Ieo

I'm not about to attempt a backstory until I see more of the world and lore, and that won't be for a while, I imagine. Obsidian wouldn't want to spoil too much anyway. Something class-based might be interesting. But your OP doesn't work anyway. Because there is no "evil" in Project Eternity.

Who knows. But this thread is completely off-topic to Project Eternity and is relevant to regular "role-playing," though Obsidian doesn't have an official "RP" subforum, it seems.

Our slightly-above-average dungeon levels contain ~1 gig of render data, uncompressed. ~1 gig uncompressed per level of dungeon, or for the whole dungeon (with an average how many levels)?

Since you can't fathom, read the interviews and posts in my sig. No.

I don't care about that Justin guy some people still want to hire (I think the artists Obsidian chose are just fine--it's a matter of style), and I'll end up using my own portrait anyway. I think IWD-style body portraits with versions cropped down to BG-style headshots would be great, if people prefer one type over the other. HOWEVER! I just realized something! Jaheira's portrait in BG2, besides being all weirdly proportioned and creepy compared to the BG1 version (*cough* sorry), kept reminding me of something that I couldn't put my finger on until just now... Kira the Gelfling from Dark Crystal. If Kira had, like, grown up all bitter and battle-hardened and stuff. We now return you to your regularly scheduled thread. Special totally off-topic request to Obsidian team: Please include a orrery like Aughra's in the game. Heh!

This thread is classified under "OP didn't back the kickstarter and barely read about it now and decided to do an opinion-vomit about what PE should have based on only one of the mentioned game hooks despite not following the reams of discussions since October 2012 including multiple threads about antagonists and music and voice acting." (And depth? Warning about writing quality? Really? Planescape:Torment.) OP doesn't actually care about PE as Obsidian envisions it--a melding of BG/IWD/PST--but he demands another BG. Don't worry. PE won't be identical to BG by a long shot.

For the record, I once took a graduate-level applied linguistics course for kicks and wrote about typographical paralanguage in CMC text and its relation to passing the conversational "floor" among multiple speakers. Hiro, you're wrong about the value of typographical paralanguage (use of emphatic formatting in this case). Well, it's just your personal preference, but prosody and kinesics are important for "listener" interpretation when the bulk of the text interaction is "voice" (dialogue), and there are only so many tools at our disposal within two-dimensional text. There's obviously a gradient as to what's acceptable versus overkill among different people, but that doesn't seem to be the gist of this little side discussion. Specifically.... who said that the presentation of text in Project Eternity would be a novel? It's a role-playing game. The majority of text is dialogic in nature. These verbal units are chopped up throughout our fictional social interactions with NPCs in the game and certainly aren't presented anywhere near a linear novelization format. When nuance in meaning is sought in dialogue form, the words and word order are certainly critical for proper interpretation, but when paralanguage isn't part of two-dimensional text, we naturally try to represent it to mimic that third dimension of "meaning." This is exactly why "sarcasm" and other jokey bits are so often misinterpreted online.

Consider that there were probably a large number of "$25 beta" add-on pledges, so an enforced NDA is probably out the window. This seems more like an open beta type of deal--stability and mechanics bugs only. Probably mostly stability since most of the backers with beta access wouldn't know the first thing about properly testing and reporting bugs. I don't know if Obsidian's plans have changed concerning the beta or if they've decided on more specifics, but this was said back in 2012: Thing is, I think that was said BEFORE the $25 add-on beta blitz, but I could be wrong. But I would expect now with all the additional beta keys going out, they'd be leery of even a "majority but incomplete" beta. I mean, think of the NDA nightmare. Technical feasibility aside, there are a number of ways Obsidian could run the beta without too much spoilers. Like side quests only, or artificial side quests, a demo version of the first "chapter," a side boss fight, whatever. I pledged at a level with automatic beta access as well and originally intended to just discard that part of the "benefits," but I'll participate anyway because, hey, I was actually good at bug testing and reporting the one time I did it for work. And I trust Obsidian wouldn't spoil me in the major bits.

