Pshaw

Hit points aren't really a problem. As mentioned by other people they're supposed to represent your ability to take a hit that would have killed you and turn it into a minor wound. When you're out of HP you're simply out of energy required to do that so when you get hit again you finally don't get up your sword in time to deflect the enemies attack and get killed. For more realistic combat you can still keep hit points you just need to make them go away in 4-5 hits tops. In a RTWP type game I don't ever see this happening. You need to be allowed to take hits and react while controlling multiple party members. However in a turn based game you can get that more realistic combat feel. X-Com is a good example of this (at least for me) as death is normal thing you need to work around because you will lose party members. If you turn up the difficulty and get rid of the ability to save/reload you pretty much get the sort of game you're looking for. So essentially we need a game with x-com style combat AND a real story/world behind it. I mean you wouldn't even need to include permadeath if you wanted to have a strong supporting cast just keep the combat hard and once a character is out for a fight have them be rendered critical. Otherwise you will probably have icewind dale type characters and an adventure's hall sort of place to replace people as they die. If such a game were to exist I'd like them to kinda go the valkyria chronicles route for perma death where if you're down you're down for the fight. But if an enemy then reaches your body they will finish you. If an ally reaches your body they can stabilize you and call in a med evac. Heck you could get rid of the med evac and force you to stick around and guard fallen party members for a bit of additional strategy.

You're completely right about this. I hate it when I need to have a wall of save files from tons of different characters all on the same loading/save screen.

I'm sure I've made my love for Fallout completely clear in previous posts but I've always found it's SPECIAL system to work great. It doesn't simply become, 'well I'm a fighter so more strength!' You really feel your all of your low scores and you also really appreciate your high scores. You can increase them beyond character creation but only rarely. Which I prefer to having X amount of points to spend every level or 2. There is no rolling involved which is great since all characters start on equal footing and you don't need to waste 20min rerolling for high stats. My favorite aspect is that while your initial attribute scores have an effect on your secondary scores (perception for example increased all ranged combat, First Aid, Doctor, Lockpick, Traps and Pilot skills) beyond that you could still improve you character in whatever areas you wanted. You could still choose specializations in any secondary skills you desired as well regardless of where your characters starting attributes fell. Because of this you could play the scientist brawler or whatever strange combination suited you. Sadly the one thing the Fallout series has always been missing was a decent way to play through without combat. Since it seems that PE is providing support for those playstyles I think that it would be perfect for a SPECIAL type attribute system.

Well if you break the year up into quarters I'd probably consider Q2 the summer quater and April is the first month in Q2. That said when kickstarting I always pretty much thought, 'if they hit the targeted release window great but I don't really expect them to so no big deal if it comes later.' Maybe it's because I pretty much expected but if they do delay it a few months I'm totally alright with it. Heck, I'd rather it be delayed until December 2014 if that is what it takes to get us a high quality RPG. If they know for sure that PE would be releasing late 2014 I'd appreciate some offical word on it but really I think they've been doing a good job keeping us informed on the developement process so I don't mind if the release date is a bit in flux.

XCom: enemny unknown, FFT, Valkyria Chronicles ect: I know these are turn based games but try and make the combat in the game fun and interesting in and of itself so in 10 years this game will still be fun to play for more than it's story/characters. Adding depth the combat, high ground advantage, cover advantage, Rock>Paper>Scissors biases, and so forth lead to a more interesting and worthwhile combat experience. So often I find myself having a hard time going back to play old RPGs because the combat is just too clunky and boring and it detracts from the whole experience. Bioware games, ME, DA, BG: Let choices from this game carry over and effect potential sequels. Skyrim: The sense of exploration. I usually prefer ignoring quests and just delving into dungeons and caves to see what I can find. Cool place, powerful monsters and loot. These things drive me to explore every nook of the world.

Being instantly killed because you've wandered off the friendly portion of the map at level 2 and ran into something waaay too strong for you I'm ok with being 1 shot. Later you can come back and fight on equal terms with those badies. However things like disintegrate aren't really interesting or challenging for me, just frustrating. Knowing that a monster cast a spell at my party members and all I can do is count on a dice roll to save me is a bland experience. If you want insta-gib spells or attacks they should all be dodge-able by having a noticeable casting animation or signal where they will land so that they can be avoided. This would at least allow you a fair chance to avoid said spells and challenge you in combat to keep tight control over your party since you'd have to battle while keeping these sorts of things in mind.

