Elerond

How did I misrepresent you, pray tell? For example you gave impression that I have said that blizzard, dc, bioware and etc. companies that have oversexualised female character have average artist when I argued agaist your point that female characters look butch if they aren't oversexualised, using claim that if artist knows what s/he does s/he can make female characters look femine and male characters to look masculine even if they have same outfit and only average artist must relay on oversexualisation to do same. Of course artist don't decide how games will look, but they only try to follow instructions from producers and publishers that try to make product to sell as much as possible. And when I pledged to this project I hoped that we can avoid such compromises that marketing department wants.

Dream it is not very nice to attack character of other conversationalists and mispresent what they have said to make your own point look better and make claims in their name what they have not made.

Highlighting characters gender using oversexualisation. Like making platemail be boobplate on female characters, and actually functional looking on male character or wizard ropes look like good traveling ropes for male characters, but on female characters they look like coctail dresses from 20/21th centry. Is just something that average artists must relay to make female and male characters look differently especially today when you have lots of more pixel to use than 64. And oversexualising male characters is not any better idea or show anymore artistic talent. Real arits can make women look femine and male look masculine in same functional looking outfit. Oversexualisation work in same settings where it work in our world, partys, ball dances, advertaisment, bordels, miss/mister competitions, etc. Where you actually want to highlights your gender and those assests/attributes that our culture sees desireable and sexual. And what is desireable in person has changed lot during ages even in western culture, for example during Renaissance period (where PE will be setting) plump women where seen more desireable and sexy than thin women. Rule of cool, works fine until it starts to destroy basic funtionality of equipment. Of course setting can have overcooled equipment but they should have negative attributes gameplaywise compared to their more functionaly designed counterparts.

Bunch of colorful pixels on 640*480 screen is very abstract, that's why it does't stand out as much as 3D models today. Compared to nowadays, these are pretty mundane. Normal-sized weapons and fully-covered body with armor for warriors. So what's your point? That you'd be fine if P:E looked like BG? Me, too. Or that it really don't mater how things look if people can't see difference with two characters . And of course BG had quite used pretty much functional design in all armours in the game. http://mikesrpgcente...gate/armor.html And same goes pretty much for the weapons, with some exceptions like war hammer that look nothing like what they claim to be, strange looking clubs and and throwing axes http://mikesrpgcente...gate/melee.html http://mikesrpgcente...ate/ranged.html Some character models, mostly female ones where quite badly designed in BG and one can see that memory and computing power limited their option quite much. So I must say that I would be greatly disappointed if PE looks like BG, because we have now better technology to use that gives us much more tools to make world look more living and make better character and equipment models. But original equipment design follows those lines that I would like to see PE to follow and keep away of BG2's equipment design.

In my opinion functional designing don't kill imagination and fantastic looking stuff, but in right hands it adds it and can make stuff much more interesting than plain design by look only here some samples from one renascence master

Actually, I distinctly remember first reading it when discussing F3 on the Bethesda forums back in those days - 2007 I think. I think that reason lack of use of word versimilitude before Sawyers post is because majority of people commenting on these topics are not native english speakers so they often use first right sounding word from dictionary and they correct themeselves when someone who have better vocabulary of the subject takes part to conversation, because it is just silly not use words that tell better what you want to say. To me functional and coherent design in enviroment, items and world overall make fantasy and scifi worlds more fun and believable. Deus ex machinas, illogical magic and item design where more ridicilous looking items are better gameplay wise are just plain stupid things that lower funfactor of the games usually for me.

My opinion is that they should keep randomization in bare minimum. So generic enemies droping random loot is okey, random encounters can work, but no random enviroments and random loot from chests, barrels, etc. In my experience that usually cause too much ridicilous loot, like junk in heavily locked chest in tresure room, or 50 gold pieces in barrel in dock full of beggars. And especially I don't like random epic/high level item loots, special artifacts should be in special places, and I like especially if they have story how they ended in that place.

I don't think these flags are necessary. They would be if you want to give different xp for different solutions, but only then. Normally the solution to a quest is your personal decision. No single solution should be the "right" one. An exception might be to giv more xp for a solution that is very difficult, but apart from that the game shouldn't judge you. That was one of the principles Avellone (I think) mentioned they want to adhere to. You also don't need the flags to implement world reactions. If you kill a member of a faction you can decrement the faction stat immediately. If you negotiate something with him you can increment immediately. There is the case that you got better with them through bargaining and then killing them afterward. But the penalty for killing them should realistically be much higher than the gain of one bargain success. If you make a bussiness deal with a yakuza and then kill one member of his organisation, guess which action he will value more. Faction meters and etc. world reaction meters are just more complex flags (meaning that they have more than one state). But sometimes you need add objective specific flag variables, for example if faction 1 would like you to do objective without killing anyone and faction 2 would like to you finish objective killing every one, and this kind checks are usually easiest to do with objective specific flags. But of course need of objective specific flags depend on what global flags you have in game and what kind options you want to give player

