kjrubberducky

I thought that a game's EULA always stated that you bought a license for the game, not the game itself. Just because there was no DRM doesn't mean you had the right to do whatever you wanted to the game files. Sure, it wasn't enforceable and required people to be trustworthy, and no one was going to come knocking down your door if you modded elves and dwarves into your Fallout install, but it still wasn't the outright purchase you make it sound like.

I need my shiny. Please?

I like the novel style the best, but the descriptive/action text should have something unique, too, like maybe italics or something.

Normal, no Trial of Iron, some Expert options turned on (no visible skill checks, influence, or faction stuff). Trial of Iron is really tempting, and I have just started getting into some games with rogue-like elements like persistent saves and perma-death. But those are fairly short compared to how long I expect it to take to play through PE. I really want to try again if I die, not just have my 20-hours-played save deleted outright. If I can have my single persistent save without the delete on death stuff, I'd definitely take it. I would also like to turn any "floating numbers" off, and I see that for skill check requirements, companion influence notifications, and messages for faction standing changes. But I would also like to see something like that for damage and hit points. For example, a grazing hit, a solid attack, or a vicious blow instead of a discrete damage value; and the monster is alert, tiring, exhausted for stamina or healthy, wounded, crippled for health. Anything to keep me immersed in the world and not tracking numbers on a spread sheet in my head, please!

Amazing! Wonderful! Excellent! Stunning! Outstanding! Magnificent! Exquisite! Great work, Obsidian! Now, does anyone have a good way of cleaning brain bits out of my keyboard? That would be appreciated...

I really think that games like these shouldn't be designed for a pacifist or non-combat approach. If a player is creative enough to make it possible, they can go right ahead, but to me, it's an unrealistic expectation. However, I like the idea that a pacifist run has consequences. A few examples: Sneak into a dragon's lair, charm the dragon, and make off with the treasure. Consequence: After you leave, the charm wears off, and the dragon becomes furious and razes nearby villages. Convince an army to not go to war, stand down, and negotiate for peace. Consequence: Their opponent uses the opportunity to take initiative and stage a sneak attack, resulting in complete massacre. Develop a reputation for pacifism. Consequence: A barbarian civilization won't even acknowledge you; any attempt at conversation is met with ridicule and insults. Not all consequences need to be beneficial to the player; a more realistic, "gray" approach to diplomacy would be welcome.

One of the big things about P:E is that there is freedom for the player to make his own choices in the game world and see the effects around him. So something related to player choice, making their own way, etc. Also, something to do with souls, seeing that they are going to be focused strongly on in the game. In fact, I would really like to see soul somewhere in the title. "Paths of Souls" "Soulways" "A Soul's Fate" Maybe I should leave the naming to others.

It would be nice to have, especially for the PC, to give the rest of the party a chance to win the fight if the PC is "killed". Also, I've seen that done, except the "countdown" is actually negative HP, so you start at 0 and when you get to -10 you die.

You need to keep the money supply from inflating too quickly. Make low level items useful at all levels, and keep the ways a player can accumulate currency limited. What tends to happen is that, for example, you have a shop keeper who sells, say, 3 kinds of healing potions: small, medium and large. At the beginning of the game, the small potion is useful and affordable, but the medium potion is overpowered considering the enemies you're facing. So you have to make the medium expensive enough that a starting character can't afford it. Then, at the mid point of the game, you have to make sure the player can earn enough money to make the medium potion affordable, and then you have to make the large potion even more expensive to keep the midway player from easily acquiring it. By the end of the game, the player is making vast amounts of money because they need to afford the large potion. With this particular example in mind, I think a crafting system can be used to devise a more elegant solution. For instance, now the shop keeper only sells one size of health potion. For the player to make better potions, you might require certain ingredients for an alchemy recipe. Then you can limit what ingredients can be gotten by limiting them to starting areas or end game areas. Or potions enhanced with alchemy improve based on the alchemy skill, which makes starting characters potions always weaker than higher level characters. Maybe you have to purchase the recipe, and higher level recipes are more expensive (this still inflates the currency somewhat, but not as badly since you only have to buy it once). One solution I don't really like is giving shop keepers limited amounts of money, like Elder Scrolls Oblivion or Skyrim. While more realistic, it was more of a hindrance and didn't really make the game any better, IMO.

