PrimeJunta

@BruceVC I agree, I'd rather do nothing now and leave it until release (or Jan 1, depending), but I understand @Gnostic's worries about being called a deal-breaker too. (I won't do that in any case; I prefer these kinds of things to be between you and your conscience, friendly gloating by the winner notwithstanding.)

I would strongly prefer a symmetrical arrangement. How about both of us buys BruceVC a $15 game now, and he buys the winner a $30 one when the wager is decided, assuming he agrees? Then we can all gloat/sulk about it together.

A curse/blessing that makes the PC unique is an Obsidian thing. They had it in KOTOR 2, they had it in MotB and arguably even NWN2 OC, and they riffed off it in South Park. I suspect strongly that the Watcher thing is very much in the same vein. I don't think it's going to be an organization, 'cuz that's more of a BioWare thing. So yeah, the PC becomes the Watcher through some event beyond his or her control, which confers both major benefits and major drawbacks.

@Gnostic - Let's keep it simple: the loser will gift the winner with a game of his choice costing $/€ 15 or less, at most 30 days after the wager is decided (i.e., the game is released or Jan 1, 2015 hits, whichever is sooner), and congratulate the winner publicly on a suitable thread here. Shake?

@Gromnir, your attempts at squirting ink and equivocation duly noted, as well as your refusal to put your money where your mouth is. I will not be engaging in further conversation with you on this or any other topic.

Both IWD's were a Black Isle Studios games, not Obsidian. Some of the same people, but different studio, different team. I agree. But that says nothing about Obsidian's capability to deliver on-schedule, on-budget. PS:T was a Black Isle game as well. For someone so sure of himself you're awfully fuzzy with the facts, IMO.

Perhaps a better solution to the "Aragorn, not Superman" problem is not to allow magic-using PC's to start with, or only allow them very limited magic. That's probably what I'd do if I wanted to run a campaign in Middle Earth, Nehwon, or Hyboria.

The bet I was offering was specifically for P:E itself, or the expansion if you already have a P:E license. If you have both... I dunno, I think it'd get too complicated. If GoG allows you to gift games, then I'm more than cool with that too, I have an account (obviously). And yes, my wager is that P:E will be released -- full release, not beta, not Early Access -- before midnight of Dec 31, 2014.

I don't have a strong preference for either low or high magic; however I think low-magic fantasy settings are much underused and would like to see one. A game where magic was rare but scarily powerful would be a quite a different beast from our relatively "democratic" cRPG's where nonmagical classes are just about as badass as magical ones only in a different way. Perhaps something Ars Magica style where you would alternate between playing the scarily powerful but otherwise handicapped mage and her non-magical minions. And a strong yea to internal consistency. I do make allowances for combat and character-building mechanics though. In an IE-style game they're bound to fall apart if you look at them too closely, and doing so will get you into simulationist territory in no time flat.

If this is indeed the point you're addressing, then I agree, that attitude is simulationist.

That's impossible to answer without knowing a lot more about the game than we do. How big is the level difference near the endgame between a completionist and someone who mostly just followed the crit path? How big is the power difference between an optimally-tuned party and a merely somewhat sanely built one? I'm not opposed to encounter scaling on principle. It worked well enough in BG2, and I trust Obs won't be ham-fisted about it. Then again an overly easy endgame won't ruin my enjoyment either; I'd rather have that frankly than an artficially inflated boss fight.

@BruceVC @Gromnir Also, a cohesive team will pretty quickly produce its own infrastructure based on its needs, whereas giving a non-cohesive team lots of infrastructure to deal with may even slow down or prevent it from ever gelling. Put another way, you can't do anything without infrastructure, but infrastructure that you can't or won't use or use right is worse than useless, it's an impediment. In some ways software is like lots of other disciplines -- I think the closest more familiar equivalents are crafts like carpentry or building -- but it has the crucial difference that you can't actually see any of it until it works, or doesn't. Until that point it's all in the mind, really. This makes managing it qualitatively different than managing a construction site or a carpentry workshop. It's also not a whole lot like business for a number of reasons I won't go into here. Just that the gulf between suits and nerds is real, and reflects real differences in what they do and how they do it. It's very rare to find a suit who really gets software, or a nerd who really gets business -- this is in fact one of the main reason most startups fail: if a nerd is at the helm he'll crash and burn the business, and if a suit is at the helm you'll get this:

@Gromnir A solid team can take a quite a bit of turnover, once the culture is there. New people pick it up surprisingly quickly. The best ramp-up I've seen is less than two weeks from introduction to powering ahead full steam. It's also robust, with several key people sharing enough of the culture that the team can lose any or even several of them (depending on team size) without more than a small speed bump. As to Obs's release dates, you're conflating publishers and developers here. Other than the original NWN2 which was a genuine screw-up, as far as I know they've always hit their publisher's deadlines, even with completely unreasonable stuff happening to them like with KOTOR2. Would you be willing to take that friendly bet I offered to Bill Gates' Son, @Gromnir? I'll only make it with one person but it's open to anyone until someone bites.

