PrimeJunta

Uh... dialog? Take Firkraag, for example. What if there was a level check on the quest, and if your level < design level, and you had accepted the quest, someone approached you as you were exiting the inn. Dialog: "Psst... I noticed you talking to that guy earlier. Want a piece of intel? Cost you 10 GP but might save your life." "[Give 10 GP] Done. What you got?" "The Baron is a bastard. He's done this before. No-one who took that job ever came back. If you do head that way, you better be prepared for the fight of your life."

Munchkins. Munchkins everywhere.

Also, building up wealth and not building up wealth could each have their advantages. Perhaps a life of poverty strengthens your soul...

Strongly in favor of limited gold and relatively scarce loot. Also strongly in favor of a broader definition of wealth than gold pieces. I ran a long D&D campaign where my players were very wealthy -- or, to be precise, one of them was wealthy (and the others were members of his household). However they often had major cash flow problems because most of the wealth was in land, trade caravans, titles, unique, highly valued art objects, connections, and what have you -- and most of the really cool stuff (e.g. magic items) was so rare it could not be bought for gold. I'd like that sort of thing in a cRPG as well. I like what's been said about crafting, actually. One cRPG trope I don't care for is disposable super-shiny loot ("Oh look, another flaming longsword of death +5, toss it in the vendor trash pile.") Instead I'd like magic items to be unique, and to grow in power with you, so they become a part of your character's identity in a way. Crafting enhancements is a good way to accomplish this, especially if it's set up so that crafting brand new items is really, seriously, painfully expensive, so enhancing existing ones becomes more attractive.

Metro 2033. Been a while since I played a shooter. This one is pretty good for what it is. Crazy atmospheric, with plenty of things jumping at you and going Boo!; however this whole post-apoc grimdark thing is frankly wearing a bit thin. Surprised to discover that my Russian is good enough not to have to play in English which definitely adds to it though.

I have a feeling that streaming is going to eventually be the default way of delivering AAA titles. It has massive advantages from the publisher's POV: no more compatibility problems, instant patch deployment, and of course ironclad DRM. It will take a few years until the necessary infrastructure is in place so latency, bandwidth, and server capacity won't be holding it back.

If I had to boil down all my frustrations with IE games and their relatives to two, I'd say "lack of transparency" and "lazy design masquerading as challenge." By "lack of transparency" I mean things like the way Athkatla dumps all the mid-game quests on you at once, with no indication – direct or implicit – of how hard they are. My first-ever quest in my first-ever attempt at BG2 was the Firkraag one, and that did not go well. I just kept feeling I was doing it wrong, when actually I was doing the wrong quest. By "lazy design masquerading as challenge" I mean things like hitpoint bloat, filler combat, and puzzles based on finding that one doodad/person/pixel by trial and error. One of my pet peeves is the hidden door – i.e., an area transition that your character would easily see but you can't because it's partly occluded by something, so you keep wandering around the map like an idiot not being able to progress. This was surprisingly common in isometric games with a fixed camera!

Obviously the big hurdle with SteamOS right now is the game library. Perhaps they think they'd be overextending themselves by launching a mobile platform at the same time. The game selection can't be the same; UI differences alone mean that much.

@Ganrich I agree re GoG and Linux. OTOH it's pretty easy to run most GoG's with Wine although it is a bit of a chore to find and/or set up the wrappers.

For the record, I'm all for Valve's market-disrupting efforts. The market clearly needs more disruption, though, as under current conditions GoG and Valve and their like can take an IMO too-juicy slice of the pie. Cartels and mono-/oligopolies are bad news.

No way Microsoft is going to get away with that. Even Apple hasn't, and their garden has much higher walls than theirs. Especially as the barriers to switching OS's have come down so much.

@Reever, there's dumbing down, and then there's getting rid of unnecessary complexity and lazy design masquerading as challenge. Sometimes it's hard to tell which is which, and the classics had a lot of both, and downright bad design to boot. As to the games you listed, I didn't care much for ME nor DA:O, but IMO their weaknesses were primarily with the aspects you liked, not so much that ME was actiony and DA:O was MMORPG-y. I didn't like the writing in either, and ME's universe was empty and repetitive; it also had the worst loot system in any game I've played, with mountains of endlessly repetitive, generic shinies. I've more or less given up on BioWare actually. They were on an upward slope until BG2, and a downward slope since then with occasional dead-cat bounces on the way. The last BioWare game I genuinely enjoyed was Jade Empire, and it was a pretty light snack compared to the banquet that is BG2. (Yes, despite having criticized BG2 a quite a lot here, it was a banquet. I didn't enjoy everything on the table, but the best courses were really good and there was such a lot of everything that I could just, like, not have any of the turd pudding.)

