Frenetic Pony

Don't really need Supersample that much, though support isn't that hard. Honestly now that I think about edges... I guess you'd have to store 2 samples for each edge pixel where there's super sampled depth discontinuity. One for the foreground depth and one for the background, and then you'd have to depth sort. Which will suck, but will be the only way to make it work unless you're doing a post process like SMAA. What's Unities lighting like again? I remember using it, and I know it supported light pre-pass deferred. "deferred lighting" (as opposed to deferred rendering, where the lighting is also deferred so... ugh). But I don't remember how it handled transparencies... hmmm.

Now... this is mostly useless as you'll not be looking at actual geometry for the most part. Toksvig normal map anti aliasing and correct mipmapping would really, REALLY be appreciated with the ability to zoom in and out. Or you could just play it at native res and it'd be fine. As for just plain ol anti-aliasing, ensuring selective edge multisampling for dynamic entities, the only actual geometry onscreen, would be cool though. Mmm, 16msaa would help those characters fit right in with what I can only assume is a highly supersampled background. Speaking of which, for the final, shipping background renders you are going to go for 64x supersampling right? Same as Hollywood? One would hope.

It's a nice enough background bit if music. It seems to strike somewhere around the right balance of sounding pleasant and evocative without ever getting in the way or being too annoying to listen too a hundred times. It also sounds a little scattered, there's a lot of slow, single instrument parts where we get some new instrument part we've ever heard before, and it's the only thing going. It feels like it's suddenly a different track, meant for a different area. I also wonder what you're going to do for the theme. A strong theme song is something I'm always a fan of, something stronger and more complex than what you'd hear in the background, something that opens with the title screen to get people excited. That's always something I enjoyed about starting up Morrowind, which I've done several hundred times at least and the theme always get me in the mood to go adventuring, frankly I think Jeremy Soule peaked with that sound track. And of course for inspiration for a theme there's John Williams, creator of undoubtedly the most recognized theme songs in history.

Don't worry, someone without the internet who runs only OS2/Warp will still complain. I don't know how. Probably via handwritten letter postmarked from a cave in Siberia.

There are always too many undead in any fantasy game. Seriously, how many endless tombs are there for necromancers to go through, and how are there somehow a thousand times more dead people in all of them than living people anywhere? And those tombs! Geeze no wonder everyone's poor and living in squalid little huts, they just save up for labyrinths of incredibly fantastical tombs and mausoleums and sarcophagus to bury every last member of their family in. A small town's cemetery is usually several times bigger and fancier than the town itself! And how do these things get built? It's got to be like a huge project, ongoing, there's got to be workers there all the time, twenty four seven trying to built out faster than people can die.

Link? Oh, and regarding NPC relationships: I hate when every last NPC will come to love and respect you. Fortunately this is Obsidian, the boss battle from NWN2 took me by surprise. But still, screw Sand anyway, what a prick. So if there's anyone like him, or a loudmouth self righteous Paladin, please give me a good excuse to beat him to a pulp and fling him off a cliff into a pack of hungry undead.

For companions I love the weird and different. I loved Shale in Dragon Age, the living essence of a person transferred into a golem, that hates birds because they poop on "her" like a statue, and likes pounding things, and thinks the crystals she can equip had better look pretty. That's something that it takes a while to wrap my head around, and that's awesome! If they don't take time to understand, and I mean understand in a bizarre circumstances way and not in a "deeply emotional way but are otherwise someone you could meet on the street" then at least make them cute (your dog companion in just about anything, t3-m4 from kotor) or funny (Zevran, HK-47, Minsc).

Eh, modders do "time consuming" things by definition. They did it fine for Baldur's Gate 2, I'm sure they'll do fine for PE. I'm just glad the idea for dynamic lighting worked out well. I always get nervous when coming up with such things, worrying that I sound too much like a babbling idiot, though I try not to project it. But the game looks great!

