PrimeJunta

Why not, as long as it doesn't hold up the PC/Mac/Linux release? -- Although I'm sure current-gen consoles have more than enough horsepower to run it great too, although the architectures are different enough from a PC that it might make things a bit trickier than the PS4 at least. I've never had a console so I couldn't really say how the UI would work; I would imagine that a game built on the idea of selecting things by pointing at them might not adapt all that gracefully to that though. I think a tablet version might be easier actually. You could do all kinds of stuff with gestures. Draw a circle to select a group, that sort of thing. (There's nothing particularly difficult about it technically I'm sure; it's a design challenge.)

Fighter-specific only, not paladins, clerics, or others: [ http://forums.obsidian.net/topic/64027-fighters-in-project-eternity-will-have-stamina-regeneration-in-combat/ ] Specifics of stamina regeneration were left open in Update #24, which introduced the mechanic, and JES also said "I don't know, man" when asked how quickly it regenerates in an interview with Iron Tower Studios in December. I can't remember exactly when they formally announced that stamina does not regenerate in combat except for fighters, but it was a while back. So not news, exactly.

I've had multiple uses of Security, Shadowrunner, and Gang etiquettes already.

Been playing with it for about 9 or 10 hours, experimenting with a few different char classes. Impressions: + Great atmosphere -- art, music, writing, etc. + Competent turn-based combat system. + Stable. I haven't encountered any seriously serious bugs yet. - Eeeeaasyyy. At least so far. I'm playing on Hard and am handling most encounters without even having to use consumables. Also scads of karma (=character points) to spend. - Super-linear, with very small areas. You do your runs in a specified order with specified objectives, with no more wiggle room than in a typical adventure game. - Classes should be better balanced. Street Samurai seems fairly boring compared to Rigger or Shaman, and deckers should have decker-specific content which so far at least I haven't really encountered. There are similar weirdnesses re equipment, e.g. a rigger can easily boost drone combat abilities past the point where she can get the drones to actually use them, while none of the other classes seem to have this problem. All in all? As it is, it's a nice light snack of an adventure/RPG hybrid and well worth the money, but no way in the same category as any full-on heavy-duty cRPG.

@anubite, Monte Cook just blogged about pre-play-centric vs play-centric RPG's. I thought it was an interesting way to look at things. In a nutshell, a game where the challenge is to build a character in order to overcome a set of pre-defined challenges as efficiently as possible is a pre-play-centric game; OTOH, a game where the challenge is to find varied and creative solutions to challenges as they come up is a play-centric game. He said they designed AD&D to be play-centric, but somewhere around D&D 3.5 the focus shifted to pre-play-centric. A lot of the discussion here seems to relate to that. It looks like there's one group of people who are worried about character building mechanics losing their challenge "if every build is viable," and another group who's thrilled at the prospect of playing the game with wild and wacky character concepts "because it allows many different playstyles." Pre-players versus players. Am I onto something here? The blog post is here. (Full disclosure: for PnP I far and away prefer play-centric gaming. For cRPG's I've enjoyed the pre-play aspects of the IE and NWN games immensely; in fact character-building is the only reason I've replayed NWN2 several times. So you could say I'm sympathetic to both sides of the argument. Which means I'll probably enjoy it whichever way it goes.)

I thought of adding a house rule that would tie different spell schools to different attributes. Enchantment and Conjuration to CHA, Illusion to DEX, Alteration and Evocation to INT, Necromancy to CON, Abjuration to WIS, that sort of thing. It would make a kind of sense and yield a much wider variety of relatively balanced mages. Didn't bet as far as working out the details, and eventually gave up on the idea because I didn't want to add even more complexity to the system.

I ran a campaign that had a paladin with INT 6 and WIS 16 (and I would certainly have allowed INT 3 had he rolled that). The player did a brilliant job of doing that role. His paladin had a natural and intuitive sense of right and wrong, but would have been completely unable to, say, describe that sense of right and wrong in terms of ethical imperatives. In many ways he was wiser, more compassionate, and juster than many of his more intelligent superiors!

