Rahelron

I do want romance stories in the game. Screw all the cold hearted players who hate love in videogames. I don't see why romance stories would be silly and other kind of stories would not. Both of them are just fiction! Every RPG game is about pretending to be someone you are not. And if playing the role of someone looking for love is stupid because you could just do that in the real world than playing the role of someone who tries to become important by killing monsters and saving the world is stupid too. I would say: grow up guys and stop reading comic books, you have to be satisfied of the life you have, not try to live another life in a videogame. Then choose: If you think that recreating a romance story in an RPG is stupid then you have to admit that everything you do in RPGs is pointless, fictional, and good only to pretend to be something you are not. If you think that RPGs are just games and don't need to be uplifting and teaching experiences (at least in their core aspects) then romance stories are as good as any other thing the developers could put in them.

About the forum badges... Our forum account here and the kickstarter account by which we made our pledge are not the same thing. So I don't think we will see the badge appear automatically. They will probably send it by mail or stuff like that.

Please developers: DON'T SCATTER "OD NUA JOURNAL" PAGES AROUND THE DUNGEON TO EXPLAIN ITS STORY! It's so cheap and so not credible... please find another way to tell the dungeon's story!

It's difficoult, even for huge music productions with live classical instruments, to cost more than 100k dollars. Ok, if they hired the Berliner Philharmoniker or another world famous orchestra they would spend more than that, but I don't think they need to do that to include a live soundtrack into the game. So I think that Obsidian studios can give us a great live soundtrack without using too much money. IMHO it would be a welcome addition to the game.

the point is that if a trend starts then your comparison is not quite realistic. you'd have a 50M investment with a 200M return vs. (20x)2M investment with a (20x)10M return. i'm pretty sure that those 3 video games huge successes on KS (DFA, W2 and now PE) WILL generate a lot of analysis reports... But gaining 200M dollars with 10 2M projects is much more difficoult than earning 200M with a single 20M project. To earn that money with 10 different games you need 10 different great ideas and 10 different teams able to turn those ideas into great finished games. Do you know how difficoult it is to get a single good business idea? Another thing: in 20 millions of budget you can squeeze in a great marketing campaign, in 2 millions you cannot.

I don't think the big publishers will ever be interested in a 3.5 millions project. Not from the economic point of view. Big MMORPGs nowadays cost around 100 million dollars to make. Normal games cost around 30 millions, 10 times the PE's cost. What I think the publishers should understand is that investing 3.5 millions on a "small" game like PE could get them a lot of good feedback from the community. This would revert in an increased brand value for their company. An example: Instead of keeping rouining franchises like Command & Conquer, Ultima and so on EA should launch community polls to see what sagas the gamers want to be revived. After that they should put some money on the line to make sequels worthy of the name. Not big sequels, just small project that would be useful to make a lot of people say good things about EA around the internet.

Personally I'll try to forget about this game and live my life until it will be released. Discussing over nothing is not fun and not useful either.

And now let's see what future will bring. Does anyone have a time machine? I want to travel straight to april 2014!

We already have games that feature huge worlds and huge amounts of quests. But so far I have never seen a game able to change its story taking the player's action into account. Many games gave the player a fake feeling of being able to influence the outcome of the quests and of the main storyline, but NO GAME trully delivered on this side of things.

I hope so. They could use an expedient similar to what we had in Diablo I. Every once in a while there could be a staircase leading directly to the surface.

"Impossible" stretchgoal Buy the Imoen license and make her a romanceable character in PE please! When I found she was my sister in BG2 I wanted to crash the monitor!

In my opinion if a game takes more than 100-120 hours to complete than it's too big. This because it discourages the player to start it back again when he has finished it for the first time. It's something that happened me with Skyrim: I finished the game with a rogue-type character and it took me 180 hours to do everything (and I even refused to do the Assassin's guild and some Daedric quests because I was roleplaying a good character). When I thought about restarting the game with a mage I found myself discouraged. 180 hours again? No thanks. I'd still like to see how it is playing an high level mage and how the assassin's guild mission would look like, but simply I can't invest another 180 hours of my time on that game. On the contrary when I played The Witcher i did 4 playthroughs just to see every quest branch and all the possible outcomes of the main story. This because completing the main campaign took 40-50 hours, not more.

