Ieo

Oh, this thread should be moved to Gameplay & Mechanics. Also http://forums.obsidian.net/topic/61973-identifying-unknown-items-in-pe Please don't make "unidentified" things unequippable! That's just silly....

They don't need to hire ANYONE at all. For God's sake, give me Microsoft's Sound Recorder and I'll create a bunch of wav files for the game. Make it believable and sincere, add some persistence and anyone will break into the voice over field. It simply takes desire and passion to voice a character. You missed the entire point about schedule in the quote--if VO has to be locked down months ahead of time, that's like late 2013 or something. It's already December 2012. Even ignoring translation issues... For god's sake, in the time it takes some amateur to do a take and retake and retake of a dozen lines along with post-processing (and dealing with differing quality recordings unless Obsidian decides to fly all these "free" amateurs in to use the same high-quality equipment) and waiting for timezone differences, maybe Avellone could've written 2-3 full pages already. Given a choice between that? I'd rather shoot the would-be "free" voice actor. As fan-made mods, I wouldn't have a problem with it. Generic soundsets after production would be fine. But for all or most of the characters in the game during production? Don't ask Obsidian to waste more time on a tight schedule to early 2014. Partial VO for the initial mood and carriage is good enough and the best compromise available to the gaming industry. More reading: On the money side, applicable for professionals (pasted for posterity so I can find it again later): (And, uh, mere sincerity and eagerness do not a quality contribution make. There are plenty of people who sing off-key who'd love to "contribute" to various projects too--no offense, but no thanks.)

No worries. I suspect this topic really belongs in the Engine/Technology subforum, really. And thanks, between work and night school, Nov-Dec are really the hell months! I'm too tired to even play BG:EE--how horrible is that? (We now return you to the topic at hand.)

Diana Wynne Jones. .....Uh, almost everything I read is nonfiction, turns out.

http://forums.obsidi...40#entry1234960 So, I guess they're still experimenting with the concept. I interpreted that quote to mean they're still experimenting with camera angle in the globally static sense--where it will be for the entire game. At first I thought OP meant this idea, but it sounds like OP's idea is to have different camera angles for specific area types, just a single re-angle iteration instead of multiples, so the work on backgrounds should theoretically be the same. On the other hand, the avatar animations may require multiple renders at different angles+positions, including all combat animations and all armor and weapons, so that may not be worth it for only an atmosphere effect.... Dunno.

That's not really the case. There might be more choice, as far as the devs changing the dialogue along the way and maybe writing up more options for dialogue, but I don't think you can prove that it will necessarily mean more depth. Part of what makes a line of dialogue memorable or "deep" for me is hearing the power with which it's delivered.One of my all time favourite video game lines of dialogue was the "would you kindly" speech from bio-shock (sort of a spoiler if you haven't played it) that dialogue really stuck in my mind because of the way it was delivered. If it was just a line of dialogue I probably would have just skipped through it without a second glance. You are mixing up "passive listener surrendering personal imagination for third party acting" versus "active reader using personal imagination to interpret dialogic text." In other words, "What medium typically has more 'depth'---a book or a movie?" Obviously, either can be complete subjective crap, but let's say it's the same title. The difference of immersion really pivots on the reader/listener/watcher, then: Either you're dependent on the "delivery" of an external party for your immersion, or you use your own imagination to create the immersion. It's a gradient Quantity does matter when it comes to "depth" (unless we're talking about poetry, but that's a whole other literary genre). Obsidian has reiterated in various interviews and Q&A that in game development, voice acting absolutely takes away development time and money, and that cuts down on the amount of dialogue you can have in a game, period. That also means, by pure numbers, a game with less "word content" is going to have both less breadth (number of factions, NPCs with dialogue, etc.) and depth (number of extending dialogue branches to develop characters, etc.). There is a good compromise in games. The purpose of partially voiced lines like in Baldur's Gate is to provide initial mood and the "vocal pitch" of a character. But it takes far less time and money for the studio to rely on the reader to extrapolate. And little effort on the reader's part--at least, a player who likes to read and is good at it. And ultimately, Project Eternity is a niche game. It's a niche game, a gloves-off old-school CRPG for smart people who like tactical play and intelligent textual content. It's a niche game that required a Kickstarter. For anyone who wants a full/mostly VO-ed "movie game," the current market is full of them. Have at that and leave this one alone. Some reading: "Voice acting in RPGs may be more trouble than it's worth"

