Crosmando

Just make a copycat D&D magic system like Bard's Tale did, though I did rather like that rune system in Ultima Underground where in order to "make" spells you had to find runes and arrange them in a 3x3 square like a puzzle. But I guess that only works in a dungeon setting, not a world where magic is common. Also, building the fluff into the magic system would be good, isn't their crap about souls or something?

Disciples 2 had awesome art-style, that music too, almost perfect high-fantasy. Also I loved how the Elves looked like your regular type who lives in trees and were friendly, but they were actually really cruel and inhuman.

I'd prefer a difficulty mode where the only way to save is Resident Evil style, every inn has a "Journal Scroll" which acts like the Typewriter, and you can find "Ink Pots" in the world, each one gives you a single save. But they are rather rare.

90's RPG's weren't that "hardcore", if you want that you're looking for late 80's and early 90's, like Dungeons & Dragons computer games made by SSI, the Wizardries and Ultimas, which in most cases are almost impossible to finish without cluebooks or cheats. I don't mean to be hurr durr im hardkore, but the IE games are easy to pick up and play, PST probably the least because it's hard to adjust to a game which is like 80% talking and the rest combat, rather than the other way around. Also Icewind Dale traps alot of new players because you have to create 6 characters from scratch using D&D rules, but once you're actually in the game it's basically standard fare hack and slash in the forgotten realms

Elves with hats. You're right though, 3D is still in the "uncanny valley" where it's good but not near realistic enough to trick us, so the human reaction is revulsion, ie it's a bad imitation of what reality looks like. Which is why 2D games which used "flattened" painted art and portraits based on real photographs or drawings age really well, while it only takes a year or two these days for the latest 3D graphics to get outdone by the next big game.

Cool idea for a story too. "You discover a sheep wondering through the countryside, obviously it had escaped from it's pen in the nearby farmlands. As you approach you are shocked when the beast speaks to you in human tongues!" etc...

Except for limited resources. Few pages of dialogue won't consume much of the resources. Romances in BG2 didn't work like that, they were branching. Every time you offer a new choice in a dialogue it potentially doubles the content. You don't just copy and paste them from MS Word, they need to be scripted into the game. It's more work than you think.

Should Project Eternity have a free-roaming travel map complete with random encounters? So when your character/party travels outside a major city/town/area, it scales out to much higher overhead camera view, where the PC/party are represented as a single character, and towns represented as a "house", and moving your little guy to the house enters the city and then the view returns to the isoemetric view showing all your party. I think you people will be familiar with the concept from Fallout and other games. A cool feature of world maps are random encounters, so not only might your party run into bands of orcs or bandits travelling between towns, but more interesting encounters such as running into say a group of refugee NPC's who could take you back to their camp (if they trust you). What I find dynamic about this type of system is the randomness, instead of just talking to an NPC and getting a quest like normal, these events are surprising and draw you in. Imagine, if you will, travelling through the wilderness with your companions when all of a sudden you get an encounter, it goes to normal viewpoint and your party is standing in-front of a terrible looking crypt overgrown by vegetation. It's in the middle of the wilderness so if you leave now you may never find it again (also due to randomness), but who knows what loot could be inside. Anyway, sorry for the rant, discuss! Or not.

Doesn't look like it will have any planes or planes-jumping, it's just the one world/continent (though 'souls' are mentioned so some kind of purgatory might exist), so I'd say not. I mean, PST wasn't just about philosophical themes, it was also the setting and planes-jumping.

I hate level scaling with an absolute passion. It turned a potentially god-like game (Wizardry8 into just a plain "good" game.

Game could look like Diablo 1 for all I care, as long as I see lots of numbers when I start new game

Probably PST. There's plenty of combat-oriented RPG's, but Planescape was the only one I have played with more dialogue and choices than any other. Also I liked PST because it seemed to me experimental, I know it's known as a classic or traditional RPG but it's really not, up till Fallout roleplaying in computer games was basically just creating a party of characters, being able to roll their stats, choose classes, and then going to kill the big evil. Don't quote me but Fallout I think was like the first RPG to introduce branching dialogue, and dialogue choices which changed the actual world in the game. I think Dark Sun was the first RPG that introduced dialogue; as in injections from characters in your party. So yeah, old roleplaying in AD&D computer games was basically just character generation, buying stuff and getting training from NPC's, and combat. Roleplaying in Fallout and then PST actually experimented with the idea that talking and choices was roleplaying. An experiment that got pretty quickly forgotten and never taken back up it seems

Unity is capable of both 2D and 3D graphics (I think), and with Wasteland 2 already well into development using it, they could collaborate with InXile and eliminate some overhead costs by sharing experiences with the engine.

