Ralewyn

While I found bloodied mechanics interesting in 4E, and this would offer good feedback, you have to consider that this is one or even potentially multiple animation sets added to nearly every creature in the game, which is a rather daunting task. "wounded idle" is one thing, but for it to really look right you may have to have a "wounded limp, wounded swing, wounded punch" etc. It adds up very quickly unless your animator can make it look right transitioning from the idle state to any other animation, which takes time. There's a reason DOTA 2 is the only MOBA that does this, and also happens to not have all of these animations implemented at the present time--it's a polish feature that eats a fair bit of resources compared to other forms of feedback (UI elements, sound effects, etc.) Valve just so happens to have resources to spare.

It would be trivial to code, but it's less a matter of programming implementation and more a matter of UI design. Sure, it can just be tiny numbers in the corner, but those are still tiny numbers that take up some amount of screen real estate--however slight--that are not related to the actual game in any way. This makes for something extra to account for in designing and actually making the art assets for it all for something that doesn't have an impact on the game. If it was telling the game-world time, however, this would be a different story. Besides, what cell phone doesn't have a clock displayed somewhere when it's locked these days?

A release date is anything but arbitrary. Release dates exist because money runs dry. A single programmer makes somewhere around $70,000 a year at Obsidian, and this is roughly the industry standard. Every single person on this project has a five or even six-figure salary, likely greater than $40,000 and Obsidian has over 100 employees. Costs add up. Very quickly. Sure there's no publisher in this equation that can get tired of incurring losses and force a game to ship so they can profit, but now Obsidian only has $4,000,000 to work with. If that dries up during development there are going to be Problems. There's only one studio that release dates truly don't matter for, and that's Valve. This is the case solely because Valve has the money to keep going without shipping a product for a good, long while.

I absolutely love--and I mean love the way Fallout and Planescape: Torment handle attributes. Where the attribute scores are highly significant and core to who your character is, what your character does and how your character solves problems. Where you can make some kind of genetic mutant right from the get-go that's min/maxed to hell and back and still manages to keep the game interesting all the same while making you feel like the choices you made at chargen really and truly mattered every step of the way. I love the progression where gains are slow and plodding if any but each point counts significantly and you can use it to balance your character out or just make them some kind of demihuman monster. I love these attributes having an impact on dialogue choices and quest lines and how people react to you and everything. If a system like this makes a return in Project Eternity oh the joys it would bring me.

I know I've always had issues with consumable items in RPGs, and always end up compulsively hoarding them for 'when I'll need them,' which more often than not turns out to be never. In that regard, while I'd like to see something new and exciting done with holdout consumables if the players don't want that then hey, I'll just pawn my consumables in Project Eternity like I do in Planescape: Torment. 600 copper is big money for something I'm never gonna' use. I think much of the issue with modern consumable design comes down to a bloating of variety. Skyrim's a strong example of this--near hundreds of different highly-specialized effects for a variety of situations, most of them only providing a brief boost to your abilities for lots of time spent fishing through your inventory for that one-in-forty potion that you need unless you're one of the players that are explicitly trying to crack the system, in which case potions become hilariously broken as in any Elder Scrolls game. But otherwise their variety makes them highly cumbersome for very little payoff. New Vegas, however, had a lot of consumables that were boiled down to food, drink and chems. Since there were only about ten or so unique chems and they all had distinct names, appearances and mechanical functions, it was easy to find what you needed in your inventory quickly. This didn't solve the problem of the massive hoarded list of items necessarily, but it at least succeeded in keeping that list from interrupting gameplay quite as much. If consumables are to stay in their traditional format, I would prefer a compact list of specialized items that are readily available around the game world and barely--if ever--scale up in power in the form of new and improved versions. As far as alternative consumable systems go, however, I'd like to bring up Super Dungeon Explore: A goofy tabletop wargame framed as a hack & slash RPG dungeon crawl. The game works largely like a pen & paper RPG except the DM and players are actively competing against each other under specific conditions. One thing I found really interesting about the game was that players could gain Potion and Heart tokens as they hit monsters depending on how the dice rolled, the Hearts would replenish their health and the Potions would essentially give them consumables to activate. What was interesting was each different type of hero had a specific special effect for when they used the potion. This potion could be used at any time and if I remember correctly, on any character. The paladin, for instance, had a straight healing potion. The rogue, meanwhile, had a potion that allowed heroes to teleport. The dwarven tank could spend a potion to take an attack for an ally. A system like this where consumables are a unified resource that different characters can apply in different ways seems interesting to me, and I'd love to at least see a prototype of it if the resources exist to make it.