See: http://forums.obsidian.net/topic/60597-in-game-tutorial/

Because it's interesting? It adds more options, I suppose. Usually when you play as an evil character, the chances are that you'll lose a lot of companions. This shouldn't always be the case. In the real world, people follow other people even if they know they one they are following might not be that good of a guy. Why should this not be possible in video games? Something like this shouldn't be possible to do for every character you recruit, but it would be interesting and it allows the writers to do something we don't see very often. Maybe the whole idea isn't good, but I'd like to see something like this in PE. Viability of a so-called evil path is a separate issue from the mechanical ability to alter a companion's "character" for the purposes of interactive party play. The former should be fully viable with whatever variable outcomes written into various plots, factions, whatever. The latter should be limited and highly dependent on a few key "worldview" features for each companion--in the real world, most everyone has only a few personal issues for which they will not budge but may be persuaded in other subjects. Some people will have more absolute views than that, others looser. There is no "alignment" in PE, and I am loathe to entertain the concept anywhere near the game. It's best to discard the absolutist concept quickly. You can change people's minds about topics of the day or even a given situation under extreme or unique circumstances through either action or rhetoric, but from the big picture design perspective for a game without alignment, there can be no "redemption" or "corruption" without relativity to an in-game element (faction, culture, etc.). The potential key for player flexibility, IMO, is not to think about a given party NPC's "alignment shift" in relation to the PC but rather their personal and functional motivations in relation to PC choices (action and rhetoric). Imagine, perhaps, our eight companions as points on the world map and each of their character as a circle encompassing their worldviews, some of which overlap with each other--and then the PC is located somewhere among them as an intersection of a gigantic Venn diagram. If we choose to ally with faction A, we might expect companions 1,2,3,4 to approve and 5,6 to remain neutral and 7,8 to disagree. It might be possible to persuade 7 to see our way through both action and rhetoric, but perhaps this is a point of contention with 8 that s/he must leave the party for a while or whatever. I see nothing wrong with that--realistic NPCs, like any person, should maintain their own immutable values. Party companions should not be subject to wanton "alignment shifts" on the whims of the PC, as this would trivialize the efforts to build unique character into each. In the ideal mechanical scenario, I would like certain quests and all faction reputation variables to be weighted on a scale of importance for our companions; there can be the one or two immutable values for each, but in most cases beliefs and/or opinions might be moved around the bell curve. And under no circumstances would I tolerate a visible meter for these companion variables because that's instant metagaming and immersion-breaking. In implementation, this means that an appropriate way to alter companion worldviews in a world without absolute alignments is through external interaction across three variables (PC, NPC, world) rather than only two (PC, NPC).

Chris Avellone bobble-head collectible for future PE funding? Just kidding. Good general overview of story development, thanks! Edit: OH. And more art in the first Sagani style. Plz.

Is there going to be one of these threads every single week until 2014? Maybe Obsidian should create a separate subforum just for that...

Considering even the official Sagani art--the first IWD-style pic (moar plz), group dungeon action shot, the Polina concept--are all different, I think we can cut some slack between this fan art and the two official existing Cadegund pieces.

Yeah, PS:T's main campaign got that right, and I agree that BG2's main campaign design (uh, and BG1, I guess?) was awkward in that respect. Knowing what we know about PE, though, I don't think we have to worry about this. Adding a temporal expression for certain side quests or faction mini-campaigns would add flavor, otherwise--may also help with replay value if you end up having to choose one quest/outcome over another simply due to time.

