Starglider

Flail of the Ages was my favourite weapon in BG2

Support for ultra-high-resolution displays does not have to be anything more than 'upscale map & GUI texture using a high quality interpolation algorithm'. That is already better than simply running at a lower (non-native) res on your monitor, which is frankly already fine for a game like this. I say this as an owner of two 2560 x 1600 screens; for old Infinity Engine games I run at 1280 x 800 and let the monitor scaler double the pixels. Sure if the devs are supersampling the backgrounds anyway then keeping the high-res masters around for possible future ultra-HD releases seems sensible, but a seperate dedicated render sounds like another unwanted boat-anchor in a very packed dev schedule.

Dev & test resources. This isn't a free/open beta game where you can just hack stuff in and who cares if it fails. Officially supported features have to work reasonably well otherwise you are opening yourself up to huge liabilities from product returns. 3D support means testers doing an entire playthrough with 3D on with at least two hardware configs (Nvidia & AMD). So no it is not trivial to make an official feature although you can always release it as a unsupported patch. Either way I enjoy 3D for movies & first-person games but agree this is a pointless non-feature for this specific game.

This is a fuss about nothing. Even really cheap and nasty GPUs in 2014 will be able to handle this stuff fine (relaively cheap ones do so just fine now). Two or three dual-layer DVDs should suffice (probably still cheaper than a dual layer blu-ray). Download caps keep rising for the digital delivery fans.

The resource needed to manage, educate, QA and integrate volunteer contributions is very likely to exceed the resource needed to just do it internally. I think it would be better to just make the game reasonably moddable and allow people to add their own contributions after release.

No, I would not have backed this project if it was a jRPG. To feel even slightly realistic, combat has to have an element of frantic chaos, not 'swing sword, take a sip of tea, consider 100 tactical options, read a web page, cast spell, take dog for a walk, look up strategy guide, have thief do backstab...'

Muzzle-loader loose-powder firearms are really not that big a deal in gameplay. Historically the accuracy was so bad and the reload time so long that they wouldn't be much good for a few adventurers fighting a horde of monsters. Your fighter would get off one musket or maybe two pistol shots at the start of each fight and that's it (until you spend 30 seconds stationary & out of combat reloading), it certainly wouldn't overshadow conventional weapons much less spell use.

Malcolm (the insane jester-mage) from the first Legend of Kyrandia game was an interesting villain. He got a bit of pathos in the third game in the series.

I will write a pitch document for my enemy adventuring party design, laying out my concept, suggested implementation and why I think it would be a good addition to the game, Obsidian will decide whether that is something they want to use (even if they do, probably with some adaptation).

5000 USD : Planescape Torment was what really got me into CRPGs (as a student).

Second stronghold, with a very different style / feel / mechanic to the first one. Probably a 3.7M / 3.8M goal, but chosing which stronghold to take over would be a significant player choice and could fit into the story (e.g. isolated castle vs thieves guild or merchant compound in the middle of a city). As for furries, it would be silly not to include them, because the furry demographic has nontrivial spending power.

I don't see the need for a stack limit if the total weight is being tracked. All ammo of the same type should just auto-stack into one slot.

The best application of bows in this kind of setting would be taking down giant monsters. For human-sized opponents they're relatively hard for a single archer to hit, likely to be wearing magical armor plus you've got the problem of shooting into melee and risk of hitting your own fighters. Giant monsters you really don't want to be getting into close combat with if you can avoid it, as your shield + armor aren't going to do much good if a swipe from an owlbear casually knocks you to the ground and gives you concussion. Bows are great in that situation as they're a large slow-moving target.

One of the (many) great things about Planescape : Torment was the unusual companions. Nordom's struggle to deal with individuality, Morte's regrets about the pillar of skills, Dakkon's history in limbo, Grace's centuries of enduring torture in the Nine Hells; all of this added layers to their characters that you just wouldn't have had with 'random group of humans who accidentally wandered into Sigil'. Project Eternity is an exceptional game exempt from at least some of the usual 'must be dumbed down for mass audiences' pressure, and I hope the NPC design reflects that.

A fully interactive environment (e.g. all objects are physics objects) is a huge time/money sink. I doubt this game will have a physics engine at all; it is just not a sensible use of time/money when any attempt to do so is always going to be a poor shadow of the interactive worlds in Skyrim / Just Cause / GTA etc. Far better to spend the budget on the unique selling points of this game, and for world interactivity scripting specific interesting things to interact with (adventure game style) instead of generic physics on everything.

Pre-rendered is technically much easier, because you don't have to worry about polygon count or shader power for the target machine. You can render with ultra-high-polycount raytracing, touch up in photoshop as desired, export a low-poly lighting mesh and it will work on all PCs (and free up more GPU power for rendering the characters / 3D objects). It would be nice to be able to able to rotate the camera in 90 degree steps, or just flip it 180 degrees, both to be able to see the back side of buildings / objects and to handle the cases where your party is obscured (in an alleyway etc) better. This is definitely a luxury feature though.

The only reason gold weight is an issue is that fantasy games grossly undervalue gold versus real history.

Awesome, unfathomable and to a large extent alien, yet still flawed, emotional and even petty.

Very much agree. Having key lines voice acted makes the characters much more real - the player can fill in the rest from that baseline much more easily than making up a voice from scratch. However having every line recorded is not an efficient use of funds unless you have Grand Theft Auto level budgets to spray around. Note that realistically, leaving out voice acting entirely is not an option. The game just won't sell to a wide audience if it completely lacks such a basic modern feature.

Elaborately animated special attacks are not an efficient use of art resource, v.s. designing more creatures, portraits, NPCs, areas etc. The game would have to be massively overfunded before icing like this was needed. PS:T did this much more economically by having a simple character-specific orientation-independent graphic (like a spell effect) for critical hits.

It applies to any class / party really; for any given encounter there should be a few different strategies that could work, but there should not be any strategy that you can just keep using and beat every single encounter with.

Heh no one who hasn't been inducted into the dark rites of the marketing department can possibly guess what those guys will come up with

We don't need that! we have the dialogue screen to show us some descriptions regarding what the companions' faces may (or may not) betray during all those moments you are affecting their "loyalty" AND said descriptions should depend on your Perception/Intelligence/Wisdom stat (or whatever makes sense in this newly developed character system). This isn't a text adventure; if you wanted interactive fiction you are backing the wrong Kickstarter. The single biggest problem with PS:T was trying to cram novel-sized blocks of description into a tiny dialog window. Even Civilisation had NPC portraits with different facial expresions, way back in 1991, because showing is better than telling and somtimes a picture is literally worth a 1000 words (of tedious exposition). Getting to see a character you like happy or a character you hate angry is a small reward in itself.

I'm all for well written dialog trees but remember that they're not the only dialog mechanism. Banter between party members (timed and on visiting location) is great for filling out characterisation. Mass Effect 2 had hotspots where you could get party members to comment on the surroundings. A rarely seen option that I personally like is being able to drag-drop an inventory item onto a character and (if it's a major plot item) have them comment on it. It's a little more convenient and natural than clicking through a dialog tree to get to 'ask about this item'.

Yes, because simply implementing the most popular choice (white male protagonist / white female love interest) is highly discriminatory.