Wolfenbarg

Unless there's an online component, there won't be a constantly evolving metagame, and thus no reason to constantly do updates. However, they will get plenty of feedback from people playing the base game which would allow them to make changes for the expansion. Otherwise it would be a money pit where they aren't getting anything in return. There are no micro transactions to live off of.

I'd pay for polish related things. Something like a more extensive score (more themes and little to no repeating music between areas), enhanced spell effects, voice acting BG2/Torment style (if that isn't present already), improved environments... things like that. I don't want them to go crazy with additional features and content that could just be added into an expansion or present in future content if it's more of an add-on Throne of Bhaal/Mask of the Betrayer style.

I hope these games aren't going to be full price at release. I can't imagine the average user spending 60 dollars on a throwback game. I also wouldn't call Kickstarter totally viable because it prevents a studio from taking risks. Transparency can be a lot of fun, but it can potentially be a ruining factor. Remember when elements of Half Life 2 were leaked on the internet in an unfinished state and the game was totally blasted by players despite not even being finished? Valve ended up scrapping a lot of that material and remains resentful of the event to this day. Similarly, we have seen a few elements of this game that were outside of our comfort zone and saw some vocal elements of the community get very angry about said details. If future games are self financed, we won't have to see them defend themselves over unfinished material and just enjoy games they wanted to make. I think that's a much more desirable end goal than seeing them rely on the community for years to come. We'll likely never see anything BUT Black Isle throwback games if that's the case.

I don't see it that way at all. The blight is driven by some kind of blind passion. Despite the cunning behind the horde's movements and strategies, they are undeniably animalistic in their execution. There is no thought or even goal behind their actions. Whatever you're giving to Morrigan isn't like that at all. It has the soul of an old god but the control and temperament of a person. You're potentially unleashing a living deity on the world who could uproot or destroy everything even more certainly than the blight ever would. That's not a happy ending, it's potentially trading an even worse future for a single life. It's the biggest gamble possible. To me that was totally unacceptable, and so Morrigan ran off and Alistar took one for the team because he wubbed me. That ended up being a very striking ending to me because I didn't see any way out of it. Every option available was bad. I mean you basically gave Morrigan a Bhaalspawn to save one person. What if you end up getting a Sarevok out of that? Of course that was when I was looking at it in the moment. By the time you get to Dragon Age 2 you see that franchising this series kind of ruins it. Instead of making a bunch of self contained stories across the globe, something as big as Morrigan's baby is too big to possibly factor in to future games. It's big enough to make a game out of itself. And if they did make such a game, they're most likely going to just put a magic fix button on everything instead of ending up with an upending change. But that's why we have headcanon, I guess.

I don't think the story will allow for you to have a group at the start. Whatever happens to you is unique to you alone. That wouldn't really make sense if you already started out with a party and any of them could logically end up being the main character, then.

Basically what I'm getting from this is "don't take anything from Mass Effect at all," which I totally agree with. Mass Effect was a neat storytelling idea, but in hindsight, it was also a colossal failure regarding what it set out to do. Not necessarily. Mass Effect 3 was a story based game they made unwinnable through the story. The overall advice there is that Obsidian should make sure the story always flows naturally and doesn't have an arbitrarily imposing obstacle that can't be overcome outside of the parameters of the world. Imagine trying to enjoy Lord of the Rings without the one ring as an achilles heel. It would suddenly be insufferable and any resulting resolution would be idiotic. This was also the problem Dragon Age 2 had. No matter what you did, everything always turned out exactly the same way because the game refused to let you have a lasting impact on the world. The game was unwinnable. It was less infuriating because the story was so different, though.

The art for this game is beautiful. When the final passes are done it's going to look pretty breath taking, I think. To me, the idea of covering that up with a cumbersome user interface just to harken back to the days when pause heavy tactical games pretty much only had the mouse to rely on is crazy. A good interface is functional while not being intrusive. It can and should rely on hotkeys to a certain extent if it's going to keep assets from obstructing your view. I mean we did go pretty gung-ho about making this a game for a mouse AND keyboard, right? Why waste valuable real estate to provide a majority of that functionality to only one of those inputs? I can't for the life of me see why Dragon Age: Origins is looked on as a bad example. The complexity of the systems within the game were far less due to the fact that they weren't based on dungeons and dragons. However, the range of inputs you had for the game are GREATER than what you could accomplish in Baldur's Gate by a longshot. Positioning actually has a very drastic effect on how the outcome of a battle will go, because the numbers reflect the change. Cross class and cross spell combinations are possible, and greatly increase your chances of success, which requires more finesse to accomplish. It's not like those things are hard, though, because the user interface doesn't fight against you when you want to accomplish those things. Meanwhile when replaying an Infinity Engine game, I always wish there was an update that could give me a less intrusive and more intuitive interface. I not only want to have greater ease of use, but I want to see the art. And most importantly, why is there so much anger, condescension, and frustration over something like this? Obsidian has made 3 sequels based on games with pretty bad user interfaces, and two of those games were incredible. I personally find Fallout: New Vegas to be their best game, and that game has one of the worst input selections I've ever seen. I'm not saying these things aren't important, but to see that the topic that gets people the most pissed off is something so trivial in the grand scheme of things is just madness. We have to be better than that.

