Falkon Swiftblade

Not that we're aware of. The last version of the backer beta comes out next week, and the final game comes out roughly 6 weeks later.

are all the graphic fx in game final at this point? I find some of them unintuitive in watching the demos. It's probably second nature for you guys who see it a bagillion times a day, but if you have any say so, the odd shaped line cone and the larger green and yellow circles could use some tlc, not only are they vague, but the simple line art style makes the overall fx look amateurish and unfinished.

Can you give an example of what a high level character of each type should be best suited for? I understand we can mix and match skills, but we won't know what opens up for us in the end until we get there, and I might not like the way the dev's chose the talents for a particular role. For example, I would most like to play an archer or a dual bladed wielding dagger striker or maybe assassin of a similar style, but your mechanic's may force me to play frontline when I'd rather sneaky stab for example. I just wondered if the classes at the end game will still feel kind of like they do initially, or will they really branch out, and how much time should we invest into a class before it would be wiser to reroll?

I don't know if they rewrote the battle music, but they def were playing some new music in the most recent pax demo that was actually pretty great! There was only one major part that irked me with the old combat music and I've expressed that to the composer already. And apparently internally the dev's had mentioned the music was not too thrilling for them either, so maybe what we heard was an example of the new music, or at least an alternate theme that reminded me of the BG games and Lord of the Rings.

I've seen elsewhere that mentioned there are multiple ending's to the game, and seeing as they're currently working on an expansion I suspect the ending is going to be inconclusive. I mean if you played any of the other IWD or BG games, I imagine it'll be in the same vein as that.

am i imagining things, or was Adam really bad and died a bunch when he played? I'm not sure if he deserves a do over, or if it's time for some new blood. I chose tim cain, but I'd be interested to see a younger person play who never played the IE games 15 yrs ago.

I have like 20 questions! What categorizes a bug into A, B, B4 or whatever system you use? Why would something be a bigger bug than another, and how many times do you test the same thing over and over to determine if it's a glitch? Do you ever go back and retest something that previously was fine? Also do you test the entire game or just certain mechanic's? How many QA testers are on Obsidian's team vs the other outside help you have? Any idea how many people are beta testing the backer beta? Do you guys have any say so in how something is polished or treated in game? i.e. If you think the hair on a creature looks more like a horn than a ponytail, or if an animation looks like rockem sockem robots, can you reject the work and request the team or person responsible fix it? (those were completely hypothetical examples!)

oh interesting, how did ya stumble upon it? Does he have a blog or something?

I like that chart, kudos to whomever created it

I'm not expecting a lot really, certainly not expecting Uncharted level animations. I think the best animation I've seen in game is the way the lion's run, but I think part of the problem for the combat animations that they didn't have to worry about when they initially created them are the bulky armors and items which would naturally limit the range of motion in combat that came into development later so they probably didn't anticipate how they would work. I can buy into that, however certain little thing's would make a big difference in selling the attacks. One of which would be foot placement and the # of steps it would take to swing certain weapons, also momentum in swings, anticipation so when they swing they swing way back especially for a powerful strike and then follow through. Also certain weapons should take longer to swing. I think maybe why I'm being so critical on my perception is the rules they have put into the world. They've included real historical types of content. The weapons are authentic, the castles and environments, there are real creatures like lions, bears, and giant beetles from Texas! I think they did a pretty good job on the ranged weapon reloading animation, and to be completely fair, I'm basing my opinion on watching other people play as I'm not in the beta. However as some have already touched on, there doesn't seem to be many animations or varied animations for crit's or impact's. If I get hit by a troll, vs a goblin I think it should really be noticeable.

quite honestly the animations in this game are almost the worst I've seen in years, and I feel so very bad for saying that. I REALLY want to like the game, but I don't understand the disconnect from their team. They really feel like there's not any oomph to hit's, the swing's don't seem to convey any weight, and it's like a buncha rockem sockem robots in fights. Every single unity demo I've seen from version like 3.5 on looks better. Even a game made by 2 brothers on 10k budget using unity has better animations, and they're doing much more complicated moves. I'm so confused. Even the stock one's that come for free are better. I think what particularly intrigues me is this is the result after 2 yrs or more. I could understand after a few months, but something got lost in translation. Where did the extra $ we raised go to? I feel like they screwed the animation guy over bad. He's probably one guy working on a 7 year old machine on 4 gb of ram. Help the fellah out Obsidian, you have to take a little more pride in your work guys, really. I feel so bad for him. I feel like they must have spent a million dollars just on art, but you can polish a turd, and it's still a turd. The animations add to the mechanic's feeling clumsy and can be quite immersion breaking. All that to say, I've seen bigger miracles happen. I have faith the final product won't stink too bad!