Oh, something just occurred to me. Having someone to come back to was always a motivator for me in these games. Gave a warm fuzzy feeling in most cases. I trust Obsidian's writing staff to be able to write a proper, organic romance that isn't annoying. I'm playing through Planescape: Torment for the first time right now, and though I suppose it's not the mechanically-defined romance we're used to in the modern RPG I'm finding a lot of the interactions with Annah hilarious. Granted, this is partially because since I know it has no mechanical basis I know it's no big deal that she's being catty when I'm talking to Fall-From-Grace or whoever else. This is the same reason Morte is such a fun character, because you can casually give him **** and you don't feel like you screwed up when his influence meter declines. So I guess on that subject more options to casually mess with your party members without repercussion because they can take a damn joke would be appreciated. One thing I'm absolutely against however, in any capacity, is the Bioware Sex Scene. You know the deal--fade in--ass--fade out--fade in--shoulder--fade out. It's quite possibly one of the most awkward and unpleasant things to watch in games today and it needs to stop. Please just fade to black or something. These scenes are not rewarding at all nor are they necessary in any capacity. They're really, really unpleasant. This would be fine if it was just something Bioware did but I saw it a while back in one of the Assassin's Creed and I said "Okay no this is becoming a problem."

I don't really have anything meaningful to say regarding sex or romance. But as far as bro-mance goes, I want at least one character I can be genuine friends with. Though I'm aware not necessarily all of these characters end up likable for everybody, I like characters that you can have a genuinely healthy dynamic with, even if some of it is imagined. Khelgar and Morte come to mind as examples. People who through your interactions you can imagine your character sharing a beer with when this is all over. People who aren't following you because you're the hero of legend, but because they're your bro and they've been with you through hell and back. As much as I enjoyed being a great spiritual mentor to a 'flock' of characters in KOTOR II, I found interactions with party members who regarded me as an equal and could treat me as just a man at the end of the day far more compelling. One thing I would like, however, is the ability to influence any companion's character growth. New Vegas touched on this by allowing you to make one of two choices regarding their personal outlooks. This would give them some sort of significant bonus in a specific area relating to the choice you made and it would impact their epilogue. This is great, but Dragon Age--wait, hang on, hear me out here--touched on a way to take this a step further. At certain points in the game you can genuinely impact how Allistair and Leliana develop as characters. Your dialogue choices allow them to sort through some issues and they can come away either 'unhardened' (the default state) or 'hardened.' What was interesting about this is these events occurred roughly 60-70% of the way through the main story-line, and once these characters were developed in this way it would actually change not only their personality, but also how they would react to certain plot events and even certain actions you took, actually altering their approval gains/losses and even changing the events of certain key plot points in some cases. It was small, and subtle to the point that I didn't realize it until I looked it up later, but I was really impressed when I saw that. I think that designing companion interactions from the ground up with this sort of system in mind could produce much more interesting interactions, to the point where it could serve as a new paradigm in NPC interaction should it succeed. Now, granted, this sort of system would increase the resources required to make a new companion exponentially, especially if you wanted to start influencing their growth in a branching tree from an early state. However, I'm under the impression at this point that every line in this game is explicitly not going to be voice acted, meaning most of these resources would be spent on writing in addition to a little simple--if tedious game logic code. Text is the most cost-efficient asset for producing actual game content available, so if we're assuming most NPC interactions will be purely text, we can safely assume that we can have a lot of NPC interactions. Though this assumption might be naive, I would think that we would have enough to adequately support a system like this. If something like that is too high-scope, though, I'd like at the very least something along the lines of New Vegas' system as mentioned above. That being said, I'd like companion quests to be a little more obvious. I ended up having to use a guide to reach the end of most of my party members' quest lines because the events were so rare.

I'm not necessarily trying to argue that there's absolutely no merit in Vancian magic, if that's what it seems like then that's my bad. I've just never liked the sort of gameplay that Vancian magic often promotes in games I've used it.

