Sarog

Obsidian has broken from race being directly equivalent to culture, but that doesn't mean that race is entirely decoupled from country. Thyrtan are more associated with Aedyr, calbranda more with the Vailian Republics, etc. Minorities in each country will be there on account of generations of interactation between peoples. Likewise a future game could have orcs, give them an "origin" civilization where they are dominant in the same way that calbranda are probably dominant in the Vailian Republics, and then have other orcs in other countries whose ancestors will still have come from this civilization. Then you put this country somewhere far from the Eastern Reach, say on the other side of Aedyr, to justify that we didn't encounter any in this game on account of orc populations not having penetrated this far. Good thing there are plenty of other options than just huns then. Obsidian has drawn strongly on real world civilizations in building Eora, and there are plenty of real world civilizations that could still be used for inspiration to flesh out the setting. Particularly I see a lack of anything with a Middle Eastern vibe, and that just so happens to be a perfect opportunity to be a put a fresh spin on orcs. I sympathize. In the early days of the kickstarter, the general vibe here was pretty much one of "no Tolkien please", or at least so I remember. I was in that camp. Obsidian went a different way, so we have to save our hopes for something entirely original for a different franchise. Better accept Eora for what it is - a fresh take on traditional D&D high fantasy, not something that aims to break from of it. With that understanding, adding intelligently written orcs or goblins (and I would say or , because both would be overkill) to a setting that already has elves and dwarves is hardly a failure of creativity or the beginning of slippery slope.

Yeah. Or if those don't work, here are some more. It is absurd how easy it is to think of new ideas for orcs which would be groundbreaking for the genre. Persian-inspired orcs, who build great cities and temples. With a despotic government and rigidly formal court culture with lots of prostrations. With a monotheistic religion and a powerful, organised priesthood. Never been done before. Carthaginian-inspired orcs, with an aggressive trading culture. Government is a mix of theocraty and plutocracy, with a powerful priesthood being forced to delegate authority to powerful trading families who are a mix between tribal chieftain and trade baron. Never been done before. Arab-inspired orcs, with a Caliphate-like state that is part monarchy, part theocracy. Militaristic, but with great intellectual and artistic achievements. Perhaps with a Ptolemaic influence where the ruler tries to convince his/her subjects of his/her divinity with extensive public works projects. Internal tension and conflict between the more traditionalist tribes and the centralized state that has to negotiate with them to get warm bodies in its armies and keep the roads clear. Never been done before. This isn't even hard. Pick a historical civilization that isn't already spoken for in the franchise, add orcs, and boom you've got something no one has done before, that you can take in all sorts of interesting directions. You keep the core of what makes orcs essentially orcs - being big and muscular and having a certain militarism - but overhaul the rest in a way no one has done before. Plus, with Eternity taking this culture-is-bigger-than-race approach, we could see how orcs would live alongside other races in these societies. Arcanum showed us a vision of what orcs would look like as a downtrodden working class. What would they look like as the dominant race in a civilization instead? We're used to seeing orcs as brutish, genocidal conquerors. What would they look like as more benign rulers? There is a stupid amount of potential, the surface of which hasn't even been scratched while franchise after franchise gives us every imaginable flavour of elves. Yeah it is still early days for this setting. I'm sure that we'll eventually seem the roster of playable *cultures* padded out a bit for future Eternity games, and this could certainly include new races. It isn't criticism to toss around some ideas of what those future franchise developments might be.

I'm contributing to a forum thread where we're tossing around ideas. Liking Obsidian's world building doesn't preclude me from constructive discussion. It isn't even like I'm criticizing Obsidian for not including orcs. Hardly the double standard which you see in my other respondent, who praises what Obsidian has done so far but nevertheless claims that if Obsidian included orcs they would just be "knockoffs". I'd disagree with orcs having baggage. In most settings, their civilization and culture is paper thin. That's not baggage, that's freedom from it. Anything you can imagine with elves has already been done. Every new twist, every flavour of subvert-your-genre-expectations, it has already been done by someone. And if you deviate from Tolkien, you find yourself in Bioware's boat where you get complaint after complaint about your elves being too different. That's baggage. That's a weight of genre-expectation that you see in franchise after franchise with clockwork predictability. To be honest, your own post contains the seeds of its rebuttal. "Orcs are almost always pure evil invaders." "They only time they were well written was Arcanum". Do you see that as reasons not to go near them? Because I see those as reasons to do something new that outclasses other franchises - provided your setting is already using standard high-fantasy races, which this one is. What if Obsidian gave us a solitary example of where those statements aren't true? Imagine Obsidian included orcs in their next game in this setting. Imagine they defied your genre expectations; giving orcs an intelligently written culture that does not paint them as evil invaders, but rather takes an entirely new approach following the same quality of world building that Obsdian has displayed so far? Wouldn't that be at least as worth while as another incarnation of celtic elves? So many of the posts in this thread are discussing orcs as we have always seen them. I seem to be the only person talking about what orcs could be if Obsidian reimagined them in future games, which I think is the more interesting subject.

