Zeckul

How will Pillars of Eternity innovate as a CRPG? What will it do that others haven't done before? Let's recall that Baldur's Gate and Baldur's Gate 2 were very innovative games for their time; nothing quite approached them in scope and their adaptation of D&D and the Forgotten Realms universe worked surprisingly well. So far PoE has mainly been marketed as "a game like Baldur's Gate", which was of course music to many ears, as nothing quite like that game was made since then; but can it ever approach its greatness without innovating in its own right? How does it push the envelope? Discuss. My take on it: I'm placing high hopes on the new combat system which, if done right, should take all that was great about tactical combat in the IE games, without the warts and rough edges of trying to fit a P&P game into a CRPG. I'm also hoping that it'll make a solid case for high-quality written dialogue in games.

Spells that caused you to lose control of one or more characters were very common, and losing control of a character in a difficult battle usually caused that character's death very quickly. Baldur's Gate 1 and 2 sorta worked because they made mages extremely dumb in general; the enemies you fought didn't use 10% of what they could really do. The mod SCS illustrates what happens when they don't pull any punches, i.e. it makes the game so hard that only expert and very patient players can complete it, without changing any stat. I think this clearly illustrates how broken the system was. Also, character death in BG was common yet means of resurrection were very expensive and tedious, so the logical option from a gameplay perspective was to reload - nevermind PC death which didn't even give you any option. The availability of resurrection spells in BG2 mitigated the issue, but then BG2 added disintegration, imprisonment and maze

An apt comparison. Dark Souls is really freaking hard, but it's also extremely fair and transparent. When you die, it's your fault and you know exactly why, and you don't have to read 200 spell descriptions to figure it out. This is kind of thing that modern games do better than the old, and I'm practically quoting Sawyer at this point.

The Steam Controller is designed to work well with games that only support mouse and keyboard. PoE should be quite playable with it.

The game has already been delayed by 8 months, that should be enough for the team to realize its vision. I think the developers have set a realistic schedule and it'll be best for the game for them to stick with it. In software you can always make a better product if you spend more time on it, but shipping is a feature, and real-world feedback is a indispensible tool for ironing out remaining issues and paving the way for future expansions and installements. It's not sane to keep a project in development for too long. PoE won't be the be-all and end-all of videogames; it'll be flawed in some ways, and future games set in this new universe will do better. That, and it's been freakin 13 years since Baldur's Gate 2.

I sure hope the system is more adapted to a CRPG than D&D was. In BG2 it was too often the case that if you failed your save - which you had no control over -, you basically had to reload, because the effect was totally or partially irreversible. The game rules shouldn't rely on the existence of save-and-reload to work.

For some reason I always play human, perhaps because I can more easily relate to my character this way (or perhaps because I lack imagination altogether).

This is a well-understood topic with a lot of existing and available research (see steering behaviors, ORCA, ClearPath, flow fields, etc.). RVO2 is a free library that could be easily integrated to provide cooperative collision avoidance; it even has a pure C# implementation so it should just compile as-is in Unity.

Uncompressed textures would make the game download size prohibitive. Anti-aliasing would be pointless for the environments since they are pre-rendered (the pre-render will have already taken care of that), but for the characters which are rendered in real-time, that would be a good idea. Anyway, if you're looking for a game to challenge your brand new Titan Z, PoE is not it

There's nothing in particular that a program can do to "support hyper-threading". It's a feature built in your CPU which makes thread switching faster regardless of what these threads are doing or what application is using them. So, that question doesn't really make sense. If PoE is highly multithreaded - which is unlikely -, then it will benefit from hyperthreading, otherwise it won't.

The game is designed to be sharp, detailed and vibrant and to look great at 1080p and beyond. Just check out the screenshots for yourself.

I remember the mage protection ridiculousness of BG2 was specifically addressed by Josh Sawyer somewhere, so I think we can expect mages to be somewhat more reasonable in PoE. As for combat in general, well, these are the guys that made IWD, not BG, and IWD had very challenging but well-balanced and dynamic combat, so again I expect nothing less.

It will "support" multicore of course, i.e. it will run on multi-core CPUs, but no one knows if it'll take advantage of them in any meaningful way. Perhaps my information is outdated, but support for multithreading is not a strong point of Unity. Anyway, we'd need access to their code to see if anything is done in a multithreaded fashion. None of this matters if the game performs adequatly.