Instadeath can be a fun gameplay element, but only if there's enough information that you can fairly avoid it. NetHack, for example, would not be anywhere near as fun as it is without all of the myriad stupid deaths you can experience, from choking on your food or dying from food poisoning, to taking a misstep and drowning in a pool, to falling down the stairs while wielding a ****atrice corpse, to being zapped by a gnome carrying a wand of death. But it's only fun because almost all of those sudden deaths are avoidable, and the game lets you discover the ways of avoiding them through those infinite replays in procedurally generated dungeons. I do not like instadeath in RPG's with precreated rather than procedurally generated content. It just leads to types of gameplay I don't enjoy: saving and reloading repeatedly to discover the hard counters, followed by saving and reloading repeatedly to abuse of any instadeath-dealing spells or abilities. In fact, this is the feature I liked least about the IE classics. I defeated Firkraag by preparing all the Feebleminds I could and reloading until one of them bit, for example. That was an exercise in bloody-mindedness, not tactical or strategic acumen.

It's not quite as simple as that, actually. Sometimes taking more time will save money, or will yield much greater value for money. Most projects start out with a very small team (the research/design/early development/pre-production/whatever phase), then expand to a bigger team (full development), and then tapers off again in the final production/beta testing/release/whatever phase (not counting testers, which cost less per hour than designers or programmers). The early small-team phase costs comparatively little per day compared to the full production and release phases, and by being extra super careful in that phase you can avoid really costly problems later on. IOW, pushing the schedule forward by 50% doesn't necessarily increase costs by 50%. It might be as little as 10%, depending on the trajectory. Bad things only happen if the project goes south in the full production or release phase. That's when big chunks of stuff get cut, things go over budget, and you get rushed, buggy releases, or projects get killed off altogether. I would wager that most of us working in software will experience at least one project like that, and believe me it ain't fun... and once you've survived it, you do your damnedest not to do it again. You also learn to recognise many of the warning signs and take corrective action early on. The senior Obsidian devs working on P:E are certainly crusty enough to have been there and done that. I have little doubts about them being able to handle the project management and budgeting end of this particular exercise.

I'm not too concerned about them staying on budget; Obsidian aren't new to this stuff and P:E won't have a large number of technical unknowns, so it shouldn't be too hard to budget. As to the schedule, they already mentioned immediately after the KS -- unofficially -- that April 2014 isn't realistic, because they exceeded their target by nearly a factor of four. What's more, Obsidian's bad old days of buggy messes are fairly far behind. They've demonstrated that they can deliver quality unless the publisher arbitrarily shifts deadlines forward and/or skimps on QA -- which obviously won't be an issue this time around.

+1, @GreyDragon. As an aside, one of the few bits I thoroughly enjoyed in Dragon Age was the Fade episode, which was pretty much built around shapeshifting. It was rudimentary and simple, but I thought it showed what kind of gameplay potential shapeshifting mechanics could have, if properly fleshed-out and developed.

This contradicts what JES has previously said, namely, that most fighter abilities are non-magical and a completely non-magical fighter is an entirely viable build. But we will see when we will see. Personally, I'll be very surprised (and disappointed) if the P:E team turns out to be so incompetent that they don't get character/class differentiation.

I disagree. I would consider a game that has an objectively and universally best party composition almost as flawed as a game that had an objectively best character build. I'd like it best if that was situational too. Have some situations that would be easiest for a diverse party, and other situations that would be easiest for, say, an all-rogue party. Situational effectiveness and a variety of situations, again.

In my opinion this is the wrong question. Different characters should fare differently against different enemies. I'd rather ask questions like: Which of those two characters would fare better in a mission that involved abducting the Heresiarch's favourite concubine from a magically warded palace patrolled by elite fighters? Which would find it easier to defeat a group of ensouled, animated suits of armour? If the answers are different for different situations, then the system is well designed and well balanced. If the answer is always "Mmm, the cleric," then there's something wrong with it.

Gimping your PC and introducing other self-imposed constraints and handicaps, or making the game difficult in other ways is a whole different story. IMO difficulty levels, soloing, or playing to a strict code of conduct are much preferable ways to do that than having classes that are inherently weaker or attributes, skills, or abilities that are inherently less useful -- worse, if the game doesn't tell you so up front. Personal note: I like rogues, and years ago when I started playing the IE games, I got immensely frustrated because my rogue just did not survive very well. I can get by with a rogue nowadays that I'm extremely familiar with the system and know how to squeeze out all the value there is from it, but I still consider the "support character" a really bad design idea.

