Dayen

My response on what game categories I like only accounts for games released to date, which I think is unfair to the genre of tabletop simulation. If there were a good platform that didn't cost $400 like Fantasy Grounds, I'd find the genre far more interesting. If you're considering this as an avenue for low-overhead production, I'd encourage it. Especially if you duplicate the lightweight mechanics you use for your games. Also: I don't pre-order (although I will support a handful of companies whose work I find pleasing via crowdfunding, including Obsidian, because being a patron is different than being a mark). I don't buy season passes. I rarely buy DLC (notable exception: Paradox Games' grand strategy games tend to get my money for DLC; obviously GOTYs excluded). I'm not interested in post-market capitalization schemes. I generally finish a game (or not) and then I'm done with it, so DLC holds no value to me unless it's an old school expansion to a game with a bunch of new content to promote a new story line. Which comes with the caveat that the first story line had to be worth playing through (example: Dishonored had an excellent story line; Dishonored 2 was incredibly boring by comparison). An important point: if a game looks like it's being parceled out through DLC, I will not purchase it. It has to be a complete game when it ships, which is a significant factor in why I do not pre-order.

Oh my. Obsidian said the profits from the game will go towards funding the expansion. That means they'll have about 2 times as much money for the expansion as they did for the main game. Needless to say, I'm very eager to see the end result. Hopefully it begins with hiring Nick Offerman to do the narration.

That's astonishingly good for a game "with no market" in the first couple of weeks.

Are you using a party? If so, you failed to read the thread. A party on hard and under is able to steamroll with a minimum of forethought. It depends. Some fights -- particularly fights where it's impossible for the tank to maintain aggro either because the opponents are too large or they're ghosts -- are very hard no matter what the setting is. Plus you need to really, truly understand the interrupt mechanics to successfully fight mages on the harder settings. (Or, you know, geek the mage.)

Been reading (and totally enjoying) Ann Aguirre's Sirantha Jax series between boring work-related non-fiction.

You've misinterpreted their purpose. It's actually about time management for Putin. He just can't possibly service all of those men (and save the world)!

As far as what Russia is and isn't doing, we've got questions to be sure. Are they at the same point with Ukraine as they were with Georgia ca. 2009? Signs point to yes. But are we, as the US and EU, at the same point with Ukraine as we were with Georgia ca. 2009? Signs point to no. Is Russia's economy in an irrecoverable tailspin? My assessment is yes, although Putin has several tools at his disposal to ameliorate the situation that most democratically-elected leaders do not. Which raises the question: whose companies will be repatriated next? I'm sure the Oligarchs are asking themselves the same question. (Side note: Browder's book, Red Notice, is a fantastic read if you're interested in how "commerce" is conducted in Russia.) Russian economic collapse is a foregone conclusion at this point. Putin cut is his own salary, which is a clever way to signal to his theoretical German allies that they can stop. But it doesn't appear Merkel was paying attention.

I never really got involved in the debate either way, but the most surprising result -- for me -- has been the noted improvement in disclosure of conflicts of interest in games journalism.

You can upgrade your favored items pretty much until the current campaign is at an end. In some ways, that means everything is viable. In reality it means you have to make significant decisions about what you're going to invest in. There are at least a half dozen "unique" weapons and armor that you can find that would be beyond expensive to duplicate in the crafting and enchanting engines.

Running windowed 1920x1080 and the screen blacked out departing the broken tower. I could ESC to get to the menu -- sort of -- to quit out normally, and the pointer occasionally showed up, but the screen was black. Hardware: SLi 2x GTX 560 Ti with 340.43 drivers installed. SLi disabled for the duration of Beta operation.

LotR is a "polite society compatible" re-telling of the original Germanic fairy tales, myths, and legends. If you had raised, perhaps, Beowulf or the Poetic and Prose Edda, or the Icelandic Sagas, or Kalevala as mature, you'd have won immediate agreement from anyone knowledgeable about them. Beowulf isn't immature because it focuses on ultra-violent handling of a problem. It's an allegory that discusses both that which is necessary and that which is not and attempts to delineate the two through a parable about a monster who eats babies. It even discusses the consequences of improper handling of a problem. The Poetic and Prose Edda are harder to break down, but the maturity of the goals of the Norse gods as encapsulated in that source material is clear. The overriding goal is to prevent the end of the world, except you can't prevent the end of the world, so the real goal is preventing the world from restarting. Certainly, to a modern aesthetic this stretches credulity, but there's an obvious accession to the hierarchy of need there. Does the world need to continue? No, not if we can ensure the coming of a new world.

