Malekith

I never refused your second sentence. If i did i would have lost hope in this project the moment the "elf" word was first mentioned. But i disagree with your first sentense. There is a middle ground between full D&D copypasta and completely Alien with insect people, sentient trees, and marble skined giants living inside floating cities. Eora has humans, elves and dwarves. That's enough familiarity. By your own logic, if we add orcs and gnomes as well because why not, won't aumaua and orlan seem out of place in a world straight from Lord of the Rings?

Bingo. They are unlike anything orcish, nor are they based in an Earth culture. And that is my point. If the only way to make orcs interesting is to change them so radicaly that beyond their anatomy nothing else is recognisable, why name them orcs in the first place.? Aumaua are very close to orcs in appearence (swap blue for green), with a completely different and interesting culture (i hope) Yet some people still want orcs, because apparently aumaua don't tick their "orc" button. Let's say PoE adds orcs. They even come with a Persian theme as Sarog wants. But they aren't well muscled, nor are they have a warrior culture. Instead they are artists, poets, philoshophers, mathematicians, artificers. They are the most mild tempered of all the races. Their main nation is an economic powerhouse, and it controls trade and banking across Eora. Foreign orcs often being teachers, advisors to kings and holding key positions to the governing stracture of various Nations. They have the most advanced ship constraction of all nations, but they disdain exploring themselves. Nevertheless, the age af exploration came because of their inventions. Would you like them Sarog, or not orcs enough for you?

This is equally true - I would argue more true - of elves and dwarves. But Obsidian is including those, and we trust them to do a good job. There rest of your post doesn't make sense to me. You seem to praise Obsidian for doing new, creative things with the races they've chosen to include, but assume that if Obsidian were to include orcs they would not be able to do similar creative things. There's nothing inherent to orcs and goblins that would suddenly make Obsidian incapable of creativity. You're arguing from a double standard. I've never seen anyone do anything interesting with Orcs or Goblins(the ONLY exception for Goblins is, funny as it sounds, Harry Potter) , but I HAVE seen them do interesting things with elves and dwarves, repeatedly. The Witcher is a good example. The fact that it pulls from a deep cultural wealth of Polish/Baltic mythology that is LOADED with elves and dwarves is what gives it substance, whereas Orcs and Goblins as we think of them effectively date from, as others have said, Tolkien's works. The PoE world is being built in a renaissance period. The powerhouses of the time in reality were states like the Dutch Republic, The Hanseatic League, the Italian states, France and the wealthier parts of the H.R.E. The nomadic steppe peoples had been pushed out of the Russias and their time was O-V-E-R. The arab world was FAR past it's prime(it's widely held to have peaked around 1100-1300. This isn't to say that everything in the PoE world must derive from the Earth at that time, but rather that it's not the eternal middle ages seen in pretty much every other fantasy setting. If you cast Orcs as any of those types of civilizations, they'll just be what they always are: low-tech, low-rent tribal militarists with some goofy priest-driven theocratic structure bolted to their seat of gov't. Want to cast them as the monolithic empire with a higher level of development but retaining the same silly themes? Maybe ripping off the Ottomans/Fatimid Egypt and some far eastern culture? Congratulations, you just made the Qunari! Tolkien's Orcs are no better than demons. They're animals. They're inspired by a version of the nomadic steppe peoples that never existed except in the imaginations of historical revisionists of the romantic period who saw those events not as the mass, gradual migrations that they were but rather wholesale demonic invasions by monster people. They are not fertile material for creating an interesting, intelligent, high-performing, thought-provoking race of people. They're always going to be a fantasy re-fit of the Arab, the Hun, the Mongol, the Turk, or the Oriental. Make me a well-written nation of Orcs based on 1600's Holland/Venice and I'll accept that they might be useful for something other than providing guilt-free cannon fodder and a vehicle for bad writing. 2 words - colonization era The clash of cultures on various technological development level.. anyone remembers the story of Spanish meeting Aztecs? or how Australia got colonized? What about far east cultures of that time? Orcs can be your Aztec culture for example or others. It's perfectly viable for fantasy setting that you can have various development of tech among cultures, because "magic" and "active deities", hence you can get even nomadic tribes or even literally cavemen... It is a colonization and exploration era in Eora, right? And the setting is still wide open for tweaks and additions, right? So we have yet another reprecentation of the orcs as bloodthirsty, low tech at odds with the humans. No thanks. I would love an Aztec inspired civilization, but no orcs. There is nothing inherently interesting with orcs,elves,dwarves. Every interesting thing you can do with them, you could do just as well( in fact better since there would be no expectations) with another, original race.

