MReed

You aren't alone in this camp -- but Overhaul Games is a part of Beamdog, so they are pretty much obliged to release as a Beamdog exclusive. Note that the devs get a bigger cut of the profits for Beamdog sales / downloads because of this relationship In any case, the devs have heard the requests to make it available on GoG, or at least downloadable without the Beamdog client, and they are exploring options to make this happen. But frankly, I wouldn't expect to see any progress on this front until several months after release.

<shrug> True enough -- but every developer had a first game, and I don't see any reason that Overhaul Games couldn't make a worthy sequel. For various reasons, I consider it very unlikely that it would be a direct sequel in any case -- at most, it would simply be a D&D game (likely using the 5E ruleset and lore) that happens to have the name "Baldur's Gate". But if that's something you want, Overhaul Games is your best candidate for making that happen.

All of the above are true -- however: There is a 100% offline mode, and the Beamdog client doesn't have to be running when you run the game (and there is no advantage of having it running, either -- no "Stream overlay", for example), and you don't have to use cloud saves. There hasn't been an explicit promise that there will not be day-0 DLC, but I'd be shocked if this was the case -- the devs have their hands full simply trying to get the product out the door. Tablets will have day-0 DLC, but that content is included in the PC version, and this was done to reduce the base price on tablets.

Also, the developers have indicated a desire to make a "BG3" should sales of BG1:EE / BG2:EE be sufficiently high to convince WotC to allow one to be made. So, that's another potential reason to purchase BG1:EE -- think of it as kickstarter where you get a free game upfront.

At the map level (e.g. the effect applies to all battles within the map) this could work fairly well. However, as described, the bonus areas would be (effectively) X,Y co-ordinates within a map, and I don't think that's a good idea at all. Battles in cRPGs should occur within a small portion of the map (one or two "rooms", effectively), and adding bonus locations like this would create strong incentives for the player to lure monsters from one end of the map to the other. In fact, this would likely be the only way to get monsters to leave the bonus locations that they started on, unless you added further mechanics to allow a player to "push" a monster away from where it was. In short, this isn't a strategic wargame, and features from these sorts of game are an awkward fit in standard cRPG games.

Just to be clear, yes, the original art assets were lost, and that dramatically limits what they can do as far as improving the original graphics. However, there are new areas (which obviously have new, high-resolution, art work) and they did some work with filters and the like on the original areas, which (supposedly) results in some amount of improvement at high resolution. Note that the developers have indicated that there will be further content (some paid-for DLC, some free) that will be created after release. No details on exactly what would be available beyond the fact that an "Adventure Y" is in the works. But... Yeah, BG:EE on PC isn't really all that good of a buy, as long as you are comfortable with modding your game -- not that hard with the various installers that are available now. As I see it, the primary market for this game is on the tablets, and even there for users that have never played Baldur's Gate before (and, likely, have never even heard of it). Whatever money Overhaul Games makes on the PC version is just bonus money from work that they were going to have to do to create the tablet versions.

I concur that the points you listed are, indeed, problems with the Vancian system implemented and that addressing these issues is reasonable, but... My feeling is that the approach should be "We start with Vancian as the base, and tweak around the edges to try to address these points" rather than the current approach of "We'll start with a blank slate, and try to come up with a spell casting system that doesn't have these issues".

Cool, those are cheaper anyhow. I'll check out one of them then. Having read all of them Drizzt books it'll probably be baldurs gate or Icewind. THanks I would recommend the Baldur's Gate series especially; it's kind of "in between" IWD and PS:T. Note that BG1 (&, eventually, BG2) are being "upgraded" to run better on modern hardware, and ported to tablets. Search for "Baldur's Gate: Enhanced Edition". The graphics are slightly improved, but the big advantage is that all of the mods are integrated, as are the bug fixes. Plus you get some unique content (three new NPCs, romances in BG1 if that's your cup of tea, some new adventure areas and the like) as well. On the other hand, it is more expensive than the GoG version, and it isn't out yet.

That is actually a very good point. Provided the spells are scripts (or something similar) and can be modified. Of which modability for this exact system will be unknown for some time. I have the same concern as with the difficulty slider issue, but more so: In the case of only supporting this style of gameplay via mod, the game certainly won't be properly balanced for "all spells are once per rest". If what you are looking for is a high level of difficulty, then sure, that's not a problem, but if you are looking for a balanced gameplay experience (which I am), then such a fundamental gameplay mechanic is going to be disastrous unless other massive changes are made at the same time.