While I won't argue the fact that Obs has console fans, as they most certainly do, don't lose sight of the fact the OP asked what stretch goals would make you pledge more cash. While I have nothing against consoles, ports to other platforms would not be something that would tease more money out of me. This is what many of us are saying. Not that there shouldn't be console versions at all: just that we wouldn't pledge more money to make them a reality. The entire reason I pledged more to Mighty No. 9 is so it could hit the console stretch goals. Really, are we going to be so petty as to be "why should THEY play my game?". One person posts that they'd pay for more platforms, and everyone jumps on them for it? The original pitch was strictly for a PC game so, yes, it kind of is a big deal. I own consoles and play games on them, but this is not the sort of game I'd want to play on a console.

You just answered your own question with this anecdote.

I don't mind random loot. I derive a lot of chuckles out of Skyrim's wacky drops. Those rare moments where you get something you'd actually want to use are made far more special by the intervening nonsense. With that said, D&D works poorly when all loot is pulled from a table via random generation. Ideally, the system would be able to recognize that a particular character is undergeared and place loot that provides a direct and immediate benefit to the entire party by redressing a weakness of one party member. But that's a lot of work for the development team, so uhh...something to keep in mind for the sequel, Obsidian?

This is kind of what I meant by "patently ridiculous" I'm not sure that's fair. It's completely possible to play an Exalted game that tackles mature themes and realism (I am currently doing so), but it really wouldn't be recognizable as what was intended by the original and subsequent authorial teams. Exalted as a product line has a long and glorious history of having the worst human beings as its developers, though, so this sort of high-brow, adult gaming is pretty strongly discouraged because they'd quickly be out of their depth in discussions about whether or not The Scarlet Empress is an anti-villain who failed or an anti-hero who succeeded. They actually wrote a book specifically about this and managed to focus heavily on the inevitable rape of said character, which is a mind-boggling accomplishment. What made it super-awesome-betterer was that they found five separate ways to justify the rape including "she asked for it." Good times.

What are we suppose to take away from that conversation? One is just going "hurhur boobies" The other was so mad about the controversial sex, ignoring the fact other people make comics AND games with murder, mutilation, flailing, hanging, torture, decapitation and cannibalism. While I'm really really not one to argue for trivializing rape, I think these guys were pretty narrow-minded. (Also, Exalted's patently ridiculous, as is mostly anything oWoD, but since the reboot rolled out, I've never met with ZOMG RAEP in any White Wolf supplement ever, so... timing's a bit off, maybe?) Exalted is pretty terrible about being a mature game line. There's some sort of misguided belief that people are in to role-playing sexual intercourse, particularly of the violent kind with people you hate. So there are Charms that deal specifically with it, particularly for the "evil" splats. The game itself, stripped of its (incredible) baggage, isn't bad, but you need to be playing with a group that is going to handle "mature" content by being mature about it. It's also pretty terrible for realism, since the entire point of the game is to set unrealistic goals and inevitably achieve them. Sort of the monomyth on steroids. With a literal visitation from the goddess being the impetus of your character's awesome.

People who do marketing care. It may seem like it doesn't matter, but it generates brand confusion. You all want Obsidian to make a lot of money. PE is a fine abbreviation.