I like the idea behind differing methods of recruitment. I say it's good place to add a bit of variety for flavors sake. It makes me think of Sulik from fallout 2, you could either buy him as a slave, get him given to you as a slave, or free him and have him join you willingly. Vic was much the same as you could either free him or buy him from slavers and there were 2 famers that would join and marry you (albeit a forced marriage at gunpoint orchestrated by an upset father) if you seduced them. I'd love to see a bit more variety for people joining your crew. There were also numerous characters who wouldn't join you if you were a child-killer. Personally I don't much like the idea of having to pay out a weekly or monthly contract to your companions but I can't deny that it would fit in very well with the adventure's hall. If there is perma-death the costs could go up based on how many other adventures have died with you in the past since traveling with you is clearly a serious risk. In the end I'm all for this. If you have a greedy mercenary type join you maybe they should get payed or get a percentage of the gold you find. If you have a brawler sort of follower join you for the glory of combat yet you sneak around and talk your way through things they should leave since the condition your recruited them under isn't being met. There is a lot of potential for adding flavor to your companions here and I'd love to see obsidian delve into it a bit.

I think it comes down to the sort of stretch goals you're talking about. If it was an issue of running out of time before launch I'd rather the game be delayed a bit longer or just have the content patched in at a later date. If it doesn't work for game balance then it should be cut but perhaps replaced with a bit of similar content. If that can't be done then yes by all means cut the stretch goal for the sake of the game. Mainly I think this is an issue of developers needing to promise stretch goals that make sense and are vague enough that they can be made tweaked enough to not upset game balance. The stronghold for example could take many forms. You only need to look at all the various stronghold suggestion threads on this forum to see that. If they were low on time or money they cold implement it simply. If the intended design was somehow damaging to the game they could simply change it to something else but still have it and fulfill their stretch goal. I don't think RTS kickstarters should be putting in specific units before the game is complete and balance testing can be done properly. Just like I'm not sure how I feel about the Hex MMO CCG kickstarter promising so many specific cards. They could find later in development that those cards are too strong or too weak and need to be tweaked. Especially in the latter case as those aren't even stretch goals but rather part of the pledge rewards. People may not care much about a card getting a buff but I imagine they'll be a bit miffed to see a card they were promised get nerfed. Instead things should be kept vague enough to be adjusted so as to not upset your fans. Because I don't think a little * disclaimer that things might be changed for balance reasons will appease everyone if you don't include something or completely change something you promised to include.

So long as the characters retain an identity of their own I'm all for it. I wouldn't want to talk a proud assassin out of a life of murder for hire just because I'm playing a 'good' character. If you had a remorseful assassin that was questioning in his path in life the whole time he's been with you maybe you should be able to influence them a bit. That or if a truly life altering event happens to a character in the game I can see you guiding them a little afterwards. One example of changing a character that I really dislike is the 'hardening' of Leliana in dragon age origins. She was a spy, assassin, thief, etcetera, for her former lover then after being betrayed, tossed in jail, escaping she finds religion and tries to reform herself. Yet through the course of the game you can quiet easily convince her to give up on all that just because you're her party leader. You'd think with her past she'd be a bit hesitant to fall into those old habits for somebody else. I'm not saying that this should be impossible (people in abusive relationships tend to keep going back to them after all) but given the length of time the game seemed to take place over the change was too sudden and easily accomplished and made her feel like she had no identity of her own. I wouldn't like to see anything like this happen again.

I'm for it but only in tasteful amounts as it adds a bit of depth to the world. A peppering of racist/sexist NPCs provide interest, realism, and contrast but take it too far and it detracts from the overall experience. The last thing I want is this sort of thing added for shock value or some awful attempt at being gritty/dark/mature.

You know there are a few things I like about dragon age but the combat is not one of them. Personally I found all the DPS to work just fine but the tanks had trouble keeping the attention of most enemies and the healer was always waaay too important. I'm not going to say that BG2 was perfect either. Although I played the game for years I find it hard to play now as the combat is simply too clunky for me to enjoy anymore. I really feel most comfortable in saying that the combat in both games was mediocre. Playable but not really enjoyable for it's own sake. If either game had some sort of endless attack with waves after waves of enemies just for the sake of killing them (no loot, no exp, no achievements) I wouldn't take part in it.

