Theobeau

The engine truly looks lovely and I liked the idea that this was all the result of hard work by a small team in the UK without prior industry experience. As someone who had a a few pounds (equivalent) spare, I was happy to pledge and support their project. However agree with many of the posters here that in terms of Bare Mettle's KS drive important things such as providing more game world context; a small sense of the plot; non-combat cRPG mechanics and importantly, marketing the project were all initially lacking. For what its worth, the team seem to have realised this with a late push of updates and possibly more media exposure. Shame that they left it so (relatively late) as it may not be enough to tip them over the line. Let's see what happens over the next few days

Great way of introducing various members of the PE team. Interesting in that it is suggested that Reddit is the main forum where PE team members engage with the fan base. I wonder where the official forums fit into that picture Re: Q: How many push-ups can you do? A: More than the average programmer, but significantly less than Chris Avellone. My very important question is How many can Avellone do?

Interesting update and further illuminates the process of writing for and producing a great cRPG. With his tribal tattoos, ownership of medieval weaponry and possible great affection for antiquarian books JE Sawyer could make for a memorable PE character. After all this in a pre-printing press age books are likely to be rare and who better as their guardian than JE Sawyer; one scary ass head-librarian who will really take you to town if you are late in returning one of those damned rare illuminated manuscripts!

@Azarkon, Completely agree and that is probably my top cRPG moment. As you also well pointed out, for such moments to have their greatest emotional impact, the game designers have to have succeed in drawing the player in to encourage them to spends hours with the game and immersing them completely into the cRPG world. That PST did all this so well is for me why Torment is the primus inter pares of cRPGs.

Thank you for posting the link, it is always good to hear updates about the project.

David Carradine, perhaps? And those are sandals, not slippers. Actually here in Oz we call these thongs though I think in Nth America thongs have another meaning. Forton in thongs.... there's an image we'd all like to see!

As a long time gamer I've only recently become interested in the meta of gaming: what constitutes a "good" game, what makes computer gaming unique, is it art ?, whither gaming commentary and criticism (Doritos and Mountain Dew anyone?) and the mechanics of how games are made. While a lot of this may already be known to the hard core gaming community it was quite an enlightening post for this reader and kudos to OBS for giving the wider KS community an idea of how much planning and effort goes into making a quality game. The nitty gritty is obviously much much more than having talented programmers, writers and an great idea. The logistics of marshalling every one into coherent teams and having skilled producers who can get these teams working together sounds quite challenging though it appears OBS have got a very good handle on Project Eternity. Thanks for a very interesting post!

Blimey cobber...... So that's why MCA threw in all that outdated Aussie slang in his recent interviews!

Mix. I also seemed to play it a little OCD in that there was a difficult resist compulsion to press quick save every 10 minutes or so. Perhaps it was all the crash to desktops that plagued Windows 95 machines (it was Win 95 right?)

Agree with many who have posted here, common enemies should have realistic items that for leaders or in a small % include Masterwork style higher quality weapons/armour etc... Named higher level enemies such as the adventuring parties that were a great feature of later BG1 could have higher tiered Masterwork + magical items (low level artifacts? that have some history or lore to them). Highest level / elite boss type enemies should have the most chance of a rare, genuinely powerful artefact weapon/armour/ jewellery/ or high value crafting item such as high end gems. I'm just not sure how to balance the need to keep magical items novel and interesting from the fact that at the higher levels, enemies should be correspondingly tougher, which in turn means that they tend to have +X weapons. This results in the plague of having far too many +X Swords of Fairy destruction, a problem that took a little shine off ToB.

A couple of thoughts on this topic. As I get on in the years, I find myself more interested in role playing characters who are more than the stero-typical callow youth wanting to go out in search of adventure blah blah blah. However, given OBS' and the lead devs track records, this is not something that I worry about with PE. However when it comes age itself OBS could make it an purely aesthetic choice; give us a range of starting ages, have a few older default portraits for the character/inventory screen and give the option of adding a grey tinge to our avatar's locks. That latter is a little less important as it won't project that well in the 2d isometric display anyway! Or make it have a small but interesting impact on character creation by borrowing from FO's idea of character traits that have +ve and -ve. As someone mentioned earlier, perhaps younger characters have more physical strength but a little less skill points or vice versa. One problem with this approach is that age doesn't necessarily wisdom; quite a few older people lack wisdom and maturity while young people, though difficult life circumstances can have wisdom well beyond their years; and youth doesn't equal strength. As an aside, the OP's post has led great series of thread on this interesting side topic!

