Elerond

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).

Another game which has where I love very much about atmospheric sounds was Darklands and how they used music and sound make cities and towns feel alive and medieval even as they were only 2d images and dialog menus. Betrayl at Krondor uses similar approach successfully also.

Vampire: The Masqurade - Bloodlines Game had fantastic atmospheric sounds overall but one level come mind overall Ocean House where excelent atmospheric sound make eerie looking manor to change wondreful horror experience Here is youtube link to one walkthrough, but I had hard time to find one where sound quality is even decent and there is no commentary.

Let Rambo tell you which is better, bow or guns http://vimeo.com/40709487

So you don't think you'd become more experienced at fighting if you were ambushed? You don't think you'd learn anything at all from it? You believe you'll only learn from doing things that have a good reason to be done, and as a consequence, the concept of "Practice" is pointless since you cannot become more experienced by engaing in that exercise since it doesn't have a good reason? The biggest problem in this thread is that people are not stating what their reason is for not wanting experience from combat, and I'd imagine that's because if there was full disclosure the reasons wouldn't hold up well to cross examination. experience points and experience leves are abstractions, which hide how and where characters get their knowhow to do things. And when those things are abstracted then it also quite logical that gaining experience is also abtracted, which means that objective based experience will probably work better than task based as in objective based sytem game master or designer has more easier time to point out when your character has gained enough experience to get some advance from it. Although I think that surviving from ambush is pretty good objective. But in systems that use straigth skill development (meaning that if you use a skill it gets better) it is more logical to use task based experience gain than objective based. This are of course only my opinions about subject.

I loved how Darklands handled this issue. It would be nice if Obsidian implements character creation system where you can choose to go world as noob who is eager to learn new things or maybe as old man who has decades of experience from different occupations but don't anymore learn things fast and his physical condition starts to drop. This of course is probably much harder to balance between races thant have different lifespan and using xp level system instead skill development system, but still it could be nice feature. http://darklands.wikispaces.com/age http://darklands.wikispaces.com/Character+creation

Problem with PE and consoles is usually minimalistic graphic memory in consoles. As large (15360x8640 from 6x6 screen map [used in IE games] where one screen is 2560x1440) 2d background consume lot of graphic memory. And when you add enviromental animations and 3d characters and objects consoles just run out of graphic memory. So to get game to run on consoles backgrouds and background animations must be renered on smaller size (which means lose of details) or game must use partial loading technics that cause map to flow unsmoothly or slowly and this can also cause need to change how pathfinding and etc. things work. PE will not probably cause high load to cpu or gpu, so prosessing power will not, probably, be a problem. Then there is of course problem of point and click and paint and select interface solutions, as they are not perfect for console controller, but are optimal for mouse. And of course keyboard will over lot of shortcut keys, when console interface much be developed so that skill/spell/talent/menu/map/journal/window/inventario/etc. selection are fast to do with few clicks from the controller. So for optimal gaming experience, consoles and pc need separate interfaces. And then there is of course testing which console version would add considerably Then there is of course that fact that PE will need quite much harddrive space, so it will not fit in OUYA's 8 GB, and it will be too big for Xbox live or PSN. And physical distribution for consoles is expensive and difficult for indie studio to do in first place.

Gameplay balances what we have seen in past AD&D full plate is best and one would use it, but some classes can't use it or it blocks usage of class specific abilities. D&D 3.0 and 3.5 put limit to dexterity bonus, some classes must take feat to be able to use one and it restricts some class specific abilities DAO, full plate causes abilities to use more combat resource and armours have minimium strength requirement to character to wear them. And in all of these games full plate is rare and expensive and it weight more than other armours. In all of these settings reason for not to use full plate come from realism or world inner logic.

From that this come in mind

Yes and no. Yes because strong emergence says that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. And no because reductionism says that a complex system is nothing but the sum of its parts, and that an account of it can be reduced to accounts of individual constituents.

They mean with previous tier, previous physical tier, which is $140. And that list in obsidian tumblr page should be most specific about what each tier includes as they say on PE's kickstarter's homepage that one should look complete reward list from there.

Excelent story companied with good gameplay mechanics in intresting and believable world added with elements of exploration, discovery and heroism/villianism and all this must be paced with appropriate rate of action, story telling, character development and threat. This of course is when we speak about fantasy rpgs.