Sensuki

I asked this on SA forums and Josh said that the animations are frame rate independent. The game speed will not increase the more FPS you have (there is no FPS cap either - which is standard for Unity). You can use the slowdown function to slow it down though.

I thought Baldur's Gate 1 had good presence of animals throughout the game. Squirrels, Bears and Wolves and the like. Cows and Horses in Rural Areas. BG2 had Deer and stuff too in forested areas. Added to the foresty atmosphere, that's for sure. I've posted about this before, but I assume it's probably C-priority or less.

I assume that Steam Early Access sales has probably been factored in to the budget for finishing the game/expansion dollars. Wasteland 2's Steam Early Access gave it enough money to keep development going for a few more months I think (two at least). That may or may not be incorrect. I just remember Brother None saying something of the sort on the RPGCodex.

I don't doubt that there will be hard content. I'm just not sure if the crit path content will be very difficult. The quotes all seem to say that the toughest stuff is optional. I suppose the toughest BG2 stuff was optional as well though, shrug. Sometimes I am a little bit disappointed about the main storyline just being easy to average difficulty, because then encounter-wise it becomes hardly worth talking about.

There's a quote from way back (probably a year ago now) about the game's combat state being very hard to break. I guess the reason is if you could run away from a fight, you would technically be able to abuse the out of combat stamina regeneration. Eg: Fight. O drats dis be hard -> Run away. Hath runneth far enough away to break combat state -> Go back with full Stamina after ~10 seconds. The worst design I ever saw regarding this was probably Neverwinter Nights 1, where you could easily break the combat state, especially at the endgame, all it required was closing a door, sitting down to rest and going back in at full health while that Paladin chick (forget her name) was still hurt.

I assume that using the cancel function only cancels the attack (or action), but not the recovery time?

The sideboob is actually pretty extreme on it.

Yes please.

There's an NDA on anything to do with the story including the plot and themes. The only thing we know is it has something to do with the Pillars of Adra, the player witnesses a supernatural event in the prologue and that one of the themes probably has something to do with factional "racism" or something along those lines. The information that Brandon Adler disclosed in the thread would have been nice if it was in the actual update as well. But it does indicate "hey we're kinda busy right now"

Did dynamic cloth and hair end up making it in?

Don't ya just f'n love 2D backgrounds.

The Codex is simply honest.

wow so edgy! such internets!

The format we generally use for stuff like this is we put the questions open to the forum and then the most popular ones get picked for the interview. That's probably why it feels like 'the questions I would ask myself'. We wanted to be fair to Carrie considering this is her first interview (!) since entering the industry that we focused a bit more about her in the beginning, rather than trying to mine information about Eternity from her. That's why it reads a bit more like a traditional interview, unlike our Q&A with Josh Sawyer from last year which was all basically Eternity mechanics questions. There's a lot of information out there now about the game mechanics of PE and there's an NDA on anything to do with the story or themes, so when interviewing a Narrative Designer for the game the only real option you have is to explore the process. What we've learned here is that Carrie's working on companions and critical path dialogue among other things, so that means she is playing quite a big role in the writing of the game. I could see her writing Sagani perhaps?

ASoIaF has better characters, and dialogue/inner monologue. Tolkien was a grandmaster world builder. If you look at a map of Essos and Westeros it is basically England plus Europe how they used to think it was shaped back in the day. Most of the things in ASoIaF are based on RL history and given a twist to disguise them.

One thing we try and do at the Codex is get new information. There are many of us there that have already read every interview about an upcoming game (like PE) so we know what questions not to ask. We didn't learn too much new information this interview but it confirms that Carrie is writing companions.

She only made a small narrative mod, for job interview purposes I think. Nevertheless it helped get her the job.

"You might be surprised to hear that Obsidian's Pillars of Eternity has other people besides Josh Sawyer, Chris Avellone or Eric Fenstermaker working on it. One of these people is the narrative designer Carrie Patel. She is also a writer, and is publishing her first book, "The Buried Life," in July." Interview conducted by Hormalakh, edited by Crooked Bee. http://www.rpgcodex.net/content.php?id=9438

Every single Diablo 3 in-game cutscene (OMFG stop interrupting my left clicking) - that's content.

I think you're getting a couple of things mixed up. The Code in Diablo 2 isn't the way it is because of the way the game was managed or developed. That's just how it was written, and testing did not find those bugs. Josh is talking about Project Management. Eternity does have some pretty crazy things - number one crazy feature is the stuff they did with the visuals in pre-production. Moving water, dynamic lighting and such in a 2D scene. I don't know if that was "planned" per-se. Someone probably did a bit of research, found a youtube video or something and said "hey, why don't we try this?". If you compare Kickstarter Projects such as Eternity, Wasteland 2, Broken Age among others - Pillars of Eternity is easily the best managed project. That said we don't have the beta yet and we haven't seen much gameplay footage, but from what we can tell in the way the project is scheduled and managed, it is a lot better than both of the others.

I am happy about the solution with the optional solid background as that solves both issues for solid and minimalist crowds. Will the action bar icons have some sort of fancy border around each button? even if just a gold or copper border? Lol, I see the RPG Codex mentality slipping in the Obsidian forums. We are actually both from there, and were having a discussion about it over there. So a cheeky snipe on here results in a cheeky reply.

**** off Infinitron.

Diablo 2 was a great game, and very replayable. The system design was probably a bit of "dumb luck" but look what happens when you try and overdesign an ARPG - check out Diablo 3 upon release. Utter fail. All they had to do was basically Diablo 2 with better graphics, and it would have been really good (besides the story being utterly terrible).

Most of the best gameplay elements of games are all mistakes or unintended. For instance there is a bug in the Quake 3 code that makes jump height and distance scale with FPS divisions of 1000 at 125, 250, 333, 500 and 1000 FPS you gain significant jump distance increases and also other things (some have argued faster firing weapons and silent strafing in some games that use this code base). This actually makes the gameplay feel amazing, and the developers deliberately didn't fix the bug due to the gameplay improvements it gave. There are also lots of other examples. The OP is definitely right in that JES is more controlling of the gameplay environment, and calls out other "developer in the clouds" out for "dumb luck".

The Steve Weatherly photo and the fact that it has art. Coffeetable pointed out that anything WIP wouldn't have art made for it.