Zeckul

This is a great update! The music is looking solid and seems to already have found its style and instrumentation. Female choirs, glockenspiels, full strings, all sound pretty good, albeit a bit too synthetic. Your bass drum is rather underpowered though: something with more resonance and "oomph" would be great.

No one knows if it's a good idea to postpone the game at this point. Any game developer should strive to plan realistically and meet its deadlines. I'm expecting Obsidian to meet its deadline and give us a finished, polished product with every promised feature at the promised date. Of course, **** happens, but no one's hoping for that.

Hell no, this isn't Runescape.

No. Baldur's Gate 1 and 2 were great games and well-received, in part because they looked spectacular for their time. PE cannot look 15 years old on launch date. It has to be very high-resolution, and it is not much more work to produce high-resolution art that looks good than to produce low-resolution art that looks good. Making stuff look good is hard either way.

An isometric projection is a type of orthographic projection (parallel axes) and is typically used by games with pre-rendered or hand-drawn backgrounds. A perspective projection is a type of 3d projection that attemps to produce the illusion of depth by making objects progressively smaller as they move away from the "camera" or point of view. This is typically used by real-time 3d engines, including SC2 and WC3. Note that Diablo 2 is an exception to the rule because it simulates a perspective projection with 2d backgrounds, although the effect looks highly unnatural.

I just mean play. I could add another option for "finishing" though. --- hum looks like I can't edit the first post, that sucks Also, although technically Baldur's Gate: Enhanced Edition is an IE game, it's not out yet so there's no point putting it there.

See as above 90% of the members of this awesome forum have played at least an Infinity Engine game before, as a previous poll showed, I was curious to know which one were played most. I played all of them.

Updating the Infinity Engine is basically what Overhaul Games is doing with BG:EE. Just taking the old UI out and replacing it with something that scales to widescreen monitors gracefully took months. Updating a 14-year old code base designed for obsolete technology is a lot of effort for not a lot of results. That was still the approach of least friction for remaking BG1 and BG2, but for any new game you wouldn't want to do that. Even Overhaul Games won't use the updated IE for BG3. If you take the Infinity Engine and fix everything that's obsolete or badly designed about it, you'll basically have a completely new engine and you'd have been better off starting from scratch. So, no, keeping old tech alive is a lot of wasted time.

No because it might negatively affect the morale of the troops after a while. Also because no one will ever care about the idea.

I disagree that early game enemies should remain relevant throughout. There are few memories I remember more fondly than finding the Death Spell in BG2 and seeing everything not worthy of my level just instantly vanish at a single word. That had me giggling like a little girl. To me, the bigger the spread, the more exciting character leveling becomes: I want it to go from "scared of rats" to "not much scared of gods". That doesn't mean it all has to happen in a first installement of PE; like Baldur's Gate, the entire level scale could split in two games, each featuring roughly half of it.

I would be against anything that forces periodic maintenance of equipement, especially a diablo-like durability mechanic. This can make sense in a combat-focused, one-character action rpg, not with several characters, a complex magical system, and well fleshed-out non-combat elements. Of all Infinity Engine and Neverwinter Nights games, only Baldur's Gate 1 had the concept of equipement that could break, and that was done to drive a critical story point home (the iron contamination), was limited to non-magical melee weapons which the player soon replaced with magical ones, and then again it didn't force to player to periodically go repair his items, only to carry around some extra swords just in case.

Despite having only scratched the surface of PS:T and having it found weird and wordy almost beyond my tastes, it is perhaps the reference that made me most interested in this project, for some reason I can't fully explain. Maybe with Dragon Age and BG:EE recently pretending to revive my favorite game ever, I'm starting to get less excited at the idea of another Baldur's Gate.

25. First contact with the RPG genre was about 20 minutes of walking around in Candlekeep at a friend's house (I think I made a ranger). The first RPG I played seriously though was Darkstone and then Diablo 2. Having this memory of a fascinating lore-rich, complex RPG in my mind I eventually returned to Baldur's Gate, then 2 (which became my favorite game ever), then Icewind Dale 1 and 2. More recently I played NWN2:MotB. Sadly I haven't paid enough attention to PS:T yet.

Items should have a sense of lore, of uniqueness, and it should feel special and rewarding to find some of the best ones. That said, whether the world is filled with magical items or not is more of a stylistic issue.

