NoxNoctum

You should try playing a roguelike Caligula if you think immersion results from 1st person For example this game has been one of the most immersive games I've played of late: I remember the tension still when I was slowly hacking my way through a mountain in that game filled with various ice dragons and these Snow Giants that would chuck a boulder at you from offscreen and blind you for multiple turns. Creeping along VERY slowly (permadeath will do that do you ), carefully conserving my shields and various abilities for the crazed lightning mage that I had been told was up there, stumbling on scraps of a journal from an adventuring party that had gone before me and apparently gone mad and turned on each other before getting picked apart by the frost wyrms. THAT is immersion . Don't underestimate the capability of the mind's eye to trump anything fancy graphics can come up. That is what good writing (and permadeath) can do.

TBH I think my favorite fantasy style I've come across is whoever did the ToEE portraits. Anyone know who it was? Also some of the artists doing the Magic cards are pretty amazing.

Narration + drawn/painted stylized art is the way to go. Thief 1+2 are two more games that did this well. (a bit different since it's 1st person narration but same basic idea): That kind of thing sucks me in to the experience about 100x more than a custscene does.

I think they should keep it to the upper tiers. Those people are less likely to go nuts when they find some feature they don't like and start trashing the game all over the internet. The people who donated that much are going to give better quality feedback like already mentioned. Not to mention it's a huge incentive to people to donate more, which is a good thing.

I see a lot of people wishing for 4e mechanics in this game which I'm kinda confused about cause I've seen it trashed on Amazon and a lot of RPG sites. I've never played P-n-P (just never been around people who were interested in it unfortunately), but I dunno, it seems kinda surprising to me to see people on here recommending it all of a sudden? Anyways, I like the vancian system of memorizing spells, it adds a cool strategic element, but they would need to come up with a solid rest system if they're going that route. As mentioned already with the mana pool system you just always spam the same stuff every fight. Kinda lame IMO.

So is GOG going to be cool with selling a full priced game? I hope this doesn't mean PE will be budget priced at release. BTW, might want to update KS page, I don't see beta mentioned at the $140 tier.

Thanks a lot for compiling these man, I'll have to check out the page to read more. Lots of good info.

One thing I always liked about HOMM3 was how it would announce the week/month, for example "Week of the Badger" or whatever. I don't think it would be appropriate to give bonuses like it did in that game but just having a unique calendar system would be a nice touch.

Ya reach was a really fun mechanic in ToEE but I'm not sure it would work in RTwP

I predict 3.2-3.5 mil.

I want to be able to walk into a late game dungeon and get completely owned if I'm not far enough along. Likewise, early game enemies should prove no threat later on. Basically I want to see enemies stronger/weaker in one region of the map (designed for late game) and weaker in another.

Just don't make it open world... open world games really bore me

This entire thread should require posters to prove they've actually played New Vegas before posting, as the amount of posts that should be answered with "Have you even played New Vegas" now is getting downright ridiculous. We're literally talking 1-3 lines of dialog per character just to say gay people exist in the world too. Veronica, you could ask "Have you ever been in love?" and she'd answer "were you ever curious? Yeah, I was once. I like to think it was love, and I hope she felt the same. I haven't seen her in a long time though." You could ask what happened and hear that the BoS didn't support their relationship because they believe everyone in their small society has a duty to procreate. BAM, over. Aside from this she would hint at her sexuality if you asked her to stay close, with nothing but a joke about preferring leggy blondes that could be taking seriously or not. Arcade Gannon, he'd say "now why hasn't some lucky man swept this bachelor right off his feet?" BAM over. Done. This is all he says, aside from your ability to recruit him by flirting if your own character is gay, but you'd literally never develop a relationship with him or flirt again. But they didn't put that in because they were pressured into it by fans (right?), but because they thought it suited the story. I guess for me that's the bottom line. I want the story, the world, the characters etc in it to be dictated by Obsidian's good judgment and not by filling any fan demands whatsoever.

+1 on that. Innuendo is much more powerful than being super explicit.

As long as it's not put in just for the sake of shock value. Sometimes I feel like the sheer amount of rape and incest in Game of Thrones for example was just over the top. Every third character was a sexual deviant pretty much. No, that's not realistic.

Did you find it hateful and racist when reading LOTR and finding that there are basically no non-white races except for the vaguely middle eastern "Easterlings"? I dunno, for me I was just thinking "hey this is a great story" Though it's funny, IIRC the very minor Arwen-Aragorn romance was written in as "fanservice" for Tolkien's daughter. So I guess some writers can pull it off without it feeling contrived .

But when you start trying to put specific stuff in to fill a quota, you're thinking about something other than the quality of the story. It's just a bad way to approach things in general. This is plain as day in Bioware games where you see how forced and contrived it is when you come to the "token gay character" (or just romance option... it's obvious when you come across a companion you can romance... there's zero subtlety)

To me this is like someone demanding that Tolkien (or I guess GRRM would be a better example) put something in their next book to fit their particular group. It's just silly . Let them write a story and let the chips fall where they may.

I don't want to see them filling some "quota" like Bioware does. Their only focus should be good story, good gameplay and good and characters. Really romance is just lame anyways in these kinds of games. I especially disliked how in DA:O you couldn't be nice to the assassin elf dude (can't remember his name anymore), without him taking it as a comeon. I mean seriously?

So where's the blog post Sawyer keeps referencing in the video? I didn't see a link. Anyways, everything sounds great so far.

Exactly. I think it would be an elegant solution to both the run back to town to rest problem and the run back to town to offload loot problem.

Ya mount and blade handled it well. This could also be used to avoid people running back to town after every single fight. (either to sell gear or to rest safely or w/e) There was no busywork involved with M&B's system, you could just buy some bread when you were in town and it would slowly go down over time.

A few ideas: 1)I'd like to see resting have serious penalties if you're doing it in dangerous areas. I.e. camping in a swamp for more than a few hours will result in you catching a disease or something. Or just have there be a % chance to have something really dangerous show up if you keep insisting on taking a nap in some dark crypt. This would have to be balanced with rewarding the player to finish a dungeon in one go, so as to avoid having people running back to a village to heal safely. 2) Or, to avoid the above problem, you could have a food supplies system, where your supplies slowly dwindle the longer you go without re-supplying. Make it expensive enough to matter, and players will be encouraged to finish a dungeon in one go rather than going back and forth constantly. It would be a delicate balancing act though but if pulled off could be excellent. On the other hand maybe they should ditch consumables entirely and go to the Tome4 route, where you have various inscriptions and runes (limited number depending on class/level) that operate on cooldowns. (the system that game uses also has "saturation" effects, so you can't just spam everything constantly) One thing I've always hated about RPGs is how I feel like I have to horde mana and HP potions... having a cooldown system does away with that entirely. I really like the OP's idea though, the only problem I see with it is that you could have people going back to town to take care of all in safety. There would need to be an incentive to finish a dungeon in one go. This is important I think.

I hope they're decently challenging though. It's boring if they're obvious. If people want to ruin the experience for themselves by googling the answer that's kinda their own problem.

^I really like that, fits well with the souls thing too like you said.