MinotaurWarrior

Option 1 is like Neverwinter Nights 2 Option 2 is like Dragon Age: Origins Option 3 is like Baldur's Gate. In this system, the fewer characters are in the party, the more XP each of them gets. Options 5 & 6 are like some PnP RPGs I've played. I don't think any CRPG has implemented them before, but I could be wrong. I think this is one of the big issues that I've seen divide the old-school RPG crowd from newer games. Certainly it's not the biggest, but it's something I think a lot of us care about and would like to have our voices heard about. Personally, I prefer option 3. It, together with the quirky 2nd Ed rules, created a more organic feeling, as different characters leveled up at different times. It also created a sort of seperation between my eternal companions, and the couple of slots I might switch NPCs in and out of. On a few play-throughs of the saga, I did fun quirky things like doing all the sidequests with a smaller party (My Cleric / Mage + Dyanheir and Minsc in BG 1, Me + Aerie and Minsc in BG 2), only using the fully party for the big story missions. When that happened, there was a clear gulf between my true companions, and my hirelings. Most importantly for some, this system allows for a greater balance between solo-play and party play, since the solo PC will reach higher levels faster. IMPORTANT RELEVANT INFO: This game is only going to have, at maximum, three more copmanions than companion slots.

I think the "normal" level of fast-talking in Black Isle / Troika / Obsidian games is good enough. It doesn't make sense to be able to fast-talk your way out of everything - but at the same time, stealthy smooth talkers who plan carefully and turn foe against foe should be able to avoid a lot of trouble. One thing I'd like to see more of, would be smooth-talking as the "darker shade of grey." This shouldn't be true 100% of the time, but every once in a while you should have the option to tell the fifty-man patrol, "No, I'm not the fugitive you're looking for. Check in the next village over," knowing that they will then go on to Mai Lai Massacre that village. I feel that smooth-talking is too often set up in situations where your choice is simply "completely avoid conflict" or "pointlessly slaughter your foes." A mixture of smooth-talking as lighter and smooth-talking as darker would be nice.

It's not going to be voice acted, so they'll probably use %CHARNAME like in BG & whatnot. However, that got on my nerves sometimes in BG, because NPCs who couldn't possibly know my name would call me by my name nevertheless. This wasn't a big deal, but it happened a few times.

Love it. Alpha Protocol may be tied for my favorite Obsidian game, and that beard is tied for my favorite beard of all time. I'd like to see a return to that magic.

The Witcher 2 did some great things with crafting / alchemy, and I think, for all its faults, Kingdoms of Amalur had some interesting ideas in this sphere. In TW2, crafting and alchmy can be used to create consumable / placeable items (potions, bombs, and traps) that are otherwise available, but finite. While there were some issues with this (trap spam was silly), overall it worked incredibly well. One of the best-handled concept was alchemy, because of the generally balanced potions, and the limited application - you could only have 3 potions, and 100 toxicity. Implimenting similar limits on consumables in Project Eternity would be a great idea. If there are bombs (or similar items), place them on a bandolier, so we can only use a set number of them per encounter. If there are traps, allow them to damage our party, and don't allow them to stack on the same tile, so we have to be careful in their placement. For armor and weapons, TW2 made crafted items almost like a second kind of distributed loot. Particularly in Dark Mode, the Oathbreaker's outfits were like rewards for completing the entire chapter. In KOA:R, most items can be demolished into their components, but something will always be lost in the process. So the Sword of Electric Lifeleeching you looted, despite not having any swordsman in your party? Deconstruct it for parts, and you might get an electrifying hilt that can be used to make a new weapon. I think this worked well.

The game has no good / evil meter, and will hopefully leave all moral judgements up to the player. There may be characters who use lethal force to defend their ideals, even against noncombatants. There may be bakers. There may be those who enslave others, and those who desecrate holy places. There may be homosexuals, and polygymists. You can judge them as you may, just in real life.

