Karkarov

My first character is going to be a male human because I always choose male human and class wise they will be.... either a Fighter or Cipher most likely. Personality wise I don't know yet, don't know enough about the game lore or story yet to have a feel for it and how I would like to play it.

*Looks at the K to the left* I already did this once and for a lot more than 20 dollars. May as well do it again.

Merry X-Mas and or Happy Holidays Obisidian Peeps and Forum Users! Hope everyone has a great time, enjoys spending it with those close, and gets to give (and receive ) some awesome gifts!

I have a simple benchmark. I cut and edit the whole video then I watch it one time. If I get half way through it and find I haven't really enjoyed it yet or it is boring me... well if I don't find myself entertaining it is a safe bet no one else will either.

For the sake of clarity ..... Xan is at the end of the Nashkel mines Dungeon standing in a side room nearby where you fight the boss of the place. You find his Moonblade in the same room with the dude you fight. If someone missed him in their playthrough well... they weren't very thorough to say the least :/

As a guy who posts Let's Plays to you tube and has dropped more than one half way through.... it is okay he quit. Seriously when you aren't enjoying the game anymore your let's play starts to suck, if you aren't having fun with it don't make video's out of it. Not only will making the videos of the footage you didn't enjoy not be fun but most people probably won't have fun watching either. If it isn't fun, it isn't worth the effort.

Well my list... 5 mil = One Companion of Every Class 5.5 mil = At least two Companions of Every Class with "personality" depth, Example one fighter is a goody two shoes but the other is a professional mercenary who only cares about money. 6 mil = More Wilderness areas/bigger world 6.5 mil = Stronghold gets full on town 7 mil = New major Faction with unique questline.

Stun is making a good point here. Really the only "bonuses" of a bard are their buffs and high lore score.

I appreciate your speedy response, don't be upset when I insinuate the troll in the thread you called out earlier isn't the OP.

Apparently the ability to hire customer party members is going to be tied to getting normal companions as well. So if you are at a point where you would have no access to normal companions you won't be able to hire any. Likewise if your current point in the story you have had a shot at 3-4 companions they seem to somehow be setting it up so that means you will have access to 3-4 hired dudes. As it stands I hope they decide to go ahead with the more companions thing simply because all the official stuff is implying there isn't much companion depth. Not only will there not be one of each class potentially but some of them may only be specific "alignment" meaning they won't even work for your team based on your decisions. By Sawyer's own admission he expects most people to have 3 normal companions and 2 "hired" ones to fill specific party need. Personally I consider story a big deal so I will take as many traditional companions as I can.

Just as an aside if this happened the game would get made, but not because of kickstarter. Most people would see that and call "BS" (because it is) and not back it since they know that game will be made regardless. That said Kickstarter is not where you want to stay. The gaming community only has so much money, and while Eternity got 4 mil that is literally a drop in the bucket compared to the budget of a game like Skyrim. Heck I am willing to bet the South Park Stick of Truth game probably has a higher budget too. You also need to be aware that 70+ backers probably already own the game. Some may buy it again at release to be extra special helpful, but they will be the exception not the rule. As my badge indicates I have already dropped over 100 on Eternity, I am not buying a retail copy at release. So also consider that fact.... around 70k potential buyers probably won't be buying at release because they already own it. To throw this out there Baldur's Gate 2 has sold over 2 mil copies lifetime supposedly... But that's over how many years now? 70k is actually 3.5% of 2 mil. They don't need sales in 10 years they need sales in the first 6 months. 70k will likely be a noticeable piece of the pie unless this game vastly out performs all the IE games. Kickerstarter is very very risky and if Obsidian can afford to not use it on their next Eternity release than they would be insane not to self fund. Food for thought... 70k sales at 59.99 (the asking price for the wasteland 2 beta on steam) = 4.1 million dollars. That's not even close to the total number of backers either since it doesn't include paypal and I am even rounding kickstarter down.

Just as an aside it isn't as hard as you might suspect to get a simple no background noise recording, sound proof room or not. Or make the background noise so slight you can't really hear it. Also the whole point is that if used for city chatter or similar purposes the sound engineer is going to have to edit the files anyway sound proof room or not to make them sound like they were recorded in a city.

Just to throw this out there but this is the second time that quote has been taken out of context. The guy was talking about his thoughts on the Conquistador games story, it has nothing to do with Eternity.

