JOG

The problem with half-breeds is that sooner or later there will be only half-breeds, and more or less pointy ears would be just a trait like color of hair or skin. The fantasy standard is that humans can interbreed with elves, orcs and ogres, but those other races can't interbreed among themselves. Half orcs and ogres are usually considered the product of rape, while petite elven women are of course always attracted to big hairy humans. When the half-breeds are sterile, the question is where all those inter-species couples can be found, Arcanum added a nice twist to that question. When the half-breeds are not sterile they should be considered an independent race, so humans actually could be half-elves - an elf / orc halfbreed.

An atheist is convinced that no gods exist. Someone who thinks that gods are not worth worshipping, regardless of whether they exist or not, is an agnostic. In most fantasy settings there is plenty of tangible evidence that the gods exist, so atheism would be considered a mental disease. As for Nihilism: Shar, the prototype nihilist, is one two oldest and one of the most powerful gods in the Forgotten Realms, her worshippers are the terrorist type that hate their own life and only find solace in making others suffer more than themselves, or taking as many others as possible with them when they finally commit suicide. Shar goes one step further, her ultimate goal is to undo creation, and she encourages her worshippers to do their part before they ultimately succumb to their chosen fate. It's a very interesting setup for a cult of villains that can't be reasoned with, but it can also quickly become a sterotype evil for evil's sake setting.

Boo! (SCNR) But seriously what's next, no wolves, no bears? As AlphaShard said, use them as therapy, some of you are brave enough to touch real spiders, why not start with looking at them at a screen? This is no FP game where a giant spider will overwhelm and eat "you". It's a top down game where you see the spider from far away.

There are many options, from Mark / Recall spells over exit-only portals to very well hidden or very well guarded dungeon exits, I always loved how all dungeons in Ultima 6 were linked togethe, and how incredible difficult it was to actually find the passages. Leaving the dungeon should be inconvenient, you should consider whether you leave or try to go down further. Just don't make a dungeon like Watcher's Keep where you can leave and enter as you please. There is no point in a 15 level dungeon when it actually plays like 15 one-level dungeons

I see no point in it other than having a fun quasi-godmode walktrough, but I don't see the a need to prevent it either. If you can import premade characters to a new game, It's not neccessaty to add extra code just to prevent high-level characters with über equipment from being imported.

As long as you don't have to hunt down wandering questgivers, I'm fine. The rogue rebalance mod for BG2 adds a lot of such filler NPCs that serve no purpose other than being targets for pickpocketing. It indeeds make the city feel authentic, and won't really take much time to realize, only the CPU-load due to all the AI scripts running may be noticeable on weaker PCs.

Food is nice for a situation where you actually have to gather supplies for a long expedition in a hostile area (e.g. the Endless Paths) but its awkward when you have to walk over to a shop and buy some food every once in a while for sake of realism. It could be handled as a healing resource: you don't rest as well, i.e. restore less hitpoints or none at all, when you're hungry. In a city you most likely sleep in an inn, and we can expect that your characters eat before they go to their rooms. But deep within the 11th level of the endless paths, it could be interesting when you can't restore health because you forgot to bring enough rations with you. It can also be an adventure hook, like hunting down those gremlins that stole your supplies. For a single character game this makes more sense, though, in a party based game, especially when only the main character is player made, one should assume that at least one of them brought some food and is willing to share.

It's still Digital Rights Management. If you buy a new computer you need to install Steam to be able to prove that you are allowed to install the game, the DRM-free GOG version can be installed simply by running the EXE from your backup DVD, even if it isn't you but your grandchild who inherited your collection of ancient computer games What's the problem anyway? If Obsidian really wanted a strict DRM scheme, they wouldn't support GOG, so the Steam version will most likely be as DRM-free as a Steam program can be, the rest is semantics, apparently Obsidian are aware that some people consider Steam in any form as a kind of DRM, and offer an alternative.

