Pipyui

I'm certainly pretentious for saying so, and am likely off base completely, but I suspect that most of us here aren't against sex scenes outright, just the manner in which such are so often portrayed. We've already more than discussed the issues of PC ego-stroking romance harems in RPGs; I don't think it's the sex people don't like, just the shallow portrayal of what sex and romance is. In terms of oversexualization, I don't think this will be an issue. We don't need to go full-puritan sex-smashing here; hints of femininity and fertility aren't strictly misogynistic or belittling, and are often quite the opposite. I don't think completely erasing sexual distinction is a proper solution (sexoclasting, if you will). A hint of "boob plate" need not be oversexualization, or even completely crush suspension of belief regarding mechanics of armor. My own thoughts are that the line between appropriate and objectifying in terms of sexualization isn't particularly fine or binary, and that responsible developers can tastefully address femininity with little difficulty.

Actually, there is little difference between an LCD monitor and an LCD TV. 1080i existed for scanning televisions that drew an image from the top down - the interlacing helped keep the image from tearing, and was better than progressive scan for such TVs - but an LCD TV can display 1080p properly, as it can draw an entire frame at once. Input lag however is a notorious concern of high-def TVs.

Possibly related: am I the only one who doesn't have the Project Eternity logo at the top of the forums anymore?

The impression I got was that it would be a game of mature themes, but not a game made to be explicitly mature. Works for me.

A picture is worth a thousand words. You only gave me 45 to work with.

Don't worry guys, I'm on the job. No need for thanks - I'm just doing what I love.

Love interest acquired. I'm totally not trying to incite heated debate or anything.

All that lead up ... to nothing. Whew!

Thanks! So, I guess the lighting techniques used for the 2D environment don't translate perfectly to the 3D space, so Obsidian had to use some cheats to sample environment lightning to reproduce for the 3D models. ... Did they try poking it with a stick?

My own german is shody at best, and google translate isn't providing much better, so if someone could translate or paraphrase some of the more important bits into english, that'd be swell. Most of the article I could glean from google translate, but it'd be nice to have some clarification on some parts, particularly:

Yes, saving game files into the My Documents folder is a windows convention, but it is by no mean a rule. There is nothing stopping a developer from keeping the save files within the game directory. As to another question, the code to recursively access an Override directory is also trivial, there should be no reason that PE can't do it.

Yeah, I think we're effectively talking the same game. The difficulty I had in contemplating a purely nonlinear game was due, I suspect, to a predisposition to equate nonlinearity to narrative entropy that I couldn't fully shake myself of. A nonlinear story doesn't mean one without stimulus for the player, I was just using the structure of those stimuli to define my idea of ideal linearity - without any meta-game forces driving player action. If we are to define linearity as a meta-game mechanic to push the PC down particular paths, however, then yes, I agree with you that nonlinear narrative is absolutely superior. As you say, our debate seems to center around semantics. I think if I'm to produce a metaphore regarding any diffence of opinion, it'd be that your ideal narrative is an empty journal and a pen with which to write your own story, where for uncreative clods like myself, I'd be happy with a complete novel given a pen, whiteout, and full creative license to change it as I see fit (even the entire thing). I had a strawman in mind initially to reflect your argument in the best way I knew how, but immediately after found better words. I just never went back to remove the preceding sentence. Yes, but unfortunetly that post well defines the limit of just how intelligent I can feign be!