..... I apologize but I seem to need to repeat myself again. No one wants backers voicing an actual character. I am going to say that one more time just to be sure I was specifically clear. No one wants backers voicing an actual character. Now are you going to imply this has anything to do with voicing an actual character, or that I am insinuating this has anything to do with characters again? No? Okay. That said, legal. E-signatures are 100% legally binding. A simple document stating by entering the contest you forfeit all creative and legal rights for any entry to Obsidian pretty much covers that. If you want to go full monty they can even simply throw this detail out there and then when winners are decided mail them a document they have to sign and mail back. Winner doesn't doesn't sign or mail it back, they just don't get used. You make it sound like they don't already have this contract ready to go for some backers who get memorials, name an item, design an inn, whatever. Those things are part of creative law too. Contest. Pretty straight forward to run this actually. You have say... 5 lines that contestants can read but they can only submit a recording for one of the lines. You have to record yourself saying that one line and email the file to a contest specific email in a file format they specify, hell they can even require a specific file name based on the line for easy sorting. Anyone doesn't comply? Entry automatically deleted. Obsidian then listens to qualifying entries and chooses say their favorite 10 among the various lines. Favorites go in a poll as part of an update, no names just the recordings, community listens and votes. The most popular version of each line gets used in some way in game. Some way being random background chatter in a city, or something similarly low impact that many players probably won't even notice. Why go through that? Well it is just a bit of fun and encourages community involvement. That said most of this community seems wholly opposed to anything resembling fun. Which is why I voted "nice idea but not priority". The only hard part for Obsidian would be taking the time to listen to the contest entries anything past that is something they would have had to do with any voice recording. Which is to say light editing like adding some echo, lowering the volume, maybe putting another sound bite with it like knives being sharpened etc. Bear in mind I don't expect any of this to actually happen. However the overwhelming attitude that it could never work or is overwhelmingly hard to do and soooooo time consuming just isn't really accurate. Additionally if this game gets panned and fails I can assure you it won't be because of the voice acting, even if a few backers sneak in. Well the only two substantive objections I have seen Junta boil down to "The community is a bunch of no talent hacks based on BG mods" and "It would be too much work." Past that I am not really seeing anything and one of those reasons it patently false, I am sure there are some very talented people in the community more than capable of delivering a short line into a mic effectively.

Well this is where there is ultimately a real problem. We simply don't know enough about the classes of the game and their actual mechanics. Yes Ciphers have some sort of additional resource but what is it called? How is it tracked/used? Is there a max amount you can have? It is hard to build a UI element to account for these sorts of things since we basically know almost nothing about how they work or the mechanics behind them. For all we know the Monk's Wound based abilities could fit right there on the normal Wound Meter in some way. In other news just to be nice I decided to start work on a full bottom bar UI just to throw out a concept of how it could be done. If anything it is going to be a great argument for why you don't need full bottom bar though because in all honesty there is going to be a noticable amount of dead space and some huge buttons. I have already made the portraits alone 7 pixels wider and 4 taller than the portrait size you said Obsidian was going with for example. I wanted to go full 100 pixels tall but that would have resulted in the bar taking up too much vertical space. I am trying to limit it to about 160 pixels, which is roughly 15% of the vertical space at 1080. To be painfully specific with a size comparison the avatars on this forum are 92x92 (not counting the grey highlight on the edges)... I am going for 80x90. So noticeably thinner but not much shorter at all.

I am sure they will open up the ability to further edit your pledge for more addons later on. It would be silly not to.

Hahaha... no. When did I suggest anything of the sort? Problems with these forums everyone reads all these "things" in to every word you say but never actually seems to read the words. Truthfully I voted "good idea but shouldn't be a priority". I am only vocal about it because I keep hearing these close minded opinions that are just wholly negative, sometimes insulting of the OP, and for the most part patently false. VA is not hard unless you are actually trying to get someone to do a full on role. No one in their right mind is going to suggest "Major NPC X" should be voiced by some random guy. Also while you are correct that they could always just get these type of voice work any number of ways why would letting backers do it be such a bad thing? Half of this community seems to think they have the right to dictate basically every element of the game and the other half seems like the feel the community should have no say at all. Why can't their be a middle ground or some simple fun event that lets a few backers be involved in the game itself in a very minor way without having to drop half a grand?