[Apologies if this topic should be posted elsewhere, this was the best place I could think of for it.] I've been noticing a rather disturbing trend on this forum as of late when it comes to discussions on Project Eternity, and I figure somebody should probably bring it up. Now, I understand we all care very deeply about the success of this project and a lot of us are expecting Project Eternity to be the grand glorious return to the golden age of yore. However, a lot of people have very different and often conflicting ideas on what will make this project successful, as is obvious in the long threads about particularly controversial topics like resting, experience gain and such. While this is okay and in fact a good thing, how these conflicting ideas are being discussed a lot of the time is becoming problematic. Again, I understand that we're all very passionate about this project, and it's natural for that passion to be expressed through what we want in the game or what we think it needs, but we're going overboard and it's derailing legitimate discussion. I'm seeing civil and legitimate debates and discussions turned into really petty internet arguments where it's just a back and forth between two or more dudes trying to prove the other party 'wrong' without trying to see the issue from the other perspective. It gains the thread plenty of attention but all the new opinions and perspectives it brings in are swept away by the constant mile-long multi-quote posts that often just boil down to "Once again, sir, you're the jerk." Now I know anyone who's doing this is only doing it because they care so much about the project, but I'd like to contend that this behavior does more harm than good when a discussion thread degenerates into this state because the communication is no longer efficient or productive. We're supposed to be the Glorious PC Master Race, are we not? If this is true, can we not rise above these petty squabbles for the sake of the community and the project? Can we stop treating our opponents as though they're knuckle-dragging morons because they have a dissenting opinion? Can we all accept that sometimes we may not necessarily be correct in our arguments or assumptions, and not be afraid to admit that? Can we stop ridiculing and ostracizing the man who wants this game to work with a gamepad, even if his reasons aren't necessarily the best and he doesn't necessarily realize the implications of making an interface work on a user experience level with both a keyboard/mouse and gamepad? Project Eternity's got a veteran design team, and they're not going to listen to any arguments that were shouted the loudest, nor are they even going to listen to what arguments are proven right in discussion. They know what they're doing, and they're going to rigorously prototype and playtest every argument they can in the most efficient manner possible before any community suggestions that are beyond 'three days of work to implement vanity feature' are integrated into the design of the game at large. This means we don't have to worry about 'my' Project Eternity being hijacked by some huckster trying to sell everyone on x feature, because debate and discussion means squat when put next to hard playtesting data. The real purpose of these discussions is to bring as many perspectives and ideas to the table as possible for the design team to synthesize while allowing them to get a general idea of what this small slice of the fanbase wants, as hopefully a sample group for the rest of those who kickstarted the project. I believe these arguments getting out of hand muddles that valuable data. I don't know, maybe I'm just new here and I'm seeing patterns that aren't there or this is something that's just part of the culture around here and that's just something to accept. If that's the case, feel free to just let this thread die. But if anyone else thinks what I'm saying here has merit, can we start trying to make a better effort towards respecting each-other and and keeping discussions on track? Thank you.

I'd like to bring up New Vegas' prolific list of hair and facial hair options, all majestic and complete with ridiculous names.

Vancian system does't do anything of that. It's encounter balance, enemy numbers and how reconnaissance is handled in game which affects player's knowledge of how he should fill the slots. Even then, there is no problem whatsoever in creating a multipurposed set of spells. Noone forces you to memorise three fireballs, when you can memorise Fireball, Haste and Dispel Magic instead. Actually, that *is* a whole point of strategy there - balancing a battle unit (and party is a battle unit) to be multi-purposeful and able to handle what game/DM throws at them. Which means making decisions, and either making everyone a generalist or using a bunch of specialists. And it is an interesting strategic game in itself when playing a spellcaster - to create your own set of spells to match any scenario. If you just end up creating your own set of spells to make yourself useful in any situation, then why is Vancian magic being used in the first place when you could just build that set of spells as a sorcerer or something? The theory behind why it's better than just having some spells that you can cast whenever is it gives you a bigger toolbox to solve problems with, but when your response when faced with not being able to forsee a specialized problem happening is to limit the toolbox to a safe standby loadout, what's the point? This is a belief I've held for years, thank you. I accepted it when I was young because I figured "Hey D&D's supposed to be the best game I guess." Then I played lots and lots of other games with lots and lots of other magic systems, and I can say with confidence that aside from sorcery in Exalted, Vancian magic is the most clunky, obtuse and un-fun magic system I've ever personally experienced. You're arguing that other sections of the game are failing and making Vancian magic not work but you're neglecting the fact that these are sections of the game that need to work only because Vancian magic exists. "It doesn't work because encounters aren't balanced with regards to Vancian magic." Do you think it's a small task or a necessary one to balance any encounter against one or more characters having access to any possible combination of roughly half the spells in the entire game? The truth is a lot of these things the game is failing to deliver on would be non-issues with a different form of magic that would be much easier to design around. The designer can build encounters towards you having a specific rough range of spells that he can assume you have access to within specific parameters because you don't have to sleep to regain them, and doesn't have to instead telegraph every encounter to you in advance in detail so you can build your specialized set of spells.