Wow, so many new people joining! Welcome all! At this point 500 members would not surprise me at all.

I think it would be nice to count money after the 3.5 as going towards expanding the mega dungeon. Like 100K p. level or so.

I love a good puzzle or mystery that I have to piece together myself. Possible game mechanics for acquiring clues and hints?

I'd like to see grimoires with different advantages and disadvantages. Consider, if more powerful spells are more complicated, then they are longer, and should take up more room in the tome, leaving less room for other spells. While lower level spells are simpler and shorter, so you can fit a larger variety of spells in the tome. So now you have a trade off, adaptability and versatility or sheer power and effectiveness. And what about the length of the grimoire itself? Maybe smaller ones can't hold as many or as powerful spells, but reading them is easier, allowing you to switch between them more easily and with fewer penalties. Or maybe their smaller size makes them easier to exhaust, but they recharge more quickly, while larger ones take longer to drain, but once you do, they need a longer cooldown. What if the school of magic with which the tome is inscribed somehow resonates with itself, making a book with most or all spells from the same school more powerful, but the focus limits the versatility. And maybe putting too many or too powerful spells from opposing schools into the same grimoire can reduce the effectiveness, or even cause a backlash at the caster.

I don't think it should really matter what other players do with their saves; they can limit them selves, or be allowed to exploit the system, whichever they prefer. BUT, if I had to have some type of limit on what kind of saves, where I could do them, how many, etc., I would probably split into 3 groups: 1) Combat Save (Save & Quit) - If you have to save in the middle of a battle, this will save your progress and quit your game; loading this kind of save will delete the file once you resume playing. You can only have one of these per Player Character. 2) Dungeon Save (QuickSave) - If you have to save in a location where you are exploring or traveling, but aren't in combat, you can use this save type; you can load this kind of save as many times as you want. You can only have one of these per Player Character; creating a new Dungeon Save will overwrite the old Dungeon Save. 3) Resting Save (Save Points) - If you are in a location deemed "safe" by the game, like resting in an inn or camping, you can use this save. This save can be loaded as many times as you want, and you can have as many of these saves as you want. This limits save scumming to a per combat basis, preventing save scumming on a per round or per action basis. Basically, increasing the granularity of the save limits the flexibility of the save. This is something that, if I had to, I could live with it. But really, Project Eternity doesn't really need anything like this. In my opinion, the sheer boredom of constantly reloading the game until you get the optimum desired result is punishment enough.

We've been told that the game starts with the PC having some kind of life changing experience, resulting from simply being in the wrong/right place at the wrong/right time. This could cause the same effect as the amnesia, in that, with the player directly observing or experiencing the event, the result is a character defining moment, thereby rendering any meager previous existence either unimportant enough for the player to not care about, or inconsequential enough to the main story that it allows the player to freely fill in the gaps themselves.

Membership is 8 extra dollars, because an 8 on its side is infinity. No other number will work because it won't make infinity.

I am sooooo glad that my wife can only see the 35 dollar reward tier when I'm browsing the Kickstarter. If she knew it was 35 + 20 + 8, she would be mighty pissed. We are only supposed to have 50 dollars a month for hobbies, but, dammit, I just can't help myself!

I love music in games. So far, any game I've backed on Kickstarter, I've gone straight to whichever tier has the soundtrack. The music sets the tone for the whole thing, in my experience. There have been games that were pretty good, fun to play and all that, but they never were very memorable to me, the sole reason being that the music didn't pull me in. While an orchestral score can be amazing for some games, it can make others feel derivative or forced. Ultimately, the music has to support the rest of the game, and an orchestra isn't something you should do to make the music "sound better". I will say that, for me, real recording sessions are miles better than whatever synthetic sounds you can stitch up in a digital studio, with the only exception being if synth is the sound you are going for.

I think that these kind of responses come from prior experiences. A lot of people have followed well known and acclaimed developers and franchises, loving the deep mechanics and stories, and ended up getting burned when the next game gets the triple-A, corporate approved, shiny-but-shallow treatment. Now, Obsidian comes along and says, "We're gonna do it right!" and there was much rejoicing And so they pin all their high hopes and trampled dreams on them. Now they are so heavily emotionally invested in Project Eternity that anything seen as a deviation from what their own "perfect" game entails, is met with flames and bile, because they aren't trusting Obsidian to make just a good game, or even a great game, but the penultimate story-driven tactical combat cRPG.... and that's probably not going to happen.

