Sensuki

I think you misunderstood. The book version of Brienne of Tarth looks a lot like a man, you wouldn't know any better except for the slightly wider hips. The show did very good making GC look a lot like Brienne but I prefer to not mention it as it leaves a sour taste in my mouth overall. I think Eternity's "unclothed" female models are not going to have any breast pronounciation - unlike the Infinity Engine games. To avoid boobplate I think you have to make the models more flatchested right ? So that's why we will probably end up with Brienne of Tarth/Asha Greyjoy style characters (flat chested).

The VO budget will likely be "small" - after watching the DFA Documentary covering audio I'd rather they just go with whoever does the best performance for the role, rather than 'inviting' big names to come and do it.

Not from an input lag or refresh rate perspective. TVs only fake refresh rates to interpret 1080i video properly (only half the picture show each frame).

Yes Kevin Michael Richardson has a great voice. I like David Ogden Stiers though as well. The chick who does the Aerie voice (forget her name, Kate Soucie maybe?) is okay but just doesn't have the same gravitas as the other two - but the style of narration in IWD2 was different.

Correct but he also sounded very sick of it to me, and relieved that in Eternity that they have the control to prevent it from happening. I'm all for practical armor. Will be interesting to see what the 'paperdoll' looks like in no armor though, probably very modest (to lacking) in curves. Asha Greyjoy or Brienne of Tarth style (from the ASoIAF books, not the show).

Modes are separate from difficulty. They're challenge modes/flavour modes. You could play "Easy & Expert Mode" and "Hardest with no modes" - for example. Path of the Damned however might be a difficulty setting as it enables all creatures in encounters and scales their level (the only mode that has level scaling). Trial of Iron will probably just save at the normal auto-save points, it's just like any other game except you only have one save slot (instead of potentially unlimited) and if you die in the game it gets deleted. The game may have auto-save settings in the options though. The IE games saved on exiting master areas and on exiting specific child areas in the game (mostly main plot stuff) and storyline save points. You could probably back up your Trial of Iron mode to circumvent the save deletion ... but then what's the point ?

This is probably already a given, but if not I would like to raise my fist in favor of an Icewind Dale 1 style intro movie & Chapter introductions. Kazunori Aruga illustrations + Justin Bell music + narration of written content by a voice actor. This was easily the best introduction of any IE game IMO.

Gone for me too.

Probably M for mature themes, drug references and violence - there won't be any nudity as the project director especially is sick of sexualizing characters.

PoE = Path of Exile lol.

You can also do it now. http://eternity.obsidian.net/ Click the DONATE button. Backer website will be up in 1.5 weeks at which time you will be able to 'confirm' your pledge. Donating before the game comes out is a better idea because it gives the developers more money for the Alpha & Beta stages of the game. Your $29+ dollars could be attributed to some bug fixing or a couple lines of voice acting so you'll receive a better product overall.

1.5 weeks.

Says the guy who registered two days ago. We know what you want Expert mode to be, you've told us - we heard you. The question is why the **** can't you hear us ? The fact is that it does not matter what you want, because it has already been defined. You clearly have autism or something, so I'm just going to add you to my ignore list - just in case you are actually somehow still confused, before I do that here is all the known Expert Mode information from here and Something Awful, I cannot be bothered trawling the other locations (formspring, ycs, tumblr etc).

Mor, you didn't know about the tooltip coming into the thread, I had to tell you about it. You never answered my question about why you want to play with tooltips disabled, but you're okay with defense being shown in the combat log We do not know what the combat log shows, the IE games did not show defenses and they probably (but not 100%) won't be shown in Eternity either, I posted this thread to try and get a dev answer. If you like to see enemy defenses you're going to want to play with tooltips on as they 100% guarantee that you'll be able to see them and the information is readily available when you mouse over an enemy, rather than scrolling up through the log to find the value (If they're in there at all). If the defenses are not shown in the combat log, what are you going to do ????

Hahah this guy ... completely in denial. Ignores my perfectly logical argument as well, after he asked for one. Ignoramus.

sharp cheese

Well currently I think the Environment Art is clearly winning. The shown portraits have also been very good. Stronghold design is also very incline. I'm sure we'll have a lot of 'stuff' to talk about in just over a week's time.

