Ieo

I personally suggest looking over research on game software interface usability. To be honest, I hate the IWD1 UI. But I don't know what the IWD2 UI looks like, so I'll have to look into that later... Hm, in relation to AI, what about the ability to actively protect a party member that's being targeted by an enemy? There's an interesting thread on threat-vs-charge-vs-other mechanic... Although that could be an additional skill purchase or something at higher levels, dunno. The per-encounter would be tier-locked cooldowns? And is the grimoire-switch cooldown still in? Tons of fascinating stuff in this update--thank you! (P.S.: The beard itching is hilarious.)

I'm not sure if encounter scaling specifically is in either, but I like the idea (perhaps within a range--like a 4-level creature difference, etc.). Overall, the proposed (what little we know, anyway) partial scaling sounds fine to me and makes sense in a very broad exploratory world. More reading: http://forums.obsidian.net/topic/60883-level-scaling-confirmed/

To be fair, having a nice speaking voice != good narration or good acting or good singing. Audiobook narrators would seem to be a natural fit with voice acting... At least better auditioning than merely reading a snippet or so would be needed. But back to the arguments against this idea that was proposed before: time and resources to cull auditions, problems in recording hardware consistency (either fly people into the studio or ship recording hardware), and so forth. So around the circle again, it really seems just having Obsidian pick from their known/preferred talent pool is the most efficient way to do VO. I imagine this is especially true when NPCs of depth are being written as we speak, and typically the writer/creators already have a voice type in mind. This would be less an issue for those random "commoners," I guess.

There's level scaling (level number) and encounter scaling (type of mob), a bit different. MMOs tend to do level scaling. BG did encounter scaling and minimal level scaling within a certain range for certain things (e.g. meeting a new party NPC) or somesuch. Also, http://forums.obsidian.net/topic/60889-level-scaling-dont-scale-individual-enemies-scale-encounters/ That said, given what Obsidian has basically decided already.... mm, whatever.

If there's anything I don't want in regards to voice acting, it's a well known narrator. She'd be far less than perfect imo. Baldur's Gate did it right. Great narration by a voice most were unfamiliar with. If any known voice actor was used as the narrator my vote would be for the same guy who did BG. I'm less interested in the fame of the narrator (I'm not familiar with the actress herself, actually), though I'd love a rich, female voice with some real gravitas, bearing, stage character. Like how I'd want the original artist for the first Sagani pic to do the rest of the portraits, not that guy who did IWD and a bunch of other games (). Kevin Michael Richardson was great in BG, but the woman narrator in IWD was quite... meh. Even so, managing to get someone like Kestelman due to a tried and true pedigree across different media (including necessarily games) would be far less annoying than some Youtube-fan-artist-cover-of-the-day. So I'll really put my vote in for a deeper-voiced narrator (male or female, but I'd like a great female narrator for once), textured and wizened, with great projection of stage character and such. I'm on a current Richardson kick with BG:EE...

@PrimeJunta: It bothers me intensely that "burn the" isn't centered. Intensely. On a related note, I request that Obsidian be completely consistent in their choice of VO over the life of the entire franchise. I'm currently playing BG:EE, and the new party NPC content was horribly implemented. Why? One reason is because BG1 proper only had partial VO (and minimal interjection compared to BG2), but the new characters are completely voiced. It's slow, extremely jarring, awkward with the missing sections when the NPC is trying to refer to your PC by name, and even more annoying when the new NPC is voiced and a (newly added) response from an old party NPC is completely not voiced. Not to mention hit or miss with crappy acting. Dear Magran, if you're going to do partial VO, stick with it the whole way including expansions and sequels for ****ing consistency. THANK YOU.

I'm really curious how this is going to balance out against custom portraits: Hm, otherwise..... A soul-speech skill? How interestiiinnnnng.