Honestly, despite what a lot of people think, doing a Mass Effect 3 isn't easy. In fact, it's kind of difficult. The problem wasn't that they ignored lore at the end, the problem was that they ignored lore at the very beginning and turned their setup into an impossible scenario where only space magic could possibly be the cure. You trap the Reapers in dark space in the first game, then end their attempts to make a new vanguard in the second, essentially trapping them again. That's an important action, right? Well not really, because they just fly to the Milky Way in 1 year with no losses to speak of. They didn't have to come up with a new way to only send a few ships through, or cannibalize their numbers to return, or even forgo returning and incite a civil war with indoctrinated agents in a final attempt to open the citadel relay. They come through with full strength and enact the hopeless scenario painted to you in the first game. Essentially, Bioware made the game unwinnable from the very outset. The crucible and the catalyst are necessary to have a conclusion at all because Bioware made the big actions you took in the first two games pointless. You can start on number three and not miss any details, because stopping Saren and the Collectors basically had no effect at all. So as far as Obsidian is concerned, provided they don't create an unwinnable scenario in the premise of the game, then we won't end up in a situation where only deus ex machina or ancient magic will be the only cure. If the roots are good, the story can flow naturally. If they ignore the roots in an attempt to capture a new audience, then everything will be ****ed.

I guess it depends on how you gain experience. If it's Baldur's Gate style where encounters are harder but you level up faster and become sort of unstoppable even on your own, then I imagine going through the game would certainly be possible on your own. If you gain a set amount of experience per person for killing an enemy though... well, you'll probably need to be hammer the quick save/load buttons.

I'm pretty sure he meant compared to Bethesda's Fallout. It makes 3 look like a dud.

If they do Skyrim, I hope it's more civil war and less dragons. In fact, I'd love more of a war concept or focus for an RPG where there aren't really correct choices, just your choices. Something like New Vegas I guess, where we ditch the supernatural and just focus on good characters. No ancient evil doodads. I think we tend to default more toward those things because invoking character drama through game mechanics is a lot harder. As for episodic content... not for open world. That format works really well for linear experiences full of setpieces, but I think just opening new areas or making a world static until the next content pack might feel... weird. I'm not opposed to the idea on principle, though.

I understand the sentiment (I hope after Eternity that Obsidian will be able to self finance their independent games), but you have to understand all of the factors here. Developers don't assume as much of the financial risk in making a game, so they don't get nearly as much of the take when a game does well. Even if they do, Obsidian hasn't released a game since the last Kickstarter. The Stick of Truth was delayed. The only money that has gone into Obsidian recently has been from Kickstarter and publishers. They haven't had a product to profit on since Dungeon Siege.

If they did, everyone would complain how KS project games are bugridden, incomplete, and a very bad system. Not exactly a good thing, right? So they don't... No, that's just poor project management. You don't see these problems in any other commercial projects. And you don't do things like add new stretch goals to a project over a year later. That's atrocious project management. There are very real reasons why specific dates need to be nailed down. Uh... what? You mean you've NEVER heard of someone adding things to production and delaying as a result? Games add features, movies rewrite or reshoot scenes, corporations modify their product line. People make changes if it will make a better product. It's fine as long as there's an underlying idea that the product must ship at some point. I mean in this industry specifically, it's pretty much a 50-50 for a game to release on its initial announced date. For a lot of companies it's not normal for them to not announce a delay at some point.

The level of anger in these threads is always kind of shocking to me.

Nothing needs to be fully voiced. But if they want to give it the same amount of voice over work as PS:T or Baldur's Gate 2 and lack the funds, that could easily be remedied. That would hardly effect the overall game in a negative way. No one said anything about turning this into Fallout.

I'm sure you could pull off either of those looks if you wanted to. You just really have to work it.

I don't get it. One of the points of crowdfunding is transparency and getting feedback from the community. Whether or not to go turn based is a big decision, and one that would make people pretty angry if they just decided it by default. It have gone completely the other way, with a majority voting against turn based combat. Do you really think that the decision was set in stone and they would refuse to rethink their systems? I don't think so. They wanted to know what people thought before hitting a point of no return.

Papers, Please is pretty good. I enjoyed it a lot. However, despite how many endings it has, there isn't really any replay value. At least not in the short term. I wish I didn't spend 10 dollars on it. If you can find it for 5 or so, then snatch it up.

You're making the vote sound a lot more scummy than it actually was, Panda. From the outset they wanted to make it turn based, which fundamentally changes a system if this is going to be at spiritual successor to Planescape. Before they really get into developing those systems, they probably (wisely) thought that people might get really pissed off if they just make this turn based without asking what people thought. If the numbers were significantly against them, then they'd know they were making a mistake and could rethink their approach. It was split, so they went with their initial decision. Of course they talked up the merits of the system they wanted to use, because they're trying to convince people that the change they wanted to make was a good one.

No thank you. If they're too strapped to pay talented voice actors for the bits that they want in the game, they can add a stretch goal that would probably be met the very same day.

This just in: Guns have been digitally replaced by walkie talkies. But the team is considering putting them back in as a stretch goal.

They're still in. Josh talks about them specifically in the PC World interview.

I'm doing the same thing. Even if the pillars themselves end up being really cool or important, as a title it just lacks a certain something. It also totally reminded me of the Pillars of Nosgoth, which is just a really cool name. Eternity it is and forever more. Unless I come up with my own title for it... Josh Sawyer and Friends Superstar Adventures in Dreamland? I'll just stick with Eternity.

Their development cycles in the past were about 18 months for games which already had an engine made. They started turning out assets pretty fast, and they seemed to have had a jump on pre-production before anything really got going. Two years flat seems about right, unless they present some massive stretch goals and people go crazy for them.

Agreed. It may not be steampunk, but a lot of ideologies could kind of cross over to Arcanum and make it feel samey with Eternity. Bloodlines would be a totally different kind of game.