@Gromnir A collection of players is not a team. A team only happens when they train and play together. Until then, there's no way to know if those players can even make a team, let alone if they can play to win. Software development is a dance where the players have different specialities, and where every player's work depends on every other player's work. A poor team will have lots of people tripping each other up -- waiting for other people a lot of the time. A great team has everybody actively helping each other out. How this happens depends on the team; every team is different. This effect is multiplicative, not additive, so the same people in a team that has gelled will be not 20% or 50% but more like 2000% -- 20 times -- more productive than in a group that hasn't. No matter how experienced or how good the people are, a team can't gel overnight, although a brilliant, charismatic, and extremely experienced team leader can help speed things along. That's the difference between a veteran studio, and a group of veterans. The P:E team is the former. inXile was the latter when the WL2 project was started. They had not done this kind of thing in ages, wheras Obsidian has only been doing this kind of thing as long as it's been around. That's also the only "infrastructure" that really counts -- team culture that makes stuff happen. (A bit of a tangent -- at that point sometimes somebody in the team, usually the leader, gets so pleased with himself that he writes a book. Thus are methodologies born. There's usually a lot of good stuff in those books you might be able to apply, but it's simply not possible to copy a successful team's culture. Eventually formal processes and practices usually emerge and are written down, but if they're any good they're a representation of what the team does and how it does it, not, as surprisingly many people think, a manual on how to do things well.)

@BruceVC That's a bet I'm not confident to take at all!

@Bill Gates' Son -- Software developer here too. I'm so confident of my prediction on this one that I'm willing to make a friendly bet with you. How about you buy me a Steam key for the expansion if it does come out in 2014, and I'll buy you one for the game or the expansion, your choice, if it doesn't?

They talked about this a quite a bit during the KS and the updates, IIRC. Too lazy to dig up the references, but to my recollection -- Not all souls are equal. Some are strong, some are weak, some are fractured, and so on. I.e., not everybody has a soul powerful enough to produce magical effects, even with training. Use of soul powers requires discipline and training. Hence animancy, orders of paladins and monks, adventurers tempering their souls through practice, and so on. I.e., your strong-souled cobbler would be entirely feasible, and a weak-souled adventurer would probably not get very far. Not very democratic, I know! A preference for consistency in lore is not simulationism*, and Obsidian is clearly putting a lot of effort into it. They've enthused about how the soul mechanic informs the lore -- where undead come from, what the best kind of steel is, how the different societies relate to animancy, what their attitudes are to manifested soul powers, how the gods feed into all that, and so on. I said in an earlier discussion in a somewhat different context with someone else that just because it's fantasy does not mean that anything goes. A well-built fantasy world and fantasy story still has to be internally consistent; to respect its own rules. "No soulful cobblers because :pout:" is lazy and sloppy. Obsidian is not lazy and sloppy with their lore; that's in fact the one thing that they do miles better than anyone else in the business. *Simulationism has nothing to do with lore, actually. Simulationism is the view that a game system should be designed to simulate some real or imagined aspects of the world the game happens in, and the accuracy or believability of the simulation is more important than fun in gameplay. This discussion isn't even about the mechanics; it's about the lore. Hence the accusation of simulationism is entirely tangential.** **I too prefer my games to be enjoyable rather than accurate. Many years ago I have dabbled with some flight simulators aiming for maximal realism, but then I discovered that flying a simulated airliner is really boring once you figure out what the buttons do. However, I do especially enjoy games that manage to excel both in believability and in enjoyability, and I think it would be cool if someone once made a cRPG that explicitly attempted to be both. I even have some ideas on how that could work, but that's a whole different topic.

@Bill Gates' Son: Nonsense. The devs have said a few weeks ago that the game is feature- and content-complete, with the only new assets still in the production pipeline being some b-priority armor and weapon sets, sounds, and final animations. Those are all drop-in resources and any of them could even be dropped without jeopardizing release. Today is June 2. There's six months left of 2014. They'll have it ready and polished by the end of September, perhaps October if they take a nice long vacation. Barring huge force majeure type things, there's no way they're delaying it until 2015. As to your specific objections -- 1. Yes, that's a pretty remarkable achievement. But then they're veterans -- they've worked with many different engines, and have large and complex utilities that they can port over as-is (e.g. their dialog and quest editor). This is all terra cognita, and you can develop really fast if there are few unknowns and you know what you're doing. 2. They left final animations, sound, and FX until the end of the process. This makes production more efficient, but means that any video they would make would make people howl. (Some are already nitpicking about the stuff they have shown.) We know a lot about what they're doing and how they're doing it from several people. A gameplay video would be nice confirmation but it's not necessary. 3. Not in the past several years though, and not when they've had control of the schedule. 4. Not bigger than similar games they've made in similar timeframes in the past, though. 5. Unlikely. The way they work, once it hits public beta it'll be pretty much done. They might tweak a few UI elements or such, but they won't introduce new systems or assets, do major rebalancing or such. That's not how JES rolls.

