villain of the story

I explained what it likely would entail just to set the record straight. You don't have to choose between them based on any number of conditions. Yes, I would also prefer all that and more before it would even come to scene rotation. But why so scared to just want it? You. Either. Want. Or. Don't. You either think it would add something of value to the game, or you don't. "I don't want it because X" is ridiculously and unnecessarily hesitant. Kinda good point but I doubt there will be more than a few people who will even bother with map creation even if Obsidian provided all the tools and gave away the details to their own particular pipeline for scenes. Because, hey, IE games have been modded extensively for a long long time and how many new maps do you remember from mods for all IE games combined? Not many. The process itself is very involving and not something most people could bother with. And for those who would, I doubt that multiple renders of a scene they already constructed in 3D would be a problem. At worst, they would just disable rotation for their new areas in their own mods. Even if Obsidian released the source files to their 3D scenes at some point, it would hardly help anyone. In fact, for this reason alone, scene rotation might be a good idea. To keep the game world more flexible in the way you can add to it without being restrained by angles.

How odd for people to consider how difficult it might or might not be. I mean, you don't need to play the "considerate guy" for developers. You either think it would be cool or not. Yes, they could. And it could be a memory hog for lower end systems, look ugly depending on systems and lose details. It doesn't sound too good for a game trying reaching back to that spot we all have for beautiful 2D scenes as in IE games. Anyway, I'm just curious to know what they are planning.

Background scenes are made in 3D, then pre-rendered to 2D images ie. what artwork? It would require 3D scenes to be rendered from 4 directions; not for 2D artwork to be created from scratch for all directions. But it surely quadruples the pipeline described above, as I've mentioned.

I am curious if the 2D backgrounds will be finalised (pre-rendered + touched + post-processed) in a single high resolution and then downscaled either by the engine or come pre-downscaled by Obsidian for lower resolutions OR, finalised in several for a range of resolutions. Surely, this being 2012 and the limitations of IE games being apparent now (namely the resolution inflexibility), I thought perhaps they would opt for a more compatible and maybe even future-proof method than locking the scenes to a single resolution for everyone, regardless of their choice of (or their monitors') resolutions, kind of as though the game were entirely 3D. It would only be common sense at this age. For those wondering, some of the theoretical differences between various methods would be: (0) 2D backgrounds or scenes are made in 3D and then pre-rendered to 2D with best lighting and other effects, then the 2D image is shopped and likely post-processed (in-game effects) for the best result. This is how the backgrounds in all Infinity Engine games were made. They are not 2D artworks as in hand-painted but 3D scenes pre-rendered to 2D images and processed. (1) 2D scenes finalised in a single high resolution and then downscaled by the engine for lower resolutions. + Least amount of work for Obsidian + Smaller file size to download / to ship in discs - High resolution images potential (and very likely) memory hogs, especially for older or low end systems - Quality of downscaling dependent on a number of things (system configuration, drivers) - Loss of detail due to downscaling (2) 2D scenes finalised in a single high resolution and then downscaled by Obsidian for a range of resolutions. + Still reasonably low amount of work for Obsidian + Consistent image quality per resolution across systems + Theoretically the best performance per resolution - Much larger file size to download / to ship in discs - Loss of detail due to downscaling (3) 2D scenes finalised for a range of resolutions + Best image quality per resolution possible + Theoretically the best performance per resolution - Much larger file size to download / to ship in discs - More work for Obsidian (though I'm not certain just how much more: it might be as simple as using presets to do all the adjustments, except several times per resolution, or maybe not) I would just like to know what Obsidian has planned regarding this. And onto my second related subject: I was wondering how feasible it would be for Obsidian to give us an option to rotate the scenes by 90°, essentially meaning that every scene or location would have to be pre-rendered and post-processed four times to get four 2D images of it which we could then quickly switch between to get the best view to our liking. Apart from the budget/time cost of the procedure itself, I believe that the actual scene data itself would be pretty easy to adapt because essentially, they will already be creating 3D scenes (Unity 3D Engine + 3D models for characters) with just the 2D backgrounds and the necessary graphical features to blend the two aesthetically. So basically, I'm just asking: is this something you at Obsidian have ever considered or are still considering? It would only enhance the game, you know, freeing you of the limitations of locked-view and after all, anyone who has played any IE game has to have, at some point, bitched about obstructions. They did this in Commandos 2 & 3 (both 2D games) to great effect. See it in practice: More: As for the toll it would take on Obsidian; take everything I said above about resolutions and multiply it by four. But it would be swell if they did this.

