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You actually provide the means to counter your own argument: Yes, there would be a different team involved, but the new team would have to be hired with the funds in the first place. If Obsidian already had a dedicated game-networking team to begin with, this would be less of an issue, but I doubt they do otherwise this would have been on the table in the beginning. So with a finite monetary pool, that alone does actually lower resources for the other devs responsible for world-building and the single-player experience, like hiring more coders and more QA. Certainly at the current and even projected numbers, this project isn't going to be rolling in ridiculous amounts of money to make the risk of #1 a truth, compared to the costs of other games past. No, I haven't seen exact BG numbers myself, but there are other numbers floating around in comparison. (Second link detailing what Brian Fargo would do with $2.5m is pretty interesting. The industry does not habitually publish figures.) http://www.rpgwatch....80&postcount=33 http://www.rpgwatch....t?newsbit=19389 http://www.1up.com/n...dgets-secretive http://www.cinemable...gets-39474.html http://www.develop-o...-as-high-as-28m http://digitalbattle...e-budgets-ever/ http://www.computera...ant-innovation/ P.S.: Splitting off "point #3" separately like that is rather disingenuous and weakens your rhetorical structure. It may not necessarily affect the design. You'd see less content without the companions, by choice. And then without extant infrastructure, to hire more devs to make multiplayer, that's less investment elsewhere. See above. See above. Also, what? BG started it with a tacked on implementation and then NWN (whatever number) was developed from ground up to include it, and that franchise was hailed to be a much better multiplayer experience. Dev interview Tiliqua. You're in the wrong forum looking at the wrong game, then. Haven't you tried MMOs? Believe me, those are faaaaar more "multiplayer" than something like co-op. And the best part is that a bunch are totally, legally free. If you're so against single-player, this really isn't the product for you, and you'd be happier if you went away and looked at games actually designed to be fully networked.

This is something I don't get about some people here. Firstly, more choices means you can customize your own experience by choosing what race you want to be. Secondly, you may not like them but what about others who do want them? Its not about player race choice, its about what it means for world building. Why are elves and dwarves so universal across fantasy worlds? Why is it wrong to feel like using elements from other fantasy worlds makes this one feel less original? Unless this game is explicitly set in the D&D cosmology then the idea doesn't appeal to me No, look farther into history. Tolkien with influence from Norse mythology, etc. Elves and Dwarves are not purely D&D things. And of course, it's best to avoid copying other things that are either pure D&D or mostly D&D with myth influence. At least Elves and Dwarves (perhaps in different name) exist in some form or another in many places outside D&D.

This is something I don't get about some people here. Firstly, more choices means you can customize your own experience by choosing what race you want to be. Secondly, you may not like them but what about others who do want them? Personally, I did vote in that poll about being fine with classical races if there were twists. Sounds like there will be plenty of twisty depth planned. It's fantasy based on the IE classics. There's only so much Obsidian can stretch in that ideal before it snaps and becomes DA:O ( ).

Deep personal matter that can have substantial impact on our companions, strangers, whatnot-----sounds a bit like PS:T to me. :D Also, I predict a large base of female dwarf ranger characters.

Well, that answers my little "No humans" idea in the other thread. Still, thanks for the additional information.

That's a whole other boring trope, though, at least to me. "Let's make the opposite of a light patriarchical human society that's the epitome of all that's right with the world and make a dark matriarchical elf society that's the epitome of all that's evil with the world!" There are twists, but an exact mirror image isn't necessarily all that unique either... The elf/human relationship in DA:O was at least more nuanced than that.

No humans. Humans went extinct LONG ago. All the current races are various descendant mixes with weird talents.

Fair point. It's not like a game like this--based off our memory and understanding of the old Infinity Engine games--is going to have zoomed-in 3D body/head creation (I do like LotRO's 'body type slider' that only allows large breasts on a body type that's already 'large'). But there could be more general templates covering both sexes that's obvious from the "distance" portrayed in 2D isometric-- buff average wiry heavyset small whatever For an 'elderly' character, white hair and perhaps wiry/small. We don't know just how much detail we can see in terms of game camera at this time. Obviously there are issues with animations and design of worn items because things would have to be tweaked across races as well.

Zeppelin fortress, Girl Genius. 'Nuff said. (Otherwise like how BG2 did it.)

This should be merged with [Merged] Co-Op Multiplayer as some potential future stretchgoal?

Oh what the heck. I didn't play the Fallout franchise--for some reason I thought NV was 2. It's too late to change the poll, though. Uh, consider FO as the entire franchise, I guess... Sorry! /FACEPALM

Hey, people, I have no doubt more are streaming in now that more news is circulating. How'd you get here? Peer pressure? (lol) I admit I'm pleased that with the tiny sample, PST is still leading.

Being serious, I'm not a fan of guns in a fantasy setting unless they're closely related to magic for people who can't use magic, like a type of wand. Or something.

I'm not terribly interested in formalized schools. Maybe different combo effects... Maybe.... the hand gesture system in Event Horizon's The Summoning and the chained skill 'gambits' of wardens in LotRO. I know, crazy.

Sorry, I considered making it like that (and it's a little late to change it, I think), but typically people will have a real favorite and thus carry associated bias in terms of expectations and hopes for game development--an underlying and unspoken psychology is also that it's possible Obsidian won't be able to deliver the perfect trifecta of mechanics/breadth/depth, so taking into account one's bias, in what direction would you prefer the game to lean? Some people have said that they liked ALL OF THEM, but that wasn't really answering the question and is more saying they love Obsidian, which is fine. The other/multi thing is taking into account that some people will also have a tie as to their absolute favorite in relation to supporting PE. And it's not like this is a pure numerical poll; discussion is of course encouraged.