You don't have romances when roleplaying with your friends because that'd be creepy to do with your friends. As you yourself said, there's a greater degree of player / character separation in cRPGs, and just as I occasionally enjoy romantic subplots in my stories, I occasionally enjoy romantic subplots in my games. It's not creepy to participate in a story where two characters have a romance. However, I do agree that romantic subplots are overly common in most media. But anyway, this is besides the point, because characters can have sexual orientations without wanting to bone the PC.

This is precisely why I think there should be homosexual characters in the game - because homosexuality is really relevant in the medieval era. Homosexuals were reviled, but they existed, and even outside of the dangers of being discovered, there were serious practical concerns for property inheritence, formal duties (homosexual nobility), et cetera. The gay scion of an ancient line of sacred warriors, sworn to protect the font of Allahandra is going to have a damned interesting story. The skilled businesswoman who cannot own property without becoming married to a person of the gender to which she is not attracted? That's another interesting story right there. There are a bunch of cool stories like this that I'd like to see in a fantasy RPG.

Marital rape was normal and legally supported for most of history, at least among the land-owning class. Serene life on the countryside could be broken up by brutal violence, death, and rape when soldiers went "foraging" in times of war. Fuedal lords had insane levels of control over the peasants who worked their land. Disease was rampant, and people were helpless against it. Sociopathy isn't a new thing, but police forces are. Child mortality rates were very high, and many cultures coped with this by not fully considering infants to be people. Among the old norse, you only got a name at around age three. Once castles were invented, seige warfare came - a tactic in which two forces sit in constant fear of battle, waiting for one side to slowly starve to death. The writings of french Knights show us that PTSD was a concern for soldiers, long before therapy was ever invented. There were really horrible problems in life back then. There was also a lot of quiet afternoons spent shearing sheep. The game should show both. This is a good (if likely irrelevant) point. Cannibalism is really just unhygenic, not particularly evil. Even in those cultures that kill people in order to eat them, the victims are usually just people who the cannibals would have killed anyway (because they were at war or whatever).

I also think that makes sense. Perhaps there should even be a degree of the mega-donors getting some sort of special privelege within this system?

Believe it or not, it's possible for NPCs to express their sexual orientation in ways other than trying to bone the PC. Like how Kevan had been married in BG 1, or how Sean Darcy in Alpha Protocol was clearly interested in Mina Tang.

My preference is TW2-Level, which is ESRB friendly (the game was rated M, not AO). Fact is, there is a dark side to the medieval-esque fuedal systems we all love, and that side has to be considered, but I really would rather not watch it.

Include it, and include it "realistically" (for a world with magic). Homosexuality didn't just appear out of nowhere in the past few decades, but it wasn't as simple for persons with minority sexual orientations as, say, Dragon Age made it out to be, y'know? It's a real story that can make real, honest drama.

That's why I think there should be down-voting. That's why Obsidian should have the option of labeling proposals as "not going to happen"

That'll just make the reload problem worse, and more annoying. Players will reload for the best possible result.

I'd like this. Another example of this sort of system might be the new Project Greenlight feature on steam. I like the way that one has concrete goals built in. Here's an idea for how it could work. Say someone suggests implementing an underwater dungeon (random example). They submit the idea, it goes on the page. Time passes, people can support / oppose it (I think there should be a downvoting option). If it gets the attention of a guy at obsidian, he can run it by some people, and see what they think. If it's an absolute no-go (everyone at Obsidian is cripplingly hydrophobic) then the're a notice on the suggestion, saying it ain't gonna happen. If they're open to it, they'll set a support goal reflecting how much of an investment the proposal is. This support goal will have two parts: a hard number (we'll only add this if at least 500 people want it) and a ratio factor (we'll only add it if at least 75% of those who vote on it want it). Additionally, there'd be a disclaimer that the whole system is non-binding, and the devs can do whatever they want.

