Dwarfare

Humorous references are fine with me, so long as they are actually funny, none too overt and not destroying immersion. Icewind Dale II did a terrific job of this in the palisade camp of the prologue, referencing most of their other games (The poor fool they sent in after the wolf in the scrimshander's shop, the barn full of rats, trying to steal the illusion's equipment and being very disappointed when it vanishes) and tropes of the fantasy genre at the time (The thought of the random dead cat that you carry around for days solely because you think that a dead cat's corpse might be the key to some mystery because it exists will always have me grinning). Some good referential humor could be a tremendous (okay, maybe not tremendous) boon to the game, but I think only so long as they keep it within the genre and not referencing stupid dances or the death star, the latter of which I highly doubt will occur.

I'm cool with the idea of resting and the healing of wounds in that manner. I mean, I certainly wouldn't want to play a game with a realistic approach. Adventurer 1 steps forward, ready to begin his epic journey! Suddenly, a goblin rises from the bushes, firing a crude stone-pointed arrow. It takes him in the knee. Adventurer 1 lays there screaming until someone comes to help him. He is taken to someone who practices healing... And you spend the next 2 years game time recovering and learning how to walk properly, with a 40% movement penalty for the rest of the game due to your poorly treated wound. In fact, adventuring is right out. It's now Project Eternity: Legend of the Depressed 7th Best Baker in the Village. Or go the other way, the way D&D is sometimes. Oh gods, an assassin has murdered the king! Woe is us, the kingdom shall collapse! Oh, wait, raise dead scroll over in the corner here. Bam, King's back. Fixed. Father on his death bed, wasting away, passing on the dreaded family secret through his death rattle... And then a paladin steps in, pokes him on the shoulder, Lay on Hands, cure disease and BAM! He's fine! Woo! Traitorous spy put a dagger in your back, twisting it and leaving you fatally wounde-Cure critical wounds potion, you're good as new! Time to deal with that treacherous douchebag. Basically just removed consequences almost entirely. Nope, low-moderate healing is where it's at, baby!

Start will a set pool of points and then get points slowly, much like NWN. Keep the points in low numbers so that they still mean something. In NWN, there was a pretty clear difference if you had 14 dex vs 18 dex. In WoW, the numbers got so ridiculous that you can't even really tell anymore the difference in gameplay between having 53645 strength and 53686 strength. Lower = Easier to calculate and more impact per increase.

What happened to that right hand, Sawyer? Injure it in the gratuitous high-fiving post-Kickstarter? xD

There's a fine line that one must strike, I believe. Purely medieval type armors, purely practical, while I find them interesting, I also find them incredibly bland and boring to look at for the most part. As far as weapons and the like, they're all too often quite plain as well, with little enough to differentiate between them, and are often not used in the way one would imagine, or hold up nearly as well in actual combat. While we're at it, the sound effects for combat might as well be the obsidian team throwing a bunch of pots and pans in a washer/dryer and hitting "record". The other end of the spectrum is no better. No, I don't want my character to look like he's wearing a neon plastic castle. I don't want his greatest enemy to be doorways that fail to accommodate for the fellows who like to have 5 foot spikes jutting out in all directions from their armor. I don't want to be swinging Big Ben at somebody, for that matter, either. The realm of the absurd is not something that meshes well with immersion, in my mind. I think most of the artists that got their conceptual work in the D&D books and whatnot have typically done rather well at this (not always), striking the right balance between practicality, realism and the fantastical. That is, they didn't bother adhering to strongly to any one of those three principles. They provide a little something more than what one would normally see in the real world without taking it so far that it loses all connection to what one would associate with reality. I found that level of variance from the norm to be vastly superior to what, say, WoW does, or Dragon Age 2. Being the kind of game it is, with the people that are working on it, I'm quite confident they'll strike the balance just about right.

Quality over quantity! But if you can have both quality and quantity, then that's a very nice boon to the game's replayability!

How about... Fallscape: Stick Temple of Alpha Star Dale Nights... Vegas. Yes. Yes, I think this will be the new title.

Yeah, that's the good bit about some RPGs that go deeper into the character customization, like NWN 1 & 2, and the old isometric RPGs to a lesser extent. Having ten or fifteen character voice options per gender keeps them from sounding the same unless you specifically choose they should, as well as providing a nice range that can help passively add personality to a character rather than actively (in other words, just having some sort of battlecry, call for healing, aid, voiced combat commands, damage indicators, but not having him speak actual dialogue in the game). BG & NWN franchises handled it fairly well, I think. Still, there's the incessant problems of cost and preference. Always, always...

I would certainly like some voiced combat bits, which is like BG, and a largely voiced antagonist. For example, David Warner's portrayal of Jon Irenicus really made that character for me. If his lines had only been text, I doubt that I myself could've imagined anything quite as perfect as he made it, nor would I have enjoyed the rest of his non-voiced dialogue nearly as much as I did without Warner's interpretation to serve as a template for it. Having some bit of (good) voice acting for all major characters who are to have a fair amount of dialogue would be incredibly helpful, in my opinion, towards giving the player a better feel for the tone of the character (tone in this sense being both how he sounds and what kind of person he is). You can read something and take it a hundred different ways, in a hundred different styles, but when you hear it, it's quite a bit more visceral, gets me in touch with who this character is and what he is like much better than text alone. That isn't, of course, to say I'm in favor of voicing all lines. A little something at the beginning to give you a better feel for the character, tidbits interspersed here and there at important points, where voice acting would really have the most effect (Jahiera's lines spring to mind, when she finds a certain something has happened in Irenicus' dungeon. Sorry, Jahiera. No smoke. No mirrors). That would, in my opinion, be quite perfect, and avoid devouring the budget while getting the most out of the characters. Although, all things considered, I suppose I could also say that the phrase "Do it like Baldur's Gate" can never really go far wrong in my book.

I searched but came up with as little as I went in with, so I guess I'll post. I was wondering, will there be much voice acting in the game (If you feel that it's a bad thing, all I feel I need to say is "You dare to attack me here? You will suffer! You will ALL suffer!")? Will it be prevalent throughout, or more like Baldur's Gate and whatnot, with certain parts by NPCs spoken during cutscenes, flavor chat as you walk about the cities? What about vocal banter between your companions? What about the PC? A few custom voice sets to choose from for all the little in between bits (combat, commenting on the weather and that woman in the red dress) in order to stylize him/her a little bit more towards your ideal? I'm assuming non-spoken text from your dialogue selections, though I could be wrong, there. Or is this all far too early to tell?