PrimeJunta

There's a case to be made for making the Kickstarter stuff non-exclusive. The better they make them, the better they'll be able to sell them.

I would guess simplicity. If it doesn't scale you don't have to implement scaling, and you don't have to account for scaling effects when balancing it. The overall effect on character power is more or less the same if they gain more powerful variants and more of the weaker ones.

I understand that you can't share the dollar details of the deal, but some information on the structure would have been nice. E.g. "This is a revenue-sharing agreement on copies sold on top of the Kickstarter." FWIW I have zero problems with that, as long as it stays DRM-free etc. It's the "we give you money, now we own you" type of thing I don't like.

I like both. They're clearly more focused on tactical play than the "traditional" versions, but both hew closely to their respective archetypes. The grimoire is a great idea; a bit of a nod towards Vancian casting without the annoyance of having to micromanage spell lists. @Gfted1, what do you mean by a "nuker" mage and why wouldn't you be able to make one? Several of the wizard spells are AoE/multi-target damage, which is at least what I'd expect from a "nuker." I've no doubt there will be ways to pump up those at the expense of other abilities.

Many of these spells are geared for tactical play. The druid area heals for example are all about taking and holding ground. I find that extremely encouraging.

I just finished it yesterday. I liked it, even though I'm not a huge South Park fan: Far and away the best voiceacting in any computer game I've ever played. This is the first computer game where I haven't switched on subtitles and clicked through to skip the dialog. I can't stand listening to bored actors trying to emote in front of a microphone. This was good, every bit as good as the TV series. Why can't they all be this good? This kind of humor is hard to pull off without coming across as mean. This mostly succeeded. It only stumbled a bit with Mr. Slave IMO. South Park catches something about what it's like to be a kid. These stories are pretty much just like what we told each other when we were in fourth grade. Gameplay was good enough to get the job done. Not brilliant but serviceable. Very easy, but if they had made it harder it wouldn't have been any more entertaining IMO; it would just have been more work because I'd have had to play the boss fights by trial and error – on the first try throw everything at them to see what sticks, then die and use what you've discovered the second time around. I don't particularly care for that type of gameplay so I'm pretty cool with easy. On the other hand, I found it a bit too easy to discover two simple strategies – one for group fights, one for boss fights – which steamrollered pretty much everything. From there on out the fights were mostly mechanical application rather than particularly interesting or creative. The length was good. It ended before I got bored, but I didn't feel like I was left wanting more. The quality was good. I only encountered one bug that forced me to roll back to a previous checkpoint, and that was about three minutes of gameplay. Very few smaller bugs as well. I probably won't replay, at least not any time soon. Doesn't feel like there was a whole lot to discover. I might faff about a bit with one or two of the other classes though, just to see what they're like.

Some of you people worry about the strangest things.

If they're sharing an engine, base assets like maps, models, animations, sound effects etc. ought to be shareable even without them having to do anything much about it.

Actually, Mr. M., the Numenera setting isn't like that. The general level of technology is pseudo-medieval. The super-advanced tech plays the role of magic – relics with weird properties that some people have learned to use, to an extent. Mechanically Numenera's esoteries, cyphers, and artifacts work just like spells, scrolls/potions, and magic items. In fact, Monte Cook Games is working on another RPG called The Strange, which is a multiverse-type setting based on the same ruleset. One of the sub-settings or 'recursions' in it is Ardeyn, a high-fantasy world. Numenera is fully compatible with it; the Ninth World could be a recursion in it, or the future of the prime world (the Earth). So a PoE/T:ToN crossover mod based on The Strange would not only be feasible, it could even be consistent with canon -- just use the PoE assets to portray a piece of Ardeyn.

Cool topic. And whoa, long post. I'll try not to make this a habit. I like to look at this in terms of structure. There are a number of options, each of which has strengths and drawbacks. Mostly linear. This is the "late BioWare" style. The story arc remains the same whatever you do. Choices are mostly illusionary; the least illusionary choices are related to the kind of role you're playing, e.g. hero vs. anti-hero. The advantage is that it's easier to write, which can lead to better pacing, fewer inconsistencies, a tighter narrative, and deeper interactions with NPC's, both party and non-party. This is also easy to sell to publishers as there's no "wasted" content -- every player gets most of it with every play-through. The downside is that you as the player have much less agency, and if taken too far you end up in adventure game territory. It also doesn't help replayability. Branching. This is the "Witcher" style. There's a grand story arc, but the plot branches at some predetermined points, depending on your choices. It retains many of the advantages of the mostly linear style in that the writers still have overall control over what goes down and can write accordingly "deep" stories. The downside is that with more than a few branches, especially if they cross, this can get seriously hairy to keep together, which can lead to narrative and even technical problems like dead ends. It's also hard to keep all the branches fully fleshed-out. In The Witcher 2, for example, one of the branches left a great deal of the underlying story untold, which made the endgame highly confusing (I played that one first), and in The Witcher 1, playing the investigation sequence in the "wrong" order could get very confusing indeed. Sandbox. Here we have a very loose grand story arc that's funneled through a few chokepoints. Most of the action happens in "sidequests" -- stuff that's just there for you to do whenever you happen on it. These sidequests may or may not branch and may or may not have different resolutions. They also may feed into mechanical subsystems that create reactivity, e.g. reputation or karma systems that open up content depending on how they develop. The grand story arc may require specific choices of its own to resolve, or it too may be affected by the subsystems. The upside is can maximize player agency, and the subsystems may even create emergent gameplay -- stuff that wasn't really designed in but happened "by itself." These are also easier to design than branching plots with lots of intersections which need to be dealt with individually. The downside is that it's hard to make it all hang together. Oblivion was a failure (IMO) because it didn't: you just had a ginormous sandbox with scads of stuff to do, but none of what you did changed anything in any meaningful way, beyond the resolution of the little thing you did (and those resolutions had precious little choice either). OTOH if you tie things up too tightly, you end up with a super-complicated and probably broken Witcher-esque thing. It's also difficult to write in as much narrative depth or as involving plotlines as in the first two -- although with the right chokepoints and right reveals, it can get pretty damn good. (I was wowed by several moments in FO:NV for example.) I've enjoyed games with all of these structures greatly: my favorites from the first group include PS:Torment, Deus Ex, Knights of the Old Republic I and II, Mask of the Betrayer, and Jade Empire; from the second group, both Witchers and Baldur's Gate 2, and from the third, TES: Morrowind and Fallout 1, 2, and New Vegas. Personally I can't really pick between the latter two; on the one hand I have a thing for deep plotting which you can't really get in a "sandbox," but I really like the freedom and feeling of agency you get in one. Before I played FO:NV I tilted towards "Witcher-style" but that was done so well I now honestly can't say which style I like more. In summary, I don't really care about the number of endings. I do care about meaningful choice. With mostly linear games, it's possible to give meaningful choices in character development and the way you relate to the story and the world (Deus Ex did both); with branching ones you can have a smaller number of genuinely meaningful choices (like in both Witchers); with sandbox ones, the critical bit is making those disparate bits hang together through some underlying mechanics so you're feeling you're making a difference. I'm hoping PoE is going to have a sandbox structure with perhaps a few more chokepoints than FO:NV, and similar reactivity to your choices. That would be rad.