This is equally true - I would argue more true - of elves and dwarves. But Obsidian is including those, and we trust them to do a good job. There rest of your post doesn't make sense to me. You seem to praise Obsidian for doing new, creative things with the races they've chosen to include, but assume that if Obsidian were to include orcs they would not be able to do similar creative things. There's nothing inherent to orcs and goblins that would suddenly make Obsidian incapable of creativity. You're arguing from a double standard. I've never seen anyone do anything interesting with Orcs or Goblins(the ONLY exception for Goblins is, funny as it sounds, Harry Potter) , but I HAVE seen them do interesting things with elves and dwarves, repeatedly. The Witcher is a good example. Sorry but no. Elves and dwarvs sucked in Witcher as well. It doesn't matter if the elves are an ancient civilazation in the magical woods who hold humans in contempt, or an ancient civilazation oppressed by the racist humans, they are still a separate race, that lives propably longer and hasn't good relations with humans. And Witcher dwarfs are as by the book as it comes. To have them be bankers and merchants in addition to miners isn't revolutionary. As for the orc arguement, i have seen them be used in a very good way, in the aforementioned Malazan series. But apart from the physical description (green skin, tusked, slightly bigger than humans), they have absolutely nothing in common with any orc depicted elsewhere, nor are they named orcs.

Yeah. Or if those don't work, here are some more. It is absurd how easy it is to think of new ideas for orcs which would be groundbreaking for the genre. Persian-inspired orcs, who build great cities and temples. With a despotic government and rigidly formal court culture with lots of prostrations. With a monotheistic religion and a powerful, organised priesthood. Never been done before. Carthaginian-inspired orcs, with an aggressive trading culture. Government is a mix of theocraty and plutocracy, with a powerful priesthood being forced to delegate authority to powerful trading families who are a mix between tribal chieftain and trade baron. Never been done before. Arab-inspired orcs, with a Caliphate-like state that is part monarchy, part theocracy. Militaristic, but with great intellectual and artistic achievements. Perhaps with a Ptolemaic influence where the ruler tries to convince his/her subjects of his/her divinity with extensive public works projects. Internal tension and conflict between the more traditionalist tribes and the centralized state that has to negotiate with them to get warm bodies in its armies and keep the roads clear. Never been done before. This isn't even hard. Pick a historical civilization that isn't already spoken for in the franchise, add orcs, and boom you've got something no one has done before, that you can take in all sorts of interesting directions. You keep the core of what makes orcs essentially orcs - being big and muscular and having a certain militarism - but overhaul the rest in a way no one has done before. Plus, with Eternity taking this culture-is-bigger-than-race approach, we could see how orcs would live alongside other races in these societies. Arcanum showed us a vision of what orcs would look like as a downtrodden working class. What would they look like as the dominant race in a civilization instead? We're used to seeing orcs as brutish, genocidal conquerors. What would they look like as more benign rulers? There is a stupid amount of potential, the surface of which hasn't even been scratched while franchise after franchise gives us every imaginable flavour of elves. Yeah it is still early days for this setting. I'm sure that we'll eventually seem the roster of playable *cultures* padded out a bit for future Eternity games, and this could certainly include new races. It isn't criticism to toss around some ideas of what those future franchise developments might be. Good ideas. Now tell me. If you remove orcs from the equation, and have another, completely new race, preferably not even humanoid in nature, but still go with your ideas. Is there something of value that would have been lost by the replacement?

Fixed. Erikson rules, but he needs a tighter editor.

Take away these parts and replace them with somehting else obviously, not just remove them. And i would love a game without humans as well. I love fantasy, just the traditional parts of it are way overused and never were interesting in the first place. Even fantasy literature has moved away from that crap, but video games are still trying to copy Tolkien/D&D. As for why backed this project, because BG2/PS:T are my favorite games to date, and i trust Obsidian to deliver more than i trust inXile. Plus Ziets described PoE setting as closer to Malazan than Tolkien, so that's a plus. That doesn't mean that there aren't things in the project that i wouldn't prefer being done a different way.

