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RaccoonTOF

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Posts posted by RaccoonTOF

    Is $4M enough?

    in Pillars of Eternity: General Discussion (NO SPOILERS)

    Posted

    Bah...wrote up a lengthy response and lost it :(. The key thing being missed from the discussion about Kickstarter not hitting the same budget of current "AAA" titles (assuming that we go based purely on the budget to determine what is an AAA title, unlike was done in the past) is that the Kickstarter funding also allows a developer to reduce the overall budget required to produce the IDENTICAL game, due to removing middlemen costs (not entirely, and they still have to have a distribution method, but sites such as Steam and GoG have already shown themselves to be viable alternatives for that).

     

    As far as reviewers being part of the "game industry" - most definitely. I'm not talking about a fellow from Forbes or the NY Times reporting on the success of a Kickstarter project, I'm talking about publications/websites such as CGW, PCG, IGN, GameSpot, etc. Those are most definitely a part of the "game industry" just like Vogue is part of the fashion industry and health journals are part of the pharmaceutical industry. Generic "journalists" I would not say are part of the "games industry" but for sure dedicated publications like those above certainly are.

    [Merged] Women, Feminism, etc. in PE

    in Pillars of Eternity: General Discussion (NO SPOILERS)

    Posted

    On the appearance side of the argument, I think these two quotes from the above linked article put it best:

     

    If I feel that what she’s wearing impedes her ability to do her job well — either due to physical risk or other people not taking her seriously — all credibility goes out the window. And if she’s in an outfit that says “sexy” while all her male counterparts are in outfits that say “powerful,” that’s a red flag — especially if she’s the only woman there.

     

    and

     

    Just to make things one hundred percent clear — I’ve got nothing against sexy. To the men and women out there who enjoy dressing their characters in skimpy clothes, go forth and have fun. My issue is not with sexualized portrayals of women, but that said portrayals are the rule rather than the exception. So long as our playing field is level, there’s no reason to erase portions of it entirely.

    • Like 7

    [Merged] Women, Feminism, etc. in PE

    in Pillars of Eternity: General Discussion (NO SPOILERS)

    Posted

    I would like an RPG, maybe this one, to be a bit like Gulliver's Travels. It could offer the player and the developers the opportunity to play with civilizations concepts, weird tribes ideas, of believable and original, and fantastic (as in "fantasy" ?) cultures. New place = new culture, little-endians or something else, a pretext for brain-food, something that would give the player fresh ideas on a topic (women role included).

     

    Creating the new place, the new chapter, would require from the designers mandatory questions, including language, history, economics, morals and... genders' roles, indeed.

    Overall for the game world in entirety, this might end up being possible. We have to also keep in mind that on release, P:E is going to be focusing the vast majority of the content on what amounts to a single kingdom. And we already know that the area which will be present in the game is only a very small slice of the whole world envisioned (I believe one of the comments about the released map was that it occupied an area roughly the size of Spain in relation to the rest of the world). So while there are a lot of opportunities for the sorts of differences you would see city-by-city, and plenty of possibilities to represent a diversity of races as "foreigners", the actual exploration of different places and cultures on a grand sense over the course of the player's adventure is actually going to be pretty limited with what we will have on initial release.

    Is $4M enough?

    in Pillars of Eternity: General Discussion (NO SPOILERS)

    Posted

    As I've said two times already, the success of Kickstarter and crowdfunding in general currently hinges on the success of Double Fine Adventure, Wasteland 2 and Project Eternity. If those manage to be successful, it will prove that crowdfunding can work and thus provide a sturdy foundation for further growth of crowdfunding.

     

    Just to point out that this should be qualified as "the success of Kickstarter and crowdfunding in general for the purposes of developing video games" - there are a number of other kickstarter projects (P:E isn't even the largest KS project to date, it is just the largest for a single video game, I believe third largest overall but the two leading it were both hardware projects).

    Is $4M enough?

    in Pillars of Eternity: General Discussion (NO SPOILERS)

    Posted

    Kickstarter is a bubble. A temporal abnormality that will either burst or fade. Right now it is still a novelty but in a few months when the sensation of newness fades and the first mayor setbacks, like failed and disappointing projects, have occurred the readiness to trade money for glass baubles will fade.

