Frenetic Pony

Battlemage: So the tradeoff in D&D has traditionally been, spellcasters get to wear less armor the better the spells they got. Sort of. By extension, just saying Wizards can wear armor now means they'll either be highly overpowered, or their pure spellcasting builds will be underpowered. Which means to me, that the ability to wear armor well NEEDS to be a thing that you spend resources on. And by resources I mean level up resources, as in feats or talent tree points, or whatever will end up being done. I enjoy powerful spellcasters. Just how "powerful" might want to be tied in with lore as well, but point being a tradeoff between being able to wear armor and cast powerful magic spells needs to be made somehow. Perhaps an "armored arcana" type of feat/what have you that allows spellcasters the ability to wear more and more armor would be nice. After all, you are trading that ability for the assumed ability to make your spells more powerful by choosing other options when you level up. This of course implies some manner of armored spell failure chance. A better, smoother system might be based instead on the level of spells you are casting. The higher the level the spell, the more armor interferes with it, the more points you'd need to put into the armored arcana, thing. This would mean classes that only ever have access to low level spells automatically don't need to worry as much about interference from armor. Meanwhile you can start a wizard out wearing armor, and if you want to continue with this you just get armored arcana when you start getting higher and higher level spells, if you don't want to continue then you just take armor off and don't put any points into armored arcana.

So, could this be an option? Probably not. Thinking about it, there's probably too many ways to word a correct answer to make it worth it. Or you just restrict the riddles to something very specific, which might be better and doable I suppose. Either way, I'm terrible at riddles so make multiple choice an option! Or just make more riddles actually math questions I'm good at those

Writing a great villain is really, really, really, hard. Glados (Portal) is the closest thing I've seen to one in a video game; though Kane (C&C) and Irenicus deserve nods. Still, even in movies or books, where you have so much more time to concentrate on character, there's only a handful of truly memorable ones out there. Sure you can start with thing like Darth Vader, and Voldemort, and etc. But you'll be surprised at how quickly the list runs out. If Obsidian doesn't want a great villain, something that's again, harder to write into a video game where you have so much less time and focus to build a character and so much less control over the antagonist (the player), then that's fine with me. I'd happilly settle for solid characters than trying to grab at something video game aren't great for doing anyway.

Considering how many people love Xcom for just the feature OP mentioned, I think OP has a problem with the game rather than the game being bad. I despise most of Skyrim and wished I'd never bought it or played it even if it was for free. It's unchallenging, has no systems, is horribly written, looks awful from a technical perspective, I could go on. But most of those are MY problems with the game, not problems with the game in and of itself, as evidenced by the millions of people that liked it. So while YOU, and everyone, can certainly be on here to talk about what you like, don't conflate your own dislike of something with that thing being a problem in and of itself. Maybe, hopefully, if it's in you can just avoid it in the game or turn it off in an option.

I think the whole "identifying" thing works better in a boardgame rather than a PC game. At least in how it WAS implemented in BG/2/Icewind Dale/Etc. In the old Infinity Engine games your guy either knew it, or you sighed and memorized an identify spell (if you didn't already have one) and then you knew it. It wasn't really interesting, just a chore. That being said, the idea of it being a mystery was still kind of interesting. "Oooh, got this magic item, I wonder if it's good?" and the whole cursed items idea has merit perhaps. But to keep those things you'd have to make the fundamental action of identifying items more interesting and engaging than just shoving it into your bard/wizards inventory and right clicking, which ended up just being an excess chore.

One log for both, but have filters to turn off combat and/or dialogue so it's easier to find what you're looking for. If you turn off both if collapses and you don't see it.

I enjoy the idea more that each character in your party is an independent character with their own motivations, meaning there's no great group cohesion where you get to choose what they do visa vis dialogue abilities. If, however, a character with a relevant ability stepped in when motivated, to say something that would give you an option you wouldn't otherwise have, then that would be very cool. Example: Your hyper intelligent wizard is in your party, and has a higher intelligence score than your character. At some point in the conversation he might butt in, saying something to the same effect that you'd get from a high int dialogue option. You can then either tell him "great idea!" or "shove off" if you want to accept or reject that option, with the appropriate consequences. You'd get the benefits of your party, but also the restrictions of only getting them when the appropriate party member agrees with that dialogue option, AND you keep the whole "idiot" dialogue tree intact, as well as any other personalized stat based trees there might be; such as the low charisma score options, where your only choices are to call people ugly gits and say that you slep with their mum.

To answer: A lot of games have this, and much, MUCH larger problems. Fortunately texture compression has gotten really good in answer. RAGE (an id game) was hundreds of gigs before compression. They'll just need to select the best method/application for texture compression they can get. Some combination of high texture compression, low, if any "loss" (as in the stuff doesn't change from the compression) and fast to read and decompress from the hard drive (doesn't take a lot of CPU effort).

Nihilism is a must! If only so I can roleplay those guys from The Big Lebowski. At some point you need to find a sloppy, lazy assed random NPC sitting in a robe in a random house and be able to yell at him "We believe in nothing Lebowski!"

"I'm taking my part of the experience with me!" *Begins forceful brain surgery*

While I want fully 3d characters, I quite enjoyed the hand drawn portraits. For that matter, even though I love digital painting (both enjoying and drawing in) I'd love to see the portraits hand drawn. It tends to make features bolder and not allow a ton of detail, which I think works better on those small portraits, relative to the amount of screen it takes up.

I love good sound design, something which even most triple A titles generally neglect. "It's night, lets throw some general cricket sounds in there" is about how far it goes. I'd love to hear a great, all directional dynamic mix with proper echoes and sound falloff scalable between mono and 11.1 with everything recorded in lossless (or near enough) sound quality. But of course that's just me.

