anek

The high-level spells were of course powerful, but except for BG2:ToB, most of the gameplay time in the Infinity Engine games was spent at lower levels. So if I look back at what spell I had the most amount of fun with on the whole throughout the IE games, it would probably be Aganazzar's Scorcher. A hoarde of enemy monsters think they're real smart, for ambushing my party from behind in a tight dungeon tunnel and melee-attacking my wizard or sorceror? Well, they shoudda thought again...

Hm, yeah, I guess you're right. I hope it doesn't automatically download & install anything without asking first, though. And also, an in-game upgrade feature might be problematic for systems (Linux, potentially Windows 7, ...) where the user running the game may not have write access to its executable and datapack. Edit: Just saw your post with Feargus answer - thanks!

Maybe not intentionally, but users of the Steam version will presumably get patches through the Steam client, and users of the GoG version from their GoG.com account page, so in order for users of the boxed version to get them, Obsidian would have to set up a PE download area on its own website or something. So it's not about them arbitrarily excluding some users, it's something that would require them to spend additional work/money.

Better. (Kicktraq seems to update infrequently...)

And the day is not over yet...

Btw, were the $250 and $500 tiers reduced to only 1 digital download each? I thought they had 2 each, when I last looked. But maybe my memory is just playing tricks on me...?

Well, I guess they hope that PE will be a commercial success. Many of us believe it will, but it's not guaranteed. But then again kickstarter projects are not guaranteed to successfully deliver on their goals in the first place. If your reward includes a copy of the game, what it actually means is that if the development of the game succeeds as planned, then you will get a copy of it. Similarly, if your reward includes a copy of the expansion, what it actually means is that if the development of the game succeeds as planned, and if after that it sells enough copies to fund development of an expansion, and if the development of the expansion then succeeds as planned, then you will get a copy of it. Yes, it means you have to go out on a limb. But that's what you are doing anyways, whenever you support a Kickstarter project. It is up to you to decide, which risks are acceptable for the amount of money you choose to pledge. If you are unsure about the expansion, simply ignore it and only choose the corresponding tier if you would have chosen it anyways.

But then it would feel more like a store than like a fund-raising drive.

You're right, in cases like this it could work pretty well. I guess the best method depends on the kind of riddle then: answer is a uniquely defined combination of characters (e.g. a name, number, ...) ==> let the player type the answer answer is a word or phrase expressing a concept (e.g. "air", "death", "love", "forest", "never") which might have different synonyms/spellings ==> let the player choose from multiple answers

I think BG2 actually did a pretty good job of crafting the riddles in such a way that they were still challenging, even though they were multiple choice. Often, some of the wrong answers were quite misleading, or corresponded to what you would intuitively choose as your "first guess" before properly thinking it through. In other cases, having only a limited amount of choices was actually determined by the set-up of the riddle in an in-game realistic manner - like having to place 7 items in 7 pots, in the correct combination. In at least one case, you actually had to crunch some numbers, so having multiple choice answers of "20", "25", "30", "35", "40" (or whatever it was) didn't really help all that much - you still had to do the calculation. As for "filling in the blanks", as others already mentioned there are some problems associated with that, like how can you handle all possible synonyms of a word, and what about spelling errors, etc... I guess it would be possible to implement in a non-frustrating manner for very specific riddles crafted with the aforementioned pitfalls in mind, but I don't think it can serve as a be-all and end-all solution for riddles in general.

What counts is the Eurovision Song Contest. Israel competes in it, hence it's European...

Ever heard of Notepad?

Higher tiers add lots of different rewards. Some are digital, some are physical. Some have symbolic value, some have monetary value. Some will affect the game itself, some not. You haven't given a single reason why your 'poorer fans should not be discriminated!!' argument should be explicitly applied only to this one single reward (in-game pet), when it fact it is an abstract argument that applies equally (and equally weakly) to all of them. No, you don't get a middle finger, you get the rewards of those tiers. Which includes the highly sought after 'beta access' reward, which those choosing the $50 tier will not get. If you think this $25+$25 tier combination is a bad deal compared to the additional rewards of the $50 tier (which, among other things, includes the pet), then feel free to choose that tier instead. If you think it's still a good deal in comparison, then, well, you have nothing to complain about.

Well, by that logic, everybody should get all the rewards of the $5000 tier (not just the pet), even if they only pledged $1. Yes, some fans are more affluent than others, but different fans of comparable affluence also choose to give different amounts. Its not like the pet is at a really high tier. It's at $50. That's a sum which everyone who is rich enough to have a computer with Internet access, can afford - if they want to. Of course, if you have different priorities, that's fine - but I don't think there's anything wrong with a cosmetic in-game token of appreciation for those who do choose to give that much. Anyways... If the game is properly moddable, every piece of "exclusive" content will be recreated by modders anyways, so no need to worry. Although such mods will probably only start to pop up some weeks or months after the release, so for a limited time, the content will indeed be exclusive. Which I think is perfectly fair.

Quote from Bobby Null, one of the Obsidian designers, in another thread:

True. However, note that designing the engine like this may not only benefit modders, but also Obsidian themselves - at the very latest, when it comes to creating expansions or additional games based on that engine in the future. Edit: As for NWN, yeah, I wouldn't want that repeated either. But I'm also confident that this won't happen in the case of PE. Just look at everything the devs have written about it so far - they clearly have a strong vision for the story and world they're designing, so that will obviously come first, no matter what they commit to in terms of opening up the engine to modders. When the choice is between awesome story and world + 60 optional sidequests and awesome story and world + 50 optional sidequests + modder-friendly, accessible engine design though, I would definitely choose the latter.