This is equally true - I would argue more true - of elves and dwarves. But Obsidian is including those, and we trust them to do a good job. There rest of your post doesn't make sense to me. You seem to praise Obsidian for doing new, creative things with the races they've chosen to include, but assume that if Obsidian were to include orcs they would not be able to do similar creative things. There's nothing inherent to orcs and goblins that would suddenly make Obsidian incapable of creativity. You're arguing from a double standard.

Not so much a matter of "do we need them?" as it is a matter of "could they contribute something worthwhile to the setting?" and "could the setting contribute something worthwhile to them?". In both cases I'd say the answer is yes. With respect to orcs, at least. I'm more ambivalent about goblins. But there were plenty of orcs in both Baldur's Gate games. They just weren't terribly important or interesting.

I'd be favour of including orcs if they were intelligently done. I've no expectation that they be added to Eora, but you never know. The setting hopefully has a long future ahead of it, which means a lot of room to grow. Elves and dwarves have been pretty well developed in fantasy. Just about every blend of fantasy has three or four varieties of elf, and possibly multiple varities of dwarf. That element of Tolien's legacy has been thoroughly tapped. Orcs haven't. In most settings, particularly D&D settings, they are just a monstruous race with a poorly-conceptualized barbaric culture. If you're already accepting Tolkien's legacy into your work - which Obsidian has done with elves and dwarves - you have the opportunity to do something new with a traditional high fantasy race that is left underdeveloped by most franchises. Warcraft of course puts a fair amount of emphasis on them, but while Warcraft may have had some good ideas it is pretty terribly written and could easily be outclassed. Elder Scrolls also does an interesting take and makes orcs playable and gives them a culture that is significantly different from the stereotype, though it is a fairly under developed part of the franchise lore. Obsidian is putting its own spin on elves and dwarves. And what I appreciate about Josh's world building is the emphasis he puts on history. If Obsidian were to decide to include orcs in the setting at a later date, I'd be excited to see what Obsidian would do with them. Orcs in fantasy have yet to receive an intelligent, well-considered civilization and an interesting, serious history. Warcraft is too childish and dudebro, and Elder Scrolls comes close but does orcish civilization in very small scale and with very little attention. So far in Eora humans seem to cover germanic, latin, and mesoamerican cultures, elves have a strong celtic influence, and aumaua seem influenced by the Far East. That still leaves a fair amount of historical inspiration that could be used to put a new twist on other races. Orcs could be injected with Turkic flavour, to take inspiration from the likes of the cumans, pechenegs, or early turks. Or they could take on an Armenian/Persian element and embrace a Middle Eastern aesthetic, which I think would be immensely interesting. Or, heck, you could even look to Greece for inspiration. My point is that just about any direction that Obsidian would pick for orcs if they chose to explore them would be dramatically new development for a race that has received precious little inteligent consideration in the high fantasy genre, and that would be a lot of fun. I see plenty of room in the current status quo for orcs to be included at a later date without stepping on the aumaua's conceptual toes. ------------------------------- I might agree with this were elves and dwarves not present in the setting. The fact that they are renders the point absurd. Taking a stand against Tolkien would be well and good, but including elves as an obligatory part of high fantasy robs that stand of any credibility. Do you think elves rob the setting of any creativity or respectability? If the answer is "no", then you are excercising an entirely arbitrary judgment of what is good Tolkien and what is bad Tolkien. Which is fine, but entirely subjective. Claiming an objective disparity between the "credibility" of elves and that of orcs is ridiculous. Orcs as we understand them are an invention of Tolkien. Which is equally true of elves and dwarves. But they do have mythological credentials, just obscure ones. Older forms of the word were used in English to refer to evil spirits, undead corpses, and something which matches our concept of an ogre. The modern orc has come a long way from that, but so have modern elves grown distinct from their mythological origins.