I was actually thinking also of D&D 3/3.5/Pathfinder. Your Zen Archery Fighter will still have a poor Will save compared to a cleric of the same level. Conversely, a cleric taking Martial Weapons/Longbow and Zen Archery will out-shoot a dedicated fighter/archer build, when suitably self-buffed -- all while retaining that huge list of spells. (Pet D&D peeve: clerics and druids are so overpowered that mechanically there's no compelling reason to play anything else. Which is unfair to people -- like me -- who like the concept of fighters or especially rogues more.) OTOH your Combat Insight cleric will only get Whirlwind Attack at level 12/15 (if non-human) because of the massive feat investment needed (Dodge, Mobility, Spring Attack, Combat Expertise, Whirlwind Attack). Combat Insight isn't in the base system, BTW, and isn't in any cRPG I've played either. It's one of the band-aids introduced in supplements to paper over the imbalances in the base system. If you think it's a good idea, then what (if any?) is your problem with P:E's attempt to make all attributes valuable to start with, without recourse to such kludges?

Your 10 STR / 18 INT fighter will be better at some challenges than your 18 STR / 10 INT fighter, and vice versa. They will not play identically. On the other hand, in D&D there's no meaningful gameplay difference between a WIS 18 and WIS 7 fighter, or an INT 18 and INT 7 cleric, and so on. Those stats are effectively meaningless for those classes. I.e., P:E will require you to trade off something of value to get something else of value, rather than to trade off something worthless for something extremely valuable. That makes character-building more varied and interesting, not less. Your "dumb brute" fighter's dumbness will be reflected in the mechanics too, not just the bruteness like in D&D; same for your "sickly genius" wizard's sickliness. How is that not a good thing?

Objectivity is also an ideal. It is known to be unattainable. Do you think that means that, say, historians, journalists, or judges should just say freck it and write or rule whatever they want, rather than trying their level best to be as objective as they can? If you don't, then why do you think game designers shouldn't try to balance their game system out as well as they can, even knowing perfect balance is unattainable?

Numenera is nothing like d20 (although you do roll one a quite a lot). For PnP gaming, I'm liking it hella more than d20 (although I'll only start running a campaign in it later this fall). Way more straightforward, way more room for creative play, both from the player and the GM side. For one thing, the stats and progression are there almost for flavor -- the cyphers are where the real action is at: you could totally run a high-power adventure with a first-tier party just by being liberal with cyphers. The Numenera team are going to have to do some hard thinking on how to translate that to a computer game though, as the system itself is really built around interaction between players and the GM. The mechanics are too simple for interesting gameplay if applied without that aspect. For example, combat is kept interesting through GM intervention and application of Effort, there's an extremely limited selection of "spells" (esoteries) but there are guidelines for players who want to creatively modify their effects, and players are encouraged to make up their own skills. The whole thing pointedly ignores things like systemic balance, leaving that up to the players and GM. One of the functions of the GM intervention rule is, in fact, to sort out precisely such things. In other words, it treats the players and GM as responsible adults who want to play a fun game, rather than rules lawyers looking to exploit holes in the system. There's no way a computer can do that kind of creative reinterpretation. I would expect that what the ToN team is doing now is figuring out how to build a varied-enough superstructure on top of the basic system to make things work in a cRPG. It'll be quite interesting to see how that pans out.

Heh. Anyway, that was fun. I'm taking a vacation from the Net starting now, though, so I'll be looking forward to whatever's being discussed here when I get back.

The funny thing is that I don't actually hate the game. I've replayed it numerous times and enjoyed myself. I just think aspects of it are rubbish, especially when it comes to writing, and moreover it would have been relatively easy not to do it so badly. Not necessarily. I'm sure it's possible to pick holes into anything; the question is how many holes you can pick, how big they are, why they're there, and how central they are to the underlying premises. MotB and PS:T, for example, are much, much better in this respect. Take Blade Runner. That movie is just chock-full of plot holes, inconsistencies, and illogicalities. However it doesn't matter in the least, as it's not even trying to be consistent. The story is driven by the theme, the characters, and pacing. Consistency never was a priority, and it doesn't have to be. I know and love Blade Runner, and NWN2 is no Blade Runner.

