Zeckul

I have no idea where to even begin solving this problem, but I'm glad to see it's being analyzed in such depth and with such great care, and it's making me confident and excited about this game. One thing I want to say though is that making lots of options viable and subtly different is not necessarily good. 2nd AD&D was incredibly restrictive in what players could wear and use, yet somehow the best RPGs ever were made with it. The simplicity of the combat system allowed greater focus to, I guess, the spell system, which was incredibly varied and deep. I guess what I'm trying to say is that depth isn't something absolutely, inherently good, sometimes a more shallow system can be better. Personally I found 3rd edition D&D to present me with way too many options and couldn't be bothered to figure out what the best build was myself, I'd always use pre-defined builds made by people with, from my pov, too much time on their hands. That wasn't fun.

And don't forget Cliff Racers!

Project Eternity owns a lot of its success to an amazing marketing campaign, and I'm not talking about paid ads. The excellent trailer, daily updates, great reward tiers, graphical representation of where we were, amazing environmental screenshot near the end, etc., they really made the most out of the means they had at their disposal. Of course, the premise of a new PC-exclusive, single-player isometric party-based RPG by PS:T and MotB's designers was pretty sweet in the first place.

Just going to chime in with everyone else: MotB had just 5 companions (Ammon Jerro doesn't really count) and I wouldn't exchange any one of them for the 22 running gags BG1 had for NPCs.

You wouldn't be the only one Mah homie Justin on tha beat? Dis be tha shiznit dawg! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qM4jmjhYH_I

Yes! It's even better in-game with the ambient sounds and the lush visuals. Icewind Dale is such a delight! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=41g-W7rqxvA

Morrowind's music was excellent in itself, however it was poorly implemented in-game. The same 20-minute loop would play without interruption ever, regardless of where you were or what time it was. Even the best music in the world gets tiresome after hearing it in a loop 200 times. Oblivion was just as poorly implemented, however they had more music so that mitigated the problem somewhat. In Skyrim, they finally have locale-specific music. Still a far cry from Baldur's Gate locale AND time-specific music (13 years earlier, at that), but it's palatable at least. Oh and Skyrim's music is the best Jeremy Soule ever did IMHO. He excels at depicting the frozen north, as his work on Icewind Dale showed, and in Skyrim he really outdid himself. This gives me chills every time. So peaceful, melancholical, deep and mysterious. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NUF7U_KYbIE

I'm surprised no one mentioned Diablo 2. It's easily the best video game music I've ever heard on several levels. The predominance of texture and overall atmosphere over melody, the unique, incredibly varied, live-yet-not-live sounding instrumentation (I don't know how to describe it), ominous, oppressive atmosphere like none I've ever heard - this music more than supplemented the experience, it defined it. I've been listening to it since I discovered the game 10 years ago and I'm still in awe. Matt Uelmen <3

I'm not exactly sure what the "high resolution" patch does or what resolution was used for these videos, but it does look quite readable for this game and nothing is particularly tiny. So, twitch might be a go for that game. I wouldn't use it for any other IE title though.

Twitch.tv supports 1080p broadcasting. I have seen some old IE games streamed from there with perfectly readable text. Obsidian would just have to have the proper hardware and setup for it. I'd like to see an example. AFAIK you can't upscale when live streaming, so the only way you'll get 1080p is by using the widescreen mod and force the game to run at that resolution, which makes everything tiny including text. Add the low-bitrate compression of twitch.tv and I don't see how you'll be able to see text without squinting.

I hope they use Youtube; live streaming just doesn't offer the quality required for a game like this. This is a game where being able to read the text matters, and that almost certainly requires upscaling the source to 1080p or better. My recording process (really simple to set up): - Set the game to its regular resolution, or if I use the widescreen mod, something close to its native resolution (960x600 for 16:10 monitors) - Record in lossless quality using Fraps - Upscale to 1200p in Virtual Dub using its Lanczos3 filter - Output to h264 avi (using x264vfw) at about 22 CRF For IE games this results in incredibly high quality for about 15MB/min which is very reasonable, since you spend so much time on static screens reading dialogue, there's not much movement to encode. Which results in this (view in "Original" quality fullscreen to appreciate): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PHF6g6vZso0 This looks basically as good as playing the game on your own machine, it's hard to tell it's actually video playing.