To date the only game with romances that I feel are worthwhile and would revit was Baldur's Gate II*. Even then I only really liked one of the three that I tried, but I could at least appreciate that the others weren't poorly done. If Obsidian were to take the time to "do it right" in any future PoE-related project, I would rather they use Baldur's Gate as a model than any of the post-NWN era of RPGs. I am happy and relieved that there are no romances in Pillars. Rather no romances at all than bad romances. *Well, I guess the Witcher's serious romances - as opposed to the random encounters - are alright, but they are so differently written on account of the fact that you're playing a much more defined character. With respect to insert-your-own personality player characters, BGII remains the only game with romances that I find tolerable.

That's not really an apt example. The ASOIAF universe is one where magic and supernatural forces forces disappeared from the world a long time ago, and are only beginning their resurgence during the time of the novels. In that context, it makes sense to equate belief in the supernatural with superstition and to have certain skepticism. P:E is a world where not only are supernatural forces "not rare" - thereby meaning that scientific dismissal of superstition is not valid - but the gods are active and might even interfere in mortal business. In that context - wherein the understanding of what a "god" is is based entirely on the presence of very real, active, obvious forces in the world, it doesn't make sense for denial of the existence/divinity of those beings to be an established school of belief in the world.

Just *once* I'd like an RPG to let me use a shield-and-spear combo. One of the world's oldest and most successful styles of infantry combat and RPGs never let you use it because of some arbitrary requirement that all spears be two-handed longspears.

Respectfully, this seems like asking to be pandered to. Being a fictional world with magic, the context of religion in P:E is naturally going to be completely different from our own, whereas "atheism" (as opposed to agnosticism, faithlessness, or a general lack of piety) is really quite specific and quite modern and therefore not a natural thing to import into the completely different metaphysical context of a different world. RPGs can't really get away with forcing you to play your character as a pious member of his/her culture's faith - and I've never seen one try, and therefore don't understand why it is such a burning issue to the melodramatic soapbox crowd at BSN - and it really is quite simple just to not pick zealous dialogue options if you don't want to portray a zealous character. And if you just want to establish that your character isn't religiously inclined, avoiding the appropriate dialogue options really does the job. Requiring the option for your character to endorse actual atheism, and to have dialogue options that amount to getting on a soapbox to bash the general idea of religion, is misguided. You say respectfully... Then proceed to toss insults such as "asking to be pandered to" (really?, I thought I was just asking for an option, I wasn't asking for the game to revolve around being an atheist or anything), "melodramatic soapbox crowd at BSN" (I don't go to the BSN for the record, and I don't see what I or the OP said as melodramatic at all. You exaggerate, we weren't throwing ourselves around in despair. I also don't see why you're so preoccupied with boxes of soap), "amount to getting on a soapbox to bash the general idea of religion" (nowhere did I bash religion or mention bashing religion, let alone wanting the options to bash religion in the game. I find it insulting that you assume atheism equals bashing religion). I think your definition of 'respectful' may be a little skewed. Atheism is the rejection of the belief in deities or believing in no deities, right? So if a character didn't see/acknowledge the gods as deities, but some incredibly powerful creature/being instead, would that count as atheism? Or perhaps you have a character who only believes what they see right in front of their eyes. Magic isn't proof of gods, and they've never seen a god in person (I doubt many people in the setting would have), so they don't believe they actually exist (after all magic can be used to explain a lot of things in some settings, especially mysterious and open worlds where there are still things undiscovered). Of course I don't expect to have a huge and detailed range of non-religious choices to choose from, but just one faithless option like you had in NWN2 would probably work in covering it. And who knows, maybe they'll feel like putting in some dialogue that lets you specify what you do/don't believe in more precisely. PS:T was certainly able to fit a lot of text in. See, the reason why I prefaced what I said as I did was exactly in the hopes that someone wouldn't go over-the-top hypersensitive in response to it. Please be a tad less fight-face. As I discussed, there is a difference between wanting the game to accommodate you in not wanting to attach yourself to religion (represented in the OPs saying that he thinks "I don't care" would satisfy most people) and wanting the game to give you options to express a real world intellectual tradition that is deeply rooted in modern-era ideology and science. So there's a distinction. Sometimes people are unclear what they mean when they talk about atheism. Not wanting to be forced to play a religious character is entirely legitimate, but that's not really "atheist" and is easily accomplished in any RPG simply by virtue of not picking religious dialogue options. Wanting actual atheism, whereby you reject the notion of deity altogether and desire the dialogue options to outright renounce religion and religious institutions as a significant part of the narrative (which has became a common and peculiar demand by a vocal group of posters on the BSN, which I mentioned only because the OP alluded Bioware's stance on the issue, and I have absolutely no idea why you are taking offense to it if you don't associate with BSN)... that is a very different thing from not wanting to be forced to play a religious character, and it doesn't really fit in a supernatural setting. Your point regarding that you can have magic and still reject the notion of deity is a bit counter-productive. Certainly, a mage or a powerful supernatural entity is not necessarily a god, and could trick others into thinking he is a god. But what definition of "god"? Characters in this fantasy world do not have our real life notions of religion to define their ideas of godhood. In P:E, a character's understanding of what a god is will be based entirely on the franchise's own metaphysics. This is what I meant by touching on different metaphysical contexts. If the world of P:E defines a god as a powerful supernatural being who is neither omnipotent nor omniscient and who meddles in the affairs of the world (which is the case, to my understanding) then there aren't grounds for mortals in the world to deny the gods *who define their very idea of godhood* as not being gods. That's not to say that it wouldn't be interesting to discover that the pantheon had deceived mortals into believing that they were more than they were, but discovering that you've been duped by a very real being is not atheism. The heart of atheism is about the rejection of faith in a being that you cannot perceive, and usually the rhetoric involves drawing no distinction between religious faith and superstition. If the entity can interact with the world directly, and if supernatural power is real rather than superstition, then what we define academically as "atheism" does not apply. So it really depends on what a person means and understands when he asks for atheism to be in the game. If one wanted modern atheist ideas to be deliberately included in a non-modern context where they don't make sense, that would in essence be a question of pandering to real life demographics. But simply wanting to avoid being forced down certain dialogue choices is entirely legitimate.

