metiman

There's no such thing as a reload problem. No one is forcing anyone to reload the game.

Okay. So 8 hour cooldowns and 24 hour health regens would be okay with you then? You said you were looking for a challenge, right?

Well I'd certainly be interested in his solution. It's not like you can just sleep anywhere without problems. There could nearly always be a % chance of random encounters. The actual time it takes to sleep is usually not that important unless you are running against a timer and even then it helps balance out the strength of an arcane spell caster, the most typically overpowered of all classes. I think having to sleep every 24 hours should probably be a requirement anyway. At least for human characters. Perhaps a major battle should also require some rest before facing another one. At least the fighters would be fatigued for a while. I still don't see much difference between an 8 hour mana refill and an 8 hour sleep refill. Well accept being able to use any spell in your book based on its mana cost. You could also rig up a mana pool to only refill when you sleep.

I believe the usual explanation fo the armor problem is that with arcane spellcasting you have to and that a weak mage would have trouble making these precise and presumably spastic gestures in heavy metal armor. Of course if it were a strength problem then a warrior mage with high strength should be able to cast or just a mage with high enough points in his strength attribute. Regardless of the justifaction if mages can wear heavy armor then you could use them as tanks and arcane casters which might make them overpowered.

There was/is a spirit eater hack that removes the curse entirely. The problem was I didn't want to remove it entirely. I just wanted to get rid of the stupid cooldown periods that only succeeded in making the game less fun and/or make the spirit eating dynamic more annoying. It has been a while since my last playthrough, but IIRC the cooldown I am thinking of had to do with using the 'devour spirits' ability in shadow mulsantir. There were only a limited number of spirits anyway. Making me wait between castings--I can't remember how long--just seemed so utterly pointless. I suffered through it for a while and then searched for a hack to no avail, and then just gave up and exited the game for good. I generally don't play games with cooldowns, but I did make some effort to play Dragon Age and I recall hating the cooldowns in that too. I don't want some kind of super-deity all powerful character that can continuously cast powerful spells, but there are other solutions to game balance that don't make me want to exit the game and go do something less annoying.

Where did you gather that from? I haven't heard anything like that. I think IWD and PS:T and MotB all used sleep-to-memorize. I don't think Black Isle or Obsidian has ever used a mana and/or rune system.

Introduced by mmorpgs, cooldowns are the lazy man's answer to combat balancing. I find that having to wait a relatively short time between certain activities is a very fakey, third wall breaking, annoying, tedious solution to reducing in power a particular game mechanic. They also tend to mean that the devs will feel duty bound to eliminate Wait(x minutes) as a game option because it becomes too easy to just instantly wait past the cooldown period. I haven't noticed cooldowns much in Obsidian or Black Isle games and I hope it stays that way. But on my last playthrough of MotB it was the spirit meter cooldowns that finally made me abandon the game out of frustration. If there had only been an option (or even a hack) to turn them off.

Couldn't you use a mirror for that? Or Obsidian could add a backscatter xray gun as a bonus item for donations above $100. When a character gets hit with the gun you will see them naked for several seconds. I do agree that upskirt shots are of the most profound importance in any true RPG, but there is more than one way to skin that kitty.

http://thesims.com/en_us/home

Are Bioware fans all homosexuals? I'm genuinely curious.

Controversial, but interesting. Why not just have an adjustable gold level? Or make it part of the difficulty slider? On the highest difficulty levels gold is scarce and maybe there are no merchants at all. It's strange that this has never really been a problem for me. Not in IWD or Fallout 1/2 or even BG2 or FONV. I haven't played Oblivion or Moss Effect or Skyrim. So I wouldn't know about those.

So basically you guys want god-like mages that are even more overpowered than in most games? Great. I say nerf 'em. Make them rest for a week between spells, after which they can start casting magic missiles and knock spells. The whole point of a class like a mage is to have a character with strengths and weaknesses. If you take away their weaknesses to try to achieve 100% AWESOME, what you end up really achieving is something that is not at all fun to play. You don't need much strategy when a 5th level mage can spam fireballs at will until they waste an entire town of high level characters. If you want cooldowns, fine, but they better be at least 8 hours long. Either that or their spells have to get seriously nerfed. See how Master of the Universe you feel when your uber-wizard's best damage spell averages 3-4 HP. I have an idea! Cheat codes. If you want to be an unstoppable super-wizard-diety you can enter God mode with a console entered cheat code and continuously spam Meteor Storms and Mass Death while remaining indestructable yourself.

