Blackstream

I don't think romances have actually been confirmed for Project Eternity. They have been very much so not confirmed. They done their best to skirt around the subject everytime it's brought up. They've stated they don't want to make it a stretch goal though which tells me that it's more than just a subject of money and time for them. I think they want to add it into the base game, but not just slapping it on like they could totally do if they really wanted. I suspect, especially for companion romances (if in), it's gonna be built into the character as completely as possible, influencing them as well as the people and world around them, and it probably won't resemble a baldur's gate or mass effect style romance much. I just hope it's in in some fashion, and I know they do at this point, they just can't really comment right now what they actually plan to do with it. Btw, because they've stated they plan on having a part 2 if this does well enough with the same companions, I'm actually hoping for a much slower romance. Maybe game 1, most of the characters (unless there's one that just moves especially fast) actually just build up their relationship with you and you can tell things are moving in a romantic direction (or not if you push it away from that), and it's not until game 2 that things really fire up. Maybe some characters get to a dating stage, some move really slow and you don't see the 'fruits' of that until game 2 or even 3, maybe one you end up getting married to halfway through the game and then break up when you realize things moved too fast. Who knows. I'd like to see a more organic way of approaching the subject either way.

It's more like, if I abstractly know that with x amount of time and money and people I can make x fully fleshed out areas (after all I've been doing this for awhile, these are numbers I can approximate in my head, in this example), then I know that by adding y to those numbers, I can make an extra area. Once they have their funding, then they start planning out all the areas, characters, companions, and how to integrate them all in to make a well designed game. I bet you won't even be able to tell which companions were stretch goals once the game comes out.

Just in general I'm a huge fan of minigame type elements. If they introduce systems like you mention, I will totally spend hours mastering the store game and the such.

What I want is a more full more rich world. Lore in every nook and cranny, npcs with interesting stories if I take the time to talk with them, a world that reacts and changes to my presence and actions, side activities I can undertake that don't necessarily relate to the main plot(s) (such as building a house, starting a bar, investigating mysteries (why does Joe the Drunk always leave just before happy hour?), exploration, etc). Just things to make me really get immersed and involved with the world I'm in. One tier I'd definitely like to see is a system that allows for a little bit of AI and varience in the world. I don't even mean huge major things like maybe the king gets assasinated in one playthrough and not in another, but I mean just lots of little micro things like, maybe there's a barfight in one playthrough and in another there's a wandering bard. Things that encourage you to play through multiple times just to see all the little nuances of the world. A system like this could be easily updated in the future too to add more interactions. Imagine traveling through the overworld on your 5th playthrough and you see a bear chasing a kobold through the forest, just randomly. So I guess that's the tier I'd like to see, is a system that allows for this and encourages you to really explore and never really know for sure if you've truely 'seen it all'. They could do it for bigger things too I mean, maybe in one playthrough a powerful warrior joins a faction and they become extra badass and you get a totally different playthrough on that quest. Sky's the limit.

Honestly, I'm pretty sure they do this with their game systems already. I'm sure some guy didn't just yell out COOLDOWNS and then everyone nodded in silent approval and they added it to their feature list. I'm sure they have brainstorm meetings already with guys talking about pros and cons of the sawyer's system, and the vancian system, with many of the same arguments that have already been mentioned here, and have been doing so for many other things too. For example, I bet designing the enchanting/crafting system isn't gonna be a simple matter either.

There's plenty of ways they could fit in the more uber spells too. For example, casting normal spells builds up a 'soul' meter of some kind, and once you have enough meter, you can cast one of the more uber powerful spells. It's essentially supermeter and something I like to incorporate into games I make, but the important thing is it allows you to have incredibly powerful imbalanced (or they would be if you could just use them at will) moves that don't encourage out of combat time loss without making them spammable either.

Personally, I hate the Vancian magic system with a flaming passion. There's absolutely nothing about I like. I think we've also settled that it's not going to happen at this point and that the devs are looking for a system to fix its shortcomings. My first instinct would be some kind of mana system, maybe with d3 style cooldowns where some of the more uber abilities have cooldowns. But they've clearly got a concept in mind. Honestly I think if they had realized that just saying the word cooldown would provoke this response, they probably would have avoided it until further down in development when they had a more concrete example/system to show you guys, because clearly right now it's more of an idea, an idea that's in flux and they can't really give examples of until they do some design, playtesting, and iterations. Personally though, I pledged so that the developers could do exactly what I hope they'll continue to do, finally make the game they want to make. I'll make suggestions and such, but ultimately I want to see what they make when they're unfettered by publishers and people making demands on their creative processes. Maybe this system or others won't do as well, but they shouldn't be pushed out of taking a chance at an idea they've got before we even have a chance to see it. I mean, there's a LONG time until this game comes out, and they're gonna be fairly transparent the whole way. We're gonna see gameplay videos and plenty of dev talks, and there's even gonna be a beta in there somewhere (which I plan on upgrading my pledge to get access to). There's time for them to realize some of their systems are flawed if that is indeed the case. And personally, I want to see what they do with cooldowns (even though I've always been on the fence about them), because they clearly have a unique idea beyond attaching a 2 second cooldown to magic missile and a 10 second cooldown to fireball, and a 2 hour cooldown to meteor swarm.