    Even today you really need big names or tons of luck to get enough money together and this will not improve with the years.

    Just to point out that the same was said about Facebook. Mind you, it was also said about MySpace, which turned out to be largely correct. Plus the sorts of things as Prodigy and Compuserve competing with AOL. Or direct publishing for eBooks, which led to things such as the Kindle and Nook. Not all of them survived, and Kickstarter itself might not either. But I'm fairly sure that the concept of crowdfunding and even crowdsourcing is one that is only going to grow, not shrink.

    • Like 1

    Does a good ("epic") item have to be magical?

    in Pillars of Eternity: General Discussion (NO SPOILERS)

    Posted

    This is a good point, and something hard to balance from character to character. Granted, in pen and paper some hilarious events can occur from going through your backpack trying to improvise -

    Agreed here also. One of my favorite encounters personally was using a 10 lb. bag of flour as an improvised explosive device to deal with a moderate sized underground cavern filled with NASTY inhabitants - with appropriate character skills in the science involved, etc. Lemme tell you, it's the last time I got laughed at by my party members for carrying such "mundane" items around, or taking such "useless" skills ;)

    • Like 1

    Gameplay or Story?

    in Pillars of Eternity: General Discussion (NO SPOILERS)

    Posted

    I can understand your saying that you don't want to list both to force someone to choose. But I think that you need to change your terms used then, especially when referring to a game which has already been promoted as an in-depth story-based game heavy on dialogue interactions. The story IS a large part of the gameplay. I believe what you are meaning, however, is "mechanics" vs "story" - and in that case, I'd have to pick mechanics, because it takes good mechanics to tell a good story but a good story doesn't necessarily generate good mechanics. (Also note that I'm generalizing "mechanics" as well, and not just using it to refer to a combat/character generation system).

    Is $4M enough?

    in Pillars of Eternity: General Discussion (NO SPOILERS)

    Posted

    Not "imposes", if anything it "raises" the potential bar to ridiculous heights. Retail sales can't be considered potential Kickstarter dollars. There are people who would walk into a store, see KOTOR II on the shelf, see the LucasArts logo and go "Oh, this must be by the guys who made Force Unleashed. I liked that. I should get this." This person's dollars are not, and never will be, potential Kickstarter dollars. If you've ever worked in retail, you'd know that this kind of customer makes up a really big portion of retail sales.

     

    Look, consumer product sales may not be my area of focus, but I *am* an Economics major. There are, by necessity, far more dollars in the retail space than there are in the Kickstarter space. You're not going to see a Kickstarter reach $20 million+. You aren't going to see publishers disappear. Kickstarter only works at relatively smaller levels. The audience and inncentives are simply not there for $20 million+. It doesn't exist. It's not going to happen. There is a space between $4 million and $20 million and we don't know how much we can grow from here, but we simply are not going to make anywhere close to enough to make a Dragon Age or Mass Effect through Kickstarter. The concept that we will see a AAA budget come out of crowdfunding is simply ridiculous. It's not going to happen.

    I'm not arguing that retail sales are not going to be drastically larger than kickstarter funding. Quite the opposite in fact. However, that $20M is not discussing retail sales either - it is referencing the production BUDGET of those AAA titles. And that budget does include the traditional publishing costs, and the markup involved. Therefore, assuming that the same game can be made on a lower budget by removing a third-party publisher (which most every economic model would suggest is possible - cutting out "middle-men" almost always reduces costs and increases per-unit profits) then it follows that the kickstarter funded title could have just as large of a sales volume on a lower initial budget - aka more profit - or, at the least, an equivalent overall profit at a lower sales volume, for the same DEVELOPMENT budget costs.

     

    Now, modern definitions of AAA titles

    When someone in the video game industry uses "AAA", they are *always* referring to production budget. It never has anything to do with whether or not the game is good or bad. If someone in the industry says a game is "AAA", they are are saying it's a big game with a large budget, probably across multiple platforms and backed by a major publisher. I've seen fans and gamers use the "really good" definition, but I've always thought that's entirely a fabrication by people who just lacked reading comprehension.

