Frenetic Pony

Does it come with free sassy gay dude to narrate? Because that would be awesome! (If rather tiring after a bit)

Not everything, it's goes to scale. Yeah you can see more "goin on" in the rest of the field. But you can not se if a person for example is smilling or be angry or giving you hand to say hello or giving you something ... But personaly in combat i prefer isomethric .. in dialog in face to face .. but i don;t supose PE will have something like that so .. i must live with it Yeah, I think the first Dragon Age and to a lesser extent KOTOR worked pretty well in this sense. Ohwell, it was a Kickstarter funded game, and a fixed isometric view means you don't have to spend as much on detailed art. Maybe Eternity 2: More Eternity can move to a cross between up close and isometric.

It's called "V-sync" and it just syncs the framerate to your monitor, so one way or another you don't get tearing. You can turn it off in almost every game, and few games in existence have ever locked a PC games framerate otherwise.

A single save file helps remove save scumming. Other than that consequences other than "perma game end" are the way to go, but few games get it right. Baldur's Gate got it right with your party member(s) dying (Classic D&D I know). It was an abject failure and an utter pain to end a fight with one or more characters dead, you had to drag everything all the way back to a priest (at least when you were a low enough level) and pay a ton of gold to get them back up and. And it FELT like a failure, which was the point, without going into "you have to restart". Fable 2 tried, and failed, at something like this with it's getting permanently scarred or whatever. The consequence wasn't bad enough though, but at least they tried. Dark Souls does a great job with this, dying is awful but coming back is "part" of the game world and lore so it works anyway. Another great example is losing your horse in Red Dead Redemption. You keep going but you just go "NO! FRAK NOOOO!" as your hard earned ultra fast horse is stolen by that bitch (only once hopefully) or eaten by a mountain lion. Unfortunately Obsidian already nixed the "dead but revivable" party member thing because they wanted to change the lore. Frankly I still think it's a wonderful way of having a defeat without save scumming, and a slight originality in lore be damned. But hey that's me.

Hand placed kinda sucks for replayability "Oh, the exact same item I got." It's fairly trivial to create a list of possible loot Monster X or chest Y could have, and then select randomly from that. So dock rot a might get "1-3 gold" and/or "Rat Bones" while awesome boss dragon's loot hoard could contain "5,000-10,000 gold" and "Awesome Magical Sword Y or Super Cool Armor Z or Magic Wand R" and then a random number generator determines which of that possible list of loot actually shows up. It's a pretty simple way to make sure everything has perfectly appropriate loot while still not making it entirely the same loot every time "Oh, it's Scragmaw the troll lord. I get to loot 571 gold and The Bonecrusher club... again, for the third time in a row." Of course, I WOULD actually be in favor of a one in a million chance for that dock rat to have an awesome jewel encrusted sword. Just so those few players that ever find it go "Dude, wait wtf?"

Eternity of Eternity: The Eternitiness

Imagination, which is why I mostly read fantasy and sci-fi, reading about something imaginative is more interesting than not for me; and for the most part fantasy and sci-fi are much better at this than other genres. Of which I'd love to recommend "Red Storm Rising" as an imaginative real world scenario that still manages to be interesting. As well as the Master and Commander series, which is rigorously researched and entirely based on historical events, but picks out those events where real life was weirder, grander, and more bizarre than most authors can dream of.

Really one of the big things for a villain is that they feel directly threatening, like maybe they are better than the protagonist and can win. No matter what other characteristics a villain has, a good villain always has that. They're smarter, faster, better than the hero. Otherwise the hero wouldn't be overcoming them right? Take two completely different but fantastic villains, Darth Vader and Hans Gruber (Die Hard). Darth Vader is threatening because he's physically huge, he's vicious (the first time you see him he's strolling through a hall of corpses like he owns the place) and he seems infinitely more dangerous than Luke does, he chokes people with the ****ing force! He's also just sort of "evil" as a motivation for the most part, and doesn't usually even have a "plan" and etc. But he is intimidating, he is more competent than Luke and is obviously a challenge. Meanwhile Hans Gruber is also vicious and willing to kill, but he's very different from Vader. He's not terribly imposing physically, but he's smart, determined, he's got a very direct plan that doesn't even involve our protagonist if he had the choice. But he's also intimidating in his own way. He's the smartest of the vicious men he has, smarter than our protagonist, and by commanding so many men he's also outgunning our protagonist. The one main thing he has in common with Vader is he's a threat, he's better than the hero, he's someone that doesn't seem likely to be overcome. Whatever else a villain is, whether they have understandable motivations or not, whether the hero is their direct objective or just interfering, whatever they look like and whoever they are, they need to be better than the hero (or the player character in this case). They need to be a threat, they need to be bigger and badder and more badass and it can't seem like there's any easy or even only slightly difficult way to beat them until they finally, finally go down.

