melkathi

The Wasteland 2 thing is not Obsidian loosing focus. It is Brian Fargo pledging support to Project Eternity. Basically what Brian Fargo said is: "Hi guys! I'll support your kickstarter campaign! But how about insetad of just giving you money and being one more backer, I give you copies of this highly anticipated game I am making to give away to your backers?" The Facebook thing: Any product needs marketing. That would usually be the publisher's job. This project is self-published (Yay!). The devs have to come up themselves with ways to make the public aware of it. And that public is not just those of us old enough to have, when BG first came out, said "Whoa! Isometric? I can see my character? An RPG that is not first person?!?" or "Its good... but... it's no Eye of the Beholder..." A facebook page is a cheap way of having an accessible online presence. Would people rather they did not have a facebook page but then would have to spend actual cash on advertising? Cash that could have been used to make a better product?

Thought I'd share my experience with the Embermage. I play on Elite which had me die a lot at first. It is quite a challenge and has me running away a lot and drinking more potions on one map than I drank with my Engineer throughout normal mode. I was going to try and use any skill that can keep my character alive. I ended up using skills that make the character fun as heck to play and the survivability seems to have started building up as a side effect. So far I have Magma Spear (starting skill) which hits every enemy in a straight line and has a chance to set them on fire. It has a nice range (pretty much the length of the screen and can be spammed. I also have Magma Mace, a melee skill that has a high chance to Stun enemies. I have this on tab, in case enemies come too close, to buy me time to run. While it was useful at first, it is loosing its usefulness very fast. It does not build up charge. Charge Mastery (passive) I am increasing quite a bit. It improves the rate charge builds up and reduces the rate at which it decays. Charge for the Embermage allows the use of skills without mana cost for a short time once the charge bar is filled up. Very useful skill, obviously. Frozen Fate (passive) gives a chance to freeze up to 4 enemies around any enemy you kill. I hope this to icnrease my survivability. Frost Phase is a teleport with a very short cooldown, allowing me to get out of trouble (and even cause some damage as I leave), Prismatic Rift (passive) has a quite nice chance of randomly teleporting enemies that hit me. Especially usefull against melee enemies. And especially fun during fights with already teleporting enemies as they zip around the battlefield like crazy Wand of Chaos (passive) adds a chance for a "strange" effect to happen to targets of your Wand attacks, but also Magma Spear, Magma Mace, Icy Blast and Shock Bolts. The effects seem to include: Acid Rain, Fire Rain, huge rock crushing down, poison, burn, freeze, panic... and can even summon a little flying critter to attack your foes. The chance for effect starts at 8% at rank 1 and increases by 2 per rank - a 10% chance at rank 2 for your weapon attack to deal AoE damage isn't shabby. At the moment I mostly run away from enemies, try to line them up for Magma Spear, spam that and watch Wand of Chaos effects happen. It's a lot of fun. I had a wand that actually had homing attacks... will try to figure out which wands have that. edit: So far I have beaten General Grell, which isnt far at all. But in Elite it is taking me a while to clear maps.

Thirty, counting the free ones.

Well at least someone understand it I still don't. If Blizzard can do global launches, why can't the rest of the industry?

Shadowrun Returns had it's release date pushed back because people gave them too much money

Why are you still on the forum? Go! Dernholm needs you!

Shadowrun Returns Shadowrun Online Dead State Dead State Dead State Saint's Row Enter the Dominatrix... or whatever they'll call it. Oh and Dead State.

I'm not getting this game Can't afford to get an X-Com game right now. Good thing Project Eternity and some other games I backed are not due out soon either

Better late than never

I agree with the Storm of Zehir map preference. Failing that, a Fallout 2 map would be ok as well. Though when I looked at the forum and saw "Do you want to see an overw..." I thought this would be about overweight companions... I'd vote in favour of those.