Spot on. I agree that there should be discussion--in the realm of finessing and asking for clarification around specific cases and whatnot, but there's a particularly vocal group that can end up damaging PE in terms of viral hearsay and wild assumptions leading to (wrong) conclusions based on absolutely nothing. Hysteria in a vacuum bottle. Inability to see things from the perspective of a developer and a gamer (or refusal to even accept the developer side of things). The last thing we need is a chilling effect on either end... But what, really, is the IE "spirit"? Was it really D&D rules and Vancian magic for most players? When it comes right down to it, the Kickstarter page itself bears repeating: Project Eternity will take the central hero, memorable companions and the epic exploration of Baldur’s Gate, add in the fun, intense combat and dungeon diving of Icewind Dale, and tie it all together with the emotional writing and mature thematic exploration of Planescape: Torment. (With several other known details thrown in, like isometric party-based RTWP.) You're looking at this through the narrow lens of not only a pure consumer, but a reactionary consumer of a traditional game product that has already reached market and was not developed in public. Truly, what other Kickstarter games have you been involved in from the very beginning, as an actively conversational observer, including alpha and beta stages, where too much innovation in 1-2 years of publicized development ultimately came back and killed the game experience out the gate? What you're exhibiting isn't a mere concern about game development approach but a basal unawareness of the current preproduction process. It doesn't make sense to be overly cautious at this stage; of course there are unknown variables--Obsidian has a $4.1 mil blank slate. We have a year of public vetting and tuning, possibly more. This isn't a private Bioware venture that wasn't thoroughly market tested (e.g. SWTOR). This isn't a typical game development cycle by a long shot where players get no say at all besides bug reporting and stress testing in a late week-long beta after all mechanics and content are already set in stone. Obsidian will most likely have testers before the $25 betas, so worrying about nebulous exploit potential at this preproduction stage where many mechanics aren't even proposed yet is futile. They have been and will continue to publicize systems and such until whenever these things are solidified sometime in 2013. As we get towards the finer points, if something doesn't appear to work after scenarios and scenarios are posed, and the forums are set afire in unanimous distaste, then I doubt Obsidian would go forward with something--certainly not as-is without other mechanics (because, as we all know, you can't pick at a single mechanic without considering its purpose in relation to all other mechanics in the system and in tandem with player behavior and expectation). So there's a healthier version of skepticism: Ask specific questions or pose specific scenarios and try to be mindful of exactly what assumptions you're inserting. As an example. I like the proposed back-loaded objective-based xp mechanic. Its purpose is quite clear and should serve to flexibly reward multiple playstyles, increasing replayability and roleplay/consequential opportunities. There is a real concern that world exploration with epic monster battles would suffer due to lack of concrete incentive: The counter in the proposed objective-based xp mechanic is that world monsters would basically not reward xp. Assumption: experience for killing world monsters has been a staple reward for the epic exploration we'd expect in the likes of Baldur's Gate. So I'll ask Josh-- How will he handle the player desire to be rewarded for world exploration and epic battles? What about world exploration battle fodder, like a random village of xvarts in BG1? Players probably want to see both types of encounters during exploration and be duly rewarded somehow. I can think of a few possibilities: * Loot only * Tiers of monster types (e.g. objective-based enemies that give no xp versus epic enemies that do) * Tie all epic enemies to loosely structured "quest objectives" (e.g. a mere rumor could be mechanically flagged as a quest) Or maybe Josh has an interesting idea out of left field, like tier cooldowns+grimoires, that players would have never guessed. P.S.: "Every first-time player?" **** that, I always multi-classed when possible. My first character in BG1 was a Fighter/mage/thief, and I think I had 6 hit points. My favorite through BG2 was the nonsensical cleric/thief (how do you backstab with a mace?).

I'll have to agree with this. Ultimately, people did not back the PE Kickstarter for specific mechanics. (I mean, maybe a few did, like Vancian magic, but they didn't "get" the basic Kickstarter at all, apparently.) We backed the Kickstarter for the gameplay experience, hearkening back to specific titles. This means the "feel" of the execution is going to be far more important to the average PE player than specific numbers; let's face it, the vast majority of backers definitely aren't on these forums. It's entirely possible to be tactical with widely varying mechanics. It's entirely possible to have dialogic depth with different character systems. And despite all the nostalgia, the old games had their fair share of particular global flaws. This is why I'm not sweating the big stuff and leaving that design to the game designers who know what they're doing, both in development and in playing games, so long as their overall approach is one of balance and choice. Ahh, multistage scripted MMO bosses. Huzzah.