Icewind Dale has great atmosphere and environment art. Exploration within the levels is pretty good (despite the linearity). The combat overall is pretty easy, Malavon is the only fight I found 'tough'. The writing and story is a lot better than Icewind Dale 2 IMO. There's not *too* many memorable encounters. Off the top of my head - there's those trapped chests in Kresselack's Tomb which lock your thief inside a room with Skeletons for a period of time which can catch you out (for a mundane encounter). The encounter with the Imbued Wights on the bottom of that can get a bit hairy if you're low on resources. Dragon's Eye has those Priest chicks, the Bombardier Beetles, Presio and her zombies and then I have to say I enjoyed Yxzunomei's bottom level very much. Some of the Shattered Hand encounters were okay, the ones where you clear the elf tower had some okay ones and some of the undead ones (with the Bone Reavers or whatever they're called) were alright as well. Dorn's Deep also had a couple, but yeah the scale is REALLY low compared to the other games (BG2 for example).

It was. Gotcha. Mine were Neverwinter Nights, Dragon Age: Origins, Diablo 3 and Mass Effect 3. Never buying another Blizzard or Bioware game, ever again. Lol I actually liked Mass Effect 2. The combat was worse, but the cinematic side was improved IMO. ME1 def had the best combat of all ME games, in the first game I got a shock reflex unscoped sniper shot from quite a fair distance away like I was playing Call of Duty 2, I was like AHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!111 So good haha. ME1 had more maneuvering and moving around. ME2 went really big on the popamole, unfortunately. All ME games have really horrible default mouse movement, requires a lot of tweaks to remove the horrible input lag and mouse smoothing.

Yeah. Let's add Icewind Dale to the mix, and you pretty much have my personal top 3. You poor soul.

Tooltip disable is, but I'm not sure what the combat log shows. I'm pretty sure that target defense is now shown on an attack roll in the log, but not 100% sure Actually it seems you have the comprehension problem. In my last four posts I am not arguing anything I am telling you what is in expert mode based on quotes from Josh Sawyer since you and Trash Man both seemed to miss the point of the thread. The OP stated that Project Eternity has mouse-over tool-tips that show the Defenses of enemies. These tooltips are disabled in Expert Mode, and that is when I stated that I would also prefer they be not shown in the combat log either (mutually exclusive with tooltips disabled). You are trying to argue (to me) that this is a bad thing. Well, you're arguing to the wrong person - I am not the one who decided that they will be disabled in Expert Mode, Josh Sawyer is. I am not the one who decided what Expert Mode is all about, Josh Sawyer is. Expert Mode does not appear to be a mode targeted at you, or Trash Man. It is a mode targeted at the crowd that doesn't want any of the helper information on and it provides an extreme between itself and "default" whereby you can choose which settings you like. Expert mode locks everything off and default mode allows you to enable and disable options on the fly. I am part of the crowd that does not want any helper information. In relation to the obfuscation of defenses, I do not believe that showing them right off the bat is as important as you make it out to be. Firstly this is how it was in all of the Infinity Engine games. In the IE games there were four attack outcomes: Hit, Miss, Critical Hit and Critical Miss. Critical Miss was on a roll of 1. Critical Hit was a 20 (some classes/abilities/items? altered this range). In Eternity there are still four outcomes which are based upon the assumption that the attacker's accuracy is equal to the defender's relevant defense score: Critical Hit (96-100 on a '100 sided die'), Hit (51-95), Graze (6-50) and Miss (1-5). The formula used to calculate it is: Die Roll + Accuracy - Defense = outcome Here is a use case: (For the record here, one attack = 2 seconds in Project Eternity, from the last available known piece of Information). Ogre A has a Deflection score of 65. Player 1 has a Melee Accuracy score of 55. Player 1 makes a melee attack against Ogre A. On the default Project Eternity settings, when you mouse over Ogre A, you will get a tooltip that shows the cookie cutter Ogre stats. Let's assume we have not faced an Ogre before so all of these values are three grey ??? like Josh's example says. Player 1's attack roll was 47 + 55 = 102 Now we know here that a roll of 47 against an enemy with the same Defense as our attack is going to be a Graze. 102 - 65 = 37, so it is a Graze. Player 1 attacks Ogre A: 47 + 55 = 102: Graze Ogre A takes X damage from Player 1 On the default Project Eternity settings, you will now know the Deflection Score of the Ogre. It is 65, so you know that you are attacking an enemy that has 65 Deflection after the first attack. On Expert mode (or with tooltips off) you will only know that the Ogre's Deflection score is between 52 and 97. Player 1 then makes another attack against Ogre A. Player 1 attacks Ogre A: 83 + 55 = 138: Hit Ogre A takes X damage from Player 1 Now we know that Ogre A's Deflection is between 52 and 88. Player 1 then makes another attack against Ogre A. Player 1 attacks Ogre A: 66 + 55 = 121 = 56: Hit Ogre A takes X damage from Player 1 Now we know after these 3 attacks (6 seconds) that Ogre A's Deflection is between 52 and 71. Assuming that the Player is paying attention to the numbers, we now know that the Ogre has a Deflection of around about the same level as Player 1's Melee Accuracy or slightly a bit higher and if we want to hit the Ogre more often, we're going to have to do something to temporarily boost our accuracy for the encounter, change to a target with a lower Deflection score or just hope for some good rolls. Tooltips/Defenses obscured means that instead of magically acquiring the exact value of the Ogre's Deflection score upon the first attack we instead have to pay attention to the numbers to work out an approximate range, and then decide what to do. This feels more "realistic" as after you take a punch at a guy in a bar IRL you don't magically know exactly how good he is at Boxing/Martial Arts upon throwing your first punch, it takes a little bit (but sometimes perhaps not too much) longer to realize whether you're going to make short work of him or you made a baad mistake (not speaking from experience, btw). More importantly it requires you to be paying attention to what's going on in the game. You don't necessarily have to keep track of the numbers because the combat log records them for you, so you can always scroll up, but if you're paying attention on the fly then you should be able to figure out what's going on after a short amount of time. And that is exactly one of the things that Josh Sawyer described in his video in the Kickstarter Update about modes, Expert mode requiring more active attention from the player. There are many other reasons why I think it's better but these two should suffice for most people's comprehension I think, the main points are that this is how it was in the Infinity Engine games (you know, the games Eternity is inspired by) and it requires more active attention from the player, which is one of the pillars of expert mode as described by Josh in the Kickstarter Update. However it is also possible that the formula shows the Defender's defense score in Expert mode as well, which is what I do not want. Both of you guys (Mor and TrashMan, would no doubt prefer tooltips anyway, so that fact is not really relevant to you).