Actually, to add-- There are quest versus campaign time issues. OP is talking about major campaigns, not a quest-by-quest basis. I think quests are manageable, but they must be a minority of quests unless the quest journal plus game clock/calendar is very robust to help the player take notes. But once we get into the longer scale of a campaign, the devs have to look at the big picture--you want to encourage players to play more content outside just the main campaign, for example. And that of course would require more game time. In this respect, I think the only way around it is to write the main narrative to not require a particular time measure or give that feeling of "war is happening over there, hurry!" You can measure a campaign outcome by number of quests done along the way (Mass Effect 2 I think). There is the gating chapter quest, of course, which is easiest to implement. I'm sure there are other ways to do this... Edit: I don't expect the main PE campaign to be one based on war or conquest at all but rather self exploration--there can be, however, timed mini-campaigns related to the factions with a similar design to the above mentioned.

I have this very (very) vague memory from Vengeance of Excalibur where you generally had a lot of time to explore and do your own thing, but after a while, the enemy armies would slowly advance and take over the map if you weren't looking. This doesn't fit the PE world, though. There were smaller time limits in BG2--only a day or two of in-game time, then go meet the NPC in the tavern, that kind of thing. Those are manageable. Larger scale may be harder to manage both on the player side and technically unless an in-game calendar was implemented and not just clock. I'm not opposed to the idea, though, just wondering what the technical implementation would be like.

Ferengi? But good to know. Looking forward to the concept art! Can haz more like 1st Sagani pic, plz?

A lot of fluff requests really are better done with player mods... assuming this can be modded (I always have a real time clock mod in my MMOs, anyway). This falls under that umbrella; there are too many ideas that are "nice to have" with little or no game impact, so the dev team should concentrate on what's really nice to have in relation to gameplay and actual content. For example, a game time clock is important to the game itself since we can't expect the player to just know that, for immersion reasons. I don't necessarily mean a numerical representation per se, though, since BG had the visual day/night cycling button that was neat.

Combat where appropriate. World combat for particularly dangerous and rare beasts, dungeon crawling. For actual questing, there should be a good mix of both with more options on the non-combat side (whether intimidation, intellectual trickery, etc.); objective-based xp will help with this. Considering the basic levels of content division we can expect in PE so far--strong PS:T style narrative and the 15-level mega dungeon--I don't think we should have a problem with story-leaning quests but combat-heavy romping. But the either/or comparison or whatever fails to take into account the mechanics design side, as others have mentioned: A ton of "hard" but essentially poorly implemented fights will end up breaking a game, so quantity has little to do with that type of enjoyment too. In a tactical CRPG of this nature, I wouldn't mind fewer fights but with smooth, excellent combat mechanics and requiring much higher tactical thinkery than DA:O, for example. Otherwise combat really would get in the way of the story.

I took into account the less savory aspects of the Orlan race and envisioned some kind of Ferengi offshoot, personally. I have no visual for the other race, though--so few details released about that. I expect we'll get more concept art later on since we have to wait until 2014 anyway.

Go read Update 24.

I look at "filler" quests and "grind" quests as different things. The former can be interesting with self-contained plotting and whatnot. BG2 = A filler quest chain would involve, for example, all of Umar Hills. Grinding is defined by tedium. These quests are more appropriate for MMOs. See repeatable quests (e.g. "dailies"). I don't want PE to have any grind quests for the reasons stated in that thread. Edit: To further clarify, I define "filler" as any quest unrelated to the main storyline when it comes to a CRPG designed around a particular narrative. So really, games like BG1/BG2--tons of nice filler to me. Games that are not railroady like Dragon Age tend to have lots of nice filler. I suppose the odd, rare grind quest like BG1's bandit scalp bounty was okay (extremely optional and out of the way), but we shouldn't "need" that (the way MMOs "need" grinds).