Male Chanter (Human or godlike) - named as Väinämöinen - speciality sang enemies to swamp and sword play Female Wizard (Elf) - named Alarielle - speciality long ranged (including missle weapons) damage and heavy armours Male Roque/Ranger (Human/Elf/Godlike) - named Elerond - speciality stealth, wizard killing, light armours, guns, sword play Male Monk (Human) - named Jolker Melchiotto - speciality close ranged combat and enemy distracting Female Cipher (Orlan/Elf/Amuaua) - named Nimue - speciliaty enemy disabling and diplomacy Female Fighter/Paladin/Barbarian (Human/Godlike/Amuaua) - Rachel - speciality pickpocketing, medium armours and exotic weapons

In objective based system you only need codition that checks when objective is completed Addition to this you need of course need flags for world reactions, but you need these in every system. This flags are things like Did not kill any one when carrying out objective (T/F) Did kill all enemies included objective (T/F) Bargained free pass through area (T/F) Killed people after bargaing (T/F) etc. Every flag is easy to check and then after objective is completed designer can give more or less experience depending what flags are up and what are down. So there is no need for any active tracking scripts to make difference between different approaches to object and to check how world will react to these approaches.

It did not work perfectly in IWD 2 (my opinion). But you can make game work with both methods work, but in my opinion objective based xp gain gives more flexibility in level design and make balancing xp gain more easier. As you don't need to implement systems that check how relative difficult is in lockpicking, pickpocketting, conversing, combat, etc. things as you can only decide how difficult objective is and possibly relative difficulty between different solutions and give xp by this estimate.

You don't need use steam for linux, there will be drm free version to linux, but obsidian don't yet know what service they will use to distribute it. So if they go with some linux only service with linux's drm free version then you probably will not get windows and mac version at same time. But if for example GOG will expand on linux too then you will get drm-free version for all platform in same time.

Well you obviously have consider balance to some degree, but it in itself is a fairly easy problem to fix - scaling encounters isn't especially difficult to automate, either in terms of having individual opponents be more powerful (worse option but easier to implement) or (harder to implement but more worthwhile) scaling the entire encounter to be more complex. For instance, if you normally would be fighting eight goblin warriors but you are levelled past that by a few levels, perhaps the encounter is then of 12 goblin warriors backed up by 2 shaman and 5 archers. But when you add enemies to encounter you must think should higher level player get more experience from encounter or should one implement game system where you can dial down experience gain from enemies. And if dialing down is the thing what designer wants to do, then comes to question how this should be implemented, like dropping some percentage of experience what enemis give by every player level or put fixed experience in encounters. And here comes argument between objective oriented and per kill based xp gain.

But how would you design enemy that game? Should it be beatable regardless of characters levels and number of characters in party? Should it be always same or level up with player character / player's party? Should it be easier to beat by higher level characters or should it give somewhat same challenge? Should it give same xp for level one and max minus one level characters? As these all are questions about how game balance should be balanced I don't see how you could design game without thinking about games balance? Except randomly throwing things on map, which I don't think is thing what some one could say to be wonderful level design which is very flexible and allows player have choices and deal with them. Of course some could think that it would be excelent game if first enemy which you face can be anything from rat to ancient red dragon, where rat probably will kill you and dragon will do it definitely. And experience and level gaining are balancing tools for rpgs, thus I wonder if you want to remove them from the game and make it more like fps or action game where player's playing skill determine how good your character is and so game don't need balancing for monsters in start or end as all depend how good player is.

You can have purelly combat based objectives, for example you kill band of bandits that ambush you when you travel between two maps. You can have combat heavy objectives, you need to make roads save from mosters that lurk at its sides. You can have objectives that spawn, for example arena fight or spawning bandit encounters. And game will have level cap, so in end game most of the player will be in somewhat same level. Objectives don't need to be quest or even journal items. They can as just easily be something like you killed band of thugs or that you found mysterious cave or you find way inside of king's treasure room. Objective based xp sytem don't mean that fights or what ever you need to is hard or even demanding, because you can become overpowered or goodlike if that is what level designers want. Because your xp don't make you overpowered if every encounter is scaled 10 levels over your level, your character will be in trouble even in maximum level in every fight if that is what level designer wants and that has not really anything to do with what xp system game uses. And what comes to crafting sytem and that is hard to balance. Crafting system should not kill players incentive to explore and find rare items But crafting sytem should also not be mostly useless gimick (like you find faster better items than you can craft them, items in shops are cheaper than crafting them) In my opinion best way to make good crafting sytem is to make it so that if you invest to it, it will save money or give you ability get better items than what you get from shops as general. And there should be also some receipts and formulas that need rare ingredients, which you need to go find from deepest and darkest corners of the world and so giving you incentive to go exploring. New Dragensang games have pretty good crafting system in my opinion. So crafting should give player to ability make some most best equipments in the game if s/he is heavily invested in crafting, but s/he should not gain ability mass produce those equipments.

