mstark

When it comes to sentient items, I much preferred Lilarcor I'd like seeing the return of sentient items.

As long as it doesn't cause PE's quest system to feel as piece-meal & chore like as that of PS:T, I'm happy for 'older' areas to refresh when it makes sense (but do we need that, with a second city to find? They've also said the Stronghold will likely act as a [third] quest hub). It might be hard for gamers to catch on to fresh NPCs popping up here and there without obvious pointers, since I believe most gamers expect to be able to complete an area and not look back. It might end up feeling quite artificial if the player will need a figurative, blinking, neon green arrow pointing in the direction of updated areas. It might work well in a smaller place that you return to often (Stronghold?). I'm hoping that PE will stray more in the direction of BG2's approach to quests and pacing, while T:ToN will stray in the direction of PS:T. I'm looking forward to both of them, and I hope they will individually improve upon the proven recipes of two distinct classics in their own way.

Just a though: I'd love if the second quest hub/city, assuming it shows up later in the game, would introduce new types of challenges/quests, rather than more difficult ones.They'd be more difficult because of being different, rather than being harder due to more enemies with more hitpoints and higher damage. It might be hard to pull off, and I can't think of any examples right off the bat.

Woah, I hadn't replied to this thread yet! Would just like to say that the monk sounds like an amazing concept, with insane potential for micro management thanks to the wounds system. For anyone who ever wished for a more "active" fighter class, score! Can the monk wear regular clothes without hindering his abilities? On that note, can clothes (and capes) be worn with armor? Say, can I equip a shirt, a pair of trousers, and put a hauberk and chain mail leggings on top? Will NPCs, as a general rule, react to what I'm wearing to some degree (when it makes sense they should)? Can't wait to obtain Vailian nobleman's clothing for my entire party.

The one possibility they will have by introducing a second city (which will, presumably, turn up at some point halfway through the story... but that's utter speculation) is to allow it to act as the second tier quest hub. Allow me to explain... In BG2, if you kept doing Athkatla quests, they would become quite trivial towards the end due to the party being far more experienced and having attained more loot. This was mitigated to some degree by the fact that the best gear in the game wasn't that much better than what you find right at the start (this is certainly not a bad thing). Either way, due to the majority of quests being available from the starting area, they all had to have a fairly similar difficulty level. Again, I don't see this as a bad thing, and it was nice that the difficulty level throughout BG2 was relatively fairly flat, since that allowed the PC's strength to remain fairly flat. Challenges were made more trivial due to your own actual experience playing of the game, and less so by the gathered experience points of your characters. What could be done with the introduction of a second major city is have it serve as a hub for harder quests. You're halfway through the game, and maybe you expect to find harder challenges. The potentially negative effect this can have is that if you ever return to earlier content, it might seem trivial in comparison, losing some of it's fun due to no real remaining challenge. If the game is designed with "staggered quests" in mind, I'm afraid it might lead to an over emphasis on growing your characters strength while progressing through the quest tiers. I guess I'm trying to say that I'd like to gain levels, and with them a wider range of abilities, but I wouldn't necessarily want to out grow early in game content (at least not in the first PE game). I'd gain new ways of tackling content, but overall, difficulty (in the sense of monster damage and hitpoints) wouldn't scale too much through the game. This has been thoroughly discussed in another thread, I can't remember its name or I would link to it. This is complete speculation, and doesn't necessarily have to happen at all. Just wanted to bring up the point.

I personally hate the "make everything viable" school of thought, and prefer clear class separation. If you want to play a monk as you would play a fighter, why dilute the monk until it feels like a fighter, rather than playing the fighter and leaving the monk alone, as a unique class? If you want to RP a monk in armour, just name your fighter "Brandon the Monk", or something. Many games have gone so far as to remove a class system entirely, allowing you to turn your character(s) into anything you like during your journey, and it works for some games, but I wouldn't like to see it in an IE style game. That said, Project Eternity seems to be going in a very good direction, where classes remain unique in their abilities and play styles, but never immediately too punished with limitations in what they can do (eg. "sorry, this stick doesn't fit in your hand because you're not a stick wielder").