I certainly agree with that sentiment -- I'm pretty sure the "I'll look at the demo if there is one" is with the understanding that this will only be available @ release (e.g. April of 13), not today. And you are correct that this all ideas are "up in the air" -- what seems to be "final" today is highly likely to change in the next few weeks, and be changed further when they actually have the game running and can test the system to see how it works. But... What I'm responding to is the philosophy behind the proposed spellcasting system -- and that philosophy is "The spellcasting system in D&D 2E / 3E isn't very good, and the defects can't be fixed by minor 'tweaks'". That is probably not going to change, and that's my concern.

The developer's positions on the spell system is still evolving (rapidly), but... Based on what is known at this point, some spells (low level) are now slated to have DA:O / MMO style cooldowns (cooldowns that are short enough to allow the same spell to be cast multiple times in a single combat). The behavior of higher level spells is a bit undefined (depends on which developer you read), but all developer posts / comments agree that they will have long enough cooldowns to prevent multiple casts within a single encounter.

This probably has to do with the fact that they don't actually have a magic system yet -- they just have ideas. And, furthermore, whatever plans they thought they had have likely changed as a result of feedback, so the "leading candidate" is changing from day-to-day / person-to-person depending on what feedback that particular person has read. To be technical, this is what happens when you are involved in a major programming project during the "Envisioning Phase". About the best you can say at this point is that cooldowns are definitely in, and some spells will be on "fast" cooldowns (reset during combat) and some spells will not. The cooldowns will be applied to an entire spell level rather than individual spells and will vary depending on character level (e.g. each time you gain access to a "new spell level", cooldowns on levels that you already have will be reduced). Whether there will be three categories of spells, such as 4E, only two sets of cooldowns (short / medium), or short / long / extreme cooldowns is unknown at this point (probably to the developers). This may not be settled until they actually have the game engine up and running (months away) and can play test difference scenarios to see what "works right". All of that being said, even a three tier, 4E system (top level spells are "once per rest") doesn't address my concerns. I have two major objections to such a system: 1) I don't like the notion of level based (rather than "slot" based or "spell" based) cooldowns at all, mostly because it eliminate the need for the player to decide between "Do I memorize two copies of spell X or one copy of X and Y just in case". Especially with the "spellbooks as physical entities that can be swapped in combat (w/ penalties)" mechanic in the game I really don't see the need to remove this element. The player has the option of memorizing two copies of "X" in his/her primary spellbook, with a backup spellbook that has "X & Y" that can be swapped in if they need "Y" for a particular encounter. 2) I don't like the "old spell level cooldowns get shorter as new spell levels become available" mechanic. Firstly, if most spells scale with level (ala D&D -- anything that reads "Does 1d6 damage / caster level") then it is entirely likely that your "low level spells" will be nearly as powerful / useful as your high level spells. I know that the 3rd level fireball spell was probably one of my top 3 or 4 spells even in BG2:TOB, and I don't think I'm unique in that way, and you've got to believe that this spell would be on a very short cooldown by that point. I wouldn't object to a system that had two "spell tracks" that ran in parallel: One track contained spells with long (> 10 minutes) fixed cooldowns (or recovered on rest only) and contained of powerful, scalable spells (in the 2E D&D tradition), while the other track contained spells with short (< 1 minute) variable (w/ caster level) cooldowns and contained "blah", fixed strength, spells (in the DA:O tradition). I'm not sure this system is better than Vancian magic, but if you have a phobia of Vancian magic, this is something worth a try.

Yeah, good idea, but I'm afraid that this doesn't work either. Enemies only have to face exactly one encounter in their lifespan (with the party), and they will (barring plot based intervention) inevitably lose that encounter. Thus, cooldown mechanics (except for the low level spells) are 100% irrelevent -- they will either have the spell (and use it once) or won't have it at all. I suppose technically they might be playing under the same rules as the player is, but practically speaking...

