AwesomeOcelot

Also they kept the scope of the project pretty vague, and some of the stretch goals even vaguer, so they have so much room to maneuver.

The problem with Patrick Stewart in Oblivion was that there were like 5 minutes of Patrick Stewart in Oblivion. And on all the trailers. He was perfect for the role and is still memorable years later, as was Sean Bean. I see no problem there. Nothing wrong with their performances but they were so short I feel the only reason they were there was so they could say these famous actors are in the game. Of course the voice acting and dialogue for the rest of the game wasn't good.

I also have a 3rd party solution offered by my bank that Amazon does not support because it's not a very well made system technically, I don't blame them for not wanting to implement all these systems. It doesn't degrade gracefully when you're using white listing and it uses cross site scripting. If you're using Visa, Mastercard, or Maestro there shouldn't be a problem, I doubt it's locked because of not using your dongle unless you specifically asked for that. Amazon and Paypal are coming out with new dongles (paypal had one, that they ceased using, and it's completely useless if you have one).

Manual looting is fun, it can be interesting and immersive, to have characters with the items you'd expect, and maybe items that tell something about them.

Amazon hasn't got an insecure payment system, it's one of the best around. They did have an insecure customer service telephone system, that leaked the last four digits of credit card numbers.

You are wrong. There are technologies, I think a 3rd party company was bought by Nvidia years ago, that allow you to turn any 3D game into 3D vision, and it's mostly terrible. Yet I know for a fact many games implement 3D from within the game engine, Arkham Asylum implements 2 different types of 3D, Crysis 2, and Starcraft 2, you can even manipulate the depth and other features of the 3D.

Wikipedia is saying it sold 140,000 copies just on Xbox Live for $10-15 in a period of about 2 months and 10 days. Four months after that it had sold well over triple that. This is an incredibly hard game for people not familiar with 2D platformers, that's about 6 hours long, it's really niche. Thanks for that, this was my bad. I meant to say 1 million sales, not $1 million in sales. Also remember that that 1 million only came after the Humble Indie Bundle in which people paid as little as $0.01 for a copy of Super Meat Boy plus four other games. Before that they were at roughly 600,000 sales, half a year after release, many of those sales being made for $3.50. I'm impressed with 600,000 sales. 2D platforming is one of the most saturated genres in indie games, Super Meat Boy had more competition than AAA FPS games. Super Meat Boy was developed in 18 months by two people (if random internet sides on google are correct), and I'm pretty sure the development costs were lower than $1m. It would be interesting if we had access to profits from Super Meat Boy compared to AAA titles.

Wikipedia is saying it sold 140,000 copies just on Xbox Live for $10-15 in a period of about 2 months and 10 days. Four months after that it had sold well over triple that. This is an incredibly hard game for people not familiar with 2D platformers, that's about 6 hours long, it's really niche.

Today's AAA (I hate that term) titles mean sinking the budget into voice actors (including celebrities that cost way more than they're worth), an army of artists (making a game like Crysis 2, Gears of War 3, God of War 3 requires a lot of artists, that are also technically minded), and motion capture that requires a hell of a lot of studio time (and pure motion capture is terrible for games, so animators still have to work just as hard). The sad thing is these either make it hard to make good game play or they take resources away from it. My favourite games in recent years have been made by small teams and they're not considered AAA. Stacking might be my favourite Adventure game. Braid, Super Meat Boy, and Trine 2 are my top 3 favourite 2D platformers (and I've been playing 2D platformers for a long time). Bastion is up there against any AAA action RPG. Rock of Ages and Orcs Must Die are incredible games, branching out in different directions from the other games in their genre. I don't understand the focus on AAA games.

