RiceMunk

Remember in Oblivion when you had to go save that one painter from inside a painting? That was pretty cool. More places: Submarine, House-that's-upside-down-for-some-reason, A colossal brain, A mandlebrot fractal, A four-dimensional generic dungeon, A Single Average-Sized Room That Has A Lot Of Doors That Lead To The Same Room Except It's A Bit Different Every Time And Monsters Spawn And There's A Deep Philosophical/Sinister Meaning And Stuff Behind The Things Changing.

Avellone's answer to the romance question makes me feel all warm and fuzzy inside. :3 Also, count me among those now clamoring for a quest where you unravel a psychopathic cipher's plot to understand the deeper meaning of love by having to trawl through countless disney-love-zombies left in his/her wake.

Wait, PE will not have Jessica Chobot licking stuff? Sorry, but I have to withdraw my pledge now.

I can't stop grinning at that image. :D I wonder how much animation the scenery is gonna have? I don't mind if they stick to BG2-level background animations but with modern tech you could prerender a lot more background frames in a lot less time. Might end up looking ridiculously nice, then.

I guess railroad is a bit of a bad word I used there. What I mean is that I prefer to be doing only one clear thing over being told "Okay, in order to advance with the main quest you need to go do these four things in whatever order. Have fun!". I have nothing against having to choose between two different tracks to take on that railroad but I don't want to have to do both tracks in order to get forward. It introduces a kind of false openness into the story imo. I don't know, I'm not sure what word to use of it. I prefer the way both Baldur's Gates did it. Note, however, that Throne of Bhaal did the whole "do these things in whatever order"-thing. It kind of weakened the plot of that one, too, maybe. I'd say BG2 struck the best balance between complete openness and having a well-defined questline to follow. You could stop messing around with all those sidequests in Amn at whatever point and get on with the main plot, if you wanted to. At any point you knew that doing one specific thing would let you get on with your Irenicus-hunting and forget all about that nonsense in Trademeet. DA:O was particularly annoying in that it kind of crammed all the locations down my throat and had more or less no "optional" big places for me to explore. It ended up feeling very contrived.

One thing that I've been vaguely annoyed with in modern RPGs is how the main story ends up being structured. Usually you end up with one main quest. This is all well and good but in order to continue with this quest, you usually end up having to (because you need to fetch the four macguffins or whatever) perform three or four or so "big sidequests" which have little to no link to the main questline itself. Mass Effects 1 and 2 (dunno about 3; didn't play) and especially Dragon Age:Origins were offenders in this. Hell, even both of the KotORs did this. I'm starting to get a bit bored with this formula. I mean, I understand that it makes the game a bit more replayable by allowing you to mix up the order you do the sidequests in but it also has a bad habit of impacting the cohesion of the main plot. I find myself pining for a finely polished railroad (with plenty of interesting sidetracks) over all this plot coupon- collecting that seems to be so popular with newer RPGs. Am I just being a curmudgeon who can't remember the horrible things about railroaded main quests or do I actually have a point here? Halp.

My greatest hope with Project Eternity and its other KS brothers and sisters (Wasteland 2, Shadowrun Returns, DFA etc.) is that they end up making their creators a nice big pile of cash from after-release sales. This would mean that they get to self-publish their next game using profits from the first one without having to either run a Kickstarter campaign or sell their IP and souls to those big publishing houses in order to release more stuff. Kickstarting is a really apt name for all this crowdfunding business in this sense, no?

But it is a system that is relying on your intelligence, not your characters (which is ultimately my objection; I want my character to be doing as much of the stuff as possible, not me). Actually, I've seen cases in games where both can kind of apply. You would be presented with the riddle but if your character has high enough intelligence/whateverelseisrelevant the correct answer is highlighted for you. Of course it can kind of ruing the puzzles for you if you don't want the game to tell you the solution. I'd say stuff like this should be turned off in expert mode, where people are more likely to enjoy figuring out the dialogue puzzles in the "proper" way. As for typing in the answers, it's going to need the devs to be very careful and do a lot of testing on the puzzles so they can have all the likely synonyms etc. included in the list of correct answers. If the player is at all unsure of their answer when giving it and give an unaccounted-for synonym, they might start looking for entirely different answers before trying synonyms and that path leads to unfair frustration and annoyance very fast.

Why hasn't anyone clamored for the dev beards yet? I thought they were a good idea. Edit: Waitwaitwaitwait, I just got it. Guys. Beardmancers.

Big effects can be big fun. I see no reason to limit (aside from the limits of plausibility) how the player can impact the history of the world. As for how these effects show in the next games, you can handle smaller stuff by savegame importing and adjusting dialogue etc. as necessary. Alternately go with (e.g.) KotOR2-like leading questions to make the player tell the next game how things happened in the previous game. Any huge changes in the game world can be more problematic though, as far as sequels go. If you can make an entire empire either fall or prosper in the first game and the second game takes place anywhere near said empire, the second game can end up being two entirely different games based on the outcome of the first. Implementing something like this is not really plausible. As I see it, to get over this (while still keeping big changes a possibility) you need to do one of the following: a) Make the second game take place in an entirely different part of the world or several hundred years after the first one. Then you can simply handwave any of the choices the player made in the first game by making a couple of historical references etc. to that era. In the example case of the empire falling/prospering, it might have eventually fallen anyhow. Then, in the distant future scenario, you can just refer to the empire in history books and either mention an era of prosperity or the actual fall caused by the player. b) Decide that only one of the possible outcomes actually happened. The player's actions in the previous game "don't matter" in this case but hey, at least you got to stir up some proper fecal matter instead of being forced to do silly small stuff. c) Do a (Darth) Revan. Doesn't matter if you decide to save the Republic or destroy it. You still skid off before the next game and end up with a kind of averaged outcome of the two possibilities. It actually worked surprisingly well, imo.

Obsidian, you cunning devils. Now I really want the expansion pack but also really really want the cloth map. I would have upgraded to 165 if it had somehow gotten me both the cloth map and the xpack. Now I guess I have to go for the 250$ reward that I've been contemplating for a while. My moneys. Take all of it. Edit: Damnit, 288 is just too much. Sticking at 168.

I've grown to rather dislike the slider-madness that seems to come with modern RPGs. I don't really care about adjusting the tilt of the fourth eyebrow hair on the left eye of my character. I'd rather just have a bunch of more general features (a couple of body shapes, head-hair configuration and colour etc.) to choose from and then stick a nice little jpeg portrait to represent my character with.

For purely cosmetic stuff (puppies, silly titles), I don't care. For actual content (read: dialogue, combat encounters, companions, side quests), I hate it. For content that has a clear link to the main plot, kill it with fire. Dip it in molten lava. Put a cross through its heart and bury it at a crossroads.

Maybe my standards have been lowered too much by recent games but as long as there's no ridiculous DA2-like bandit rain, I'll be content. Because eff you, bandit rain.

Finally got off my arse and upped my pledge by an eight. Now, what title to pick... something awe-inspiring and cool. ...is "Sentient Mop" taken yet? "RiceMunk, Sentient Mop of the Obsidian Order" Totally awesome.