limaxophobiacq

More money doesn't always = a better game. I'd much rather have a $3.5 million game aimed at a specific niche audience (PC RPG fans) than a $20 million game aimed at everyone with a gaming platform. If Project Eternity somehow generated the kind of hype a game like Skyrim received, and millions started pouring in, I think the devs would feel some pressure to not only justify the extra money with features that typically ruin RPGs (like fully voiced dialogue), but also pressure to make the game appeal to a broader audience. They're already experiencing some pressure just trying to appeal to a small bunch of cRPG fans who disagree on issues like turn-based combat vs RTwP and cooldowns. Just imagine the headache they'd have if the project gained a widespread following. I don't think there is any reason to 'fear' the kickstarter suddenly going up by millions of dollars. Also it's perfectly possible there's a few kids* on IGN etc, who are to young to have been introduced to the old IE games but who would have enjoyed them if they had and who could be interested in PE. Not saying they are any significat portion of those sites readership but even if they're only a fraction of a percent they wouldn't be insignificant. *I don't mean this in a pejorative sense, I was a kid when I first played Torment.

If unwinnable encounters are in the game, getting into a fight and then realising you are outclassed and running away must actually be feasible. Getting insta-gibbed or hold-personed/confused and mauled to death just so you have to reload and avoid the encounter is not fun, but fleeing in panic can be.

The waterfall and statues are amazing, and the bridge is quite nice. The grass and dirt is well, grass and dirt, so I guess there are limits to what you can do.

I really hope the cities will have distinct aesthetics with their own architectural styles. Baldurs Gate and Athkatla were kind of same-y and bland.

Given that it'll probably be an Aedyr or Dyrwood city, I think it'll either be mixed human-elf-dwarf or mixed human-elf.

To reach the 3.5 goal, obsidian needs to raise $800,000 in its last five days, which seems a lot but it is just about the same amount of money doublefine rased in it's last five days, so I think it is far from impossible

I voted 50/50 I'm fine with them having mostly or only established monsters as long as they have their own takes and aesthetics for them. Ogre doesn't have to mean 10 foot neanderthal, dragons don't have to come in 12 different-coloured varieties, trolls don't have to be green and fear fire & acid damage etc..

Note the boat in the lower-left corner for scale, the door is huge. It is a good deal more zoomed-out than planescape was. The camera-angle does seem lower than in IE games though.

I remain optimistic, and even if we 'only' get to 3.4 it's not like they're going to use those last $400,000 for hookers and blow. Edit: Probably.

"While I know it might seem financially irresponsible at first glance, I now get free shipping!" Any other ideas of what to tell her?

Yes. I think the it was used because a lot of the discussion that has been framed as being about realism has really been about wanting more darkness and grimness. 40k gets references because 40k is a setting that is (intentionally) designed to be as horrible as possible rather than striving for any kind of realism.

I'd like to see some realism in the portrayal of kingship*. As for what I mean I think the metaphor of the kind as shepherd is appropriate; the shepherd guides the sheep and protects them against predators, because the shepherd wants to feed of them himself. The ancient egyptians had the right of it; the King is the one who devours the people. *And in extension nobility, so this falls under class differences. I think that if you look at the actual history rather than fiction, calling imperial China the nice part of town seems fairly absurd. Life as a subsistence farmer was never particularly nice to start with and add to that their exploitation by the state and the land-owners, the threat of bandits and raiders in times a turmoil, the living conditions of the convict work-gangs, and the chaos when dynasties fell and the picture is pretty grim. The amazing thing is that people still seem to have managed to find some small bit of happiness despite all this.

Yay Landsknechts! Awesome. If I could play this guy with a breastplate and a bit of magic as some kind of fighter-mage or warpriest in P:E, I'd be in heaven.

If the lore update impresses and shows that the setting is something more than another Faerûn/Greyhawk clone, I could add another 100$ or more.

