Eiphel

What are these differences? Physically these differences are where hair grows on them. Wild Orlans are covered with a coat of hair on every inch of their bodies, including the face. On the other hand Hearth Orlans have tufts of hair the ears, but otherwise the face is covered with hair much like a typical human. The Orlan detective concept depicts a Hearth Orlan. PLEASE have the Orlan Detective be a character in the game. Preferably with associated fantasy-film-noir quest.

I feel like a seasoning of trivial quests (with good writing) elevate a game by making it so the deeds of great import are broken up a bit by more of simply experiencing the daily nature of the world. Also they allow for amusing/irreverent/intriguing little asides which are compelling but not substantial or integral enough to devote more extensive quest design to.

I agree with this. So far the godlike feel a lot more like an extra 'cool thing' thrown onto the top rather than an organic part of the design. It's still early days though, and we've really not seen much about them. In particular, the elemental godlike concept art really threw me though - it doesn't look like it shares any sensibilities with any of the other worldbuilding material.

This is something I have always, always dreamed of seeing in a game. It would take an immense amount of effort so would probably need to be the focal point of the game's design to be done satisfactorily, but wow it would be so much fun. The potential for a fulfilling playthrough where my character takes the stance of 'Frankly, I couldn't give a damn' is really exciting. (Heavy Rain offered a little bit of this, in amongst its many flaws.)

Obviously, some old, mad Wizard developed the Flame of Eternal Burnitude, and made oodles of money by selling it to all the dungeoneers throught the land. Afterwards, they killed him off, took their money back, and re-dubbed the technology Infini-Bright. The mage who invented endless magical light for dungeons and got stiffed out of royalties would be such a great quest hook...

I'd prefer not so see you choose a god's alignment on a character creation screen (or any other screen) by clicking a little button and selecting it as you would a trait or feat. I'd much rather see it be something that you 'selected' via roleplay, just like alignment in Planescape: Torment or 'tides' in the upcoming Numenera game. As a living, breathing game world, you should be able to see the vestiges of the various religions and interact with them, and through THIS you should find a central way of displaying your alignment. Additionally certain other actions could be flagged as giving you a minor boost to alignment with a deity (like giving coin to a beggar as a trite example). Some things should hurt your alignment with some gods, other things should be accomodated by multiple gods. (And nothing in the worldbuilding I've seen suggests people can't honour several different gods. In fact usually when there is a pantheon, people do respect ALL of the gods.) Alongside this I'd probably envision scaling static boons to different spells, stats and abilities tied to each god's alignment. Whichever god you were most closely aligned to would grant you their boon, with the extent of it being based on how closely aligned you were. (Potentially all gods could grant boons but this risks balance issues.) This means from a purely powergaming perspective it's always best to play a devout cleric so as to be as powerful as possible, but I can see balances against this. Imagine having various special roleplaying events which cued off other paths for clerics. Maybe you discover a sect of balance-obsessed cultists who confer upon you their secret spells of balance magic, but only if your alignment to each of the gods is within a small range of each other. Maybe if you rapidly break alignment from a god in a big way you trigger an event involving the consequences of your 'fall' which allows you to develop in a different way and see reactivity in the world you'd otherwise not have seen. That's what I'd love to see anyway. If it were implemented how I dream (which might be infeasible in a game where it's not the focal mechanic) I would certainly be compelled to play a cleric. (At present my favour is for ciphers and chanters. Apparently the letter 'C' is a big selling point for me.)

Excellent! Still not perfect - too much dead space and oversized decorative elements, redundant left-hand wing - but this is definitely moving in a direction I like. What he's saying is, if you like it then you should'a put a ring (of health and mana) on it. Superb. I salute you.

Wait wait clerics can turn into kittens now? He means in terms of how effective they could be. (I knew that.)

Wait wait clerics can turn into kittens now?

Awesome! I'm actually in a Pathfinder campaign right now (we're only level 2) as a Wizard. I take it Magus is a prestige class? It's a base class. https://sites.google.com/site/pathfinderogc/classes/base-classes/magus

This is pretty much the exact idea behind the Magus in Pathfinder.