Duuuude, SSAO. Unity has an option built in! Also unity has light probes, light probes! By all means, abuse those as much as possible for dynamic objects. Ditch the overhead light indoors and switch to lightprobes + SSAO or a blob shadow for low end. For outdoors ie day night cycles maybe you can light probe a static gray light and then modulate by the selected ambient. It's a win, a win I tell you!

The characters DO stick out a bit too much, and I'm trying to figure out why... Lighting applied to the characters that isn't being applied to the environment? Obviously no SSAO, why? But regardless... hmm...

The main thing I can see for next gen is that both Sony and MS allow self publishing. Which is awesome! I can foresee PE coming to The PS4 if it's a success on the PC first. The main reason I say PS4 only is because, well it has a touchpad control in the center, and PE is really, REALLY not the type of game for a standard control pad. The only technical considerations I can foresee besides easy portability to a GCN/x86 based system is running at max setting and 60fps at 1080p without a ton of trouble. Which isn't so much a consideration as a plus. Or maybe even pulling a 4k resolution at 30fps, or 60? I obviously don't know how PE is going to end up running. Point is any ports to the Xbone/PS4 will be mostly a control scheme concern so far as any really big obstacles so far as I can see.

"Slacker Backer" if I'm interested in pre-ordering the game, that's no going to be the most encouraging thing to see. It's a small item sure, but if you're pre-ordering a game almost a year (more than a year?) in advance I wouldn't want to be called a "slacker" for it. I'd just suggest changing it to "pre-order" and be done with it. Oh, and put it on Steam when possible. Planetary Annihilation was, while early access, still $90 and was up on the top 10 best selling titles on Steam for a while. More pre-orders of PE are good for everyone, though having a proper title may be helpful as well.

Leave "jobs" to things like Ultima and Fable type games. They're designed around those things being in there. PE and the Infinity Engine games are designed around tactical combat to bash open enemies for their loot in the middle of dungeons. Everything from the camera to the controls to the presentation works towards that, and I'd much rather do that than a "job" in PE.

Feeling filthy rich is fine, but being overly wealthy in any game is boring, because by implication you then don't have anything to spend it on. There are more than enough games out there (Borderlands 2, Diablo 2, etc. etc.) where eventually even the sight of money is just worthless. It becomes like looking at a pile of trash the game just threw at you; because you've no use for it but now its just cluttering up the screen everywhere with every enemy you kill and every chest you open. There needs to be a solution, there needs to always be a reason to have money, no matter how ridiculous the amount you have is.

"Oh good, a magic item my party can't use because no one's built for it. Trash!" Not fun.

Nah, everyone loves getting new loot, entire games are based on "get the new loot!" Fable 3 tried something like this, went all out. All your weapons would morph and change appearance based on what you did, giving you new bonuses as you went along. Almost no one liked it. It just put a huge, magnificent crimp on the joy of getting cool new items because they were never as good as your morph sword, and your morph sword wasn't cool because it was still sorta the same thing you'd had the entire game.

Sweet. Not that I don't like durability as a concept. But the way it was proposed was "your armor is perfect until it breaks, and then you have to repair it." Which doesn't give you any incentive to care about durability. It's just an annoyance you have to pay resources for every once in a blue moon. Imagine being in the middle of a dungeon and your tank's armor breaks "Oh great, all the way back to town and..." and that's the only actual consequence of such a system. If it was interesting, I'd be all for it. But the way that was proposed wasn't interesting. And to be clear, not being able to repair it isn't interesting. Then it's just inevitable that everything you have will break eventually, and any actions you take one way or another can at most prolong the life of said item only by margins. I.E. your actions ultimately don't matter much, as that armor you have will break.