(snip) Obviously, it is entirely possible that Oblivion has a third choice that makes the points above moot, but... "Trust Oblivion" isn't a good enough argument for me, and I really can't see a way for them to "show their work" to convince me that they have found a third way. To be honest, I don't see why the general idea (which I personally like) couldn't be easily scaled by the three more difficult settings--numbers are more easliy scaled than binary, that's for sure. Then someone might say that 'normal' play shouldn't be diluted to 'require' a more difficult setting--if the very first difficulty setting can significantly increase the cooldowns and such or even remove them entirely, then at least the other two in combination should provide enough challenge for the really hardcore--and I seem to remember an Obsidian comment about allowing players to pick and choose among the difficult modes. Not sure. Yes, there was a dev post indicating that there would a number of options to set difficulty, and the length of the cooldown timers could definitely be one of them. But simply adding a "Base cooldown length" slider isn't really enough to resolve the issue. The game has to be balanced either with the assumption that "players will have most / all of their replenishable resources available for every encounter" or "players will need to conserve replenishable resources over multiple encounters". A game balanced for "all resources available" becomes insanely difficult when played the other way, and a game balanced for "limited resources" is insanely easy when the situation is reversed. This is, by the way, one of the valid reasons for objecting to rest-spam in IE games: If restspam is possible, then the developers have to create encounters that are challenging to a party healed to 100% with all spells available. If a player (for roleplaying reasons) wishes to not restspam, then they will feel that the game is trying to force them to restspam, by throwing absurdly difficult encounters at them. This is addressable as well, of course -- you could double up every combat encounter in the game, with one set used with low cooldown times, and another set used with high cooldown times -- but you've just dramatically increased your workload. It makes more sense to choose one or the other and balance the game for that, and the other group is just SOL.

Sure, it sounds interesting, but you can't get from here to there with the proposed mechanics. Radically different cooldown based mechanics, sure, but not with the rest of what they are proposing. To create situations where players need to conserve resources between combats, it has to be difficult to recover those resources. This difficulty could take many forms, of course -- in a Vancian system, it is based on how easy it is to rest, for example -- but there has to be some player-level cost imposed. For a cooldown system, this would mean that the cooldown times have to be very long: long enough that an "average" player would, playing at an "average" speed, have to go through several different encounters before the first cooldown timer expired. Right of the bat, then, the statement indicating that cooldown timers may expire during unusually long combats (meaning that in those combats, you might cast a high level spell early and be able to cast it again before the end) puts a cap on how long cooldowns can be, and a fairly low cap at that ("paused" time doesn't count towards cooldown time, after all). I can't think of any combat encounter in BG1/BG2/IWD that took as much game time as two normal encounters, much less three. Setting that aside, though (who knows how long they expect the average / long combat encounter to take in game time), the next problem is worse: given that the low level spells can be spammed to your hearts content, the only occasion you might want to pull out the "big guns" is a difficult combat encounter. More, the only time this would become an issue is when several difficult combat encounters occur in immediate proximity, as otherwise, you could just use your "big guns" on all the difficult combat encounters and let them recharge during the intermediate easier encounters. If several difficult combat encounters occurring back-to-back is rare (most likely) then having to make these sorts of decision would be rare as well. If several difficult combat encounters occurring back-to-back is common, then the game balance is poor. Obviously, it is entirely possible that Oblivion has a third choice that makes the points above moot, but... "Trust Oblivion" isn't a good enough argument for me, and I really can't see a way for them to "show their work" to convince me that they have found a third way.

Yeap, I agree -- until the P:E kickstarter, which inspired me to once again hope that the kinds of game that I enjoyed might make a comeback (or, at least, one last gasp before dieing for good). I still hold out some hope that Overhaul Games (BG1:EE / BG2:EE are successful) will produce the kind of games that I'm looking for, so I suppose I haven't yet learned my lesson. Any, hey, the new X-COM is pretty faithful to the original, so it is possible for old-style games to be published in today's market. So, maybe a future kickstarter project will be what I'm looking for.

Um, you must have read a different thread than I did -- I remember a large number of people arguing in favor of cooldown, either with the argument that "We should trust that Obsidian to do cooldowns 'right'" or "The combat system in Infinity Engine games was poor -- the game was successful despite the mechanics, not because of the mechanics". In any case, the point is moot now -- combat (level based) cooldowns are definitely in, and I'd judge that spell / counter-spell battles in the sense of Infinity Engine games is probably out. At this point, my expectations are a game that "feels" very similar to DA:O, but with maybe 50% of the content, which will probably be worth picking up when its out.

My feeling on multi-classes penalties is basically the 3E approach: When you level up, you select a class to advance, and you gain all the benefits of that class only. Character level determines how much XP is required to advance any of your classes, of course. This means that a level 10 character might have 10 levels in one class, be 1/1/5/3, or any other combination -- but not matter what, he/she has the same amount of XP. I don't support 2E-style multi-classing at all (simultaneous advancement in multiple classes), as it leads to the type of balancing problems discussed in the poll answers. Just to be clear here: Class related benefits shouldn't be front loaded (like they were 3E), and (generally speaking) skills gained from one class shouldn't be usable to satisfy per-requisites for abilities in another class.