I didn't think you were talking about PE, but to mix that system into the franchise later doesn't seem like a good idea either (unless, like all the previous commentaries about it, MP was tacked on and crappy as it was in BG2). Mass Effect, Dragon Age, so on. Maybe you didn't pay attention to all the initial discussion started in 2012, but trying to make "decent" MP content is another issue besides the technical complexities of MP; first we have the technical side of making different platforms work together in MP and all the related networking bugs, and then if going for "decent" MP, the content somehow has to reflect the MP context, so then what? Something has to give for a development firm without multi-million publisher backing. And you're probably smart enough to guess the price. Although the answer was actually given back in 2012. Adding later would introduce quality inconsistency into the PE franchise when we're hoping for a unified trilogy or whatever. Quality intellectual SP games are extremely rare right now, and the proposed caliber of combined IE games is completely nonexistent, so most of us who don't want anything to do with MP are purist because we've already seen how MP strips and dumbs down SP content for AAA titles with multi-million backing. Reusing SP infrastructure isn't going to make much of a difference because you still have to develop new content and MP still has its own infrastructure complexities, but if you want "decent" MP, I'll bet the SP infrastructure will need to be reworked around it as well. But again, I wouldn't mind if it was completely crappy tacked-on MP where only the lead character can affect dialogue choices and such, and SP content development was never affected. As I and others have said many times whenever the MP/co-op/console thing comes up, just have another Kickstarter for those items and make a different game. It can be set in the same universe, but a different kind of game altogether (because you can't have the same PE-type game with PS:T-like content in a console or proper MP environment--it just ain't happening). For once, leave the games-for-dumb-masses to Bioware and the like and hopefully Obsidian will give us a solid, proper old-school-like SP game. That's what they promised, anyway.

DA:O combat was easy. Part of the symptom was that it only ever had, what, three enemy classes? Ranged archer, mage-type, and melee grunt. That's it. And then the actual skillsets each of those classes used were quite small. Contrast this with fighting a party of enemies in the IE style: Mage, fighter, cleric, stealthy thief, ranged fighter, maybe a druid. Then the collection of skills each of those classes possess. Yes, AI has a lot to do with it (and luck), but DA:O was less technical in the sense of variety. Sure, you had MMO-style LOS, but that's no big deal. And you didn't find threads about game difficulty in the first few pages because that was discussed back in 2012: http://forums.obsidian.net/topic/60710-just-how-easy-will-easy-be/page-1 Look for the quotes by the dev Bobby Null. That said, we have details on specific options for the hardmodes. http://eternity.gamepedia.com/Mode And you can turn specific things on and off.

Fun typo! My mind must have swapped "give a wide berth" with "a wide girth". And you are right about the visibility of course (except perhaps for colours and obviously wide characters). But it is still a must in so far as I love getting to pick those rather central attributes, even if they remain just numbers to many people - to me, they are one step further in the character creation. Since those items are a "must" to you, what will you do when Obsidian doesn't provide the numerical choice input? (Weight, height, age) I mean, I suppose you can just enter your own data in the character custom bio section, assuming PE will have one (I don't see why not since BG and maybe IWD had the option). Different hair styles would be nice, since those are fairly visible in iso minus the helm, given the fidelity of the update 61 sample screenshot. None of the IE games gave choices for actual hair or lack of hair besides hair color, AFAIR. But it looks like the vast majority of detailed aesthetic customization will come down to portraits and player extrapolation. I for one am fully intending to use a custom portrait I made for the BG games.

Doubtful. (And you mean girth, not berth.) I love dressing up my characters in multiple armor and clothing sets as well...... in MMOs. The camera zoom and free swing make sense in that environment. What you are wanting is appropriate for those types of free-3D games. In an isometric environment? Height and age are both aesthetic variables that make little sense to develop for an iso view; height won't be obvious to see and age---seriously, pick a white hair color or something, but facial wrinkles are going to be invisible, so pick the appropriate portrait or supply one of your own if you don't need a "gazillion" to pick from. Weight? Maybe the two normal/fat body types in BG/BG2 will be possible. But unless all the avatar art assets and animations are scaling somehow, it doesn't seem worth the development effort. In rolling multiple alts, I'm much more interested in classes and race/party combinations that affect actual content in PE.

Meh, stupid. How many of those ported-to-console games have over half a dozen reactive branching dialogue options and lots of text to read, and multiple party members to control? Whether a game is AAA or not (or has lots of money or time) is 100% irrelevant compared to the genre when it comes to system porting. Look, I'm even being conservative and not mentioning the 18-dialogue-options-on-one-screen and 800k words in PS:T. Anyone saying "if X can do it even though X is a genre absolutely nothing like PE" without considering those differences is... This topic has been done to death. I'd rather the mods just merge into the console thread and let all the stupidity congregate there.

