[will there be injuries and will they matter?]

as for my own preference: i'd like for healing potions to work on wounds, cuts, bruises and the like...but if major injuries happen i'd like to see a bit more effort put into healing them, perhaps i need to see a specialist, visit an alchemist who specializes in regeneration etc..

 

Yes, the injury system in Dragon Age was excellent in this regard.

[Romances, yay or nay?]

If RPGs were to treat romance as seriously as the movies I watch and books I read, they could probably only include one per game, and it would be explored through the main plot.

 

If you want a completely fixed, static experience go play a JRPG. In western-style RPGs player choice is a vital element and forcing the protagonist to have a pre-set relationship with one NPC eliminates that.

 

Personally in a fantasy RPG I prefer fantastic relationships, with exotic partners or circumstances that you'd never get in real life. I get enough exposure to standard human relationships from all the other media and indeed everyday life.

[Companion loyalty system?]

Voted 'yes, invisible' but it would be cool if the character's UI portrait changed depending on whether they are neutral/happy/unhappy, so that you can see at a glance / have a constant visual reminder of whether your party is cheerfully following you in to hell, or sullenly executing your orders with gritted teeth.

[[Merged] Durability]

Edges going dull and armor getting dented, such that I have to remember to visit a blacksmith and click 'repair all' every so often to restore full bonuses, is a nice touch. Items actually breaking is just annoying, unless they are junk / ancient / improvised weapons. Having to individually repair every item is pointless interface busywork when 90% of the time the player wants all of their items sharpened / fixed etc.

[Encountering New Races - PC committing atrocities]

Being caught stealing should definitely trigger hostility, the current CRPG trend (and JRPG baseline) of letting you loot everything from everwhere without consequences is bad. I really like Skyrim's crime system, where you can fight, run, pay a fine, go to jail or (for some crimes) use personal favours to get out of punnishment. Probably took a fair chunk of dev resource though, might not be feasible to implement for this project.

[What do you want the other race(s) to be?]

Hippo people. There are just not enough anthropomorphic hippos in games these days.

 

Heh another Spelljammer fan.

[[Merged] Co-Op Multiplayer as some potential future stretchgoal?]

A lot of people say the funds that could go into adding co-op multiplayer should instead go towards making the single player game "even more awesome". While a lot of people will agree with this statement, we need to keep in mind the law of diminishing returns: adding more and more resources towards only one feature will at first increase its quality and attractiveness by a large amount,

 

The budget for Baldur's Gate 2 was something like $5 million in 1999 money. So even assuming Obsidian are match-funding the Kickstarter budget 50-50, doubt this will be an issue unless the Kickstarter exceeds $5M

[Respawning enemies.]

Destroying the monster generators back in Gauntlet was very satisfying, and created a tactical choice between killing the monsters and destoying the generators. The modern equivalent of that is that when passing through an area you can chose to just fight your way through, or go the extra mile to destroy the black magic obelisk / orc encampment / tunnel entrance fo the underworld / evil cult temple etc. That wouldn't remove all wildlife but it would take out the primary threat from the area. I think players would enjoy the sense of accomlishment and ability to actually change the game world in this way (where appropriate of course).

[Epic Weapons / Armor / Items ?!]

I agree (I think) that a formulaic upgrade system like Diablo (sockets) or Skyrim (soul gems) doesn't seem appropriate for the direction this game is going. I preferred the BG series where you had to find specific parts or do specific quests to unlock the potential of each artifact, e.g. finding all the bits for the flail of the ages. It would be even better if there was an element of choice in some cases e.g. you can make a magial sword powered by a trapped spirit better at killing or parrying depending on how you solve a quest to strengthen the spirit.

[My weapon does nothing!]

IMHO outright immunity is a poor design choice, unless it's something ridiculous like trying to attack a dragon with a buffer knife. Attacks in the face of heavy resistances should do at least scratch damage, so that characters aren't rendered totally useless (even though they may be tactically ineffective). Even if the enemy can regenerate faster than the blocked character alone can damage it, they can contribute DPS to a group attack. In fact one of the nice things about CRPGs is that you can implement 'regenerates specific types of damage at different rates' easily without burdening a GM with bookeeping. That means that if say you're a low level party with no silver weapons, you can still take down werewolves by concentrating all your attacks on one enemy at once, and doing enough DPS to overwhelm their non-silver-weapon damage regeneration.

 

Similarly protective spells that grant X hp worth of damage absorbtion (for a particular attack type) are more fun than absolute immunity for a set time period.

[Armour and weapon designs - a plea.]

I prefer variety in form to 1543 types of glowing oversized magical longsword. Isometric should make this easier : for example the Infinity Engine games had flails, Skyrim doesn't, because in the former you just needed sprites and stats whereas in the later it's a physics engine nightmare. The best example I can think of isn't an RPG at all; the Soul Calibur series has a large variety of edged weapons, from historically accurate to exotic ones (bladed tonfa, whip swords and ring blades), while generally staying fairly restrained on size and gratuitous glowiness.

[On class inequality]

This looks like a pointless restriction on character design with no benefits. Any stat combination you can make without the arbitrary mental/physical divide you can still make without it, but you have ruled out lots of valid combinations for no reason.

[What do you want the other race(s) to be?]

Centaur would be kind of cool, since you don't see them too often in as playable race in games, or maybe druid/ent-ish, plant-based biped would work (resistant to poison, but highly susceptible to fire)?

 

Agree : it would be good to have a non-humanoid race. I think you'd give up the ability to wear most armor + social difficulties in return for stat bonuses e.g. for centaurs better constitution, running speed & carry capacity. PST had bariaur wandering around and ToEE managed to include a lamia (cat-centaur) as a one-off throwaway monster so it can't be too hard to implement.