Does too. Not so. Planes can border on each other, or overlap each other. The Lower Planes, for example, border on each other. You can travel from Baator to the Abyss, in fact, Charon's Ferry Service provides a handy way to do this. Same thing for that ocean made entirely of holy water on the Higher Planes, or the spatial relationship of the Spire (and Sigil) with the Outlands, and of the Outlands with the Outer planes. Yet these aren't transitive planes, because there's no overlap. Overlap is the defining characteristic of transitive planes. That's why you can use astral projection to travel from one place to another on the same prime material plane – the two planes overlap. The relevance is that the KoS is projecting from the astral plane to the Prime Material, compleat with silver cord. Through a portal. That does not make sense. Astral projection doesn't work that way. You don't have portals when astral projecting to start with; that's kind of the point of astral projection. The physical body is the anchor, the astral body is the projection, not the other way around. The fact that the KoS can do it is completely arbitrary. Whoever wrote it up just made it so and said "because reasons." DM's fiat. Bad. Whatever the spell is, the underlying mechanics should be consistent. With the astral projection spell (or any other means of astral projection), the mechanics are as I described above – your astral body no longer overlaps with your physical body, and since your consciousness resides in your astral body anyway, the physical body goes catatonic, with the two connected with the silver cord. Now, if you use the spell to actually travel to another plane, here's what happens. When you arrive at your destination – another PM or an outer plane – (and here's the magical part) – the spell recreates a physical body for you in the new plane, using locally-available materials, and reconnects your silver cord to it, destroying your original body wherever you left it. The newly-created body becomes the anchor instead of your original one. When your astral body syncs with the newly-created physical body (the x, y, z coordinates on both planes overlap perfectly again), you "shift" to your new location. At that point your silver cord has a length of zero again. I.e., you can't project from the astral plane into a physical plane the same way you project from a physical plane into the astral plane, and the silver cord can, by its very nature, never exist on a physical plane. It only comes into existence when your astral body is out of sync with your physical one, and in that case it's an extension of your astral body. Yeah, true, I hadn't actually thought of that inconsistency. Rack up another one.

Not so. That is the case with the Inner and Outer planes, which do not overlap with the Prime Material, but not with transitive planes. Transitive planes overlap with other planes. The Demiplane of Shadow, aka the Shadow Plane, as it's done in MotB, is an example of a transitive plane that overlaps with only one plane, i.e., the Prime Material. The Astral and Ethereal planes are transitive planes that overlap with multiple planes – the Ethereal with the Prime Material and Elemental planes, the Astral with the Prime Material and Outer planes. Again: a transitive plane has a point matching every point (x, y, z) in each of the planes with which it overlaps, and possibly many points that do not overlap with any of them. That's what makes them transitive. Specifically, the difference is that the former is not possible in the Forgotten Realms cosmology. Whoever wrote it in doesn't understand how the planes work, and how astral projection works. It's nonsensical. Illogical, in the sense that I already described: he doesn't make sense within the Forgotten Realms/D&D/Planescape lore. Things just don't work like that. To recap: (1) Astral projection works from the Prime Material to the Astral, not the other way around. (2) What was he doing on the Astral Plane? (3) How did he get there? (4) If he was banished there by the Illefarn, why there? (5) What kept him from popping right back to the Prime through the many portals there? (6) Why was he laying waste to the Githyanki strongholds there, when he would stop at the borders of the Illefarn empire in the evil ending? (7) How come the Sword of Gith is the only thing that can hurt him (not really) when his only connection to the Astral Plane is that he was banished there? (Or was he, see (3) above?) ( What's the connection with the Ritual of Purification, which doesn't actually appear to do anything to him? The very basic idea – that the Illefarn would create a magical WMD drawing directly from the Weave, to defend against the Netherese, and that went Horribly Wrong when the Weave failed due to a magical experiment by the Netherese, causing said WMD to switch to the Shadow Weave after which things go Horribly Wrong – is fine, although jejune. Nothing from there on out makes a lick of sense. That's my problem with it. And it wouldn't even have been hard to make up a lore-consistent story about the Illefarn - KoS war and his subsequent attempts to return. You know what I think? I think that whoever wrote it was such a desperate PS:T fanboy he absolutely had to write the Githyanki into the story, and then went through all these horribly convoluted twists and turns to do that, ending with a nonsensical story that plays fast and loose with the cosmology of the setting. That was a bad idea to start with. If you want to write in the Githyanki, then make up a different villain. If you want to use an ancient evil arising from the Illefarn-Netheril war, then leave the Githyanki out of it. Or else be much cleverer about coming up with a connection. (Hint: try tying up the Netheril-Illefarn conflict with the Githyanki-Illithid one. One or both parties of either conflict, or perhaps rogue elements in them, could be in touch with the other. This could play into the creation story of the Guardian. If the Guardian was created by use of Illithid magic, for example, it would make sense that the Sword of Gith was capable of hurting it... and it would even make sense that the Guardian would come back to attack the Githyanki after being cut loose from Illefarn.)