This wouldn't work, besides which adding MP is a waste of time and resources, mechanically... Simply, there's no contextual hook between premade multiplayer characters who have no backstory and reactive dialogue options in a PS:T-like game, and then there's no reason at all to allow other players to control existing companions in the dialogue sense because the entire point is that the companions have significant backstory and relevant hooks to other NPC interactions outside a player's control. This is a single-player game. And don't bother suggesting that a multi-player controlled vanilla party should just have reactive dialogue options in the "hive mind" sense all derived from the head party member's control, because we get back to the 2012 developer comments that MP is a bad idea for heavy SP content unless you want crappy MP implementation (and I'd be fine with that--make it real crappy and avoid sacrificing anything in SP). BG2 and PS:T handled "multi-party" conversation a little bit differently, but it's highly contextual to pre-written companion backstory and the given NPC/quest situation. For example, in BG2 you could speak to that one vendor NPC using Jaheira or your PC and the reaction would be different, but if Jaheira did it, it's not like the player had any control over dialogue choices. Or in PS:T you could ask Dak'kon to interact with Fell as translator or you could just do it yourself, with varying degrees of success and control. @Ineth: I prefer PS:T's mixed handling. Each additional NPC dialogue line is basically a return carriage, so to speak. Osmaer— The innkeeper digs inside a mug with a dirty rag before raising his thick eyebrows to your level. A strange, silvery tooth appears behind his fat, shiny smile. "Welcome! Welcome! Please, make yourself comfortable, traveler." Osmaer— "Food's hot and my rooms keep cool. Holler whenever you need, I always got time to spare these days. How can I help ya?" 1. "I have questions about the area." 2. "I want to order food and drinks." 3. "Let's see what rooms you have." 4. "Goodbye."

Forget the dirty beta masses. I want alpha access.

That's what I pointed out in a previous post with a link to text usability/accessibility design; and there are actually color blindness emulators for this purpose, which is neat: So high contrast on solid backgrounds is best, and then we can talk about hue. If you scroll halfway down the link, there's the ESPN example where the normal branded color is red, but it looks like a muddy brown to someone with red/green color blindness. Out of curiosity, I downloaded the Web Accessibility Tools Consortium app (compliant with WCAG 2.0 guidelines) to test out the various screenshots in this thread. The PST screen: Fail, red dialogue on brown background. Pass on AA for the off-green description text on brown background, but fail AAA level criteria. The BG screenshots: Fail, red dialogue on black or near-black background. Here's what the BG dialogue text would look like, for example: FYI, protanopia and deuternaopia together comprise a minimum 7% of the population, most likely more because apparently many people go through adulthood without even realizing they're color blind(!). Sorry to the "old school IE games did it like that" folks, but this is one case where basic accessibility should trump tradition, hands down. Of course, if text/UI coloration is possibly moddable, that'd be great too. Edit: Before I forget and before the edit window closes---here are the results for the PE example screenshot:

Something Awful is a step ahead here. Perhaps you can sell them for good coin too *shrug*. This reminds me of hydranencephaly cases. I believe there's a recent one where a girl born without a brain is, what, 6-7 years old now? But it's hopeless for anything remotely close to a "human" existence. Quite sad. But as parents, if your choice is between endure the hopeless or kill your own child, well...