The thing I don't like about click-and-travel point-to-point travel maps is the volume it tends to take out of the world. DA:O (the goto game for cRPG criticism, it seems) is a particular offender - there were but a handful of locations to visit on the travel map. All of the effort the devs made in trying to flesh the world out with lands, cultures, and histories was contrasted sharply by the very few settings one actually visited. The world became a set of points including a city, a town, a sub-terrain city, a forest, a tower. These locations were such isolated campaigns that they never, in my mind, coalesced into a whole world. The game thus became not an adventure through Fereldan, but a series of scenes in a play (Scene I: Osmar, Scene II: some town), which never let me get my imurshun settled. I would like to imagine that PE would combat this with a greater set of locations, but I don't think this perfectly solves the problem. I'm still not exploring the land, I'm going from points A to B in a puff of smoke. "Mountains?" *POOF* "Beach." Yes, the dotted line is supposed to abstract my travel, but there is such a thing as too much abstraction. I much prefer the macro style map that I can traverse by my own power. Sure, the setup is effectively the same, but I have one fewer abstraction layer, which is enough to grant a boon to my imagination. Making areas inaccessible until the time is right is easy: broken bridges, denied access to cities, caverns that cannot be traversed without a certain ability/item, etc. It's just the macro map, so I'm willing to tolerate most anything short of invisible walls guiding my progress at this level. Of course, the more natural the obstacles, the better.

Damnit Gifted1! We all know who you're talking about, and if you're gonna talk about me at all, I'd like the decency of being addressed by name! Anyway, in terms of the topic at hand, I like the forced artistic perspective that isometric games can lead to the medium. The artist can portray a scene in exactly the way they wish to protray it. On the other hand, I like the control of perception that 3D games give me, where I can view a scene from any perspective I choose (within the confines of the camera). 3D games are getting increasingly better at building a scene beautiful and complete from any angle, but I would argue that the art isn't perfect yet. The only particularly irritating problem I have with fixed isometric view is occlusion, but it's a problem I'm willing to ignore if the scenery can dazzle me.

I think we're running straight out of the scope of the game here.

Ok, so I'm late to the party here, but how "big" is a 5 point difference in accuracy vs. deflection score? Will I be unable to crit half the enemies I encounter (presuming approximately same level) because they have good armor? At the beginning of the game this difference may be huge, but late game will it be trivial (>=5% chance to crit a guy in blue steel plate, 0% to a gal in marginaly shiny blue steel plate)?

While this is also true, minmaxing (or minimaxing) is an algorithm to create aritficial intelligence in turn-based systems. It is infeasible to calculate more than a very few moves into the future, as the complexity is exponential. It almost certainly won't be used in PE, but it is relevent to the AI topic and how AI generally works. (it was the only one related to games we learned in AI) Wikipedia It is also true that we haven't yet (or likely ever will) solved chess. The warehouse computer example is decades old, though. Recent chess programs can beat grandmasters not uncommonly, and fit in one or two server blades (not much space at all). Wikipedia

I don't know anything about video game AI, but a popular trick (or at least the one I know) is Min-Maxing. Min-Maxing creates a tree of which each level represents a turn (though the game need not necessarily be turn-based, just turn-abstracted), and each node a possible action of that turn. Thus the tree maps all possible immediate futures of the game, and the computer chooses it's own move based on some heuristic that either minimizes its own potential loses after X moves, or maximizes it's potential gain after X moves. Lecture over. Anyway, what I'm saying is, it's not unreasonable to think that the AI is calculating your party's potential responses to its own actions, and using this to minimize or maximize its own harm or damage dealing, respectively. I'm almost certainly completely wrong though.

Well, they stuck with PE anyway. I'll admit to being a tad disappointed however. It lacks a certain pizzaz.

To my eye, I'm less confused by the mild disrepair of the stronghold walls as to the odd lack of rubble their holes have. Chunks are torn out of this wall, but there's not a misplaced brick to be seen. I can imagine others coming along to collect stone for other works, as history shows happens quite frequently, but then why just the rubble? That makes no sense to me. Did the previous inhabitants clean it up then go, "Well, guess we're done here" and leave? Were they conquered in seige shortly after clearing it up, whereafter all parties just up and vamoosed? NOW I NEED TO KNOW. And I know this is dumb, but I wouldn't mind if the wall repairs appeared in a slightly "off" color, as to show difference in age or material. Just a thought. But great update! Lovin that stronghold!

Fulfilment site on standby? We've been teased about it for ages!

