PrimeJunta

It is a silly question. I refuse to answer it.

@Tsuga C none of the godlikes can wear helmets.

@BruceVC, Josh said that a romance would cost a minimum of 100 times as much as BHM. I do not find such lopsided hypotheticals particularly interesting.

@Mannock: IME when devs put in easter eggs, things are going well. It means they're in good spirits and somebody had a bit of slack waiting for somebody else to do something. No project has gone over schedule and over budget because they were debugging one of those. In a pinch, they'll just remove the checkbox from the settings UI and make you enable it from a console command. I.e., there are better things to grump about. Big Head Mode is cool.

Like this, you mean?

@Arouet: here's the vision for P:E: "Eternity will take the central hero, memorable companions and the epic exploration of Baldur’s Gate, add in the fun, intense combat and dungeon diving of Icewind Dale, and tie it all together with the emotional writing and mature thematic exploration of Planescape: Torment." Combat and dungeon diving are one-third of that vision. Josh has said on multiple occasions that the game is going to be heavily combat-focused. It's not going to be an adventure game in RPG clothing (like PS:T or KOTOR2). Ziets and Avellone aren't lead writers; they're doing areas and companions; Josh has overall control of the lore and story. I.e., this is very much Josh's baby, not MCA's or Ziets's. I have extremely high hopes for the writing; what we know about the coherence of the lore has had me whooping with joy already. We also know there's a personal angle to the story, and that there's a lot of text in the game. So that's all good. But combat is still going to be the main gameplay mechanic. I'm not sure how enjoyable it's going to be if you just want to click past it, although with the difficulty options and the console I'm sure it'll be possible. But a big, big part of the effort will have gone to making good combat.

@Stun I agree about the megadungeon. Swatting beasties for XP is kind of the thing in dungeoneering. I'm pretty sure they're aware of this, though, and am interested to see how they addressed it. Lots of phat lewt, maybe? I'm also interested to see how the megadungeon's power curve plays, if it's designed to get harder faster than you level up. That could turn out to be fun or frustrating, depending.

Inb4 someone brings up seamen... oh, I guess I just did.

I disagree. Yes, good writing does take time, but if you have some decent writers on the payroll, it doesn't cost much -- and laying out the groundwork is not tied to production at all. I.e. if BioWare really cared about writing, they would have a bunch of high-level concept writers working all the time. Triage the ideas every once in a while, pick the promising ones, and have them lay out the groundwork in world building and main story arcs. If they had, say, three people like that, they could easily come up with three solid, interesting, well thought-out, and original settings and stories per year. That'll build a backlog of them to draw from. When the time comes to actually make a game, pick the most promising one from the stack and ramp it up. You wouldn't have to, like, start making a trilogy without having any clue about the main antagonist's motivation, or have plot holes big enough to drive a dreadnought through. Once a franchise picks up, assign one of those writers to developing it. So yeah, that. I guess it just bugs me that BioWare are so often praised for their writing, when their writing is rubbish. There's just more of it there than in most other games. From where I'm at, two buckets of turds are not better than one bucket of turds, unless you're a gardener.

@Stun: Absolutely. And if you like, we can also compare voice acting, animation, production values, cinematics, and graphics. I've no doubt DA:I will excel in all of those areas. How much that matters remains, naturally, a subjective preference. Again, what really bugs me about BioWare isn't even so much the streamlined/simplified/twitchy/dumbed-down mechanics -- I can enjoy those perfectly well, if they're well executed, and BioWare's by and large are. What bugs me is that it would be so. simple. to make BioWare's games playing, like, before they hit the bargain bin -- all they'd need is tighter, more coherent, and more creative writing, and coherent, logical, and diverse worldbuilding. Neither of these would affect production costs one bit; they'd still need the same amount of writing and same amount of modeling and animation. It seems like such a colossal waste to put all that loving effort to bring to life a world that's fundamentally boring and lacking in consistency. And when I really want to cry myself to sleep, I remind myself that BioWare is generally considered to be good when it comes to writing for games.

Wow, this forum just keeps getting better and better. I thought the breathing anim in chargen was a bit exaggerated, and I also noticed that the paladin's breastplate appears to be made out of rubber. I'm also sure that neither of these "problems" are going to be noticeable in the gameplay. (And yes, I still think that going with the 3D toon in chargen, at least at that size, was a minor mistake -- although one that's probably not worth changing at this point.)

@Zitrual Why not add a "decay" mechanic while you're at it? Corpses stay corpses for some time, then turn into skeletons, then into a pile of bones, then disappear. I agree that this kind of thing would add flavor and atmosphere. However, I would not consider it a very high priority. Put that effort into polishing up the quests and combat, I say.

It's not a hardware issue I'm sure. It would be yet another thing to keep track of though. If it was up to me, I'd vote for "until area change, and not included in savegames."