Agreed. Although, I think I'd like to see more natural/grown type visuals and less synthetic-styled stuff. In general... not specifically in the dialogue UI. Think tree-trunk instead of carpentered table. Or, a combo could work, I suppose. I dunno. I know it's silly, but sometimes, the excessive amount of tool-crafted look/feel kinda makes the UI feel a lot more like it's intruding in the screen. Like it doesn't really belong, but someone installed it by hand. I think I get what you mean. The more detailed/chiseled/tooled the UI is, the more artificial or "metagamey" it might feel because it's so obviously designed, right? To me, that's like the extreme end of riveted metal or space age UIs, obviously man-made. There are ways to soften the UI to a more organic feel, but it has to fit the setting, and PE's setting looks to be pretty variable between urban/wilderness areas and everything. The UI design also has to be usable, though, with fairly obvious buttons and widgets. It can be an interesting balance. Like adding vines, moss, a weathered and aged look, etc., maybe even add stone to the wood mix. Well, all things being equal, between the old chiseled stone UI in BG/other IE games and this wood look, I quite like this one... I agree with the punctuation string between the number and dialogue text. A little bit "busy." Now, there's talk above about the old IE red text on black(ish) background. I tolerated it fine, but I didn't feel it was particularly readable. And text/background color is a big part of the usability/accesibility field. Red/green color-blindness is pretty common, and the ESPN example on the text design website I linked is an interesting example. That weird brown on black doesn't look nice at all. (As a side note, nothing in web/document design pisses me off more than light grey text on white background. I just want to reach through the screen and strangle the idiot hoity-toity designer who thought it was aesthetically pleasing and shine a laser into his/her eye.) The text colors generally seem fine in Obsidian's example. I hope that the PC/NPC names are set off a bit more, though--perhaps each different speaker has a different color? Or something lighter/brighter than the brown chosen there.

I'm jealous of the new hires, interns or not. *sigh* I like the conversation text style, more PST-like with textual description alongside the dialogue. Not necessarily in the typographic sense--I'll leave that to the font fiends--have y'all seen the documentary Helvetica? It's a real hoot. Available on Amazon Prime if you have it. And I like the surrounding old-school wood texture. At first I thought I wanted stone, like the old BG series, but wood is actually "warmer" and more inviting than stone, in a way. Hard to describe. That aside. I'll have to watch the video later...

I don't particularly care about the sharpness of shadows except in terms of rendering resource overhead; in one game I've played, you're given the option to enable true stencil shadows, "blob" shapeless shadows, or no shadows, all for differing GPU prices. My only minor gripe about the shadows in the original screenshot (and thus in your example) is that the direction appears incorrect given the stronger two points of light flanking the door as opposed to the more diffuse source behind the party. Actually, there should be multiple directional shadows from opposing light sources, but whatever...

I CAN SEE THE CHAIN LINKS ON THE AVAPEEPS! That's an amazing amount of detail you guys managed to cram into the little avapeeps' armor... Aw, I'd love to do some QA. Not at that level, though. Personally, I think the brightness/lighting is fine, though I also wonder how many controls we'll have in the game settings.

I like sign posts and store signs and definitely not metagamey quest markers on the minimap. I also would love to see "fuzzy" quest directions like "about twenty paces east of the bear statue" or "south of the river mouth and east of the dragon's nest" or "travel north until snow wets the ground" and stuff like that. Just need a compass. But besides the in-game markers of whatever type, I really want the ability to add my own waypoints/markers to the world map in my "journal." There were threads about this in the mechanics/whatever sub-forum. P.S.: @Eiphel This is easy to get around in game design. Many games, including the IE games, ensure your character is familiar with only a small geographic area before setting out, and that honestly makes sense in these types of old fantasy settings. You might have heard about Athkatla or whatever big city far to the north, but the vast majority of people won't travel very far from their village, and the only news you get are rumors and such from people who do travel more. Obsidian just needs to be cautious about putting too many metagame crutches into the UI; as long as there are options, though, I think we're all covered.

Given that "this is not what my imagination told me I was promised" appears to be an epidemic across some online groups, on some level I'd still say yes. I accept full responsibility that Fargo billing his game "Torment" got my money (and on some level I actually do regret it). And that's exactly where I drew the line between PE and the Torment* project. Project Eternity's Kickstarter was very clear to me; the words they used (homage, etc.) with very few and very explicit specifics the game would have to bring back the "feel" (isometric, tactical, party, pause, the guy who wrote PS:T, etc.) meant the underlying mechanics would be different but the content genre, quality, and quantity--the stuff that really matters--would aim to "recapture" that old-school magic formula. I don't believe Obsidian will go wrong with this, especially with backer feedback right here on the forums. Now, I suppose I can see where a few people might've skimmed the PE Kickstarter and thought they were getting a combined mimic, but honestly, I think it would've taken a lot of willful ignorance throughout the one-month Kickstarter campaign with all the videos, updates, and interviews to not understand what Obsidian was really aiming for. In comparison, the Torment blurb was truly name-dropping marketing hype that kept using words like "sequel," which means a whole different thing than "homage," which also means there's far more room for failure. I hate the phrase "spiritual successor." And yes, I retch now at the thought of Dragon Age, though by itself without mentioning BG, it would've been okay; the difference is that Bioware took no feedback about the design of DAO whereas Obsidian has the direct pulse of their fans here and has demonstrated very clearly that they do listen and act. So I'm not worried. PE most likely will redeem the phrase "spiritual successor" for me. As for the OP. I wonder if you actually read/listened to the Kickstarter material, including all the talk about substantial reactive world content and companion content beyond RTWP/iso. You say that describes "any number of older CRPGs" yet list none that specifically competes against those mentioned (BG/IWD/PST) and you cannot say anything then and now comes close to offering all three together. What was "promised" was very specific, and those elements from the ongoing developer updates have not changed. And I'd argue that the bar is actually set very high, especially with the fact that a game combining the three strongest elements from the old IE days cannot get standard industry funding, so we the funders (not you) have pretty high expectations after dropping an average $$$ for vaporware. Having few or simple expectations is hardly the same as setting the bar "low." *I had attributed the Torment project to the wrong folks, oops.

