Death Machine Miyagi

I don't envy the designers. They have to keep thinking of new ways to get people excited so they get more pledges, which means things you measure. Tangible things like classes, regions, factions, races, spells, features, whatever. I personally would just like to see 'at 2.5 million we'll be releasing a more polished game, with more dialogue and more developed characters and story, because we now have resources enough to finish it properly.' I'll take that over adventurer halls and barbarians and necromancers any day of the week. But I guess it doesn't excite potential donors as much, so eh.

It also informs me Mr. Sawyer was working on an NWN2 module that would have told the story, but it was abandoned. Presumably because working on games all day and then going home from a long day at work to...work on more games all night was a little much to ask.

The wikipedia page now informs me that BG3 was around '80% done' when it was scrapped. Seems rather unfair.

I'll go with 'nearly complete control with some limitations.' If multi-classing into a certain class is completely at odds with the character, or if certain powers/spells/whatever conflict with that character, I see no problem with prohibiting that choice. Otherwise, being able to customize your NPC followers is a hallmark of the Infinity engine. Keep it keep it keep it.

In case people forget, btw, BG3 was under development during the last days of Black Isle Studios. It would have had a loose connection at best with the Bhaalspawn storyline. As I suspect any future BG3 would; by the time ToB ends your character is either a god or as close to a god as a mortal can get. Not a lot of room for advancement after that. http://en.wikipedia....The_Black_Hound

ToB was an expansion pack. Moreover it was an expansion pack riddled with obnoxious plot holes and blatant indifference on the part of the writers. I will not dignify it with the title 'Baldur's Gate 3.' That said, whether Overhaul would be up to such a project is a whole other subject. I won't wrote them off, but neither am I holding my breath.

We trusted BG2 to folks who allowed us to have sex with Anomen. That's far worse. Yet they came through for us.

The trick here is that a BG/BG2 fixpack covering a ton of bugs already exists. A mod that allows you to play the whole saga, from BG to ToB, in the BG2 engine also already exists. Since they exist and are free of charge, as selling points, they aren't as convincing as they might be otherwise.

You keep saying this. Its not true unless you choose to make it true by specifically seeking out mods with OP items/NPCs. Otherwise, there are plenty of BG mods that weaken existing overpowered items and increase the threat posed by enemies. If you're going to issue blanket criticism of the very idea of modding, at least criticize it on grounds that aren't blatantly false.

I've pre-ordered mainly for the sake of the updated mods that I hope will start coming out for it, leading into BG2:EE, if it sells enough. Otherwise, a good chunk of the things it offers (BG1 in the BG2 engine, for example) are already available.

In regards to misogyny, I'm hoping for a more realistic approach...that is to say, you won't find an equal distribution of male and female people dressed up in plate armor and wielding two handed swords...but without making the game excessively frustrating for women. Thinking of Game of Thrones/Song of Ice and Fire, Brienne 'the Beauty' and her treatment might be the kind of treatment you should expect if you play a female warrior or some-such. People will snigger at you behind your back, act confused and ask why a woman is dressed up like a man, and otherwise express varying degrees of surprise and disapproval about such an odd sight as a woman dressed as if she's ready for a battle. But regardless, I think encountering a world with its own gender roles, whichever those may be in a given culture, will make for a much deeper and more immersive experience than men and women being treated exactly the same.

You're basically describing Arcanum. And yes, I agree 100%. Arcanum would be one of the better examples of what I'm talking about. It wasn't just 'Hey, look, everybody! Steam engines and trains and guns to go with your elves, dwarves and wizards!', it was 'Hey, everybody! The Victorian period was filled with class bigotry, social darwinism, racism, misogyny, smog-churning factories and backwards mentalities and ideas of all sorts! And so is our game! Have fun!'