Question for Obsidian: somebody at RPG Codex suggested this about Chanter class: http://www.rpgcodex....18#post-2306518 Which would be terrific but I doubt anybody at Obsidian had anything of the sort in mind regarding the Chanter class because: Maybe somebody over there would like to share some thoughts?

Gotta say, I don't like that wallpaper all that much.

Err... well that's what happens when you grow up without hugs. It is true. I did grow up without many hugs. But I maintain that the two has no relevance.

Imoen was still a lot better than ImoenV3 in Dragon Age. That biatch from France "Orlais", I forget her name. Now that racist soldier woman from Mass Effect, also forgot her name. That was one of the rare characters I liked in a Bioware game.

I wanted to hug her to death and feel the breaking of her bones under my pressure.

I like some of Kieran Yanner's work but he or she doesn't compare up to the Justin Sweet's artwork. Compare these: vs. I feel that Yanner's art is a bit too cartoony and lacks a certain touch of a classic fantasy feel. Sweet's art stirs up my imagination and feels like part of something bigger. Probably because he intentionally leaves some space for imagination. Cannot say the same for Yanner. His or her art feels sharply defined and constrained. I get the impression that Yanner's strong suit might be more light hearted depictions. He or she might have been perfect for Disney type stuff (that is a compliment; I love Disney art and it's not something everybody manages to get right).

Still not buying cool downs. You cast a bunch of spells and they lock out with a cool down. What exactly happens during that cool down while you can do other stuff that allows them to be unlocked again in the first place? It's so artificial and non-involving. And is it not better to focus on the known problems of a pre-existing tried&true system and improve on it instead of coming up with an uncanny mix of everything without any street cred? Especially that has repeatedly failed to be at least as good in most if not all of its incarnations? Grimoires is an excellent idea, though.

Another suggestion regarding Grimoires: Make it so that spells you add to your (or to a) Grimoire will become available only when you rest after doing so. Just to add a more tactical level to Grimoires and prevent potential "Grimoire reset" abuse between encounters. I love the idea of preparing or finding Grimoires, though.

I would like rotating (or switching between) 4 renders of a 2D scene. Commandos 2 and 3 did it and it was way cool and useful.

They didn't and I don't assume there will be none. Regardless, those are some of my ideas without any place or need for cool downs. Cool down = no player involvement. Lazy design.

EXACTLY! The thing that troubles me the most is that I've heard Obsidian talk about how bad the old vancian and resting system is... BUT not a word of criticism towards cooldowns (I may have missed some announcement and if I have, please tell). It would be nice if they at least acknowledged the flaws of that system in the same way. That is probably because they have not done any games with cooldown sytem yet, but they have done games with vancian system. A pretty big part of combat in Alpha Protocol revolves around cool-downs.

My musings on combat magic mechanics: (1) Replace cool-downs with casting times Why? Because it's more tactical and interesting. I'm not a fan of ADND mechanics in IE games but they did some things right and this was one of them. Casting a spell takes time. That is a more interesting tactical consideration that is in your face than the waiting game for cool-downs. No instant cope outs. Casting can be interrupted which is another tactical consideration and a rather awesome one. IWD series had a Combat Casting feat that gave you a bonus to concentration so it was harder for enemies to interrupt your spell-casting and that defined your spell-caster character very sharply. Suddenly, the difference between a spell-caster who was simply back-up support and a combat caster became much dramatic. Perhaps something similar could be used in PE. (2) Dynamic Casting Times Spells that are on the same level as you and higher, cause incremental penalties on casting times, making it take longer to cast consecutive spells. And vice versa: casting consecutive spells below your level take less and less time to cast. This might better emphasize the feel of progression and acquisition of power for a spell caster. And since high level spells would take the longest to cast anyway, it's unlikely this could be exploited. (3) Switching Grimoires requires "casting" If switching Grimoires required an incantation or ritual that took time and could be interrupted, question of switching at all would become a more dramatic and tactically interesting consideration. And all the more reason to have an ability such as "combat casting" so that combat-oriented spell-casters can shine. (4) A "Meditate" or "Concentrate" ability that acts like a spell Instead of a passive cool-down mechanic that doesn't involve the player in any means, meditation to recover that which is depleted and also to alleviate the casting time penalties (which would also neutralise the bonuses). Meditation itself could simply be sitting down on knees for as long as it takes to recover however amount of whatever and naturally, it could be interrupted. More tactically interesting. The key point about this instead of a cool-down is that it's an active choice to be made by the player. One big problem about cool downs is that they passive and they do not involve. They downgrade the combat experience to a gamist time management. DOES NOT INVOLVE. NOT FUN. (5) A kind of "resource" or "pool" to regulate all of this Ie. basically what the cool-down would be without naming anything, which is odd because despite all that focus on souls, cool downs are like the worst thing you can do, devoid of a narrative connection. Anyway, this would be the resource that you would eventually need to replenish. My main concern about all is player involvement. From my perspective, cool downs are the absolute worst and the laziest "solution" to a number of things because they not only not involve the player, they often exist in a vacuum and generally not make much of a sense. I still have trouble fitting cool downs anywhere into the PE's picture with souls powering so many things.