That makes a nice desktop wallpaper but not a particularly playable experience, with everything scaled down to a fraction of its original size. Try it out; it's very playable - more so even. I did, it's unbearable. Especially for the UI where every button and clickable element is reduced to mere millimeters of my screen. When I use the widescreen mod I set it to something that respects both my monitor's aspect ratio and the designers' intent for scale: 960x600 for a 16:10 monitor or 1072x603 for a 16:9 monitor.

That makes a nice desktop wallpaper but not a particularly playable experience, with everything scaled down to a fraction of its original size.

Games have gotten much better at teaching the player how to play; accordingly, today's gamers are expecting to be able to just jump into the game and learn as they go. Good UI, rules and level design goes a long way towards allowing the player to discover the mechanics by himself, and reduce the need for explicit hand-holding. Nobody really wants tool-tips and NPCs that tell you what right-clicking doors does.

I'm not a UI expert but I think the game industry has learned a thing or two about user interfaces since BG1, 1998. BG1 was a stellar and revolutionary game for its time, but that doesn't mean every aspect of it should be copied forever. As mentionned before, Dragon Age: Origins manages to give to the player something both stylized and functional without using up 40% of your screen's area. As for as style goes, we have no idea what might be best for this game yet, (and Obsidian doesn't know exactly yet either, probably), so it's up to them to decide. I'm not voting because the poll is basically worded like "do you like something that looks great or something that looks terrible?".

For all my admiration for IE games, I don't like the D&D leveling system much. It doesn't give you nearly enough choices, you basically just watch your character grow in power according to how you set your character at the start of the game. I'd much rather have points to invest as I please, Diablo 2-like.

Few people remember that Baldur's Gate 2 actually had level scaling. In several instances, the game will spawn different mobs depending on your level: there's even a component in SCS2 to force the game to always choose the hardest encounters. I think some amount of level scaling adds to the experience, in the way BG2 did it, but Oblivion and Skyrim are definitely examples of how NOT to implement it.

The Elder Scrolls series would be an excellent counter-example, as these games enjoy some of the most active and talented modding communities, yet are single-player only experiences. Personally I do not want to see multiplayer as it is typically a large programming and design challenge; I'd rather have 20 more spells, another character class and another area, than a multiplayer mode few people will actually use. Yes BG had multiplayer, how many people actually enjoyed it?

Nostalgia. I am curious if this will feel like a 2014 game paying homage to games from 2000, or if it will feel like a game from 2000. Well, maybe it'll save time. With a fixed viewpoint you only have to make the game look good from one angle. If this means less resources spent doing graphical design and more into gameplay and other content, it might be a good tradeoff after all. They better make it really high res though.

That's really quite simple, with real-time rendering you have to make compromises, as it, understandably, requires a lot more computing power. At a certain point, you get something which is just too complex to render in real-time. So, no, you cannot always achieve the same effect in real-time as you would in pre-rendering. As for the details - pre-rendered backgrounds are made to look the best at a particular angle and distance, so understandably more time can be spent on ironing every little nook and cranny, so it'd just look perfect. You also have to make compromises with pre-renders; it becomes almost impossible to do dynamic lighting and shadowing; it is very difficult to represent depth convincingly with the orthographic projections they use; every animation has to be isolated, looped and pre-baked which makes it much harder to get good-looking stuff that moves like water, foliage, clouds, haze, etc., leading to unnaturaly static scenes. I think at the point we're at today, we get better-looking graphics, with more detail and artistic freedom, by going with a real-time than a pre-rendered approach: plus of course we get camera freedom and resolution independance. Apparently Obsidian has decided otherwise, and I'm quite curious as to why.

From the KickStarter page under update 6. Oh well that closes the discussion then. I'm curious to see how well real-time rendered characters will blend with pre-rendered backgrounds; I don't find previous examples of this approach very convincing* (Beyond Divinity, Rise of Nations, ToEE). We'll have to wait and see. I hope they pre-render at way more than 1920x1200, seeing how that's the native res of most displays today, so as soon as you zoom in you'll already lose quality. * to illustrate: notice how the models look sharp and high resolution compared to the backgrounds when zoomed in close in Beyond Divinity:

By the way did anyone from Obsidian said they would use 2d backgrounds? I've seen some articles mention it but never from the devs themselves.