[Enough money to "make the game" - Multiplayer, modding, language support "open-ended"]

I'm more concerned with the impact of multiplayer on the schedule than the budget. Online co-op would be nice but it would be a huge amount of QA time (effectively do the entire QA process again but with multiple players present). Strongly recommend releasing the game first, then adding co-op as free DLC some months later if it is successful.

 

Presenting 'modding tools' as a binary choice is a bit of a false dilemma. Yes, the game should be at least as moddable as the Infinity Engine, in that dedicated modders prepared to mess arround with XML files, write scripts and draw their own maps should be able to make their own classes, NPCs, areas etc. No, the game does not need NWN style super-easy-to-use module building tools.

[Experience for Killing Enemies]

Experience points is supposed to be an abstraction for your character learning something. How much do you learn from killing your three hundredth sabre toothed swamp rat with a +2 bludgenhammer, or casting turn undead for the nineteenth time that evening? Not much. However the first time you fight a gryphon or successfully cast a lightning bolt is likely to be a very memorable experience. Learning comes from novelty; seeing and doing new things, taking risks, finding solutions to new problems. I would hope that's reflected in the game.

[thank you!]

That's really awesome of you

 

It was the least I could do; Planescape : Torment is my all-time favourite game (ahead of even System Shock 2) and was inspirational to me as a student.

 

but how fun is that, getting to make an adventuring group of baddies?! Hopefully they work with you a little bit so you don't just operate blind.

 

I recall reading that Obsidian will send out some character sheets. It's quite possible that the group I have in mind aren't suitable for the game; they had a great backstory and worked well in their own (Forgotten Realms) campaign, but might just be too strange for a low-magic / medieval setting. Still, it's worth a try, I'm sure my old late 90s D&D group would love to see their characters get a cameo in a CRPG.

[Low to mid magic world...does ya want it?]

Low magic also implies low gold: You will not be paid 100 gp for delivering a man his lucky socks, it will be more like 3-5 gp. Random barrels throughout a city won't be loaded with gold, neither will crates (remember how in BG2 you could collect 20,000 just by scavenging the poor parts of town without doing a single quest? this doesn't happen, its absurd)

 

I'd go further than that and implement gp/sp/cp (gold/silver/copper). This isn't pen and paper, there's no cost to keep track of this stuff. I expect to find only a few miserable copper on low-level goblins/thugs, versus a purse of silver for doing some important mission for a local noble, versus the kings ransom in gold (still only a few hundred sovereigns) if I ever sold a rare powerful (late-game) artifact. It makes the world a little more realistic; real people use varied coinage and large numbers (tens or hundreds of thousands) of coins seems out of place in a medieval setting.

[First-Person for travelling ala SSI games (to see the sky)]

I like this idea in principle, but I think it would take far too much dev / artist resource to implement. FMV prerendered cutscenes are better, as they also show us the characters in more detail, not just the world (can also be farmed out to other artists without taking time from the main dev team).

[The Chosen One]

I like having some unusual ability for the protagonist, even if it isn't terribly practical or useful, just to set them apart from being another race/class combo (it's also a story hook). However this ability doesn't have to be unique in the world; Baldur's Gate was ideal in this respect in that there was a prophecy about 'a bhaalspawn' but it wasn't necessarily about /your/ bhaalspawn. You had to fight against other 'chosen ones' with the same powers as you, with very different ideas for how to use it.

 

PS:T had the same general idea with the incarnations. There were many versions of the nameless one, you were just another in a long line of them, except that your choices made it possible to finally close the cycle (well, practically your ability to not forget everything when dying, but it doesn't /feel/ like that as a player ).

[Should there be player-generatable companions?]

Characters integrated into the setting are certainly better for first playthrough. If you can control their skill / ability development such that they can have different builds late in the game, then there is no real need to be able to make a whole party yourself. However if the character designer is there anyway for the protagonist, then it doesn't hurt to have that as another option. If the designers are concerned about players missing out on key story elements, this could be an unlockable for second playthrough / new-game-plus mode.

[Update #7: Non-combat Skills with Tim Cain]

In Arcanum, shrunken characters (via magic) could pass through certain narrow passages and get to otherwise unreachable locations.

 

Dragon Age did that with the mouse form in the nether and I thought it was a neat little puzzle element (along with the golem and flaming man forms).

[The Obsidian Order of Eternity wants YOU!]

Apparently I am a member due to backing at the $5000 level? If so perhaps I should be the 'Master of Golems of the Obsidian Order' since the donnation was funded by my work making commercial artificial intelligence systems...

[What makes a villain you love to hate?]

I actually prefer a villain that I sympathise with on some level, but ultimately disagree with and must destroy. Shades of grey and all that.

[2D Isometric Graphics (Warning: Large Pictures)]

While isometric graphics are fine, I do prefer being able to rotate the playfield in 90 degree steps so that I can see the whole environment. PS:T could have done this if it wasn't for 1999 memory limitations; the environments were 3D modelled and could have been rendered in four orientations no problem. With hand-drawn 2D graphics obviously this is more difficult and expensive.

[What classes would you like to see?]

Also I'd like having a mage-knight that doesn't actually suck, as in most games they seem to be never as good than pure warriors/knights or mages.

 

Well you are trying to have your cake and eat it, flexibility has to come at a price in raw ability otherwise they'd be an unbalanced class.

Presumably if you disagree with the designers that much you can just mod the game and tweak the stats Baldur's Gate style.