But why would Tim Cain specifically mention prone position in the first place with regard to attacks, knock downs don't exactly count as a "position" but more like a result. I hopefully thought about stealth opportunities, covering from ranged attacks and crawling through spaces otherwise inaccessible. As for rifles, it is a must. They could add penalty to reload while prone but the ability to shoot while crouched or prone is a tactical no-brainer. As for melee weapons while prone, I liked this from the Kickstarter comments: Though it's not an optimal stance to use a bow. Bows are best used standing for best draw strength and accuracy. But it would be cool if, for instance, you could shoot arrows while sneaking crouched with a reasonable amount of accuracy penalty.

It is interesting to hear Tim Cain willing to repeat the same mistakes they did on Arcanum back in Troika. Spam Harm spell, anyone? Yeah, great idea. Just so that every mage can fall back on something. You know, back in DND, mages had slings, staffs and other low tier combat options when multiclassed. It's *extremely* disappointing to see that they are thinking of "resolving" problems with lazy design. And whatever happened to the magic of magic in high fantasy anyway? Why do we even need to have spammable low level spells? Is a mage no good for anything else? Does everything have to revolve around combat this much? Yes. Absolutely no. "Cleave" (or insert whatever melee ability) is not "special ability". If you are capable of doing it, you already got the training to do it any time. It's just a certain way to hit with your weapon. You don't "replenish" a physical move. You don't run out of a physical move. What can happen is you run out of stamina, the energy to do it. And that could be resolved through more meaningful mechanics closer to PNP. Stamina pools. Fatigue. Cumulative penalties to your subsequent attacks when you don't stop for a moment to take a breath. Mechanically, it would still be similar to cool-downs except not really because cool-downs have this very specific context of being specific to abilities or ability groups.

Story - the same as every other Bioware game. Ancient Evil from somewhere awakens once again and because nobody is willing to believe it, you save them from the brink of destruction. Also followed the BioWare 4x formula to the T. Nothing captivating about it. Origin Concept - It was interesting, yes. Deep Roads - also known as Derp Roads among online RPG communities. Absolute worst part of the game. Quests - With no moral conflicts. If you couldn't settle on the absolute best WIN-WIN situation, it was only because you didn't know of all the possibilities and/or didn't have the stats to have your way. Other times, it was mostly plain uninteresting and lazy reasons for throwing trash mobs at you. Controls - They couldn't even decide whether they wanted you to use the overview camera or the other, closer one from behind or WASD or point and click. Neither ever worked good all the way on its own without making you need others every now and then. Banters at Camp and mid-game- on about the same level of quality with that of the worst fanfiction out there. Most of it read like juvenile forum discussions. Circle of Magi - Had ups and downs. You could tour the entire map without ever stopping by the circle and they and apparently, they could just keep waiting for you as long as you wanted. Very poor handling of quests and poor handling of the fake urgency of The Blight!!. Tactical controls - Camera was terrible. How far you could pan the camera was restricted for no apparent reason. Oh wait, I remember now, it was because there is no Fog of War so if you could pan the camera all over, you could see the hostiles everywhere. And what a disappointing change that would be from the final product. LOL. Camera teleporting your characters to predefined spots and including your party NPCs without ever asking you. How tactical. It is particularly bad because sometimes you could see a combat situation from up ahead but you couldn't place characters tactically because they always got teleported. Not what I would call tactical at all. Automated actions that left your character blankly staring while being killed. Character Creation - If you had said "Origin vignettes", I would agree. But Character Creation? One of the most basic and featureless I've seen in an RPG. In line with BioWare's other recent titles. So I'd rather PE be as far away from DA as possible in any way possible.