Could have thrown in the action-RPG such as the ME series or even MCA's own FNV into the mix; interesting to see if that option would have scored a few more %. For what its worth, count me as one of those dyed in the wool CoD I mean PST fans.....(phew, almost revealed my true colours here!)

Great interview ! BTW: Chris got it right bloody oath can mean hell yes. If he wishes to continue with archaic Australian slang in his next interview, he should throw in bonza, sheila, she'll be right mate and crack open another tinny.

For myself, I appreciated that OBS is trying to regularly update the community, even if the news is "Hey, we really are working!" Some 74,000 people have backed this project, investing OBS with both their hard earned money but also their hopes and aspirations for a complex, character and narrative driver cRPG of the likes that hasn't been seen since the golden age of cRPGs. While it must be almost impossible to manage all the conflicting expectations keeping everyone in the loop is a great first step. The suggestion of an official community liaison is a great one for as the devs get stuck into the project, the temptation will be to cut back on the less "essential" things such as frequency of updates. Hell, look at WL2. Acknowledging Fargo's heroic KS efforts, once the project got stuck with the nitty gritty, the time between updates has really drifted upwards. Finally, as someone living down under, can't say I'm too upset that they opened with "Good Morning America". Who knows, maybe OBS should consider using this to acknowledge all the nationalities of their backers. It'd be great for everyone to see how far and wide their fan base has spread!

How cow, 18 pages on this topic! Putting aside boob plates, chainmail bikinis and realism in fantasy cRPGs is 18 pages some sort of record for this PE meme?

Only came across this thread today so while late to the party well spotted and well deduced Leferd! The pieces certainly look like they make Interplay (did I get the italicised writing right?)

+1 for BG style. There were some gorgeous vanilla and customised portrait sets for BG1, surely enough to satisfy most player's preferences re: gender, race, aesthetics etc... And as the poster "Tiax rules all" proves, there remains quite a few talented fans out there more than willing to make custom sets for the new game. Providing a way for players to tweak the portrait in-game would be a great touch.

If it doesn't cost a lot of resources to implement it then why not make it an optional extra. As the OP mentioned, this was an option of the IE games so implementing it could add to PE's legacy feel.

@Starwars: Thank you for posting this thread. The interview was very interesting and revealing. I hope they are able to stick to a regular update cycle. Given how some other successful KS' quiet down once they get stuck into the grind of making the game/final product I'd settle for monthly updates.

OBS just answered this question; check out Starwar's thread in this same forum titled New interview with Adam Brennecke (small spoiler for a new character). Details are his OP and link where OBS discuss future publishing models for potential sequels. (Edited: silly me, worked out how to directly link to his thread below....) http://forums.obsidian.net/topic/61823-new-interview-with-adam-brennecke-small-spoiler-for-a-new-character/

AoE looting sounds like a great idea; could be optional in that you have to click and drag the AoE for it to take effect; otherwise manually click on each corpse/chest for the old school feel. I would expect the final loot/inventory system to be modified as compared to original IE games. Any modification could still stick to the inventory grid a la BG/IWD or grid tetris like diablo ( ). My preference would be inventories to incorporate some sort of list system which groups like items together (perhaps like some of the better modded versions of FNV's inventories).

If something like this gets put into the game then an interesting aside would be to see how the PE's version of souls fitted into the traditional Faustian bargain. After all if souls routinely fracture and if people in the world of PE routinely get reborn into another vessel after death, what value does the soul have to an infernal power? Can they still place the soul into some sort of evil afterlife ? Would they still want souls? Interesting to see how OBS tackles this.

Depends on the level of realism you want in PE. If it was an optional mini-game whose development wouldn't detract from core game/narrative/character development elements then why not ?

Interesting original question and answers. Like most of the earlier posters, if PE is very successful then while OBS would have more clout to negotiate a more equitable publishing contract, a just as valid argument could be to point to the crowdsourced funding as a major factor for their success. After all, with KS they got great early publicity for the title, have locked a large number of motivated fans into de facto pre-orders of the game + paraphernalia and most importantly have a free hand for development time lines esp. internal QA vs release dates (a problem which plagued their AAA titles NWN2, KoTR2 and FNV and become part of their reputation ). The latter issue has been mentioned by several of the OBS team during the just gone round of PE gaming site interviews. It would have to be a big pot of money to OBS to give up all that up + a sizeable % of the subsequent profits. Nikolokus summed up my position on how modern publishers have cast a pall on the industry much better than I could.