That is like saying that a story does not have a point... Pretty sure the story was about being the son of Bhaal and Irenicus's plot, but okay. They were completely optional and you had to actually mine conversations with the companions to get them. You could avoid them completely and it never affects the story one bit. I just thought they were silly little minigames, and what's worse they didn't actually change anything after (apart from the companion staying in your party), which made them even more jarring.

I hope they test the game economy thoroughly before releasing the game. I remember one old RPG you could forge weapons with basic materials you could find, and then sell them back to merchants for stupidely high prices (and for some reason no matter how many times you sold the same sword to the same merchant he always agreed and paid the same price as if the laws of supply and demand didn't exist), otherwise the game was great but this one exploit broke it

Money doesn't grow on trees. What feature do you think is less important than romances? Because something will have to go completely or be scaled back so Obsidian have the time/money to script romances. For example, in Arcanum Tarant (the main city) has a newspaper which changes based on the actions of the PC, so if you do something in the game world, something good or bad which makes big news, you can actually pick up a copy of the paper and it will say [player name] has done this. I personally think that's a good feature, it shows reactivity of the world, that the world isn't static with the same old NPC's sitting around town telling you the same rumors. It's not a neccessary feature, but it would be nice if a feature like this could be in this game. snip If they aren't fluff, absolutely. But I've yet to see an RPG have romances which weren't fluff, just flavour text to make the player feel all campy, like they are actually romancing a cute Elf chick or tall dashing Paladin! If it's woven into the story sure, for example if you have high Charisma (or equivalent) points, you can talk suggestively to an NPC of the opposite sex (or whatever) and they will tell you stuff they wouldn't if you were an ugly Orc with Charisma/Intelligence points of 3. Again, Arcanum had Beauty as a stat, and the higher it was the dialogue options you had with NPC's changes, you could talk more specifically, ask more probing questions, and people would tell you more because they found you more attractive. Now that's RPG mechanics, because it serves a point in the actual story. BG romances didn't have any point.

Pretty sure most people have read a book, and they have no pixels at all I am talking about The Romances, as in those long dialogue strings in BG2 with Aerie, Jaheira, Viconia and Anomen, that had absolutely no point being in the game. Have romance or romantic themes in the story, lover's betrayal, whatever, sure. Having standalone Romances initiated by the PC, please no they are self-insert silliness.

Sure, character interaction, I think romance as part of a greater story or side-story is fine, in fact it's expected. I just don't see why they should waste time making BG2-style romances, which are in fact just long dialogue puzzles of flavour text, where you have to choose the right responses.

That would add even more complications because it would rely on the sex of the PC. So if you had one female companion that was romancable if your character is male, that would mean Obsidian would need to make a male counterpart to that NPC (if your character was female) with dialogue altered to how a male talks, that's because the player gets to choose the sex of their PC. And that's not even taking into account if you wanted to have a gay character, which would mean adding a gay/straight affliation in the character creation screen. Do you realize how stupid that is? Do you realize how much pointless work scripters would need to make a system like that work, just so you can chat up an elf maiden or burly dwarf man? Not to mention how immersion-breaking having modern moral systems in medieval settings is (there were no gay people in the middle-ages, not because they didn't exist but because the concept was so culturally reviled that you'd probably end up burnt at the stake unless you were like the richest noble in the land). You'll also notice that I said PC (Playable Character) a few times when I could have said just "Player", because romances are really crossing the line into simulation, ie it's about the person behind the screen, not your character in the game I don't see how adding stat increases and other bonuses for romancing certain NPCs would lead to that. When elf character gets some bonuses because of his relationships it doesn't mean that a dwarf character needs to get the exact same bonus in by being a dwarf. It would have to work that way, or the game would be unbalanced to one race, if one race got a bonus others didn't, people would just play as that race. The same as having a spell which is overpowered, so there's no point with bothering with any other part of combat because you can just keep using an unbalanced spell to kill everything.

