2. I'll guarantee you alot of people would notice it, if not everyone. It doesn't take long for people to realize they're doing something for no reason at all, and then they're going to get bored of it. 3. Then they're going to start asking why killing things doesn't improve their sword skill, talking their way out of things doesn't improve their diplomacy, but handing someone a marble makes them better at both. Which, honestly, is far more nonsensical than xp/kill. There's no way to logic out a rationale for that.

Then you contradict yourself again in the next paragraph. Which is it? Do they reward for it or do they not? Finally, one of your sources for a "Great example" is a Shooter. Deus Ex isn't an RPG, because it's Player Skill dependent, not Character Skill dependent. It's an FPS with a crippled interface, and a "Leveling system" that reduces the degree of crippling, until the point that the Player's Skill is sufficient to overcome the crippling and from there out, it's a full-on FPS. OTOH, if you'd like a great example of a game that handles the situation correctly, Fallout, Fallout 2, and Planescape.

The issue with this is you just described a highly linear game. Since experience becomes Goal-based, and you can never progress without completing goals, you end up moving in a straight line. If Town A is filled with level 5 quests, and Town B is level 10 quests, you cannot do Town B without doing Town A first. Further, it's just unrealistic to the point of killing the suspension of disbelief. The character could conceivably kill 100,000,000 critters, and never get better at using his sword. But handing a person a magic marble suddenly improves the character's fighting ability. The correct implementation is the one that most closely mirrors PnP RPG's, where actions are rewarded with experience. Be it killing a critter, talking your way out of a fight, sneaking past an enemy, pick-pocketing, etc. Actions that would, in reality, make a person more experienced. In honesty, it sounds like everyone's just trying to ignore the root cause of the issue in CRPG's and kludge in a hack to fix it. The issue isn't, and never has been, kill-based experience. It's always been CRPG's failure to reward alternative solutions and/or non-combat actions.

Largely incorrect. Xp/kill is meant to represent the challenge of defeating the critter, which in PnP works fine because the DM can handle arbitrary inputs and deal with non-combat solutions. The issue arises in that game developers, except for the Obsidian team, are generally unable to understand the need for anything but killing everything in sight, such as Bethesda. Just because the Developers of RPG's since the late 90's generally don't understand RPG's doesn't make the system bad, it makes the developers bad. It's not the system's fault that those developers decided that the only thing to do in an RPG is kill things.

Honestly, CRPG's are really the only place trying to force you to choose between combat and noncombat. D&D's a great example, pretty much all of it's systems have combat and non-combat skills seperated out. Which in honestly, is much more realistic. There's nothing stopping someone from being good with a sword and understanding botany/chemistry. The whole thing is really just an artificial seperate that CRPG's fostered early on as they joined PnP in navigating how to balance these two skill sets. This implementation is much more refined than early "One-dimensional character" systems. Ideally, in a well developed system, non-combat classes would take the place of these artificial divisions.

It's tough to substantiate a claim like this unfortunately. There's certainly a belief that it does. I have no idea how marketers substantiate it from the other perspective, either, though. I'd argue that Publishers don't, from what I've seen there's virtually no market research in the gaming industry. I think like many other things, it's just that the business end keeps telling itself "This is true" until it believes it. Much like they do with "Only shooters are worth making today, nothing else sells", while blindly ignoring everything else that sells. Are you saying that the executives are factored into the budget? To some degree they will be, depending on the executive level. Project Managers, Producers, those will be factored in. Senior managers may be factored in, as well as cooporate managers assigned to a development house. It all depends on where the Publisher chooses to define the Studio as starting. Plus, in honesty, all of upper level management gets indirectly factored in as the Publisher generates no product itself, so the cost of everyone working for the Publisher will be diffused amongst the Studios/Projects indirectly, and can easily lead to misleading math. Then there's the question of "How many Project Mangers/Producers are really needed?". Halo 3's a great example... http://halo.wikia.com/wiki/Halo_3_Credits 1 Studio Manager 1 Executive Producer 2 Product Leads 4 Producers 1 Senior Business Coordinator 1 Buisness Administrator 3 Security Personell 1 Microsoft Executive Producer 3 Legal/Buisness 1 Program Manager 3 Microsoft Finances 4 Microsoft HR 4 Microsoft Researchers 1 Microsoft User Researcher Lead 2 Microsoft User Researcher Engineers 6 Microsoft Asia Researchers 3 Microsoft X-box PR So that gives us 39 people whose jobs don't actually add value to the game, many of whom have their positions duplicated. If they all made just $50k/year over 3 years, they added 5.9 million to the cost of developing Halo 3, and in reality it's likely closer to 8 or 9 million. That's why I say AAA games are perfectly fine, the problem is that Publishers have no idea how to manage themselves. They keep trying to cut corners in quality, treat developers poorly (By report), and complain about cost, when they could easily shed a metric ton of cost simply by eliminating all of this excessive duplication of positions and quit trying to count ancillary positions in a game's cost.

