Frisk

Is this really an issue? During the character creation process you will presumably select the gender and race. Barring major magical effects, those will be fixed. You will also select class - now, the devs have not said whether something similar to dual- or multiclassing in D&D, but I am going to assume not - it just adds too much complexity. Then you have various stats - presumably you will have some control over their initial values, and possibly some control over how they might change throughout the game. Finally there are various skills and abilities, some of which might depend on your race or class, but other might be available to all. Presumably you will have full control over how they develop, but once you make a choice, you will have to live with it - it is silly to be able to swap out skills, when you can just go back and start a new game with a different character. This is not WoW.

From twitter::

Not sure if I follow... if it has no consequence should the game care if you are truthful or not? Well, in this particular case it would have consequences if the other party can (magically or otherwise) know if the character is lying.

Markers like [intimidate] make sense when the meaning is not clear just from the words. Consider for example [intimidate] Your offer is not acceptable. [polite] Your offer is not acceptable. If you saw just the text string, it would not be obvious in what tone this was being said. Now, I can easily imagine scenarios where one NPC might react "better" to the first option, but another NPC would react "better" to the second one. However, the tags can be avoided altogether by proper rephrasing, so there is no doubt what is really meant: Are you trying to insult my intelligence? Make me a better offer, or else... I am very much afraid that your offer is not quite high enough. Regarding tags like [lie], the game might offer something like: [lie] Yes, I have delivered the package. [truth] Yes, I have delivered the package. However, offering two options like that does not make sense in a case like that - if the player has not delivered the package, the second option simply should not be available. You should not be able to select [truth] when actually lying, or vice versa. Sometimes, however [lie] and [truth] make sense.... [lie] Yes, I think your daughter is very beautiful [truth] Yes, I think your daughter is very beautiful In this case, the game cannot determine the truth - it only exists in the mind of the character, or the player.

Right, but that's only two different light levels for (some of) the areas. You didn't get the sun moving across the sky or the shadows dhanging as time passed - it just went from day to night and back - which is the same as I expect to see in PE.

I don't really like having to type in answers to riddles and questions, simply because it is unfair to those who are not native speakers of the game language. Players may have sufficient command of English to be able to play the game, but if it is, say, their third language (as in my own case), they may not "think" in English - they may have a more limited vocabulary than a native speaker and expecting them to type in answers is just a bit unfair.. Personally I prefer language-independent riddles and puzzles.

Will there be a day/night cycle at all? If the player stands in the same area long enough, will the lighting change? Have the devs said anything about this? Personally I don't expect to see the sun/moon move across the sky, for a simple reason - pre-rendered background implies pre-rendered shadows - it would look silly if the sun moved in the sky and the shadows did not change - and might end up pointing towards the sun. What I kind-of expect would be to see day/night versions of some areas - if you camp in a wilderness area in the evening, you might get ambushed during the night. Also, in towns, some facilities might only be open at night, and some quests might only be doable under the cover of darkness. This can be achieved either by rendering two different (day/night) versions of the area background, or by applying a "night mask" to the area. I would not expect to see regular sunsets/sunrises and so on.

Uh, no...because 25bpp is totally uncompressed data - which would just be plain silly. With lossless compression you should be able to easily get 15bpp - perhaps better. 8bpp (or one byte per pixel) is probably a reasonable compromise for good lossy compression without any visible loss in quality.

uh...2bpp (bits per pixel) would mean 3.2GB, but that would probably mean image quality lower than a typical JPG file - Lossy compression is fine, as long as you don't go too low ... 8bpp would give us considerable space savings as well as image quality that would be VERY hard to distinguish from the original uncompressed one. One other thing - we don't really need 32bpp for the original image - if the alpha channel is only used for transparency, it can essentially be just a monochrome map - meaning that the background only needs 25bpp. The bottom line, however, is that depending on the compression quality and the image size, the background for a large area will take 50-150MB. Depending on the average areas size and the number of areas, we could come up with an estimate of the total space needed, but for now, the best guess is probably just "somewhere over 10GB". Let's just wait and see...Obsidian might have some actual numbers in a few months.

