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Hugo Rune
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Posts posted by Hugo Rune
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- All Summoned weapons are now considered universal weapon type.
Does this mean they will no longer benefit from Weapon Focus talents?
I suspect this means the exact opposite. I believe they are now treated like soulbound weapons and can benifit from any of the weapon focus talents. Like, a summoned quarterstaff would also get the accuracy bonus if you have only the ruffian talent.
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Hmm, I've been hearing the same thing about the German translation. Doesn't concern me, I wouldn't have wanted to play the game in German anyway but in the past I've been playing German localizations from time to time. You're right, they are often atrocious and can be so bad that an otherwise great game is completely destroyed because it's so distracting. They often seem to be done by high school students with just the barest grasp of either language. I really can't imagine why in videogames, an industry that has now been fully established for a long time and is in part eclipsing movies in terms of the money that is being made, translations are so often utterly unprofessional. If this is the case with PoE it's really a damn shame, even more so because the game is so text heavy. I fully understand anyone who is angry about it. It's disrespectful of the fans who don't speak English well enough to play the game in the original version and it feels like a rip-off.
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I think the problem in BG2 was not that there were too many quests in chapter 2 but that there was (comparatively) too little to do in chapters 5 and 6. Thinking about it, there was that huge variety of things to do in the beginning, most of it optional, a pretty good middle with still lots of optional stuff (Sahuagin city and the three possibilities to finish the Ust Natha questline) and a very linear end. I loved the game so much that I would have liked the end to have the same content density as in the beginning or even more, as long as the quality stayed the same. But thinking about it rationally, it already was a huge game. How much content can you expect? There are limits to what can reasonably be done in such a game.
So, going from the premise that BG2 was already pretty much at the limit in that respect and seeing that there really was a huge inbalance in terms of content in the different stages of the game, I have to agree with Josh here. The game wouldn't have suffered if there were maybe 2 or 3 fewer huge quests in the beginning and 2 or 3 more in the end. It might even have been better as it'd not been so lopsided.
But that's reason speaking. What I'd really want would be a game of the consistent quality of BG2 that's just as absurdly bloated at the beginning as at the end.
f*** I just noticed how old and how long this thread already is. Don't mind me, I had a bit too much to drink...
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Strange, forum won't let me edit my post. Anyway...
@danielkx
"Filthy rich" was tongue in cheek. I don't think they'll be filthy rich. But if they'll sell ~1mil, I think that would be a pretty huge deal. It's more than enough for a spectacular sequel and it could be tha basis for them to really go independent and make the games they want.
@Tigranes
I agree that you have to take into account the several tens of thousands of their most hardcore following who are willing to give them money for a game that they haven't even begun working at. But those are only a fraction of the people who would like to play and buy such a game once it's finished and what's more, you have to keep up with those things at least a little bit to notice that a kickstarter campaign is even going on. Most people don't, I think. I personally know lots of people who I expect will buy the game but haven't pledged.
@diamonds0a
Thank you! That's pretty much what I thought. I'm really happy that they have their own IP now as that will hopefully mean that we'll see many more of this kind of game from them in future. Actually, I'd wish that they take some of that money and try to create another new IP. Something that's really out of the box and goes beyond the typical high fantasy/space opera/post apocalyptic setting. I'd like them to give Josh free hand to create the game he'd like to make without any constraints. I've really been impressed with all that he's come up with and he seems to be big on history. An rpg in a really historical setting has long been a dream of mine. It's probably too risky but a guy can dream...
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As I understand it, the deal with Paradox covers only very specific aspect of the actual publishing of the game. Shipping and such. I could imagine it freed up some of the money from the kickstarter that was budgeted for these things. Sure, Paradox will make money on this too but to me this doesn't look like the usual publisher deal as in "we finance the game and keep all the money and all you get is a lump sum and maybe a bonus if the reviews are good". Obsidian financed the game by themselves, through the kickstarter. So in this case I'd expect it to be the other way 'round. Obsidian gets to keep the money and Paradox is maybe getting a percentage or even a lump sum.
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I was wondering. I think that this game will be pretty huge. As in, it'll sell really well. It's my understanding that one of the most attractive aspects of crowdfunding for a developer is that, as long as you stay on budget and actually manage to create the thing you set out to create, it's pretty much impossible to fail in a conventional sense, i.e. to create a loss. You've been making the thing with other people's money that you never have to pay back, so every unit you sell is pure profit. Now, I think that Obsidian didn't stay entirely on budget. The game was delayed quite a bit and that costs money that had to come from somewhere. So I guess they either invested some of their own money or got some extra money from somewhere else. Maybe that's what the deal with Paradox was for.
