metiman

Children are optional. The gameplay won't be hurt if they are not included. If they are included then they absolutely must be killable and you should only get a reputation as a child killer if you are seen and caught. And getting a child killer reputation should not make the game unplayable afterward. Some npcs might even approve of it. Also, children should have weapons of some kind and fight back, with their stats being proportional to their age.

Romances are essentially mini-games, and I dislike them for that reason alone. They have nothing to do with the plot. They have nothing to do with the combat. They take development time away from the important game mechanics that actually make the game fun to play. If the only reason you play 'modern' cRPGs is the romances then you aren't really interested in RPGs. You are just playing for a Sims-like experience, in which case wouldn't it be better to just play The Sims if that's what you are after? Romance/sex simulation is not why I play cRPGs. I play for the strategic combat and/or the story. Those two things are hard enough to do, even with huge budgets, that I can nearly count the number of great cRPGs on the fingers of one hand. Why introduce various mini-games that take development time away from the important stuff? The core values of an RPG experience. Especially in a game like this with a very limited budget and very short 18 month development cycle I really don't want to see the devs wasting any time at all on mini-games like romances. One possible solution to the problem of the diversion of core-RPG game mechanics to a mini-game is to encourage the fans themselves to write romances. Throw the female and homosexual gamers a bone by allowing them upload their own romance add-ons or if romance mini-games must be included then add them in after the game is completed and offer them as DLCs. That's really where they belong because, even if you enjoy faux-romance with sprites, it is an inherently extranous feature. An extra. Perfect for DLCs. Then everyone wins. The romance-lover faction gets some nice big romances to play and the rest of us don't have to suffer with lesser combat and/or story because of it.

This discussion is pointless because it's clear that this game will have a traditional IE-like 3rd person (axonometric) perspective which may or may not have a zooming feature (I hope it does). Having said that I would like to defend the first person perspective. The fact that Bethesda and EABioware-2 make awful games with first person perspectives does not mean that such a perspective is inherently bad. Their games would have been just as bad if they had been isometric. For games with a single character and no party members first person perspective can actually be quite nice if done well. Think of Ultima Underworld, Arx Fatalis. It even somewhat worked in the later Might and Magic games, despite the difficulties. It do think first person is more 'immersive'. It gives you the same view that you would have if you were that character encountering that world. With sufficient technology and true photorealistic stereoscopic graphics it has the potential to make the game into a sort of holodeck or lucid dream experience which could be very powerful indeed. Try playing a game with shutter glasses or an HMD or 3D monitor or some other stereoscopic aid and you might start to see the benefits of feeling like you are actually there. It makes even relatively dull encounters seem more exciting. The problem, and it is not a small one, is that it makes tactical multi-character combat feel unnecessarily difficult. I mean, would you want to play a game of chess with your eyes at the level of the board? You wouldn't really even be able to see all of the pieces. I think that would even be true in a hypothetical VR environment. Having a raised view of the battlefield is always going to benefit tactical multi-character combat, especially pseudo-turn-based RTwP where all of the characters are frozen in place most of the time that you are making tactical decisions.

Minsc was annoying. More so than most BG2 characters he seemed to have been written for a preteen audience. A 7 year old might find him endlessly entertaining. A 20 yr old is more likely to just find him annoying and ridiculous. What was it with Bioware1 and their need to have intentionally annoying characters. Jaheira was also extremely annoying. Imoen also to a lesser extent. Why create characters that most people are just going to want to kill off immediately? As for the number of NPCs I think 7 fully written characters would be fine, but I'd also like to see the ability to roll your own characters. I dont think it would be particularly expensive to add that feature. It would add way more replayability than adding an extra fully written NPC or two. Another possibility is to add a couple of minimally written characters. They would have only very limited back stories and dialogue and would just be there as a slight improvement over rolling your own. I know a lot of people hate DLC, but charging $5 for an extra playable character after the game has been released wouldn't be a bad way to go.

Interesting. I like his work better than Sweet's. It reminds me a bit of David Sutherland's famous cover illustration on the second edition Dungeon Master's Guide.

This game isn't going to have any cooldowns. It's not going to be WoW or Dragon Age. Can you modify your ideas to work without cooldowns?

What would be the point of the Steam version if you already have the GOG one?

It wasn't technology that made them move slow, but that is an amusing idea. It's funny because I haven't found their movement to be slow even at a measly 30 fps. Weird. Can you give an example of a game where movement is at what you consider to be normal speed?

I hope not. Seems like development time could be better spent on other things.

They aren't as limited by their promises as they are by their finances. When the money is gone it's gone. The more money they get the longer they can continue to work on the game before the money runs out. The math of annual salaries x number of devs is not very forgiving. Having said that most of the truly great cRPGs took at least 2-3 years to make. Making one in only 18 months would be extraordinary. Presumably they can still make a great game if they limit the scale.

I like the exhaustion idea. I also think mana systems and per day systems are okay. I don't see why it has to be either or. BG2 had sorcerers and mages, and I played both and enjoyed both. My first choice would be a variety of different systems. Some magic might require a ritual. Some might require praying to your god. Some might depend on how exhausted the incantations make you. And you could still have the more traditional mana and memorization systems as well. More variety = more replayability. Some of these system may be a better fit with the game narrative and of course that should take precedence.

Your mage can only shoot some limited number of fireballs before he runs out of 'ammo' and has to sleep. Firearms give you another long range option. I don't see any problem with them as long as it fits in with the setting as I'm sure it will.

I agree that a 3 dex should have serious penalties, but that is not what min-max means to me. To me it just means focusing on optimising your character to the greatest degree possible in terms of combat. That is possible whether low stats have serious penalties or not.

