Ieo

I think it's important to view a potential "flee" mechanic in light if save/reload behavior as well. On one hand, players may argue that there's no point to flee and you might as well fight to the death because you can just reload and either try again or wait until you're higher level; the abstract issue with this view is that it's metagame strategy. It'd be very interesting, IMO, to have an actual flee-regroup mechanic developed to off-set that and to also offer combat flavor:

Maybe there won't be predefined rest spots. Maybe you can rest anywhere with varying degrees of random spawn interruption. Maybe the difficulty modes will alter that ability. Maybe crafting will have first aid for basic field service up to a limit. Maybe there will be a temporary camp mechanic that you can set down. You're doing that vacuous thinking thing that so many hysterical boys did at the mere mention of cooldowns (that is, thinking about an individual mechanic concept in a vacuum, without any context to additional possibilities)... In the old IE games, if you ran out of potions/healing spells, you had to rest in predefined areas to get back those healing spells in order to heal (and possibly rest again to have a full stable of spells for the next fight)--or rest outside and risk interruption. So the dual approach is actually more forgiving. There are two prongs to this that when taken apart and viewed without that rational big picture can certainly appear broken: On one hand, the stamina regen makes the Internet Tough Guys squeal in rage because they feel that dumbs down combat "strategy" and makes fighting too easy. On the other hand, the health heal-only-by-rest makes the Internet Wussy Guys squeal in rage because they feel that makes combat far too punitive. Heh. The way I see Obsidian's approach to all of this: Big picture is viable resource management for all classes in any given combat setting. We have a tiered and prop-dependent cooldown system for magic classes. This evens out the lack of categorical auto-attack and rest-spam flaws of the old systems. But that was a form of umbrella resource management over the entire party, so where does that go? We have a health/stamina dual system that requires rest for full health but you can continue to plug away at adventuring at the risk of greater injury or death if you don't rest. In other words. The high-level resource management appears to have been shifted from one set of classes to all classes. And I think that's totally fair. Is there room for more finesse and additional interesting mechanics and such? Absolutely. I fully expect related mechanics to appear or the ability to turn on/off things in difficulty settings. But I'm very much in favor of the big picture concepts so far.

Eh maybe. Talk is cheap as they say, you should be based on your actions in and of themselves for the most part. Talk is just a very easy low risk form of action after all. If you say "I will save the orphans!" then do it, well that really shouldn't factor in. If you say "I will save the orhpans!" then you fail, or worse, purposefully botch it then if anything your reputation loss should be worse. But if they don't bake that in through some means I will live. The "Planscape" method was considerably too specific. We don't need five different versions of "Yes I will do it." There's the basic speech->action model of interaction and then there's persuasive rhetoric. Actions don't always speak louder than words, especially when thinking about higher-order, very complex social interactions where either action or speech can influence multiple things. For example. There is a leader of a clan set to execute a "criminal" (by their laws), whom you wish to save. However, maybe you also want to remain on the leader's good side for other reasons. You could slaughter the entire clan to achieve that end, but it would break your other goals/desires. You could break the criminal out of jail and risk antagonizing the clan and be banished, but perhaps that way there wouldn't be death, but you'd lose all faction reputation. You can try convincing the guard to do something. You can try to persuade the leader. Bargain. That sort of thing. I wouldn't say talk is always "low risk"--you can easily set off a war just by saying the wrong things.

I disagree. The fact is, historically players have never had such insight into the game development process at all; it's traditionally very black box. I have no doubt mechanics discussions at the high level went on in the background for all other games as well. Think about the original IE series--they're famous for interpreting the AD&D tabletop ruleset into CRPG terms. Game balance, class balance, player progression tables--certainly in good games, these must all receive critical attention whether they end up perfect or not. We just don't hear about how they do it otherwise. When a final product comes together, the coding is executed so quickly and combat is so engaging and story and character all so immersive that we don't think about such things. At least, that's ideally how it pans out.

No "open roaming" so there's no point to having a giant canvas world. Nor would it make sense because you'd need a realistic space between geographical regions for geological formations and climates to have logical progression (and it sounds like PE will have significant geographical range). Technically, it'd probably be impossible from the computing-power standpoint due to the tremendous size (file and otherwise) of the hand-painted art--the reason why "open roam" 3D can do that is because a lot of the art assets are repeating from a library or something, and you can disable stuff like "grass" to help render graphics faster. The hand-painted quality of the large and discrete IE-style maps makes each unique and not appropriate to repeating/tiling/whatever. Old-school all the way.

I hate wasting time looking for a safe spot to "rest" to get spells back so my dead-weight mages could be useful in the next fight. Strategically going through a combat scene thinking "I should save this for later--even though this demonknight critter is currently kicking my ass and half my party may die" is hardly good tactics either. But Josh is on the same page with that, so I'm good.