Yet, the old IE games used very little if any live instruments in their soundtracks. It's all samplers and digital manipulations.

Neither. I'm saying I hope "live music" doesn't necessarily mean using a classical orchestra, because that should be a stylistic choice rather than one based purely on budget.

Please tell me "live music" doesn't necessarily mean "classical orchestra". The choice of using a classical orchestra should be a stylistic one, not purely a matter of budget. I'm not saying PE shouldn't use a classical orchestra, just that this choice should be based on stylistic considerations.

I used the full extent of the little influence I have on Youtube to promote this project. I'm so glad this is doing incredibly well, it shows people want this type of game!

It's a well-known fact that Baldur's Gate 2 heavily favors good actions over evil ones; evil alternatives to quests, when they exist, often mean tons of lost experience if not good items. For instance, in the Copper Coronet, if you kill Hendak for Lethinan, the Beastmaster won't appear afterwards, robbing you of the Tuigan Bow (3 shots per round), plus you lose the chance the complete the Slavers quest, about 36K XP per character, although you can still go there kill everyone if you're so inclined. So how do you play evil in Baldur's Gate 2? Do you take the evil alternatives even when they're clearly inferior? How do you handle romances? What arbitrary acts of evil (murdering, thieving etc) do you commit while staying in the bounds of acceptable reputation? What does it mean to be evil to you and how do you rationalize your actions? I'm curious to get everyone's opinions as I'm in the early stages of an evil LP of BG2, and I usually play this game with good characters. By the way, I asked the same question at the BG:EE forums, but I also wanted to get input from this community.

Private betas for highly publicized games happen all the time. BG:EE is undergoing a private beta right now. A private beta is easier to manage from a marketing point of view; the developers can take more risks with it because they know it's not going to be shown to the whole world yet.

To reword my question in case it was confusing for anyone, I'm wondering if getting access to the beta will require signing a non-disclosure agreement (private beta), or if it will be public. I'd still like an official answer.

Yes it is a lot smaller. 800x600 on a 15 inch monitor results in a 0.381mm dot pitch, while 2560x1400 on a 27" monitor results in a 0.234mm dot pitch, i.e. everything is only 61% of its original size in each dimension which means everything occupies about 37% of its original space, i.e. everything is almost only 1/3rd of its original size. That's just maths. But it gets worse when you add the psycho-visual effect of representing much more of an area and thus shifting the focus away from small details, making them even more difficult to notice. So yes it looks like "Sim Ant" because objectively everything is much smaller, and because subjectively you're representing a much larger area within a single screen.

Kevin Michael Richardson anyone?

Just wondering if I'll be able to stream gameplay of PE's beta or not. Not a big deal if I can't, still got my key reserved anyway, but that'd be nice.

Kicktraq's optimistic projection is currently 3,56M$: that is, if donations continue at the same rate as in the last 24 hours. We could do even better

Yup that Zeckul sure is a great blog author. His quality sucks because his recording/streaming resolution is way too low, I haven't seen any graphical glitches from the game itself (yet).

I find those Dungeon Siege 3 models highly detailed, well animated and very pleasing to eye, and I would love seeing style of the same level of quality (with a somewhat different art direction obviously) in PE.

I hope we at least get the ability to initiate conversation with our companions, unlike in BG1 or BG2 where the best you could hope for was a few lines of random banter or your romantic "interest" deciding now was the good time to talk. I'm also hoping for an influence system a bit like in MotB, except MotB basically forced you to tell your companions what they wanted to hear to benefit from their influence bonuses. If you can devise a system that makes these dialogues worthy and rewarding while not falling in the same trap as MotB's system, that would be perfect.