Piccolo

I wish they had courses like this when I was in eductation.

Hopefully monsters are rare. As said in another monster topic, I think I appreciate them a lot more in fantasy games when there's only a few of them out there hidden in the depths of the world, that are whispered about by NPCs a lot and mentioned in lore books, but very rare to actually encounter. There should be a sense of wonder and discovery when running into one. If they're used all the time as bosses, they lose their appeal for me. I would much rather face tough human enemies as "bosses" most of the time, rather than monsters. - As for types of monsters... nothing too alien, but nothing too overused either, like dragons.

$4m is more than enough to make a great RPG. As the budget goes higher and higher, so does the potential to make the game worse and worse with detrimental ****e like voice acting, cinematics, fancy animations, mainstream attention through advertising, etc.

Slightly taller than average humans, with very different shaped skulls to make them unique.

I think it's very important in RPGs for characters to be able to fail. If my characters can't fail, it usually means: - It's too easy for them to become all-powerful - The gameworld is scaled around my character to prevent failure - Player skill plays too big a part, overriding character abilities ...or a mixture of all three.

8 is absolutely fine, if they have a lot of depth to them. If you want to experiment with different party setups / class combinations, that's what the Adventurer's Hall is for.

Oblivion had some pretty horrendous flaws, like level-scaling, but with a ton of mods it's an alright game. I'm not sure if I can say the same about Skyrim. There's so much I dislike about that game that it would probably need to be modded beyond recognition to be redeemed.

Ugh... don't lump Skyrim together with Morrowind in the poll, please. Morrowind is a masterpiece. The best open-world RPG ever made in my opinion. Skyrim is garbage in comparison. Between the stripped away RPG elements, hand-holding, increased emphasis on action, and ****ty voice acting instead of written dialogue, it might as well not be from the same series as Morrowind. It's more like a bad spinoff game than a real TES RPG.

So essentially, they're undead then. Whatever they are, they're clearly not living by human standards. Otherwise why would the description say "unseen by living eyes for centuries" and "cannot be walked by the living"?

Strong souls, from everything Josh has told us so far, represent individuals who are very much the opposite of dead or diseased. Do you have any quotes to back that up? ...Because they sound pretty dead to me. In the second paragraph, they describe "restless victims of a horrific plague" - that to me, implies that they're no longer living.

I'm just telling you what the dungeon description said. It's been uninhabited by the living for centuries and is now only home to restless souls.

Occupied? You're kidding, right? We're talking about an ancient structure that's been abandoned for centuries here. Who said that ancient structure that's been abandoned for centuries by someone known, can't be occupied by some one unknown. And really - another unlogical point - if it is not occupied, than you cant fight anyone there because it is empty. Did you even read the description they gave for the dungeon? It's inhabited only by souls of plague victims and such. Not the living. Same goes for you, Stun.

How many times do I need to say, I'm not suggesting preventing the player from turning back and leaving through the inital entrance. Perhaps I didn't make that point clear in my original post, but i've stated it numerous times now throughout this thread. You even quoted me saying it on the previous page! Oh, now there's a good idea: lets promote tedium and repetition! No mid-dungeon exits, but go ahead and allow the party to just walk back through ALL the dungeon levels they've already seen/explored so that they can leave. LOL It's only tedium if you're the kind of gamer who insists on carrying every last piece of loot out of the dungeon so they can sell it. Such gamers should not be pandered to with exits at every level. They're as bad as grinders who treat killing like an MMO, to gain XP. The rest of us will pass through the dungeon once without backtracking.

Occupied? You're kidding, right? We're talking about an ancient structure that's been abandoned for centuries here.

How many times do I need to say, I'm not suggesting preventing the player from turning back and leaving through the inital entrance. Perhaps I didn't make that point clear in my original post, but i've stated it numerous times now throughout this thread. You even quoted me saying it on the previous page!