Anyway, maybe someone with a little knowledge of these things wants to speculate a bit (or someone without knowledge wants to speculate regardless).
How much did Obsidian go over budget in your opinion?
How many units can a game like this be expected to sell?
Is Obsidian now filthy rich?
Unfortunately I couldn't even start speculating about that as my knowledge of videogame development and the finances of it is pretty much non existent.
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So, I've been sitting at work all day, hardly getting anything done because I keep coming back to checking on the reviews as they come in. I haven't had the opportunity to play the game yet and probably I'll still have to wait a few days until I have enough time to really get into it but from what everybody's saying and from what I'm reading, it seems clear to me now that you've done it. This is shaping up to be a stunning success, a worthy successor to the IE games and may even become a classic in it's own right.
I have to say I'm giddy with excitement. It makes me so happy how this has worked out. I've always liked, even loved your games but I also understood much of the critizism that was coming your way. At the same time I always believed that you were capable of really great things if you could just work on your own terms for a change, without publishers interfering. Something outside the mainstream. I always believed that but I also always had nagging doubts if I wasn't deluding myself, if that wasn't just a narrative I wanted to believe.
Well, maybe it's still to soon to say but from what I'm seeing, you've proved it now. Sweet vindication!
(Hope that wasn't too sappy but that's how I'm feeling at the moment.)
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I have not read every post in this thread but I'd like to add my 2 cents anyway. BG2 is kinda exemplary in 2 ways, a good and a bad one. Of course it can be soloed, I've done it lots of times with many different characters. But the experience varies a lot, depending on the character you're playing and your level.
Generally, at low levels and when playing a non-arcane character, soloing the game is hard. It requires intense metagame knowledge and a lot of careful tactics and patience. You'll need to know where every trap is and what effect it has. You need to know every encounter and where enemies will spawn and so on. Dealing with mages often means running away, hiding and waiting till their spells run out. Dealing with poweful meele enemies often means kiting them and whittling them down with sling bullets or something. Setting traps where you know enemies will spawn or turn hostile to effectively skip a lot of otherwise very difficult encounters. Stuff like that. What this means is that most people wouldn't want to do it. It's not, generally speaking, fun. Most people wouldn't even think of it. I didn't ever think of it until long after I became very experienced in the game.
For an experienced player it can become fun though, but you're not really playing the game anymore, you're playing with the game, if that makes sense. You're not involved in the story, there generally aren't any pitched, intense battles that you win by a thread. The game becomes about testing your superior knowledge, finding new and creative ways to get around challenges in ways the creators of the game never intended. This can be a lot of fun, as long as the game really is set up in such a way that it's only players who have already played the game many times in the intended way, players who otherwise probably wouldn't play the game anymore anyway, who can do it. I hope it's going to be possible. Probably it's very hard to make it impossible anyway in a complex game like this because the developers con never think of everything.
The second way of soloing the game that was also in BG2, is broken and I hope we won't be seeing it anymore. The way experience sharing worked in BG2, combined with the ridiculous power curve of arcane magic users meant that after quite a short time in the beginning of the game, sorcerers, mages and mage-multi/duals just became so powerful that it actually felt that it was easier to solo the game with them than to use a party. Planetars coud replace fighters and clerics easily and spells like project image, time stop, improved alacrity, chain contingency and several more, at times when the enemies didn't have anything to stand up to it (which, if you use them right is pretty much all the way to the end of TOB), combined with the right items meant that you could just stomp through the game, laugh at everything thrown at you and never feel challenged at all.
Anyway, from what I've read about Josh Sawyer's design ideas I'm confident that this kind of brokenness is out. That's a good thing, I think, even if a small part of me will miss the times when I figured out for the first time what kind of crazyness was actually possible when playing my high level sorcerer.
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About mechanics, I want to know as much as possible as long as it doesn't tie in with the story in a way that it makes sense to only find out during gameplay.
About story and characters we know enough already, imo.
About lore and the world, I want to know everything that might be considered "common knowledge" from an in-world perspective. I love reading about this kind of stuff and it just makes me more excited about the game. I want to start the game with a very good picture of the world and it's history, cultures and so on because I think it rarely makes sense to find out all this stuff during gameplay when you're playing a character who grew up in this world. But there should still be enough stuff to find out and discover during gameplay. Stuff that isn't commonly known or even stuff that is commonly believed to be true but actually isn't. I wouldn't mind if Obsidian actually spread a bit of disinformation in this regard.