I personally despise Vancian magic for being un-intuitive, unsatisfying, and requiring heavy amounts of bookkeeping, but most of all I despise it because Vancian magic demands the player make choices about their abilities for situations they have little to no information of. A choice that isn't informed in a game isn't a choice and it isn't fun or satisfying, it's just annoying. Vancian magic explicitly punishes players for not knowing what the game is going to throw at them in a given dungeon or on a given adventure where unless they're reloading a save or using a guide they shouldn't know exactly what the game is going to throw at them. This makes Vancian magic even more of a problem in pen & paper RPGs, but I still find it really annoying in cRPGs for how its power usually scales and the kind of gameplay it generally encourages. As a 5th level mage in Planescape: Torment I've stabbed a good 200 times, and cast a good 10 spells tops. I'm not a mage, I'm a walking corpse with a knife that sparkles in a funny way every so often.

I've always loved the idea of crafting systems in RPGs, but never really the implementation. There are a scant few games I could name where I actually enjoyed and was engaged with the crafting system. I'm less concerned with what it makes and more concerned with how it's made. People keep mentioning New Vegas, and though I'll admit I never bothered with ammunition crafting, as much as I love New Vegas its crafting system is the exact sort of crafting system I despise in games. I hate crafting systems that involve you having to hunt for pages upon pages of unique components and reagents that clutter your inventory and would otherwise be vendor trash and never knowing what you should actually keep because it's important or trash because it's just cluttering up your inventory and you can't make anything useful out of it. 9/10 times I went to the crafting bench in that game I realized I didn't have the components for what I wanted to make and would have to make a mental note to keep an eye out for it later, when really I wanted to be able to make that thing when I was at the base in the first place. Most of the time I just up and forgot about whatever I was looking for. Supplies for tanning gecko hides, as one example: I'd go hours at a time with gecko hides I couldn't tan because I couldn't find turpentine or horsenettles, and I believe there's still untanned gecko hides in my inventory after I finished the game. Does it impact my experience really? No, but those are gecko hides I never made profit on because I was waiting to double their whopping 10-cap-or-so value by gathering the crafting supplies that never materialized. I actually really enjoyed the crafting system in KOTOR II, personally. For its time it was quite simple and streamlined and I was genuinely engaged making mods and equipment and such for my party, especially building my own lightsaber. It's unfortunate, because all the numbers are pretty broken and so crafting numbers are broken too and even if you make really cool stuff it ends up not really mattering because you're going to be an unkillable planet-slayer up until endgame no matter what you're doing in KOTOR II, so some more stacked overpowered stuff on top of that doesn't make a lot of difference. But with KOTOR II I could get rid of stuff I didn't want in my inventory cleanly and efficiently and recycle it directly into making stuff I did want, like sweet armor inlays for all my jedi robes that buffed CON and gave HP regen, and in general I just really liked the designs for a lot of the equipment mods, how many of them weren't necessarily upgrades so much as side-grades and were mostly dependent on what you were looking for. It just never ended up shining through because the combat balance in general in that game was super wonky. In my experience, crafting systems in games have one or more of the following issues: Arbitrary: Crafting doesn't do much or is mostly used for economic purposes. Nothing you can make is better than what you're finding just playing the game normally at your current level. Arcane: Crafting is stupidly complicated to make anything useful and requires you invest a massive chunk of time to get anything good out of it while not being fun. Resource Management: The game features 50+ unique ingredients for making things, all of them having no other purpose but vendor trash while never being easy to find when you really need them to make something. This becomes especially bad when the game has encumbrance. I actually happen to be exploring the issue of crafting systems in a personal project I'm working on right now as both a design experiment and an opportunity to learn more Unity and Scaleform. I'm trying to build a crafting system that is engaging and intuitive enough in its dynamics that it can carry a game on its own. It may work out, it may not, but I suspect I'll learn a lot in the process regardless.

Because it was the name I came up with at 6 AM after finishing Dishonored and I thought it was a nice name at the time before I'd actually written my post. If you take offense to this name I apologize.