Sure, but in this case it shouldn't be that complicated. Assume that PoE breaks exactly even at zero post-kickstarter sales. I.e., the kickstarter covers all direct and indirect costs related to developing it, including but not limited to personnel costs, rent of office space, depreciation of capital etc. I.e., operating profit for PoE at that point is exactly 0%. Assume that by "gross revenue of post-kickstarter sales" I mean the amount of money paid by customers to whoever sold them the license, i.e., GoG or Steam. Assume that GoG's and Steam's cut is 30%. (I believe this is a fairly well-founded assumption.) So, at this point, 70% of gross revenue will be going to Obsidian, and 30% will be going to Valve or GoG. Correct? Now, you estimated that Obsidian would only be getting 30-50% of the gross revenue. That's a gap of 20-40%. Where does this 20-40% go? Corporate end-of-year taxes should not factor into this equation. They never do when calculating or estimating the profitability of a project.

Net profit of the project, yes. You don't deduct taxes paid on net profit of the corporation when tallying that. You don't even know what those taxes are going to be (although you should be able to guess.) To find out of if a project was profitable, you deduct costs from gross revenue, correct? If you end up paying taxes on what's left, that's good because it means the company was successful enough to pay a dividend, even after any of the project's net profit may have been invested in, for example, a successor. However. The corporate tax rate in CA is between 1.5% and 8.85%, depending on the type of corporation. That's tax on operating profit after interest, deductions, and so on. Suppose operating profit is about 30%, which is pretty healthy for a software company. With a tax rate of 8.85%, the overall tax on revenues from PoE would be less than 3%. So even if you take into account taxes, I can't see how you'd get close to your numbers. (Naturally there's a lot you can do with that revenue; e.g. invest it in various marketing-related things to increase volume or hold up prices, reinvest it in a sequel, maintain nice fan forums like this one and so on. I'm leaving all of that out of the equation ATM; I assume you were too.)

Steam's/GOG's cut is about 30% and corporate taxes are only paid on profits for the whole operation and aren't therefore generally considered when estimating the profitability of individual projects. What transaction fees do you think would eat up 20-60% of gross revenue?

Sorry, Lephys. You're still not understanding what I'm saying... and you're still repeating the same thing. Which is not a counter-argument to the argument I'm making. I got a sudden bout of bloody-mindendess so I'll give it yet another go. I'm pretty sure this is the last one; if it's still not sinking in, I'll have to conclude that either (a) I'm not good at explaining it, (b) you're irredeemably dense, or © you're pulling my leg. First, I think these analogies aren't helping. They're only muddying the waters further. Second, your problem (with understanding what I'm saying) is that you're still stuck on specifics (e.g. swords vs maces) whereas I'm talking about general defining characteristics (trade-off traits in general, computer RPG's in general). By "general defining characteristic" I mean that "a game which does not have this characteristic does not, in my opinion, fall in the computer role-playing game genre." Entirely regardless of the imaginary world or system of mechanics in the game. I'm making the following claims: Premise 1. "One of the defining characteristics of computer role-playing games in general is that they allow multiple approaches to solving problems, combat and otherwise." (Agree or disagree?) Premise 2. "One of the defining characteristics of computer role-playing games in general is that success in a task, combat or otherwise, depends on your character's skill level at it." (Agree or disagree?) I'm stating that these two claims imply the following consequence: Conclusion 1: "Therefore, any trait that involves a 1:1 trade-off between two equally useful abilities is inherently attractive." Reasoning: "Because of Claim 1, the player will usually be able to avoid using the weakened ability, and because of Claim 2, he will derive a large benefit from the strengthened ability." (Agree or disagree?) You will note that these claims are entirely independent of what fictional world we're in, or which two equally attractive abilities we're talking about. I also made a few secondary points derived from Conclusion 1: Corollary 1: Therefore, 1:1 trade-off traits between equally attractive abilities should only be used if the player has to choose between several of them (such as in Arcanum), rather than "choose" whether to take such a trait or not. (Agree or disagree?) Examples: You might argue that this is just academic theorycrafting, but the fact of the matter is that this is done wrong in many if not most cRPG's. Fallout's chargen and D&D specializations both suffer badly from this problem, for example. (Agree or disagree?)