Yup, my bad. Though, I was more refering to DE:HR where it has both when utilized. (And a lot more that I want in similiar games) DE:HR is pretty great in regards to a dialog system. I still think it could be improved, but it's awesome for its type of game. I loved the DE:HR system, it fit the game and the franchise well, it doesn't have a time limit and the responses are in full if you want them to be. Another thing, you might have misunderstood what I was saying (And looking back that was probably my fault). I don't want timed in all conversations either, especially casual ones. Timed is good when it fits, like in HR when you're dealing with someone on the edge. That's also why I'm so disappointed in the boss battles of the main game. Edit: (If the question comes up: AP was only sparsely casual and most of that weren't really conversations. Though there are 2-3 instances where it REALLY didn't fit.) Edit2: Also I'm using casual here wrong, as I encompass some other conversation types into that as well. The reason I didn't mind the time limits in DE:HR was that there were very few instances of it, and I never encountered them anyway because they're long enough that I was able to read the responses in full and decide what I wanted. Also pheromones.

Yup, my bad. Though, I was more refering to DE:HR where it has both when utilized. (And a lot more that I want in similiar games) DE:HR is pretty great in regards to a dialog system. I still think it could be improved, but it's awesome for its type of game. I loved the DE:HR system, it fit the game and the franchise well, where you're playing Adam, it doesn't have a time limit and the responses are in full if you want them to be.

Now that actually makes sense for some games like The Witcher 2, action RPGs and FPS with RPG elements like Deus Ex: Human Revolution, interrupts over NPC spoken dialogue make a lot of sense. Wait what? That's exactly what I'm arguing for. AP was a (bad) FPS with RPG elements too. And AP's conversational system wasn't without flaws as I mentioned in a previous post. Edit: Overall I actually prefer the way DE:HR did it. You didn't mention interrupts over NPC dialogue at all, and I know that Alpha Protocol's system isn't that.

Now that actually makes sense for some games like The Witcher 2, action RPGs and FPS with RPG elements like Deus Ex: Human Revolution, interrupts over NPC spoken dialogue make a lot of sense.

Actually, if this really is the case I think it would be more in the line of having choices like - Retort angrily - Try to manipulate (wisdom/skill) - Agree with him - Intimidate (skill) then you can choose what really fits his personality. (this often might have the problem were above descriptions end up with lines that just feels far away from what you expected) Because when exact words are written out it often ends up with you choosing what you think is the best answer and it is again about you, not the character. Unless the writers have a uncanny ability to come up with conversation options that really don't convey which choice is better. Otherwise I agree with you, timed conversations don't fit into this game. That's the worst consequence of having a time limited system. When I play it's the exact opposite, not having exact words means I choose the best option, and having the exact words allows role play if there's enough options. I don't think conversation can be represented in: angry, manipulate, agree, intimidate, that doesn't respect dialogue at all.

Wow never seen that in a good conversation system, saying different things gets different responses.

What part of that can't be in the good conversation systems of RPGs? And also, wow that sounds like great conversation game play, be smug and get someone to attack you. That's never happened in an RPG before. Revolutionary!

How is having endless time to think up an answer challenging at all? How does it benefit the interaction? If I have limited time (though AP's were quite short, I agree) finding out the personality of your opponent and reacting according to it gets fun (for me). Especially where there are no real *wrong* answers, just consequences like in AP. I don't want a challenging mini-game that's completely bull****. The short one-word or phrase doesn't reflect forming a response in a conversation. If you don't know what your choices are they're not choices, I might as well just pick randomly. It benefits the interaction because you can have more options, where you can choose full responses that you know before you choose them. I want to play games, not be played by games, and that's what these stupid dialogue systems feel like, they feel like quick time events and stupid mini-games. Anyone that's ever played a good RPG can see the difference to these RPGs, and how this system is lacking compared to older games.