It's an "Adventurer's Hall". Narrative-wise, it will be like hiring nobodies so I'm not sure I'd like it if they pulled some personal crab on me or nagged me about their personal bullshot. However, if you could just up and create new characters once you reached whatever necessary level, it would also be kind of disappointing. Too easy, no? So I sort of agree with Crusty. I'd like behaviour traits (though not annoying things like autonomous looting) to balance it. Jagged Alliance 2 comes to mind. Characters had all sorts of traits that made them authentic. Some hated the water. Some, the heat or rain or desert or night or each other. Some were psychotic and went on auto-fire sprees even though you had only wanted to shoot once. Etc. In fact, it might have been far better if you could just hire (as in, keep them paid for as long as you wanted one) premade and reasonably fleshed out NPCs at this Adventurer's Hall with behaviour traits and very brief backgrounds ala JA/JA2 sans the plot-narrative depth promised for the companions. More so, they could use "the custom NPC" reward exclusively to fill the Adventurer's Hall roster. Either case, having to pay to keep a custom character from Adventurer's Hall would be a good point to balance it and give world currency extra meaning. After all, it's extremely likely that we will become crazy rich by mid-game.

It's and has been about ease of design on most cases for a very very long time, not hardware capabilities. It will always be far easier to design interior and exterior locations completely separately because mixing the two brings a number of design changes that take far more things into consideration and thus longer to design completely independent of hardware limitations. And there are certain advantages and disadvantages to both. In a lot of games with a general strategic/tactical view where the two aren't separated, interiors look poor-ish and it's often hard to make out the details and most of these games had poor ways of resolving the obstructions in line of sight. This is easier to deal with when you have separate inside and outside locations as each can be catered to on an individual basis, free of anything else. The same sadly applies to many of my favourite RPGs. Interiors locations in towns were often plain and dull in Fallout and annoying to look at in Arcanum while they looked very polished and often beautiful in IE games. You could, however, argue that doing it that way is lazy. Personally, the only game where I completely enjoyed that separation was Commandos 2 and Commandos 3. All locations in a map were always active so AI could actually go in an out regardless of where you are and you could even peek inside windows and it would show the interior in a small frame over your main game view outside.

What about 2D isometric, party based, with minimal voice acting? Is that appealing to the mass market? Is it possible that they changed their minds because I remember the mention of 2D but it is nowhere to be found on Kickstarter page right now. I think they changed their mind when they decided to use Unity. However, 2D vs. 3D is a very shady situation. Indie games have been invading PC for a while now and 2D is slowly making a strong come back in so many diverse forms, it could possibly change the position of a lot of publishers these days. But yes, 2D would be unthinkable since early 2000s up until last couple years.