Obsidian could easily just GPL the custom tools they made after the game is released. I mean I understand the case for not doing it during development proper, spend the budget where its needed. But post release support, assuming the game does well enough, isn't going to be that hard to clean up and release those tools, even going so far as to open source them. Just because they made these tools themselves doesn't really give them any value to anyone else, in fact it's kind of useless except to Obsidian and sister project Torment 2 if they just sit there unreleased. The only real extra worth in these tools is giving them to the community. It's not like there's any downside whatsoever to people having access to this stuff. And the upside that Skyrim, for example, probably sold a million copies more than it would have from supporting mod tools, if not more.

Everything should be magical all the time! I should be able to cover my body in magical trinkets, and then my glowing form shall reign o'er the land as like unto a god Or rather, I dislike when the game doesn't change in how you play as you progress. This smbc explains it rather well: http://t.co/UfKquMall5 Instead of just "more health and damage, and your enemies get more health and damage!" I'd rather new mechanics be introduced as time goes on, both on my side and on the enemy side. I want to go into a fight and go "Oh! That's never happened before."

There's something wrong with pre-combat preparation. It's boring. "Time to go into combat. Better cast every buff spell I have."... and ten minutes later you get to the "fun" part. And you do it again and again and again and again... Because hey spells regenerate and are infinite! Get rid of the type of buffs that are both temporary, last long enough to get you through at least some of a fight, and are always castable. They just invite abuse, and a boring kind of it at that. Instead, limit buffs to consumables only, to buffs you flick on with a switch and have a constant resource cost, to buffs that last a few seconds at most. This will make the game more interesting, and take away motivation and opportunity to spend forever just outside of combat, preparing in the same exact routine you always do.

Possibly not. On the one hand if you're playing DOTA, you can play the same character with just 4 abilities and spend many many hours playing the same one. On the other hand, this isn't DOTA. And since your customizing your character build, so choice there seems paramount. Maybe, since we don't level up a lot apparently, there will be a lot of choices when leveling up, but maybe not so many abilities that each character might have access too at any one time.

The interesting thing I'd always found in these kinds of RPGs is the reward mechanism. You come across a room of enemies, you can talk your way past or kill enemies. You always have a motivation to kill enemies, because you get loot. Everyone likes loot right? And if you get XP then you've got even more motivation to do so. Then there's the motivation to roleplay, if that's your type of character. On the other hand you can talk your way past. If you get no XP you don't have much motivation to talk, beyond roleplaying. If you get XP, it's often less than just killing the enemies anyway, not too mention not getting any loot. So if you get loot and Xp for killing enemies, you will tend away from roleplaying because Hey XP and Loot! So the reward mechanism should correspond to the game. If you want PE to be primarily about roleplaying, then objective completion only XP would be the way to go, and maybe even minimize the loot random enemies drop. If you want more of an action game then by all means all the XP and loot in the world should come from enemies. Personally I vote for the former.

Yes we can, in fact I'm on some right now! Oh... uhm. In the, game. Nothing to see here

"Tiax rules all!"

Yeppers, complaining about a thing you don't have to buy is ridiculous, always has been and always will be. It's a freely available thing to purchase or not to purchase, and the seller is free to set whatever price they want because... they're selling you something. May as well go around to random houses for sale and complain to the sellers that it costs too much, and they buy it anyway. If you don't know what you're getting... again that's your fault. You just paid $25 for a thing you don't understand because you don't do 2 minutes of googling and then complain about it... yeah definitely your fault then.

A. Screw the override file B. Screw the... anything else from Infinity Engine mods Just copy The Elderscrolls if at all possible. The active/deactive data archives is just... waaaay better. Way better. You can just activate entirely new games with a different 'master file'. And you do/do not want a mod? Just click to activate it or deactivate it. I'm replaying NWN2 now, modded, and the installation process is just a pain. Especially with the stupid Dialog.tlk master file needing to be changed for certain things, so you can only have 1 mod that changes that, so you need to merge mods that change it manually and... ugh.

Doesn't sound like you'll need it. Each class just seems to have a single, defining, unique combat mechanic and otherwise you'll be able to choose whatever skills you want.

Yay! Glad other people caught onto the idea that you're just supposed to post what stretch goals you'd like. I was going to edit the first post, but I can't for some reason. Is editing originating posts disabled for some reason? Anyway, I hope the good folks of Obsidian see some ideas they'd like to pick up. I honestly just posted a kind of generic-catch all based on what other people were already asking for regardless of stretch goals. Multiplayer, console and tablet versions had already been widely called for after all.