I think 1.5 would be best, myself. There must be "2" territory because, after all, this is a Kickstarter venture.

Oops, forgot that one. Added, though people mention it in comments so that's good too. (And we can be sure the devs are reading the forum at least...) Hmm. I'm trying to remember if I actually played Arcanum---I suspect that's the one where I couldn't figure out something stupidly simple and kind of gave up. Like going to a different area on the map. Yes, Mystwalker, that was my intention. Nostalgia is incredibly powerful, but the range of games in the dev pedigree listed on Kickstarter is so very wide with different strengths, so people are going to have different expectations, especially for those who've already backed it.

DA:O was fine on its own without taking into account any of the nostalgia factors thrown into the marketing. The problem for me was that I specifically bought DA:O only for the constant mention of "spiritual successor to BG," and I was burned. Boy, was I burned, such that I just gave my discs to friends without looking back. Honestly, I felt completely betrayed and hated Bioware a little more. The fact that I backed this Kickstarter containing yet more nostalgia marketing shows that I'm really itching too but have just enough optimism left that a crowdsourced venture will actually work. Please don't pull a DA:O on me, Obsidian. I will cry lots. And lose all faith in the game industry completely, forevers.

I'm curious, from the marketing angle, which game hook(s) really drew people in to Project Eternity and encouraged them to back the Kickstarter. Expectations shown in the forum can vary widely particularly from which game preference people have (e.g. co-op preference from IWD/NWN folks) or party NPC quality and quest branching. Given the developer pedigree, both PS:T and BG hooks drew me in, but primarily PS:T. How about you?

But we've got a finite palette (the size of the trees the developers have resources to produce), so the wider the gamut, the cruder the distinctions. I'd rather have a few shades of light grey to choose from (with darker shades added by being presented with tough choices rather than just because the PC doesn't care about hurting innocents) than just black, white, and mid grey. Posterization gives much better results on a greyscale image than on a colourful one. I see what you mean. I admit, I was thinking of it in painting terms--"Well, in order to get grey you have to mix white and black, so of course you can't avoid black, duh!" Still, PS:T managed to cover both ends and a bunch of the middle admirably, with enough overall content, so here's to hoping. (Anyone have an idea of how much PS:T cost? BG?)

I don't know about the others but GOG handles international orders without any problems. I'd suspect Amazon would be a tad problematic, given they do not allow me purchase any mp3s. Well, that's a shame. I'll put my grimy little vote token in the GoG bucket, then (for digital download) and I'll still hope that the only DRM on the box is a disc check or offline reg code at most.

What about Amazon as a distribution channel? Their digital game downloads don't require DRM necessarily (core game downloader isn't installed but runs independently as a downloader for the full game with pause/resume functions); I got DRM-free Divinity2:DKS from them this way and just deleted the little downloader app after it was done. The small 'casual' games do require installation of the full client, but that doesn't apply here. From what I understand, Amazon's digital games service is meant to challenge Steam/whatever, but I have no idea how successful they are and the specific pros/cons since I rarely ever buy games anymore. I wonder how well Steam/GoG/Amazon handle international orders, too.

Thing is, a lot of people still misunderstand the original intention of D&D's "evil" alignment. It wasn't about destruction and whatever (that was more along the 'chaotic' lines). That brand of evil was essentially selfishness. I really liked how PS:T treated good/evil/whatever as fluid and nuanced in dialogue choices (you always start out neutral), and I'm sure people remember that there was a truly psychotic evil version of TNO and then the "practical" evil TNO. I'd love more grey, more choices, more consequences. "Mature" psychological content requires more grey, IMO; but to have a good amount of quality grey, you still need the range between good-evil. So we can't cut evil if we're after this kind of depth.

(In reply to Sickly, before the merge) It sounds like you haven't done co-op in the old school IE games. Did you play the main hooks? (IWD, BG, PST) Let's look at the three major hooks: IWD for mechanics, BG for breadth, PST for depth Only IWD and I suppose BG made any sense for co-op due to the type of content--IWD had very little in the way of story (i.e. it was completely unmemorable to me, sorry ) and did not rely on party interactions at all for any content. BG, on the other hand, had some good party NPC interactions, but with its replayability, it didn't hurt to create your own party or play with friends for some power-gaming. Please note that I haven't heard good things about IE co-op support and haven't done it myself, so I dunno. But then PST--that's an entirely different beast. The party NPC interactions are so critical to gameplay that the game itself either doesn't make sense without them or lacks a significant portion of content if you choose to not to use them, so why bother playing the game at all... This is a single-player game in the truest, purest sense. Now, if the content depth is between BG and PST with very fleshed party NPCs--and judging by the VERY FEW party NPCs planned on the Kickstarter, I suspect this will be true--adding co-op would essentially cheat the player out of significant content Obsidian worked so hard to create. It would be pointless. Granted, I know some people subscribe to MMOs just to roleplay and not actually work the mechanics for achievements, which ultimately means that comes down to "well, it's the player's money," so the argument simply goes back to the fact that the old school single-player games with substantial content should concentrate on being top-notch single-player games before branching out to something like that. The balancing is different--imagine PS:T with the various dialogue options (sometimes over a dozen depending on your stats) and the friends trying to figure out which one to pick. How does that work? It doesn't. I think it could be a much later addition only if there's enough funding for a good implementation, but not now. Definitely not now. Maybe even a separate Kickstarter.

'Sokay, I can see how you might misunderstand given the marketing around the project. As a side comment, I wonder if the full Windows 7 and Windows 8 tablets could handle this (it comes down to the graphics hardware, I imagine). It's the iOS/Android tablet OSes that really aren't on the table for support. Only full Mac and Linux desktop clients are being suggested in the stretch goals. Could be something to consider only after the desktop version(s) is completed, which would be 2014.