Maybe I just have better peripheral vision than most or something (or just too much practice) but I can normally look at center screen and without really "glancing" away still see what my hp is on most bottom placed health bars. That isn't the case with bars on the right, I have to stop and look cause it is too far from center. But you are definitely right that Widescreen is a more natural "view".

That's because there wasn't much of it. Also you would be surprised to know how many people you hear and see in movies for example are just on the set extras who are there one day and gone the next. The entire chant from the prison in Dark Knight Rises for example was actually just some dude holding a microphone up in the middle of a football stadium asking the crowd to yell words they put up on the score board. I also have a good friend who worked on the TV cooking show Good Eats. Did you know almost everyone who appeared on that show was just friends of the host? Heck my buddy is (hilariously) a sound technician and he actually appeared in small parts on the show himself on multiple occasions with plenty of speaking lines. One of the primary "expert guests" was also actually the hosts Chiropractor and had no background in cooking much less acting or voice work. I think you people seriously over estimate the skill it takes to yell "What in the heck!" into a microphone. I am not saying major npc's should be getting voiced by backers. I am saying maybe they could record "orc in combat sound set 4" off volunteers. Or "random people talking which will get overlayed by other people talking and or birds chirping/city noise" to play once every 10 minutes when you are in the docks area of Defiance Bay.

Okay but bear in mind... most monitors are wide screen now. In fact you can't even buy a non widescreen TV or monitor anymore unless you are buying one used or just a really old one. Or perhaps a special use one... Either way most people will be on widescreen. Why does that matter? Most people in general like to "center" the action. Like if your party has engaged a dragon, you don't have the dragon in the bottom right corner of your screen your party around them and like the center of your screen is just the floor. Most people would center on the dragon with their characters dotted around it. You want focus on the action and it is just easier to do that if you put it in the center of your screen. So looking at the center of a wide screen monitor what's closer? The bottom center or the center right? Exactly. Before any "but your mock up!!!!" nonsense starts I am still going to remind people my mock up ui was designed to try to be consistent with what Obsidian themselves posted and feedback i got in the thread. I really don't care if it is center aligned or in a corner, or even if it takes the whole bottom. All I care about is it not being U shaped and being able to hide the combat log.

I suggest doing some research on voice actors on BG1/2 and voice actors in games in general. Allow me to rephrase. I don't care who did some the lines in Baldur's Gate and Baldur's Gate 2. Some of them were so bad you probably could have gotten a random guy off the street to do them and they would sounded about the same is what I am getting at. As a person who has actual connections to broadcast radio I am fully well aware how professional voice work operates.

You would be wrong. There were many professional voice actors in BG1/2. I sure hope they didn't pay the "Nyuggghahaha I kicked him in the head until he was dead Nyuggggahahahaha" guy. If they did they really need to get their money back.

The first part of your post made sense Junta. Truthfully most console owners who really are serious gamers also own a pc more than capable of handling Eternity. I think it is worth mentioning though that any current console probably could handle it technologically as well but... that is basically side bar. The number two part you may be surprised by the answer though. It really does get tiring seeing people on this forum insinuating everyone who owns a console is either an idiot or someone who is an idiot who also only plays FPS games.

Fair enough but I was just pointing out that other than the narrator I doubt there was any "professional" VA in BG for example. Half of Bethesda's voice work is even now Dudes from Accounting.

Exactly. It isn't that your idea wouldn't work, it would. It would result in quite a bit of screen clutter though, which is why most WoW player UI's you see suck so much. They just can't get past the idea of only putting what is actually needed on the screen. Just consider 6 character... 10 buttons per character (even that isn't their whole ability list like you said), means 60 buttons only for character actions on screen at all times? Just a little too much. That being said though you could handle it by just having a special toggle show up when you select multiple characters. If you hit the toggle it makes the action bar for each currently selected character pop up, when you hit it again, it goes away. Of course half the forums would start frothing at the mouth if such a simple but effective solution were used. Still it is kind of a cannon to swat fly resolution either way. In my personal opinion I think having that many buttons on screen even briefly would be more annoying than the benefit. The question is why do you feel having the action bars away form the portraits is better than near the portraits? Other people have already talked a little about why they like them closer but I just don't remember you stating many reasons as to why you prefer them being further away.