It wasn't JUST a simple question; it may have started that way, but then the person asking qualified the question by voicing their concerns that a common thief would be able to take on their demigod status character. With a qualification like that, Obsidian's response needed to be qualified as well, basically saying that, while they will have level scaling, it will be limited, and won't occur on the scale that the poster was concerned about.

Emphasis YOURS, and still don't get it? Are you kidding me? When they say "scale and then be fixed based upon where you go in the world first", how does that even remotely mean enemies in the same location will level up with you? What they are trying to say is that, if you are given a CHOICE between towns A, B, and C, they want the encounter difficulty to be easiest in the first town and hardest in the last town, no matter what order you visit them in. And then, once that order has been established BY THE PLAYER, the encounters are scaled and then FIXED; that means that after the initial scaling, there will be NO more scaling and the difficulty will be fixed. So if you come back to the easy town after playing through the hard one, it will still be easy; it won't scale anymore because it's been FIXED. Honestly, all of you are so paranoid, throwing around your accusations of BIOWARE and BETHSEDA, when they made it perfectly clear they weren't doing anything of the sort.

Upped my pledge for membership! I want to be the Bath Toy of the Obsidian Order. Squeak me!

Weather: Considering this will be an isometric RPG, the weather in the sky is limited to what you can see by looking at the ground. So lightning would only show as flashes of light, and clouds only seen by the ambient light on the ground. I do like the idea that there will be combat effects from weather, like fog reducing visibility and enhancing sneak skills, or snow slowing movement speed and reducing knockdown resistance, or making fire less effective and electricity more risky. Seasons: Depending how big the game world is, seasons can give the elapsed time spent traveling on the map a sense of scale. Realistically, If towns and fortresses are miles away from each other, traveling between them a lot will make time pass much faster, and seasons are a good way to show the player this instead of relying on an abstract date posted somewhere. If the quest took multiple in-game years to complete, I don't see that as a problem.

Well,looks like I was right.What's wrong romancers,one might think that you don't have actual arguments and after all there really is not desire for quality features but only the cheap and juvenile desire to pandered to despite insisting not to be the case. Thematically relevant? Okay. Project Eternity is about the nature of souls, right? How about exploring the idea that souls can interact with and affect each other? Can certain types of souls "harmonize" with other compatible souls, making both stronger or somehow changing them? On the other hand, can souls of such different ethics, like order/chaos and good/evil, coexist, or does prolonged contact and interaction "erode" them? Do souls exist in a vacuum, only to be affected by their vessel, or can they feel the effects of other souls, in cases like magic use and romantic/platonic relationships? Is there even a difference for the soul if the relationship is romantic or platonic? If they are affected by relationships, how quickly do the changes, if any, become noticeable to the character? Along the idea of there being stronger and weaker souls, does a strong soul make a weak soul stronger, or vice versa? Or does the stronger soul start to impose itself on the weaker soul, pressing it into submission? Or do the two souls find an equillibrium? There. Thematically relevant. That's just your speculation about how they are going to deal with the souls thing.Also wath you are writing sounds more like a desperate attempt to ham-fist romances in it rather than what Avellone would write(seriously is it even possible to get more cheesy than"love can change souls","can different souls hug each other or are they damaged by it"). Also you skipped the other points. But,hey,carry on watching romancers getting so desperate to justify this crappy feature while pretending to be so different than GaiderFans is moderatedly amusing. First of all, I agree with your first point: there is no reason romance has to be in the game, especially if it doesn't fit. As for your third point, you basically said that even if the romance was well written, it would go against point #2, which is redundant and not worth debating. Concerning the second point: Of course it's speculation; we are in the "Speculation and Discussion" Project Eternity forum, are we not? As for my writing, I am no writer, and have no idea what will actually fit with the game. All I presented were ideas where to take a romance plot that would be thematically relevant. If those ideas weren't your cup of tea, that's not my problem.

A way around this is to link difficulty with geography. Main roads and habitable areas have bandits, the edges of the wilderness have wildlife like wolves and bears, and the deep wilderness is where the crazy and challenging encounters happen. So not truly random, just random within a set.