Zeful

4 million USD wouldn't fill out an art budget for "modern quality" models and textures, so what you're talking about here wasn't even on the table. Besides, part of the pitch to kickstarter was EXACTLY what they are doing now. 3D character models on a 2D background, with a special layer on top of it to show where the party can stand. It's what I bought into when I pledged, it's what a lot of people bought into when they pledged. If you were somehow under the mistaken impression that you were getting a full 3D game, do everyone a favor; ask for your money back, and leave.

Different game, different rendering system. Different way of handling environments. It's quite literally impossible to rotate the camera when all the backgrounds are little more than pictures drawn from one perspective. The only way it would be possible is to have all the images drawn from a perfect bird's eye view, which would make the rotation worthless. Please do research on the differences between the games before making comparisons. Wasteland 2 will have fully 3d environments and their reason for not initially wanting to add a rotating camera was worrying about art assets and how long it would take to fill out all sides of the various environment assets. Project Eternity has nothing in common with Wasteland 2 in terms of environment design, what with the world being hand-drawn images that has collision maps attached to them.

Except this has the issue of either making all combat too lethal, or not lethal enough. Differential HP based on class allows for character archetypes that need active protection and increase the tactical options in a fight. The only way your system would work with that in mind is to make spellcasting require multiple very high stats, reduce the ability for your strong character to carry everything by fixing the number of things each character is capable of carrying, such that investing in HP to equal the mundane classes compromises your ability to do something important.

And you of course have a wide variety of sources to back all that up? Just to point this out, the basic design requirements for full-plate would make it easier to wear and move in pound for pound than a 60 pound day-pack worn by the (US) military. Because it's harnessed all over your body, spreading the weight out over a huge space. wearing 60 pound of fullplate, strapped to your body in a properly fitted harness should actually encumber you less than a 10 pound backpack, because of where all the weight sits. Yeah, you'll be a little slower because you suddenly gained 60 pounds of dead weight, but it wouldn't even begin to impair your maneuverability or combat capacity like you suggest. You're talking tournament jousting armor, in which rare cases of competitors needed to be lowered by a winch onto their horse because the armor had as little manueverabilty as possible in the attempt to keep the competitor in the horse, so the joint at the waist was welded shut, making it impossible to get on the horse without a winch, not because it was heavy. Because come on, plate armor wouldn't have been invented or used if it wasn't expected to work, and plate armor still saw use in WW1 for crying out loud.

And there are better systems that can do all of that better without feeling entirely artificial and arbitrary. Like this one I wrote in twenty minutes that also prevents magic spamming in combat, has a form of battle fatigue for mages, and allows high power spellcasters to feel like high power spellcasters.

But there has to be some way for the player to force enemies to attack your defensively specialised characters, otherwise they become quite useless. Some sort of ZoC-system would be preferable but those can be tricky to implement in games with real time combat. There's an easy way to make that work. Give mundane or defensively specced characters THE ABILITY TO MODIFY ENEMY MOVEMENT. Shield bashes, bullrushes, hamstrings and grapples. Make those characters get in the way and actively stop the enemy from just beelining to your mages/rangers rather than just passively being more "threatening" because wank. Suddenly, characters that you can specialize defensively are one of those things you can never have enough of because of enemies intelligently priorities the mages/rangers. Aggro as a mechanic of taunts and compulsions makes very little actual sense, and compared to the things a character could be doing? Really shouldn't even be an option.

It might be nice, if it wasn't for the requirement that magic be very simple to facilitate spell crafting. If your magic system is even remotely complex (see Skyrim) the number of variables the player would have to mess with to interpolate it's costs are insane. The only cost mechanic in a magic system that could be complex and still have spellcrafting is cooldowns, because who cares if it takes 20 minutes of real time for the spell to reset, just make a series of weaker versions to make up that time.

For this I think a more stringent and universally applicable system would be best. Something like Shadowrun's spell system where spells invoke a physical cost on the caster would be what I want to see. You select a spell, cast it and you have to make a check to endure the rigors of spellcasting. If you fail, you damage your soul, which reflects back onto the body, and you take damage[1]. I would also couple this with a small mana pool that recharges at a moderate rate[2], most spells "on your level" would nearly drain the full pool, while the weaker, "lower level" spells would leave more; allowing for high level casters to cast several weaker spells in sequence while larger spells require waiting a short while. Every time you cast a spell though, part of it's cost is "reserved", with failure doubling or even tripling this reserve cost[3]. The reserve takes a much longer time to clear, hours, but time spent moving between adventure zones on the map counts toward it. This system limits spell casting somewhat, preventing spamming through two mechanism a skill dependant casting system, making each spell cast a gamble, and an inherent cost restriction. High level casters will be able to spam low level spells, but in doing so, they might restrict their casting high level spells for a time. This system also works for non-casters though magically powered fighting styles, or other inherent magical abilities, and can be part of every class' architecture without impacting their design much. 1: Damage taken should depend on quite a number of factors, spell power, the caster's power, the caster's magical resistance, but not the caster's skill in magic. 2: In that casting spells of "your level" should require maybe two or three attacks with a quick weapon before you cast again. This should be based on the tempo of combat, you shouldn't have to manage every character in the party at once, it should be a cycle between your characters thus the game. 3: This would be a "degrees of success" mechanic, the better your character rolls are when casting a spell, the less each spell reserves of your mana pool, to a point; this also applies to failure, the closer you are to succeeding, the less mana is reserved. This prevents players from just spamming their best spell, as it would be harder to succeed on, resulting in, on average, less actual spells used over the course of the encounter. It also prevents casters from "just being better" than non-casters at mundane activities, and allow non-magical exploration skills to still be valid.