Yeah, not that easy. To elaborate on the brief list that I provided earlier: 1) One of the computers has to maintain the rest of the game world (e.g. the position of monsters, state of quests, and so forth). A process has to be designed where this server transmits the data to the client(s). This leads to a number of issues up front: a) What happens if the designated server goes down? Is a new server selected from the existing clients and the game continues? Does the game display an error message? b) What happens if the clients and the server (due to lag) disagree with the state of the world -- for example, what happens if client A sees a monster as alive (and the player on that computer attacks it) while the server (the "system of record") says that the monster is dead? What does the server do with the invalid attack command? 2) Game saving / restoring a) Can only the server save the game? This is the obvious solution, but sucks if the server is not available but everyone else wants to play. b) When restoring the game, how do clients get matched up with characters -- especially since someone might move from one computer to another between sessions. Have to design a UI to allow the server to perform these matches, most likely (especially if you don't have a matchmaker server / user accounts) c) When restoring a game, what happens if the same number of clients that was available in the first place isn't available now? Who gets control of these characters (if anyone)? 3) Player / NPC interaction a) If the party includes companions, and the companions respond to "Talk" requests from players (e.g. "Banter packs" in BG1 & BG2), what happens if someone other than the "hero" starts a dialog with the companion? Obviously, the banter isn't going to make any sense if the hero isn't participating, so do we have to design separate dialog for this case? Perhaps we can just prevent non-hero players from talking to companions altogether. b) Can non-hero characters talk to non-party NPCs? Again, the dialog probably doesn't make any sense if the hero character isn't present. 4) Mechanics a) What happens if one player pauses the game, then dies of a heart attack? Is the game permanently paused? If any player can toggle pause, what happens when two players try to pause the game at very near the same time? The obvious behavior is that the game pauses, then immediately unpauses, which isn't what either person wanted. b) Certain mechanics may require the game to be paused to work properly (conversations, store dialog) -- what happens if one player starts one of these interactions, then dies of a heart attack? These are just of the top of my head -- I suspect the actual list includes 100s of items. None of these are unsolvable (as many other games prove, including BG), but they all take time to implement, and (much more importantly) they all take time to test. At the absolute minimum, adding multiplayer doubles the number of test cases that need to be tested & retested -- every test case needs to be executed once in single-player mode, and once in multi-player mode. Then, on top of that, you need to add multi-player specific test cases (as described above) to the multi-player testing. Trust me, it is a non-trival amount of work, even if your engine helps with some or all of the plumbing.

I'm still watching the Bioware forums, but it is more than morbid curiosity at this point. I'm pretty certain that the lesson Bioware learned from DA2 mechanics is "We didn't go far enough in making this an action game -- we should use ME3 mechanics as the model for the next title." Given my experience from DA2, I'm pretty sure they won't admit this, but that's what I expect to see.

Everyone has preferences when it comes to features (or just about anything else, for that matter). The difference between the two categories is "Are your preferences more accurately described as 'non-negotiable demands' or 'all else being equal, this is what I'd like'".

I only speak for myself, but as a multiplayer "hater" myself: 1) The primary reason that I don't want multiplayer in the game is that I don't want the type of player who like multiplayer to be a part of the community / audience for this game. Multiplayer gamers outnumber single player games by a significant margin, and if they join the community they will be a very loud voice when it comes to pushing for features -- features that will inevitably impact my single-player game experience. Maybe not today, but eventually. For example, there was an active thread over in the Overhaul Game's forum asking for PvP, party based, arena battles to be added in BG1/2:EE. I understand that's not what you want, but once the feature is in (no matter how limited), it will attract people who are currently ignoring this game because of lack of multiplayer to come and participate, and those people are the ones that I'm worried about. 2) A secondary reason is, as explained in my earlier post, netcode is not a trivial thing to write and it most definitely not a trivial thing to test. Even if it was a stretch goal, it is very likely that there would be some impact (no matter how minor it may seem) to the single player experience if multi-player was added. Since I won't use it, I (very selfishly, I'll admit) don't want to pay that cost.

I think the sentiment here is "Since this is a conclusively closed issue, you should stop posting / complaining about the lack of co-op play. You now know for certain that it won't be included, so... If you can't accept that, you should revoke your pledge while you still have a chance to do so." This is a reasonable sentiment -- there are certain features that, if excluded from the game, would make me revoke my pledge, and I'd prefer that Obsidian close out some of the long running debates on this forum (romance in particular) prior to the end of the funding people so that people can make an informed decision before their pledges are final.