There's actually a pretty fantastic amount of fud flying around from Publishers about this. What's actually happening is this... -The Publisher adds ~25% - 30% to the cost of the game alone. One full quarter of "How much game X cost to make" is actually money spent on people who don't actually generate any real work. These are suits with fairly large salaries who make decisions based upon what they think will generate the largest bonus for them. -Marketing a product can end up quite expensive. Tens of millions of dollars to do commercials that don't improve a game's sales, buy out the entire background of websites, give the "Gaming Journalists" VIP treatments to aquire perfect scores, etc. -Publishers add internal overhead as well. Publishers do not like teams that act on their own, so Publisher introduce hefty levels of middle management. One interviewer recently spoke about how two artists who sat beside one another at a big publisher couldn't collaborate on art, they couldn't talk to each other, they had to go through a manager. I think it was The Witcher's devs in an interview talking about friends. -Then there's the favors given to retailers. Those pre-order items are things requested by retailers, that cost dev's money to create, just to get a contract with the retailer. AAA games could easily have a budget at least 30% lower, and likely even less, without all of the crap Publishers introduce that don't contribute to a game in any way. A 20 million dollar game likely only had between 10 million and 15 million actually spent on making the game. You can get a sense for how this works by pulling out the credits for an AAA title, and looking them over. You'll find half of the people credited don't actually do anything at all for the game. AAA Game Development today, if it were a government, would be a feudal system. Where a sizeable number of people don't actually do any work but take a sizeable amount of resources. Edit: If you want a better sense of how it works, and feel like doing math, pick a game you know how long development was. Then... -For each programmer figure an average of $85,000 -For each artist figure an average of $65,000 or $70,000 -For each sound figure an average of $65,000 or $70,000 -QA's a crapshoot. Good QA would be $85,000ish (CS trained people equivalent to programmers), bad QA would be $35,000ish (College grads, no experience). Most publishers will use the latter. Add it all up, get a year's worth of expenses, multiply by the years it was in development. It'll be low, but an approximation. The numbers are coming from an article I recall on Gamedev.net about 5-6 years ago.

You're misunderstanding what is happening, though it's not your fault, as CRPG's badly implement it. What's happening is what PnP RPG's term as "Incidental loot". The way it works is, some critters cannot or would not carry treasure, but you're not the first they assaulted. So lying around on the ground will be the remains of previous victims and their valueables. The wolf isn't "Carrying treasure", it's what is left in the area from past victims. CRPG's have traditionally handled this very badly. Early CRPG's just gave you text that told you "You've found this!" after fights. As the years progressed, implementation didn't improve, loot came on corpses or boxes, so those wolves had the incidental treasure stuck on their bodies. Today, there still hasn't been a good implementation of Incidental Loot. So it's not the loot that's the problem, but CRPG's failure to improve presentation.

You'll need to substantiate this with direct evidence, as your conclusion isn't supported by your premise. A narrative driven single player game doesn't lend itself well to mutliplayer. The story is intended to be consumed by one person, and everyone else is just there as spectators, which does not make it terribly interesting for the other parties. Further, you just made this giant leap where there's going to be "Increased sales" through the addition of a feature which has historically seen little actual use when implemented. Very, very, few people buy a narrative driven single player game to do multiplayer. Especially when you try to portray it as a feature with years of benefit, because as a narrative driven experience, few will play it more than once. Multiplayer, in this instance, adds very little value to the product at the cost of a significant amount of resources. I strongly suspect the pledges would slow, or even stop, at the multiplayer level because honestly, we're talking about a very small number of people who would use it, as the poll shows. It's of value to less than 20% of the people.

I question the benefit of multiplayer. Except in multiplayer specific titles, the number of people who participate in multiplayer generally tends to be very low. Further, I'd hazard that there's more people who won't buy a game with multiplayer in it, as these past 2-3 years have been multiplayer focused, and have also seen major drops in revenue. Anecdotal? Yes, but it's a data point worth investigating because it's quite possible it's a contributing factor. Personally, myself and all of my friends won't buy a multiplayer game. None of us want the headache.

Mass Effect 2, Mass Effect 3, Dragon Age Origins... It's EA's new policy, find the most tantalizing companion, cut them out, and sell them for $10. It's one of the many reasons I no longer buy EA products. On topic: If the item doesn't affect the game in any way, and isn't key to the story, if it's just a trinket, I don't have any issue with it.

