Jymm

I see no harm in putting up additional stretch goals. I have to believe that seasoned devs like Obsidian know what they would have to ask for in resources to pay for the additional work. They won't risk their existing scope and quality for this. If their pitch is strong then people will vote with their wallets. If the pitch is weak then we won't fund the request and no change happens. I understand it may mean some small extension of release date, and if so I can live with that if it means I'm getting even more game for my money. That's my take, anyway.

Now that I've gone and said that, I remembered a question I had much earlier in development. How does the time commitment to keep backers informed and energized compare with the time commitment to keep a traditional publisher informed and committed to your project?

Greetings. I don't post much, but I read every update. And I loved this update. I love the "behind the curtain" development stuff and its one of my favorite things about the new crowd-funding culture. I've backed about 8-10 different projects and you guys are second only to maybe Star Citizen for the quality and consistency of content for backers during production. And even those guys are more slick marketing and less real-world details than PE. I appreciate how much effort this really takes, as I've seen these kinds of things in my own work. Having Brandon spell it out so all can see that an update like this is 7 hours of someone's dedicated time - time away from working on the game itself - just drives it home even more. Such communication and connection to backers is a major commitment. I appreciate that Obsidian is making that commitment. So if it means we have to wait just a little longer or fund you just a little higher to see the thing through, then count me in. Thanks for the great update(s) and keep 'em coming!

Loggin' in special today just to say: this stronghold looks BADASS. Thanks Tim.

I obviously haven't been on here much and haven't kept up with this particular raging debate, but I do read every update. And I admit I groaned a little when I saw the durability mechanic. But I trusted the designers to test it and make the most of it. Having just read Josh's follow up saying they were removing the mechanic and the skill, I'm absolutely impressed. A reasoned discussion of why the system was created, and an incisive, specific decision on how to tweak it in response to feedback. THIS is why kickstarter is the way to go. We could never have this kind of dialog on a publisher-funded game. I couldn't be more pleased with how this process is going, and of all the KS games I've funded (about 8-10) Obsidian are doing the best job of communicating with the fans / backers so far. Hats off to you guys.

I thought the video was extremely impressive. The only part I found noticeably distracting was the blur on the character crossing the stream and Josh said its a compression artifact, so no worries. Honestly, if the game looked exactly like this I would not issue one complaint on release. I completely respect the opinions of everyone who wants to tweak 85% perfect to make it 99% perfect. That's a laudable goal. But this is still a relatively low budget title. I'd prefer they get to 95% on gameplay and story elements, personally. (Yes, I realize its different staff, but it all comes out of the budget at some point.) So with my 1 / 73,986 vote I say: do that. Just do exactly that, and keep going. And thanks Josh for coming in to discuss the feedback. Its so very different than any publisher funded game. You'd be sued for showing and talking this much about your secret unnanounced, unconfirmed game this early in development.

Somebody should definitely repost this poll so it makes sense. I confess I like to level the characters myself for customization. I would live with them being autoleveled to an appropriate set of abilities. It does make sense for immersion / story, and its not a dealbreaker unless they have a terrible spec build.

I'm ignoring your flames and going back to the original post. Agreeing with what seems to be the consensus: 1. A main plot that is time-limited is in direct conflict with a game that encourages exploration and is content-rich with sidequests. Thus a bad fit for what most of us are expecting from PE. 2. its freaking annoying when NPCs claim that X peril is happening now and we are free to ignore it indefinitely. What's the point of having them say it? The world feels less real, the consequences of my heroism feel less... well... heroic. So time limits are common sense in places. Some of those places might even be part of the main quest so long as it doesn't preclude us from experiencing certain content because we're rammed into a plot tunnel. 3. Wherever time is limited or action needs to be taken, it should be clear. Where you are free to roam, that should also be clear. Simple enough.

I have to admit, I hate this idea. And yes, I do at times also participate in the bioware forums. One of my great frustrations with traditional P&P roleplaying is when a great idea goes down to exceptionally poor die rolls. This feels like that result. Once I figured out that choice results were random I would end up either a) reloading every situation 25 times to see what outcomes were possible or b) quitting the game for good because nothing I choose to do matters. Probably option a for an evening or two then direct to option b. No offense at all intended, its a novel idea and I appreciate you proposing it. But if I find out a game does this, I am flat out not buying it.

Like many here I think ideas 1,2, and 4 are great. I particularly like games that allow you to rest until X where X is an obvious time that you would want to do something, like dawn, midday, dusk, midnight. I personally don't care about day / night being the same length of time, but I agree that them lasting 10 minutes of realtime is obnoxious. I would love to see seasons done artfully in a game, but that will only matter if the story they intend to tell lasts a whole year. Maybe PE is the right game to finally do this, or maybe its not. I'd leave that up to the devs to figure out. All-in-all, another sensible, not at all psycho post. I think your screen name is ill-conceived, PsychoBlonde.

