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anek

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Everything posted by anek

  1. The difference is, that scaling individual monsters takes away any objective measure for how difficult that type of monster is, and how "tough" your party needs to become to be able to handle it easily. That is unfortunate for two reasons: Players who like to carefully micro-optimize their characters to the max (which is usually necessary when playing on high-difficulty / perma-death mode) are denied that empirical feedback. Players are denied the satisfaction of seeing how far they've come, in the form of meeting a type of monster which a few weeks ago of in-game time almost tore them apart, but now it doesn't even give them a scratch. So I totally agree with the OP: Replace monsters with different ones, or scale their numbers - don't scale their individual toughness.
  2. Am I the only one who can't help but read "Free Palestine!" every time I look at the part of the map that says... FREE PALATINATE OF DYRWOOD ...? Not just in this version, also in the original map...
  3. Roughly 200% of the target amount reached in the first half of the kickstarter - sounds like a success to me. And a lot can still happen in the second half - some of the other prominent kickstarters experienced a steep rise towards the end, especially if high stretch goals were introduced at that time.
  4. The devs have already stated in the kickstarter updates that they do not want to restrict the origin of the PC at all, and instead let the players decide for themselves who they want to be in the game. The only "special" thing about the your character will be that at the beginning of the story you witness a supernatural event that affects both you and the world and shapes the events to come. But where you came from, what kind of person you are, and how you deal with these events is up to you. So since the devs have already made up their minds about this, it doesn't really make sense to request a stretch goal that does the opposite.
  5. Fan servicing is what successful stretch goals are all about. The trick is to do it in a way that will place the least amounts of limits on the developers during the course of creating the game, so they are still free to create it however they want. A human ranger NPC named "Minsc" with a hamster in his pocket and 10 lines of dialogue, will be much easier to accommodate *somewhere* in the game (just stick him in some tavern or whatever), then accommodating a seventh faction after the devs get an ingenious inspired idea for how the world could be designed around exactly 6 factions that are related to each other in some special way.
  6. I don't think it needs to me mutually exclusive. Having an in-house artist do the base portrait set (i.e., at least one per gender per race per class per alignment), doesn't preclude having a 'famous' artist come and do 5 or 6 bonus portraits for whatever gender/race/class/alignment combinations he feels inspired to do. (I never played a cRPG where I felt that there were too many portraits to choose from, but quite a few where I felt that none of the shipped portraits really fit my character. So in this case more is always better...) And having an in-house composer, doesn't preclude having the composed music recorded by a live symphony orchestra.
  7. I think all those "more game content!" stretch goals may not be the best idea. For one thing they don't really inspire people that much - we don't even know how big the game will end up as it is, and what role different things like factions/companions/cities will play exactly, so how can we know how much additional value 'an extra race' or 'an extra companion' or 'an extra city' would actually be? Secondly, I wouldn't want Obsidian to get into a situation where they'll feel obligated to make a different game than they themselves would want to make, due to premature stretch goal promises that have been made. E.g. if due to unforeseen circumstances it turns out that they will be able to make either 5 really well-rounded and enjoyable companions, or 10 crappy companions, I sure hope that they won't have already promised to do 10. I think the best stretch goals are the ones which do not change the game in major ways, and are also much cheaper than the stretch goal target associated with them, but which can really inspire people. Don't make your fans go "Hm, ok, let me weigh the pro's and con's for a moment and figure out how much game time/flexibility/etc. this reward will objectively add to the game". Instead, make them go "Wow, cool! *turns off brain* *lets imagination/nostalgia take over* *fuzzy feeling inside* *reaches for credit card*". Now, the difficulty is of course in coming up with such stretch goals. My creativity is limited, so the best I can do is list some ideas based on some "inspirational" stretch goals of this sort that have been successfully used by other kickstarter projects, although I think Obsidian can probably come up with even better ones: Bring in a "celebrity" artist, e.g... a popular graphics artist, to design some of the character portraits a popular story writer, to design one of the the optional side-quest ... Commission live orchestral recording of the background music Let heroes from popular RPGs of the past have a small cameo appearance (like Drizzt from BG1 appeared in BG2) And of course, they should be set at least $500,000 apart, even if it costs much less to fullfil each of them. This way, most of the money can go towards plain 'ol development of the game itself in the way that Obsidian envisions it.