No level scaling. What I'd really like to see, however, is no level scaling, plus a flatter level power range. One thing I thought was done really well recently in DA2 (and also was in V:tM: Bloodlines, and Arcanum) was that your stats didn't actually get better unless you put points in them. If you never increased your constitution, your health never went up. Never increase your cunning? Your base critical hit chance stays the same (but actually goes down relative to the critical hit resistance of your enemies). Et cetera. And, to an extent, this also applied to your enemies. The hurlocks you struggle defeating at the start of the game have about the same health as the hurlock grunts you kill in one hit later on. That creates a real fealing of progress, as opposed to, say, DA:O (or Oblivion, or any number of other titles), where the "little guys" change to suit the player. Even where there's no "level scaling", in many RPG's there still is level scaling. It's just done by hand instead of being done according to a formula. Consider NWN 2, where the human enemies, lizardlings, and types of undead you can fight all throughout the game are always scaled to the player's expected level, with grunts a level or two below the player and bosses a bit tougher than the player. It's just kinda silly. If, instead, all normal bandits were about the same in terms of combat stats, and the player just never became ten times better at everything, the game would make a good deal more sense and be more fun.

I see two options here that I'd really like: 1st, there's the TW2 option, where the journal is actually being written by someone else, who has their own personality and perspective that spices things up, or 2nd, whenever you get a journal entry, there's a indicator that appears on your screen prompting you to, if you so choose, edit that entry yourself. So, Baldur's Gate-style, + a reminder to edit the entry to add your own perspective.

There are two things I'd really like to see here: different coins (copper / silver / gold, with prices based on actuall historic prices for goods), and non-combat moneysinks, ala Crossroads Keep. A military base, quests that have options involving large coin expenditures, supporting factions, et cetera.

I'd prefer a The Witcher 2 / Alpha Protocol / Fallout 2 set-up, where there are just differing points of view, but you are at times forced into conflict with them. A lot of the time, in a well-written story, people with similar perspectives are forced into conflict by circumstance. Spoilerific details of what I mean lie ahead:

I'd really like BG style options here, just as an option. Especially since it looks like we'll have very few recruitable NPCs.

It certainly doesn't stop you from reloading, but it allows you more of an option to play without reloading. Whenever I think of this issue, I'm reminded of the early parts of Baldurs Gate 1 (and in particular, that one stupid wolf to the north of your starting position after the prologue). You really had no choice but to reload after almost every death, because of how exponential deaths would be (after minsc died, everyone was in for a hard time), and how you couldn't really afford to keep getting those resurrection spells because [Frequency of death]*[Cost of Resurrection] > [value of loot earned in the amount of time it'd take for one of your party members to die]. And so you get into the habit of always reloading, and get stuck in it. In Dragon Age, I remember continuing on a lot, even after really racking up the injuries, because while they made things harder, forging on ahead seemed less inconvenient than reloading and playing a section all over again. Sure, there's the option of savescumming to get the absolute best possible outcome, but why bother? Not that Dragon Age is the model we should be looking towards. I like those games (especially the first one) made death too inconsequential. It was only when I was being most careless, in the longest marathon dungeons, that the injuries started to rack up enough to really matter.

My personal prefferred solution? Let us attack anyone, cast our spells wherever, et cetera, and have a backpath to the MQ (like in Morrowind). So, say that we realize who Sarevok is while at Candelkeep. If we attack him and win, we get a note on his body about the rest of the Iron throne, and then we can go about our business defeating them and finishing the game. This backpath can be as bare bones as you want (For Morrowind it was literally just fighting people and taking their stuff), so long as it lets you get to the end.

Something every adventuring party should have, but AFAIK no game has ever provided: a goddamn cart for my loot. In Fallout 2 you did OK with this, having trunk space in the car, but that's not enough for me. Every single fantasy RPG I've ever played, every time I head towards an cave full of Gnolls, knowing I won't be able to carry all of their valuable steel weapons back to civilization, I wonder why my ultra-rich owner of priceless enchanted artifacts cannot seem to acquire the simplest and most essential of material transportation aids. In addition: how the hell can you carry so much on your body? Kelgar must have been very uncomfortable carrying all those seven-foot spears on his person. If you give us a cart, we can get by without the riddiculous personal storage capacity.

This is really true, and strikes me as strange. AFAIK, didn't all non-DnD Black Isle / Troika / Obsidian games use some sort of point-buy system? Maybe the classes will be more like the specializations in Alpha Protocol, where they just make slight alterations to the way you buy points?