Caption: "An agent of Dunryd Row attempts to perceive a "housed" soul within a piece of evidence." So yes, he is using his arcane powers. (I couldn't find the reference, but I do seem to recall that the fist holding that... thing was confirmed to be the Dunryd Row emblem.) Let's recap the known facts and supporting pieces of evidence. Fact: Josh referred to Dunryd Row as 'secret police' and 'spy service' and said that it's staffed by ciphers. Fact: A portrait of an agent of Dunryd Row shows a character in uniform performing an investigation. Fact: Adam Brennecke referred to said agent as a 'detective' and stated that he 'investigates murders and such.' Metatextual point: street addresses are common circumlocutions for police headquarters. Scotland Yard, Quai des Orfèvres etc. I can't think of a street address standing in for a state police, however. The Lubyanka for example was not a euphemism for the CheKa or the KGB. Context: Dyrwood noble families are stated to engage in feuding on a regular basis. My hypothesis: "Secret police" in its modern sense presupposes a law-based state, where said police organization operates outside the law and in secret. I do not believe this fits Dyrwood exactly, since it is described as a feudal state, where the lord is the lawa. Therefore, Josh must have used the term to suggest an idea rather than in its precise technical meaning. I'm assuming, however, that 'secret police' is the closest he can get to expressing it in two words.¨ Therefore, to reconcile all this evidence, I posit that Dunryd Row combines several different but interrelated functions. It is an investigative police organization, similar to Scotland Yard, in that it investigates crimes of a particularly notable and complex nature. In particular, it investigates crimes that are of direct interest to the ruling classes of Defiance Bay. If some scullion gets his head bashed in in a barfight, it's unlikely that they would be called in, but if the daughter of an aristocratic family is found dead in her bed the day before her wedding, they most likely would. In this function, Dunryd Row agents operate openly, in uniform, and as recognized agents of the Erl. It is a spy service. It gathers intelligence on what is going on in Defiance Bay, and reports its findings to the Erl. It keeps tabs both on various local movers and shakers -- the aristocratic families, the organized crime, the trade companies, and what have you -- and functions as an arm of counter-intelligence against foreign agents. It also undertakes specific intelligence missions in this aspect of its function. In this role, the agents of Dunryd Row operate clandestinely. Finally, Dunryd Row has extraordinary powers, including at the very least the power to detain suspects for interrogation, but possibly including secret courts and the ability to "disappear" people. From where I'm at, this job description does not exactly fit the term 'secret police' in that it is not primarily a tool for political coercion or suppression of dissent, but it is clearly different from your normal town guard to make use of the term warranted. Thoughts?

Quote from Adam Brennecke: (Source.) How do you reconcile that with "secret political police?" "Detective" and "investigate murders and the like" sure sounds more like Scotland Yard than Gestapo to me.

@Gromnir what's your interpretation of the picture?

One more thing about Dunryd Row -- apart from what they've said, we can also make inferences from what they've shown. What they've shown is a portrait of a sympathetic-looking character in uniform -- note the prominent symbol on his vest -- using his cipher powers to investigate an object. That looks a lot like a police detective going about his job, and not a whole lot like a secret police agent repressing dissidents. I don't think it would be wise to ignore that either.

Yes, illathid, therefore "combination of Scotland Yard and Her Majesty's Secret Service."

@Mor, political repression is not a new invention, and secret police -- whether under that name or something else -- isn't new either. Frumentarii Jinyiwei Council of Ten and their State Inquisition I just went over what we know about Dunryd Row, and it appears to amount to roughly this, both items from update #65 -- It was characterized as 'secret police' It was also called a 'spy service' It is staffed by ciphers It is 'respected, if somewhat feared and mistrusted' The vibe I'm getting is more of a combination of Scotland Yard and Her Majesty's Secret Service than CheKa, frankly. I don't recall mentions of major political dissent or repression in Defiance Bay, and it seems to me that something like the Aedyr Empire or one of the Vailian city-states would be more likely to host a ruthless political police than a 'free palatinate' consisting of a loose confederation of erldoms led by a duc. It seems the Dyrwoodians feud a lot between each other: that seems to provide the most logical job for Dunryd Row.

I have an AD&D Lankhmar module in a box somewhere.