  8. While I think the InfinityEngine look of the late 90's / early 00's would still be acceptable, I hope that Obsidian will really use the technological possibilities of this decade to the fullest extent possible to give us the most stunning pre-rendered backgrounds ever used in a video game. The bar is really not that high, seeing as the big-budget games all go with live rendered 3D just because it's considered "cool".
  9. You better not solo through IWD2 then. In that game, strength and numbers of no-name enemies scale with the average character level of your party members (completely disregarding the number of party members). So if you're soloing, you'll have reached a pretty high level by the end of chapter 2, and you'll have the pleasure of being surprised by massive packs of ferocious dire wolves in the first two maps of chapter 3.
  10. This. Pre-rendered backgrounds can use a whole different arsenal of modeling and rendering techniques, as well as meticulous post-processing and fine-tuning by hand by the artists, because it does not matter if each 'frame' takes 3 hours to render on the company's high-powered rendering server plus 5 man-hours of post-processing - there will only be one 'frame' per area, so it'll be worth it. Compare this to the scenario proposed by the OP, in which at least 60 frames per second need to be rendered live on the users hardware (lets say, a 4 year old Laptop), i.e. each frame needs to be rendered in 16 micro-seconds or less and only using the kinds of techniques and 'tricks' which graphics cards support. Is it really that difficult to imagine how in the first scenario the backgrounds will look a hell-of-a-lot better?
  11. I'm not trying to push for romances in this particular game. (Although seeing as the devs have already confirmed that the PC's background and character will not be predefined, but can be defined by the players and their imagination, I don't see how it could not fit in the game if the player is so inclined.) What I'm arguing against, is the close-minded prejudice against game romances as "yay we had sex" Steam-achievement, rather than as a well-thought-out optional part of NPC dialog-trees and action-consequence scripts that is fundamentally intertwined with character development and friendship and gives a game depth and makes it 'come to life' better.
  12. And I say you're wrong in pretending that they are fundamentally separate things. If the PC and NPC find each other agreeable, spend enough time with each other, build trust, share viewpoints and stories, etc. - they become closer. What kind of relationship will develop, should depend on their respective inclinations and choices (through words and actions) as well as to some extend of course on circumstance and pure luck. That is role-playing at its best! If you don't like where your relationship with another character is heading, make this known through your words and actions and the other character can react. If you want the PC to be friends with a particular NPC but not romantically involved, then simply don't lead them on... Simple as that.
  13. Well, duh, not everyone will like every NPC personality. In that case simply "role-play" what you would do in real life, and ignore that NPC or tell him/her to shut up. I myself had little tolerance for the immature/whining NPCs in BG2, but quite enjoyed getting to know the (on the surface) "hostile" ones. If none of the NPCs who have a friendship/romance scripted in a particular game grow on you (or on the presonality of the character you're playing), then so what. Thats the beauty of role-playing: Everyone will experience the story differently, based on their inclinations and choices. But what makes you think that there could not be any NPC that you (or your PC) would actually like to get to know and spend conversation time with?