Whilst we're starting to diverge pretty significantly from anything likely to appear in PE now, I do like the idea of an RPG where the mechanics of your 'camp' are a full part of the game. That would be really interesting.

Actually I was thinking about artwork (out of game, cutscenes, those little interactive titlecard things)! But ability visuals being distinct from the other magic visuals would be of interest too. I had forgotten about that Orlan being a cipher. Whilst I realise it's an effective visual shorthand and gets the point across quickly, I'm a bit disappointed they fell back on 'touching temples and frowning in concentration' for the pose.

I believe the intent is to include text based, interactive 'cutscenes', although they are much more 'micro' in scale than the example given above. The activity above wouldn't make sense as a text based screen, since it includes dialogue, exploration of a location, and monster encounters - the specific stuff that is the meat of IE gameplay. What we have seen is an example of such a scene in which the player is presented with different options regarding crossing a collapsed bridge, which makes much more sense since jumping, climbing, engineering and the like are not part of the core gameplay.

Well, you know, if Obsidian announced a superhero RPG as their next game after PE, I'd be all over that...

I can't overstate how utterly I disagree with this. The whole point of these games is to have a reactive world and great player choice. This sentiment flies entirely in the face of that. RPGs are balanced to make all classes equal so that people can play whatever classes they want. Specifically balancing to be uneven is the exact opposite of what these games are aiming for. What if I don't want to be forced to include a wizard in all my parties? It completely defeats the whole notion of having a range of classes to choose from if you then railroad people into an optimal party makeup. And besides, you liked wizards but what if uneven party balance existed... And heavily emphasised the neccesity of making sure you had a sword-and-board fighter leading every party? Would you be so in favour of it then? (Incidentally, I'm pretty sure the IE games didn't have uneven class balance intentionally...)

The Pathfinder Magus class is a fighter-mage design I thought was pretty neat. Essentially their shtick is using melee combat as a delivery method for their magic, and having melee-delivered spells be more versatile and generally synergistic with being in melee.

So, I have the various pieces of PE concept art cycling through my desktop background, and I was looking at the composite shot of the Monk, Wizard, Fighter and Cleric, and I thought to myself, 'I hope we see some Cipher concept art soon'. But this got me to thinking, what visual cues should the Cipher incorporate? I love the wizard designs we've seen, particularly Aloth and the female elf. They're a nice diversion from typical wizard designs whilst still having an inherent wizardliness. The cipher has much less existing expectation to work with, and its closest kin in other settings - psions - often come out looking just like wizards with a 'head' focus. The difference between the look of a psion and a wizard is often that the psion has a headpiece on or is touching their temples. I'd hope PE could come up with some more distinctive visual language to convey Ciphers. So what do people think would make a good look for Ciphers? What existing character designs would you take inspiration from? Is their anything they shouldn't do? I think I'll be playing a Cipher or a Chanter, and there's a good thread already about Chanter influences. My main desire is that they'll be clearly distinct from wizards, and also I'd like to avoid the cliche of lots of (usually blue) glowy floaty light effects. They're cool but they've been done a lot. Just like the wizard designs have shied away from beard-and-robe without turning against it completely, I'd like to see the Ciphers have a bit more uniqueness too.

I think there's a slightly flawed premise in the question: The wizard's spells are not a counterpart to the fighter's sword wielding. Ability to use a sword is universal to all classes. Wizard then has spells. Fighter has their combat feats. The wizard doesn't get the fighter's combat feats, nor does the fighter get spells. The wizard just gets to equip a sword - presumably a fighter can carry a staff if they so will it. (If there's wands or scrolls or some other sort of artifact that dispenses spells, I would like to see fighters be able to use those, with them making the same sort of tradeoffs as a wizard using a sword.)