Writing code that's understandable and functional is hard. I haven't met anyone who can do it who isn't fiercely proud of what s/he does. There is something similar to an artistic temperament about being able to do that, although IMO a great coder/designer is more like a great swordsmith than a great artist. OTOH being fiercely proud of what you do is no guarantee of quality, especially if you have people with an inflated sense of self-worth. There are lots of those around. IME most coders can't actually code worth a damn, even if they have the formal qualifications to do so. If you have that problem, I only know two ways to solve it: bring in someone who's ten times better, who proves it to them by coding circles around them, then proceeds to point out exactly what they're doing wrong... or give them about ten years to figure it out themselves.

@Alfiriel In my experience the best programmer-deisgners are the lazy ones. They'll always find a way to do the most with the least amount of effort, and they'll know to have a break before they're so tired they'll start to do damage. The ones with a strong work ethic are the worst; they'll sit there all night and produce gigantic quantities of garbage code nobody's able to understand except them.

I like the undead concept. But are they romanceable? :ducks:

More like a political philosophy. It is all about class warfare after all.

I like sax and violins.

I hate everyone on this thread already.

- The Witchers did sex, romance, and women well - Jade Empire is the best BioWare game - Baldur's Gate is a tedious grind and Minsc should be shot - D&D sucks in almost every way

@DCParry If you're replying to me, I think I need to clarify. The concept of "class struggle" is explicitly Marxist. It is of course crucial to Marx's theory of history, and in my view a highly useful way to look at both historical and contemporary societies and their evolution. Marxist historiography does explain a lot of history in terms of class struggle. However, pre-industrial societies did not conceptualize the conflicts within or between them in terms of class. In Marxist terms, the classes of the time had false consciousness. Peasants in a jacquerie did not think of themselves as rebelling against the class structure which made them peasants, nor did they believe that the conditions that pushed them to revolt were caused by that class structure. They thought of these struggles either in terms of 'justice' (restoring a usually mythical order currently unbalanced by an unjust ruler), or in religious terms. The Renaissance itself was originally seen not as an era of something new, but as the rebirth of the glories of ancient Rome and Greece. So yes, there was plenty of class conflict, sometimes even revolutionary or near-revolutionary class conflict (Chinese history has plenty of fascinating examples!), but describing this confict as 'class struggle' in the Marxist sense is anachronistic in a work of fiction set in a pre-industrial age. The concept wasn't invented yet, and people did not think of what they were doing in those terms. This is what I meant in my shorter post above.

And praise the gods of computer games for that!

Class struggle as a concept is a bit of an industrial-age notion though. Doesn't really fit in a Renaissance setting; back then class conflict wasn't about overthrowing the system and usually wasn't even conceptualized of in terms of class. It'd be a perfect fit for an Arcanum spiritual successor though. Upcoming kickstarter maybe...? I figure MCA has had his fill of the original and is champing at the bit for the opportunity to do it right.

My biggest niggle with SoZ is a trivial one. Loading screens. There are so many maps and they're so small that you transition between them a lot. To be genuinely playable, the transition ought to be instantaneous, or as good as. Instead it feels like I'm staring at a loading screen more than actually playing the game.

I'm confident they'll do a good job. There are precedents. Class (and to a lesser extent, race) was worked into Arcanum, and virulent misogyny into FO:NV, and I don't recall hearing too many complaints about it being in-your-face or didactic.

I never managed to finish SoZ. I got into my usual powergaming mode, and once I had broken the economy I lost interest. Perhaps I'll give it another shot one of these days.

If I can't make my stronghold an anarcho-syndicalist commune where we take it in turns to act as a sort of executive officer for the week, but all the decisions of that officer have to be ratified at a special bi-weekly meeting by a simple majority in the case of purely internal affairs, but by a two-thirds majority in the case of more major affairs, I'm going to be extremely upset at being oppressed by the violence inherent in the system.