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.

Kinda yes but kinda no. In the context of a simple AI, it makes sense that monsters etc. go after whoever is dishing out the most damage but this can be exploited by kiting and whatever. A very resounding no to taunt mechanics, though. Those are just silly in almost all cases where they end up being used in cRPGs. If we want to give fighters etc. the ability to "tank" enemies, I'm more in favour of D&D-like opportunity attack-mechanics. The enemy AI could then go with a sort of cost/benefit decision on whether they want to get smacked by whoever's attacking them and go deal with someone else or whether they want to finish with whoever they're engaged with at the moment.

Ogrezilla is pretty much giving the reasons why I dislike having the "trivial" stuff like food being a limited supply in games like what I'm expecting P:E to be like. If the only "punishment" for running out of food in a dungeon is a boring 5-minute trek to town and back, I'd rather just skip the whole limited-food thing entirely. One rather simple way of making proper food preparation an issue would be to have the dungeon respawn if you leave it for a resupply trip. Then in theory, if you go back with the exact same amount of supplies as you did on your first "attempt" and go through the dungeon in the exact same manner, you should just run out of food around the same part as you did the last time. Respawning dungeons brings forth all sorts of extra concerns regarding how to handle loot, experience points etc. with the respawned stuff, not to mention what to do with all the unique encounters in the dungeon. And, most importantly to me, it seems like a really cheap trick. I'd prefer something a bit more refined than what accounts to essentially a "restart level"-button. Ideally having to deal with limited supplies should happen within the context of the dungeon itself. I'm not sure how that would always be possible though without making it excessively contrived.

Both hunger and tiredness mechanisms belong in my books to the category of "Nuisance if they have nothing to add to the game so if they don't add anything, don't add them." Whether hunger adds anything to the game really depends on what kind of an enviroment your party ends up adventuring in. Hunger systems in my opinion have worked best in post-apocalyptic settings for the very reason that food being a scarce commodity can sometimes make finding a fridge full of tasty yum-yums feel like as big an accomplishment as finding a shiny new gun. However, if your adventuring party is constantly hovering around well-stocked towns and cities, keeping food supplies stocked means you just have to occasionally pop into a town to go buy another pile of Generic Rations and I don't see such round-trips adding anything of value to the gameplay. It becomes another issue if you have wander far from civilization and move slowly because you're needing to take breaks to heal up and whatever. In this case a limited food supply will bring with it a natural limit to how long you can stay in the deep wilderness until you start running into hunger-related issues and have to begin the trek back to the nearest town. Even here, though, if the trek back and forth between town is nothing more than a matter of clicking your map, it becomes nothing more than a tiny chore to get back to where you were, with nothing significantly changing if you hadn't had to make the trip back. You can make it matter by adding random encounters or respawns happen if you do such traveling back and forth but will such things make the return journey be littered with annoying nuisances or actual peril that you actually have to think twice about before you choose to risk the encounter? Depends on how difficult you make the random encounters, I guess. As for resting mechanics, I don't have anything against them in principle if they're something akin to Baldur's Gate et al., which involves essentially clicking a button and hoping you don't get jumped while you sleep. What I find annoying about even BG-like systems, though, is how often you may be forced to rest your party. Sometimes it feels downright silly that you need to have your party take an 8-hour nap every 2 encounters because your mages have run out spells. I'm not sure what to do about such a problem, though. While writing this I was actually reminded of a rest/food system that I personally found rather nice. The system in particular being the one from Ultima 6. What makes Ultima 6 a bit of an odd ball in the Ultima series is that it's the only Ultima between 1 and 7 that didn't have starvation happening from running out of food. However, in it your party could rest at any time in the wilderness and while doing so, if your party had food, ate some food before going to sleep. Your sleep could be interrupted by the usual random encounters as is typical with these but what was interesting is how having the food and eating it before sleep affected the gameplay. That is, your party would heal a whole lot more from a good night's rest if they had food. Going to sleep without food was mostly good for passing time but little else. This makes me consider how sleep and food could be combined in a nice way to give a decent balance between micromanagement and tactical interest. That is, your party will never start explicitly starving because you can assume that they'll always manage to scrounge for food or eat some boring crackers or whatever to keep the worst parts of hunger away. However, having actual tasty rations brings with it the advantage that your party's resting will be greatly more effective. Without food, your party will barely heal at all and maybe even the mages have trouble memorizing their full set of spells/recharging their mana after their nap. If you do have food before resting, though, your party will mucnh away at some of it and get a proper night's sleep. They wake up nicely healed and your mages are full of magical goodness, ready to face your new day of adventuring. At least it sounds good in my head. I'll stop rambling for now.

