duskwind

Presumably not meant to go live till tomorrow's update.

The Bloom is attached to Sagus Cliffs, which is a nice sunny city; it won't all be gloomy!

There's nothing about that on the front page of the kickstarter; presumably you have to become a backer to find out what your money is going towards, which seems extremely dodgy.

Indeed. Or extended the duration by a week or so, to put it on a different month for credit card bills.

Yeah, that one looks interesting. Started out as a graphic novel, which I think is a promising sign for having a decent story to it, and the art is great.

Um, six figures isn't middle class. You earn more than 95% of people in the US, and at least four times the median.

She's a millionaire entrepreneur. And while the original goal could still potentially have been innocent enough, there's absolutely no justification for it getting to more than two thousand percent funded! She should be shutting it down, not adding higher reward tiers.

They do have a professional editor to keep all the writers in line. And the original Torment had eight writers...

Though ideally you should play the OC first, since MotB does carry on with the same character and has some minor links to the original. The Zehir dialogue system is largely irrelevant since it has so little dialogue.

Dollars per day tends to be erratic during the middle stretch; PE ranged from $22k to $93k, WL2 from $14k to $112k. I think it's a bit early to predict a trend. And the end spike comes from existing backers increasing pledges, not just new backers.

I'd recommend NWN2. Though be warned that the final act of Mask of the Betrayer doesn't quite live up to expectations, I believe due to the game being rushed out too soon. And I wouldn't bother with Storm of Zehir at all.

Cool Any chance you could you add a day 0 to the graph? So it starts at the beginning of the first day, rather than the end.

You've got Baldur's Gate; why do you need Project Eternity? T:ToN is telling a different story different characters in a different setting with different game mechanics, just in a similar style to P:T.

Except the studio is in control; if for example they decide they need a few extra months to get the game right, they can take it. Some backers might get pissed off at the delay, but there's nothing they can do about it. And the studio owns the game, and keeps all profit from post-kickstarter sales.

The problem is the early bird limits are much too low relative to the total number of backers. There were tiers sold out in six hours, before I even knew it was happening.

At high level there should definitely be large hordes of easy-to-kill enemies, as well as tougher individual opponents. The same sorts enemies that proved a great threat even as individuals at low level should still be around as you get more powerful, attacking in ever greater numbers to provide challenge rather than levelling up themselves. It's immersion-breaking to only ever encounter enemies of comparable power to yourself.

I'm aware that's how most games do it, and I don't like it. Melee fighters should do relatively low damage but without cost, while ranged attacks should be limited but powerful; an arrow should be pretty much undodgeable for all but the most dextrous high level characters, and potentially do a lot of damage. And ranged combatants have the advantage of being able to damage the enemy while remaining safely out of reach of melee weapons themselves (depending on the layout of the battleground). Ranged combatants that can run out of ammo should be capable of switching to melee, though less effectively than dedicated melee fighters; I think this makes more sense for archers than mages, so I'd recommend against a system that lets mages run out of power entirely (eg the Vancian system).

I don't see that as a problem; magic should be a great deal more powerful than hitting people with bits of metal, so it needs to be limited in other ways. Personally I like the warmup idea, with more powerful spells taking longer to cast.

Time limits that force you to miss out on content would be a bad idea, but I like the idea of time limits if they're short term ones, leaving you free to wander around and explore as much as you like after they're dealt with, before moving on to the next encounter that involves urgency.

How would you feel if it was one of the other PCs, rather than yours? Which is most of the time. It's easy enough to come up with a story reason why the PC has to stay with the party whether they like it or not. But it probably isn't a good fit for what we know of the Eternity story.

Giving more XP on high difficulty settings so you'll level up faster and thereby reduce the difficulty seems somewhat counter-productive.

I wasn't including characters who can potentially join in a fight as non-combatant bystanders. Or perhaps special NPCs who are particularly unflappable by design (though they need to be very special if they're not bothered by a fireball going off in their face). But generally everyone in the immediate vicinity of a fight should either join in or try to get out of the way, rather than stand there continuing to chat to their neighbour while swords are whirling all around them. Potentially the flee-from-combat distance could be determined by the relative levels of the bystanders and the combatants; humble villagers will run as far as they can and not look back if a dragon lands in their midst, while a band of mercenaries could gather round quite close to watch a couple of drunks engage in fisticuffs outside the tavern. The use of ranged or area effect attacks would add substantially to the flee distance, while special situations like a formal duel could reduce it even if the combatants are high level.

Yes, running away should be an automatic non-combatant response to combat happening too close, with return to usual position/walkpath afterwards. Having random commoners strolling through the middle of a pitched battle is a bit distracting. It could be overridden (by the devs) in specific cases where there's a reason for bystanders to stay put, and if they wanted to get really clever, they could have bystanders attracted towards combat (but not too close) where appropriate, ie a circle around the combat zone, where any bystanders within the circle run outside it, and any outside the circle are likely to approach the edge as spectators.

Exactly. Why go off looking for random creatures that aren't causing anyone any trouble and slaughter them? It is indeed pointless, so why encourage it by awarding XP? If it's not fun in and off itself, then don't do it. Levelling is never going to be remotely realistic anyway, so why not base it on achieving goals?

Ideally, how companions feel about you should be measured on more than one dimension, and they should interact with you differently based on how they feel about you (rather than only interacting at all if you've maxed out loyalty). That's a lot of work to write, though.