Ieo

Oh, you mean misuse by Obsidian Order members, not Obsidian? Er, reactions, by whom at what? So, as a preventative measure.... wh.... ? Uh I'm so confused. So how about that second city....

Damn. Which would work perfectly with one of my earlier ideas. See---people need to stop thinking about the implementation in only a vacuum. There are plenty of ways to counterbalance so gameplay style is still fair but world kills are still rewarded in some way.

It's like the music threads asking for any composer besides Obsidian's own Bell, who has done some fine work. Polina is great for the concept art; the original Sagani concept artist is also great (who are you?!).

Why do you think that these ideas are great in the first place? I, for example, don't think that regenerating "health" is a good thing. And who is right? (1) Consider what the mechanism is trying to address. (2) Consider the mechanism in relation to other mechanisms in combat. There you go with your vacuum thinking. (This is exactly why there's pointless hysteria on the forums about this/cooldowns/etc....)

I preferred the wallpaper Sagani myself, as for that first concept art - I'd assume it was done internally. More internal art! The original Sagani was awesome. I don't think we need another artist; Ziets was different, I guess, because he will be involved in content creation.

Well, this is a gaming forum on a business website for a product yet to enter development, not a psychological counseling corner... Inviduals voicing their opinion is fine. Not exactly in a demanding matter though, though this is sometimes unavoidable in a internet forum. However using the group/order isn't. I don't understand your last comment. Using? Exactly how has Obsidian used the Order for their own nefarious marketing purposes? KS Q&A

It's not unfair for backers to expect some input. But there's a vast difference between an instantaneous rage-quit without waiting for explanation (e.g. the period between the first cooldown post and the interviews describing the mechanics in more detail) and merely bowing out due to a direction you disagree with. Except that no development has even started yet.

They were organizing the Obsidian Order of Eternity backers group, so had high visability Ah, right. Honestly, I don't see what the big deal is. For one, it's his money. Secondly, he and others are plain overreacting just like with the cooldowns. There have been plenty of good ideas thrown around in the update thread and the poll thread, but they're drowned out like 20 to 1 by people more concerned about validating, in a vacuum, their personal playstyle by a single mechanic. Which is silly. @Obsidian: The xp idea is still good, just needs some fine-tuning. Frankly, if someone is going to throw a public fit without academic discussion along with reasoned suggestions, a forum is better off without them stirring up more hysteria. Time and time again, many gaming forums.... I mean, if Obsidian suddenly decided to add full cut-scene 3D animated talking head/uncanny valley sex romances for every companion, I'd pull out too (I'd just hope Obs would announce this before the KS ends ).

What? QA should never be part of a stretch goal, it should be fully expected in the base product. On top of that, don't talk as if there's risk in poor QA without a stretch goal for polish ("fewer people means less polish"?)--Project Eternity's kickstarter was already successful in 27 hours, and all the current funding on top is icing. The view I take is that any extra time or money that Obsidian may need for further polishing should not be an issue at all, from the player standpoint.

"Beta test" does not equate with quality assurance. Software QA/QC is a complete process that includes beta testing as a step--reports must still be collected and organized and prioritized with redundancies removed and dependencies determined, then workload parceled out to devs by group or individual, then the time required to actually pin down the bug in source code and trying to fix it without breaking something else. Obsidian wrote somewhere that they invested in better bug reporting back-end and such somewhere, so at least that part is probably set. I'm all for it, having spent a little time in a software QA setting myself. It's not just money, though--time can be a factor. We had to push out an enterprise release by two months to fix a single semi-major bug. But fixing stuff like this can/will make all the difference between a happy experience and a poor one. Edit: (It's also possible that I'm misparsing your statement because it's early in the morning for me, but I read your post as meaning "free beta testers --> low bug rate anyway")

