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Morality Games

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About Morality Games

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  • Pillars of Eternity Backer Badge
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  1. Approximately 362,000 owners on Steam, 14.5% of whom are backers. After dropping out of the daily top 25 sellers for a while, the game is now back on the chart at #21. It's hard to guess how that compares with other platforms. 14.5% of 362,000 is 52,500 -- suggesting that about 1/3 of the 77,000 backers got their copy somewhere else (tho some may never have picked up their copies), which in turn suggests robust sales outside of Steam, likely for a total of a bit more than 500K. All that's just speculation, tho. Unfortunately, the only retailer not selling Steam copies is GOG, and a disproportionate number of that community probably got their copies during the KickStarter.
  2. Companions in past Obsidian games worked well mostly because their dialogue boxes were designed as puzzles where spreadsheet values, Influence meter, and flags hit by exploration or events in the critical path 'unlocked' dialogue choices that allowed you to develop a deeper relationship, a relationship which surfaced during critical moments to produce a divergent outcome to a quest, cut scene, or scenario that wouldn't have existed otherwise. Often you got special items, knowledge, or stat boosts. That kind of complexity and interactivity is missing from Pillars of Eternity. Even worse, they went with the Bioware structure where each companion's character development is compartmentalized into two-three conversations worth of development split between a companion quest. Their motivations are present in a summary and straightforward way, usually with them explaining what they want and what needs to happen in the relationship right away. Real life groups and cliques don't work like that, with the members of each clique varying in terms of their standing and personal interaction with the alpha male/female, and not every companion should start by having a quest. Some of them should never have them at all. For example, in Planescape: Torment, you do Grace's "companion quest" in advance of her joining your group; she joins you out of curiousity if your spreadsheet checks manage to unlock the proper dialogue options. Dakkon doesn't have a quest until you unlock it through conversation, and Annah and especially Morte are mostly critical path dependent characters; they have no quests apart from their need to help the Nameless One. Rather than having every companion have a goal that they "announce" near the outset of them joining the party, Obsidian should go back to their older, celebrated style where companions are well differentiated in terms of why they are there, how you interact with them, and what you get out of them. So in Pillars of Eternity 2, maybe one companion starts as a mercenary you meet at an inn who you pay installments of gold. In Pillars of Eternity, this would be a Goldpact Knight. Instead of having a conventional quest, the writers should make it so the Goldpact Knight knows a lot of the factions and NPCs you do work for in the game because he's been employed by them before; you learn about his character and develop a closer relationship with him through conservations stimulated by his commentaries and insights, which may also unlock new ways to interact with those factions and resolve their quests. If he comes to like and respect you, he teaches you something about X to make your character stronger. On the other hand, if you fail to pay him he'll allowed himself to be employed by your enemy and you have to fight him later -- if you have low Influence, he'll attack without a word. If you have high influence, he will tell it is nothing personal, and you can use Resolve to convince him that it IS personal and that by allowing past relationships to affect his choice of employer he has forsaken his Goldpact vows, which results in him abandoning the field. They should do more stuff like that. I know they did this a little bit, especially with characters like Durance or Grieving Mother, but it really wasn't up to scale.
  3. Unfortunately, the Open Gaming license doesn't allow you to adapt the D20 system into a computer game. So, they would have to develop a different rule set. As amusing as it would be to see Tim Cain develop a turn-based D&D 3.75 cRPG to school the Sword Coast Legends guys, they'll have to go a different direction on whatever cRPG they decide to make. Unless they've got some kind of contingency I know nothing about. Actually some people think that's not correct. There was discussion in this thread about it already. http://forums.obsidian.net/topic/66652-pathfinder-crpg-by-obsidian/?p=14766Well39 Well, all I can say is that if Obsidian intends on making a Pathfinder cRPG using d20 rules they had best announce development now so they can get the lawsuit out of the way sometime by 2020. At least by that point we could have had an Eternity trilogy and nobody will question them if they take a similar direction with this license. KickStart Paizo/Obsidian's legal fees so that they can make a d20 cRPG.
  4. Unfortunately, the Open Gaming license doesn't allow you to adapt the D20 system into a computer game. So, they would have to develop a different rule set. As amusing as it would be to see Tim Cain develop a turn-based D&D 3.75 cRPG to school the Sword Coast Legends guys, they'll have to go a different direction on whatever cRPG they decide to make. Unless they've got some kind of contingency I know nothing about.
  5. That argument seems borderline impossible to support, beyond the fact that enemies respawn from the environments but the portals stay closed. There's like 4-10 portals on average, each one spawns like 16 demons during two rounds of combat and some significantly more. Did you kill 100-150 Mages and Templars in the Hinterlands?