Were people referring to DA1/2 as examples of what not to do? I dont' think so. It seemed as if they were being held up as examples of how to do companions right. But the only thing that Dragon Age did right in terms of design was the character creation. Best I've ever used in any game. I was able to create a female character with a face that was actually pretty. Genuinely beautiful. That is a real achievement. Albeit a purely technical one and something that does not make all the mindless popamole trash mob killing 24/7 any more enjoyable. I guess it's mainly good for coming up with interesting faces and importing them into BG2. It also seems to imply that there was nothing worth emulating in any of the IE games that this project is attempting to reproduce. Games like PS:T for instance. Why not discuss the companion interactions in that? That's something actually worth studying. Why does it seem like the majority of people in this forum are not even fans of Black Isle games? Many of these people are going to be very disappointed when this game is released and it does not resemble Bioware games in any way. Obsidian is not Bioware. As much as some of you might like them to be they are not. Black Isle had very little influence on BG1/2. I can only hope that some of the strategic combat elements in BG2 can be learned from, but you should expect something more like IWD and PS:T than BG2 since, again, they are not Bioware and had almost nothing to do with the design of any of their games.

I don't recall experiencing this problem. Can you give an example of a game which has this problem? As far as fixing it it's simple: make acquiring gold extremely difficult so that money in the world is scarce. Force players to have an extremely high barter skill to get anything at all for their fancy weapons and only offer them small rewards for missions. Surely this must be one of the easiest game mechanics to do well. The problem is players who want everything to be easy and need to have a +5 magical sword at the beginning of the game. I don't think this project will have problems like this because the devs don't have to pander. They can simply make the best game they know how to make and if some console players find the game too hard well that's just too bad. You don't even really have to have stores in the game at all. Ultima Underworld didn't have stores and it was great fun.

But insulting people because they don't like something that you do is okay? Besides it was not my intention to insult anyone (well except maybe for the Bioware developers responsible for that atrocity known as Dragon Age), but merely to point out the simple facts about the consistently poor game design in Dragon Age 1 and 2. They do not make for good comparisons with this project. Obsidian's aims are the complete opposite of those kinds of modern mainstream pseudo-RPGs that make big publishers drool in greedy anticipation for jumping in huge piles of cash as if they were autumn leaves.