With character models this detailed, faces will be clearly discernible (unlike, say, in the Infinity Engine games). ---- How will Project Eternity solve this? Will the character creation screen give users so many customization options for the protagonist's 3D character model, that one could, say, create a 50 year old fighter with a rough and scarred face and steely glance? Or a 19 year old mage with a soft, tri-angular face, narrow eyes, and an appeal of playfulness and irresponsibility? Or will we simply get a few fixed 3D models to choose from? My guess, a couple of standard faces with a choice of hair, beard and the colors of those and skin. One might hope for body types, but I'd call that a longshot. I don't mind standardized as long as there are "enough" choices----though another issue is whether the model face will automatically match a painted portrait. Portraits are one of the standard areas of customization, with tons of collections available for importation in the old IE games (except PS:T). So how would that work out...

This is what I really like to see: High-level, big-picture thinking about the player experience. Josh is right--all too often, when looking at a product (game) development in relation/opposition to players, the players themselves come in with such biases that blind them to larger cohesive thinking such as multiple mechanics working in tandem, the flaws of old nostalgia, and so forth. Ah well. I like all of the proposed mechanics so far because I understand the reasoning behind them and know they're WIP anyway.

I encourage our character artists to start high on the poly count. Edair is under 4k--so "high" for this kind of game. This allows for more flexibility, as we can always LOD the assets down to lesser numbers, as needed--in some cases, automagically.The number of enemies will not be restricted because of poly count. intelligent combat AI, pathing and collision avoidance are the more costly CPU processes that will determine enemy counts, not to mention quite simply: "Designer Requirments" for an entertaining and manageable battle. I'm not a fan of swarm enemies (DA:O being a good example of few enemy types but lots of them), but flexible combinations offer more diversity in combat, sure. Also, about this graphic density/quality per others' concerns---this is a basic rule for art in general, back when I worked with physical->digital graphics. Always start out with as high a quality as you can manage for the initial base assets, then scale down for functionality, even if the "product for the masses" ends up significantly compressed or something. Thing is, as hardware power increases over the years, this approach definitely has much better "aging." I don't see this approach as wasteful (higher than is needed) but rather future-proofing. Assuming that's what Obsidian has in mind too.

Okay, a mod needs to reword that sticky in General for "known information" about camera zoom. I personally don't care either way, but some may really want it. One of the biggest annoyances in DA:O for me was the forced camera shifting--on a selected party member, unable to move the camera view far away into the fog of war or to the fringe of a given battle. At least that I remember, the camera in the old IE games would move with your party as you dropped those movement carats (no idea what they're called) on the ground and directed party location, but you could easily move the camera view manually to an unexplored part of the map or around an entire combat zone. I think there was also an option to center the camera view on a character during an auto-pause event. I hope PE will have similar, perhaps even greater, player-camera freedom.

WAIT WAIT, I've played that game before--Mad Libs, amirite? "I hope Rob feels my treeing pain about the treeing language filter on this treeing board." ...? Whadya mean, 'tree' isn't an adverb? Carry on...

http://forums.obsidian.net/topic/62215-relationshipromance-thread-iv/ And read ALL the previous threads about this (the locked ones, the moderater-started ones). Just do a search.

You can even see Edair's 3-mm belt pouch!! With this much detail in an update, I really wouldn't mind waiting 2-3 weeks, personally. Asking for one a week with this much content might be a little greedy. Just maybe.

SWWEEEEEEEEEEEETTT............. That's what an Aumaua looks like, huh? (Way too many vowels, dammit.) Shark fin hat. I definitely like the little combat avatar model. Looks to have more detail, less awkward, better than the old stuff already. This is just fun to read. LOL So, uh.... more first Sagani-style art plz? Thanks!

Realistically, looking at how BG2 was changed from BG1, I suppose the larger market forces at the time indicated players preferred more "direction." And the reason PS:T didn't do as well as it should have. Current games with the exception of "open world" like Oblivion/Skyrim are entirely railroads (see Dragon Age). Onto PE, then--I think it's safe to say the kind of players clamoring for this project want something a bit out of that mass market. So more "empty," beautiful exploration spaces! On the other hand, Josh did say in an interview that content density would be a bit more spread out to avoid the 'empty' space, I think... That's not the same, though. Everyone goes into a dungeon expecting both challenge (combat or puzzles) and loot. The BG1 spaces might have had the odd dire wolf here and there (and the big pack of those petrifying lizards, ouch), but in general were true wilderness areas. Unless the dungeon has an entire "ambiance level" where you only get creepy music and odd placement of objects and blood stains or a ton of paintings with nothing to actually do, I'd argue the dungeon isn't that kind of exploration--definitely a dungeon crawl.

Instead of fully random encounters in the "exploration areas," why not pull from a pool of crafted encounters? These can still be somewhat scaling but designed to be unique and challenging; maybe the triggers can depend on party level, progress in the main campaign, party NPC presence, reputation for a certain faction, or some combination, and the pool from which a "random" encounter may be pulled could increase/change based on that. Still, I liked the open areas with little to do but explore and carefully slice off the fog of war.... Granted, I haven't played BG in a while (or BG:EE, still recovering from Real Life), so I'll test that nostalgia later.

