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cute female tieflings.

I say NAY! I don't want friggin timed quests, or other action-game tropes. When it comes to quests, It's always good when a game lets you do what you want. Am I the only one here who still remembers "archaic" things like player agency and roleplaying? Why are we asking a game to force us to do a so-called crisis quest immediately when we may not want to? Why can't the player have the choice to roleplay that Urgency or not, depending on his own whims?? Like the poster above me said, any well written story should be able to instill that urgency into the player's mind by its very writing alone. If it can't, if it has to set timers and put up ticking clocks to get the player to act promptly, then it has already failed.

LOL @ the Op. That was great! That's Viconia! Which brings up a semi-serious point. Dark elves. I'd be interested to see what, if anything, Obsidian's gonna do with regards to Elves, and their lore.

Dumb tech-less question: if they encorporate dualwielding, won't the left handed animations already be there, thus giving ppl the choice to use just the left hand?

Agreed. Recreate Edwin from the BG games. He always was so underappreciated. Apparently most people couldn't take their minds off of gimmick characters like Minsc and Boo long enough to see Edwin's personality for the brilliance that it was.

15 minutes of awesome! One funny snippet. The interviewer was asking Feargus about how hard it is for Obsidian to please everyone, and Feargus's Response: Feargus: "if they listen to everybody, it'll be a Japanese, turn based dating sim with insect people

^this. None of the infinity engine games had a tool set. Yet this didn't stop the massive pool of amazing mods from coming out for every single one of those games. So this absolutely raises the question of whether resources could be better spent elsewhere.

Depends on what kind of ammo the machine gun is using lol

HELL NO! A game can't be everything to everyone. If you want to make a story driven game, make one, if you want to make a dungeon crawler, make another one. Never mind the fact that these concepts tend to appeal to different people, if you try to do both simultaneously, likely neither one will come out terribly well. BG1 did both simultaneously.... and really really well. And there is a such thing as story-driven dungeons, you know. The concepts are neither mutually exclusive, nor do they have a history of polarizing the fanbase.

Wat? Look at the most cited Dungeons on this thread: Durlags tower and Watcher's keep. Both were optional. Both contained the best loot in their respective games.

No, in some systems (including D&D), monster physical attacks are equivalent to silver, cold iron, adamantine etc, depending on the level of the monster. Thus a dragon could, in fact, do full damage to a werewolf using his bite attacks. Also, afaik, werewolves are not immune to elemental damage, or mind effecting spells.

Ooh! we have a Developer watching this one. No better time than the present. I don't like to think in set math terms like that. How about "a few levels". But don't just pile on the levels for the sake of filler, so that you can say: hey, here's a 5 level dungeon for you guys!" Instead, there should be an in-game reason for a dungeon to go that deep under ground. It's hard to explain. But let me give you an example of something from my Pen and paper days that I'll never forget. This was D&D 1st edition (Yes, I'm 40 years old lol) We had a party of 20-25th level characters, and I'm pretty sure my DM was growing uneasy with how powerful we were, so he got us to agree on one last Epic adventure. Live or die, our characters were retiring after this one. He set up massive dungeon. I don't remember how many levels it was. More than 4 but less than 10. but it went pretty deep underground. And by the last level it didn't even feel like we were on the prime material plane anymore. It felt like we had decended our way into *some* powerful being's plane of the abyss, or Hell. The dungeon itself got progressively harder with every level, the story got more morbid, verging on infernal the deeper we got. Eventually, we saw no more signs of the world we knew (no more tables made of earthly materials. no more marble tiles on the ground. no more human bodies, no more writing in a familiar language in the books, scrolls etc. We were literally deeper than anyone in the known world had ever gone. Instead, We got hints that this was a base belonging to a being of fairly substantial rank in the lower planes. And after weeks of gaming, we got to the last level, which utterly dwarfed everything above it. It was a massive open cavern, divided in half, long ways, by a river made of the most foul looking (and smelling) rust red colored ichor we had ever seen. One of our guys hovered his hand over it to get an idea of what we were dealing with... It was liquid cancer, for lack of a better term. He lost his hand and part of his forearm in 2 seconds. No saving throw. As we looked around, we saw no end to the cavern, it seemed to stretch forever. But we did see what appeared to be a giant dome-like structure in the distance. So we headed there. We walked in, and started taking damage from invisible fumes, our Thief lost his eyesight permanently. And sitting on a slimey throne at the very center was... Anthraxus. The Oinodaemon himself. TL;DR: Large multi-level dungeons are best served with 1) mystery-based stories that unfold as the levels do; 2) Pieces of Shock and Awe; 3) and final bosses that justify the dungeon's size. Paramount. It's what differentiates a memorable experience from a tedius grind. And my answer is Yes. When I judge a game, I remember the memorable moments in it, and it doesn't make a lick of difference if those moments came from the main story, or if they came from that optional dungeon. 1 High end stretch goal. Make it the $2.4 million one, and I'll up my pledge by $100 the moment I see it on the kickstarter page. Promise.

Pickpocketing was actually worth it in IWD. In Kuldahar you could pickpocket a ring of free action from both Orrick and Arundel. You could Pickpocket a ring of protection +2 and a necklace of missiles from Ozwald. Needless to say, all of those are a big deal, when you're 4th level. But back to the actual point: I wish thievery wasn't so profoundly punished. In the IE games, if someone caught you stealing, that was it. They'd turn red and fight you to the death, no matter who they were. For example, In BG1 if you tried to steal from Gorion, your father, he'd turn hostile and fry you with a lightning bolt. And If Tethtoril was around, he'd join in and assist Gorian in slaughtering you. Silly. That's not even remotely logical. There should be varied responses to stealing depending on who you're stealing from. Skyrim does something pretty cool. If you steal from certain NPCs, they wouldn't confront you directly. Instead, you'd find hired mercenaries ambushing you a few game days later, complete with a note on their bodies explaining who hired them and why.