  14. Ever consider that those in favor of romances in RPGs, are not talking about the cheap "sex quests/achievements" you associate them with? Because we have seen good, mature examples of how 'romance' can be implemented, in games you apparently have not played? Look at BG2 for example. 'Romances' actually just consisted of being engaged in mature conversations about life, purpose, the past, the future, morals, etc. with your NPCs, and - over many days and weeks of in-game-time (= many hours of player time) - special trust and friendship forming between the PC and one of the party NPCs, out of which over time, something more then friendship could develop. Or not. It's the long way of getting there, with all the conversations with different viewpoints on 'mature' and 'deep' issues that were shared, that made 'friendships/romances' such a great part of the game - not simply a goal that was "achieved" at the end. I don't understand how romance-hating players could possibly be annoyed by romances as they were implemented in BG2, seeing as you had to actively pursue trust-building and friendship with that NPC, in order to even get them to the point that you could actually consider them romances. In every single personal conversation the NPC would engage you in, you had the option of choosing a dialog option along the lines of... "This is not the time to muse about such trivial tings, we have more important matters to worry about." ...and the NPC would respond with something like... "I... did not know you felt that way. I shall not bother you again." ...and the romance would be over irreversibly, even if it hadn't even started yet. What more do you want? I understand that you might rather not see developer resources put into implementing romances that could otherwise be put into features that you like, but I don't get how people can claim that romances would actually make the game less enjoyable for them, if they don't want to pursue them.
  15. I like this idea too. I think the effect it has on the game balance can be counterbalanced to some extent by making good reputation actually mean something. E.g. lets say if you always take the selfish root, never take risk to help others, kill everyone instead of cooperating with them, etc, then you will get more loot and endure no sacrifices like permanent loss of stat points or things like that - however, many side quests will become unavailable to you, you will not have allies in difficult boss fights, many shopkeepers won't sell to you, etc. So it will be: evil route --> higher immediate reward guaranteed good route --> you may be indirectly rewarded in the long-term, but it's not guaranteed
  16. If by "fair fight" you mean without reloading and then taking advantage of the fact that you know where exactly each of them will spawn, then neither have I...
  17. Why not? I never understood the point of the level caps in the InfinityEngine games, and tbh. found them pretty unfair. So I'd be interested in hearing your reasoning.
  18. Yeah, you would need to baby-sit them... It can be annoying, but is quite possible as BG2 shows (where you can get into a similar situation when you dual-class one of your party characters)
  19. No, that is not the case anymore now that Unicode is supported almost everywhere in the digital world. If the framework on which the application/game is based on (in this case, the Unity engine) supports Unicode for all its text handling (and I would be surprised if it didn't), then a Chinese translation should be just as trivial from a technical point of view as a German translation. PS: Of course, I don't know if English<->Chinese translators with fantasy game knowledge are as easy/cheap to find as English<->German translators. But that is a different question...
  20. Because in most games, your companions happily ignore your "run away, you fools" command, and start to wander back into the area of effect to hack some baddies as soon as you turn your attention elsewhere? Well, then may the solution is to simply not make PE one of those games? I never had such problems with the original InfinityEngine games, which had relatively non-aggressive party AI which (at least in BG2) you could even fine-tune, and which you could quickly disable (or re-enable) on demand with a single key-press.
  21. True, but having that iterative process in place will ensure continuous improvement and hence a much higher quality in the long run. It translations are done by professional all at once and shipped with the game in binary form, it will be much more difficult for fans to correct mistakes and make further improvements to the translation during the years to come.
  22. But whether or not it succeeds is something that the fans themselves can control. So if they really want it badly enough, it will happen. It they don't really want it that badly, why spend developer money it?
  23. But the Italian is also spoken in Switzerland, North Africa and in parts of South America, not to mention some small areas of Australia. I believe that a game of a certain value should be translated according to the standard EFIGS in Europe with possibly Russian. I hope that if they add other languages​​, Italian and Russian are the first choices. I'm pretty sure that a Russian translation would have a much larger user base for this kind of game than an Italian one. But personally, I think providing translations is overrated... I the devs make the game moddable enough, the user community can create their own translations using crowd sourcing. The resulting translations would probably be of higher quality than those commissioned from professional translators, too, since the latter usually don't understand fantasy settings very well, and certainly would not be as intimately familiar with the game as fans who have actually played it.
  24. The problem with large numbers is that they are difficult to read and even more difficult to quickly put in relation to one another. For example, if two quests got you 50 and 500 XP, respectively, then you will only need a split-second to look at those numbers and see the the second was ten times as "profitable" as the first. However, if it was 500000000 and 5000000000 XP respectively, it would take you much longer to extract the same information...
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