Second, I recognize that the primary people who care about a rogue's backstab/sneak attack are going to be people who play those characters. Other people, who tend to play other classes as their primary characters, likely won't feel too strongly about it simply because they normally don't benefit a whole lot from the sneak attack ability anyhow. They probably mostly control their own character and casters in combat, and find it tedious to position a rogue to maximize their damage output. That's fine.** I think you should be able to make your rogue the way you think he/she ought to be. I am all for being able to CHOOSE for your rogue not to have backstab/sneak attack. Perhaps make all the "rogue-like" skills be selected as feats first before they can be advanced. Create a formula to determine how many starting feats a character gets, and let them completely customize their rogue experience. In this case, everyone wins. With a finite number of feats, you could make tradeoffs to make your rogue less rogue-esque, and select non-rogue specific feats that draw you closer to another class. Not interested in the stealth/sneaking/sneak attack? Great, don't select those feats, and you can instead select martial weapons and medium armor. Now you have a second-class fighter who can pick locks and disable traps. I'm alright with this sort of system. I'm NOT ok with a system in which I get pigeonholed into someone else's idea of what a rogue should be. Give me Options or give me death. While options are good, unless we're going to make rogues a straight jack-of-all trades class they need to have a core mechanical focus, otherwise things start getting wobbly really quickly. I'd argue that this is part of the problem, as the original D&D rogue can apply to so many different roles and so many different characters because of its vague definitions and lack of focus in the design. I'm in favor of the rogue having a foundational mechanical focus and I'm in favor of that focus explicitly not being combat, but instead being utility. That being said, it's not viable to just make a class that's no good in a fight, so of course rogues have to maintain some level of combat ability, but it seems in most cRPGs this is the rogue's mechanical focus. This is problematic because this usually becomes expressed as one of two archetypal rogues: The flip-out-and-kill-people ninja with crazy powers that let them teleport and vanish in the middle of a fight and all kinds of other shenanigans, and the plotty-planny-knifey rogue that while more believable I have never seen a genuinely immediately engaging and intuitive implementation for. Though you do have a point about who's going to play it. I'm playing whoever will make the most optimal diplomat, and that likely won't be the rogue. So I'm not going to sit here and argue about something I'm not gonna' use if other people who will use it very adamantly want it one way. I mostly just wanted to bring up the thought that perhaps the combat role of the rogue needs to be re-examined.

I just want to make this clear: I'm not necessarily advocating the ability to play a full-pacifist playthrough, nor am I debating the ethics and wisdom of a character just knocking out everyone they have to fight. I am also absolutely not pushing for the stealth and nonlethal takedown mechanics from modern console stealth games and shooter/RPG hybrids to be ripped off wholesale and imported into an IE-styled cRPG, that would be absurd. All I'm asking for here is the ability to define what level of force is actually necessary when I have to use it, even if the difference between killing a dude and knocking him out is purely cosmetic.

I prefer to solve my problems without fighting, so this is a little biased, but... I've never kept a rogue or rogue-similar class in my party in any western RPG because I wanted sustained DPS, and I only ever played a rogue to be a super cool ninja when I was a pre-teen. Rogues-as-DPS has just never seemed very mechanically engaging to me for two reasons. One: DPS rogues are supposed to fill out the role of being flip-out-and-kill-people ninjas without actually having any of the style or flavor of flip-out-and-kill-people-ninjas. Two: I've never found stealth mechanics in pure western RPGs very engaging at all, because sending one guy in to skulk around out of the whole party always struck me as boring and extremely time-consuming, a lot of the time taking as long as the encounter would take to resolve to properly position the rogue. No, instead, I never leave without a rogue in tow in any game I play. Because I know there will always be traps that need disarming, locks that need picking, and problems that will require a more subtle approach. When I use a rogue, I use a rogue for their utility in traversal and problem-solving. I use them as the party's multi-tool, and it's always satisfying to have the character who's got this under control around. So in this sense, I've only ever perceived rogues as interesting when they're skillmonkeys, problem-solvers, and survivalists. Some stuff for helping them stay up in a fight is fine, but I've never been interested in rogues where the primary purpose is to flank and stab dudes. Modern western RPGs have been trying desperately to make the rogue's core combat dynamic of flanking to catch enemies off-guard engaging for years now through whatever convoluted means necessary--blinking mechanics, being able to just up and vanish in the middle of a fight, whatever. These RPGs have never stopped to consider that perhaps backstabbing wasn't ever really engaging at its core to begin with, and that instead it's maybe an artifact from a time when designers just simply didn't know any better. The fact is the rogue's always been a catch-all term for several very different pictures of several very different characters, and while I believe the proper rogue is at its core versatile first and foremost, all we've ever really seen rogues do is stuff that keeps them out of a fight or stuff that rigs a fight in their favor. This means that most rogues we've seen are designed around not wanting to participate in a proper fight because fair and proper fights are for suckers. Does it make sense, then, to focus the rogue on fighting fights that they don't want to be in? I'd contend that it doesn't make sense. I'd contend instead that the core purpose of the rogue is to large and varied box of tools to solve scrupulous and unscrupulous problems alike for the sake of their continued survival with--whether that toolbox was built on courtly intrigue or scraping and surviving as an urchin. That while this toolbox has tools to deal with combat, they're focused on making sure it's quick and safe or avoided altogether. "Because people get killed in combat," says the rogue. "Namely myself. And that simply won't do. I have famous paintings to fence, nobles to woo, tales to weave and tombs to plunder. I simply haven't the time for every daft orc that wants some silly new trophy. I've been alive in this business for a long, long time, and I plan on doing whatever it takes to keep it that way."