Diablo 2 did this. It looked a bit strange and pixelated, but Diablo 2's graphical style and low resolution mitigated the issue. Because Project Eternity aims for a very clean, high-res, pixel-perfect look, judging by the screenshots seen so far, and because the camera is placed much higher than in D3, the effect would look jarring.

The file formats might not be compatible. TToN is licensing the tech, but has already indicated they intend to modify it to suit their particular needs. My take is that any effort on both teams to accomplish this would be better spent making the best possible games they can. If it's just a matter of licensing then ok, but I doubt it'd be as simple as that.

It's not a matter of "processing every frame", much the opposite really; you want your brain to not be able to tell any individual frame apart. Eyes don't have a framerate anymore than ears have a sampling rate. That we use still images to represent motion is a limitation of technology, not a biological attribute of human beings. After being exposed to both, I can easily see the difference between 60 and 120hz, especially if I'm interacting with the image (i.e. in a game). 120hz feels less like interacting with a computer and more like being there, although it's still far from being fully convincing. As for PoE, of course being a Baldur's Gate-like game, it's not as important as in a first-person shooter, but going forward 120hz monitors will become more common and the game should natively support that without breaking down (like Dark Souls does).

Popular myth, entirely baseless. Look at your mouse cursor. Move your mouse side-to-side quickly enough and you'll easily see individual frames at 60hz. Even at a 120hz it's still easy to see individual frames, although quite a bit better. To re-create perfect illusion of movement would require upwards of 1000fps. Gaming at 120hz is more responsive, more life-like and provides greater clarity of motion.

Lol, I even created that thread. I need a memory check

Everytime an update hits it's exactly what I thought was the right thing to do. I had been expecting Winter 2014 and no more stretch goals and that's exactly what you decided to do. Once again I'm very happy with how things are turning out. And everytime I see a new area screenshot it makes me drool and burn inside with anticipation. I hope the ambient sounds are as good as in the IE games, as it was really the combination of high-detail area art + realistic audio atmosphere that made these areas so immersive and enjoyable. Cannot. Wait. You guys are awesome. Accept my virtual hug.

I have two requests regarding framerate: 1) Do not tie the simulation speed to framerate as in the Infinity Engine. 2) Allow for framerates above 60fps and test that they do not cause glitches. By 1) I mean that the framerate should be independent from the game speed, i.e. game time advances at the same rate regardless of the framerate. In the Infinity Engine, if you increased the framerate, it made everything faster. By 2) I mean that sometimes high framerates causes glitches due to floating-point precision issues. Dark Souls is notable for this, where the physics engine was only tested at 30fps and completely breaks down at 120fps, with characters falling through floors etc.

In 10 months it's very impressive that they managed to get 3rd edition rules in there, plus a significant re-work of the inventory system. I so miss quick weapon configurations and 50% more space in every other IE game. Spell icons were completely redone and very beautiful, with a clear color code system which made spells much easier to find. On the negative side, dropping OpenGL acceleration is an inexplicable mistake; music wasn't nearly as good as in IWD1; the story was disjointed and drawn out.

I love this idea and hope it gets implemented I hate this idea and hope it doesn't see the light of day. ...but I will behave if it's implemented. I don't like it either, I think it's confusing.

I'm not thrilled about the idea of the game's scope being expanded so late in the development process. This would have a good chance to delay the game significantly, and I really want PoE to be done in 2014. If the game budget suddenly explodes for some reason, the money should go into funding an expansion pack or sequel.

I'm not sure how much of this is intrinsic to open world RPGs as opposed to the result of Bethesda's incompetence. The Elder Scrolls pretty much fails in every aspect that makes an RPG interesting - characters, combat system, leveling system, storyline, quests - but they know how to make a large pretty-looking world with sunsets and fill it with semi-random stuff. Who knows what might happen when a developer who knows how to do these things creates an open-world game? It never happened yet, so there's the possibility that it could be good.

I want Icewind Dale 3, with new Jeremy Soule music. Jeremy Soule depicts the frozen north like no one else, as he's demonstrated in both Skyrim and IWD1. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H1VreyJwMVM