I like the minigame method fine in solitary games like Skyrim or Alpha Protocol. In those games it breaks the montony of shooting or slicing things. But the IE games don't fit that schema for me. Party balance requires lockpicking characters to be useful. If I can compensate with player skill (or totally suck at it and ruin my badass rogue's reputation) then it messes with the entire party dynamic.

Ditto KaineParker. I voted "yes", but barely. Managing material components is obnoxious busy work, IMO. But having some powerful spells which require specialized or even unique ingredients is the stuff of legend. That part is cool.

I agree with others here that the best thing is to make a new estimate now-ish based on the current scope expectations, team size, etc Then if they think they need to adjust the target adjust it now. But deadlines serve a key purpose as do the milestones along the way. I think they get that.

Its not just the hair. Its the hair and the eyes. I don't mind the old guy thing. I can live with the stereotypical bare chest and baggy pants. The scars and the tattoo are OK. But the hair is just incredibly dorky. And the eyes look sort of sad and defeated. Its incongruous with the hardened body and the defiant stance. Anyone who has fought long enough to make that age and had their body take that much abuse should have eyes that convey steely resolve and / or otherworldly wisdom. Luckily its just concept art. I've seen enough of the concept art for game characters to know that there are often many changes (some subtle, some dramatic) before the character is fully realized.

I agree that this particular scene veers over into melodrama, but I did like the setup. If Connor's mom hadn't had such a lackluster voiceover (rare for Bioware, at least anymore) it might have worked even a little better. And yes, there is an "optimal" solution where nobody loses. And knowing its there actually diminishes the impact of the whole affair, IMO. I may prove to be in the minority on the board potentially, but I think Bioware has done a number of quality plots and scenes that worked emotionally at least for me. One problem if you were trying to slap Roger Ebert with them though is that the best ones all require major setup. Mordin's sacrifice only means something because you have dozens of hours with that character, many of them hilarious. So you remember the character fondly. You understand his underlying moral conflicts. You realize his age and how he has few years left and looks back on all the things he's done. You need all that experience to make that one scene hit home. Just posting a single clip on YouTube couldn't possibly make that work. Its like trying to post just a clip of the end of GodFather 2 where Fredo goes out in the boat and gets shot and saying "OMG, so moving!" You need the entire previous film series to build the weight of that moment. They've also done some good uplifting emotional bits at various points. There are big ones like the entire Tuchanka bit after you cure the genophage, assuming you have the right charcters in play there for it to feel like the rebirth of a species. There are smaller ones too. One of my personal favorites is in ME2 when harassed by the reporter about the choice to sacrifice human ships in defense of the council. If you take the paragon option Shepard interrups and recites every ship that was lost and the casualties of all the races in that battle with this pride and indignation that just swelled in her voice. I was like "YES! Eat it, you idiot! You don't understand one thing about this war." I get goosebumps even now remembering it. Maybe you thought it was dumb. But it worked for at least one person who played the game. And incidentally, I can't imagine how that scene works without full voiceover. So I think the way you work your narrative magic is dependent on the medium you're using. Fundamentally I agree (again) with PsychoBlonde. You have to throw a number of things at the wall and see which ones stick for which players. I can personally say that some of the plots about losing children, even some of the cheap ones, had much more impact on me personally once I had children of my own. So some things will work better on different players and its a big diverse world. (But that stupid child at the beginning of ME3 as far as I can tell works on no-one.)

Isnt this one of those vexing topics where mature people will recognize mature content when they see it? Violence and sex displayed for excitement and without resulting consequences is shallow and definitely not what I would consider mature content. When things are shown as they would really be, without glossing over inconvenient subjects or the consequences of action, that leads to a more mature presentation in my view. We can say that X race is poor and exploited and then make merry plots that include that assumption. But what does that single piece of lore imply? If you can get across what life really means for that race in a population center then you can make people think more and raise the maturity level of your work. Realistic onsequences of people's actions have to matter too. I can't rob everyone in town X and then trot down the road to town Y and expect that nobody there will catch news of my deeds. I can't mistreat one of my companions and make decisions that go against their ethos at every turn and then expect them to remain forever loyal or buy back their favor with a scripted bauble. You can make an FPS as bloody as you want and even if it nets a mature rating for violence there is nothing "mature" about a game that lets you respawn at will, take dozens of bullets without dying, kill thousands of enemy soldiers without any repercussion... At some point you must figure how you want to balance this with a level of heroism, positivity, or even just plain fun. If its too much like the real world then at some point you may lose some people's interest and that must be weighed. There are still incredibly few games willing to sacrifice serious market share for a moving, realistic, and mature (but potentially un-fun) presentation.

I agree with many of the other replies. Companion reactivity is cool. If they like / dislike other companions and are vocal about it that's cool. If they eventually threaten to leave themselves due to incompatibility I'm cool with that too (as long as there are enough decent companions that a single bad breakup won't ruin your gameplay effectiveness.) I've even seen games where one party member will silently kill off another one offscreen. But the rather crude voting system seems like a poor way to handle these things in 2012. If you designed the right sort of plot setup that suggested why the party was seen as a voluntary democratic conclave then it would be plausible, but that doesn't seem to mesh with how most of these RPGs are set up with a single, uniquely important player character.