In D&D you have every other race, and then you have humans which in pure statistics and ability wise pretty much always end up making every other race look at least a bit worse. Try to balance them and try to make sure they aren't the standard against which every other race is judged. I don't think there's ever been a popular story or setting, fantasy or otherwise, in which humans aren't the benchmark against which every other race is to ultimately prove inferior. Even the stories where humans are downtrodden have them rising up and winning and being great. Just having them be, another race, would be refreshing in and of itself.

A. People don't restrict themselves. It's just not the way the vast majority of people work. Making something intentionally harder by ignoring obvious advantages makes us feel stupid. B. This question pre-supposes there aren't people that like a challenge to begin with and that the game isn't for them. And since the game is, optionally, for those types of players, the ones that enjoy eking out every advantage possible, it's not even a question to be asked.

Why not both? Some randomly generated weapons with random magic stuff on them. Other's like singing sword, or other crazy powers that are unique.

The traditional cost here is an opportunity cost. You have the opportunity to get money, or you can "be good". But in a game where you're going to be dumped upon with loot it might make "being good" more interesting if it were a higher cost.

I'm currently playing Icewind Dale 2 co-op, and have gotten so overleveled that we just split up into two groups, and we still haven't encountered any particular challenge. There defnitely needs to be some way to keep things difficult.

Yay live recorded music! I'm not even going to bother with suggestions. Everyone in the world has their own "best music" and pretty much no one really agrees on what that is, so I'll leave it to them. The only concern I have is high quality recording and playback. 5.1 surround mix stored at 320kbps MP3 please!

I pretty much never play through "evil" in any game. Just not appealing. But it might be more interesting if the "evil" option were more than just, well, an option. The choices presented, if any, are always somewhere along the lines of "You get five options of varying good to neutral, and one where you kick a puppy." Which just isn't that neat even if I were interested. It would be a lot more interesting to see more varying ways to be something that's not necessarily a paragon of virtue, and might even be considered evil. Selfishness, vengeance, cruelty, etc. are all things that could, at some point, be options for the player.

I'm fine with just getting experience for a bunch of stuff. Kill an enemy? Get XP. Complete a quest? Get XP. Make a successful use of a non-combat skill? Get XP. Find something cool? Get XP. Half the idea of XP is just to reward players for doing stuff. So if they succeed, at whatever, they get rewarded XP. How the players expend those XP "points" can also be considered. Do you only get to improve things you use? Do things require trainers? But, frankly, Skyrim was boring as sh*te in this manner and the MMO trainer thing is more for draining gold out of the economy than anything else. So the standard of level up screen with a "select a reward" level up such as Fallout, D&D, and etc. is fine with me. There can be room for improvement and innovation elsewhere.

Well there definitely should be a rat catcher quest. It's just rats, ordinary rats. And you only get paid like one gold to do it. And then after you can complete it you can say to the quest giver "I, uhm, was expecting something a bit more... heroic." and he just shakes his head in pity at the poor deluded soul that thought catching rats would be heroic.

A console version is certaily doable, as is a version for tablets (iOS, Android). Unity certainly has the cross platform capabilities. But even the discussion of such, for Obsidian as a company, will almos certainly wait until after the game is done. Any port is going to cost time and money, and as such is going to need a good case for being done. Because the game is at least mostly pre-rendered it should run on an incredibly vast array of hardware, so vast that if you're reading this then you almost certainly are doing so on a platform that can play Project Eternity just fine. Which means the demand for a port to consoles and/or tablets is going to have to come from people that wouldn't even play the game otherwise. Now there may be plenty of people that would do so. Minecraft can be played on a ridiculous cross section of hardware, and yet there are over a million people, with Kinect alone, that have bought it for the 360. Then again the appeal of Minecraft is also incredibly broad. The appeal of Eternity is inevitable going to be less than that, and how much of that appeal crosses into people that would only play it if it were available on consoles is questionable. All of which means it's going to need to be up to Obsidian as a business case sometime after the game ships, and that it's not a terribly good prospect.

A crazy, ultra ambitious town building mini game with its own economics simulation, quests, and defensive battles. Ok, that's ambitious. But heck, the old sim games similar to such were made by a handful of people at most. I'd easily be happy if some of my money went to hiring someone just to make an awesome stronghold(s) play area the entire time.

And (most likely) lastly, I'm sitting here in a cafe with my laptop, bored with FTL (after hours and hours) and wishing I could play something that wasn't a flash or facebook game. Push this onto WebGL if you can. Play in a browser, the first major, hardcore commercial game available as such. Why the heck not? Unity should have the capability, and you'll get a ton of press.

Continued. Animations are important to any game, and since there's going to be no trouble storing or playing it ony any reasonable GPU 30hz pre-rendered animations should be a minimum. But there's no reason not to render out 60hz and even 120hz animations. As selectable options. I would stress the characters being in full 3d; if just for the sake of eliminating all the animation artefacts from pre-rendered stuff that are going to inevitably crop up. A selectable character level of detail should keep the specs for the game wide ranging, and with no worry about backgrounds displaying up to 40 characters at once should be doable over a wide range of hardware. And since I've mentioned dynamic lighting, why not store the lighting in different channels? True, the easiest way to create changes in lighting is just going to be full scene color correction. But you could do more by storing direct sun lighting in a channel, sky color lighting in a channel, and then albedo and all the bounces seperately. Each would then be changeable and tunable by hand to a degree. Very useful for transitions such as weather and day/night cycles. Further it would be nice to see even the ground cover as transparent depth layers. Little details like characters feet disappearing behind tufts of grass are going to help a lot. Though I imagine you'd have to see to see whether the transition is going to be terribly noticeable, I suspect not though. It should be exactly the same as any characters foot clipping through grass today.