Realism is more about the scope of the character's goals and their ability to accomplish said goals than it is about tackling mature subject matter. Bastion is an amazing game not because the subject matter is terribly mature (although in a meta-context it is), but because the protagonist has one very simple goal, is surrounded by other actors with competing goals, and has just enough ability to succeed in meeting his goals. With that, I will avoid spoilers and just say that you ought to play the game if you're looking for something fresh. Realism as a literary technique has made a comeback, particularly within paranormal and fantasy fiction, within the last ten years. It's still bumping around second fiddle to the Accumulated Chronicles of The Monomyth Man, but there's a lot of really good fiction about men and women of slightly-better-than-normal capability caught up in the tide of events and just managing not to drown: Scott Lynch's Gentleman Bastards, Patrick Rothfuss' Kingkiller Chronicle, Jim Butcher's Dresden Files, and so forth. All feature protagonists whose primary virtue is not giving up. They may be more exceptional than their peers in wit and polish, but that just makes them more interesting characters to read. They all set realistic goals at the outset of their stories and sometimes they fall short and that is not the end of the story. I don't want this to become a discussion about save scumming, but I think Obsidian would be making a statement if somehow the characters could fail and end up better off than they would had they succeeded at some point in the story and make that failure optional. That's new and interesting, it provides incentive to players to simply let the game progress as it may. Dead companions make the story that much more poignant, particularly if the protagonist is clearly not the better man in the comparison. If part of telling this kind of story is naked people, I'm okay with that.

I am K negative as well.

We can, it's simply a conversation that has already occurred. Often enough that people are now being short about it. Perhaps Obsidian will port the game over to consoles when Unity's framework for the new ones is robust enough to support it, but the Infinity Engine-style games never really turned out well on consoles in the past. Managing multiple characters in real-time, even RTWP, requires AI scripting robust enough that you can leave the character alone and know it isn't, for example, going to cast cure critical wounds on someone who is down 2 hit points. I own a console and I'm perfectly satisfied with it for the purpose of playing games that benefit from a controller scheme, but Pillars of Eternity isn't going to be one of those games any time soon. In short, I wouldn't hold my breath.

Well thanks for the detailed descriptions, although I never claimed to be an expert on swordplay, and neither should you , since your claims run counter to what people that actually work with these swords think (see 2nd link in my previous post for details). But you are missing my general point, which is not to make the combat super duper complex to make it uber realistic, but to simply adopt a fun historical alternative to the Conan type cliche of 2-handers we have now in every game. You missed my point. These "people" who "work with these swords" apparently have no clue what they're talking about. That entire video was a basic overhand chop to rising slash movement, which is more often associated with Kendo than western swordplay (western swords rely on the weight of the blade because the edge isn't terribly fine and thus are often slashed downwards). There are entire manuals that demonstrate the "waves on rocks" methods utilized in conjunction with the claymore. They also explain the presence of the leather foreguard and why the blade wasn't sharpened all the way to the crossguard. These were huge weapons and getting the best leverage for a quick strike often entailed "choking up." So like I said: I'd prefer a game that is playable over one that is "verisimilitudinistic," particularly when that verisimilitude is wrong.

In D&D the most popular type of sword, period, is the bastard sword. The bastard sword is, like the longsword, actually an arming sword, notably discernable by the relative proportion of the blade's length to the hilt's length, the complete edge on both sides to the crossguard, and, well, the crossguard. They came in a wide variety of lengths and were generally intended to be used one-handed by a mounted knight. The longsword, categorically, is actually a weapon developed in the late Middle Ages that is commonly conflated with the claymore because, unsurprisingly, claymores are a type of longsword. They are unwieldy on horseback (hence the rise of the backsword for cavalry use in about the same time frame, featuring a single sharpened edge and a thrusting tip) and clearly intended to serve as an infantry weapon, often requiring two hands to wield properly due to their length (between 3 1/3 and 4 feet from crossguard to tip of the blade). They could be and often were worn in a harness across the back that in itself constitutes a pretty clever piece of engineering involving really fancy stuff like ties and snaps to keep the sword in place when it was not being used to cave in heads and still be relatively easy to pull free over the shoulder. This is of course assisted by the fact that by medieval warfare standards 98% of people are weak. Longbowmen, heavy infantrymen (men-at-arms), and especially knights were men (and occasionally women) who were physically at a level of capability we like to pretend is really comparable to Olympic athletes. I guess my point is this: you may think you're an expert on swordplay. Inevitably, there is going to be someone who knows more than you do. I'd much prefer a playable game than one is verisimilitudinistic and thus completely inaccessible to a person of average knowledge when it comes to the intricacies of medieval warfare. If you're simply interested in learning more, Wikipedia cites several very reliable sources in their articles on swords.

I have few real preferences on the Stronghold, but an idea that intrigues me is that it also becomes the second major city over the course of the game.