Infinitron

I think an Icewind Dale-like product would best be self-funded, perhaps as an expansion pack for Pillars of Eternity. Kickstarter should be used for launching the production of full-scale RPGs with a larger scope. There's no reason to aim lower than that.

Don't think "1000 lockpicks that break after 5 uses". Think Deus Ex. (this is all just conjecture though, I don't believe we actually know how lockpicking will work in this game)

Like I said, I don't think those games were very balanced in the first place so adding one more area wasn't really a big deal. I don't think Durlag's Tower had any "game-breaking" items either (BG1 as a whole was very conservative about items). Watcher's Keep might have been a different story with regard to items - I don't really remember. Generally speaking character power in D&D is determined primarily by level - an item has to be crazy powerful to have a serious effect on game balance. As far as rebalancing goes, though, the final boss battle of BG1 was actually upgraded for the expansion. If you can get a copy of BG1 without the expansion, you'll see that it's easier there.

For many people, that would be a reason to feel anguish that they DIDN'T back it.

In this game, it is. A wide range of mechanics in Pillars of Eternity has been designed to be "save scum resistant". We've had many discussions about this so feel free to use the forum search function.

Torment is being directed to a great extent by the people behind Mask of the Betrayer, a rather popular Obsidian title, so even if you don't like inXile you should have supported it on those grounds alone.

According to many, the very first recognizably "Black Isle-style" RPG was Dark Sun: Shattered Lands from 1993.

Unfortunately, there's really no way to make lockpicking a non-savescummy mechanic without this break from realism. I mean, crit-fail? Why should I ever crit-fail? Reload!

I don't think there was anything about Durlag's Tower that really unbalanced BG1 any more than exploring the entire overworld and hitting the level cap instead of focusing on the main quest unbalanced it. Ditto for BG2 and its "Chapter 2 of everything". You may have a point with regard to the more linear IWD, though.

Sure. But if all you have is rules and tools without genuinely dangerous foes that do lots of damage, then what you get is "fake complexity". "Oh look, you can use fireballs to do massive damage against the ice monsters, this game is so sophisticated!" Except it isn't because the ice monsters do piddling damage against you and you could just as easily take them out with standard attacks. This is a major problem with games today.

Why should we care about difficulty as an end goal? Combat being fun to play should be the goal. An encounter with enemies hit really really hard and that's all they do can be really challenging and tactical, while being boring all the same. Difficulty doesn't come into the equation, it's more about how you approach the chalenge, not the level of chalenge. IWD2 is generaly considered more difficult than BG2, but it's difficulty is of an entirely different kind. Which one someone prefers is entirely subjective. Sure, I'm not arguing otherwise. Although personally I do value (possibly optional) high difficulty as an end goal.

Actually, what allows it is that the game is easy/broken. If BG2 required a truly min-maxed party, if it didn't let you rest at will completely negating all long-term strategy, your self-imposed challenge of picking an inferior party composition wouldn't have worked as well, I wager. Greater balance for greater difficulty. No longer does the game designer have to say "but wait, what if the player doesn't have the good class here? better make this fight easier" when he designs an encounter.

20,000 concurrent players is a very impressive number, even if it includes Kickstarter backers. Compare that with some other RPGs that have been released recently and you'll see. Considering how low the game's initial budget was, I think they at least made an impressive return on their investment. As for Eternity's playtime, you might be surprised. Consider that there are people who have played Wasteland 2's beta for timespans of around 20 hours. That's said to be about 30% of the final game. Do the math!

A lot of players think that "difficulty" in a CRPG is some hard-to-create formula that requires immense amounts of trickery and complexity. But the truth is, if you want a challenge, you need nothing more than enemies who hit your guys really really hard. It's that simple. There are valid arguments in favour of "GM sucker punches", but don't ever make the mistake of thinking that they're a prerequisite for high difficulty or for a game that isn't "casual".

"Hard counter" doesn't exactly mean "forced party composition" in the sense that you absolutely can't win without that composition. There are, after all, plenty of grogs who have beat BG2 with a solo rogue or whatnot. It means that a particular party composition is extremely effective against a certain enemy, while other party compositions are extremely inefficient, making that party composition a "no-brainer".

Dragonfall had all the budget of Shadowrun Returns' sales proceeds, which were probably considerable. Apples and oranges, really. They already had a working platform, Obsidian is making things from scratch.

Who are you talking about, besides Nathan Grayson of Rock Paper Shotgun?

The Rock was a pretty good movie too.

Yeah, I don't think there's going to be any dice rolling on that type of stuff in Pillars of Eternity. By the way, if you do like the dice rolling stuff, then Torment's lead designer Adam Heine takes the opposite approach: http://it-tormentrpg.tumblr.com/post/78434193081/una-lunga-chiacchierata-con-adam-heine (there's an english translation in there, ctrl-f to "randomness")

This is pretty funny: http://games.on.net/2014/03/if-you-dont-like-to-read-dont-play-this-game-pillars-of-eternitys-josh-sawyer-on-dealing-with-grognards/

The topic of my post isn't really about the issue of retrying a skill check that you've already failed. It's about whether the game is going to present you with skill checks that are far above your level at all, and whether you'll be expected to mold your character over the course of the game, such that he can return to solve those skill checks later on.

What does "under leveled" mean? Under leveled for an entire area? Why can't you be "under leveled" for just that one check?

Is the game being structured so that players can often go back and pass those skill checks after they've gained some more levels and raised the relevant skills, or is it more like "that's what your character was specced to do, deal with it", like in the 3rd Edition D&D CRPGs? In those games, the imposition of a level cap on your skills meant that it always felt (to me at least) like you needed to constantly stay "topped off" at max level with the skills you'd chosen in character generation. It discouraged you from specializing in other skills in the middle of your character's career. If you WERE "topped off" at a certain skill, you could usually always pass any skill check with it when you encountered it for the first time. The games never really threw a check at you that was purposely designed to be something that you couldn't pass until later. So it was like, if your character was predestined to be able to do something, then he'd be able to do it always, and if not, tough cookies, do it in your next playthrough with your next character. Compare that with, say, Fallout, which was built around the idea of slowly building up your character's competency with various skills over the course of the game, even requiring you to do so with Small Guns --> Energy Weapons if you wanted to remain competitive in combat. Which was kind of bad, but also helped emphasize that sort of design - always improving the same skills was the wrong way to play the game.

You guys are being trolled

Semantics. It's the same thing as making a bunch of class-exclusive skills, like Perform for Bards in NWN. Ah, but you say "no, we're basically taking existing universal skills and chopping them up into class-exclusive skills, not creating new ones whole cloth!". Well, I'd say that's still almost as much work in terms of balancing and re-balancing.