Are you kidding. Dragon Age: Origins was terrible - that and the original Neverwinter Nights were two of the most disappointing games I have ever played.

Nice Straw man argument there. I'll join in the re-quoting of myself. Defense tooltips are turned off in Expert mode. You want them on - no problem, they're on by default in normal mode. Expert mode doesn't look like it will be for you either, you clearly 'want to be an expert' though. Calling it Expert Mode is likely Josh Sawyers own subtle dig at people who like obfuscation (like me). Perhaps they should change the name no? Call it Retard mode. Would you want to play the mode then ?

Take that up with the devs, clearly expert mode is not what you want it to be, hahah. Default = everything on (help) Expert mode = everything off (no help) Expert mode is separate from difficulty, AFAIK the only thing we know that it does do in regards to making the game physically harder is enables permanent death. There may be some other small things as well. We are not sure yet. Other than that though all it does is turn all the helper information off, everything. You are clearly in between - your preference is covered, don't tick expert mode (which forces everything off) and select the options you want. Problem solved. Like I said from the very first post, Expert mode is essentially BG1 mode.

You want to debate about the pros and cons of showing and obfuscating Defenses? Before we do that, let's clear something up. First of all, this is how it is. By default, you will get exactly what you want. The defense values of enemies will be displayed in the tootlip, after you attack them you will get the real value of that defense. Because the showing of defenses are being handled by a tooltip rather than by the combat log, they may actually not be displayed in the combat log, because you'll know what the defense is anyway. Expert mode will disable these tooltips. It will disable the Health status of enemies as well. These two things have already been confirmed. Now this thread is about whether or not the display of Defenses comes up in the combat log as well. Are you saying that you will play with these tooltips disabled, but you want to still see the Defense values in the combat log ? I am pretty sure you are not going to disable these tooltips anyway by the sound of it, that's why I believe Expert Mode will not be for you. Instead, as I previously said, you will not tick expert mode when you start a game, you will have the option of manually disabling the things you do not wish to see via the options menu.