Does time limits or stupidly short dialogue responses improve conversation game play? No, it makes it terrible. Which games have the best dialogue and conversation gameplay? Fallout and VtM: Bloodlines, followed by Fallout 2 and Fallout: New Vegas. Dialogue which had way more impact on me than games that employ this system like Alpha Protocol, Dreamfall: The Longest Journey, or Mass Effect. It's terrible game design. Because there's no time to read meaningful choices you're given vague phrases or even single words that don't reflect the response you'd want to give. It's the type of decision of game designers that don't want to be developing games, they want to be designing animated movies with relatively bad graphics that sometimes involve some interactivity. They say "we want conversations to flow like real life", but that's the anti-thesis to good game design, where we have conventions that are deliberately not like real life because we want to play games that are fun, challenging, involve interacting and choice. These systems feel like mini-games, not quite as bad as Bethesda mini-games, relevantly the Oblivion social mini-game, but in general pretty bad. They don't seem to have any relation to what you're actually doing. Yes, you get the "flow" of the conversation, at the expense of every thing else about a conversation. Lets have quick time events as well as the NPC is talking, that will make us concentrate more. The only reason why these systems exist is because they are a compromise for consoles, where a lot of gamers don't want to read more than a few words a minute. If these games hadn't have been developed for consoles then we wouldn't have had these terrible systems. Yet we are told to eat ****, it tastes good, and some people say "mmmmm yes, more please", these are the people who liked Oblivion and Skyrim, who didn't like dialogue in the first place, didn't care for the game play involved.

The higher resolution assets are not necessarily production quality, so if they were to create higher resolution backgrounds for the game they may start out with even higher resolution backgrounds Also it's not just the backgrounds that will need to be higher resolutions or fidelity.

I think if they thought they were able to completely crowd fund the project they would. I understand your reluctance and share some of it, I'm definitely not going to pledge as much as I did for Project Eternity, Dead State, or Hotel Noir. I want IP to be controlled by the creators, so they get the royalties, income for talent, not income for the rich. One thing that helped persuade me was that Blur has already sunk more money than they're asking into this project, so just to help them out for producing such an awesome trailer and trying to get The Goon in this medium is worth pledging in my opinion.

Windows 8 is meant for all kinds of PC, and touch is not limited to Metro apps. By the time PE is released there will be millions of touch-enabled Windows 8 PCs... It's quite clear that development has been focused on tablets and that touch isn't an improvement on desktops over mouse and keyboard. You're only kidding yourself. We don't know this, we do not know how powerful they will be, or how much power PE will need. PE does not rely on particularly fast or precise input, you can always pause. Thus no rebalancing is required. IE games can be played almost exclusively with a mouse, a keyboard is not necessary except to name your characters and savegames. PE will likely be the same. Pointing can be emulated well with touch, there are just a few things that would have to be handled differently because touch can't do right-clicks or hover. That changes the options for play style quite a bit, and either the developers and players are happy with that, or they're not and things will have to be changed. It seems to me that such a play style would excessively require pausing. It really depends on the game whether pointing can be emulated well, you can of course be way more precise with a mouse or a stylus.

If this feature isn't implement, something that would be just as helpful for me is extensive and colour coded combat log that's easily retrievable and can be viewed in game in a large window or fullscreen, with time stamps and breaks for changes in maps. That's only really a replacement, and not an optimum one, for sharing with others.

This is why it's a gimmicky fad. How is 3D going to improve a game with 2D backgrounds that don't have depth? It doesn't make sense to ask for 3D. I don't even see a point in isometric games like Starcraft 2, but at least you have depth on one axis there. It seems like people really really want to justify their expensive equipment. Arkham City or Crysis 2 sure, but it's such a waste of time and resources for most other games, just so they can have it on the box in a store, which won't be happening with Project Eternity.

???? DA:Os story was pretty damn lackluster. It was essentially a story about some people from an order of heroes fighting an ancient evil. Don't get me wrong, I liked DA:O, but the story was pretty much its weakest aspect. DA:O may be the most generic game I've ever played. Some of it was well made, the graphics, Alistair and Morrigan, the paragon/brood mother arc, the mage's tower abomination. With BioWare and Bethesda games, I mostly don't care about the characters or the plot, apart from the many times when its/they are annoying. DA:O and Jade Empire have the most generically pointless evil antagonists.

Years ago I read a forum post by a South American who said that publishers don't even bother selling games in South American countries, everyone just pirates games, and that if he had to buy games they'd be incredibly expensive imports. That's probably changed a bit in recent years, but it's quite possible Spain has a larger market for games than Spanish speaking South America.