@JE Sawyer As I've pointed out earlier, the best use of gold I've ever seen in an RPG is from the first Dragon Age. There are always multiple things to get, at every store, that you may be able to afford by saving up all the money you ever get until the very end of the game. This makes you want money, this gives you motivation for money, there are a million epic items and you might be able to afford a handful towards the end of the game if you complete every quest and turn over every stone. Does it contradict "I don't want to buy good items at a store?" Certainly. But anything you do contradicts what someone does or does not want. At least this way, this is where the money goes. To that grand, epic, thousand gold item you are slaving away towards. Towards that Ferrari of swords or armor or whatever it is. It gives people a long term goal, and makes money always valuable for every kind of player. Make the player feel like they will never, ever even come close to being what might even be termed as "rich" in the game; and they might not like you, but they'll love every scrap and penny of money they can find.

The durability thing feels really inconsistent. Either make it matter for everything the same (all armor gets worn) AND make it so that durability damages use, thus making it an actual game mechanic players need to care about, or just don't do it. At the moment it sounds like a halfway measure at most, just something that might be a slight annoyance but nothing actually worth taking into consideration 99.99% of your time. Also, it's a small suggestion, but someone is going to add it as a mod. Make crafting take "in game" time. You open the crafting menu in the (game) morning, build something, and when you're done it's (game) afternoon at least. Just a nice touch.

See the comments for more information. So, combined with their AoE attacks, this means Barbarians are your hardy, high-endurance trash mob hunters. Sounds about right. Though I hope it's tied to how much damage they do. Just taking less damage is a bit stayed. But taking less damage the more you do, i.e. do damage to fill some sort of meter (call it "rage" meter cause why not?) and the more rage you have the less damage you take.

I am, and that's good enough for me. I put my money into faith in Obsidian as a developer, and they're doing their best to deliver. If I wanted the exact, picture perfect game in my head I'd go off and make it myself.

Err, yeah it can become a problem. Some games (my latest example is level 30+ in Borderlands 2 + DLC) can just have you sorting through piles and piles of trash, with so much stuff thrown at you that all is meaningless. "Oh look, it's one of those extremely rare colors, I'll toss in with my dozen others I have that are junk." So, there's definitely such a thing as TOO much loot.

Nice, but a few things: Avoid lining up the sunlight direction too close to the camera direction when outdoors, shadows will be minimally visible at best, thus no contrast, and a boring image. B. Heightfog! Sure why not, why didn't I think of that? Antistropic heightfog might be even cooler. But, that's probably just particles yah? You've got deferred rendering going anyway, so deferred shading on particles one would hope. That's about all I can say based on these screenshots. Looking nice!

How about none of this? No "morale" blah blah whatever. The Witcher 2 is the best game I've ever played when it comes to "choice" and what they do, and they imply no morality one way or another. You make a choice, and the logical outcome just happens one way or another. You can get an entirely different mid section of the game depending on what you do, but there's no "good" or "evil" ever assigned to either choice. Which made it that much more interesting and nerve wracking to choose one way or another, because it was an actual difficult choice rather than a clear dichotomy between the "good" and "evil" choice.

The UI looks more compact in its layout, but I hope they aren't going with the plastic/utilitarian look for the final one. A bunch of people seem to think there's this dichotomy where you can only have either a nicely skinned UI or a small, efficient one. Which of course are two completely different things, yet never the less how the UI is laid out and how it's skinned are a Venn diagram that mostly overlaps in the middle. I.E. I like the layout of the UI better, but please make it solid and cool looking too. There's nothing stopping both efficiency and good looks. As for the portraits... why can't there be both big and small ones? The character you've selected has a big portrait, the other 5 have smaller ones. I also hope that the wilderness slice hasn't had a lighting pass yet, because right now it looks like a blank noonday sun, which is as boring as you can get for an outdoor area.