danielkx

I also would like to know if there will be an eBook version of the guidebook...I know many people prefer hardcopy but for some reason I like digital versions of books more. Would be nice to have that as an option.

They did? [citation needed] Only thing I remember reading was I think Adam saying that they either are planning on or are wanting to try to implement it in a patch or the expansion.

Steam takes 30% of the gross sales from the game companies that make the game... That's more than Sony and Microsoft take from companies releasing game on the consoles Sony and Microsoft make. Why the hell should valve get such a ridiculously high % for doing very little? Yes they help drive sales for game companies... But 30% is just atrocious. I cannot support their company as long as they do that.

I would guess that if PoE sells fairly well that they would either forgo kickstarter for the sequel all together or use kickstarter for partial funding and fund the rest from the profits of the first game. That is dependent on the success of PoE. If it can manage to pull in around 500k units sold that would be quite successful for a kickstarter project seeing as how the vast majority of the cost of the game has already been paid for. For console games developers usually make around 15-20% of the gross revenue, but since this isnt a console game Obsidian would likely get a larger cut. Also I would guess that the publisher for this game would get a substantially lower cut of the sales since they are not funding the game. If I had to give an educated guess I would say that Obsidian would get around 35-40% of the sales depending on where the majority of the sales come from. If the game is mostly bought through steam, then they would get substantially less since steam takes 30% of all sales (one reason why I NEVER buy through steam, they rip-off these developers and publishers). If it is a reasonable breakdown of steam, gog and physical units then they would get a larger cut. The 35-40% figure I said would likely be if steam sales account for over half, which is likely. If the game sales 500k units and Obsidian gets 35% of those sales with an average price of $50 per game that would net them $8.75 million before taxes. Of course these are numbers I am pulling out of thin air based on estimated percentages given a few years ago relating to how much developers make from console games.

Part of what you have to realize with recent games using Unity is that they all suffer from one thing, very small budgets. These games with such low budgets cannot be expected to have high level animation and good graphics. Although with that said, I would say that PoE actually looks good, and while there are some issues with the animation, it isn't all that bad. They produced a better looking game than I would have expected considering their low budget, inexperience with the engine, combined with the overall size of the game content

Switching to a new engine would be a huge undertaking and require a substantial amount of resources to do so. Unity engine is more than capable of doing what you are asking for, however the budget Obsidian has with PoE limits many of these things. There is only so much that can be done with $4mil budget, especially with a game this large. Switching engines would be the worst thing they could do to the overall game, even if the game looked better than the original. Now that they have a full game experience with Unity under their belt I think you will see significant improvements in the next game they make using this engine.

Assuming the first one is something I like, which I have a feeling based on videos it will be, I would like the sequel to be very similar to the original. I am not a fan of making drastic changes from one game to the next within the same gaming universe. Dragon age has been doing that and that really ruined a potentially excellent franchise. If this one works out well then they should just make some slight changes and improvements. Maybe implement a few things that they would have liked to do in this game but couldn't do for various reasons but bottom line is they need to make the sequels feel very similar to the original.

GoG without question. There is literally no reason for me to go with steam. I do not need auto patching as I have no problems or issues installing a patch myself. Even if I have to wait an extra day to get the patch because sometimes patches get released through steam a little faster, I am more than fine with it. Seriously, downloading and installing a patch manually takes like an extra minute or two compared to having auto patch, so I don't see the big deal about it.

If there are any mini games please show those. As someone said earlier, anything to do with crafting.

Not sure how well this would translate to tablets. Controls and interface would be fine as is evident with BG:EE. I play that a little on my Droid Turbo and controls are just fine. But even though PE uses Unity, I wonder how well it would perform on tablets. Still would be worth Obsidian consideration if the launch of PC version of the game is successful enough.

I would imagine the release this week would be newer than Josh's livestream.

Although hopefully obsidian will make some changes to the dialog box. Currently it is way too big and takes up so much screen space, plus we lose the rest of the UI to the box itself. If obsidian doesn't do it hopefully it can be modded.

Very true.

Does anyone know if there is or will be a way to disable the voice acting during conversations? I know that a lot of the conversations will not be voiced, but there are the ones that have the initial lines spoken and I think it would be a good option to disable them for those of us who simply do not want them voiced. Although I would still prefer the ambient dialogs (party banter) to remained voiced just because it makes it easier to keep playing the game without having to stop for a few seconds to read the banter.

I backed the $50 tier which includes the digital fun pack. This is what the description says for me on the backer portal: Digital Downloadable Copy of Pillars of Eternity, DRM free for Windows, Mac, or Linux.So it would appear, based on the above description that the copy you get is available for one of the OS's. Perhaps there are other options that allow you to get the game for multiple OS's without having to do a full purchase for each one.

I have to say I am quite excited to play this game for a ton of reasons, but one of them has to be that the conversation system will not include a ton of voice acting and most importantly will not be cinematic like so many games are today. Ever since kotor (maybe sooner) companies like bioware have been attempting to make their conversation systems more cinematic and include "digital acting" from npc's (Obsidian is no exception to this either). I have to say that after having recently played a little BG:EE it was refreshing to not have to deal with the cinematics. I just finished playing SW:TOR for about 2 months (I just love star wars) and I just could not stand the dialog/conversation system. Part of it is because of the dialog wheel and voiced PC, but also the fact that when you initiate a conversation with someone you leave the main UI and transition to the cinematic system. Even DA:O has a pretty cinematic conversation system, just minus the dialog wheel and voiced PC (which is admittedly a massive change by itself). I am playing DA:O again and the cinematic conversations is making it difficult for me to truly get into the game (I have played and beaten it before). I just want to say I am very happy that Obsidian is sticking with the IE system of staying within the main UI/HUD and just having the text box/dialog box come up and we get to simply READ everything instead of having everything spoken to us and acted out by digital characters. Hopefully this occurs more often as I simply cannot understand why it would be desirable for anyone to want to leave the primary UI and watch digital characters act out a scene whenever you want to have a conversation.