I like the use of chapters, if only because it gives the game more of a "story" feel. It's like a story book where the story isn't just being read, parts of it is literally being experienced by you. In BG2 the chapters were exclusively tied to how far you had progressed through the main quest, whereas side quests didn't affect your progress in the same way (making chapter 2, and 5(iirc?) feel far longer than other chapters due to them taking place in the open world. Didn't at all mind that, since (and I'm repeating myself) I really liked the modular feel of BG2, with the main quest separate from distractions. As amazing as many parts of PS:T are, I'm liking it less and less due to the constant flow of miniature quests. Yes, they introduce amazing characters and great dialogues, but the constant running back and forth feels a lot more like a chore compared to BG2's linear modules, where story lines aren't allowed to intermingle to the same extent.

Considering who's currently working on PE I'm pretty sure the game will have a balanced, tasteful amount of secret content and Easter eggs.

While I agree with your entire post, I'll just quote this bit for emphasis. I really liked how many (if not all) of the more major side quests were strongly separated from each other (and from the main quest). Not only did it make it easier to focus on one single quest branch at a time, it also made it a lot easier to switch between them without getting lost in a tangled mess (although the Quest Journal didn't quite support this). They all had dedicated areas, with little to no intermingling. Trademeet is also one of my favorite bits of the game (the only fairly large settlement available outside of Athkatla), and it functioned as a smaller quest hub. If I remember correctly, it's one of the few places outside of Athkatla with access to the same conveniences the larger city provides. I'm kind of guessing the Stronghold in PE will serve a similar role, based on what they've said about it.

^I suppose that refers to chests/doors/traps that require "detect traps" or high enough perception in order to discover? Very similar to how IE games did it. I would hate to see loot glitter, or shine, or any such crap, but I'm all for BG2-press-tab-style highlighting/outlining.

I agree with Sabotin. Very good points. Moderate BG2 spoilers ahead. TL;DR: BG2 "got it right" by separating the linear main quest from its open world. It got it right by opening the entirety of the world up early. However, the main quest rushes you, encouraging you to not explore. Bad quest log design not helping in case you want to finish quests picked up in the past. I also agree with Hormalakh. The almost daunting openness of Athkatla once reaching chapter 2 is one of Baldur's Gate II's strongest points, and a large part in why I believe a lot of people choose to replay the game. It's not paced in a way that progressively unlocks optional content, the main story is made very strong due to the fact that it's linear, and fairly separate from distractions. I'd like to briefly compare BG2 to PS:T with regards to pacing of the game. BG2 has a very clear separation between the main quest and the side quests. PS:T has more even pacing, with side quests intermingled with the linear main story as you unlock new areas. I would prefer PE to take after BG2 in the pacing of the game. I want the world to open up quickly, and be an open playground, and I want the linear main quest to stand in strong solitude. I quite liked that you weren't given a constant stream of "new things to do" in BG2 while concentrating on the story. I have to say it's made playing PS:T feel very choppy to me; the great quest of finding out who I am is broken up by a million meaningless little errands. I'd like to bring up why BG2 got it right, and where I think right went wrong. Chapter 2 of BG2 is the part where you discover the game, the world is open, you can do whatever you want. However, this isn't clear to first time players due to being rushed along by the main quest. The open feeling of the early game is largely achieved by the extreme quest density at the start, as compared to having content more evenly spaced out in the main story. A huge city to explore, endless things to do. I believe the strength in BG2's story lies in it being separate from the open world, and fairly separate from distractions. By good pacing, the main story even brings you back to the open world during an intermission (exiting the underdark), allowing you to complete content that you might have left half finished. However, upon returning to the open world, you've got no way of checking what quests you might have been in the middle of when you left it. In addition to that, you're instantly being rushed along again by the main quest. I think this could be solved by introducing a journal that gives each quest its own entry: it would be very easy to see that, once out of the underdark, you're given a chance to return to these quests. There was no clear way of tracking individual quests using BG2's journal, and it weakened the game as a whole. The fluid, diary-style, of BG2's quest journal was a wonderful idea, but didn't work out in practice. It would have worked if it was used exclusively for the main quest, and side quests were sorted as separate entries on a separate tab. As a side note, the game also doesn't warn you that going to Suldenesselar is the point of no return. In a game that feels open and free for the majority of it, you do not expect to suddenly be locked away from the rest of the world in such a definite way. It makes sense for the story, but I was somewhat disappointed that I couldn't go back. However, that made me compelled to replay the entire game again. Much of BG2's replayability lies in how quickly the game opens up to you at the start, so if you feel you missed something there's little content to repeat (Irenicus' dungeon) before you can get to it. I want to disagree about this idea; you would still have to remember which NPCs were going to offer you quests, and morevoer, you would have to go back to get those quests when you were done with your current ones. It would be an artificial and frustrating restriction, as well as requiring mind reading from the NPCs to work in character. I disagree for the same reasons centurion brought up. Artificial limitations like those are extremely frustrating. A well structured/designed quest log is a far more appealing option. I tend to play the IE games quite methodically, I will talk to everyone, picking up every quest I can, and work my way through them one by one.

