Infinitron

I don't have a strong preference, but one thing that nobody mentions is a Baldur's Gate 1-style hybrid system - with both a large open world to explore map-by-map, combined with a clickable fast travel world map.

Actually, it might be worth it to reopen the $20 option on Paypal, since money on Paypal gets delivered immediately. You can't change your mind and reduce your pledge like on Kickstarter. Want a cheaper game? Fork over the cash NOW. An added bonus is that by pledging on Paypal, Kickstarter don't get their 10% cut.

Guns aren't steampunk. Steampunk = 18/19th century Firearms were around long before that.

Your initial assumption was correct. It's not the PS:T successor. This is Josh Sawyer's baby and it's more likely to be inspired by the cancelled Black Hound project.

IMO, the current method of just reading forums is in fact the best one. It adds a context of discussion to the desired feature that would be missing in a simple list of entries.

They're not going to use the original Infinity Engine.

lol this is a riot I don't intend to continue this discussion, but just one thing: Wrong about what? How is it wrong that I employed a catch-all term for the purpose of the discussion? Don't try to shock-and-awe people with superior knowledge that's completely irrelevant to the discussion at hand. It's poor form.

I'm almost certain they're using a fork of Onyx with a different name.

Uh, what? Look, maybe in short range, under ideal conditions, a musket ball would put a hole in plate armor. But how likely was that to happen? The fact is that fighting men continued to wear plate well into the Renaissance period and beyond. Why would they do that if it wasn't effective? The "warm butter" simile is what I'm objecting to. It just wasn't that simple.

This is a myth. The projectiles of early firearms bounced off of plate armor. No, Sir, this is not a myth. I have a PhD in history, so believe me, I know what I'm writing. Even crossbow bolts and composite arrows pierced plate mail easily. lol credentialism Yes, it's a myth. It's true though that longbows were actually more powerful than early firearms.

This is a myth. The projectiles of early firearms bounced off of plate armor.

You don't even need a steampunk setting to have guns. Guns were around long, long before the Industrial Age. They were made in workshops by craftsmen. These werent "flintlocks", either. Flintlocks were high-tech compared to some of these early firearms.

Actually this is a myth - primitive firearms absolutely could not penetrate hardened plate armor. Also they didn't shoot bullets as we have today, they were more like little balls.

No cooldowns doesn't mean spamming. Infinity Engine games didn't have cooldowns. But didn't? Just because the cool down was 24 hours or however often you rested, doesn't make it any less limited. Resting isn't a cooldown. Resting recharges all of your abilities. A cooldown is per-ability. Resting is initiated by the player whenever he wants, giving him more control. Cooldowns are automatic. You can only rest when it's safe. Cooldowns happen in the middle of combat. In short, they are completely different.

No cooldowns doesn't mean spamming. Infinity Engine games didn't have cooldowns.

Since most "medieval fantasy" games actually have worlds that are more like early Renaissance Europe, the presence of primitive firearms makes perfect sense.

Where did you gather that from? I haven't heard anything like that. I think IWD and PS:T and MotB all used sleep-to-memorize. I don't think Black Isle or Obsidian has ever used a mana and/or rune system. Josh Sawyer said it on a forum. The SomethingAwful forums, I believe. http://forums.someth...9#post407551559 I've talked with Tim about this for a while and here's the thing: camping out in the wilderness and setting watches and getting ambushed by jackasses has a great classic AD&D feel to it, but it got pretty silly in games like IWD2. I'd like to build in reasonable mechanics that make you rest in the wilderness, but I don't want it to result in the sort of degenerate "rest after every fight" stuff we've faced in the past.

Amen. Let me recommend these articles by the brilliant Eric Schwarz. http://www.gamasutra...e_Cooldowns.php http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/EricSchwarz/20120506/169837/Cooldowns_FollowUp.php

In all fairness, I don't think DA2's problems had anything to do with the platform it was being developed for.

Another formation, more appropriate to medieval fantasy, is the schiltron or spear wall: The testudo formation would probably be overdoing it:

You're probably not a pack-rat like many/most RPG players are.

I've already said this on the Wasteland 2 forums. Probably the best way to prevent the player from acquiring massive amounts of gold is to to completely remove the option to sell items. The only gold you have is the gold you find. But this would be a controversial design decision.

I believe these things can be implemented without a turn-based combat system and without a hex-based battlefield. Total War games do it, though admittedly you can't control each soldier individually there, which makes things simpler. I'm also reminded of certain fights in The Witcher 2.

The formations in the IE games were purely about character placement. They had only a minor tactical effect on combat at best. Maybe since your fighter was at the front of the party, he'd get attacked by the monsters first. Or maybe they'd just run around him and go directly for the squishy mage. By midgame you generally stopped thinking about them entirely since combat quickly become too chaotic to stick to any sort of rigid formation. I'd like to see formations made better. Let them have an actual effect on the combat rolls. Let the game recognize when my characters are bunched together, perhaps giving me the option to automatically place them in some kind of mini phalanx or shield wall formation. Let me effectively block off territory with a row of my fighters, and deflect arrows with their tower shields, defending my poor squishy mages.

It wasn't a leak, it was a planned engine demo that was showed at the UNITY 2012 conference. I don't know who started the dumb rumor that it was a leak.