    Actually - considering that those people in the "video game industry" include reviewers as well as publishers, developers, etc - they are most certainly not ALWAYS referring to the production budget. Or rather, it has not always been so. And it is this difference - that of what it "used to mean" and what it "means today" that I don't understand / disagree with. The whole origination of the term "AAA" was based on ratings - like letter grades in school - not anything to do with how much money went into a production. Yes, on average, those games with bigger budgets tended to get more sales and higher ratings - but it was not a direct result of the extra money, nor a defining aspect of the "category". Somehow, it has become so now, with the result that now cross-platform, extensive voice acting, orchestral scores, etc (things which cost more money) automatically "bump up" the category of a game - and even to the extent of causing a game to lose in the actual ratings if it does not have them, regardless of how well the game is created without those elements.

    No Bathos please

    in Pillars of Eternity: General Discussion (NO SPOILERS)

    Posted · Edited by RaccoonTOF

    Please remember that even though we all (hopefully - those that backed them on kickstarter at least) trust in them to create a good game, they have also said that they want our input, suggestions, and feedback as well. As put by Adam Brennecke in his interview with Marceror over at Sorcerer's Place:

    [Marceror] I imagine that when you put something out there for the fans to see, you get immediate reactions and feedback, and it helps you to go back and know better how to iterate on your ideas.

     

    [Adam]Definitely. Usually you don’t get a chance to communicate with your fans like this. They are the ones who are playing our games, and we like see their feedback early in the process.

    http://www.sorcerers...ead.php?t=58248

     

    So be sure to keep up the good discussions of what is wanted, just try to make sure it is civil and useful :)

    Where is everyone from

    in Pillars of Eternity: General Discussion (NO SPOILERS)

    Posted · Edited by RaccoonTOF

    Puerto Rico and the rest of the Caribbean islands are usually considered to be part of North America, even if they are not technically on the continental plate. The biggest "dividing line" conflict actually seems to be over Panama and whether the portion of the isthmus south of the canal (bordering Columbia) is part of North or South America (though geologically it would be somewhere in the middle of the swamps of the Darien Gap, neither at the Columbian border nor at the canal itself)

    Does a good ("epic") item have to be magical?

    in Pillars of Eternity: General Discussion (NO SPOILERS)

    Posted

    The trick with "special purpose" items is twofold: 1) making sure that the special purpose item is still reasonably useful in situations that are not in the niche role it is meant to fill, and 2) making sure there are enough examples of the niche role to make it worth even considering at all (and that the benefit it gives is a meaningful improvement when it does).

     

    As an example, the stated prevalence of the arcane veil leading to firearms being decidedly useful against a non-insignificant portion of potential enemies, while still presumably being at least moderately effective in mundane situations. This even has the added bonus of making said wizards using the veil also have to fall back on mundane defenses in addition to the veil as well...

    [Merged] Women, Feminism, etc. in PE

    in Pillars of Eternity: General Discussion (NO SPOILERS)

    Posted · Edited by RaccoonTOF

    You are doing a good thing, adding another layer to this discussion. Funny thing is, I think there are a lot of men out there who like romance and dresses as well. Both things could be included in PE as well and would enrich the game, I think - as long as they are equally important to men and women both. For example: Having to participate in a festivity and having to choose an outfit/parade uniform, seeing as though adventuring clothes do not really fit the high society (or nobility). Or romantic subplots (but this is being discussed already...).

     

    Actually (while I've not been following that thread for the past day or so) I think the MAJORITY of the people calling for reasonable romance options there were male - though admittedly I think some of them were for the "fanservice endings" a lot of them were not. That said, it's even more of a pitfall over there because it adds the element of "taking away from" existing/alternative content in dev time, rather than just taking the same development effort in a specific direction.

    • Like 1

    Does a good ("epic") item have to be magical?

    in Pillars of Eternity: General Discussion (NO SPOILERS)

    Posted

    Agreed on the special cases of null-magic areas or immunity to magical items - but those are just that, special cases. Rarely are special cases like that considered when a list of the "best" items in a game is determined. Just as in D&D I would much rather be wearing leather armor than full plate if I fell overboard, but basically anyone would agree that the full plate was the "better" armor.

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