I understand that this may not exactly be something this forum might have a taste for, but these guys are alumni of my school and I'd really like to see them succeed, so if you dig flying cars and intense action, you might want to check out Distance, by some of the guys who made Nitronic Rush: http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1857884659/distance-a-next-generation-arcade-racer

This one might be a little goofy, but here goes: I love the nonlethal approach. I explicitly try to kill as few things as I possibly can whenever I have a realistic nonlethal option for dispatching enemies in games, and I feel the highest vindication whenever the game, world or characters reacts to those actions. These options are common across many shooter/FPS hybrids--Deus Ex, Dishonored, Alpha Protocol, etc. But after recently finishing Dishonored it occurred to me that I'd never seen this option in any Infinity Engine RPGs or really any pure Western RPGs that I could think of at the time, and I began to wonder why not? Most tabletop RPGs, D&D included, have at least a short barely-referenced sidebar on how to deal nonlethal damage and knock somebody out in a fight, why has this never been an option in the classic or modern pure western RPG? Sure it's a bit silly, since most of what you're cutting down are nameless orcs, thugs, kobolds, and other miscreant cannon fodder, but I've always believed the mark of a true hero is restraint: Just look at Batman. It would be nice to have a game where my diplomat knows some martial arts focused strictly on rendering opponents unconscious when things get hairy, I would prefer to walk away like a smug badass saying "I warned them" when negotiations fail. Usually, instead I just shake my head and sigh mournfully at the lives wasted this day, because the option to do anything but set them on fire isn't ever present. Granted, I eventually become desensitized and then when negotiations fail I just cackle like a maniac as I introduce them to a colleague of mine: Doctor Force Lightning, Ph.D. in Murder From a development standpoint, adding in options like these seem pretty trivial, depending on how deep you wanted the system to be. A good 90% of it would be minor subsystems in the game logic--a bool or two here, a different value there--I'm not asking for much, just a little confirmation that I left those dumb thugs on the street battered, bloody, but still breathing. It's not like anyone's going to carefully examine the character model and check to make sure they're using the flat-edge of the blade, so unique animations aren't really necessary I'd say. Don't suppose there's anyone out there who shares my sentiment?

I coughed up $50 at launch for Alpha Protocol, and you know what? I didn't regret it. It's not a perfect game, I have my complaints--bosses balanced against stealth characters for one. But I genuinely enjoyed the core stealth gameplay as well as the character progression and how all the powers worked. I have fond memories of streaming it once and making a Michael "The Bear" Thorton--a giant murdermachine in a lumberjack beard, trucker hat and sunglasses that was dropped fist-first into the most dangerous places on earth. From there he would run screaming angrily through crowds of terrorists and assorted ne'er-do-wells, bringing justice one fist-to-face at a time. My major complaint with Alpha Protocol is--and perhaps this was unique to my playthrough, but I doubt it--that it always felt like the antagonists were always one step ahead of me no matter what I did. This lead to me losing my sense of agency even while I was making significant progress, it seems like I always got duped or set back instead and that's just how the plot worked. This sometimes involved some pretty weird contrivances to force me to choose between two crappy options where I could've chosen both and saved the day. For example: "Oh I don't trust you enough to wear a kevlar vest and beef up security at the rally, you just don't have enough proof of these claims." Really, dude? I have proof that one bad thing is gonna' go down and you can't just put on the vest? Really? Come on. All things considered though, I enjoyed it and learned from it and had fun.