If I had known kickstarting this game would net me an update a week on how you are actually building the game, I would have given you more money! This has been a great addition to the experience and I hope you can keep it up. Giving the fans who funded your game even 1/10th of the information you would normally have to provide to your publisher is still way more than we would generally ever get to see. As for all of us forumites second guessing their budgets I'm sure they just read it and chuckle. We trusted them with $4 million dollars. Surely we believe they know how to staff a project. (Bugs do suck though, so I understand the hand-wringing.)

This makes me think of a related question. How much control will we as the player have over the development of the companion characters once they are in-party? A lot of games lock particular NPCs into fairly narrow roles through unique abilities and skill trees. If its more like D&D structure then you are free to build out in a variety of ways, but the companion's basic attribute scores and initial starting skills probably push you hard toward only one or two viable builds from there. The adventurer's hall throws this all wide open for players that want to tinker with mechanics extensively. But for that to be cool you need a good variety of options for classes and for abilities within those classes. I'm wagering most players especially on their first playthrough will want to stick with almost exclusively Obsidian's excellently written companions and thus will have a known set of character build options with only one variable (the PC). I have certainly found that in many games the balance is designed such that you can't really make a viable run without a party member in each of several roles. If you can't pick locks then big swaths of content are unavailable or needlessly tedious. If you don't have a mage then some puzzles can't be solved or some foes are almost insurmountable. Things like that. So playing a rogue type character and discovering you don't like / accidentally tick off / haven't yet unlocked the tank role character(s) becomes almost unplayable. If there were sufficient synergy between characters of the same class, or sufficient distinct build options to make two characters in similar roles useful, then it would free up the player more to pick what they want to play and still roll with the companions they most enjoy.

Enh, you could also look at all of Obsidian's past projects and see that they have consistently included this material for awhile. I'm not sure if PE being fan-funded raises or lowers the chances of them going this route. They don't have a publisher saying "our market research indicates 46% of RPG fans consider romance content to be 'very important' to their immersion." But they do have a 24 page and growing thread on the topic in their forum. I would have to guess that if it comes about it will be because someone on the team has a good pitch for the specific NPC plotline or romance arc and they decide "yeah, lets do that". If nobody comes up with a good pitch then it won't get included. And personally I won't lose sleep over it either way.

I agree with PsychoBlonde that its better to just phase out most of the random city encounters at higher level rather than scale them. Scaling them such that there is an endless supply of super parties just ready to die by your sword seems incongruous and becomes just grinding. I'm not personally a fan of grinding. I also did like the concept of clearing an area. Its worth fighting these random encounters becuase if I do enough of it then I can stop them for good and this petty annoyance will go away. I will have cleaned up the city and people will comment on it and I can feel like I had an impact. Much better than mindless random encounter.

I can't say this is a dealbreaker, but if we are making wishlists then cities that feel inhabited would be on mine. There are supposed to be 2 big cities in game. Very often even "big" cities in crpgs are filled with maybe 50 people, tops? If we can get plenty of extras on the scene as mute, uninteresting NPCs going about their lives then I can only imagine that would help with the vibe of a living city. One issue I can think of though is trying to make clear to the player which NPCs are useful / interesting and which are just scenery. A lot of obvious ways to do this come across as gamey and would ruin any immersion gain from having more NPCs on the streets.

Its lame story-wise when they do this because no real criminal would try it unless they were drugged out of their minds. And game-wise its similarly pointless. Unless the mugger has a humorous line or something, then its just a boring bit of dialog and split second combat to disrupt whatever you were actually trying to do. I say put a few bits like this in the early game and then just nix those encounters after a certain level threshold. At some point everyone on the street steps out of your way unless they are themselves a powerful badass. And a true powerful badass sent to assasinate you is a fine upgrade to the "random street mugger" encounter so long as there is good in-game justification for the assasin.

I'll second Mr. DeathQuaker that its annoying when games superficially substitute romance for sex in their parlance. I'm fine with either but call a spade a spade. I was actually kind of disappointed that in DA2 Isabella would actually eventually fall for your PC. I thought it was cooler when she was just totally an out-for-fun **** who wasn't ashamed of it. But nooo, they couldn't just leave it at that. Because the player is just so unbelievably awesome that they can win over even her. Sigh. Jack's romance plot in ME2 is somewhat improved from what I understand because you can _either_ bang her like an animal _or_ you can wear down her tough shell and win her over. That's more like it.

I think they are calling them "godlike" for lore reasons. Suggesting that people of the world of PE refer to these individuals as godlike. Nothing more. And they've made it clear through that update and other places that these are mechanically like tieflings and aasimar, even if the lore basis for their existence is slightly different. I'm personally OK with it. I think tieflings / aasimar are kind of fun.