Lord_Darkmmon76

I can understand exklusive deals, they happen. Some may not like it but that's how it works sometimes. What is not ok imho is that Obsidian used Steam to promote the game for months. They used Steam to build a community for this game. And suddenly they switch to the Epic Games Store but STILL use Steam to maintain the community and continue to promote the game via Steam. So Steam is good enough for still promoting the game but not for releasing it? They should at least be honest and show the courage and remove the game from the Steam until it is released over there. This is very disappointing.

After watching the demo video the only thing I didn't like was the conversation interface. Generally it looks very good but I think it is way too big. It takes up half of the screen and the text never uses all of the space. I think it really looks odd if most of the space in this window is not used. It looks... empty and seems to be a waste of space.

If you want to play an Ultima game Richard Garriott recently did a kickstarter. Go there. Thanks for the warm welcome

For all of those things audiovisual elements could be included. Your partymembers could be limping or they could sneeze and cough if they are sick...So you know that something is not right. If you want to know what time of day it is, open the inventory and take a look a the watch. Of course, dialoges would still be in place, maybe similar to how Ultima 8 did them (which by the way did not have a UI/HUD, too): http://images2.wikia.nocookie.net/__cb20090825111253/u5lazarus/images/2/2f/Bane.jpg Another idea would be to have health and mana/stamina displayed as bars if you mouseover the partymember. If you do not hover with the mouse over the partymember, the bars are not displayed. They could also be permanently displayed during combat.

I believe that an evolution in terms of UI and HUD would be really interesting. Being stuck to the same features and terms in RPGs is stagnation. I don't propose to create whole new mechanics. Of course there should be all of the elements in the game that an RPG, especially one in the tradition of Baldur's Gate, needs but I think for immersion it would be great if those mechanics could be mostly hidden. Think more of a virtual world and less of a game. Floating numbers, names above heads, hit point bars etc. I think all of those are mechanics we could do away with in modern games without sacrificing a really deep RPG-experience. Cluttering the screen with windows, bars, icons etc. drives away the focus from the actual experience of being in another world. If I look onto a screen and just see the landscape etc. it is simply much more immersive than staring on a HUD or UI as this rips me out of the feeling of being in this world. Maybe this comes from playing MMORPGs in which the focus seems to be much more on too many windows, numbers, texts on the screen instead of the world and what is going on around you. The game experience should always be the focus and not some numbers or bars or windows. Therefore I think a system like in Ultima VII would be great.

Instead of having your skills visible in a bar at the bottom of the screen you could allocate abilites and skills to keys. And you could have a special key that could bring up a skill-bar if you need to re-allocate skills or enter new ones. As for HP and stamina loss, there could be audiovisual feedback. You loose health, the rim of the screen gets a bit red and you hear the beating of your heart. The more damage you take, the more red the screens goes and the faster the heart beats. Something similar could be used for stamina loss, too.

I read the latest update of Project Eternity and after playing a bit of Ultima VII a thought occured to me. How about no UI for Project Eternity? In Ultima VII you generally just see the landscape and what is going on. Of course you can open the inventory and your status screen/paperdoll for you and you companions as well as a map. But there is no UI on the screen. This makes for a very immersive game experience and it works very well. It pulls you much more into the world. Here is a screenshot: http://sergorn.files.wordpress.com/2010/10/u7codex.png I image that it could work in Project Eternity, too. There would have to be some audio-visual feedback for some things like you or some of your party members being hurt etc. Also I propose that there should not be names or health bars above the heads of monsters, NPCs etc. And there should not be any numbers floating around showing you how much damage you do to the enemies. Instead there could also be audio-visual feedback like blood and visual wounds on monsters, limping or fleeing monsters so that you know how much damage you dealt to them. Image how much more immersive the game would be if you just see the landscape, the creatures, NPCs, the party etc. Nothing to detract you from the immersion of the world...

The automap could show you where he is located and of course you should be able to wake him up if he is asleep. This works quite well in the Witcher-series or Skyrim for example.

I wonder how alive the world will be. For example how about daily schedules for NPCs where they wake up in the morning, go to work and go to a pub and after that back to bed in the evening and you could watch them doing their daily stuff. Or a highly interactive world like in the old Ultimas where you could fetch water from a well, mix it with flour and put the dough into an oven to get bread which you then could eat. I think that Obsidian will concentrate on the "essential" parts of the game but a world that feels alive would a welcome addition, imho.

Steamboats, especially paddlesteamers would be cool. This could bring some atmosphere into the game like in those horror-stories from AD&D Ravenloft or even George R.R. Martins novel Fevre Dream.