They should check the real donations amount first. The numbers shown on the Kickstarter page are just promises, someone may have problems with the actual payment. After that, if the money still exceeds 3.5 millions, I would like the obsidian guys to stock 100k for testing, quality assurance and emergencies and spend all the rest to (choose one): 1- Include completely animated gargantuan monsters (if they haven't decided to include them already). Infinity engine dragons sucked. 2- Add more depth to the romance storylines (include marriage, adoption, more dialogue and so on). 3- Expand the crafting system. Add smithing, carpentery and tailoring. Let me build the furniture for my own stronghold! 4- Plan more branches for the main storyline and more radically diversified endings. I know the developers are planning to give to us players a lot of freedom, but it's never enough! 5- Give us an italian translation! And please: 1- No more classes. There are enough already. 2- No more races. Giving depth to the announced ones is quite an hard task already. 3- No more companions. Same reasons as above.

From a gameplay perspective I never used Rise Dead or similar spells in IE games. When one of my party members died I simply loaded my last save. So I couldn't care less about the presence or lack of a Resurrection spell. From a lore perspective I agree with the OP. I think resurrection and other means of reviving people have always brought up a lot of problems from that point of view.

The poll is pretty self-explanatory. What do you think?

I would really like if the crafting in project eternity wasn't just a way to create stuff to fill up your character's paperdoll. Crafting weapons, armors, rings, amulets, runes and potions is good, but it is limited. What about creating a system that allows to use crafting to interact with the world? I.E.: The player is wandering in a cave and finds a locked portal. He realizes that he can't open the portal without a ritual key (something like the dragon claws in skyrim). There are 2 possible solutions: 1- Find the original ritual key (which is hidden somewhere outside the dungeon... maybe in the treasure of a powerful monster). 2- Craft a copy of the ritual key! In this case the player has to buy or mine some plastic matrial, then make a cast of the "keyhole" and finally craft the new key with the right components (which he has to guess looking at the portal or stuff like that). Having choices like this would improve the crafting system and the gameplay too!

We already had a game with a main city like Istanbul. It was BGII and that city was Athkatla. I think it's time to move to something else.

Mmmm some ideas for a 3.6 million stretchgoal: 1- Completely animated gargantuan monsters (if they haven't decided to include them already). Infinity engine dragons sucked. 2- More depth to the romance storylines (include marriage, adoption, more dialogue and so on). 3- Expand the crafting system. Add smithing, carpentery and tailoring. Let me build the furniture for my own stronghold! 4- More branches for the main storyline and more radically diversified endings. I know the developers are planning to give to us players a lot of freedom, but it's never enough! 5- Italian translation!

The trend is going up, but it's still not enough. We need a great last day to make it to the 3,5 millions.

Seeing how the Kickstarter campaign is going I think that there's a good chance that the guys at Obsidian will need to hire new people to complement their team and get every single feature of the game done. If that is the case I think that Brent Knowles would be the perfect person to help them out. Who is him? He is the lead designer of Dragon Age Origins, he worked on Baldur's Gate II and Neverwinter Nights too. He left Bioware in 2009 because he didn't like the direction the company was taking with DA II. Right now he doesn't seem be at work on any game, he is a freelance designer and a writer. Here's a post about his experience at Bioware and why he left. http://blog.brentkno...08-summer-2009/ Here are some quotes: "Party control/tactical combat are huge factors in my enjoyment of a role-playing game as is adopting the role of the hero (i.e., customizing my character)" "interactive movies have never been the kinds of games I wanted to play. [...] I kind of wish the huge effort I know it takes to build those cinematic experiences could be spent on gameplay."

I'm thinking about rising my pledge too... but I'm conflicted: On one side I want the second big city so bad... On the other side Obsidian completely ignored the request of a translation made by the italian community. I'm not happy at all about that.

If you take paypal donations into account it has already happened

Localization I agree with you. Let me add something: Localization for movies and games is usually done outside the original production/development studio. It's done by third-party companies in the target countries. So if the people at obsidian decided to make an italian translation for PE they wouldn't have to do it themselves, they would have just to pay the right company to do that. No manpower taken away from the game developmant then, just some money spent on a translation.

Portraits should be featured, at least to show them in dialogue menus. But, i mean: let's move forward! We are in 2012. I would like the development team to focus on better in-game avatars for the playable characters, not just on portraits. The IE games had portraits because the engine and the available screen resolutions weren't able to show detailed models for the characters. But with the current technology and screen resolutions detailed in-game avatars with expressive faces should be a must-have.

The player should be able to build the stronghold from the foundations to the rooftops. What I mean is: you start with terrain and you decide the layouts of the towers, the walls and so on. If this is impossible then the developers should at least let the players decide what kind of stronghold they want. Some like castles, but others might prefer a mage tower, a secret hideout or a fancy palace.