I prefer Random. Point buy, from my observations, results in "Clone-Characters". Meaning, in any point buy system, the majority of characters in a given class will have identical or near identical stats. A Fighter is always going to have an 18 strength and high Dex/Con. A Mage is always going to have a 18 Int. The Cleric will always have an 18 Wisdom. Because in any point buy system, to do anything less than a perfect score in your prime stat(s) is just unthinkable. No one is going to willingly make a fighter with all 15's. At that point, the whole thing really becomes a redundant exercise. Why even bother having stats? Just assume each class will have it's prime scores maxed and just have people announce "I'm playing a X". It puts us on that slippery slope where we end up with Bethesda games where there's no actual Character, just Mana and Stamina, which will ultimately go away as well. Honestly, one of the most iconic RPG-related characters existed only because of random rolls (Raistlin). I understand the arguements for point-buy, but honestly, I think random rolls don't receive sufficient consideration for what they do.

It would work out relatively well. There's nothing inherently wrong with a Publisher doing a kickstarter. It would permit them to gamble on an edgy idea while minimizing risk and maximizing potential. From a Gamer's perspective, it'd just be a cheap pre-order. The Publisher's could toss out innovative, or "Niche" ideas, and if they fly, their team is paid for and gamers get diversity. The problem is: This assumes Publishers are interested in making great games. Which they're sadly not. Publishers today are interested only in bringing the next Call of Duty to market. Even if today's Publishers did try this, there'd be abyssmal QA and the bare minimum in gameplay. This event though, this is different. It's a lecherous Publisher wanting Obsidian to be a level of misdirection for them, without offering anything at all in return of significance. $5 says that by the end of 2014, we see most Publishers doing Kickstarters while bleeding money due to their inability to adapt to the market.

It was probably a small publisher who is desperate for cash to keep them going, so they had nothing to lose. I can't see a big publisher risking doing this when Kickstarter projects are mostly small change compared to what they deal with. Actually, it was likely a large publisher. Most likely EA. The intention behind this would be to create a layer of misdirection with who is responsible for the game. It means the Publisher is not confident that their name can sell units, so they require some other name to sell the units and they reap the profits. The only Publisher in the industry with a name so poor in reputation is EA, their name on a box causes units to sit on the shelf. That's why they keep renaming studios "Bioware", because "Bioware" can sell units, "EA" causes them to sit. Plus, the Industry is not in healthy condition. Activision's the only one in relatively good financial state. The market is dropping double digits in revenue, for the better part of 3 years, and it looks unlikely to stop as long as the Publishers maintain their current business strategy. I think you're seriously underestimating how dire the Game Industry is right now, and for the foreseeable future. The Industry is losing massive percentages of revenue, there's very little that's "Guaranteed to sell" at this point. Publishers don't understand why, and they're clinging to the hope that another console generation can save them, ignorant of the fact that it's their endless sequels, lack of diveresity, and anti-consumer initiatives that are driving people away. They have no idea if they can make it to the next console release. They have no idea if that'll even help. They're afraid to return to PC development, afraid to fund anything but "Mainstay" genres like FPS and Action-Adventure. Kickstarter is an enourmous threat to them. It means they lose control of the independent studios, they lose control of the PC market. It means the future they're attempting to force on the market of F2P and micro-transaction loaded titles aren't the only avenue for gaming, and their monopoly is threatened. It means their "Next generation" titles which will likely be the nth-sequel to some tired series has to compete with some reasonably fresh new idea. They've lost control at a time when most of them are disliked or hated, and when they really can't sell console games anymore. They've existed this long only because they were the "Bank" and used that to control the market, now Developers don't need their money, and don't need their distribution channels, so they no longer serve any purpose at all.

Agree 100%. As someone said on the Fallout 3 boards, Bethesda doesn't make RPG's, Bethesda makes "RPG's" for people who hate RPG's. Bethesda doesn't want RPG players, because then they'd actually have to learn how to design, and design is a skill they completely lack. I mean honestly, not only have they been releasing the same game for nearly 20 years, they've been releasing the same game with fewer features and complaining because everyone else doesn't make things the same way. The only bright point to the whole thing is that Bethesda will be wiped out when TES:Online bombs.

Molds I'd like to see broken in CRPG's? -Not every magic item has to be combat focused. Very few, if any, CRPG's have implemented compelling magic items that could be used outside of combat. -Something else never really done in a CRPG is a puzzle-dungeon, or a challenge dungeon. A great example of what I mean is the old Fighting Fantasy book "Deathtrap Dungeon". Everything to date is pretty straightforward, items are made so that their use is obvious. A puzzle-dungeon you have to work to figure out, with a great reward at the end would be incredible. -I still recall to this day an old Dungeon or Dragon magazine with a short module in it. The entire concept was "Teach the high level PC's to fear kobolds", the premise was that with good use of traps, and guerilla tactics, kobolds could seriously threaten really high level PC's. It's something that's never really been done in a CRPG, giving the Player critters he thinks are simple and then turning the tables on him. That's what pops into my head.

Absolutely not. "Bioware" is long gone, it's a brand name EA slaps on studios while it's churning out endless weak titles. Ever since EA took over, the games have been becoming increasingly crappy, and gravitating towards Actiony mechanics instead of RPG mechanics. Hire old Bioware employees, sure. Work with EA? Absolutely not.