Out of the choices there I want BG. Planescape is the more interesting world by far but in this project I want the world to feel a bit more traditional. That said if fallout 2 was up there I'd pick that. Not that I'd want that sort of setting for this game, I'll get my helping of that when wasteland 2 launches, but I really enjoyed the feel of the world. I loved zig-zagging around the map trying to find hidden areas or special encounters. The whole world just had a bit of mystery to it that I wanted to uncover. I also enjoyed things being a bit more down trodden in the world at large. It made doing the heroic things a bit more special.

While it's really more of an action RPG, leaning more towards action, I really cannot recommend Bastion highly enough. It's a pretty short and sweet game where everything just fits. Music, art direction, story, world, variable difficulty, weapons suited to a variety of play styles, it all comes together in one great little package.

I would like to see a new game plus mode where you can play with your level capped characters through a whole game of monsters scaled to fight level capped players. Along with that toss in a few new areas that can only be accessed in this mode with a few uber boss types that yield the most powerful items in the game. Granted I'm a bit of a whore for replay value though and this is the sort of thing I'd like to see as much for that reason as much as for the challenge of bonus bosses. Generally speaking I think non-essential bosses should be harder than usual, be off the beaten path and yield better than average loot.

I would like class based speech options as well just not as you described where the class should determine what sort of dialogue skills you can level up. For example if you're a druid with low speech I think your class knowledge that makes you a druid should allow for some unique dialogue options/persuades. The same thing can be applied to character race. Perhaps an elf beggar would normally charge for info but if another elf spoke to them they'd have an option to play on their shared heritage and get the information for free. What I do not want to see however is 3-4 dialogue related skills. I much prefer fallout's method of just having speech which applies to everything rather than dividing it up into a ton of subcategories.

Gotta head off to work so sorry in advance if the thread turns on to other topics later on but I don't have time to skim :-p To the OP however I'd say that it's honestly just far too many skills governing 1 action. I mean it would be like breaking down speech craft into, pitch, empathy, lying, presentation and topical knowledge. The whole idea is that speech craft encompasses all of those things making you good at getting what you want through dialogue. A lock picking skill takes all of those smaller parts into account in and of itself. If you go down that road where lock picking has 4-5 sub-skills do you then do that for everything? I'm all for a minigame of some sort, I did enjoy lock picking in thief the dark project. Still I'd want a minigame to be optional because I'm not sure how well it would fit into a game like this and I'm sure not everybody enjoys them. Basically have it so if you meet the minimum skill requirements to pick the locked object it starts up a minigame and you open it once completed. Otherwise toggle minigame off in the options menu and just roll to see if you pick the lock.

I've gotta second TheTeaMustFlow here. As much as I love a strengthening of bonds I'd love to see mechanics where maybe how often you let a player get severely injured or die effected their attitude to you and the mission. I feel that often games tend to focus solely on the dialogue trees as the end all be all of inter-character relationship building. If you promise to somebody in a conversation that you'll keep them safe yet constantly let them die in missions I feel like that should effect their opinion of you. Maybe characters could even confront you about often you let them take the bulk of the beating. Maybe some characters could me more sensitive to this than others, melee characters for example should probably less sensitive. I mean there should be a flip side to this where if you get them out of more scrapes in fine condition they should gain confidence in your abilities as a leader. It also wouldn't need to be direct combat related alone. Perhaps bolder characters would frown on too much sneaking around and characters with a bit of battle lust would frown on negotiating your way out of conflicts. Granted the latter falls under dialogue related morale issues and would probably be in the game regardless. I think it would be very interesting to see some sort of morale mechanic placed in game that took combat and game play choices into account in addition to whatever dialogue options you're picking.

The story hook is important to my interest in the main story. Still a game doesn't strictly need that to be entertaining. I'd rather the hook that keeps me playing be that the game play is just fun. There are plenty of games with bad stories and fun game play that I'll replay and many games with great stories that I just can't get through again because the game play is too dull.

As many have said I feel that with the GoG versions of the game out there then there is really no need to worry about playing a steam version without running it through steam. To do so would essentially give you the GoG version. I also think that maybe they'd like to have their steam version linked to steam to help give them a bit more feed back about how often people are playing and for how long as well as the free advertising when your friends list sees you playing it constantly. I know when it comes to cool indie games like Bastion, FTL and Mark of the Ninja I like to play them on steam so my friends can get curious about the games and maybe pick them up themselves.