I hadn't actually considered the implications of the skill division before now, but now that you mention it, I agree it has some disappointing implications - But by no means are they certain to come to pass. Having seperate combat and noncombat progression does sound like it would lead to a degree of homogeneity where you can choose how you fight in combat and what you excel at out of combat, but you can't choose to what extent your character tends toward or away from combat, with every character having to be a balanced build who is equally comfortable in and out of battle. I don't really see that the solution proposed in the OP truly circumvents it, however, so much as offers a hack to disguise the issue. If it was a mod being applied for a problem post release it could be a good answer, but when the game is in design I'd advocate addressing the issue much more intrinsically. One possibility I can see is that whilst combat and noncombat skills are delineated, there's no reason why progression in them has to be. If you play a pacifist, avoiding battles wherever possible and talking down every enemy you can, you might get more noncombat skill points than combat skillpoints, or vice versa. That would be a pretty satisfactory system to me. If they then included a system where, at character creation - and only at character creation - you could swap points between combat at noncombat skills, then I think it'd be totally fine. What I don't want to see is a system where every time you level up, regardless of how you've been playing, you always get equal amounts of combat and noncombat skill points. Not only does that homogenise every character into being balanced, it actually causes the very problem that Obsidian said they wanted to avoid. They said they were splitting combat and noncombat progression so you wouldn't have to (for example) give up your prowess with a blade in order to be a good craftsman, or vice versa. But in a system where you always just get equal combat and noncombat points regardless, they would actually be enforcing that. Imagine I'm trying to play a pacifistic, diplomatic character. I'm being told I have to spend half my skill points in the combat skills which have nothing to do with how I'm playing. That's something to avoid. I'm very much in favour of determing the split of combat and combat advancement based on how you have split your focus in achieving goals. You should always get *some* of both, but a character who solves every problem with an axe should be seeing a much greater progression of combat skills, and so forth.

Heavy Rain was a deeply flawed game, but one thing I appreciated about it was you could fail to do whatever it was you were meant to be doing, and the game kept rolling. Yeah, you screwed up. But you have to live with it. And this is more punishing than a fail state which is just a hard death or otherwise ultimate failure, because in that case you fail, game over. The story stops there. You reload or whatever. But if the story keeps rolling, your failure means something, it plays out across the rest of the tale. And in Heavy Rain, a failure didn't just mean less content, it meant different content. I played through and had intentionally had once character screw things up to see how that would impact the story, and got a different outcome to my flatmate who played it attempting to 'win' conventionally. (It was an outcome that made no sense, because Heavy Rain... Not exactly coherent. But that's moot.) I think that's another exciting notion - Whilst I certainly approve of goals at which there is no 'failure', just different outcomes, I also approve of the idea that where there are goals you can definitively fail at, that failure isn't a stopping point, but just another point of reactivity. What I'm really getting at here is that, whilst people will generally want to play to 'win', a really exciting failable quest is one where the failure is equally developed, such that you might choose to fail (as a player, not in character) to see the outcome of that.

I'll probably add more to this later, but I'd say Torment actually has a largely linear plot development. Whilst Sigil is pretty open, it's still fairly gated and with a distinct direction of flow, and once you leave Sigil things become pretty linear indeed. It's not wholly linear, but it's definitely on that end of the spectrum. On the other hand, of course, much of the story is not really about where you go and what you do, but who you are - and this area is highly personal, and malleable, and can be explored differently each time. The plot beats of Torment are linear, whilst the thematic and character development are not. I'd also say I thought New Vegas was an absolute triumph of reactive storytelling, and managed to deliver a story which I found utterly satisfying and also personal to my character. I think it actually performs a remarkable trick of presenting a pacy, well developed, coherent and complex narrative whilst be hugely non linear.