There are two aspects to PC versus companion content development, I think: Dialogue options with "personality" and then the total PC reactivity with the world. The thing is, companions are essentially extensions of the immersive environment given individuality. As a part of the world alien to the PC, the companions know things we don't. One trap when creating dialogue, e.g. Dragon Age, was that the PC lacked personality most of the time and was only asking questions. Then if the writer injects a lot of personality into PC dialogue, there's the risk that without enough options, that would narrow roleplay possibilities for the player, on top of which I don't think the writer should make too many factual assumptions within PC dialogue either, or it's like a type of intellectual godmoding. As for the character story part, this is going to depend heavily on the game narrative first. Like I said elsewhere, it doesn't matter to me how much of the PC's backstory is prewritten because the dialogue options ultimately should shape both the PC and his/her effect upon the world. But you don't need to worry about this or even advise Obsidian on the matter. PS:T, which Avellone wrote, is a perfect example of balanced PC/companion depth tied so intrinsically to the game narrative. * Tons of PC dialogue options with different personality, also asking questions. * PC backstory is pre-written, but you had completely control over actual personality development and world reactivity (choices), which in turn affected how companions reacted to you.

I lost the post I was going to quote about "why can't we have both?" (romances and good game mechanics)---but I'd argue that's not a proper counterbalancing pair. It should be romances and nonromance character content, some excellent nonromance content being like Dak'kon or Morte. We now have Avellone's character development update, and I think it's time I re-post some of my earliest posts about game romances, which I wrote back in October 2012 (and followup). Specifically, it's pretty obvious that Obsidian doesn't have a team of writers for PE the way Bioware does (and can have different writers do different romances and other game content), and this development is thus linear because Avellone is doing it all himself; I really do not want "romance" to overpower other content in the same character: It's already well-known that it takes at least 2-3 months for Chris to write a character at his speediest, so the obvious answer to "why can't we have both" is TIME. It's either spend more money to hire more writers, whose output will be of questionable quality/style compared to Avellone by himself and would require additional editing time anyway, or add more time to the development timeline. Because otherwise with the way PE Is development at this point, requiring "deep" romances ("done right") in the game would, IMO, require at least 1-2 characters out of 8 to be completely devoted to only that content type, and that never seems to go well because either a chunk of people are always left out from the RP aspect or the 1-2 romance characters become so "universal" that they're meaningless. Moreover, saying the addition of romances is great for economic reasons is a weak argument. Basically, that "reason" is merely a cover for personal preference. The FPS games that don't have romances do just fine in the economic department; can you really say "add romances to FPS games because it'll obviously increase your bottom line!" with a straight face? Or would you say people played the Infinity Engine games primarily for their romances? It's about the target audience that Obsidian wants to attract and how that affects game development on their timetable: Creating content here and adding a mechanic system there can and will take resources from other places or even impinge development proper. As always, my preference: Leave game romance to the modders. Now, if Avellone did end up leaving traces here and there with no resolution, fine. But I'd much rather have a bunch of Dak'kon -like content because that's rare already in both games and mass media. BruceVC: You missed all the previous thread discussions pointing out that "romance" is actually not a deeper and intrinsically better type of character content compared to other deep and complex relationships, be it family or the bromance/womance that's fallen out of favor in Western mass media since homophobia became much more salient.