Personally, btw, I'm not so much itching for a world which properly reflects the real life middle ages as a world which makes sense within its own rules. In fact, a P:E world which hewed too closely to our own late middle ages/early renaissance wouldn't make much sense, because there are things like 'non-human races' and 'souls that grant magical powers' which our world has never had and which would certainly have had a major impact on our historical development if they had been present. Simply put, if the background is late medieval/early renaissance, I'd like to see some of the brutality and backwards ideas and bigotry which underlie that setting...but I would also like to see how such a world might be effected by things like actual wizards who can cast actual spells. If a society has developed with a temple just down the street that can raise people from the dead or heal wounds for just a little bit of money, how would that effect the growth of the society in question? How would the verifiable existence of souls that grant abilities change how people see things and how they do things, not just on an individual level but throughout the entire world? Can you consider how different our own world would be if our own middle ages had priests who prayed to god...and through that were capable of curing diseases or resurrecting people? The whole course of our history would be radically altered. I think it would be cool for the developers to sit down and consider things like that when they introduce spells or powers or aspects of the world, to look at their potential effects realistically and from an adult perspective, and then to try and play it out accordingly. Such a thing might almost play out like a fantasy version of what Watchmen did to superhero tropes, which would be slightly surreal, but also potentially really cool.

Very true, but one commonality between Byzantium, Italian city-states, Imperial China, etc. is that all of those cultures were a great deal more brutal and unforgiving than modern sensibilities are accustomed to. Byzantium had its blindings and mutilations for political and other crimes, the Italian city-states had the free companies selling their services and living by plunder, Imperial China had punishments involving killing not only the offender but his entire family, all his friends, and even his students and subordinates, and so on. No matter where you were in the world, life during the 14th and 15th century was nasty, brutish and short compared to life in a modern first world country. Sensibilities reflected that. That can come out in various ways, not just reflecting medieval France or England, but I hope that it comes out.

That said, I would like to see a P:E that takes some of the darker approaches to medieval life shown in things like A Song of Ice and Fire. Just...please don't overdo it. Players and readers need hope and places that aren't dark and miserable to counter those that are.

I mentioned that a good chunk of fantasy takes only the service elements of medieval society while ditching the less savory aspects. Things like Berserk or (and I'm a bit weirded out suggesting any connection between this series and Berserk, of all things) the Song of Ice and Fire series seem to have popularized the opposite approach; to take the darker aspects of medieval life and play them up to the hilt until the entire world seems to be a sort of non-stop cycle of people getting raped and murdered and burned and cannibalized and otherwise suffering all sorts of nasty fates while the bad guys routinely win. I prefer that approach to the High Fantasy approach which sanitizes everything to the point of toothlessness, but I've gotta admit, I really don't want to see P:E play out like Berserk, pre- or post-eclipse. There is such a thing as so much darkness that apathy ensues, since probably the only thing good that could happen in such a world is if the whole damn place were just put out of its misery.

The description given of the game heavily implies a late medieval-ish kinda world. Most fantasy games and stories, however, don't take their medieval setting much beyond 'people fight wearing armor, use swords and bows, and there are some vaguely medieval-ish rulers and political systems around with titles like 'Lord' and 'Prince' and 'King'.' Medieval sensibilities and culture and customs and beliefs can crop up, but are much less emphasized. Of course, there's a reason for that. The culture, sensibilities, customs and beliefs of the late middle ages were (in many cases) really, really awful by modern standards. So the question: how much 'Medieval' do you want in your Medieval European Fantasy? Would you like to encounter cultures which more or less reflect the real late middle ages....that is, overflowing with misogyny, brutality, religious intolerance, disease, famine and all the other sordid unpleasantries that remind you why you should be happy to live in the 21st century? Or would you prefer that sort of thing be toned down in favor of the surface feel of the medieval without seriously delving into the worst of it?

Level cap is only valuable if they plan on making a sequel you can import your character to. A BG1 level cap, for example, was important. Where the level cap becomes irritating is when you hit it with quite a bit of gameplay left to go, even when doing a fairly normal playthrough. KOTOR, I'm looking at you.