This is an interesting question that I've thought about quite a lot. Especially in regard to the ubiquitous 'RPG elements' we see as a feature of games now. My position is something like this: If you go back to early classic and traditional RPGs, and trace the evolution of the genre, there's really not one single defining element which is the 'RPG' element. Instead RPGs really evolved as a set of interrelated systems which for a long time were all very much part and parcel with one another. Those systems, however, are not mutually inclusive, and over time - especially over the last generation or so of games - we've seen an unpacking of those various elements, going in both directions: RPGs which exclude or replace certain of the typical systems as not a part of their whole, and other games which season themselves with one or two of these elements integrated with their whole of very different systems. So the phrase 'RPG elements' seems very apposite to me, as I don't think it's a genre defined by a single aspect, but rather it's a bunch of discrete aspects whcih can be mixed and matched with elements from anywhere else in gaming. On top of that, there's a distinction to be drawn between a game with 'roleplaying elements': a game with elements of playing a role - and 'RPG elements': genre tropes which are frequently mechanical in nature. Now, the IE games are pretty traditional and ancestral to the genre, so they all feature a fairly classic and all-encompassing conjunction of RPG elements, and include few elements from elsewhere. That said, Icewind Dale skews hack-and-slash heavy, and has the fewest roleplaying (playing-of-role) systems, whilst Torment is heavy on the roleplaying and is light on a few of the archetypal mechanical elements (combat is underdeveloped and there's no character customisation, picking of feats and skills and suchlike). So I view the RPG genre as being somewhat modular in nature - whilst we typically see genres as a classification system, and thus all about delineating characteristics, I don't think the RPG genre works this way. It's more like a collection of interrelated systems/tropes/elements which can be mix and matched with other elements from outside itself - in configurations which are predominately RPG, or which are a seasoning over a game of a different nature, and in balances which are purely mechanic to purely playing-of-role. Defining something as an RPG, then, ends up being pretty contextual. It depends what the specific topic of discussion is, and if the game in question holds those specific RPG elements which bear relation to that topic. The same game may bring a lot to one discussion of RPGs and be irrelevant elsewhere. For me personally, true roleplaying is about shaping a character. Sculpting a specific identity and pursuing that identity through the world. So, for example, the Walking Dead is an RPG for me in that sense - It's a game that affords me an experience of playing a role. But its mechanical identity is far more heavily descended from point-and-click adventure games. So in a discussion of point-and-click games, I'd bring it up. In a discussion of playing-a-role in games, I'd bring it up. But in an RPG discussion focussed on level ups and combat systems, no, of course it wouldn't fit the active definition, and wouldn't make sense to bring it up, regardless of it personally being an 'RPG' to me for what it fulfils. Now, as a heritor of the IE games and based on everything we've seen so far, I'd say PE undoubtedly will feature a very large swathe of the classic RPG elements, and it'll be hitting up both the aspects of mechanical and playing-of-role identity, so defining it as an RPG should be pretty uncontroversial and universally applicable anyway. Did that make any sense?

Yeah. I'm with ya there. I especially hate how you run into "Sara wants you to go and pick up her delivery from Steve's shop," and it's a quest. Sure, it's irksome that it's just a fetch-errand, but... wait, what if it isn't? What's irksome is that, the actual, involved QUEST doesn't start 'til you get to Steve's Shop, and he's missing, and there's blood on the floor or something. NOW something's up. Yet, in many games, it's all "congratulations! You made it to Steve's shop! 100XP for the first segment of that quest!" No! You didn't do anything yet! The errand simply LED you to an interesting situation that now constitutes a quest. It may seem like silly semantics or something, but I think the structure of such things should really just be divided into two separate things: Thus-far mundane happenings/context/leads, and actual quests. Ehh, kind of like how Arcanum does it. When someone tells you something, you just jot it down in your journal, even if you don't know what you're supposed to do yet. "Sara would like someone to check on her undelivered package." It doesn't say "QUEST: Find Sara's undelivered package!". There's no unsolved mystery yet. Maybe she can't leave the house, and she just thought she needed to go pick it up, instead of waiting on it being delivered the next day. It's not a missing package. It simply wasn't delivered yet. *shrug*. But, I digress a bit. Arcanum's journal was pretty poor, but I do like the distinction it draws between 'Heard about' and 'Accepted'.

Actually that gives me the idea that the stash itself - Like the physical object that stores it - Could have magical properties. Like it's a big chest or something which functions like a bag of holding and is magically present wherever you make camp. (Hahah, now I'm imagining a backstory for this mysteriously helpful chest and everything.) Or, y'know, the Luggage.