lordgizka

Well, Kickstarted money probably cant be called "costs", since a large chunk of it (what isn't spent on rewards) is free money with some vague strings attached. And, since developers can get money from other sources, this sort of deal is amazing for them. Before crowdfunding, only socially beneficial (and also military and scientific, I guess) projects would get this level of support from anyone. I guess my point is that the scenario in which this becomes "normal", at least within certain game genres, is terrifying to me. Even now studios ask for more money after already going through what they got for free. And then we get stuff like Broken Age with it's questionable gameplay and 4 hour length of it's first half. Ideally, of course, when a studio gets their revenues from a successful kickstarted project, they'd finance themselves from that point on, but even now studios, including Obsidian, Double Fine and inXile, either have multiple crowdfunded projects or are currently planning to announce them. While not even being close to releasing a previous one, no less. Small teams are better at using crowdfunding, I think. The Banner Saga turned out good, and they got relatively little money from KS in the first place.

I'm not sure how much money can the backer portal without Kickstarter actually yield, but I'll probably donate something to the promise of more companions. The fact that this came up more than a year after the original KS is not a good sign though.

Significantly different content based on the player's decisions. To encourage replayability and all. So far, I only saw The Witcher 2 do this properly.

Finally went and played BG:EE since 1.2 patch got released. I love that all the ogre mages drop katanas for some reason. Also, never played Tales content and now I'm amazed how bad I am at this game. Reloading and buffing the party before every high-level spellcaster fight is not a lot of fun. Also, I can't quite function without contingencies and sequencers, and I haven't seen the scroll for minor sequencer anywhere. BG2 is far more forgiving.

Welp, I actually voted for TB. Mostly because there are too few turn-based isometric RPGs, and also it's always easier to adapt tabletops to this. Best case sscenario is, of course, what Fallout had. Everyone's happy then.

I'm starting on Normal, with influence lost/gained messages turned off. That way I'll hopefully be actually capable of roleplaying something specific and not a regular sociopath while reloading almost all party conversations.

This is extremely nice. Still 9 or so (post ToEE/Lionheart?) years lost, of course, but things are well now, at least.

Both options damage the game for those who actually buy it... they don't go nuts with the second one due to it being totally useless, 'cause there was no game that was not cracked within a week... (most are cracked BEFORE they are even released to the public, does not matter how great the drm is... hell my friend has to pirate the game he actually OWNS because the old drm does not support winVista/7, if I remember these are ubisoft titles like splinter cell) Starcraft 2... they turned off the achivements today again... I could not play for single!? player achivements... How exactly does making an MMO damage the game for legitimate buyers? I realize there is the atrocity that is SimCity now, but it was cracked anyway. That doesn't count as an MMO then, if it can be played offline with the client alone. The second option is of a self-sufficient client, which always can be cracked. Do you suppose companies should simply give up? Witcher 2 was a great game, and CD Projekt were kind enough to not include DRM at all. And it had ridiculous pirate rates. Because people could pirate it. DRM can be harmless, just look at Steam. My original point was simply that increasing the number of variables that hackers have to take into account will buy time.

Since they probably already settled on a name, I feel we'll know once the backer site goes up. Seems like a good publicity move.

The only real two ways to effectively combat piracy are: 1) Game can only be played online, and the server side is being heavily utilized. Basically, be an MMO. 2) DRM is linked to actual game code. Think the game making fun of pirates, with changed dialogue, self-erasing saves, all the fun stuff. Now why exactly don't all companies go nuts with the second method is a great question. Granted, it's extra work for the developer, but making a crack for such a game will always take time. Time during which some would be pirates might give up.

This game is going to have a number of tombstones it has no realistic way to actually have. Guess this'll be mildly amusing down the line.

I feel like their decision to limit almost all higher (95+) tiers was not the smartest of ideas. The final push from more devoted and yet poor folk will be less than it could be.

I would very much like to see a direct card payment option on their backer portal. Multiple KS projects had the option, and it seems strange to me why Obsidian, or inXile for that matter, wouldn't, at least after the actual Kickstarter ended. It would technically be no different from a pre-order, and would mean not losing money compared to PayPal.