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I like the idea of different languages in the game world, I think it'd add great atmosphere but I'm not that keen on some far fetched quest to "decipher" it. Really, you don't hunt down "stone slabs" to decode single characters of a spoken language. You either find someone who can teach it to you or you make due with pantomime until you understand a few words and then go from there. I'd just like a speak language skill. In general, I'd like all kinds of knowledge skills and stuff like decipher script and so on. I was always disappointed that computer RPGs just never do that king of stuff.
Edit: sorry, should have read you post through to the end. Yes, for a dead language the rosetta stone approach makes much more sense and could be fun. Still, I'd like the whole thing to be skill based.
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Probably someone has already thrown that out, I'm not going to read the whole thread right now, but the stamina/health system that you guys are planning might give good opportunities for light/heavy armor tradeoff.
Heavy armor would impose a stamina penalty while significantly reducing health loss when hit. Light armor doesn't affect stamina but when you're hit, your health suffers more.
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I like a good turn based system but RTwP was an integral part of the old IE games and I liked it a lot there. I'd be disappointed if PE wasn't RTwP also because of that.
Also TB really needs to be done right or it becomes boring. I liked combat in ToEE for the many options and full party control but I found the combat in Fallout 1&2, even though I love those games for the world, atmosphere and the writing (and the SPECIAL system!), to be a snooze-fest. What's the point of a turn based system if you can only control one character and one that has few attack options at that (and will likely only use one of them - either burst or aim for the eyes - for 90% of the game)
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Well, I certainly don't think they should open their books for us, that'd just be stupid. I wouldn't mind if they gave us an overview on how much of the money is going where, though. Double Fine did that and it was interesting to see how much of the money could be realistically expected to go into the game after kickstarter and amazon fees, failed payments, costs for physical rewards and so on was accounted for.
I generally think they should take a page out of Double Fine's book when it comes to keeping backers informed.
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I dont think I am familiar with the warlord class anyone care to elaborate for me so I can be appropriately out raged?
I don't think Adam means this Warlord class (it's homebrew, i.e. not official!) but the 4E Warlord, which is much closer to the Paladin archtype.
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I'm not really an Adventure Game person but I've seen Episode 1 of the DFA Documentary and the highlights reel and I am hoping that they follow suit. Adam mentioned in the recent Sorcerer's Place interview that they were looking at the way Double Fine Adventure are handling their post-kickstarter updates.
That's great to hear! Seems I have missed that particular interview. Double Fine is doing a great job of really keeping their backers in the loop and the sense of progress you get from the updates helps a lot to maintain the excitement for the project even long after the kickstarter has ended.
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So, Obsidian is going to film and document the whole development process, which I think is a great idea. They don't do it as a stretch goal so they don't owe us anything, really, and maybe they haven't decided yet but I'd still like to know, if possible, how they're going to do it. Is this going to be a documentary as in "we're filming all our work, then, towards the end, we'll cut all the material to make a roughly 90 min feature and release it to our backers" or are you going to do it like Double Fine and release parts of the documentary as episodes whenever there's a new stage in the development process and/or to show different aspects of the production (or soemthing different alltogether?).
To those who haven backed Double Fine Adventure and therefore can't see it, Double Fine are constantly releasing episodes of their documentary (there are 5 so far), each showcasing different aspects of development and what has happened so far. So far they have done episodes on the writing process, introduced the programmers and how they work, showcased the artists and so on. In between they are releasing a ton of other updates from just-for-fun stuff like watching Tim Schafer play his old games to in-depth articles about art, production, programming and so on. They are very careful not to spoil anything but it gives a great sense of being part of the production and a fascinating behind-the-scenes look at how such a game is being made. It's also very entertaining.
So, basically, what I'm saying is: I want this. Of course Obsidian hasn't planned to do this from the start like DF, so I'm not expecting quite the same wealth of information but it would be great if you modeled your approach to this documentary business after Double Fine.
Of course this is mainly directed at the Developers but I hope others here will chime in. So, what's your opinion on this? Agree/disagree/don't want them distracted from making the game/don't care/whatever?
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I'd be surprised and also a bit disappointed if Obsidian didn't include something very like the casting time from the IE games. As Director said, AD&D did the same thing by pushing wizards back in the initiative order so as to give others a chance to interrupt their spells. The way the IE games did it seems to be a very natural and logical way to do this in a quasi real time system. It also just makes sense that it actually takes a little time to cast a spell. How would you balance it otherwise anyway?
Btw, the fact that you could sometimes shut down a spellcaster had little to do with this mechanic but with bad AI. Install an AI enhancement mod such as SCS and spellcasters will actually make use of the many protective spells at their disposal. You won't be shutting them down then. Let's just hope they do a better job with the AI in this game. Another way to make the whole shutdown issue less likely would be to give spellcasters a chance to resist interruption like 3E does it.
