PrimeJunta

I disagree strongly. IMO TESO is a textbook example of how not to do a classless system.

Also, the sixth sick sheikh's sixth sheep's sick. /thread

IWD2 is only $9.99 and Anachronox only $5.99. That's sixteen bucks. You'll need $24 worth more, sir. We'll need your e-mail address. You'll get a mail with codes you can redeem to get the games. I'll PM you about that.

@Stun, I'm fairly certain everybody expects tangible results from a completionist run. The disagreement is about how dramatic the impact of those results should be -- like turning down the difficulty from Heart of Fury to Easy, or from Hard to Normal, or something in between. I prefer a moderate impact; i.e. I'd rather not just coast through the endgame even if I did complete everything. There's also disagreement on what the game is allowed to do to produce those results. Personally I don't really care what happens under the hood, except that I like it if it's subtle. Any of the methods discussed here can be done well or cack-handedly. If content gating is a door that won't open because reasons it irritates me, but if it flows naturally from the events, it's great. If level-scaling produces bandits loaded up with magic armor and weapons worth a king's ransom, it's incredibly irritating, but if it's a matter of subtle changes in group composition I won't even notice. If the level cap is set so that I hit it halfway through the game I'll probably stop playing, but if it's near the endgame I don't mind. And so on.

@BruceVC You got it. To summarize including your role in it: 1. Me and Gnostic gift you with a $20 or less GOG game(s) of your choice each now. I.e. you get games worth up to $40 total. 2. If P:E is released before midnight of Dec 31, 2014, you gift me with a GOG game or games of my choice, worth up to $30. 3. If P:E is not released before midnight of Dec 31, 2014, you gift Gnostic with a GOG game or games of his choice, worth up to $30. A happy victory dance here by the winner is optional. I think we're good to go. Which games do you want?

@BruceVC You're not taking the bet. You're keeping it fair. Me and Gnostic are taking the bet, but you're holding the stakes in escrow until it's decided.

@BruceVC You're just the trusted third party here. Come to think of it, you would deserve compensation for it. How about both of us buy you a $20 game each now, and then you buy the winner a $30 game? You'll end up $10 worth of game ahead.

It would be awesome if it turned out the Watchers were a complete rip-off of the Witchers.

Cool! @BruceVC, which games do you want?

@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?