My engineer gets awesome embermage, outlander and berserker loot I also play a summoner engineer by the way, but I seem to use a lot more spider mines than you. I was very sceptical about them, now I absolutely LOVE them. Every time I enter a dungeon I go through the same motions: summon first set of three spider mines, summon heal bot, summon second set of three spidermines, summon stun copter, summon third set of three spider mines. Then I walk down the corridor and watch the spider mines rush ahead and exploding the monsters ahead Also really like how the Heal Bot will randomly run up to you and salute. Has anyone linked this yet? http://i.imgur.com/83lWz.jpg Devs seem to be really cool. Other random thoughts: I used the alchemist and threw in 4 uniques. Was not worth it as they turned into a random unique that wasn't even usable by my class. What is usefull though is the fact (which isnt listed by the alchemist as a recipe) that 2 set items will transmute into 1 random set item. So if you have 3 sentinel boots like I did, 2 of those chucked into the alchemist and tada a new item (exorcist gloves in my case). My spare two ghastly shoulder pads turned into nice clovenhoof pants as well. Unique socketables (such as skulls) combine the same was as socketables and not as uniques. Extremly not worth doing though as the fact that they are unique does not affect the outcome. Socketables in general are only worth transmuting if they are lowest quality. Blue ones and unique ones, if you are not going to use them are best sold. Started an Embermage on Elite. The game suddenly has become really challenging. Also started an Outlander on Veteran Hardcore. And quickly found out that hardcore and normal characters do not share a stash... Last patch broke the textures on some engineer armour pieces. Hope the fix will be up soon. Until then my engineer is running around wearing pure white armour, http://steamcommunit...s/?id=100999438 Going to farm some random maps with my engineer for loot and cash. My embermage drinks potions as if there was no tomorrow

I had a lot of fun staggering through streets at night, getting into drunken fights with robbers and monsters But it worked for the witcher because it had a certain gameplay. I do not think it would work for PE.

Very much agree. So far I am very much indifferent in regards to the project. I pledged, even added another $8 for the order of obsidian, but it is deffinitly the kickstarter I have pledged the least. If this wasn't a kickstarter, which means there only is a limited time frame to the campaign, I would forget about the project till release. Or until they bring out more info. So far they have said "We made some games you really enjoyed and some games you were rather indiferent about." But there is hardly any worthwhile info on this project.

Woah! Obsidian is making a Duke Nukem?

I never could stand that spell. Fireball? Ok a ball of fire, I an see that. Acid Arrow? An arrow of acid, sure why not. Magic Missile? A missile of magic.... erm what exactly does that mean? Just sounds silly.

Project Eternity: Nothing Lasts Forever Or Project Instantaniousness: A True Short Story

You are the one with experience with them. But for what it's worth, maybe this time around, with no publisher making decisions for Obsidian, perhaps communication with the translation team will be better and you get apositive surprise. One can always hope, right?

I'm on my fourth playthrough of AP. Still love it.

As well as our arsenal that includes such diverse elements such as surprise, fear, ruthles efficiency, a near fanatical devotion to Obsidian and nice red uniforms.

I want a custom forum tag! Oh, wait...

No ridiculous pop culture references (Haris Pilton *shudder*) No orphan chosen-one, destined by birth, in reality the only true decendant of whatshisface, shall bring balance to the force raised by their uncle/mentor etc cheap story mechanic No militaristic garbage - only soldiers understand the gravity of situations, all civilians ever do is stop us from saving the world blah blah. If I wanted that I'd be on the BSN praising ME No killing 10 rats quest but also no joke about killing 10 rats quests. Both have been doen to death. No forced difficult decissions that are only there so the game can boast about difficult decissions. If there has been so much foreshadowing that players have seen the situation come up from miles away and only end up in the situation because the game has them on a railroad track to doom, then we stop be players/gamers and become simply a helpless audience. No feedback spam on consequences of player actions just to stroke the player's ego. Not too many wierd/strange/cool companions. I'd rather see a few interesting characters who are that without having to be the superexotic race we have never seen. If everyone is exotic even by exotic standards, then the exotic companions loose heir exoticness