Their new set of stretch goals is so ambitious it's almost funny. Also, I'm interested in how their number of legacies is justified. I mean, suppose the original 6 are one dominant color each + no affiliation. What is 16 then if there are 9 possible pairs for 5 colors + individual ones + no affiliation? Also, if what I write now makes no sense, then my excuse is me being sleepy. Edit: I mean 10 pairs. Okay, it makes sense. Woo.

The original poster's premise is a bit weird. Only F:NV out of all Fallouts had distinct sets of missions leading to multiple endings. And Arcanum has a linear story. And Witcher 2 has completely divergent story paths, which is insanely rare in any RPG (of course, the ending is relatively fixed, but that doesn't diminish anything). Of course, making an ideal non-linear RPG basically means making multiple games in one package, which is too much work and therefore money. But hey. we'll still get Witcher 3 and whatever else CD Projekt are making. Probably not in any Kickstarter-based project, especially because of the short development cycles.

They have addressed the development cycle point in many of the updates. Yeah, but what do you suppose happens when any popular Kickstarter-funded game is heavily delayed ,or too short, or too buggy, or just bad, or some combination of these? Internet hysteria won't necessarily destroy the developers' reputation, but it'll certainly destroy the "donate us a bunch of money, we're good for it" business model. And then we'll be getting more games like Dragon Age 2 or something.

Forking storylines (the more diverse, the better), walls of text, roleplaying your own character, and any medium that doesn't require massive funding. The last bit is so that there are more games, see? The worst thing is that there never was (to my knowledge) a game that fit all of these criteria. And since people don't like to make what other people aren't or weren't making at some point, there probably never will be. Terrible.

I am still uncomfortable with the marketing for this project, or the fact that the story is way too similar to PS:T, but I still backed it. Just because the only "proper" western RPG in a while was Witcher 2. Oh, and development cycles for all the major RPG Kickstarter projects are too short. Which is inevitably going to lead to amusing fan outrages down the line.

Well, if Avellone *really* suddenly wants to do an exploration of human depravity in PE, that's good. I mean, it's always more satisfying to kill villains if they deserve it.

"Real" journals have this thing where they are written with a specific style, where the best case scenario is having two versions of it: normal and "stupid" (for stupid characters, that is). I see this as something that detracts from roleplaying, because the player is basically presented with the thoughts of their character, which they have no control over. This is great for defined characters, but not for "blank slates".

On a very practical note, I'm pretty sure at least a good chunk of post-release customers will have the pet too just because it's unlikely Obsidian will slap DRM on the pet files. Seriously though, I want something reminiscent of a lim-lim or a guar. Yeeeess...

As I understand it, Obsidian doesn't actually have an in-house QA department. So, as it is good practice with any RPG games, I'll just wait a bit after release. A month, maybe. I still remember what Dragon Age games were bug-wise. And they had massive funds to QA the damn games. I'm not terribly optimistic, basically.

All we know at this point is that ciphers are going to be "like psionics" ability-wise, but use their own and others' souls to fuel their powers. And we have no idea about what souls are, even, in this setting. From a practical perspective though, if ciphers were going to have unique dialogue, we would hear about it by now. Quiet a huge feature, this.

Even if Obsidian don't have enough money to make the game the way they want, they can always use bank loans. It's not publisher's money or venture capital, so it should be fine. Edit: and Kickstarter and it's kind are horrible for multi-million dollar projects. There needs to be a crowdfunding site specifically for games managed by, say, principal developers of a specific genre. Or the whole idea normal enough for pre-pre-orders on the developers' page to bring enough money (without using PayPal or similar services too).

Right, I should probably have said "Japanese visual novels", although I don't know if or how many that are translated. Not the flash games or even the classic "true love". Like I mentioned, I see a market opportunity here, pretty much no games like this are made. There is just interactive fiction AFAIK. Well, during the live stream Feargus and someone else (Avellone?) reacted quite cheerfully to the idea of making a visual novel. I'm pretty sure that *this* storyline focus is not what they had in mind.