Respectfully, this seems like asking to be pandered to. Being a fictional world with magic, the context of religion in P:E is naturally going to be completely different from our own, whereas "atheism" (as opposed to agnosticism, faithlessness, or a general lack of piety) is really quite specific and quite modern and therefore not a natural thing to import into the completely different metaphysical context of a different world. RPGs can't really get away with forcing you to play your character as a pious member of his/her culture's faith - and I've never seen one try, and therefore don't understand why it is such a burning issue to the melodramatic soapbox crowd at BSN - and it really is quite simple just to not pick zealous dialogue options if you don't want to portray a zealous character. And if you just want to establish that your character isn't religiously inclined, avoiding the appropriate dialogue options really does the job. Requiring the option for your character to endorse actual atheism, and to have dialogue options that amount to getting on a soapbox to bash the general idea of religion, is misguided.

I find "god of ---" set ups extremely shallow. Pick an element, pick some human activity or characteristic, and arbitrarily relate the two. Very clumsy and very stale. Why should a god willingly limit himself to a specific tiny niche, and why should people worship that god to the exclusion of others when his doctrine only deals with a few fragments of mortal life? It works in unified pantheons were the gods are generally all "on the same team" despite personal rivalries, wherein the faithful worship the whole the bunch collectively and focus on one or the other depending on their immediate concerns. But in a late middle ages era with competing churches and themes of religious conflict, emulating pagan traditions is very out of place. The way that D&D settings traditionally handle it is extremely bad. Religion in a late middle ages era should represent highly institutionalized, intellectualized, politicized, worldviews, not the spiritual equivalent of picking a sport's team because you like its motto and the colour of its uniform. So I always hope to see set ups where the gods, despite identifying particularly with this element or that activity, still claim supremacy over the entirety of mortal life and promote comprehensive worldviews that would actually impact the way that people live. So instead of god of knowledge who appeals only to scholars and bards, make a god who preaches that all suffering can be stopped through the identification of and rigid adherence to axiomatic laws, resulting in a highly legalistic theocracy that is polarized between an academic elite and a close-minded rural base. Instead of a god of time who appeals only to historians and clockmakers, a god who preaches that the physical world is fundamentally sinful and corrupt and that therefore the role of the faithful is to endure the different phases of their life as stoically as possible, because the decay of their physical bodies over time represents their gradual liberation towards a more pure state of being, whose worship is particularly popular among the oppressed and impoverished. Or instead of a chaotic-lulzy god of thieves and trickery who appeals only to society's misfits, a god who preaches that the world exists so that mortals may explore the mind of god through it, meaning no mortal state may impede the faithful from sensory pursuits, resulting in a religious culture of lawlessness and hedonism on one extremes but great artistic and intellectual accomplishment on the other. It has to make sense to why entire cultures and nations would worship a deity, and how that deity's worship would impact how they view different, unrelated aspects of their life. In relation to P:E and souls, there are so many ways to build this sort of theology as different gods offer different explanations as to the nature of the world, the nature of the soul, and a mortal's obligations in life in order to advance the soul along some spiritual objective. If that potential started and stopped at "god of war, whom you pray to for fighting" and "god of nature, who doesn't want you to chop down trees" it would be both a terrible waste and terribly boring.