http://en.wikipedia..../Muscle_cuirass http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Codpiece http://www.users.qwe...tion/index.html I want my character to have the cod piece on the right. I rather like the flowing 'stache. Only available to monks who specialize in hip-thrusting forms of combat. Gives them wicked bonuses, though. And a chance to cause the target to flee in horror for 30 seconds.

Oh god, I just got horrible flashbacks. "Oh, it's raining bandits again. Must be tuesday."

Tragic stories can be dramatic. They can also sometimes be really trite and boring. Happy stories can be dramatic. They can also sometimes be really trite and boring.

We are not sure about that yet. For what we know, our adventuring party gathered not because they wanted TO ADVENTURE, but because of some special event. Also, I don't buy into explaining ridiculous stuff with other ridiculous tropy stuff. Maybe in D&D they have Adventure Parties, Adventure Academies, Adventure Guilds and they can act stupid because they are ADVENTURING and such, but usually you do not gather onto a life-changing trip with possible death at the end just because OF ADVENTURE. The existence of the new 5000-dollar backer tier with its enemy adventuring companies strongly hints at the existence of a "culture" of adventuring parties/companies running around the countryside, doing their adventuring thing. As for whether adventuring parties would go for the "trophy stuff" instead of practicality is a matter that boils down to the age-old debate of the Rule of Cool vs. realism in stuff like this. I tend to favour moderate amounts of the Rule of Cool in favour over realism when it comes down to that choice but I can respect your opinion if you prefer the opposite.

Making these sorts of assumptions about armor using museum armor is a common mistake. Suddenly, one or two codpieces made by fancy lords can be thought as a common thing. You have to understand something when you are seeing armor like that - most of the armor we can check at museums was made for kings and rulers and brought to them as gifts. These suits were gathering dust in their treasures for hundreds of years without any chance of actually being used in combat. Not that they were't meant for it completely, a lot of ornamented and beautifully made armor, even from later ages, probably can serve perfectly fine as real armor would and anyone from those times would easely trust it their life. But you have to put things in a bigger perspective. Generally in combat, everything which is made to show off or sticks from armor too far, like horns or alike, would be the first thing getting cut away. Even today people who like to kick each other with metal sticks often go for the guy in the most fashionable equipment if they are given an option. Remember that this game is not situated in historical Europe but (edit: probably) some sort of a high-fantasy pseudo-late-medieval world. With D&D-style adventuring parties running around the countryside killing kobolds or whatever. While you wouldn't expect to see wangmail or boobplate in army vs army combat, it wouldn't surprise me at all to have adventurers occasionally running around in these things. Because adventurers can be eccentric like that. Still probably not very common though.

Some history buff will likely correct me in one way or another but I think platemail+firearms wasn't a horribly uncommon thing in the transitional era between platemail-clad knights and musket-wielding, lightly armored squares of foot infantry. This was mostly because the firearms of that era really sucked and plate armor was still somewhat useful against them.

Love the new look on the breastplate. Not a breast plate anymore. Now the sketch looks just perfect. Though, reading the arguments in this thread, I have to concede that there may exist real arguments in support of why boobplate might in some cases be a perfectly logical, albeit somewhat impractical, choice of armor for a person. Those reasons being the same why historical platemail occasionally had ridiculous codpieces on it. Sometimes plate armor is not there just for protection but also for showing off (exaggerating?) certain... characteristics of the person wearing it. In a society (unlike late-medieval Europe, where most of this stuff gets its inspiration from) where a warrior woman is not an uncommon thing, I wouldn't be any more surprised to see the occasional piece of exaggerated boobplate as I would to see the occasional ridiculous wangmail.