  6. If we're still rating this game on a scale of a hundred I give it a 60/100. Continuing their established legacy of one step forward and two steps back, Bioware made a compelling critical path only to strand it in a sea of going in no particular direction. Designers didn't seem to get the point of an Elder Scrolls-esque open world is to create (and then feed) a relentless hunger for interesting discoveries. "What, a mine full of expensive rare metals outside Balmorra? So I can harvest to sell with no consequences? Cool!" Players steps into the wrong side passage, and then BOOM: Fire Auruch! "WAGGGH!! The Balrog is chasing me and I'm only Level 2!!!!!!!111" <--- my first Morrowind experience Most of these environments entail you finding the same types of puzzles and fighting the same types of enemies (Fade Rifts + Demons make up 50% of the enemies in every area). Consequently, there's very little excitement to be found just wandering around -- but wandering around is the point of these large environments? From the trailers I get the sense that more elaborate side missions were supposed to provide additional context and meaning to exploration, but these must have been scrapped at some point.
  7. You'll be shocked what a guy can do when the choice is (1) do more work than you ever knew existed (2) or Dungeon Siege 4. ... in seriousness, he has co-workers, the writing across these projects entails different levels of intensiveness at different times, etc.
  8. This is getting mildly ridiculous. Negative reactions have ranged from "Everyone except Bishop" in NWN2 to "Only Bishshop" in NWN2 to the entire cast of Kotor II and every shade between across all Obsidian and non-Obsidian RPGs -- including popular, Award-Winning characters like Kreia and fan favorites like Alistar.
  9. Surprised this hasn't worked its way into this thread. http://www.inquisitr.com/517030/obsidian-entertainment-wants-to-make-another-star-wars-game/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Inquisitr+%28Inquisitr%3A+All%29 Obsidian has been developing a pitch to create a new Star Wars RPG, but not in the Old Republic era. Probably about as good as we can expect.
  10. 1/8 of the companion writing tyme dedicated to sappy Fan Service. I wish someone would write a low-combat romance CRPG, even an indie one. They would make a fair bit of money and lots of folks would be happier and not haunt games like this with their demands. Romances are part of the Infinity Game family tree, like it or not. The only series that didn't have them at all was Icewind Dale, which also didn't have meaningful character-driven relationships of any sort. No. BG2 had them. That's it. And they were an astonishingly (and mercifully) shallow part of the game. IWD 1 & 2 didn't. BG1 had no romances. PS:T's 'romances' (I don't consider them to be) can be viewed either way. I'm not a maths genius but that's 1/5th of 'the family.' And a tiny fraction of that 1/5th. If that's the level of romance we have to endure in PE then fair enough, otherwise you are inflating something to suit your own preferences. Which is fair enough, but doesn't bear scrutiny. PS:T had romance-themed content you could choose to act upon, or not. It wasn't as much about developing a specific kind of relationship as exploring a different aspect of the relationship. My other main point is that Icewind Dale as a series isn't even applicable because it had no meaningful companion relationships. Its not a question of whether romances are good to include among character relationships, its that character relationships and character-driven narratives are themselves not instrumental to a role-playing game. The only game that omitted romances among the character-driven narrative Infinity Game engine was Baldur's Gate.
  11. 1/8 of the companion writing tyme dedicated to sappy Fan Service. I wish someone would write a low-combat romance CRPG, even an indie one. They would make a fair bit of money and lots of folks would be happier and not haunt games like this with their demands. Romances are part of the Infinity Game family tree, like it or not. The only series that didn't have them at all was Icewind Dale, which also didn't have meaningful character-driven relationships of any sort.
  12. And hey if you want more they finally finished the restoration project mod. I have so little time for gaming these days but I hope to get to it eventually and see how they did. Amazing. There were still some things I wish they had added though.
  13. Well, Amazon has to file a tax form for certain because it is profit for them. Same with Kickstarter.
  14. Final Fantasy 6 and Chrono Trigger are great role-playing games. I know from personal experience that the Persona and Tales series are of quality. Fire Emblem also has elements role-playing and is great ... less so during its GameCube and Wii run, but Awakening looks promising. I understand that Dragon Quest is on the same caliber. Even Feargus Urquhart (Obsidian CEO) spoke favorably of developing a sequel to Chrono Trigger, and was in talks with Square to make it happen. or Chris Avellone, for that matter - He mentioned it a few times in the countdown party, too. Chronotrigger got a lot of love from Obsidian that day! for the record, I've never player Chronotrigger - number of JRPG's I've even started you can count on one hand Generally the argument is whether Final Fantasy 6 is the best or Chrono Trigger is the best. The best character-driven interparty jRPG versus the best choice-driven interparty jRPG (but also great characters). Both of which have great -- I mean, great -- exploration. Both anticipated the best of what would later be achieved by Western developers with narrative, character, and choice, so its little wonder why they receive so much respect.
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