So if there were new stretch goals, as mentioned, what goals would get you to pay in more? A stab in the dark: $5 Million: PS4/Xbox One version. $5.5 Million: Stronghold gets customizable themes/upgrades (evil/civilized/nature) instead of just a linear series of upgrades $6 Million: iOS/Android version. $6.5 Million: Stronghold now gets a customizable town to lord over and grow. $7 Million: Post release co-op/multiplayer mode. The big one right? Heck yes.

To continue on the "Yeah open world non-linear games cost money." tangent. Like, to have non linear modern feeling open world game, well first off there's the engine. This new generation of consoles is not going to make a 3d platformer play better or more interesting. It's not going to open up possibilities for 2d fighting games. It's going to be limited for what more power can do for linear first/3rd person shooters. But oh boy oh boy is more power and ram just the ticket for open world games. Every open world game programmer hates 512mb of ram on a 360, is slamming their heads against draw call counts, and is getting dirty looks from their AI programmers who want to use the CPU cores for more than just setting up graphics. Which is all to show how complicated these games can get. This is not to mention competition, which has shot up enormously just over the past year. The Witcher 3, the pirate franchise spinoff coming from Ubisoft, the next gen versions of GTAV, even the next Metal Gear Solid is open world along with Red Dead 3 (it's the third oddly enough), Mad Max, Just Cause 3, Fallout 4, etc. etc. And as much as PR people might whinge about similar games not competing, you just know Call of Duty sales are going to start tanking heavily once people get a hold of Titanfall. And open world adventure/rpg type games that have a ton of money poured into them compete, even if you have unlimited money they compete for your time since they can take so much to complete. This is not to say I wouldn't be interested personally. Nor that the sheer response to even mentioning that such a Kickstarter might appear isn't encouraging. Just that it's a much larger undertaking than Eternity, and being original and thus with no nostalgia factor might not be the best thing for Kickstarter. If Obsidian had the ambition, as in more ambition than they seem to have, and just said "we're doing the crazy do anything kill anyone open world RPG fantasy game everyone actually wants" and tried to go the crazy Star Citizen route... well not only do I think that would be entirely possible in succeeding, if a long shot still, but I might be even more interested. But they aren't doing that, so I'm skeptical until I hear more.

Honestly? I really kind of hate where Bethesda has taken The Elderscrolls. Their storytelling has become generic and boring, their setting even more boring, their dungeons linear, and their games ever less interactive. This is the opposite of what I want. So kind of like what they're talking about so far. Though, a huge open world game does not sound episodically possible, does not sound great for and overhead view, does not sound like it's going to work terribly well on Unity (which I've used for several little games myself) and honestly sounds like something you take to a big studio and say "We're going to do this using Unreal Engine 4 and thirty million dollars and 3+ years of development." Then again maybe I'm reading in too much. It maybe could work a lot more like Divinity: Original Sin http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2013/12/09/hands-on-divinity-original-sin-2/ Which might be pretty neat. Though I'm not sure I'd like another throwback fixed isometric view. If you want to photoshop stuff away then just buy virtual texturing for Unity: http://forum.unity3d.com/threads/96280-Amplify-Virtual-Texturing-for-Unity-Pro-RELEASED!-Starting-at-99 Go in and bake all the photoshop stuff you want in full 3d!

Can I get like, a different badge? I mean, I don't especially NEED the K. Is there like a badger? I'd love a badger, a dancing badger.

Thoughts? No reflections. Solution: Pre-render the reflection map like what's done with the background, light, apply, win. Problem: No skyboxes in the current game make for extra work for the artists. Or blank areas where the sky's reflection should be

Games always take more money than you think to make, and any project by a rule of the universe takes longer to complete than you think. That being said more funding is ALWAYS better. I'd be watching Star Citizen in awe too. So any more funding efforts are great for me. If I had to choose stretch goals I'd say: #1 "Make the game better." #2 Mo cap all animations, including detailed facial animations and hire Morgan Freeman to voice all characters. #3 Develop real life unicorns using genetic engineering. Deliver to backers.