If you have time, I'd like to see a quest done different ways similar to what you did in the last demo to see how the party responds to you, or maybe actually an example of how others respond to you because of a certain reputation you have developed. Also, lets see some crafting of foodstuffs and an item. (I'm assuming we can craft armors and things? Can we name them? that would be cool!) Questions: Are crafted items better or worse than random drops? Will there be more than 1 best weapon of the game? If you have time, please create a talking weapon like the few that were in BG games! Also, maybe discuss how a high level character will play vs a lower level character of the same type so we can understand the character evolution. I think it's fairly easy to understand how a high level wizard would play out, but what would a high level monk or chanter be great at for example?

Question for the guys like Bester or other modders who program. Can you guys adjust the speeds of animations or attacks at all? I wonder if it would be possible to eventually be able to speed up or slow down attacks to give more weight to the attacks and magical attacks? I think that would make combat also feel more satisfying if there were pregnant pauses from time to time, and also slightly exaggerated follow throughs on swings. That might have to be done through the animations themselves, but I wasn't sure what capabilities you guys would have.

Why did they get 35 days to run their funding? I always see 30 days for kickstarters with bigger and even much smaller budgets.

Also, I thought of an easy solution to the circles under the feet for readability. All ya need to do is add a second circle around the first as long as it's a little big bigger or smaller than the other circle. That negative space inside the two circles creates a strong contrast of where the target is located and it won't matter so much what colors are being used.

I noticed in the recent Pax video the color of damage in the video looks to be red with a black stroke around it. Would it be at all possible to change the red to include a lighter shade of red either as a gradient on the edge, or as a stroke to assist in the contrast popping out to more easily read against the background. Or, maybe that's an option we can mod in post release?

darnet, Adam was saying something right about 37:00 into the stream about something he did for companions and the stream garbled up his reply, does anyone know what he was talking about? I was very interested in his response.

I have to give props to the music in the recent livestream, although it was very quiet, it was very pleasant and gave me the same "feels" of the old IE games, albeit a tad toned down. I suspect they will be recording live instruments any time now, since that's one of the last thing's to do.

^^ I think they keep them so empty because of the pathing issues of the party size. If there were npc's hustling about our player's would be walking into them like a robot vacuum cleaner.

Any chance we could get a ui for loot comparison similar to this? It doesn't have to be that big, but I like the fact it's easily identifiable it's armor, which is better, and it would be swell if as you hover over items in the inventory it could bring up a simple tool tip ui even if it were up and down arrows showing what is better. Maybe one item would have a green stroke around it if it's better and grey if it was worst?

not a huge big deal, but would I be able to download a version of the game for PC and Mac if I have both machines like I can on Steam, or is it just the one game total? It sounds like the Linux and Mac version's have been problematic and I may have to default to the PC version.

Lol, didn't read any of the rest of the thread, huh? It's another acronym for NPC, assuming you don't translate it from it's french origin first. i skipped page 2!! thx though!

I also noticed how all the character's feel glued to the map. I wish there was some AI patrolling in there, and more props. It is kinda dumb to have a bunch of monster's standing in an empty room guarding nothing. There's missing narrative of why things are where they are. The folks in the city feel very samey and out of context. Thing's seem to slowly be improving over time compared to last year, but it's like a crawl to the finish. I could understand if the game is as huge as they say it is. Although, I'm not as impressed so far as how big the game is versus content per area. Thing's feel either too sparse, or too template and grid like. I hope they can triple their efforts to add some variety in the fight's, animations, and idle state's before it ships. Although, it certainly prettier than I anticipated and it looks like they finally decided to scale up the models a little more compared to the stuff they showed off originally which makes them not look like micro machine soldiers at least. PS what is a PNJ?

Bester, do you understand how to work with the animation files? I'm curious since unity supports motion capture files if we could somehow import idle states we customized and created so that we could bring in custom attack swing's, or maybe gesture's when you're angry or laughing for example to implement?

As a rule, in color theory typically red, blue, and yellow would be primary colors that have strong contrast. Then complementary colors with strong contrast would be red/green, blue/orange, and yellow/purple. I think if you wanted to have the most contrast from what I've seen in the game, you would probably not want to use green circles at all to avoid a loss of contrast against the background. Blue would be a good, red, and yellow/gold would be most useful.