I agree with the OP in that the first thing is an interesting world. I won't care how much left I haven't experienced in my first play through if the game world and systems aren't worth another play through. Luckily I think Obsidian will be able to deliver this in spades so I'm not too worried on that account. After that the main thing needed to encourage re-playability (for me) is having many things that are mutually exclusive. Classes and NPCs are a good example of this. You obviously can't play every class in 1 playthrough and with the limitation on party size it will take at least 2 playthroughs to play with all the various party members. Still I think that these are less important to having mutually exclusive objectives/content in the game world itself. Simple because you can experience other classes through control of your party members and sometimes you simply might not want to play with every single party member because you might dislike them. I simply hope that you run into many decision points where picking 1 thing excludes you from something else entirely. Preferably with consequences that are not immediately know/felt. If, for example, I join a thieves syndicate I wouldn't expect to continue getting quests to kill my fellow members from bounty boards or town guards. I also shouldn't be able to pull an elder scrolls and somehow become the leader of every major organization in the realm yet somehow remain completely burden free to go of questing where the wind takes me. In my opinion its these sort of in game choices that have me coming back to games over and over again. Also this game will have the re-playability of different play styles with the emphasis they've placed on combat or dialogue or stealth giving different ways to complete the same objectives. If you add that to having plenty of mutually exclusive content you get even more re-playability since you might want to try out a diplomatic noble warrior and later experience those same areas only this time with a kill everything sort of character. The only downside of that style of content is that if people don't replay the game it leaves lots of content unexplored by the 1 time players so all the time and money spent to make the content they never even saw is a bit wasted. So I can see the point in not taking this sort of path with the game as well.

Morte: Every party needs a joker and he's probably the best playable joker around Annah-of-the-shadows: You also always need 1 fiesty or spunky character and she's always been one of my favorites. Garrus Vakarian: He's one of the better comrade in arms characters but he's also got that gallows humor which makes him my favorite loyal comrade characters. Goris: I like to have beast/robot/animal companions and Goris is one of my favorites. He's a completely physical character combat wise but he's also a dedicated scholar and I always enjoy that sort of mash-up. Legion: I found him to be incredibly interesting because he thought process and how he experienced reality was so completely foreign and that it always bothered me how little time he got to spend in the party. I'd take him in my top 5 just to be able to hear more about the geth and his banter. If Legion got more screen time in mass effect I'd rather take Delita Heiral from FFT.

Really I'd much rather go with a little from both rather than all one or the other. That said for a long while in dragon age 2 I had some mace or another and I kept stabbing people with it like it was a sword. I'd much rather have attack animations that make sense over flashy death animations. Especially since I need to generally see the attack animations more often and they're far more prone to going stale.

Perks akin to those in Fallout. Meaning plenty of bonuses to skills but also fun quirky ones.

Lol denial. You were supporting bioware romances(and their crappy writing in general) like crazy a few threads back. You were acting as much as a fangirl as any of the people ridiculed in the link. The problem you don't understand is that romance on its own isn't the problem(aside from a writers ability to write this kind of relationship well), turning it into a choose your own sex fantasy adventure minigame(which is what you people want) is. I have no problem with many of the bioware romances I'll gladly admit to that. Only a handful really stand out in my mind as awful and the majority of them are in DA2 which was low quality through and through. However my liking of some of those romances that I believe are done well doesn't mean I've ever gone to any forum clamoring for fan-fiction or any thing else. I've said in previous threads that things like sex scenes are tacky and shouldn't be included along with the fact that I was fine with the more subtlety implied romances seen in PS: T. So to assume I (and all other pro-romancers since you're lumping all of us together) want a "choose your own sex fantasy adventure" is just an assumption on your part and is quite simply wrong. You can paint us with a broad brush if you like, that's your choice, just understand that you'll always come off as ignorant as anybody who claims something along the lines of, "all people who play rpgs are virgins with no lives that live in their parents basements."

As opposed to the wealth of open-mindedness we get from you guys... ONCE AGAIN. http://www.something...cial-forums.php Rejecting bad ideas is not the same thing as being closed-minded. All ideas are not good ideas. Implying that all pro-romancers are like that or that all romance in games lead to things like that is foolish. It makes about as much sense as point out the Sandy Hook shooter played mass effect so clearly playing ME (or maybe the romance in ME?!) makes you want to shoot children.