November 17

Agree. How so? Unless you consider 2D instead of 3D and the Scripted Interactions instead of cutsceens to be regressions as well, i fail to see the logic. It would look way better, without needing much resources. But the option to keep it as it is should be easy to have. Just have the option to look at our model as it appears in the gameworld(tiny, from a far out, isometric viewpoint), and allow the current view to everyone that want it.

I also find the low-res model jarring because everything else looks so wonderful. I would've preferred a drawn paperdoll with worn items represented as boxes containing the inventory icons. Agree. That would look better, and would fit better with the rest of the game. Also a solution would be to have your toon image on character creation and inventory be as small as in the gameworld,and viewed from the same angle, like in IWD2 the inventory paperdoll was. The way it is now it just draws attention to it and stands out as bad because the rest of the game is beautiful

^ This. That PoE has elves,dwarves,D&D classes and Forgotten Realms-like setting are the worst parts of the Project already. Adding the rest of the baggage won't help.

Said the swordsman to the disarmed archer. 6_u Oh Lephys..... Ok I admit, I laughed I was expecting Lephys' reply even as i typed the word...

You sir, are deranged. PS:T, BG2 and IWD2 had very good starts. IWD and BG were terrible though. Almost as terrible as NWN2 OC for that matter. Though MotB opening is superb.

Just make a seperate IP steampunk, Cyberpunk, Sci-Fi, Gothic Horror, Weird, whatever. No reason to contain all your ideas in the same IP. Keep PE fantasy.

Divinity:Original Sin costs $40$ and it's the Top Seller for 2 straight weeks. Wasteland 2 and Pillars of Eternity will propably release at the same price.

That is great and all, but if it releases for real (supposedly soon) at a 60 dollar price point they are going to find out no one will be buying their game. I have played it, it isn't worth 60 dollars. Honestly I would say it is a 20 dollar game at best. While i agree W2 isn't as good as they promised, what a game is "worth" differs from person to person.I agree W2 would be a 20 dollar game for me, but for someone else it could be worth the 60$ price. Mass Effects are "worth" 10$ max for me, and TES 0$, but there are many people who would consider an 150$ Collector's Edition money worth spent. So even if W2 came at a 60$ price, i have no doubt it would sale. Not as much as if it were 40$, but that is true for all games.

But no gameplay vid. And i'm starting to hope they never show any gameplay until release just to piss off Darji

Not really, but Sawyer has said many times that he doesn't give dates unless he knows what he is talking about and not quess. For them to say all over the place that the game will come Winter 2014, it means it is sceduled to come then. If there is a delay, it will be something unforeseen, and propably will be a one- two at most- month delay. From Octomber-November to December 2014. January 2015 is the most they will make it and that only if they can't help it. The estimates by some people that the game will be delayed for months and it will be released Spring-Summer 2015 are completely off base

That is not quite right. First of all I want to see progression. And video material shows this the best. Honestly and sadly I do not really care about Obsidians updates because I just do not want to read a lot of stuff. I look at the pictures and designs. And say yeah great. And move on. sometimes with classes explanation for example I will ready the stuff but that's it. With Divinity I actually watch their videos even pause them to see what has changed and how. I get really exciting and my friends too since I link these videos and tell them about it. Result was 5 people bought the game on steam. Success. Obsidian I can not show the stuff to them because they do not care much right now. With no video. There is no real excitement here. As for the press thing: I am not really jealous I am disappointed because I have seen kickstarter projects differently than publisher games and I hoped about more transparency. I also think it is a huge mistake not only to show it to the press since written media on the internet is either dead or dying. And that it was just a really bad marketing move for a game no one besides backers and hardcore fans do not even know exist because there is no material. no one reads the RPS previews. But yeah let us conclude with saying. I am disappointed by their handling and that I most likely will not back anything again from obsidian but rather buy it at launch. Josh Sawyer: If you don't like to read, don't play this game.

Charlatan or mentally unstable ?

This. That man has taste

Bioware did that and you know how it ended.

No. r00fles!

I disagree with this mentality. All games aren't made for everyone as we all have diferent tastes, contrary to AAA wishes. I would appreciate if devs were more forthcoming and said to me, "this game isn't made for people like you, find another one" It would save us all a lot of trouble and many negative feelings down the road.

As much as I hate sentences like this.... this. Why do you hate sentences like this? Curious.