A couple things here. First, We're not just talking about a game with a good story, good gameplay and deep role playing. Because plenty of games have all 3. No, We're talking about game with a story as good as PS:T's, gameplay as good as IWD's, and roleplaying as good as BG's. Huge difference. Second, there IS a law of physics that prevents such a thing. It's called the space-time continuum. lol

Op is right. You should always be wary of a game that promises the best of both worlds. Because it can never happen. Planescape torment delivered the thematic depth and the type of text-based storyline that comes around once every 10 generations. But the tradeoff was that its combat was crap. Icewind dale was the opposite, it gave us the quintessential dungeon crawl experience and fantastic tactical combat, but at the cost of narrative, story depth and exploration freedom. The BG series gave us rich companions, and decent free roam, but it lacked Planescape's deep morality-based roleplay. And all of those games had bigger budgets to work with. It's wishful thinking that PE will be Torment +IWD +BG combined.

I dislike how Neverwinter Nights 1 & 2 did traps in general, but they did do one thing right: If you were a character who lacked trap removal skills, you could destroy the trap with a ranged weapon or spell. I thought that was cool.

In modern RPGs, you are correct. But traps used to be lethal in the IE games. Very lethal. Durlag's tower (BG1, tales of the sword coast expansion) had dozens of traps that could instantly decimate your entire party several times over if you accidently stepped over them. and that was fun? When it was all said and done, yes. Much more engaging than, say, sprinting through empty corridors to reach the foozle, killing him and then looting his treasure with your false sense of accomplishment. And in the case of Durlag's tower, the application of "you face death with every step" actually made sense, storywise. Durlag was a dwarf who was driven mad with extreme paranoia. Consequently, he turned his home into a deadly trap-filled labrynth to keep out intruders. It was meaningful, and refreshing for us to be able to witness, first hand, the scope of that paranoia, instead of just reading about it, as is usually the case in crpg stories. To Obsidian: Promise me a dungeon in PE that reminds me of Durlag's tower, and I'll up my donation by $100 tonight.

In modern RPGs, you are correct. But traps used to be lethal in the IE games. Very lethal. Durlag's tower (BG1, tales of the sword coast expansion) had dozens of traps that could instantly decimate your entire party several times over if you accidently stepped over them. The result is that the dungeon puts the fear of god into people, forcing them to stop, pay attention, and take it nice and slow. This plays into the atmosphere of the entire setting. Fear is not the easiest thing to capture well in a computer game. Personally, I want to see traps and a trap disarming mechanic, but only if its done right - like it was back in the day

D&D had Rust monsters, who were not only resistant to your +1 sword, but could destroy it on contact if you hit them with it. D&D had Jellies and puddings, who were not only resistant to your +1 sword, but would split and become more powerful on contact if you hit them with it. D&D had mages who put up Prismatic spheres that made them not only resistant to your +5 sword, but you risked DYING HORRIBLY if you hit them with it. D&D had creatures who could telekinese your weapon right out of your hand, forcing you to try something else, even if you did your homework and came totally prepared for the fight! But I guess it makes total sense that someone who's played D&D for 14 years would be annoyed at the 'unfun' nature of some enemies in the IE games being resistant to your weaponry. No wait. it doesn't.

I'm pretty sure The Witcher had big budget and lot more staff members working on it. . It had a bigger budget ($8 million). But it certainly didn't have a bigger staff than Obsidian. It also didn't have as seasoned a staff as Obsidian- which I think makes a huge difference. Experienced, verteran pros can do more in less time than n00bs.

I'm gonna predict 4 million. There's more hype and name recognition for this than there was for Wasteland 2, and that game did 3 million

I wouldn't read too much into these "projections". They might end up being accurate, but they're just guesses - mathematical predictions derived from the rate of donations from the past few days. For example, since sunday, Project eternity has been getting ~$85,000 in donations per day. The graph in your link there is saying that if the trend stays at that rate, then by October 16th, Project eternity should end up with 5-10 million in total funds. The only problem I have with these types of projections is that they're not....human. They don't take into account things that often influence spikes and dips in donation speed... like if Obsidian were to announce some mind-blowing stretch goal that causes the current fence sitters to suddenly decide to donate when they weren't impressed before to do so. Or the opposite: If one of the Obsidian devs says something about the game that totally turns everyone off and ends up halting the donation rate.

There was plenty of level scaling in Both BG games, but it was far more imaginitive than the lazy nonsense we got in, say, Oblivion or DA2. In BG1, if your party was, like, 1st or 2nd level and you're out in the wilderness, you'd encounter A wolf. or A couple of Kobolds, but if your party is 7th level you'd encounter, 10 wolves, or a small army of Kobolds. In BG2, the type of enemy actually changed according to your level. If you're 10th level and you're in Fiirkrag's dungeon, you'd face, say, a pack of Yuanti. But if you're 18th level, you'd encounter a group of Golems. Personally, I'd soon see the entire notion of level scaling wiped from the minds of every developer in the world. It's a lazy mechanic at its core, used in place of a good imagination. There are ways to challenge a high level party that do not involve suddenly giving that guard an extra 200 hp, or worse: breeaking the game's lore and making even common bandits into 30th level demi-gods.

I agree, but I do think there should be different spell schools. Then let the player define himself as either "a nuker" or a "healer" or "jack of all trades" based on the schools he's chosen to pursue. Or is that too Skyrim-ish for us?

It would be more accurate to say that I prefer the system(s) used in the old infinity engine games, which, btw, also included the implementation of Sorcerers. LOL really? where did I claim that?