I never suggested the PC could do anything to save the relationship, or that it would fall apart. Besides, what you do with the characters is up to you; iDon't think P:E would tell you that a decision with them was "wrong" going by what the devs said. But do you just want slabs of meat to cast spells and swing swords? Because I gotta break something to you then. You can find a lot of that elsewhere, probably done with better tech and a higher budget than you will here. If you're not interested in the people, regardless of whether or not you want to be a "relationship counsellor," why exactly do you want to play an Obsidian game-- particularly this Obsidian game? You're going about this all wrong. Think about the Kickstarter target audiences (yes, multiple)--spanning PS:T to IWD. Did you play IWD? It's a full-on tactical game. There's a considerable audience for that sort of play, and this is why Obs is adding the Adventurer's Hall. Josh is a mechanics guy. There's a considerable audience for PS:T depth as well (me, and I'm okay with a Fall-From-Grace level of implication) along with those who desperately want BG's exploratory epicness (me too, but minus the ham-fisted adolescent romance options). Speaking of ham-fisted adolescent romance, I'll advise Obsidian how NOT to do romances, if they were to be added: I've barely started BG:EE and one of the new romance options is horrific. Absolutely terrible. Flirting on the second or third banter (barely a week of in-game time), out of character for the basic NPC design even though my PC barely knows anything about the NPC outside the scripted background. There has been no development at all besides asking questions. This is not how it should work in an actual relationship, guys. No thank you, current-Bioware-style, but I'm going to send this one to a hellish death...

I agree that cutscenes should be fully voiced. But.... that also requires very good VAs. Quest/interaction dialogues are another matter. I think the vast majority of players here don't want the PC to be voiced besides the basic selection/combat soundsets. I've started playing BG:EE, and I must say that I don't like how the new characters were implemented. They are fully voiced. This is completely inconsistent with the existing characters (partially voiced in default content and completely unvoiced in new content), very jarring when they speak lines containing the PC's name and leave an empty void where that name would be ("Wait, are you___?"), and the pacing is thrown off due to the difference between established reading rates and waiting for a VO to complete. Moreover, one of the antagonists I've met so far has a horrible voice actor. Any normal person can tell instantly if someone is merely "reading the script." Flat. Something "off." With full VO, this tastes far too, well.... current-Biowarean. I'm a bit disappointed at the moment, really, but anyway. The logical problem here is that you're coming at this from a very flawed premise: That what you see as the consumer is the exact replication of the ideal product the developer wanted to make. How could you possibly know what initial depth was chopped and edited out in favor of full VA? Why not ask developers themselves? To wit, in a Joystiq interview with Brathwaithe and Avellone ("Voice acting in RPGs may be more trouble than it's worth"): And additional thoughts from Avellone in the article, particularly about AP, Fallout 2, KoTOR2.

I'd rather Obsidian come up with three titles they like and then put them in a forum/KS poll. @TMTVL: Soulcery?

@Bli1942: I'd say that Project Eternity is just the code name for the overall Kickstarted project. So I'd rather avoid "common singular dictionary words easily lost in Google searches" myself. It should either be a portmanteau or a minimum two-word string, IMO. Not bad, but you missed one of the trifecta... Baldurscape Dale: Tales of the Dyrwood Coast (for the first of a trilogy plus expansion, naturally) Ah, shoot. I can start BG:EE proper today. Ciao!

YES!! this was a key reference image that I used. Again this drawing was exploratory, to contribute to the conversation of architectural style. It's not necessarily going to be in the game. There are others, and they are all color, but i didn't post them yet. Can you post the buildings location in Google maps?? Are there other buildings in your town like this, because yes! we do like Romanesque. For some reason, I find this really awesome. That someone came to this forum, looked at the pics, thought one of them reminded of something in his town, mentions it....and it turns out they're right and it was a major part of the inspiration. Wow, I agree. Talk about a random cool factor there. HEY. HEY LOOK. That building has a handrail and wall around the 2nd floor door! Please add those to your reference WIP graphic. Yes, that is the extent of my current criticism. Okay, carry on...