If setting was so irrelevant to the enjoyment of a creative work of fantasy or sci-fi, DnD would never have had another setting beside Greyhawk, and no one would know who Lovecraft was if his work had to live on his execution and not on the draw of his mythos. But DnD had many settings, including Planescape, Spelljammer, and Ravenloft, which provided for characters and stories that never could have worked in Greyhawk/Fearûn. Do you honestly think it wouldn't matter if P:E threw away the cliches western fantasy altogether and set its story in a world inspired by the Dreamtime of aboriginal myth*? Or based itself on Exalted instead of DnD and had us play a game of politics among the soul-hierarchies and world-bodies of the titans who created all that is? 'Exploring' new and wondrous worlds is why I think I'm into fantasy and sci-fi in the first place, and just rehashing the same old stuff pretty much kills that. *Edit: I'm not saying that this would be desirable, just that it would be different.

Is there someone else you think of who they could get that is more qualified? Because all the money raised is ultimately going to be go towards paying the people who make the game.

While it's true that I am quite dissapointed that the ambitions for the P:E setting seem to be little more than making a slightly altered Faerûn, obsidian has managed to wrest interesting and 'fantastical' stories out of the actual Faerûn, so they should be able to do the same again with this world. I am also holding out hope that while the setting seems very safe and bog-standard rpg-fantasy from everything we've heard*, this is mostly done to present a familiar basic structure around which they can build new ideas without scaring traditionally-minded people off. *And still some people went berserk over something as tame and trivial as introducing guns! Which I guess proves that catering to my kind and making something completely non-D&D inspired might not have been viable, sad as that makes me.

I really have no idea what kind of salary a job like what Ziets is going to do on P:E usually brings, but if he is going to be hired full-time for a year and a half of development $100,000 isn't really that much considering obsidians expenses.

I'd be nice, but I'd be perfectly fine with something that looked like the old IE games just scaled for modern resolutions.

Swarm Curse or Axe of Torment in PS:T, one for effectiveness and one for cool visuals and flavour. For BG1, Mirror Image. In BG 2 there was also Cloudkill and Acid Fog which were good fun. For IWD I'd go with the elemental summoning spells just because the elementals looked cool in it.

George Ziets on the team is very nice, though I think we have enough classes by now. Why they don't put up a goal like the one for 2.2 (more regions) is beyond me given that seems to be what most people are interested in. Hopefully they're saving it for the 3 million mark so I can have a reason to increase my pledge.

Urgh. Given that them thinking level-scaling is required probably means the characters will scale nonsensically in power once again, plus the elder-scrolls style crafting they seem to be talking about in the latest update, these last two days have been a serious damper on my enthusiasm for this project.

WTF is wrong with some people. Have you honestly built so much of your self-worth on being 'hardcore' that you feel that making a game fun for someone who doesn't care for that nonsense and isn't good at IE combat will somehow taint it (even if it does absolutely nothing to affect the difficulty you'll play at, which for this game we can be pretty sure it wont), and thus feel the need to insult them for it? This is almost as bad as those sad ****ers on rpgcodex, who are silly enough that being too embarrassed to have a 'wussy' "Like" button on their forum but still wanting to circle-jerk about awesome they are have a button to 'brofist' each others posts (not realising that brofist was originally an ironic joke by more self-aware nerds making fun of such ridiculous posturing).

To quote myself from another thread: "Mages in this setting have probably been crafting magic items for centuries or millenia, do you think your character should be able to make enough stuff to equipt your whole party over like 6 months to a year, at an equal level of power to the best those countless other mages have made in all that time? " IMO, no. Great artifacts shouldn't be forged in a day. I'm fine with a few item-crafting (or re-forging) quests like in bg 2 and icewind dale though, those were cool.

I doubt we'll ever see that because it would be an enormous mess....once a project is funded the money start being spent on it so if it were to later fall apart it would be because they ran out of money and the project is still in a highly unfinished/unplayable state. So you see the dilemma? Can't give back money after they are gone. Unless they figure out an insurance system for kickstarters but I'm not sure we want to go there as the drawbacks are likely to be far worse than the lack of it. I don't mean conditional on Obsidian actually fullfilling the stretch goal, I mean conditional on the project getting enough funds to reach the stretch goal, justl like how donating to the project as a whole is conditional on the project meeting its goal.