I really cannot see how that could be the case for static, pre-rendered backgrounds.. This might be an issue for textures on polygon models, but that's not what what we are talking about.

They will probably start contacting people once it is clear who actually paid - some transactions might have failed because of problems with the credit cards - someone said this would take 7-14 days after the KickStarter closed. Then they have to combine the KickStarter and PayPal lists - some people paid with both methods (maybe they forgot to add shipping on Kickstarter and did it later on PayPal, for example), and combine the payments of those who paid multiple times on PayPal. Give them a week or two.

As I said earlier - if an "object" on the screen is a part of the pre-rendered background, this is just not going to happen. Of course, not all objects are going to be pre-rendered - some will be displayed dynamically, and can be destroyed or moved around at will. The most obvious examples are of course the characters and monsters. If you chop a monster to pieces, it will presumably disappear, probably leaving a corpse behind. There is in principle no difference between that and chopping a tree to pieces to leave a stub behind. So, if it becomes necessary for plot reasons to allow the players to chop down a particular tree, that is easy enough to do. This is not going to apply to every single "object" you see in the world - most of them will simply be a part of the pre-rendered background (or one of the pre-rendered layers - i suspect Obsidian might go for multi-layer pre-rendering to allow the characters to pass either in front of or behind "objects" on the screen) So, in short. If destroying objects in the environment will serve some purpose, it will be possible....but I think there is virtually no chance it will be supported in general.

Not realistic for items that are parts of the (pre-rendered) background. Doable for items that might be implemented as "placeables" - such objects can be removed, or replaced with destroyed versions of themselves. I don't imagine this will be done/doable except maybe in a few cases where this serves the plot.

I am not particularly fond of the idea of "Boss battles", or the whole idea that the purpose of a game is to provide a series of battles, of increasing difficulty - culminating in an epic fight against the archvillain or a megamonster of some kind. Sure, something like that may be emotionally satisfying to those who only play a game in order to "win" it, and I may well be in a small majority, but this is exactly why PS:T is my favourite game of all times - it didn't end in an epic fight against some "übermonste" - no, it ended in a satisfying, logical way, after a great story. To me, it is the journey that matters - not the destination. So what does this have to do with boss battles? Well, I am hoping that instead of just having to fight my way through a series of combat encounters, there will be ways to avoid combat - diplomacy, betrayal, bribery, whatever - I hope the game will focus on a series of challenges - where combat is not always the only way to resolve the situation. Of course, sometimes it will be - I do not expecting a "bloodless" path through the game, but the bottom line is that to me, big, epic boss fights are an annoyance, not an attraction. Sure, I may be in a minority, but I think there are some others who share my opinion.

Indeed, but that's not what I was talking about - prerendered shadows from fixed light sources are easy. The tricky part is dynamic lighting, for example if the characters carry around lanterns, torches or magical light, and real-time shadows, when the characters (or monsters) move around.

I'm not so sure about the "minimal" part. It's easy enough if you just have light from above - then you can easily create realistic shadows on the ground. The problem is when you have light sources to the sides - when you pre-render the background, you lose information on the orientation of any particular point, and without that information is is hard to create "correct" shadows. However, the the shadows don't really have to be accurate, just "good enough", so this probably not worth worrying about.

Well, you don't need entire areas to provide interesting class/race/gender/faction-specific experiences. I would for example imagine that in the big cities there will be a number of NPCs that will only really interact with you if you meet certain requirements - each class might have its own quest line, but the quests would take you through the same area - the experience would just be different.