The poll is STILL dumb, because any smart person can see that "romance" is "love+sexual attraction*," ergo none of the other options even make sense for the question. Oh, they've been mentioned plenty, just not discussed. People tend to skim right over them. My primary post still bears repeating. And with my other post about the sociological research done on the romance mass media genre so far, I think we can see that a lot of the posts about getting romance into the game because it's the "height" of human interaction--that's a dysfunctionally simplistic view about human relations, actually. Would they add flavor? Yes. I just don't want Obsidian to sacrifice a bunch of character writing in favor of a long-winded application thus because we have so few characters to work with, while you skipped the vast majority in BG2 anyway. Fall-From-Grace was a very well written non-romance because you could easily read between the lines if you wanted to, but so much was left to the imagination as well (and Avellone said she was his favorite character in PS:T to write!). I'd go with that, at most. Out of Kieślowski's Trois Couleurs, I've always loved Rouge best, though, as touching more deeply and broadly upon the human condition in ways so few other works have done. (Okay, I couldn't stand Blanc on its face, but artistically, it was very well done too. Just ouch.) *Only in the character relation sense, not the other ones.

Why would you think this? "Need"? "Make sense"? Oh, right. You have no inkling of evolutionary biology.* Actually, especially if there is an Aumaua companion, the race should be land-based even with maritime leanings. Otherwise it would be unreasonable for an "aquatic/amphibious" physiology to cavort through the widely ranging geographies of PE with the party. In our world, there have been plenty of land-based humans with extremely strong oceanic ways of life throughout history recorded and unrecorded, yet none of them had gills or sharp fish-tearing teeth or such from prior ancestral stock under the same living conditions. Interestingly, they all had prehensile hands and could manipulate complex tools and materials, thus removing a significant portion of natural selection. Interestingly, Aumaua look like they have prehensile hands too, if you squint hard enough. *And before someone says that it's a fantasy so that much detail isn't needed, that post is entirely based on a false assumption of evolutionary needs to begin with.

Really, my biggest issue with the concept art so far: The staircase up to the second floor of the house has no wall or handrail or anything. SAFETY ISSUE? Can't agree with this sentence at all. "good designs should tell a story all by themselves". Agreed. Aesthetic and narrative may be related only in the basal sense (e.g. this culture ekes out survival in the coastal tundra, therefore decoration is limited to char staining, and clothes are all dull gray from sealcattle hides), but a mature audience should also remember not to "judge a book by its cover." It's all fine to me so far. (Forton's leg notwithstanding. )

I think I mixed up skill checks with stat checks in one of my previous posts, which PST definitely did have (and which definitely created unbalanced play by class type). Anyway, PE will have dialogue stat checks in the low end, but I don't remember if they said there will be any for the high end. Preferably, neither skill nor stat checks would overshadow the actual roleplay decision-making aspects of PE dialogue. Carry on...

There was a thread a while back theorizing possible names (and offering up a lot of suggestions, half of which were jokes I guess), but yeah.... I guess we're stuck with PE until further into development. No idea how game naming is done as a matter of course in the industry. I agree there should be a subtitle; that allows for both recognizable branding and some sort of continuity into the franchise, assuming there will be one.

