Frenetic Pony

Putting this here so the devs will see it (hey all). Finished the game and enjoyed it overall, but having kept notes here's a list of criticisms: The biggest one is, Avowed doesn't do anything particularly new in any category. I'm not suggesting a party based RPG needs to revolutionize everything, rather that it would be nice and enticing to see a one or two things that people have never seen before in between all the things we have. A new game mechanic that changes how you talk to characters fundamentally, or maybe just steal one that already works well but is underused like the "real time" conversations from Oxenfree. Or maybe just a crazy type of monster not in the D&D handbook, or even just some bizarre one off quest where you travel through time or into a characters mind once. A thing or two that stand out as new and memorable, that's all, take a big risk here or there. Moving onto the host of minor criticisms: The game felt overly combat heavy to me. I enjoyed the combat certainly, but a good 75% of the playtime, plausibly more, is shooting stuff over and over and over again. I know there a lot of places and times in games that are "filler". Do the simple puzzle, do the simply platforming challenge, etc. But sometimes even filler is nice just for a change of pace. There's a lot of "video game!" enemy and loot placement in a very story heavy game. Why and how did the chest of random treasure get here? "Because it's loot that's why" isn't a very satisfying answer in a world on the more serious end that you're asked to emotionally invest in. Why are there enemies 5 feet from the city and the city guards? I get "nature is attacking" and etc. but bandits just hanging out around the corner feels overtly silly. There's a sense of story and environment progression, but not one that's matched by game mechanics, or enemy types, or etc. There's nothing new to discover in these new environments, no new type of weapon or enchantment on a weapon that does something different. No new enemy type that makes you change how you approach combat, no new type of trap even that you have to watch out for. Progression can be more than just scenery and story. That's mostly about it. There's a ton of "obvious" feeling things to do. If you're going towards a Dark Messiah (finally, what an underrated game, entire direction for action gaming even) one could go farther. Kick enemies off cliffs and into spikes, heck make a boss or two that can do that to the player! Make the physics a bit more unified and coherent (why don't explosions set things on fire?). Etc etc etc, I'm sure there's ideas aplenty there and I'm looking forward to any sequel or otherwise. Thanks for a fun game.

Lolwut

Include funny combat barks too! Shoot a bandit in the crotch and his mate could scream "You're- you're a monster!" If it's a corporate goon have them yell "For the corporation!" and their mate go "Don't you know who we work for???" If it's a combat robot it plays "Impressed by X-28's combat performance? Should you survive please contact Stellar Defense Corp to inquire further!" Plenty of humor to get in with dialogue during combat.

See, the title is a pun, get it? Hahaha And that's the thing, it's a joke. The Outer Worlds is full of jokes. The combat could be full of jokes! Take the "physics!!!" combat of other games like Breath of the Wild, Half Life 2, Bioshock, and just crank the dial fully up until the combat is just as silly as the rest of the world. Put battery packs and electrical outlets are everywhere, and all that needs to happen for random cracks of electricity that will zap anyone, or any puddle of water, or any metallic body full of electricity. If it's a robot watch it malfunction and squeal like R2-D2, if it's a person watch their muscles contract as they get flung across the room like being hit by lightning! Carry this over to everything, fire prevention robots spray "Cryo gas" that does cold damage and freezes puddles solid, target the cryo tank and watch the gas shoot out all over the place, causing the robot to possibly shoot out of control across the room spraying everywhere! There's flammable stuff everywhere, because of course there is. Light a human(oid?) character on fire after they get covered in flammable liquid and watch them run around like an over dramatic extra in an action movie, throwing themselves out breakable windows and flailing around like loons. There can even be an entire series of in game jokes explaining why the world is this way. Why do we have to work around all these barrels of extra flammable spaceship fuel? Well someone ordered 10x too many on a spreadsheet and we didn't have room in the warehouse to store them all. Why are the guardrails to the industrial shredders out? Well see it's fine because we put a "caution, guardrails are out" sign next to them! Please note, the caution sign is now out. I.E. Make the combat as silly, hazardous, and funny as the rest of the world.

The title is pretty much it. Would love to see going crazy with spacescapes and etc. Model the planets and moons and rings around a planet with actual geometry, have them spin around correctly, the skybox capture should make them show up in lighting/reflections! Forget the Star Wars "Establishing shot of the planet/wipe to landing on the planet" thing. Model the entire planet at low detail and use the atmosphere aerial perspective tools to have the entire landing sequence, from space to pad, in game, in first person view on the ship and fully controllable. Heck you could throw in a water refraction material on the ships front facing glass when passing through clouds, see condensation! Point is, would love to see the tools just put to use in a way that's absolutely nuts. Take the ambition Outer Worlds 1 had for crazy spacescapes and make it sing. I'd assume there's a much bigger budget (MS money) and combined with next gen consoles and UE5, heck put it to use for trippy space dreams.