I have been giving some thoughts to some of the technical problems with implementing dynamic lighting and realistic shadows in a "2.5D" isometric game. The thing is, dynamic lighting and realistic real-time shadows are something people have been working on for a long time in "true" 3D games, and it is not that hard to find and implement good solutions - in fact, Unity will handle this pretty nicely - see what they offer here: http://unity3d.com/unity/engine/lighting However.... Those techniques are meant for a 3D environment, and I just cannot see how they would apply directly to a "2.5D" game - I cannot see a simple, good solution (and I have done enough programming at the DirectX level to be reasonably familiar with the issues). What worries me is that if Obsidian decides to implement realistic real-time shadows, it would require substantial work, but if they don't, they might disappoint some people whose expectations are based on their experience with "3D" games. Personally I don't need to see real-time shadows - but I don't really know what expectations people have in general. .

Obsidian already has somewhere close to 200 people who pledged $1000+ for the privilege of having an input into the game. Just managing their contributions is going to be enough of a headache. Keep in mind that for legal reasons Obsidian will have to verify that anyone contributing to the game is not ripping off the intellectual property of a third party. There is practically no chance they would allow non-employees to write something like game lore - they cannot take the risk that people might be copying the text from somewhere else.

I think there is close to a 0% chance of flying being implemented - there are just too many issues with it. It just does not go well together with a 2.5D game, which presumably will include a walkmesh of some kind - but not a real 3D map of the area, so it is pretty complicated to determine where you can fly and land. It *might* be possible to implement a levitation spell, where you would go straight up and down again, but that could lead to silly situations, like flying through tree crowns or overhanging objects. Those issues are not unsolvable, but fixing them would be complicated - personally I'd prefer that Obsidian spent the effort on something more productive.

I think you are completely missing the point. The game is not going to use tiles, but that does not mean that they have to do every area from scratch - there will be reusable resources. The can re-use things like trees and such as animated "placeables". Alse, when the build the model for each area, they can re-use components - walls, buildings, statues, etc that they have used elsewhere - place them in the model and render them from different angles than they did before. There are numerous other (and better) ways to re-use resources than to use tiles.

Ugh, this discussion is getting silly. THERE ARE NOT GOING TO BE TILES. IT IS AS SIMPLE AS THAT! Now, this does not mean that there are not going to be reusable resources. For example, Obsidian might decide to implement the static parts of the scenery as a bitmap (or possibly as a multi-plane bitmap to handle occlusions, players walking behind walls and such), but use "placeables" for anything that moves, like water or trees (leaves). But we are not going to have tiles like NWN had.

I am really curious regarding what level of detail we can expect to see in character and monster models. I assume we will (presumably) not be zooming in to view the characters up close. That makes sense in a 3D environment like NWN2 or DA:O, but not when you have a "2.5D" isometric view. I really do not expect the characters to take up proportionally more space on the screen than in BG or PS:T - but we will have higher resolution and better looking characters - just how much better, that is the question. If the character will be implemented as a regular polygon model, what kind of polygon count can we expect? Most certainly not anything like, say, Sheppard in Mass Effect, who was something like 20-25.000 polygons (including equipment). Something like that would be a complete overkill for something you will never be viewing up close. So, what can we expect for the characters? I don't know...maybe 2000-4000, but that's just speculation - I expect we will be told at some point next year.

I don't even understand why people are bringing up tiles - that's not even an option being considered. Anyhow, we know the backgrounds will be big and the game will take up several disks, but so what? It's not an unsolvable problem. I suggest people find something else to worry about.

I don't agree with that at all. I would say that it is in the developer's best interest to make a game that people enjoy. That's all. If people enjoy "powergaming" (whatever they consider it to mean), let them. If people think the game is too hard or too easy, then allow them to change the difficulty settings until the game is of appropriate difficulty for their taste. Too many people seem to think that the purpose of playing a game is to "win" ... I completely disagree - the primary purpose is to enjoy the game...even if "winning" is meaningless. Consider PS:E (which is my favourite game of all times). Did you "win" the game - or did you just reach a satisfying, appropriate end, having a lot of fun in the process?