Good point, perhaps you can still be random encountered in a city, but the chances are lower (perhaps 20-30%). There are usually city guards protecting the streets afterall. I guess my point is that I don't want "railroading" type mechanics in this sort of game. You should be allowed to do whatever you wish. If you want to rest anywhere, then you can. But there are risks to this and it becomes a legitimate reason why you shouldn't rest. Not just "don't do it because I said so." This should be true with most things in the game. You should be able to do many things, the question is whether the risks are worth the rewards of doing any certain act. You might think it's "railroading" because as concepts are proposed, players typically take them and sprint down the path of railroady "omg this is gonna break the whole game/my playstyle!" assumptions without context to other possibilities. I'd suggest that players basically take a step back and remember that Obsidian in several places have said that player choice is paramount to the game experience, even if mechanics are crafted to nudge in certain directions, rather than hardlining. This is a Kickstarter! Just read the dev forum posts, and you'll see that player flexibility is foremost on their minds, because game industry devs with years of business experience are very aware that there are different ideas of "fun." Everything is WIP. Holistic game mechanics are like spiderwebs--you can't just pull out a thread for study without taking into consideration so many counterbalancing things. Including player behavior. Players do not have the capability to see the high-level top-down view of development (and while I really appreciate that Obsidian is sharing so much with us, part of me thinks it's actually dangerous for Obsidian to do so when the initial reactions almost always magnify things out of context, even if said context hasn't been fleshed out yet; case in point, cooldowns). Anyway. In BG (both), I think it was essentially impossible to rest in cities because the guards would interrupt you for vagrancy. (Maybe this didn't apply to Athkatla slums district, but I don't remember now.) So I can see forced policed in cities within socially acceptable limits, and then free resting with variable risk (maybe tied to modes) between wilderness and dungeon areas. Among other things.

Boo! Hiss! Boo, I say. Ditto! I thought this was an "old school CRPG"? So, why are we stepping away from skill and attribute checks in dialogues and instead are making it "E for Everybody"? Why? Did you read? I'm interpreting Josh's interview comments (the entire thing, not the conveniently reduced sentence above) to mean they want to shift away from skill/att points controlling initial dialogue checks to actual roleplay dialogue choices with long-term consequences. Which sounds better. That was certainly an unbalanced weakness in PS:T, as much as I loved the game.

Thank you for that update. Just out of curiosity, and assuming that there will be giant-sized creatures, if we take the mace from, say, a Storm Giant, will it scale down to the party proportions when we equip it? (Say, a two-handed mace-like weapon.) Or will it simply be unusable? I wonder if that racial size difference could be more easily implemented as hammer of giant-uses-2H-as-1H --> we use giant hammer as 2H. (Edit: Which I guess is what you suggested in the parenthetical, ha. When you said "scale down," just assumed 1H -> 1H.) I believe I saw somewhere that armor from different sized races would auto-magically fit our characters, though.

You should read the Kickstarter. Short answer: No, PE will not take the game "essence" of TOEE. ESSENCE (all of this is on the KS front page): Baldur's Gate exploration and breadth Planescape: Torment narrative depth Icewind Dale combat mechanics PE is not a D&D game because it doesn't have the license. The only things from TOEE that PE is taking are the 3D model avatars and objects, IIRC. Gear item slots are standard in virtually all CRPGs, so that has nothing to do with TOEE.

Daaammiiiiiitttt, I can't watch this at work. Someone post a transcript, plz.

Im in favor of resting, just not having to hump back to some "safe spot" to rest. Thats unfun for the sake of replacing a mechanic that works fine. In prior IE games you could rest (almost) anywhere you wanted. I am fan of free resting also and I have impression that resting freedom in PE would be similar as in IE games and safe resting spots are only areas where there is no possibilty for random encounters. Right, a similar rest system may be adopted since that was a universal party mechanic, but it may also be very different. This whole conversation is a perfect example of what Josh was saying. How some player whines about proposed mechanic A while assuming B even though the details of B have not been discussed (yet), and undoubtedly even if B is explained, someone will continue to whine about A. There could even be a C in there. If the magic cooldown is mechanic A, then B is time and C is tier application and D is the grimoire. So why assume anything about rest mechanics and then whine only about the health/stamina mechanic? Express concerns about the rest mechanic in relation to that. WIP and big picture--If you have awesome ideas to finesse the proposals, then say so. For rest mechanics tied to the health/stamina mechanic, I could see rest-anywhere-with-variable-risk and a once-a-day ability to drop a camp, or something. As for hit point bloat... I'm pretty sure there was no mention of dying in 2-3 sword hits.