Feargus and I believe Chris as well did in fact visit Bioware from time to time while they were their publisher to check on their progress and even give them a bit of advice just as you would expect. This thread seems to reinforce my belief that most biodrones are so young that they have no sense of video game history at all and that the only reason they like garbage like DA2 is that they don't know any better. They simply have never experienced a real cRPG and have been conditioned to enjoy social simulators. Or it may just be that they've never played a game they didn't like. I suppose I could give my own review of DA:O although I haven't tried playing it in a long time. There are so many reasons why it as an awful game that it is difficult for me to believe that even a single person would have the patience to play it. I found it more tedious than washing dishes, and I am most definitely a cRPG fan. Perhaps if compared to MMORPGs it doesn't fare so badly, but compared to real games it is not even remotely worth spending time with. I guess young kids do have a lot of free time, but there are so many games that are far superior. A replay of BG2 for instance. Hell, even Arena or Daggerfall are far better games but compared to the ones in my sig Dragon Age is a crime against humanity. I tried so hard to like Dragon Age. I really did. I had been naively looking forward to it, hoping that despite my doubts they really had been attempting a spiritual successor to BG2, finally. NWN, and NWN2 (with the exception of MotB and to some extent SoZ) were both pretty big dissapointments to me. Although their aims to reproduce PnP gaming was quite noble and groundbreaking. I was one of those people that had been dreaming of a BG3 for years, but I had become accustomed to being disappointed by them by that point. What I remember is that you fight the same kind of creatures the whole time. The game is mostly about, to borrow a bit of mmorpg-speak, fighting 'trash mobs'. And it's not like the awful combat is rare. It's nearly constant. Everything about the fighting was awful and poorly thought out. Everything. I cannot think of even a single redeeming feature. Far from being a spiritual succesor, Dragon Age was the opposite of BG2 in nearly every way. Especially the combat, which followed the modern trend of popamole action game combat. That's what rakes in the big bucks and one of the reasons Obsidian needs to use kickstarter to fund the kind of game they used to make, not dumbed down with things like Awesome Buttons and twitchy popamole consolized combat. And of course, in the usual Bioware way, the writing would have flunked freshman English class. Is it really so expensive to hire a real writer like Avellone? Or is it just because an 'awesome button' appeals more to the masses and is a lot cheaper? A common paraphrase of H.L. Mencken is "You can never lose money by underestimating the intelligence of the general public." I bet that saying is sitting framed on a wall somewhere at the EA/Bioware offices. That really is how they think. They dont' care about gaming or gamers. To them it's just something little kids do. If Bioware had actually cared about a well written story they could easily have hired a real writer. After all, MCA may be the best writer in the world of videogames but he is not the only gifted writer in the world. Perhaps the doctors didn't care about the writing or just didn't know the difference. Of course even if they had hired a real writer he would have almost certainly have been fired when EA bought them. I used to consider Bioware one of my favorite developers. I still have my original boxes from buying BG2/ToB when they were released. I replay BG2ToB with Sword Coast Strategems probably every 6 months when I can find the time. But Bioware is no longer Bioware. They are now just a division of Electronic Arts and we know what kind of soulless, non-gamers who only care about money they are. To them there is no difference between Madden Football 2012 and Dragon Age 2012, and I would have to agree with them. Despite the horribly written, cliched storyline there is just something so enjoyable and even addictive about BG2 combat. In fact I love BG2 so much that I have for years been thinking of attempting to write my own version of BG3 using the GemRB engine perhaps and keeping all of the core elements that made the game so amazing. The only game I can think of with combat that may be somewhat better than BG2 is ToEE with it's incredible implementation of turn-based combat. Bioware's shift to non-strategic popamole, mindless, fast action combat is nothing short of a betrayal of all of their old fans.

I think some of you have to actually look up the word mature. It doesn't seem to mean what you think it means and frankly it doesn't apply particularly well to anything involving a computer game. I do remember even when I was young that kids liked to use the word far more than adults. Kids would say things like "Oh. That is sooo mature." in a sarcastic way. But just by saying things like that they are revealing themselves to be children because only children talked like that. Maturity is something that children idealize, but to adults, at least adults who aren't parents, it isn't a particularly useful word in daily life. And most adults don't spend a lot of time thinking about whether a thing/person is 'mature' or not. Generally speaking children do not engage in things like rape or necrophilia or torture or genocide. Those are generally adult pursuits. As such they are certainly just as 'mature' as any other kind of activity that adults engage in. Sex is often considered to be an adult activity, but I think teenagers are way more obsessed with it than adults. So I dont really consider sex to be a particularly mature subject. I think a better word for what some people seem to be talking about is seriousness or thoughtfulness. A story that takes itself seriously and/or ponders the nature of things in a serious way as PS:T did at least to some extent. It doesn't have to aim at any particular demographic. I was in my early thirties when PS:T came out and at that time I think I appreciated the dark themes of loss and death etc more than I would have as a teenager if only because by that time I had had experiences which sort of resonated with those themes. Even so I would have absolutely adored that game as a teenager as well just because I was always the kind of person that would have appreciated it. It doesn't matter whether you are 14 or 40. You just have to be the kind of person that likes to think about things seriously. A ponderer. If anything I was much more that way as a teenager than I am now. Most people are that way. They grow out of things like philosophy usually by their late 20s to early 30s.