It's insulting that you find the air of authority in yourself to call people with various types of concerns as "overreacting" while doing the latter yourself by creating a thread solely about your own concern over other people's concerns that you authoritatively label as overreacting. Somebody is definitely overreacting. As for myself, I'm disappointed with the RTwP model but I was expecting it so it came as no surprise. I made two threads at RPG Codex about wishes vs. expectations about Obsidian's then-eventual Kickstarter RPG project: http://www.rpgcodex....t-to-see.69434/ http://www.rpgcodex....ll-it-be.69359/ While a pressing majority at RPG Codex wanted TB, realistic expectations were all over the place. I'd like to think that I was being more in touch with reality by expecting RTwP. What came to me as a surprise is the recent details and the amount of PR marketspeak we are getting from Obsidian to justify it. Only now, all of a sudden, Obsidian is claiming that "level scaling is necessary to provide non-linear challenge". Come on, now. We are your fans. We are familiar with your past games, under Obsidian's title and from before. We KNOW this is simply not true. Likewise with cool-downs. And the lack of rounds coupled with RTwP. All of a sudden, this game is sounding more and more like something even worse than Dragon Age. It's that, Obsidian promised us a game with the storytelling of PST, tactical combat of IWD series and explorarion of BG series. Lack of rounds, cool-downs and level-scaling already sort-of negates the latter two so the game they originally promised is already objectively different than the game they are shaping up as they go, regardless of our "inattainable dreams" we project on the promise of a game. And this is much cause for concern to me. If you enjoyed the poorly and lazily designed MMO-influenced combat in Dragon Age and you love twitch fests with cool-downs and level-scaling to babysit the player, good for you. Your preference doesn't put you in a more "righteous" place. If you, however, buy into the PR marketspeak of Obsidian with their ridiculous justifications, then that puts you in an objectively sad place. Irony? In case you have missed it, "Oblivion With Guns" was the official analogy Pete Hines (VP of PR and Marketing at Bethesda) and Todd Howard (senior lead designer at Bethesda) have used to describe Fallout 3. No Kidding. Prior to those statements, "Oblivian With Guns" was an insider joke among old school fans to make fun of Fallout 3 going First Person. Then it became an officially endorsed label. Almost like a joke. I think what you have failed to realise is that you have belittled and still are belittling that person for his own personal preferences, and for pretty awful reasons without a solid base. There are valid concerns over explicit mention of all those features. Take romance and take Bioware. They are trying hard to cater to every goddamn binary orientation. So much that their games end up being sexist tokenist poorly written fan fiction where every NPC exists only to appease the player and doesn't have his or her own preferences. If you play a woman, you can shag with everyone and everything. If you play a men, you can still shag everyone and everything. Everone and everything around you exists just for that purpose without integrity. Compare that to New Vegas where you get plenty of attempts at flirting and none of it leads to anything because the characters in FNV have their preferences and they don't bend it to the player's will because they have integrity and that is partly why they are stellar examples of good characterisations. So now, when the issue of romance becomes a "promise" all of a sudden, those of us with a critical mind have every reason to be concerned by this. In the end, you are ironically imposing your own totalitarian mentality on what other players should be open to, being petty and shortsighted in the process yourself because you have convinced yourself that yours is the more progressive and liberal position to be in. Please try to get over yourself, no offense. I doubt anyone does. Even back in the day, IE games were quite very simplistic. I don't remember anyone pointing at IE games and praising how hard or tactically challenging the games were. Especially among the then-older (now grandpa) PNP RPGamers, much laughter was had regarding the perceived depth of IE games. And with good reason: the very first entry in the series, Baldur's Gate, was initially made to be a fantasy RTS title which got changed into a RPG adventure game and the rest of the series took that initial implementation as gospel with trimmed additions from different editions of AD&D instead of improving the base model. True dat. Examples abound as can be evidenced. I don't see the relevance. Dragon Age was a rather poor game. It certainly wasn't an IE-type game. Then Dragon Age 2 came which had barely anything to do with even the first one to begin with. I wouldn't. I disliked Dragon Age a lot. I don't have a thing for dating simulators disguised in make-believe grim-dark pretenses. Derp Roads anyone? Or combat teleporting, overriding any tactical placement you might have done even when the game was screaming to you that you would have a combat encounter up ahead? Or the senseless cool-downs that only served as lazy balancing attempts? That same fake sense of urgency as in Oblivion "invasion of Daedra" V2 when where you went first didn't matter (eg. that fortress on the hill didn't get overrun and completely lost until you went there, regardless of where you went before, or the magician's tower. Game waited for you despite a pretense of urgency and desperation)? The awful writing? The insulting sexist tokenisms? And so on and so forth. Anyway, this isn't about Dragon Age. I am not so sure that it is, though that much is up for speculation. Is that a fact? Did Obsidian explicitly say "we tried to pitch this game repeatedly and failed each time. Nobody wants to make this kind of game any longer"? If they did, I've certainly missed it. Oh but I remember, they don't even have a clear concept in their own minds to begin with, other than IE-like high fantasy adventure, so we can not even tell whether any publisher would be willing to fund the kind of game they want to make. And they are not stressing any fundamental "old-school qualities" in the basic concept itself. Take Brian Fargo and Wasteland 2, for instance. He told it straight: he wanted to do a TB game with lots of choices and consequences. And he tried to pitch it to a lot of people. And every attempt failed. So whether W2 Kickstarter would work or not, it would be the last time he would try. Could we say the same for Project Eternity? So far, at this point, based on the details they have revealed (RTwP combat, cool-downs, level-scaling, generic fantasy setting ie. stuff that are perceived to be popular and in demand with mass market appeal right now), I would be hard-pressed to believe that they couldn't find someone to fund this type of game if they tried hard. Dungeon Siege 3 came out just last year which is a simplified console action game from a similar viewpoint. In fact, I'm certain that they could get this game out with a publisher. But again, this too would be speculation. I'm not even going into the issues of IP rights and whatnot, which are entirely outside the scope of this discussion. Speculation. Plenty of games still coming out, except not from your favourite North American game developer.