You might have missed, but Obsidian already decided on Polish and Russian translations. They will be done by distributors in Poland and Russia. Although Obsidian didn't mention any companies, we have reasons to believe that we know who they are and fear that quality will be an issue. As far as length restrictions are concerned...nothing unusual, really. It's just a skill you need to have, if you want to do your job well. I wouldn't say it significantly effects translation efficiency. Yeah I saw that after posting. As far as your comment on length, it is not unusual, that's why I mention it. And its sadly ignored by many. While yes, there is skill involved (for menus and buttons you will quickly have a working formula worked out) especially when it comes to ficiton and dialogues, there is a lot more involved beside just shortening something. It does affect results (I am not sure efficiency is the right word here). But re-reading the example of the Witcher I mentioned, I suppose the biggest factor for them was cost. Yes, there are terrible translators out there. I have seen greek subtitles in movies that had me spending the rest of the movie laughing at the translation (for example you have one cop congratulating another on a bust and the subtitles had "bust" translated as a sculpture ). I sure hope the russian and polish translations are better than that

Skeksis rule Gelflings drool. I had a big, goofy grin reading this

Just a few short notes with my thoughts to whoever can be bothered to read them: I just got my first paycheck for my translation work (woohoo! Money!). I only started this kind of thing recently and am not planning to make it a permanent career. There was a need that had to be met and there were only two of us available to do the job. Someone said early on in the thread that translations are cheap. No they are not. Usually transaltors are paid by word or line. This means that regardless how experienced they are and how deep they are in the subject matter, the rate you will be paying them at will be constant. There is no "This is easy so it will be cheap". Some blant description will cost just as much as the Gann's dialogue Usually translators are specialised on subject matter. As this is a tanslation of fiction though, you cannot just hire a specialised translator who already knows all that you could be writing. Translations aren't easy. And especialy fiction. You need to balance the original style with what works in the language you translate into. Some languages are very different from each other. So while the original had short sentences, giving a sense of haste and imediacy, it may be extremly hard to do the same in the target language. And there always is the simple technical problem. I had read a comment from the guys at CD Project about the original Witcher game and the trouble they had with the english translation, something they managd to fix with the Enhanced Edition. If I remember correctly the problem was in part that to express certain ideas, which in languages like german would be easy, allowing for the "creation" of words by "adding" them together, would take long texts in english. Lengths of text the game just didn't allow for. Especially with cutscenes, there is only so much text that can be added. Just think of the silly effect of dubbed into englih old karate movies where the lips of actors move far longer than the speech we hear. I currently keep facing the problem that the german word in my translation may be twice as long as the english word - and I keep getting sentences send back with a note "Can you try to shorten this just a little bit so it can fit in the space we have?" And a good translation needs constant correspondence between translator and writer, to ensure that the spirit, the style, the subtetlies of the original aren't lost. Bad translation to some point result in the translators not knowing what the hell they are translating. I get emails saying "Can you quickly translate this sentence" or, even worse, "is the translation for this word this?" and I often have to reply "What's the context?" or "Well if the context is a) then this or b) then this..." A good translation can reach a lot more potential customers. It can create goodwill among these customers who decide that this company cares about them. But a bad translation can alienate them completly and drive them away. Champions Online had terrible localization like that. It reach "All You Base" lows. So while I applaud the enthusiasm of everyone offering to help with translation into other languages, do make sure you know what you are getting yourself into. And be sure you can actually provide the quality that will make the project and your love for it justice. As for anyone who thinks translations would be cheap or easy, as a gamer and someone who frequents the net, you shoul be aware of All Your Base and thus know exactly what that kind of quality that attitude ends up with. edit: related unrelated: Quenya would be an interesting localisation for a high fantasy game