First Computer: C64 First PC: 286 with 2Mb Ram, VGA card and sound blaster card just to play Ultima 6

Actually it's much more stupid, nobody who expects a fight will carry his weapons on the back, sword fighers in all cultures figured out independently that the quickest way to draw a sword is from the hip opposite to your sword arm. And no, ninja neither carried their swords on the back, nor did they use that theater-stagehand outfit as an uniform. In PE's prespective you won't notice the sheathed weapon anyway, I'd be fine with weapons simply not being displayed on the avatars unless they actually draw the weapons.

I prefer a soft level cap, and a lot of sequels where you can continue playing your character, rather than creating a new character for each sequel. I don't need to max out my characters before the game ends, so there also is no need for pointless endgame grinding levels like in NWN2.

Baldur's Gate or MoTB. Those portraits give the characters um... character, while the rendered chargen images are just bland faces with no expression. Even modifying the portrait depending on the current outfit can be done with 2d images (and was done since Ultima 7 Serpent's Isle) but it will mean much more work for the artists. Customisation is no argument for render portraits either, as long as there is a "portraits" folder, you can use anything as your character portrait, even a screenshot snippet from a game with render portraits.

In a non-linear game, some sort of level scaling for opponents is required to keep things interesting, but the opponents shouldn't be downscaled only made more powerful within limits. BG2-Style level scaling is okay for me: have more and / or more dangerous variants of the generic enemies, but cap their power at a certain point (e.g. 3-5 lesser Wolfweres, Wolfweres or Greater wolfweres) but keep the bosses at fixed level (Elder Red Dragon) Loot-scaling is a no-go, when you successfully fight trough a Level 10-15 dungeon with a level 5 party, You should get the Level 10-15 reward for that achievement. If your level 25 party enters the same dungeon, they should get the same level 10-15 reward for that non-challenge.

For me the, most annoying thing about Steam is that I want a quite secure password for any plattform I spend money in, and although I usually run Steam in offline mode, every once in a while I need to go online and realize that my password is so secure, that even I can't figure it out. I tend to avoid Steam, but if a game really needs Online registration / DRM, Steam is the way to go, I won't install clients for any other DRM plattform. I don't get the point of achievements either, they're either pretty pointless stuff that will be achieved automatically if one actually bothers to play the game, or they go deeper and record decisions you made duing game play, that may or may not reflect your real life disposition.

I doubt it will be checked, it's a honor system, not a "custom forum title" addon. If you ask for proof it's no longer a honor system, and even with just about 600 members it would be quite a task to check everyone, I use different email addresses for forums and kickstarter/amazon, for example. So you had to check whether I have access to both email accounts, others might have pledged $10 extra just because they like round sums, you had to make sure they don't get a set of cards when the survey comes, etc. When someone wants to cheat "the system" in such a petty way, I hope he's proud of his forum title, that will show him he's a jerk whenever he sees one of his own messages. “Our youth now love luxury. They have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for their elders and love chatter in place of exercise; they no longer rise when elders enter the room; they contradict their parents, chatter before company; gobble up their food and tyrannize their teachers.” Socrates 469-399 BC

I just did a rough estimate and completely forgot about Brazil Anyway, my point is that A) translations suck. and B) the languages to translate to aren't chosen fairly. Games usually get translated for the big 4 of western Europe: German, French, Spanish and Italian, not because of fairness or number of native speakers, but because of potential customers. Russia and the former USSR states are a big new market, but the other languages, no matter how widely used, get no love, out of simple business considerations. When the big greedy publishers don't support the other languages, Obsidian with their still limited budget should consider this very carefully.