I enjoyed messing with the internals of the InfinityEngine games, installing and using some of the superb mods created by others, and also creating small mods and fixes myself for personal use. And I'm really looking forward to being able to do some of this (and more) for PE. I hope, however, that no kickstarter money is wasted for provided official "modding tools" or a "mod distribution infrastructure". This is just not necessary, because fans can also provide all of that, for free. And they (or rather, we) can provide them and improve them over time in such a way that it fits whatever modding purposes we come up with, not in a way that only covers what the original developers though that modders might want to do. And in fact, it may divert attention from what is really required in order to ensure that PE will get as many (actually useful) mods as the InfinityEngine games, and hence live on for decades to come just like them - namely, a modder-friendly data file structure and data/scripts driven engine design. But maybe we all just have different ideas of what "modding" actually is? I get the feeling that to many people (especially those who grew up with the newer 3D RPGs, rather than the Infinity Engine games), it merely means having an editor with which they can create new maps/areas, stick a bunch of monsters in them, and then upload them somewhere so others can explore them. For me, this is just a very small part of what modding means - especially for a game with 2D pre-rendered backgrounds such as this, where not many fans will be able to come up with new high-quality maps anyways. Modding, in the sense of the IE games, means that modders can freely tweak or extend the internals of the game's rules, behavior, entities, maps, and other data - in order to provide bug fixes, "tactical enhancements" mods, additional NPCs and companions, and many, many, many other things. I've explained it in more technical terms here: http://forums.obsidi...n/#entry1227128

What about what Archmage Silver quoted above?

Yes, the 'familiars' in BG2 were not very useful in battle... But some of them made for really nice scouts, due to high stealth proficiency and good magic/elemental resistance. Anyways, the PE pet will only be cosmetic, so I guess it won't even have that.

I think the idea of this '20k likes' campaign is not to get just existing PE fans to like the facebook page (Obsidian wouldn't really gain anything from that), but rather to encourage fans to spread the word about PE to other people who are already on facebook, so that those will visit and like that page, and maybe some of them go one step further and become new kickstarter contributers. For may people nowadays, facebook is the main (or even only) source of information about projects like this, and even if they already know about it they might be more willing to support it if has a facebook page which they can like, subscribe to for updates, and share with other facebook users. It's kinda like reddit in that regard, only for a different kind of crowd.

Yikes, that doesn't look like something that would ever emerge through natural evolution... (Or something that a sane god would create, in case you're more of a creationist...) And I somehow doubt that genetic engineering would fit the setting of PE...

Yeah, yeah, I've read the arguments that people use to justify piracy (2DBoy listened to those arguments as well and World of Goo had an 82% piracy rate without DRM), but have you ever attempted to find anything on the Nexus? It's a usability nightmare. Um, not using the steam version has nothing to do with piracy. Some people just don't like steam and the whole DRM hassle. I for one will use the DRM-free version from my kickstarter reward. As for the article you linked, maybe you should have read all of it, 'cause they come to the conlusion that "there seems to be no difference in the outcomes" of piracy rates for DRM vs DRM-free games, and they think that DRM is a "waste of time and money" (quotes directly from the article).

I guess how important this is will depend on the zoom level they choose. If the characters are as tiny as in BG2, they really don't need much detail... )

PE won't be using 3D terrain though, it will (mainly) use pre-rendered backgrounds shipped with the game as 2D images.

But it handles only the low-level stuff like sprites and 3d models, right? I would guess it's still up to the game developer's to implement how e.g. they store and load map and character scripts, spell definitions, XP progression tables, save-games, etc... as that is different for every (type of) game, and Unity is not bound to any particular type of game. So the actual "game engine" of Project Eternity - on the same level as the Infinity Engine was the game engine of Baldur's Gate - would not be Unity itself, but rather a custom RPG engine developed by Obsidian on top of Unity. I think that's also why in one of the updates or interviews they spoke of using a combination of tools provided by Unity, and specialized in-house tools they already have. Well, the Infinity Engine was also closed source. It was probably written in C++, but that doesn't really matter - because all the actual rules and behaviors of the game's character classes and NPCs and items and areas and quests were not hard-coded, but rather bundled as (compiled) LUA scripts, plus simple text files for dialogs. Modders came up with a tool ("Near Infinity") that could parse the bundled data and extract and decompile those LUA scripts and text files, so they could be studied and modified. Modified versions of scripts and dialog files (or additional ones) could be placed in the games "Override" directory, and the game would automatically use the ones it found there instead of the corresponding ones bundled inside the main game archive(s) - this allowed mods to be easily installed and uninstalled without having to modify the shipped game data. And it gave *a lot* of flexibility as to what modders could do, like continue fixing bugs in quest and dialog scripts, even years after the publishers have stopped releasing official patches translate dialogs into different languages for which there was no official translation mods that replaced the high-level abilities of playable classes with completely different, innovative ones mods that added new joinable NPCs into the existing game mods that painstakingly modified pretty much all encounters in the game to become more difficult and tactically diverse mods that created completely new maps/adventures Unfortunately, in the later (mostly 3D) games, the focus of modding has almost exclusively been only on the very last point from the above list: allowing players to create new addon maps/adventures. While having that is of course nice, I think it was actually all the modding possibilities for modifying the actual main game itself, that contributed the most to the longevity of the Infinity Engine games. And remember that those games didn't provide any modding tools at all - fans created them all by themselves, like they saw fit. The point being: For simple "user created addon maps", having a crappy engine design and merely shipping a "map design tool" (with obtuse internal workings) with the game is enough. All the other interesting modding possibilities, however, will require a well-designed, flexible, accessible, and data/scripts driven engine - whether tools to work with it are provided by the devs or instead by fans is then pretty much irrelevant. So that is what we should be asking Obsidian for - not simply "modding tools".