Don't know how I got this bug, but general sequence is as such: Get Macredd bounty. Complete bounty by using persuade option, turn in flamethrower for quest completion. Get Happiness is a Warm Ship quest. Go back to backbays, no peaceful dialogue option for Macredd shows up, it's missing. I had to look up a quest guide to make sure it was supposed to be there, and it is. But I talk to him and the dialogue option is just missing, even though that's my active quest.

Found an audio bug that will have a kind of "scroll closing sound" that I'm pretty sure is common put on repeat for eternity. To get it to stop requires saving and reloading, and it shows up about every 3 minutes, and I can't quite pin down what causes it. Considering I'm running off a realtek high definition audio built in mobo piece and no one else has reported this yet I suspect either my drivers are out of date and/or this has something to do with running Windows 10. I'll try to update my drivers and see what happens.

I love both ways of going about enchanments, but for a PoE type game I'd prefer more thought out, handmade enchantments. In Diablo or Borderlands I can find a new thing and go "oh cool, whatever, more stuff!" Because those games are all about stuff, stuff stuff stuff, piles of loot reaching to the sky, and numbers that should go ever higher and do the same. For a more story driven game I'd... well I'd personally prefer if the enchantments and magical had more "story" as well. I always read the little descriptions on the unique items in BG2. Always made it feel more special than "Sword +1"

And it's really jarring, to go back a decade or more, to totally static trees. I've suggested before replacing foliage and leaves with lightmapped billboards of the same texture. Little performance hit and you just warp the billboards a little to create the illusion of movement. Otherwise the backgrounds look great, but that one part is just plain jarring.

Yes. Will the beta have Moon Wizards? I hear those are hot right now.

There's actually four layers - final, depth, albedo, and normals - all 32 or 24 bit. They are all compressed, but in a way to preserve as much detail as possible. Decompression is quick, and most of the load time is spent loading the textures off of disk. I don't have the exact size, but the game is going to be average download for today's standards. I honestly wouldn't mind if it took 500GB to have the game uncompressed. so long as the graphics are better. I really hope the compression doesn't take away any really noticeable details. I also noticed in the video, the characters look like they're out of place, they have no realistic shadow at all. Its like they're not really standing on the ground... one guy said it was as if they were floating. I agree then. hope this gets addressed, it literally made me second guess how excited I was for this game. Full sized normal and spec, 4k background render, 32bit BC7 for albedo, Normals in DXT5_NM, compressed losslessly using something like X-Zips. Regardless, drop shadows for low end and SSAO for the high end might be good. Now I understand SSAO will effect other things like the environment, so maybe instead you could do a shape based AO? The Order: 1886 of all things *yes that brilliant looking game, just uses a capsule based ambient occlusion to supplement SSAO. So if SSAO would overdarken things just do something like that. Or better yet. Something like this: http://www.gdcvault.com/play/1015320/Ambient-Occlusion-Fields-and-Decals Attach voxel fields to character limbs via the scene graph to animate, and you've got per character ambient oclussion

We do have dynamic directional light shadow maps. Those are the shadows that are being cast by the spheres and characters. We do not have point light shadows, which can be more complex, and for us is challenging because of our psuedo-2d/3d situation. It's something that I would love to do moving forward! It didn't look like it! It looks like it's only for dynamic objects, while you could easily do a proper shadow map for static objects that's just a static set of of depth maps tiled and streamed like the background. That's just my impression though. As for point light shadows, just create a pre-rendered set of cubemaps for the environment for each shadow casting lightsource, place a shadow casting lightsource in the same spot for the "game" render. Combine the realtime game render of characters/dynamic objects with the static cubemap and it should work.

Well that's really disappointing, all you need for environment shadow maps is a tiled pre-calculated shadow map. That's it, no need for lightmapping or other oldschool stuff. Just create a planar shadow map from your static sun/moon source and output to streaming tiles the same way the background works. Also just turning SSAO on should still work out well with depth information and etc. Unity has a nice enough built in SSAO right off the bat.

A 2d game for the Rift... BRILLIANT! I demand this, DEMAND! I'm a backer so I'm in charge of everything! In fact, this should be like a tabletop simulated 3d. With your characters in 3d and the backgrounds as a 2d tabletop, and then the game should support co-op and you should be able to look around the virtual table to see other players. I demand the entire game be re-written as an Oculus only D&D tabletop simulator.

Sony Conference: "Please welcome, Obsidian's Josh Sawyer." Sawyer (Walking out on stage) "Hey great to be here. You know Obsidian was founded by the same people that created some of the great tactical party based RPGs of the nineties like Fallout, Baldur's Gate, and Icewind Dale. And with our project Pillars of Eternity we aim to bring that feeling of deep tactical combat in an expansive, isometric story based RPG back into the modern day. And we want as many people to come along for the ride with us. So today I am proud to announce that Pillars of Eternity will be coming to the Playstation 4 in two thousand fifteen. For a sneak peek, here's a look out our latest trailer..." Cue trailer.