Keyrock

That's my opinion too. Other than the fact that my character witnessed some extraordinary event I'd rather have the rest left up to me. Give me a blank box and let me write my own bio/backstory would be my first choice.

My favorite quest was "Hung Over" in The Witcher 2. It begins as you (Geralt) wake up naked by the harbor curled up in the fetal position with a tattoo on your neck. From that point on you try to recover your gear and find out just what the heck happened the night before. It's jolly good fun and somewhat different than standard RPG quests, which is what I liked about it.

Wow, part 6! It's the Occupy Wall Street Obsidian Forums movement!

It's clear that Obsidian has the chops to pull off weird and wacky companions and make them interesting. I mean, they don't get much weirder and wackier than Lily Bowen, and they certainly managed to make her an interesting and fun to have around companion. Isn't that right, Jimmy?

While I, like most, prefer both a good story and good gameplay, given the choice of only one or the other, story is king. This is likely because I'm as much an (point & click) adventure gamer as an RPG gamer.

Absolutely yes, as long as they're interesting and not just weird for the sake of weird.

Agreed, having the campaign overlap the Project Eternity campaign by so much was definitely detrimental, but more than anything the way they pitched the game and how vague it was is what really was the death blow.

Sleeping Dogs went on sale on Steam so I snatched it right up. I played a bit on a friend's 360 and loved the bejesus out of every second I had a chance to play. Now I get to play it whenever I want (spoiler: as soon as Steam finishes downloading it). I'm super excited.

Strip away the bells and whistles of full high quality voice acting, physics effects, and numerous high quality cutscenes, and the budget of a game shrinks drastically. If you're looking for a game with gorgeous cinematics and top-tier voice acting, like Mass Effect or The Witcher 2, this ain't it and 4 million would not be nearly enough. This game is going to be somewhat stripped down in terms of bling, but deep in terms of gameplay, tactics, and story. For that, and in the hands of a group of veteran, seasoned developers, 4 million should be plenty.

If it creates a branching storyline path then I'm all for it. It would be interesting to see what negative or unexpected results failing to save someone or convince someone of something can have. Slightly different but somewhat similar, I'm glad they'll be including perma-death for characters in Expert Mode. I enjoy the challenge of having to deal with loss. For example when playing a game like a Fire Emblem game, if one of my party members dies in a battle I usually keep going rather than reload and do the encounter again so everyone survives. Dealing with attrition adds another challenge.

That was mostly underwhelming since I don't own a Mac. I do however like the look of the REDKit toolkit and I am excited to hear that Cyberpunk 2077 (I guess we'll need to change the name of this thread ) will be sandbox.

As Ieo wrote, highly unlikely. Unless it's a special case that has a story to it, like getting Khelgar to change to a monk in NWN2. Even if such a case existed in Project Eternity, it would be extremely unlikely that you would get to choose the new class.

Yeah, if the companions are deep and fleshed out enough, and have a variety of reactions given how you choose to approach situations, then it's entirely conceivable that you could have a relatively different experience replaying the game even if you choose the exact same companions to travel with the second time around.

8 is pretty much the perfect amount in my opinion. It's just enough to cover all your bases well (not enough for every class, but enough to cover every conceivable basic function within a group). Any more than that and you run the risk of not having enough time/resources to properly devote to each companion and you wind up with shallow companions. I'd rather have a smaller number of well fleshed out, interesting, colorful companions, than a whole bunch of cardboard cutouts.

That stream of Chris Avellone playing Arcanum sure would make for a nice X-Mas present to us.

If we get even so much as a screenshot today I may need to change my tidy whities. I'm so totally bursting with excitement that I'm most probably setting myself up for disappointment.

I imagine that we will however have the short dialogue bits that characters make in combat, when hurt, when selected, etc. (e.g. follow me everyone, I'm really hurt here, taste my steel!)

And I would take that to mean: a BG or NWN level of voice-over. They'll probably voice opening lines and character-defining lines, but most lines will not be voiced. Pretty much. Probably only major characters and main quest type stuff, and, like you wrote, a few opening lines or a paragraph or two at most. Definitely not anything past where out character(s) get to make a choice of replies since the devs have actively said how much easier it is to do branching dialogue when it's just text.

Uh-oh. XD Actually, they were equally rude to Veeno. (I did not totally just sound like a 5-year old tattling to the teacher... right? Good... /cough ) Don't let them get to you. For every troll, there is at least a hundred of us who welcome folks with open arms and treat them with respect.

... I didn't know that. D: I completely misunderstood it, I thought as long as the amount above your tier is 8$ or greater, you can join the Order. If I'd known that I have to add 8$ on top of my +20$ for the expansion, I would have! Well, my name is already on the list of to-be-added-to-the-Order so I will immediately go and donate another 8$ via PayPal. I hope that counts. edit: Great, and my title was actually changed. Now I feel like crap. I'll donate 10$ via PayPal to make up for this. Your heart was in the right place and you made right with PayPal. Nothing to be sorry about at all.

They will send us a questionnaire asking what rewards we would like for what we pledged (and shipping particulars and such). I don't expect to see that questionnaire until a week or two after the PayPal ends, if not longer. After all, even the people who only pledged through Kickstarter may still wish to top off with PayPal and they're going to have some 75,000-80,000 of these to go through. This is going to take quite some time. Be patient, everybody.

I imagine you are right and I trust that Obsidian will consider such possibilities and others when deciding on how to implement mechanics. These people have years of experience building great games so I should definitely give them the benefit of the doubt. I just thought I'd bring this up because when thinking about the stamina/health mechanic, the little that I know about it, the "chicken-run", as you put it, scenario quickly popped into my mind since I've seen this sort of thing happen in other games.

I am intrigued by the concept of splitting hit points into health and stamina. Personally I think it can definitely work, but I can see it also being exploited. Depending on how fast stamina actually regenerates during combat, I fear it may be exploited during combat. I have no problem with casters using a sanctuary like spell to effectively remove themselves from the field of combat for a short while to recover, or a melee character stepping back while another or two step forward and use aggro pulling skills, like taunt, to get the heat off said character, that's good tactical gameplay and a good use of your smarts and skills to survive. What I'm afraid of is characters simply running for 45 seconds while their stamina regenerates. Obviously this wouldn't be as effective against enemies with ranged attacks, such as archers, although a moving target would likely be much harder to hit than a stationary one, though I'm not sure if or how that would be reflected in actual gameplay mechanics. However if a character was facing melee attackers and their stamina fell to a dangerous level, they could simply run around for a while, staying just out of reach, until their stamina recovered. Then once recovered they simply stop and continue fighting. if they get hurt again they start running again. Lather, rinse, repeat. This is not exactly my idea of good tactical combat. Fortunately there are two easy ways I can think of to prevent such a thing from happening (there are likely other ways too): 1) Have stamina regeneration halt when running - This makes sense considering that sprinting for 30 seconds wouldn't exactly help a wounded and beat up character feel better. Likewise, running around wouldn't exactly help any wounds clot, in fact wounds that have begun to clot may become torn open again by the act of running. 2) Apply movement penalties to characters with low stamina - Let's say, and I'm pulling these numbers out of my behind just for the sake of example, when a character drops below 50% stamina their movement rate drops by 25%, and when their stamina drops below 25% their movement rate drops by 50%. This makes sense since a beat down, barely conscious character wouldn't be able to run as fast as someone who's in perfect condition. Thoughts?

QFT

We MUST make this happen!