If I have remeber it right that half naked VIP monk guy uses mind expansing drugs, so I would think that there will be other drugs also in PE's world.

Objective don't need to be quest/mission, game can just reward you from doing something what level designer has seen such thing that there should be xp reward from it, for example when you kill a dragon in secluded for fun of it. And if designer wants to indicate that you have done an objective by someother means than giving you xp they can always add in your journal a pragging line, like today I killed a dragon. There is no need to tell player before hand about objectives they can be secrets that are only revealed if player accomplish them.

I personally disliked how enviroment was designed in Fallout 3, for first sight it looks cool, but when you start to wander around it start to feel that things are randomly dropped around the map there is few logical explanations why settlements are where they are, how settlement get their food/water/or both. There were lot of cool ideas in Fallout 3, but they feeled to me that they where disconnected from each other. Skyrim in gave me much better feeling that things in the world are connected and even that Skyrim had lots of things that I didn't like, enviromental design was not one of those, I would say that it may have best enviromental design in Bethesda's games or at least it shares top place with Morrowind.

I think that mcmanusaur very generous in his offer to make us MMO in PE's world and paying it from his own pocket. This would also add money to Obsidian's coffers as mcmanusaur of course would be them remarkably large sum for rights to do his game in PE's world. And we know that mcmanusaur will be very successfully with his game as hundred percent of PE fans will buy it as this absolute perfect and no way biased poll show us, so we should encourage to but his billions to make this absolute megalomanical idea of his to come true. In my opinion such entrepreneuring soul like his should always encouraged to invest their money to good things like PE MMOs which will then create good income sources to companies that I really like.

I want good balance between content and areas in the game. So I would not like to see hundreds contentless areas in the game but I would not also not like if we hava only one area so full of content that you will drown to it.

Games don't have random combat in them. As even random encounter are designed to be in the game. So if they decide to create random encounter to their level they will also decide reason why it is there and what reward player will get from getting through of that encounter. So if game uses objective based xp, level designer will be aware of this fact and therefore they design reward for their designed level using game's rewarding system. For example a lazy way to design a random encounter would go something like this: Decide where and how often random encounter can occur: For example 20% change when player moves from dock to marketplace in city What the encounter will be: For example player encounter band of five ruffians Ways to solve encounter: For example Kill ruffians or die Rewards and punishments from the encounter: For example 100 XP and loot if survive and if die player must reload How world will react to encounter: For example it will not. In objective based xp system player would get 100 xp after combat is over In xp per kill based system player would get 20 xp per killed ruffian Both systems work in this scenario similary. But if you want make encounter more difficult on harder difficult level, but you don't want give more xp for player. Then there will start to become difference in this systems. For example in objective based system you could easilly add 5 ruffians to encounter or change ruffians to higher level ruffians and you don't need to do anything else as xp gain don't change. But in per kill based system if you add ruffians you need to lower how much xp player gets from per ruffian and this can cause problems in other levels what you have not designed if you don't add your own ruffian type in the game and same goes for higher level ruffians as they probably in default would give more xp, so you need to fix that also. That is why in my opinion balancing encounter is much easier when you can put fixed xp for them instead to calculate how many kills or tasks your encounter will have and how xp should be divided so that player will get that xp ammount what you want him or her to get from the encounter.

I add my humble thanks for LordCrash in the choir

Big part of good story is verisimilitude and suspension of disbelief. Because if you can't empathize to story you don't usually care about it.

I would say that pure objective base sytem will make deciding to use raw force with out any trickery more valid option. As often player/character is punished if s/he don't use sneak or diplomatic options as they reward usually more experience than combat option, so player usually go around this fact by using first either sneak or diplomatic option and in some rare cases they can do both before they will use combat option to ensure that they will not lose any xp when they decide to use combat option. Or sneaky character gets key to locked door via diplomatic means and then s/he will lockpick door after all, because s/he will get additional xp reward by doing so. These are bugs in level design caused by task based xp sytem and they will sunk level designers orginal ideas about which solutions should give greatest xp rewards and which should give better rewards in other sectors as player can achive them all. And usually when level designers tries to answer to this design problem they often relay on railroading that forces player his or her choosen solution. Objective based xp gives often more easier answer to this design problem as player will only get xp from solution which s/he used first. Of course this don't remove all kinks from the reward allocation but it make level designing easier. This is of course only my opinion which is based to my own experiences.

That probably depends on which version of game you take. If you take Steam version you will get it to Windows, Linux and Mac OS (utility feature) If you take GoG version you will get it at least for Windows and Mac OS (utility feature) Other distribution version there is not yet information (except that you can use physical copy as DRM-free or include licence from it to your Steam account).