Money doesn't grow on trees. What feature do you think is less important than romances? Because something will have to go completely or be scaled back so Obsidian have the time/money to script romances. For example, in Arcanum Tarant (the main city) has a newspaper which changes based on the actions of the PC, so if you do something in the game world, something good or bad which makes big news, you can actually pick up a copy of the paper and it will say [player name] has done this. I personally think that's a good feature, it shows reactivity of the world, that the world isn't static with the same old NPC's sitting around town telling you the same rumors. It's not a neccessary feature, but it would be nice if a feature like this could be in this game.

but in WOW technology and magic or on par, thats why they coexist in relative harmony, and a hunter with a bow does the same damage he does with a rifle Yes but arrows cannot penetrate hardened plate armor, bullets can. So the question from that is, why haven't the culture with the bows and arrows adopted the new technologies and culturally adapted to defend themselves, or not adapted and been conquered.

That would add even more complications because it would rely on the sex of the PC. So if you had one female companion that was romancable if your character is male, that would mean Obsidian would need to make a male counterpart to that NPC (if your character was female) with dialogue altered to how a male talks, that's because the player gets to choose the sex of their PC. And that's not even taking into account if you wanted to have a gay character, which would mean adding a gay/straight affliation in the character creation screen. Do you realize how stupid that is? Do you realize how much pointless work scripters would need to make a system like that work, just so you can chat up an elf maiden or burly dwarf man? Not to mention how immersion-breaking having modern moral systems in medieval settings is (there were no gay people in the middle-ages, not because they didn't exist but because the concept was so culturally reviled that you'd probably end up burnt at the stake unless you were like the richest noble in the land). You'll also notice that I said PC (Playable Character) a few times when I could have said just "Player", because romances are really crossing the line into simulation, ie it's about the person behind the screen, not your character in the game

The danger is, they either need to go full steampunk to make it work. Otherwise it will just look like the guns in World of Warcraft, which are silly and jar the gameplay experience because while you have some species with a medieval society, and others with almost science-fiction level technology. Mentioning WoW again as an example of how trying to create extremely diverse/unique regions all in the same game backfires, because nothing fits and the world feels disconnected. They called it the "World" of Warcraft but it's really just dozens of isolated zones without any meaningful connection to each other. You walk out of a bustling tribal jungle filled with savage trolls and into an arid desert, there's no connection. What I mean is, in Arcanum there was technology like steam engines and gunpowder, but they explored the logical conclusion of that, industrialization was destroying forests, magic was becoming obsolete and clashing with modern society. In WoW there's no one saying "Well these gnomes have freakin helicopters and robots, and dwarves have rifles, and these are obviously superior technologies, so why hasn't the other cultures traded for these technologies or been conquered with them?" So if the game has guns, what is the consequence of that on the whole world?

Yes but they are just cosmetic, no really changes it just makes the character stay in your party. I stumbled over the "romance" in PST (that kiss with Annah) by mistake, just because I knew that if you keep talking to companions and choose different choices every time, eventually they or I would get some XP out of the conversation. I wasn't "looking for" romance banters, and I didn't particularly care for the romances in BG2 either (found BG1 better because it didn't have them). Didn't see how romancing a 2D sprite was very meaningful, I just wanted to take my party on adventures, explore, kill stuff, talk to NPC's. I don't see what the need for "extra features" like this is, it doesn't add anything to the core gameplay experience, it's just something maybe developers could add if they finish the game 100%, polished and bug-free, and they have money left over (something a fan-funded low-budget RPG is definetely not going to have).

Romances aren't roleplaying though, at least not in the way Bioware does them. That is called simulation, and I doubt any backers wants dating sim minigames in an RPG. What I mean is, if romance is in the story (or a side-story) of PE, as in a character is in love with another character, and it fits into the story seemlessly, sure, it's just part of the story. But allowing the PC to initiate some kind of romance dialog with a companion, is completely silly as it's separate from the actual game.