I would love it if this fellow came bundled up with a plot as intriguing as the gnome conspiracy in Arcanum.

An Athkatla sized metropolis springing up out of nothing around our stronghold in a couple of months because we successfully run a few errands or whatever would be silly. Big city 2 should be established and have history.

Baldur's Gate was so flawed. You can't even see the **** on your companions. Even if you take their robes off. And there aren't even sex scenes. Thankfully Bioware learned from their mistakes and supersized the **** on everything they possibly could in Thedas. Their ability to identify how best to refine their RPGs is nothing short of clairvoyant.

Would it be in bad taste to request that it come in three different colors?

nevermind

I find the idea of a rifle-wielding conquistador paladin quite compelling, honestly.

Medieval =/= Dark Ages.

I liked the wording of the paladin description. A focus on ideological zeal and monastic discipline, but still freedom for different causes and different orders rather than the simplistic "Always Lawful Good" of yesteryear. There's plenty of room there for new interpretations and interesting applications of the class, which is gratifying after so much contrary bleating by people who felt that a paladin archetype would automatically be shallow and stodgy and somehow doomed to fail without morality mechanics. Mechanically, the addition of "commands" will make for a nice touch to strategic gameplay, and I'm hopeful to see passive auras in there as well.

From what little has been said of the gods, though, it seems likely that the world's religious ideas are not going to be very medieval at all. There is - or, should be - a tremendous difference between a monotheistic civilization that has a single, powerful church but a non-interfering deity, and a civilization with a diverse pantheon of active, meddling gods who interact directly with the world. I'm curious how the game will handle that. I always found churches and religion in D&D settings to be very poorly thought through and not really fitting to the time period they try to encapsulate. If Obsidian manages to pull of a polytheistic medieval society with active gods with proper internal logic, that will make for an interesting medieval-but-not setting.

Engineers are for steampunk. That sort of class works well in a setting designed for it, but P:E's setting is late middle ages with crude firearms and early cannons. A gunslingin' technoventurer would be doomed to be out of place. If I'm not in an explicitly techy setting, when I hear "engineer" I want to think "guy who builds fortifications". But, sure, subjective.

I like this. Monastic zealotry means flavour. Also, giving monks FLAILS instead of nun-chucks is just about the only thing that might make me want to brofist them. I can at least buy that the flail in that picture could do some damage to a knight. Take the flimsy eastern stick-on-a-rope and throw that silly thing away.

I think you are making some big assumptions there that aren't necessarily true. Paladin code being entirely "alignment based"? Well yes and yes. Yes in term of "paladins associate themselves with good." No in terms of "paladins must have hardcoded morality mechanics to make sense". The devs have told us that they aren't using morality mechanics. That doesn't mean that the world and/or game will have no good, no evil, and only murky grey morality. It means that the game's mechanics will not make moral judgments about objective good and evil. Characters and cultures will continue to have their ideas of what is good and evil, and you don't need Lawful Good or Lightside V on your screen for a rigid moral code to be present in the class narrative. Why does moral relativism mean that a paladin can't fall from his code? He can only fall from his own code of moral values, not from the codes of moral values that belong to other cultures/religions/whathaveyou. Why would relativism affect that? Other people's consciences don't matter in terms of the paladin falling or not falling. Maybe you think that without clear, objective moral choices and morality mechanics, a moral code would be meaningless because any action can be interpreted as "good" in some way. But I disagree. If we are told that the paladin code is X, Y, Z, we don't need a morality mechanic to hold our hands and tell us that we are *this many* bad decisions away from falling. As long as the code is defined, it doesn't matter if there is objective morality or not, because we know what the code is, and what it means to fail it. I think the lack of objective morality mechanics would make paladins more interesting, not less. If Good is Good and this is objectively true and recognized as a cosmic force, recognizing it and struggling to uphold it is nowhere near as meaningful as if good is an elusive, fragile idea in a murky world.

If we knew that was in the game, it would certainly make the absence of a paladin class less of a disappointment. I would still be let down if traditional paladin class mechanics of auras and immunities weren't present and available to a plate-wearing melee specialist. Being an armored, clerical spellcaster is not the same.