Stylization is fine as long as it doesn't look cartoonish. Some of the example images posted here were a bit cartoonish. Others were just highly detailed, beautiful, and imaginitive (that beautiful deviant art page) Good art direction and photorealism are not mutually exclusive. In any case are any of you really expecting photorealism on this project? Photorealism is expensive. So forget it. Obsidian has never done a cartoonish looking game. I don't see any reason to believe they are planning to start now.

I agree with this. On the first playthroughs you use and get to know all of the lovingly created NPCs, but eventually that will get boring and, if the combat system is good, I will want to experiment with different combinations of characters like all mages or all fighters or all thieves or various optimal combinations. In BG2 you had to use a kind of work around (starting a multiplayer game and saving it to the single player save folder) but it was possible. Most of my playthroughs of BG2 nowadays are with characters that I have mostly rolled myself. Any time there is a relatively easy way to increase replayability it should at least be considered.

I don't accept it. Nothing has improved. Are you calling me a fool? Moderator! You haven't given even a single example of what you are talking about. Are you expecting us to be psychics? What did you have in mind? Better graphics perhaps? I would welcome that, but it is unlikely due to cost constraints. In terms of actual gameplay cRPGs most definitely have not improved since the 90s. What is there to improve? It's really just graphics that you'd expect to progress with time. Action games did improve between the 90s and the new millenium, although they seem to have stagnated for now until the new consoles are released. But RPGs? No, they have not improved.

I see. Another Dragon Age feature request. It is starting to seem like most of the posters here just want Dragon Age. It sounds almost like contingencies in BG2 or just character AI scripts. I don't have a problem with that, but I don't particularly care about it either.

So has it been confirmed that if you like Bioware games you therefore must be a homosexual?

Well another way of putting it is that the devs should be making the kind of game that they would like to play. Since they are adults themselves it will be a mature game by definition. It just means that your target audience is mostly people over 18. Although people are trying to imbue those phrases with whatever meaning they want, that is all it really means.

You haven't even explained what you mean by "auto tactics". Are we supposed to guess? I know writing more than 1 sentence is a strenuous thing. Is it like letting the game play itself so you can just walk away and make a sandwich or go to sleep and wake up to see that your character has saved the world or was quickly killed?

Yes. Urgency is great. It makes the story/situation seem more compelling. If you can just bide your time for a couple of years before trying to solve the problem then it makes the problem seem rather trivial. "Yeah, one of these days I'll get around to saving myself from an imminent fate worse than death or saving the world or whatever, but I'm really in no hurry to do so. <yawn>. Like I really care about those dumb supernatural effects that are supposed to affect me. Hah! Think I'll just take another nap." It would be sort of like reading a novel where the main character didn't particularly care about the central conflict. Maybe he'll get around to trying to solve it in the next book, but he probably won't be bothered. I suppose this sort of attitude could add an element of humor. Having said that I wouldn't mind a switch in an .ini file somewhere to turn off the consequences of being a lazy protagonist. It might help replay value.

The fact that it is made by and for adults. Full stop.

I must say I kind of like the idea of the exhaustion system. I've never heard of it before. But if you truly are exhausted you should have to sleep to recover. Get somewhere quiet and away from enemies to nap for at least a few hours. Just waiting around should not be enough to recharge your exhaustion meter or whatever. In the end it should balance out to be equivalent to the old sleep-to-restore-spells mechanic. The system could also be more finely grained so that the power of the spells is inversely proportional to how exhausted they make you. For instance, if you shoot a 3rd level fireball and roll a 20 that should make you more exhausted than if you only rolled a 2 and something like finger of death should only be able to be used a very small number of times in battle before you have to sleep for a while to recover. For those who want to sling spells with impunity 24/7 this system could also include some ranged (and melee for the suicidal mage) attacks that are no more damaging than a crossbow bolt which would not cause fatigue, at least not to a measurable extent. The sleep system could also be finely grained so that even an hour of sleep will help at least to some degree. Speaking of the sleep system, I'd like to see sleeping out of the sight of enemies always restore you to some degree. If you encounter monsters they should be at random times. Not always as soon as you fall asleep. Another system could be that your diety powers your magic. Your spells are sort of like prayer, praying for his assistance in a particular way. But if you are constantly bothering him he might shoot a lightning bolt at you and refuse to give you magic for a while. Another system could be that your mana is sourced from your companions fatigue and that the more spells you use and the more powerful the spells the more fatigued your companions get, reducing their effectiveness in combat. This idea comes from the HBO series, Carnivale. He had magic, but it carried a serious price. Something like that could be interesting.

I wasn't that impressed with the IWD portraits, although I don't think it particularly matters. The portraits are not the most important part of the game for me as it seems to be for many of the posters here. As much as I hated Dragon Age and thought it was one of the worst games ever made, it had a great portrait creation system. So good in fact that I like to import portraits made in DA to BG2. That kind of 3D creation system is almost certainly too expensive for this project though and nearly any amount of money spent on portraits is wasted money. I'd like to see a new artist get a chance to draw some beautiful 2D portraits. Surely Obsidian already has competent 2D artists. If it turns out that those artists can't handle such things then by all means hire Sweet.

There is an easy solution to the voice acting problem. Get rid of it. It's scary how selfish many of you are. You don't care at all about other people. You just want the best possible game for yourself and everyone else in the world can go to hell. So you are chaotic evil then? As a chaotic good person in real life I would like to see as many people in the world enjoy this game, and I would like to see the game get as much funding as possible. Making translations at least for French, Spanish, German and maybe Polish or Russian will almost certainly increase the funding for the game significantly. That's why a commitment has to be made for it before kickstarter is over. At least the French and Spanish text translations should be trivial.