I believe there are two ways to make a very strong and compelling antagonist. 1. Make them believe they're Right, and make them Right on some level. I was harping on this in another thread to an extent earlier, but I find every faction in New Vegas to serve as its own compelling antagonist. Sure, some of them are skewed more towards seeming morally good or evil, but they all consistently think that what they're doing is best for rebuilding society, and these reasons all make sense to some extent depending on your worldview, at least enough that you can understand why people would believe in them. You aren't fighting House, the NCR or the Legion because they're Evil, you're fighting them because you disagree with their ideology, which makes your interactions with them more organic. They aren't just some demonic foil for you to strike down with your brand of justice and moral superiority--they're constantly testing your own beliefs and ideologies, and may just end up changing your mind by the end of it all. 2. Give them a deep relationship with the protagonist This is a theory I have based on observation across a wide stretch of media. The best antagonists have complicated relationships with the antagonist that colors their interactions and makes those interactions interesting. Darth Vader and Luke Skywalker, for a famous example. For an example from video games, one could argue that Portal is about the player developing and eventually terminating a dysfunctional relationship with GlaDOS. [Vampire: The Masquerade: Bloodlines spoilers ahead] As for an example from Obsidian-related games, we can look at the Prince LaCroix from VTM: Bloodlines. From night one you're stuck as this guy's pawn whether you like it or not, and the whole game is spent making him out to be the most smug, hate-able representation of The Man and the worst traits of the camarilla. By the time he stabs you in the back you're just waiting to be given a reason to punch this guy, and that's what makes the finale of the game so very satisfying, because you get to single-handedly tear down LaCroix's dominion goon by goon and watch him grovel pathetically while his tower burns. Without interacting with LaCroix through the entire game this would not have nearly the impact it does, because he's just some dude instead of your unjust lord or **** boss in addition to the power-hungry maniac bent on conquering the world. Technically speaking, yes, there is an ending where you side with him, but really honestly--why? [End VTM spoilers] Kreia very nearly hit both of these points, with a relationship you develop over the course of the entire game and a philosophy--at its core at least--that was believable and made sense. But then sadly the ending had to be rushed out the door and the payoff fell flat.

Honestly given the option I would prefer a lot more choices like the ones featured in Fallout: New Vegas, particularly which faction you side with in the ending. We have the ability to deliver more complicated narratives in games now where moral and ethical dilemmas can be shades of grey rather than black and white without it being really ham-handed or forced. Caesar's Legion could be considered objectively morally evil, but their philosophy was something that could be understood and made sense as to why people would follow it, and they all thought they were doing what was Right. On the other hand, the NCR could be considered morally good, but Mojave denizens tended to paint them as an empire spreading too thin, with poorly managed and maintained good intentions that would end up screwing the little guy. Again, the NCR was doing what it thought was right and you could see how they thought it was right. I had to think for a good few hours while not playing the game to decide who I wanted to side with, and who would do the most good for the Mojave--my motivation. Mr. House, the NCR and solo endings all had their pros and cons, but I ultimately decided that if neither would represent the common people and betterment of all, I'd just have to take over the Mojave myself and maintain its independence. Even after making that choice, the anarchy it wrought made sure not everything worked out for everyone entirely. I loved that ending. I loved deliberating on it and having my views and beliefs challenged. I loved that even with all my good intentions even I was not the perfect wasteland-savior to make the Mojave an independent utopia, because somehow that made the choice far more satisfying. I got an experience out of these choices presented that could simply never be replicated with a clear Good, Neutral, and Evil set of options. I'd just pick Good barely thinking twice and that'd be that. It would be "I'm the good guy, I pick the good ending." Instead, with New Vegas it was... "I'm the guy that wants the Mojave to be a better place for everyone. I'm the guy who has helped the sick, the weak, and the poor of this land and touched every community I can to make this world better, from fixing water pumps to stopping massacres. While you all sat glaring at each other I've been all across this great land, I've seen crazed mutants, ghouls in rockets, cannibals in suits and the daily struggles of the average small town. I'm the one that knows what this land is about. I'm the one who knows what's best for this land. Not all of you, in your respective ivory towers. I'm the one who will make this land better, so I will ask you nicely once to get the hell out of my desert."

I recall an update stating characters would have a Stamina and Health score, where the Stamina is your immediate HP from fight to fight and Health is overall how you're doing long-term. This suggests to me that Obsidian's looking into a rest system more along the lines of 4th edition D&D, in which you have two different types of rest: A Short Rest of 5 minutes that replenishes some of your resources--spells, abilities, health, etc. and an Extended Rest lasting several hours that replenishes all of your resources. The short rest has diminishing returns until you take an extended rest, so you eventually will have to sleep, but you won't have to sleep after going through one fight that went particularly bad. I can't really think of an example of this sort of system in any computer RPG, but it seems to me the design team wants to be tracking and having players manage long-term and short-term character resources when dungeon crawling. This would imply a long-term and short-term resting system--something I'm interested to see in action. So in that sense, I suppose I'm in favor of mixed.