Indeed: obviously Obsidian still has the last word to say about the designs of these items. Which makes me curious: suppose Obsidian turns down a design. The person who designed it pledged good money, with the stated reward for that pledge being that they get to design an item/NPC/whatever. Does Obsidian reserve the right to revoke that reward? Will Obsidian return the money if they do so? Will they simply tell the person to design something else, since what they've been given isn't acceptable, and keep it up until they get something that is acceptable? It would be much easier if this were simply an offer for fans to send in requests. As it stands, this is marked as a reward. People are paying for the right to design something, which means it isn't quite as clear-cut as just saying 'no.' Yes, I have no real fear of 'gag designs', given the size of pledges involved. What I fear is not so much malice as incompetence. Regardless, glad to hear from a designer that they've thought of this too, and Chris Avellone's experience on Wasteland 2 is proving this to be not really a problem.

Many or few is less important than whether sheer quantity of enemies is being used to compensate for awful enemy AI. NWN2 would be an example of that, and that should be avoided.

And joking aside, its partly the prospect of 'lots' that has me uneasy. When I was a kid, 'lots' in a game was a good thing; the more the better. Being a bit older and wiser now, I understand that any game has only a finite amount of time and resources to spend, which means 'lots' might simply translate into 'quantity and not quality.' Back in the late '90s, the second Elder Scrolls game, Daggerfall, bragged about having a world map the size of England or some such. They conveniently left out that that world map was filled with cut-and-paste towns and dungeons virtually indistinguishable from each other, an endless barren land, and similarly faceless and banal NPCs. Give me a few small but beautiful maps with a comparatively small number of richly written and imagined NPCs over that any day. In light of that perspective, just how many named characters with dialogue did BG or BG2 or Torment or Icewind Dale have, in the whole game? How many inns? How many rival adventuring parties? If there are going to be 3 player designed inns in the game, how many Obsidian designed inns will there be? If there are 200 player designed NPCs, what percentage will those 200 make up of the game's total cast of NPCS? Are these NPCs going to be actual characters, with dialogue, or will they just be random cannon fodder you blow away in two seconds flat? I don't know the answer to these questions. I'll just say that 200 NPCs sounds like a lot to me, and 'a lot' is definitely not always good. And yes, I have a bit of faith in Obsidian given their history. Which is why I'm only 'uneasy' and not 'withdrawing my pledge.' I expect they'll do the right thing, but the wording of what people are getting worries me a touch.

Very few of the stretch goals have me excited. On the other hand, if selling the game from a storyline perspective as the initial post seems to hope for, I'm not sure what kind of stretch goals they could possibly put in. 'Reach $3.5 million and we'll write the story even harder'? 'Reach $4 million and we'll throw in another plot twist'? By what measurable barometer could you sell stretch goals based on storyline?

I have no doubt anyone adding new stuff to the game will do so with the best of intentions. But, as any number of fanfics will attest, just because you love something doesn't mean you're any good at it. I'd prefer the majority of the actually designing be left to the designers. Also: there are 200 people who have devoted enough money to design an NPC. 3 people have devoted enough money to design an opposing adventuring party. 3 people have devoted enough money to design an inn. Just how many NPCs, opposing adventuring parties and inns will this game have, anyway?

That is, the ones that offer the chance to design something and put it in the finished game. NPCs, epic level artifacts, opposing adventuring parties and what-not. Simply put, someone giving a lot of money is a lousy basis on which to assume that they're a competent game designer. What if the NPC/artifact/whatever designed is...well...completely godawful and utterly inconsistent with the tone of the game? Does Obsidian apologize and politely refund the money? Do they smile and nod, take the design they were sent and massively retool it to actually fit the game? Do they just add it in, since a deal is a deal, even if the NPC in question is a ninja zombie cheerleader or something? They carefully hedge these reward tiers by adding the words 'within reason', which could make all the difference in the world, but still, I'd be curious to know just how far they intend to take this 'design your own NPC/enemy adventuring party/tavern/inn/whatever' idea and to what extent intend to veto any really awful ideas, despite the money given.

I'm pretty sure it was Tim Schafer who kicked off this whole 'hey, you remember how awesome classic games were? Well, big-name publishers apparently don't, so give us money and we'll make one on our own' craze.