Well, prior to P:E, they were the only company making party based, RTwP games. There were a couple of games from Europe in this mold (Drakensang: The Dark Eye and its sequel), but those were minor games in the US market at best. So, if you are talking about fans of this particular type of game then it is more or less impossible to keep Bioware's name out of the discussion. Note that the reference to "View Bioware games favorably" wasn't intended as an insult or anything, and my apologies to anyone that was offended (in this thread, I suppose, it was inevitable I suppose). Obviously, lots of people do like Bioware's games and feel strongly that Bioware is moving in the correct direction -- otherwise, they wouldn't be as successful as they are. For that matter, I'm certainly not a Bioware hater myself -- I even enjoyed the story in DA2 (pause for gasps of horror). However, Bioware has moved the mechanics of their games in a direction that I don't like -- and they've moved far enough at this point that the mechanics prevent me from enjoying the story. I have a similar reaction to the Witcher games -- love the story, despise the mechanics. In any case, I do NOT believe that someone who enjoys Bioware games can't also enjoy P:E, nor that they shouldn't have a voice in the development process. I do wish that they would be less vocal about their preferences sometimes... Yeap, I bought just about everything on that list. FYI: ME1 is worth playing, even from my point of view. While it looks like a shooter, it plays much closer to a RPG than you would expect. ME2, on the other hand, is a shooter with strong story, and I never finished it (got it for free). Jade Empire is also surprisingly good (despite appearances) -- from a mechanics POV, Jade Empire is "ME:0.5". Yes, this is the type of thinking that I had in mind when I wrote that bullet point -- specifically "...there has to be some sort of reason..." and "...earmarked as gifts for friends and relatives...". On the other hand, I've got a boxed game coming with lots of extras that I'll likely never open (if there is an easy way to do so, I'll decline to even have the boxed copy & extra sent to me), plus some absurd number of downloaded copies that I'll likely never give away or otherwise use. I donated based on "This is how much I can afford", not "What will I get if I donate this much". To be clear, there is nothing wrong with donating because of the tier awards -- heck, based on the funding reactions when tier awards were changed (especially adding beta access at the $120 tier), it is obvious that most people are choosing their donation level based on the tier awards. This is not a bad thing. Heck, people are investing $10k because (I assume) they really want to meet the folks at Obsidian and more power to them -- whatever gets the game funded. But... that's not true in my case, and I think that many of the people who fit in the "Interested primarily in features" bucket feel the same way.

Interesting discussion -- I agree with the sentiment in the original post, but also agree that it over simplifies things. I'd put it this way: There are two groups participating on this forum: 1) "Game oriented contributors": People who want a good game made by Obsidian / specific developers. The specific feature set of the game is mostly irrelevant to this group. 2) "Feature oriented contributors": People who are interested in a specific set of features. This group of contributors believe that having features "A", "B", and "C" (and not having features "D", and "E") is by itself the goal of this project. Members of group #1 are generally: More likely to have primarily determined their contribution level by the rewards associated with that tier, and are only likely to increase their donation amount if doing so gets them a new award. They are also more likely to view recent Bioware games in a favorable light. They are most likely to support innovation on Obsidian's part favorably ("They know what they are doing") They are most likely to support adding "options" to the game in an effort to maximize the commercial success of the game, especially as stretch goals. They believe the whole point of the effort is to make a game that sells lots of copies (e.g. to non-kickstarter contributors). This will enable Obsidian to make other games, hopefully without having to go through Kickstarter to do so. Member of group #2 are generally: Likely to have donated based on what they can afford, without regard to the awards associated with the tier, and are only likely to increase their contribution if a new feature is announced (or, more commonly, if a specific feature is excluded). Likely to have hated the recent Bioware games (in general, to have a very narrow definition of what "RPG" means). Violently oppose deviations from the Infinity Engine feature set. Oppose adding stretch goals that add "options", especially if those options would tend to broaden the audience of the game. They believe that simply completing the game and sending it to the backers is enough to make the game successful, even if it never sells a single retail copy. While they likely want a sequel, they believe that this effort should also be funded via kickstarter. Group #1 far outnumbers group #2, and members of group #2 acutely aware of this fact. This is one of the reasons that they oppose any effort to broaden the appeal of the game -- they are already in the minority, and bringing on new gamers will only make the situation worse. I'm part of #2, as is the OP. Not unsurprisingly, most of the posters in this thread are part of #1 (as they make up most of the posters on this message board).