^That's how I trudged my way through the entirety of Baldur's Gate 2 the first time I played it. 12 years old, barely knowing English :D. Still loved it. To be fair, unless you have a complete understanding of D&D mechanics, and knew where to find the items you needed, having summons to soak up damage/one hit kill spells was fairly necessary in many an encounter.

Will death animations & corpse positions be pre-defined or use some form of physics/rag-doll mechanic (which might end up looking rather strange, considering they'd be collapsing onto a flat surface)?

It's not as much a lost opportunity as a very difficult problem to solve. In a 2D game, every animation has to be pre-rendered, in 30 frames per second. For example, an attack animation that is 1 second long requires 30 separate images FOR EVERY ANGLE that the attack can be performed in. Infinity Engines has 8 angles, resulting in 8*30=240 drawn frames, and that's for a single attack, with a single weapon type, for a single character sprite, for a single gender of a single race. As you can imagine, this quickly adds up. Infinity Engine games (Eg. Baldur's Gate, Icewind Dale) probably chose to save time by making a single death animation (resulting in the corpse landing at the same angle every time and looking the same). For each angle you'd like the corpse to fall in, you'd have to pre-render a separate animation. Not to mention if you'd like the corpse to decay, you'd have to create separate states for every single angle in which the corpse can die. That's quite a lot of time (and money) spent creating sprites, time that could be spent polishing out bugs, enhancing the story, or making new areas. The benefit of using 2D sprites is that it takes up barely any graphical memory, so you could have virtually endless corpses & decay states on screen at once (you can see this in Age of Empires (1) to some extent, during large battles http://media.moddb.com/images/downloads/1/16/15535/rot.JPG). When it comes to 3D, you gain some benefits, but lose others. The trouble with 3D, simplified, generally boils down to polygons - there's only so many you can have on screen before your graphics card melts. The more expensive your card, the more of them you can see at once ("higher" settings in a 3D game generally equate to 3D objects using more polygons). If using 3D, you can develop a physics/rag doll engine providing a potentially endless amount of death animations. All handled by the physics engine in real time, calculating how bodies collapse. This opens up easy ways of creating flying death animations as fireballs go off, etc. The problem is that the body can land in a virtually unlimited amount of positions, which can't be predicted and easily replaced with pre-rendered static 2D sprites once they stop moving. But then, if you figure out a way to do it on the fly, would you even want to replace it with a static 2D sprite once it stops moving? Or would you prefer keeping it a 3D object that you could blast around the map over and over again by throwing fireballs at it, watching it tumble around? (which one is less immersion breaking?) I suppose one way to do it would be having the game "screenshot" the corpse once it becomes immobile and seamlessly replacing the 3D corpse with the static sprite (an interesting idea), but then, there would be no way of making it decay without impossible to implement decay states for the live generated 2D sprites, since those could not be generated intelligently on the fly. If they figure out a way to keep the 3D corpses in game for a longer period (possibly by reducing the polygon count, read: "quality", of a corpse), they could apply simple effects such as the skin tone changing with the age of the corpse. They could even have chunks of meat taken away from it IF there is a modeled skeleton underneath the regular textures (time consuming, to produce not only the character model, but also its skeleton). Maybe it won't even be a problem to keep corpses around in Project Eternity, considering that once you've killed something, there isn't going to be anything new "re-spawning" in that area for quite some time, meaning there's no need to remove the corpse until this happens.

