Pyradox

Oh god, why did I read this horrible thread? It's nothing but gamergaters and people trying to defend a dumb limerick as artistic integrity. Are you actually serious? This doesn't at all represent me. My goal in backing this project was not "I want a studio I love to make something that offends SJWs". And that quote. Jesus Christ man, that quote. You know if the limerick referred to laser guns and sci fi stuff you'd have no problem with it being changed, but the moment someone gets offended, it's the death of liberty to actually listen to them. This entire situation is still messed up though - who is the change for? It's not for the GGers because apparently the most important thing to them is that this game contains content that offends minorities. It's not for the people who were actually offended because it's obviously a dig against them. Third time's the charm, right?

There's already a super high quality screenshot LP on lparchive.org, so I voted video LP, though it'll have to be longer than 10 minute chunks - probably 20-30 minutes instead because there's a lot of content. Also bring in other Obsidian people as co-commentators. Specifically Tim Cain.

I'm from New Zealand so it's against my religion to answer "Australia" to that question. I think we own part of Antarctica though...

Wish I could've joined. Unfortunately I upgraded my pledge by $30 for the next tier, not $8. Which wiped out all my spending money.

Cultural differences aside I'm pretty sure the ideal scenario is that if situations are created where those would be interesting topics to explore, they are explored, but if they aren't, they're left out. Controversial features shouldn't just be taken as a bundle of "maturity" and thrown into the game because that's not what maturity is. Slavery for example isn't the kind of thing you want to just throw into the setting for the sake of being dark. On the other hand, what if someone swore an undying oath of servitude to the king, and their reincarnation was hunted down and "claimed"? That would be a case where slavery is tied into the lore and can be used to discuss interesting topics. The question therefore is not "is this stuff going to be in the game?" but "what kind of themes or ideas will the game present, and how far will those be explored?" If everything follows from there, rather than the other way around, the game probabaly won't just come off as trying too hard.

How could anything be more important than immersion in a role-playing game ? Pretty easily. People don't actually have numerical statistics representing their ability to dodge or predefined inventory slots. When I pick up an apple I don't cause it to vanish into a menu for easy retrieval later. All of these sacrifice immersion for the benefit of gameplay. RPGs tend to operate on very complex systems with a lot of variability - in order to make things clear for gameplay purposes you often have to sacrifice realism in order to keep things understandable for everyone. Obviously there are certain parts where you can be more or less immersive - typically you want the player to spend as much time in those and as little time in the menus as possible, but it's a tradeoff. The really immersive parts exist because the unimmersive parts gave you that background information in the first place. Take the journal for example - if you get a quest and come back a week later, should your character have forgotten in the space of five in-game minutes that someone asked him to kill some boars? Of course not. These mechanics allow you easy access to what your character knows so you can play them properly. I would say the abilty to do so is far more important to an RPG than allowing you to play out your character's thought process. It just keeps things running smoothly - no "but my character should know that!" or "but it makes no sense for me to have ane extended rest in the middle of the day just so I can check my quest inbox!" - it cuts out the middleman to deliver a better gameplay experience, so then you can get back to doing stuff that's actually fun, and then you can feel immersed in a fantasy, not a fancy email client.

I don't know about this implementation, but in all of Valve's recent games (the Half Life 2 episodes, Portal, TF2, Left 4 Dead etc) they've had the ability to switch on a commentary track. After you load up the level it spawns a series of floating speech bubbles that you can activate to hear the designers talk about that part of the level. It's actually a really neat feature, and you can't activate it until you play through normally so you always get the non-fourth wall breaking experience first. EDIT: I swear the above comments didn't exist when I wrote this. Oh well.

That would certainly be doable - in fact it would require a lot of dungeons have lore behind them for Chanters to collect, which basically works out great for everyone. The more high-level the dungeon, the more epic the tales.

Sorry to re-quote myself like this, but I'd quite like a bit of certainty - does anyone know which I should do? Preferably before the kickstarter ends? To my knowledge you just up your pledge by the respective amount, wait for the suvey to be sent, let them know which addons you were after.

$110, upgraded from $80. Wish I could get those cards, but this'll have to do.

The thing with the journal system as it stands is it's really convenient - it's easy for stuff to get lost, or to be filed under a name you're not familiar with, so it's hard to find later. Your system while realistic adds a lot of busywork that just makes things less convinient for everyone - you can't simply check your journal for the directions to somewhere you were supposed to go without resting first. Which makes no sense if they were given to you in writing, and means you have to have a "directions to _____" item in your inventory. Which isn't inherently bad, but it's typically harder to find something in the inventory (especially if it's sorted by icons, not names) than it is to simply check your journal. It also dilutes the functionality of the different menus, so you have to learn multiple procedures for a single task depending on whether you've rested or not. It's perhaps best to think of the journal as already including that feature - stuff marked "new" has yet to be inscribed, then as you read it, that's when your character is writing it. If we go this route we can have everything already in the journal, which is convenient, but new stuff can be in a different colour or font, so it's noticable but not overt. You can still include an animation of your character writing, or even just a typewriter effect as the new entry darkens into permanent ink letter by letter (I reckon this would be nice). This could also inform finished quests - as you look at them they cross themselves out one by one and vanish from your "to complete" list. I say cross themselves out then vanish because it frees up space (you don't want to clutter up the quest log so the main quest is buried under several new sidequests you just finished), but it's obvious what's occuring, you're not just "forgetting" a quest or something equally confusing. I mean, if you really want to see them all chronologically there can be filters, but UI elements need to serve gameplay first, immersion second.

Why would a megalomaniacal wizard have a chain around his neck though? He probably thought it was the height of fashion. That or it's a giant stone titan who the paths were built around as a sort of elaborate subterranean prison. A Dungeon if you will.

You know what sound cool? Chanters. Just look at this:

I think it could work pretty easily if you just pick something up, get an "updated my journal" message if it's interesting, and then there's an entry in your quest log saying "I found something weird, I should look into it when I get the chance". Then anything you find out is logged under that entry. It offers no guidance, but if you forget about it for a while it's useful to have all the information you've uncovered in one place. Which is pretty much how I'd expect a journal to function anyway.