Oh! What if your previous PC incarnations appeared in the adventurer's hall? They might level as your PC had (without guidance), and perhaps comment on events as is consistent with the choices that PC made in another game. I think it would be best to only have PCs that have completed the campaign appear in the hall (so they can have a personality as I mentioned above). This way they could be a veteran adventurer (gimped somehow to fit your own experience), and might even make odd quips subtly indicating familiarity with your quests.

This is probably true. I don't feign any pretense of understanding the process, but I suspect that physical games aren't often handled like money where new shipments are sent out at intervals according to demand. I suspect instead that most games manufacture all copies at once and distribute them, only worrying about producing more if the demand is high enough. Obsidian will probably make a big batch for the backers and then some, but I would be surprised to see this turn into something you buy at walmart, unless hype and attention spike dramatically in the coming months. Unless those sell out real well, that'll like be it, and they'll cruise digital.

Will I be able to track my fantasy team from my smart device? No, wait a minute... What is there to do outside of combat and questing? Will there be gambling, dogfights (goblin fights?), opportunities for fishing (every good rpg has a fishing mechanic ), an arena, entertainment at the stronghold, drunk-tipping? How frequently can we expect to see area transitions? Are we going to see a loading screen after every few yards, or does the majority of a full environment pan? Thanks!

@mcmanusaur I tend to agree with most of this, however I find it difficult to imagine that a person looking for escapism finds it in a world without some form of direction. To strawman the argument (I'm untalented with words and argument form, so I resort to extremes to (hopefully) help flesh my less radical ideas), I can look at a sheet of white paper and say that, since it is an amalgamation of all colors, I can project my own personal sense of perfect art upon it. Of course, your argument is that the white paper is perfect potential, whereupon a person can craft their own ideal art. I see no flaw in a game like this, but I still would argue that it wouldn't yield as much impact in story as one that might incorporate linear elements. Which I suppose brings us back to the stimulus/impetus bit. I believe I did use them fairly interchangably, so I should clear up that in my mind they are closely related. To me, the stimulus is "that guy was murdered," and the impetus is, by a resonable progression of gaming thought "I should find out who and why." I do not believe that this impetus should be forced upon the player, who should be making his or her own choice to investigate or ignore the matter; but from a story perspective, I don't think it's unfair either to funnel the player into a scenario gilded to incite particular emotions and experiences from them. To make bad analogy, I suppose I don't want to be lead through a cavern by the hand, but would rather follow the art and patterns painted into the rock to determine my own path. And if the rock is painted in certain patterns and shapes that draw me from one point to another by the talents of the artist, that's fine by me. Bringing that back into the realm of gaming, I believe that the stimulus provides impetus to the player, to follow or not, and I don't think it unfair to string stimulus into reasonable progressions of story, which should provide impetus to the player by virtue and quality. To me, the nonlinear aspect is the mechanic of infinite choice, whereas the linear is the structure defining the world I inhabit. While nonlinearity defines that I may warp and change the structure, linearity is the world as it exists without me. That dead guy was murdered, and he was killed by Kaine the Farmer, who was seeking retribution on account of the daughter that said dead man raped and brutely killed. Linear story, and a reasonable linear progression of "investigate, determine suspects, find incriminating evidence, encounter Kaine, close story." The player doesn't have to follow this path, and idealy infinite paths would be valid, but it could be argued that not all paths are equal in "story magnitude". One might encounter the murder scene and imedietely kill the dog - it was obviously the dog, and it had it coming, growling at you like that. And while some may enjoy this route more than others, I would argue that doesn't score as high in "story magnitude." (which to me is like art theory - all answers are correct, but some are more correct than others (blue/purple=cold, red/yellow=warm, lines provide paths to the eye)) The beauty of nonlinearity is that those who enjoy the dog-killing story better can do so, but the appeal of linearity is to define logical and pathological patterns in the nonlinearity (if I'm not just contradicting myself, which I'm not so convinced of anymore). Disclaimer: I don't mean to outargue you by sheer volume of words, I'm just egregiously bad (by self condemnation, perhaps) at conveying thought and idea, and I attempt to combat this with sheer volume of words. I find this topic to be particularly interesting to me. Perhaps we should dedicate a thread to it? Too much?