^this. I hope dragons won't be exchanged for something different just in order to be different. That said, some of the dragon concepts posted in this thread are just awesome. Hopefully, "The World" will be filled to the brim with huge, wickedly dangerous beasts that, as long as you don't walk straight into their lair, couldn't care less about the goings and comings of mere humanoids.

In a 2D game based on 2D sprites, keeping corpses around isn't a problem, since a 2D sprite takes up negligible amounts of memory. You may already be aware, but PE uses 3D objects rather than sprites, and each corpse will take up as much GPU resources as a living & moving creature. This is why most 3D games resort to having corpses either fade or rapidly sink into the ground, because leaving them around would quickly become extremely GPU intensive (if new creatures enter the area while corpses are still around). I'm with you in that I very much would like the corpses to stick around, at the very least I would not ever want to see corpses fade/sink right before my eyes a few seconds after I defeated the creature. I don't think excessive on-screen polygon counts due to corpses will be a problem in PE thanks to the nature of the game, so we'll probably see corpses stick around at least until we rest, or leave the area and come back. If mobs in an area are reset/re-spawned, the corpses would have to go away to not clog up available GPU memory with their polygon counts, but since we're not going to be seeing constant streams of hundreds of mobs Project Eternity wouldn't need to free up GPU memory as often as, say, StarCraft 2, an ARPG, or an online shooter. They've said they wish to keep the game playable on a wide range of computers, though, which might mean on lower settings corpses will disappear quicker. Personally, I'm thinking areas will be reset maybe every 12 in-game hours or so (similarly to IE games), so if I'm travelling locally I would still see corpses lying around when switching between areas, but if I travel far away and come back (or rest for a long time), the area will be reset, with fresh mobs and clean ground.

Elerond was arguing that we might not be able to change it (and that it would be unnecessary), so I summarized the points for why we should be able to, just in case .

oops.

For reference, all the possible factors in how the game will look in the hands of the player: Render resolution - the size, in pixels, of the 2D rendered area graphics in the game (of which there will be 2 sets, the larger being 4x larger than the smaller one). We will hopefully be able to manually switch between whichever Render resolution fits our monitor best. Game resolution - the resolution, in pixels, at which you choose to play the game. Can not be higher than your native Screen resolution. If set to lower than the target render resolution you will see less of the area, if set to higher than the target render resolution you will see more of the area. Screen resolution - the native resolution of your screen, and also the highest resolution at which you can experience the game, assuming the game doesn't lock you into one of it's two target resolutions. If your screen resolution is higher than 2560*1440 you should be able to see a larger playable area than the developers "intend" you to. If you play with the 1280*720 target renders you should be able to see a lot more of the area. It'll also be very tiny. Screen size - the physical size of your monitor, two monitors of different physical size can have the same Screen resolution. This is why it's important to allow the user to set the game to any resolution they like (and why we should be able to choose which target renders are used). Imagine a 27" and a 13" screen, both with 2560*1440 resolution, the game should not force both monitors to play with the same amount of area visible. It makes sense to give the player manual control over this. By the way, I've not gone back to check, but I'm almost entirely sure Josh confirmed that the we will not be forced into playing with one of the two target resolutions. We'll freely be able to set the resolution of our game, within the limitations of our hardware, with the result of the area renders appearing either smaller or larger on screen.