I'm not, but the Illefarn did. That's how he ended up in the Astral Plane to start with, remember? (Edit: or did they? I forget, where did Illefarn banish him? If not the Astral Plane, then how did he end up there, and why does severing his connection to it make it possible to destroy him? Again, it makes no sense. It just mangles astral projection beyond all recognition.) Small discussion of planar physics (edit) in the Forgotten Realms/D&D universe. The physical body is on the Prime Material. The astral body is on the Astral. The Silver Cord is also on the astral. The Astral Plane is a transitive plane, overlapping with the Prime Material and the Outer planes. That means that for any point (x,y,z) on the Prime Material plane there is a corresponding point (x,y,z) on the Astral plane, but the converse is not true. Most points on the Astral plane have no corresponding location on the Prime Material. The interview with Myrkul in MotB, for example, happened at a location on the astral plane that almost certainly does not correspond to any location on a Prime Material, but very likely corresponds to some location on an Outer plane. The distances between any two matching points can also differ radically. Sometimes a very long distance on the Prime Material is a very short distance on the Astral, and vice versa. Which makes traveling through the astral plane, e.g. by astral projection, attractive. Under normal circumstances, your astral body completely overlaps your physical body; i.e., any point (x,y,z) in your physical body matches the same (x,y,z) in your astral body. With astral projection, your astral body and physical body move apart, but your consciousness stays with your astral body. The connection between your astral body and physical body is the silver cord, which simply connects the center of your astral body, wherever it is on the astral plane, to the point on the astral plane matching the location of your physical body on the material plane. It is a connection between two points on the astral plane. In other words, it doesn't exist on the physical plane at all, any more than your astral body. Your astral body is astral because it is on the astral plane; if it wasn't, it woudln't be. There wouldn't be any point, and in many cases there wouldn't even be any place for it to exist, as the astral body could be somewhere that has no matching location on the prime material plane. N.b.: the astral plane has evolved a fair bit over the history of (A)D&D, and there's also a certain amount of contradictory lore about it, e.g. some sources treat it as something like an outer plane, others as a transitive plane. But I believe this is the way astral projection works, mechanically, in all of the editions. The color pools you use to exit the astral plane add some complication to the story, but I won't get into that here. I disagree, especially about the KoS. Terribly bad villain; at the same time clichéd and illogical. Ammon Jerro was an interesting character psychologically; the trouble with him was that his actions didn't make a lick of sense.

Oof. That makes even less sense. The silver cord connects an astral traveler's astral body to his physical body. It cannot even exist on the Prime Material. If it did for the KoS, that's a major violation of D&D metaphysics. Second, it doesn't make any sense to banish something to the Astral Plane. It's a transitive plane, connected to Prime Material planes and Outer Planes. It's pretty easy to get out. I won't even bother addressing exodiark's post. It's all ex post facto rationalization of plot holes. Anyone can do that. The point is that in a competently constructed story you shouldn't have to. (Exception: intentionally surreal dream-like stories, following dream-like logic. NWN2 is not one of them.)