@Osvir, that makes sense. Thank your for clarifying what you meant. I believe there was a subculture based around co-op play in that vein that emerged around IE games and NWN. I can see the appeal, even if I wouldn't want to participate myself. I can also see how it would make sense in a game with lots of variety both in story and in gameplay.

So why spoil that by injecting a computer where it isn't needed?

I'd be surprised if the price at release is as high as $50-60. That's AAA territory. Wouldn't be surprised if it's $35 or maybe $40 so slacker backers won't feel bad. AAA games generally drop to around $10 over a few years, with various Directors Cuts and Ultimate Editions pushing them up to $20 for a while. Indies and mid-budget fare settles somewhere between $5 and $15. Since there aren't any precedents for something this size funded this way, it's hard to predict exactly where the price will eventually settle, but I think $40 give or take $5 at release is a reasonable gues, and "more than $5 but less than $20" is reasonable for longer-term; how fast it gets there I won't venture to guess. With these numbers, I don't think ~$10M gross, in excess of Kickstarter, is unrealistic at all -- and most of that will be pure profit since development is already paid for and digital distribution cost per unit isn't all that much. That's a pretty respectable amount of money; enough to base a business model on, even accounting for some screwups like future Kickstarters that don't go as well as expected, or games that go over budget and schedule somewhat. I very much hope that happens. I'd like to see more stuff that falls somewhere between creative shoestring-budget indie stuff and big-budget AAA stuff that must necessarily make compromises, in both technological and gameplay, to reach large-enough markets to pay off. PoE, T:ToN, and WL2 are important for the industry as a whole. I said elsewhere years ago that I hope an "art house" scene emerges for games like it did for cinema. This could be it.

PoE had about 74,000 KS backers. That would stil leave 526,000 to reach Grimrock's sales figures. Personally I'd be surprised if PoE doesn't sell a million copies over 2-3 years. It has clearly broader appeal than Grimrock. For comparison, The Witcher games have sold about 5M copies so far. I think the market is largely similar.

Jeez. From where I'm at, your initial statement was more like "If it rains bricks, you need an iron umbrella," and my counterpoint was "True, but it never actually rains bricks, and an iron umbrella is not great to protect from rain because it's heavy and it rusts," To which you kept repeating, "Yes, but if it rains bricks, you need an iron umbrella." I agree that yes, Lephys, indeed, if it ever rains bricks, then an iron umbrella comes in very handy, but I still contend that in reality it hardly ever rains bricks, and therefore carrying an iron umbrella is a bad idea.

My biggest problem with PoE style games is that I tend to flip into "meta" mode too easily. This leads to all kinds of stuff that kind of ruins things for me, like restarting over and over again, exploring branches by going to a previous save and trying another approach, looking for strategy guides which leads to looking for spoilers, and so on and so forth. I find it difficult to just throw myself into a game and enjoy it, whatever happens. An age-related thing is that my tolerance for frustration has gone down. I no longer have the patience to, say, keep reloading until I figure a battle out (BG2, here's looking at you), or keep exploring until I find that annoyingly-hidden last piece of a puzzle, and so on. Nowadays getting stuck mostly just gets me to quit, or look for spoilers, both of which ruin it for me. Conversely, if a game gets too easy, I get bored and quit as well. I'll only soldier on through these kinds of things if the game brings something to the table that really pushes my buttons on a deep level. Well-executed something that I've already done before doesn't quite cut the mustard.' As to PoE, I remain extremely optimistic. I like 90% of the design ideas that have been presented; I agree with almost all of the ways it's different from the IE games (mechanics, guns, metaphysics), and I've tremendously enjoyed the writing and world-building the game's makers have done before. I also get the vibe that this is something they really want to do. Perhaps, in a way, PoE is a test. If I won't enjoy it, I don't think I'll enjoy any game anymore. Tastes change. I've been playing computer games ever since my dad took me to the Stanford University computer center and introduced me to rogue. That'll be 32 years ago this year. It's a pretty good run for a hobby.

Legend of Grimrock had sold 600,000 units a year ago. Do you seriously think PoE would sell less than 1/30 of that?

PS:T had a plot-related reason too. In both cases, I believe MCA was the individual responsible for both the reason and the NPC's.

Yes, I suppose I am, at that.