The problem is you need someone truly fluent in more than one language just to proofread the translations, let alone make them. They have to have a real 'feel' for the language that you can really only get from living in a counry where it is spoken for some years. It can be difficult to find someone like that. For Spanish it's pretty easy here in the US. In Florida and California you've got people habitually starting sentences in English and finishing them in Spanish. Something I always find funny and interesting, although I've talked to some native Spanish speakers who find it annoying. IIRC, when I lived in Montreal I noticed nearly the same thing for French (although perhaps not quite so frequently), which was even more amusing. Miami and Montreal are both superb locations to find truly excellent translators for those languages. To make matters worse you always get people who think they are fluent in their second language but really are not. Nevertheless, for a text heavy game like this, translations seem like a must. So which langauges? Countries with at least some international cRPG development: France, Poland, and Germany come to mind. The idea behind this is quid pro quo. Countries with lots of native speakers: Spanish, Russian, and maybe Japanese and Chinese. I hesitate with Japanese because they seem so fond of their own jRPGs and with Chinese because I'm not sure the average Chinese makes enough money to donate a significant amount. Not sure about this though. China changes so fast. Still, Japanese make a lot of money. It would be nice to get into that market and the Chinese market is obviously so gigantic it's almost beyond imagining.

I can't believe anyone can actually play through DA:O, let alone DA2. It's about as much fun as watching paint dry. You guys must get really bored. Also, giving examples from those games as if you expected the rest of us to have played them is silly. If we liked games like that we wouldn't be here. Also minsc and boo were great characters...if you are like 5 years old. Nearly all the writing in BG2 and every other Bioware game ever made is/was laughably bad. Much of it seemed like it was written by and for preteens. I've played a lot of cRPGs over the years, and I haven't found many with worse dialogue or so called voice acting. BG2 is one of my favorite cRPGs of all time mostly because of the combat dynamics. Not because of the wriiting. If only Avellone had visited Canada more often to set them straight, but I guess he was pretty busy at the time writing his own masterpieces. If you want to talk about good companions you're pretty much stuck talking about PS:T or some other game where the writing was done by Avellone and other members of Team Torment. That's what I thought this thread was going to be about. This game is going to be modeled after IE games and mostly ones from Black Isle. Why not just accept that it's not going to be Dragon Age 3. Your already getting that. Maybe they'll even throw in an 'awesome' button if you're lucky. It sounds like you guys could use one of those.

While finding someone with good literary translation abilities can be tough, it is far from impossible. I support a player house as long as it takes no more than 3 hours of programmer time. All you really need to do is take any house in the starting city and assign it to the player. Whatever chest happens to be there will be a protected database of stuff you put in it. There. Was that so hard? I don't know why everyone is making such a big deal over that little thing. In FONV I used the chest in front of the arms merchant for the same purpose. When I played BG2 I used the chest in Cernd's house to store all my equipment. Is that what people mean by a player house? If so it's fine by me. If it's anything more than that it is an utter waste of time. Has anyone asked for anything more than a place to put stuff where it won't disappear?

Now that you've gotten your wish we all expect you to donate at least $500. We'll know because you'll have the gold forum badge.

Wasn't there also talk about an engine that Troika never finished? Maybe Tim Cain could get the code? It really is a disappointment that they aren't going to use Onyx. It seemed like a nice engine and the graphics reminded me a bit of Diablo 3 graphics (a good thing). It looks like we will probably end up with an engine thread similar to the one we had on the Wasteland 2 boards. Wouldn't it be simpler just to cut and paste that discussion?

I want the romances to be like the ones in Fallout 1.

The setup sounds very intriguing. Hopefully it can be used to build suspense and mystery about what really happened and/or is still happening to both yourself and possibly others. I'm particularly excited about this. It indicates that you understand the importance of a central mystery to build intrigue when telling a story. I'm glad to hear of some novel races to add to the more traditional ones. I hope that the ability to venture out with a party of 6 of your own rolled characters can be added in the future. It helps tremendously with replay value once you've played through with all of the companions. I also like the possibility of god-like characters or creatures. I liked references to The Lady of Pain in PS:T and liked how she actually interfered with mortal affairs from time to time and was considered a very real danger by the culture. That could probably have been developed a lot further than it was, but even so the presence of actual gods/deities in the story is exciting.

I'd like to see them use Unigine, but I don't understand why they cannot simply make some tools for their own Onyx engine and keep using the Onyx engine for future titles. One of the reasons we had such excellent IE games is due to the fact that they could re-use the engine. They would only have to adapt the Onyx engine once for this style of game and then they could continue to use it for years.