The problem with the die and reload aspect of IWD and IE games is that it requires a huge amount of metagaming. Having to know what the upcoming battles are going to be in order to have success is not good design. Learning from mistakes is one thing but having to metagame at such a substantial level and so often is quite absurd. This is honestly the overall problem I have with DnD games...while they feel rewarding when you figure things out, they are not as fun to get into for a lot of people, myself included. For those of you that have been playing DnD games for so long have have a good understanding of the system I am sure you enjoy the metagaming because you likely see it as more advanced planning, the problem with those of us that don't have such a strong grasp of the system is that not only are the games very unforgiving, they feel restricting and not nearly as fun to play. No doubt many of you will not agree with me, I wouldn't expect you too, however I am just speaking from my experience with these games. I am in fact extremely excited for PoE because it will be challenging but likely not require such an extreme amount of metagaming and will be more forgiving but still challenging. And yes I know virtually all rpg's require some metagaming in some way, I am speaking more of having to have so much foreknowledge of the battles to come and related aspects of the game.

Going gold matters because developers have to release a final build and prepare it for shipping/distribution. This generally takes 4-5 weeks. Of course they continue to polish during that month or so, I am pretty sure that is what I was saying

I though it was required for the achievements system. But I see EU IV has achievs. Can you run the .exe without running Steam? (cause the DRM is Steam, not something ontop of that) There are no DRM requirements for anything on Steam (on top of using the client for downloading the game files). You can have the full feature package without using Steamworks CIG DRM. It's indeed the case for EU IV or for example also for Divinity Original Sin... I believe Hassat is saying that Steam is the DRM because you have to use steam to play/launch the game everytime, you cannot just launch the game exe without it going through steam. Unless things have changed about Steam that I am unaware of which is entirely possible.

That's like going to a car dealership and the sales person saying that "you can buy the car now but you cannot have it for another week," and you saying, "well that's fine but at least give me the keys to the car!" LOL

Most games go gold within 5 weeks of release date...some a little sooner some a little later. So the game we receive on launch day will not have been improved on/polished for around a month. This is a big reason as to why there are day 1 patches. A full month is a substantial amount of time to test and fix plenty of issues within the game. Also I would guess after this next backer beta update there will probably be maybe 1 more update to the beta. There just isn't enough time for Obsidian to get to the substantial amount of bugs they already have combined with the balancing they still have to do. Even if they released 3 more updates to the beta, it will likely provide very little valuable information for them when the game is so close to release and there is already so much to do (especially for the relatively small team they have for this game compared to larger budget games). Once the game is released and they upload the day 1 patch, that first week or so of general public playing the game will provide a massive amount of information for them to sort through. I would guess that after the highly likely day 1 patch, there will be at least 1 more substantial patch within a month to address the major issues that almost always arise from having a very large number of people playing the game at the same time and discovering many issues that the dev team could not find.

There is zero chance that there will be a public/open beta so close to launch. I would render a guess and say if the next update to the backer beta isn't the last one then at most there would be 1 more update after. There just isn't enough time to deal with the open beta and quite honestly, even if they were to release one tomorrow, it would not do much for them. They already no doubt have a huge list of bugs, glitches, balancing and overall polish they have to do for the game based off of their own testers and backer beta testers. They will not even get to a significant amount of those things before the game goes gold by the end of February so they have plenty of things to do without having a public/open beta to deal with. I am very excited to play the game, so much so that I am trying to play BG:EE. Have never been able to play the Baldur's gate series, was just too much I did not know about the systems and everything. But I am so excited for PoE that I got BG:EE on my computer and smartphone so I have plenty to hold me over until release of PoE. Plus I will likely wait a couple of weeks until after release so they can release the first patch to deal with the issues they could not get to before release of the game + major issues that the general public discover on initial release.

The problem is that there are essentially two possibilities: you can roll higher stats than you can buy in a reasonable amount of time, or you can't. You can also roll lower stats. Also, point-buy systems tend to discourage exceptionally low values in any stat (though I doubt Obsidian would do that). I like fixed or mostly fixed stats. I'd also support a GURPS-like approach where you can buy stat increases with skill points, so instead of learning a new skill you can make yourself stronger or give yourself more hit points. In fact, I'd be interested to see a game where hit points don't increase unless you buy them at level-up. I may be remembering wrong but i think drakensang's system was similar to this. You could increase your attributes but not by much, however to gain hp you would have to buy the hit points... and they were not cheap. By the end of the game I had less than 100 hit points.

I remember when I played the first Drakensang game a while back, I would consider that game to be fairly oldschool/hardcore in certain aspects. There was a sidequest that had you go into a basement that had multiple levels, around 5 I think, so you could kill all the rats including the queen rat. You had a guide take you to each level. So after you complete the second level, he catches up with you to take you to the third level. He always warned you that the next level will be quite dangerous and offered to take you to the surface if you felt you werent up to the challenege at that point. Now I must say, I would not have been able to complete that basement/dungeon if that option was not given too me and was grateful that they implemented that in that specific quest. If this 15 level mega dungeon in PE is anywhere near as difficult as the Drakensang one, I would say there definently needs to be an option for you to return to the surface and come back after you feel your character is up to the task of taking on the next, more challenging level.

Something in between NWN and DA:O. Probably more like DA:O with two extra boxes, one for dialog box and another for a combat log. I should be able to customize the UI though; for example being able to move dialog box and combat log to different areas of the screen etc...