No. I haven't though a tremendous amount about healing points, but that brings up an interesting parallel resource management behavior in RPGs. I've seen (and talked to) innumerable gamers who say they end games with inventories full of consumables: potions, wands, scrolls, etc. The most commonly cited reason they give is that they don't know when is/isn't a good time to use them. Also, because they often have no idea when they might get more, they don't want to run out. It's sort of the inverse problem of rest spamming. I'm one of those players. My playthroughs of baldur's gate typically have me not really using my fun spells for 99% of fights, and I have potion cases FULL of all sorts of potions and scrolls that I might use in a situation someday maybe. And wands and stuff. And whatever. I figure I use it when I get to a fight I need it, but my team building is good enough that I never need it... but I don't just wanna chuck out potions for the reason you put up. Now to some degree I realize this is just a problem of mine and not all game design because I'm like this in literally every game with consumables. On the other hand, if they're buyable or I get them in droves, I tend to spam their usage to avoid having to use other consumables/rest/whatever LOL. On a related note though, if there's some way of getting extra reliable consumables (say alchemy or something), suddenly it's a spammable for me. Honestly though, my other problem is that I just straight up forget they're in my inventory too (skyrim potions have this issue for me), but that's another matter entirely.

Romance options along with enough budget to do it right.

But BG did that by the end. With Ascension you were challenged enough, sure, but the base game? I should not have been able to put up a few basic buffs, wander into the final battle with Amelyssan, and win first time through. There's just no fun in realising that your major boss battle is never going to be challenging or interesting. Sarevok was better. That certainly wasn't a fight I was finishing without a number of tries. Think the problem with the series was just an underlying one, actually; mages/clerics just got too powerful by the end, and they had to make the fights doable if you had a party heavy on the fighters & rogues. if you're going around with 4 of your people magic users... There were quite a few heavy abuses you could do in BG, and most of them involved magic, which really was another issue in BG altogether. I dunno if you used those, but there were just absolutely sick things you could do. On the legit end there were things like Time Stop Improved Alacrity Horrid Wilting spam. On the extremely unlegit end, there were things like restoring simulacrums to make multiple duplicates of yourself with scrolls and items in your quick slots and using chain contengencies to spam synchronized sunfires and using wish to get all your spells back in the middle of the fight (I may have cheated remembering all that and checked out a cheese guide). I remember seeing an image of a 1000 damage hit thanks to someone transformed as an iron golem backstabbing. And then there was my kensai/thief that could pop assassination and just churn out 100+ damage crits all over the place, and later on I had plans to use mislead scrolls to do it at will (and possibly the simulacrum helmet to do it at will twice as often). Really the problem with BG is that the abilities and spells in that game just aren't really balanced at all, lol, especially when used in combination with other abilities. It's not so much the character himself becoming a god, but there's ways to just abuse the system hard, in ways that probably weren't intended or thought of. And D&D itself I think has some of the blame there, because spells in D&D are just not fair in general, especially as you get to the higher level spells.

Consider right now the highest stretch goal is 2.3 mil and we're almost to 2.2 mil, people really have no reason to actually pledge a lot. My guess is they're debating back and forth what the high tier stretch goals should be right now, and probably have been for the last week or possibly even since they hit their funding within about a day of launch. I'm not even planning on upping my pledge as I'm poor, but I'm checking the kickstarter multiple times a day to see if they've added stretch goals yet because I'm extremely curious as to what they're gonna do. Anyways, the latest we'll see the new stretches is I believe the 3rd when paypal goes up, but I'm hoping they come out today (Monday) to give people time to see them and think about pledge raising. I wonder if they'll add in paypal donations to the total from kickstarter to determine pledge goals. And if so, if there's a cutoff date to hit that.

I guess I'm the outlier, in this thread at least. I like PCs that get uber powerful over the course of the game. I'd like to be able to trivialize the occasional pack of bandits that don't realize I've got dragonscale armor enhanced by a legendary blacksmith with a magical ore I found in another dimension and am wielding a sword that was fabled to be able to even cut gods. But I also need challenge. After fighting those brigands and wasting them, the captain comes in and it turns out he's a god avatar and I've just ruined his plan, and the real fight starts and he starts throwing me into walls and crap. I'm just making random stuff up, but the important thing is, I like progression of power, but the game needs to be hard anyways, and it's nice to throw in the occasional scene to remind the player that he is in fact pretty uber. Notably, even in baldur's gate, it has this progression of power. Your hp doesn't even go up that much, your stats never really increase aside from a few books and the like, and gear doesn't get expoential. I mean the difference between a normal sword and a +5 holy wtf sword I'm gonna go take on this lich now is... +5 damage and accuracy. Yet by the end of baldur's gate 2 (not even counting ToB here for a second), you're wasting dragons of all kinds, summoning planetars, and gibbing low level things like it's no thang. Even in bg1 I remember my fighter becoming one hell of a beast by the end. It's just the important thing is to not let the player get so uber that there's no challenge left in the world.