It's gotta be Edair. ô_o

That's because when it's mentioned, people invariably mix sexism up with a whole bunch of other things based on unspoken assumptions and neither self-awareness nor social awareness (I'm speaking academically at this point). The immediate assumption in the OP and by other posters was "sexism" in the purely anti-female sense; subsequent discussion added the other potential side, but that's a distinct afterthought. It's also just the nature of a gaming forum--it's impossible for certain topics to stay focused. For example, rape in our real world is usually the height of misogyny as a crime only against women, but no one seems to recognize thusly that there is no equivalent, socially "accepted" version against males either*. Have you not noticed that it's merely an accepted "oh well, it happens IRL so it should be in the game" from the perspective of male gamers, and really the main people who would be "squeamish" are female players? Yet their views have traditionally been seen as inconsequential in the gaming industry unless a game title is specifically marketed to them. Misandry doesn't exist at that level (no, murder doesn't count because that's equal opportunity). At the same time, we do expect a level of subversion in PE, and it cannot be entirely "realistic" either for a number of reasons on the mechanical and/or player side (like lack of armored women because there were like three in the European Middle Ages)--what constitutes fantasy, what mechanics work with player enjoyment, what's appropriately mature versus dark for the sake of rating. The question then becomes, "To what extent can/should PE mirror our-world inequities and to what extent can/should they be subverted?" Basically, I'm interested in any social inequity that is "equal opportunity," identifiable for the inequity it is yet quite possibly subverted for a fresh perspective or a rare historical truth (blacks enslaving whites), even in a classical fantasy setting: fictional races, slavery of multiple races, cultures covering differing political systems, societies covering unique mores, religious persecution, rape of boys/men by another race, etc. * The cases of boy-rape against church leaders and the likes of Dahmer and Sandusky are notorious to another level and their treatment by society is a topic for different book.

This thread is just going to rehash the other "how mature should this game be" threads anyway. Suffice it to say... I'll trust Obsidian to handle this well and appropriately for both their game world and for the players (there is a tension balance in that respect). If they have any questions about player input for details that can be massaged, let them say so in an update or something.

I'd only vote "Yes" for the "open" ending in the third section, but still with closure (i.e. much like Baldur's Gate 1). Obsidian is hoping to make this a franchise. I'd really like continuity between games without gigantic time skips or wholly brand-new NPCs/PC.

I hated the Dark Elf thing because it was far too much a caricature of "mirror opposite" lazy cultural design. Zeits' design of Rashemen in MotB sounds much more interesting, though I'll never have the opportunity to play it. I expect racism, sexism, age-ism in PE appropriate to its endemic cultures and religions.

Besides which the party combat system between Baldur's Gate and DA:O were nothing alike. BG was classically tactical requiring substantial player control, DA:O barely tactical due to competing AI behaviors, queuing, forced camera shifting (honestly, I hated it)--DA:O was easy, to say the least, on default compared to BG's default. GIven Obsidian's intentions, PE will be closer to BG/IWD than DA:O, hopefully by a long shot. BG is mentioned as a conceptual template for PE, but Obsidian is not today's mechanically-weakened Bioware. So party mechanics should matter more in PE. Party tactics should matter more, as well as strategy at the high level. But particularly when powergaming becomes normative in subsequent playthroughs, as a player's party tactics improves, it makes sense to lower party count or even solo tuned builds, difficulty modes notwithstanding; I certainly did so for BG (at least for 2), and old-school BG/IWD are the models for this playstyle, not DA:O. Obsidian has already stated that the party is "optional" for PE though the game is designed around such a foundation, so that implies similar powergaming flexibility as the old BG/IWD games. I'm sure they're still tuning that idea, of course. Unlike today's cinematic Bioware, Obsidian is espousing significant player choice both mechanically and narratively for PE. Sounds like a real bear to balance out, but I really wish them all the best to make that dream happen.

I'm not in favor of the OP's idea. The RNG may make that sort of implementation patently unfair, and there was no definition of "difficulty" either. In fact, only the developers have a very good idea as to what variables go into "difficulty" and what mechanisms can and should be tuned. The reason why they have all those extra hard modes is simple--the so-called hardcore have different ideas as to what constitutes "difficult." Ultimately, I'm not concerned about any of that because: There will be special 'hard' modes that aren't mutually exclusive. There will be tuned difficulty levels covering the gamut. You're talking about level scaling. Project Eternity will not have level scaling except the main campaign (think F:NV, apparently). It sounds like there will be encounter scaling depending on what region the player decides to visit first (makes sense--BG had this, I believe, and non-railroad exploration games should have some flexibility for that scaling difficulty). http://www.pcgamer.c...dian-live-chat/ http://forums.obsidi...96#entry1218696

Ah, totally missed/ignored this update due to timing. Great! I'm looking forward to the backer fulfillment site. And the art update (hoping for more art like the original Sagani). For ideas on deities, I refer to Vernon's "Digger"... ( )