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I like turnbased systems. Highly tactical and interesting if done well and much more exact player contol. Can be great fun, didn't like it much in Fallout, though. Anyway it should be clear that it's not going to happen in this game. PE is trying to follow the IE games which were RTwP (which I like just as much as TB combat) and the vast majority of people, me included, absolutely want it that way. It's just one of these things that come up again and again, like multiplayer, console ports, full voiceover, etc. that are completely pointless because it was stated from the very beginning without question that they wouldn't happen.
And, really, if Obsidion now, after the kickstarter is over and you can't remove your pledge anymore even start to consider changing such a cornerstone of the whole project as RTwP combat, I'd be really pissed. Even though I also would have pledged for a TB game... It would just be dishonest and feel like taking the piss.
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Seriously, it's going to be a 14 level dungeon! There have to be exits every now and then! If the dungeon is well designed it will become successfully harder the lower you go and you should expect to have to turn back at some point and come back later when you've gained some more experience. I can't think of anything more pointless and boring than trudging back through several empty levels you've alrady been to with the knowledge that you later will have to do the same thing again in the other direction, perhaps several times throughout the game. That'd just be horrible design.
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137.5k on paypal now!
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I've preordered too because I want it to succeed but I have to admit I'm not that excited about it. It seems it'll add little over Tutu or BGT with mods. Bugfixes are well and good but the game is pretty solid as it is already and the new content is meh. Of the three new companions I'm only slightly interested in the Wild Mage girl because I've always liked the class. I probably won't touch the monk (I hate DnD monks) and the Half-Orc Blackguard (I always found Blackguards to be such a silly concept. Fighters with some vaguely evilish abilities haphazardly tacked on, being all evil and stuff.). The only thing I feel is really worthwhile in this is that they promised to make the game easier to mod by leaving a lot more things soft-coded. I hope that'll breath some life into the BG modding community again.
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You won't be getting kill XP, so you will avoid combat as much as possible, which is only a good mechanic for a game like Deus Ex or a game with rather linear levels imo. This is the kind of thing that makes your eyes roll in disgust whenever you have to kill trash mobs - because the reward is practically non-existant. Annoying combat.... Check!
I don't see why this should be true. It'll certainly get easier to decide to take the sneaky/talky route instead of just stabbing them for XP, if that's what you want to do but there's still the fact that
A) you don't get to loot an enemy if you don't kill them and
B) sometimes an axe to the face (make that an exciting, tactical battle) is it's own reward.
I certainly have never gone out of my way to avoid battle in games where I didn't get XP for every enemy killed.
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We are not getting to $4M barring something truly massive. Right now, we're at $3.44M Kickstarter + $0.1M-odd Paypal for a total of roughly $3.55M with 14 hours to go. We've been averaging slightly more than $10K per hour for the past 30 hours or so. It is reasonable to assume that this will continue and quite possibly even increase to $15-20K per hour in the last 10 hours, but even so that would only take us to $3.75-3.8M total. Basically, to get to $4M, we would need to eclipse the collection rate of the very first day which doesn't sound very plausible.
Actually, we wouldn't have to make as much as the first day. We're now at about 3.45 million, factoring in a round 100k from paypal, we're at 3.55. We've collected roughly 75k today so far (which is much more than we did yesterday at this point, iirc) and would need another 450k. So we'd have to collect about 525k total today which is almost 200k less than the first day of the campaign and a little more than double of what we made yesterday. I'm not gonna say it's easy but it seems doable. This campaign has pretty much destroyed all predictions so far.
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It's not so much the grinding, I think, but that, if you give XP for each kill and each task accomplished (like picking a lock, beating a speech challange,...) it becomes your best tactic to do them all. Like in FONV there were many locks that you could either pick or open via a computer terminal that you could hack. your best option was to hack into the computer but not open the lock, then pick the lock -> presto, double XP. This scenario repeats itself whenever there are multiple ways to accomplish a task. That's the weird/degenerate scenario Josh is talking about I think and I agree. I still would like to see XP per enemy killed but I know this has bugged me too in the past and I can't see another way to deal with it effectively, so I'm not bothered.
Edit: uh, seems I'm a little late with my answer...
What about a pause button?
in Pillars of Eternity: General Discussion (NO SPOILERS)
Posted
What are you talking about? If unpausing is happening in 20% of the cases it can be really annoying but the autopause still has it's use in 80%. That's obvious.
I agree with the OP. It's just a minor annoyance for me but I have noticed it too. Adding an option for a pause button that doesn't unpause would fix this problem completely and very efficiently. It's a good suggestion.