It's irrevelent whether posters in this thread or elsewhere like mods, or specific mods, or whatever. The point is, there ARE people that like mods, and there ARE people that like making mods, and by including mod functionality, you engage that playerbase, and it increases the longevity of the game for those people. To not include mods these days is to basically intentionally hamstring the potential of your game. When playing baldur's gate 2, or really any game that has mods, there's one very important thing I ALWAYS end up looking for, and that's bug fix mods. The devs are great, and possibly even in this case they'll actually keep updating and fixing bugs, but let's be honest, Obsidian games aren't exactly known for being bug free, and if there's one thing a fanatical playerbase will do, it's make patches that fix bugs. Even recent games have this issue. Take dragon age origins. I'm not sure about the current state of the game, but there's a mod called Qwinn's Unofficial DA:O Fixpack that fixed a lot of bugs as of according to the desc patch 1.03, making the game more playable for everyone and not having to wait for the developers to eventually get around to fixing everything. Then we have the following expansion, Dragon Age: Awakening, as I recall, never updated the toolset for awakening assets and the such for some reason, and as such, there were bugs the community could not fix (and doing some research, some bugs even the devs themselves couldn't fix (silverite mine bug being a more notable one), which the players can't fix without access to the data either. Checking the mod database, there's finally something for it, but reading the comments, it's like 50% whether it works or doesn't and possibly screws things up even more. Things other than bug fixes people often like to do with mods, graphic updates, extra npcs, more dialogue, and yes, more quests and items and gameplay changes. For example, in baldur's gate 2, other than fixpacks, one of the biggest mods I had installed was ascension. The boss fights in vanilla were honestly pretty weaksauce, and ascension made things badass and hard. It was also made by a dev I believe who filled in things they had planned to put in anyways, so some of the extra things (trial powers) I didn't even feel bad about adding. There were also quest packs where people found stuff in the code and basically reenabled and stuff like that, that's more debatable, as well as banter packs because the game feels kind of quiet to me with base dialogue, but mostly I wanted ascension, the fixpack, and the exp limiter removal (mostly because I don't like how the exp cap affects dual/multi-class characters, especially if you're soloing one. You can disagree with my choices, maybe even all of them, but the point is, there's people that want mods for different reasons, and adding the functionality will make people happy and keep people playing longer.

I'm fine with gold having weight, but only as an optional expert mode/fallout new vegas hardcore style option. Not tied in to difficulty or anything.

One of the things they did that I'm really interested in is the reward where you can design an npc and they'll put it in the game. Seems innocent enough until you realize there's 200 slots, and 63 of them are taken atm. That means there's gonna be at least 63 npcs in the gameworld all thought up of by 63 different people with their own individual backstories and such, guided a little bit by obsidian writers. The end result should ideally be a much more rich world, I'm hoping, especially if some of those npcs are tied into quests and stuff. It's really a staggering number of characters when you think about it, it's enough to EASILY populate a lesser game entirely.

In Baldur's gate especially, the vast majority of 'Your weapon is useless' incidents were solved by having a better magical weapon. And by that I mean upgrading your +2 to a +3 or whatever. There were a few exceptions (golems mainly), but even those were generally fixed with magic (melf's meteors killed just about everything as I recall, and for everything else there were generally summons and the like). So played through the game and without turning my characters into a walking arsenal, or even switching weapons at all, and had no problem beating the various encounters. My only reloads were generally due to me making a tactical mistake or rng gibbing one of my characters. Which means, literally, just have a balanced party. A couple of fighters with good magical weapons, a couple of mages with a variety of spells, a cleric or druid with their own spells as well as summons. A thief type for traps and later on the broken use any item ability to supplement your party with even more flexibility thanks to scrolls. Or you know whatever. And sure, quite often there'd be a fight where I hear one of my characters complaining about how their weapon was useless, or my mages couldn't really cast anything effective, or maybe only one of my party members had level drain protection so my other melees had to stand back. But the rest of the party always picked up the slack. And yes, the game also held your hand and if you were fighting specific mobs (trolls), would shower you with the methods you needed to kill them too, just in case you decided to not have mages with you for some reason. And in other cases, the fight would be completely optional (early iron golems) until you were ready. I get the feeling that PE will be similar to this model, if not even more lenient, in addition to providing deus ex like options to do things like change the fight in your favor or avoid it altogether. I'm trying not to hope for too much, but I am hoping the game at least feels like BG3 for me.