Most games in the 80ies weren't translated at all, and the first game that was translated on release was Ultima 8. That Daggerfall wasn't translated is a good thing, There was a "german" version, (english game with a german manual) where they translated "missiile weapons" to "Raketenwaffen" - (rocket weapons) just imagine the rest of the game... The german BG1 translation using random dialects where the english version used accents was so hillarious it was more satirical than anything else. And that's the problem I have with translations, too much will be lost without anything I can do against it. the narrative suffers badly from mediocre translation, and more often than not you need to know english pretty well to be able to translate back and figure out the original meaning. (Heck I can remember the german version of the old Lord of the Rings crpg having a riddle that was completely unsolvable unless you actually were able to translate back and figure out what was really meant, that was the point where I decided that I'm better off playing the english version, and blaming myself when I get stuck due to language barriers.) So my advice: Learn english, it has more advantages than just being able to experience games, movies and novels the way the authors intended them to be experienced. If you want to support languages "fairly" (i.e. based on number of native speakers) it should probably go like this: Mandarin - Russian - Spanish - French - English - German - Portugese - Italian... Realistically speaking: with English, German, French, Spanish, Itallian, Russian and Japanese you should cover the vast majority of gamers.

Just have a look at Spiderweb Software, that guy releases a 50+ hours RPG every year since the mid 90ies, alternating between remakes and totally new stories. Every 2-3 games there are even major improvements to the engine. Now extrapolate that with a budget of 4m instead of 5-10k, a team of 20+ instead of 1, dedicated programmers, artists, and sound guys, and you'll see that 18 months are quite possible. But yes, Obsidian, this time nobody is rushing you. If it aint done, it aint done, this time your financiers want a complete game rather than a quickly released one.

Yes, that's a general problem of the Infinity engine style. With tilesets like in the original Fallouts or Arcanum you can do just as much as with 3D model based areas, but with the background-image + walkpath / points of interest, it will be hard to add new areas that aren't just photoshopped copies of original ones.

I'm all for Fallout-style slideshow-ending, but I really hope that it doesn't in a epilogue sumarizing everyone's further lifes. Show us the consequences of our actions, but also bring back the old times where we could play the same characters trough 3 - 4 games, until they finally earned their retirement.

How about the player discovering a rat nest on his own incentive (while looti... um inspecting the inn's cellar), kills them, and returns to the innkeeper, but instead of the expected reward gets scolded because the rats were the secret ingredients of his famous stew?

For. Or an insignificant amount of battle XP, maybe even class dependent. The problem with XP for killing in a game where you can reload any time, is that you will try battles just for the sake of it. There is no incentive for stealth or guile, when you get the guys to fight among themselves (by speech check or confusion spell) and then finish off the survivers you miss out lots of XP, when you talk your way out of a fight you loose a lot of XP, when you avoid the fight altogether, you loose a lot of XP. Most characters need to be roleplayed badly to get max XP. Only borderline-insane utterly reckless characters like Qara or the stereotype Orc barbarian will get max XP and be roleplayed properly.

A good way for a stronghold / guildhall "money sink" would be a training hall that works like in the "Magic-Candle"-games (anyone remember?). There you could assign tasks to companions that were currently not in the party (i.e. the mage researches spells, the smith makes a new sword and the warrior hones his skills), all this wouild require money, but you'd get something in return in a couple of weeks, and the out-of-party NPCs weren't completely useless. Generally, most games are too generous. After a couple of levels you swim in money, mostly because the best equipment is either found as loot or crafted. When there is actually stuff to buy (or order) a simple visit to town could quickly reduce the giant heap of gold you're constantly dragging with you.

Actually that's the salt of pepper of the RPG generation PE aims to bring back. Today's RPGs play just like the ones of the 80ies and early 90ies, just with polygons and voice out instead of bitmaps and text. In the short period from '96 to 2003, a lot of RPGs were released where you actually could roleplay your character. And guess what - most of these games were made by the guys who are today known as Obsidian Entertainment.

In the Mid 90's he was an usenet-curiosity, usually ranting how he quit his job at Sir-Tech because they were no longer interested in quality, and how better Grimoire will be, and that it will be the only Wizardry-like game that ever will be made again, because without him, nobody at Sir-Tech is capable of making Wiz 8. Nonetheless they (Brenda Brathwaite) released Wiz 8 in 2001. Maybe by the time Grimoire is finally released, the standard monitor has a 2432 x 1536 resolution and can show Grimoire's 1024*768 without distortion, would be a shame when all his perfectionism would get lost in upscaling.