Rage quits are generally lame anyway, and I didn't see it as high-profile because I don't know anything about the handle. /shrug It's the same as the cooldown bit: people take a general mechanism description and then go all hysterical that it's going to be implemented in a vacuum, exactly as it is, without taking into account all the other mechanisms and design decisions that would be connected to it. And "start giving ideas"? The PE forums have always been hopping with ideas, it's just that those of us who actually try to maintain constructive discourse with actual suggestions to temper controversial proposals (the details are not set in stone) are drowned out by the crybabies who take a game mechanic very personally. Besides which Obsidian has plenty of ideas balanced between both play experience and substantial game creation experience. Just like the cooldowns, it's best to poke Obsidian for creative solutions than dismissing an idea on its face and rage-quitting. Meh. The mature way is to just quit and take your money with you. Maybe the forums will quiet down now--that's not necessarily a bad thing.

Oh, I'm sure there will be PLENTY of space between City 1 and City 2.

I'm not understanding this thread. There will already be a minimum of 5 difficulty levels in PE, as Obsidian already described the 3 hardcore modes, we can expect a default normal mode, and Obs said there will be an easy mode somewhere. Unless you're talking about the very specific options within each mode--it's too early to tell. I'd leave all that minute balancing up to Obsidian.

No. Lots of other threads about MP/co-op, you should read them. Related interviews and dev posts linked in sig, which all boil down to: It's too much work and money for very little gain and no actual content while historically after people ask for a co-op experience, it's very rarely used after game ship. It's impossible to "limit" the development of MP to a certain area in the core game because all the extra work in implementation and debugging would still have to happen as if MP was a part of the game engine--i.e. it's not "less" work at all. Then it's a bad idea to include it from ground up in a sequel because the SP content would suffer (yes, there's dev cite in sig), unless there's a lot of money to throw at the whole thing, which make it a different beast from the original.

Yes, and at the same time, I cannot imagine Avellone producing crud narrative/dialogic content. It's, like, not possible with his genes, or something.

Yeah, I thought I deleted that part of my post before posting. Heh. Personally, I'm not worried. I like lots of content--it's replay value.

This is so subjective. Did you think Torment dragged on? Or IWD? BG1 or BG2? Side quests represent optional breadth and is only the high margin in game length, by the way. For me, there is too much content only if the creators couldn't keep up the quality.

And this health bar (that receives the vast majority of damage) regenerates on its own even during combat. If that's not enough, we have warriors spamming adrenaline rushes to replenish their stamina, paladins inducing stamina regeneration for all companions and priests doing all of this, but on steroids, for the entire party. Hysterical hyperbole with no interpretive basis. Where you people are getting this stuff... must be a hard smoke. It's ironic that you talk about hysteria. If you were able to read, you'd read some informations that have been presented regarding this system before commenting with such an impetus and ignorance. -Stamina regenerates on its own even in combat. -Warriors can self heal stamina. -Paladins can replenish stamina of party members and so can Priests and/or Wizards. So where does the "spamming" and "steroids" come in? You're claiming that devs have said all of those things can be spammed ad infinitum in a battle to heal a party to full, as a standard. Dear, if rapid auto-regeneration of stamina during combat (the thing that will absorb the vast majority of damage) doesn't ring an "issue bell" in your head, a thorough examination of it is in order. Not to the hyperbolic extent that you framed it. If you were able to read, main health is still hit, so it's not immune while stamina is super-charging; "help" regen isn't necessarily the same as regen to full. Your squeaking sounds exactly like the cooldown spamming hysteria before. Edit: And judging by your sarcastic drama in the poll thread--yes, that's a good helping of hysteria.

Thanks, Ink Blot. Great stuff. Sagani is confirmed, supposedly, as a companion. Definitely still appreciate that the women are being drawn out well, and hopefully that makes it in game too. And I'm glad Obsidian is taking heed to the translator company concerns expressed in one of the update threads.... Stick a white gazebo somewhere with an arrow sticking out of it for me!