It's important to allow us to set the game to any resolution we'd like, that is the only way to ensure it will remain playable on as wide an amount of monitors out there as is possible (even if it means having to play the game at non-native resolutions). It's great that there are two different target resolutions, it will make the game look better on a wider variety of monitors, but locking the game to always play as if it was played at 2560*1440, or 1280*720 (depending on which texture set is used), regardless of the resolution and pixel density of your monitor, would not be a good idea. I'm sure the renders will be made at a size that will play well with the majority of today's monitors at their native resolutions (if not tomorrow's), but I'm equally sure we will be able to choose which resolution we want to play the game at. People know to expect things look smaller on their above average pixel density screens (that's presumably why they bought them), no need to force them into playing the game with pixel doubling—unless they choose to—by manually setting the resolution of the game to lower than their native screen resolution.

AFAIK, the graphics are rendered to a "target resolution" of 2560*1440 - meaning that is the resolution at which it will look ideal, and scenes will be designed with this specific resolution/aspect ratio in mind. However, that doesn't mean that you can't play the game at any resolution you'd like, if you'd play it on a higher resolution monitor you'd would see more of the map, but at a smaller scale - exactly like the old IE games - unless I manually set the resolution of the game lower than the monitor's native resolution. You won't have to mod the game to do that. At least that's how I assume it will work, and if it doesn't, I will certainly mod the game to play at whatever native resolution I'm currently on. The IE games were designed to a target resolution of 640*480 (and later 800*600), but that doesn't mean that's the only resolution you can play the games at (BG2 natively allowed resolutions up to 1024*768 if I remember correctly, PE will most likely allow you to play at any native resolution) .

^not true, you might have misunderstood what I said. I'm playing PS:T on WQHD (2560*1440) today, which makes it look quite small but still playable. I compared this to playing Project Eternity on a 4k 27" (4096*2160, far more pixels per inch) in the future, thinking the experience may be quite similar, due to PE's higher target resolution. PS:T would become entirely unplayable on such a monitor, unless played at a non native resolution (which, unfortunately, would result in noticeable blur due to bad upscaling).

Will zooming, if playing on a 2560x1440 monitor, resort to pixel doubling or will the max zoom level be a 1:1 representation of pixels? Just curious. I understand the arguments against even higher resolutions very well and, for what a single users thoughts are worth, I'm happy with the direction the game is taking in regards to its resolution & scaling (but we can always dream, eh? ). I don't mind the ant farm feeling of playing PS:T on a WQHD 27" screen, and if, in the future, I'd be playing PE on a 4k 27" screen, its scale would look relatively similar to that of today's PS:T experience if played on the higher target resolution. @AwesomeOcelot, there are already 4k monitors at $5.5k, and TVs for $1.5k. 365 days from now, I believe the prices will be significantly lower. Keep in mind that the current 4k monitors at $5.5k are aimed at professionals, with 1.07billion colours and good colour space reproduction, one aimed at a wider market wouldn't require the same specs and could likely be produced at a cheaper cost.

Possibly, though I believe easily accessible passives that would completely mitigate the reduction would properly set a fighter wearing heavy armour apart from a mage doing so. A fighter mage, on the other hand, might have access to talents partly mitigating the reduction. Same thing could, of course, work by simply letting fighters have access to more partial mitigation passives than a mage, if complete mitigation would not fit the system.

I bet you fighters will have access to passive talents like ignore *insert armour type here* penalties :D.