There you go again, trying to impose thoughts and opinions on me in a vain attempt to win the argument. I'm in favour of plausible explanations for there being only two exits if it makes for a much more intense, ominous dungeon the player can't just hop in and out of at leisure. I'm sure you're not completely devoid of an imagination, so I shouldn't need to provide reasons why an ancient dungeon that's been abandoned for many years might not have as many viable exits as it had when it was first constructed.

BG1 is my favorite IE game. I wouldn't say it's better than PS:T, just different and more to my taste. All the IE games have their own strengths and weaknesses really. There isn't one that's objectively the best... and nor is there one which Project Eternity should exclusively try to emulate. It should draw on the strengths of all of them.

Huh? I'm not suggesting having only 1 entrance / exit. I'm just suggesting no exits at every level purely for the player's convenience. So you enter the dungeon and have two choices - progress through every level to escape (there can even be multiple exits near the end of the dungeon), or turn back the way you came (which should come with some peril, such as new encounters).

Perhaps the problem here is that we're a forum full of people who have completely different philosophies on what makes a good dungeon. Some people hold atmosphere, exploration, and discovery as paramount, while others just love Roleplaying captured Rats in a maze. I'm in the former camp. You're in the latter. But that's fine. I'm pretty sure obsidian has already said that this mega dungeon will have multiple exits for those who wish to savor the experience one piece at a time, instead of doing the whole thing in one go. Don't lump me into a catagory when you have no clue what you're talking about, please. Firstly, atmosphere is hugely important to me. That's a big reason why I don't want exits at every level. Go read the description they gave for the dungeon. It sounds really ominous - a place where most adventures don't come out alive. So being able to hop in and out whenever I want to sell loot in a nearby down completely trivializes the dungeon. It becomes less of a deadly location to endure, and more of series of game levels for people to collect loot and kill baddies. Secondly, exploration and discovery are very important to me also, and I fail to see how not having exits halfway down makes the dungeon any less exciting to explore. Please, explain that logic to me.

Or better yet: Brain-toggle option: Use/Don't use the F**king exits if you want/don't want to. Perhaps, in addition to exits on every level, they could have big floating markers inside the dungeon to show you the way through. It wouldn't kill the atmosphere or anything like that, because we can simply choose to ignore them. I mean, hand-holding isn't hand-holding, right? It's just more "options".

Morrowind. Darklands and Arcanum are close runners up though. And if I could completely remove one RPG from history, it would be Skyrim.

Noone is forcing you to visit the mega dungeon, just as nobody is forcing the people who don't enjoy lots of dialogue to spend most of their time interacting with NPCs. Stop trying to ruin the dungeon for people who actually love dungeon crawling. Would you like it if someone who hated lots dialogue asked for it to be drastically cut? At the end of the day, this is supposed to be a "best of" IE game. That means it'll have a fairly healthy mix of story/dialogue, combat/dungeon crawling, and exploration. Also, as others have rightly said in other threads like this, i'm sure there will be a lot of interesting lore connected to the dungeon, as well as exploration value. There's really no reason for it to simply be a hack n slash affair. It's really not actually. I'm certain the developers thought long and hard before announcing the mega dungeon idea. They knew the range of levels we'd end up at. If they honestly thought we'd end up with too many or too few levels, they would not have gone ahead with the idea or would have set different targets. They were always in control. Adding a new level per 2.5k backers was just a fun way to involve the community.

Aside from the main theme, I would actually say that the Oblivion soundtrack is a lot better. Morrowind's soundtrack always seemed too repetitive to me.

Thanks

Same question I asked in the Paypal thread: Why are you planning to take Paypal down so soon? This is a little disappointing, as I was really hoping to grab one of the mid-high tiers in a couple of week's time. If you're worried about being fair to the people who pledged early via kickstarter under the assumption that the rewards were limited availability, I think a much better solution would simply be to change some of the Paypal tiers to make them a bit less compelling. For instance, the exclusive in-game items, signed physical items, beta keys, memorial stones, wasteland 2 downloads, and expansion downloads could all be removed from the Paypal tiers... along with the really expensive tiers ($1k-$10k) offering design your own content. Or perhaps bump some stuff up like the signed collectors edition to $1000 as the new highest tier, without NPC design.