​@IndiraLightfoot I loved the idea of barbarian aristocrats. Vercingetorix: Boudica: Harald Fairhair: Sevt III of Thracia:

Well, at least the fade tears make more sense than the we-must-kill-all-organic-life-to-save-organic-life Reapers. Er, a little. I wish they'd do something that's NOT just a grab-bag of tropes and clichés shaken vigorously and then dumped on the floor. (There will come a day when I stop grousing about BioWare's writing, but today is not that day.)

Yes.

The smeary-looking ground is due to video compression, I'm quite certain. You'll see the textures sharpen up when the camera stops for a while.

Oh, Lephys, Lephys. Don't ever change. There is a point to this kind of discussion, though, annoying as it is. It puts a social price tag on oblivious sexism. Take Sensuki, for example. He's really not all that argumentative and strongly prefers to discuss games rather than, say, cultural or social issues. He and others have already modified their behavior when they've noticed that certain kinds of behavior will bring out the SJW's and get threads derailed. It doesn't even require huge roaring battles, just "Hey, that wasn't very cool" followed by a few Likes. It imposes a social cost on dickish behavior. That's how the culture changes, little by little. The world ain't ever going to be perfect, but it can get better.

They wouldn't be separate objectives. It'd be like this: (0) Get quest from Farmer Bob -- set bit FARMER_BOB_WYRM_QUEST_GIVEN. (1) Objective 1: Find Wyrm Cave: 100 XP. Triggered when coordinate (x1, y1) is mapped. (2) Objective 2: Enter Wyrm Cave: 100 XP. Triggered when WYRM_CAVE map is loaded. (3) Objective 3: Get rid of wyrm, sets bit FARMER_BOB_WYRM_QUEST_COMPLETE. Options, mutually exclusive: (3a) Intimidate, trick, or persuade Wyrm to leave (1000 XP) (3b) Slay wyrm (1000 XP) (4) Report back to Farmer Bob (500 XP). Since 1, 2, and 3 naturally follow in sequence, the only things you'd have to check is FARMER_BOB_WYRM_QUEST_GIVEN after setting bit FARMER_BOB_WYRM_QUEST_COMPLETE, and both bits when talking to Farmer Bob. If FARMER_BOB_WYRM_QUEST_GIVEN is set, show "Must report back to Farmer Bob" in the journal, else show "Someone in the nearby hamlet might be interested in this." And when talking to Farmer Bob, check both bits: if neither is set, have Farmer Bob give you the quest; if QUEST_GIVEN is set but QUEST_COMPLETE is not, do the "Did you kill it yet -- no" dialog, and if QUEST_GIVEN is not set but QUEST_COMPLETE is set, do the "I just killed this wyrm" dialog, which sets both bits and gives you the XP from step 4. Again, this is completely vanilla for any game that's at all free-roaming and so lets you stumble onto locations in the "wrong" order. Kill XP affects it in no way at all.

Extra work, sure. Lot of extra work, not so sure. In this case, steps 1, 2, and 3 always follow in sequence, so the only thing you'd need to check for 3 is if you already got the quest from the farmer, and adjust the concluding text accordingly. Also this wouldn't change at all even if you had kill XP, assuming there still was the farmer interested in seeing the wyrm dead. Either way you'd have to code for the possibility that the player stumbled upon the lair before getting the quest from the farmer (or end up with weird journal entries.)

@archangel979, thank you for the explanation. I use a different definition, but at least now I know what you mean.

I don't mean quite what you mean by "Chosen One storyline," I think, @archangel979. Ask yourself, "How would the world have been different if you had failed your quest?" If the answer is something like "It would have been overwhelmed by darkness" then we're probably dealing with a Chosen One storyline. If it's something significantly less dramatic, then probably not, even if the PC was unique in some other way. So, by this test, NWN2 OC and both KOTORs would be Chosen One stories, but PS:T and MotB would not. (Whereas FO:NV wouldn't even be a Unique One story, since you start out as basically an average schlub who gets caught in a bad situation.) I strongly suspect P:E will be more like PS:T or MotB (or, for that matter, the BG's) than NWN2 OC or either of the KOTORs.

@archangel979 I'm not sure P:E will have a Chosen One storyline. They've hinted that the motivation is more personal, and it won't involve saving the world from an ancient evil.

Problem with Darklands-style "learn by doing" character development is that it's very hard not to make it incentivize really boring activities. Farming and grinding is repetitive and tedious, but practicing a skill in learn-by-doing is even more so. Personally I prefer classless, level-less and XP-less systems. Earn character points directly, use those to develop your character. Have traits and skill/feat/spell/etc trees instead of classes and levels. Class, level, and XP just seem like so much unnecessary complication.