Apologies to Polina ahead of time. I remember there was discussion about the stance somewhere, and I thought someone had Photoshopped the leg thing, but I didn't find it. Here's a slight adjustment. Eh, I still think he's fine. About the "monk" thing, I think I'll just call him Fighting Friar Forton and be done with it.

Some random things. They appear practical yet are definitely stylized fantasy. In the first two, her armor is a weird combination of scale, what looks like chain, plate on the arms/legs, and a tiara-plate-thinger (besides helm). The third is some kind of a... lobster plate thing (plate never comes naturally in green, anyway).

Actually, no. I wouldn't argue about text being "wonders" and is always better than a graphical representation. But it would be better in this game than what Osvir is proposing. It's inappropriate. We're looking at a narrative/dialogic text balance somewhere between BG and PS:T, not some oversimplified retarded console "3 options, paragon/renegade/neutral!" spread, which means emoticons are completely out unless the vast, vast majority of dialogue options are given the ":|" which defeats the entire purpose of the proposal anyway. We're expecting quite a bit of nuance. When it comes to nuanced graphical representation in, say, the character portrait, the number then produces a resource burden (I'd expect a ton of portrait versions along with the neutral one). No, PE won't be a novel (and Avellone is pretty clear that he wouldn't do the same massive text content as he did in PS:T), but for those of us who actually read, a few words of descriptive text is sufficient and a lot less work on the production side. As for the graphics of the day now having enough fidelity---yes, the uncanny valley does exist. I don't expect that in the IWD-type painted portraits we're going to end up having (and there's a problem with expression there as well since it wouldn't show up well with semi/full-body IWD portraits), but it's not like current graphics are perfect representations of human expression as opposed to our own imagination.

I agree with Leo completely on that. However, his proposed solution to have different branches(representing different types of relationships) pretty much solves that problem. Not to mention it is a good idea in general, after all it would be terrible if the only way the PC could actually get to know their companions would be to be everyone's best friend. Thanks. I really hope that Obsidian sees the actual implementation ideas around the threads... Anyway, after a lot of work, I managed to nab part of the new PureSophistry interview that I think is cogent to this discussion on the technical resource level. *Cross-referenced with another interview, that's 2-3 months per party NPC. There are several things in this section of the interview, direct and implied. For one, especially if we're looking for PS:T levels of depth (which had seven party NPCs), that's a crapton of work. Therefore, while other people are complaining there are too few and they want more, I really don't want anymore than eight. Eight's enough, thank you very much. Then there's another point that's implied: Obsidian likely will not be hiring a bunch more writers the way Bioware can for their AAA cross-platform titles. Now, it's possible that Ziets will be responsible for world-building/quest writing and Avellone for party members, or a team does world stuff and Ziets and Avellone do the characters and oversee the team stuff, maybe--but the examples given always has Avellone doing to the party NPCs (he did write PS:T himself, after all). It would be nice if Obsidian could clarify exactly who's doing what, but that's how I interpret the interviews so far about Avellone being responsible for this part of game development--ergo, this is the resource bottleneck if we're expecting quality. You can outsource programming easily these days, but I highly doubt this is true for cohesive writing. I'm trying to look at this from a game development resource management perspective: I'd truly love the kind of equal, split path implementation into different interesting relationships for a full play experience regardless of player companion choices (outside plain ignoring the companions), but who knows if there's enough time given the resource limit (i.e. it comes down to a math problem again, that I can see). Plus the low intelligence dialogue they plan on adding. So, on the resource burden...Maybe with the "Y" examples I posited much earlier, make the main trunks much longer and either relationship branch shorter, I guess? I think it'd still be possible... I'm hopeful, mostly...

Edit: Totally missed the (partial) transcript link in the OP. This is a difficult one for me because Feargus is a bit fuzzy, I don't have face/lip reference checks, and Feargus talks super fast. I've caught only a small part of the interview but I've given up on the rest now, TBH.