And this health bar (that receives the vast majority of damage) regenerates on its own even during combat. If that's not enough, we have warriors spamming adrenaline rushes to replenish their stamina, paladins inducing stamina regeneration for all companions and priests doing all of this, but on steroids, for the entire party. Hysterical hyperbole with no interpretive basis. Where you people are getting this stuff... must be a hard smoke. It's ironic that you talk about hysteria. If you were able to read, you'd read some informations that have been presented regarding this system before commenting with such an impetus and ignorance. -Stamina regenerates on its own even in combat. -Warriors can self heal stamina. -Paladins can replenish stamina of party members and so can Priests and/or Wizards. So where does the "spamming" and "steroids" come in? You're claiming that devs have said all of those things can be spammed ad infinitum in a battle to heal a party to full, as a standard.

Oh god, you're right. (1) No healz?! No rezzes, and possibility for maiming or permadeath?! WTF and with objective xp only, why bother with combat! (2) OMG stamina bar regens in combat and classes can spam soul powaz to heal it? NERF And this, folks, is why mechanisms shouldn't be discussed in a vacuum.

And this health bar (that receives the vast majority of damage) regenerates on its own even during combat. If that's not enough, we have warriors spamming adrenaline rushes to replenish their stamina, paladins inducing stamina regeneration for all companions and priests doing all of this, but on steroids, for the entire party. Hysterical hyperbole with no interpretive basis. Where you people are getting this stuff... must be a hard smoke.

Hmm, here's a zinger then: what would happen if the PC has a relationship with one of the companions, then a couple of levels later it is discovered the companion (or the PC) is pregnant? Didn't that happen to Aerie in BG2 at some point? I never romanced her, so I don't know the details. @Osvir I don't believe stories "benefit" or not by inclusion of romance but rather that such stories are either designed to be such from the outset by virtue of genre application or the plot mechanism is specifically added to hook proponents of said genre--thus romance is not something I see as having additional intrinsic value in a fictional work, but is either the underlying nature of the story itself already or is used for marketing. Either you like the genre and reactive positively to the audience targeting, or you don't care for it (for whatever reasons). That said, literature and interactive binary computer programming cannot be fully equated anyway, IMO, which I discussed in one of the locked romance threads. My preference still goes for an 80/20 implementation of non/romance content.

Sure, I can understand the fear that general adventure-hunting would not be appropriately awarded, though I read Sawyer's "general killin'" comment that the implementation would still have fuzzy edges outside the quest objective aspect. I had noted earlier that balancing against finer points of the difficulty modes may or may not be an issue if enemy xp constitutes a significant chunk of leveling, but honestly if balance is a concern, then I don't think it's a problem to remove world monster xp if they have interesting loot. Josh already said that the opposition was noted, but he's a systems guy--he knows a lot of systems and has seen how they work both in the back-end and front-end during play, so I trust that an overall implementation will take into account these various things. Still, back-loading xp to quest objective is a generally good idea to me because it does address a major imbalance among playstyles per leveling, but like all good idea proposals, it's still open to fine-tuning. Frankly, I think the concerns for this mechanism will be easier to address than the cooldown ones.

By a "vacuum" implementation, I mean the idea that the system will on its face appear in the game without any regard to any other potential mechanism. For example--ignoring different enemy types and frequency/density, ignoring the setting/level design for a quest, ignoring the objective design itself, etc. A prime example of "vacuum" thinking was with the cooldown announcement some weeks ago: The people dead-set against it assumed it would only be applied as a spell-level cooldown applied in seconds, without taking into account other potential variables such as application by spell levels, or very long cooldowns, or that cooldowns could work perfectly alongside limited spell number per tier or mana or something else. I made such a suggestion early on, but well, people got overheated quickly in the exact same way I see it here. And it turned out that I was right (in general, not my specific idea); Sawyer had other mechanisms in mind that would temper the main implementation of cooldowns as a solution to specific issues he saw in the old D&D Vancian CRPG application--cooldown by spell tier and grimoires, and rest for other things. I don't remember the details, but the point is that vacuum thinking merely generates useless hysteria instead of an academic discussion for other linking mechanics.