Seems like quite the controversial topic here. We all have seen this sort of progression system perform quite admirably in a very specific subgenre of RPG--the FPS hybrid. This includes the System Shock series, Deus Ex, and of course Bloodlines--a personal favorite. However, this does not necessarily mean objective-based character progression will go off without a hitch. To my knowledge, Project Eternity is going to have its basis in D&D 3.x rules, which features level progression, while all the games mentioned above featured point-buy progression systems. The other more obvious difference is Project Eternity is most certainly not an FPS hybrid, and I can't think of any RPGs more along the lines of Infinity Engine games that featured point-buy systems or objective-based progression, so it's unproven. However, I have confidence in Obsidian's design team and their ability make objective-based progression work should they choose to go that route, and I most certainly did experience gameplay degeneration in KOTOR and KOTOR II, so I can understand the argument in favor of it. I can't think of a title from Obsidian, Troika or Black Isle that didn't have some sort of variance in progression reward based on how you solved a given problem, so I doubt we should have any fears of just getting a flat lump sum from completing a quest with multiple solutions. I can understand the concerns about players not getting experience rewards for simply playing the game without following the plot--nothing from exploring or just hunting or the like, and to that end I'd like to make a suggestion that adds a layer of abstraction that's already been somewhat proven: New Vegas had a challenge system that kept track of a large variety of variables--most of them killin' related, that you barely ever noticed was there. With every lock picked, computer hacked, robot blown up, etc. a little counter in the corner went up. When that counter hit a certain threshold, you'd complete the challenge and gain a nice tasty experience boost that I remember being quite satisfying. Not a lot compared to what you'd get for completing objectives, mind you, but that was because all of these actions also got you immediate bits of experience. I would suggest that this system could be expanded and used in conjunction with the objective-based experience rewards. This gives players regular rewards for doing what they would normally do in the game; such as stabbing rats, but removes the immediate skinner box compulsion to conduct a full-scale rat genocide across an entire dungeon floor before proceeding. If the player still wants to do that, hey, that's their business and the system will keep tally towards their next rat-killin'-experience bonus. However, if the player doesn't despise rats enough to systematically murder every single one room by room, floor by floor, they don't end up feeling like they aren't completing the dungeon 100% for avoiding the rats because each individual rat doesn't give that little bit of experience points up front. Note that this doesn't necessarily alter the rate of experience points gained very much at all, this is more a matter of player psychology--removing the compulsion that causes degenerative gameplay to occur by adding an extra layer of abstraction between killing stuff (or doing any other more mundane adventuring thing, for that matter, such as lockpicking, sneaking, speaking, exploring, etc.) and actual character progression. Mind you, this is all just theory based on observation. It would of course require time and resources to be proven or dis-proven through prototyping, but I would think a paper prototype of this system could be drawn up and implemented in a matter of hours for a given session of D&D. This method would require more player book-keeping, granted, but this is a system to be used for a digital game rather than a paper game as paper prototypes often are, so we could safely ignore that factor for the purposes of playtesting.

Recording actual video wouldn't be the way to go here for a myriad of reasons already discussed, but this feature is entirely possible. The common implementation of this sort of system is to (and I'm very roughly paraphrasing here) record all of the events or 'messages' sent around the game logic over a certain period of time and save them. This includes both what they are and what data they contain. Essentially, every time the user hits a button, or a character attacks, or a physics object collides, or whatever sort of event the developer wants to immediately announce to the rest of the game engine, a message is sent that's only a few bytes large including all the data about the event through the messaging system to anything else that's listening. Depending on the game and how your messaging system is implemented, dozens or hundreds of messages can be processed every frame. This is usually implemented in networked multiplayer games because they already have to record these messages and send them around and check them for consistency, so the process of recording a long stream of them sent to a server over a period of time and then adding in a feature where the engine can play the simulation back with all those messages later is relatively simple. This is precisely how you can watch replays of Warcraft 3, DOTA 2, and Team Fortress 2 in-engine from any angle or perspective--there's no recorded video, the literal game was recorded and the engine itself is playing it back. The good news is that Unity, like most modern game engines has a messaging system, so Obsidian won't have to build their own from scratch. However, Unity's messages are fairly bare-bones and mostly used for user input, so some groundwork would have to be done before this feature could be implemented. A little or a lot depending on whether user input was being recorded or whether it was actual game logic that was being recorded. Usually this feature is implemented because all the groundwork for it is already there--as per the case with many networked multiplayer games. This would be an extra layer--even if relatively small--that would have to be implemented on top of the rest of the logic that would be exclusively for this recording & playback feature. There's also another layer of complication if you want to be able to replay a battle and pause/rewind/etc. during it, as with a Warcraft 3 replay.