Lephys

I just want to take a moment to give a round -- nay, a dodecahedron! -- of applause to the moderator team. For, without them, we would all be badge-less. And for their constant vigilance in threads like this, getting people situated so quickly after they happen to get to post about the problem. ^_^

Yeah, defense-type values are one of the biggest numerical distinctions between classes. I think a Wizard starts with something like 25 or 30 Psyche, and 10 Deflection, while a Fighter starts with something like 25-30 Deflection and 10-15 Psyche. From there, you start running into lots of other bonuses and such, and you eventually arrive at just the sheer manner in which the class functions (like a Monk with his Wounds, or a Cipher with his Focus, etc.). It's a pretty big stretch to say they're just all pretty much the same thing, and you only distinguish them with talents and such as you progress... I don't think they're any less different than before (in other rulesets). They're just... differently different. Also, for what it's worth, I'm very much with Jon of the Wired in that I believe you misinterpreted Josh Sawyer's quote. I'm fairly certain he was meaning "When I sit down to figure out how a Fighter and a Wizard are going to work in a given game, I start with them being equal, then look at how to move them apart, rather than just starting with them being very different and just guessing at exactly how they should be separated, and by how much." Something along those lines. He was talking about designing the classes, not the finished result of the classes. Not "start" as in "when the finished classes start/are level 1, they're equal," and not "then they move apart as the player progresses them through the game." In fact, there's a quote somewhere where he was talking about his reasoning for the hard-value bonuses (like how a Rogue gets +3 to Stealth, or how he starts with higher reflexes, but then gains the same amount of reflexes as everyone else as he progresses). He was specifically talking about how, in things like DnD rules, you end up with a Wizard with a base attack bonus of 4 or 5, while a same-level-Warrior ends up with something like 12. Basically, everyone starts almost the same, but one class gains a greater attack bonus more often than another class. So, his philosophy on that seems to be to establish the things that make classes different from the get-go, and maintain those distinctions throughout, with character-progression player decisions allowing for a bit of tweaking along the way. As opposed to "the more you level, the greater the difference between your Wizard and Fighter will be!"

The only thing I'm not getting is how the process wouldn't be the same for professional voice actors. There seems to be this idea that they just pick the one they want and forego listening to a bunch of samples of character lines to figure out whose voice they like for that character, THEN getting someone in on the project and presenting them with their workload and standardizing their setup. Some people keep saying "No, because then the voices would be crappy!" But, no one suggested just randomly implementing community-submitted sound files into the game. That being said, yes, I'm going to join PrimeJunta in agreeing with the "it'd be too much work" thing. Why? Because if they already don't plan to have all the stuff voice-acted, then it's going to be extra work no matter what -- professional or volunteer. The problem isn't "Omg, no one who isn't a 'professional voice actor' can possibly have a good voice and be competent enough to record lines on nice equipment." The problem is, implementing more voice acting would be implementing more voice acting. If they were still searching for voice-actors for the stuff that's planned to be voice-acted (I really have no idea where they are on this, development-wise), then I'd say "Sure, why not... let people send in samples." If you listen to a sample, it's going to be immediately apparent that it's super crappy and you can't properly judge the voice. In which case, you skip it and move on to the next one. Also, set standards up front. "Only sound files of such-and-such quality and format." Boom. If someone just has a stick mic and Windows Sound Recorder, and tries to send in a sample they made in 5 seconds, then it doesn't even waste anyone's time for review. Why? It doesn't even meet the criteria. Finding suitable volunteers isn't a preposterous idea. It's just not going to allow more of PoE to be voice-acted, really, because money ins't their sole constraint with that.

I still wouldn't call that "up to" the bear, Besides, the point wasn't that no game ever gets the range right. It's that there's more to just breaching some radius to an animal's behavior. Yes, eventually, if you get really, really close to it, it's probably going to get angry with you, no matter what, because it has no idea WHY you're so close, and opts to "shoot first and then ask questions" -- to err on the side of caution/survival. But quite often, an animal just hates the fact that you're encroaching on its space, and will simply chase you until you're sufficiently away from it. Not hunt you down forever. It would be nice to see less-overly-simplified animal behavior in such games. 8P. That's all.

^^ It's hardly any different from the amount of importance now placed on pre-orders for games. It's not quite the same thing as a Kickstarter (in which the game is either funded, or the development doesn't really officially begin, pretty much), but, still. It's really no different from securing the funds for any project. It's just from a different source. I mean, when publishers make a game, they don't just start with no money and hope the game sells well after it's done so they can pay for its development. And, with Kickstarter, the people initially funding the game are the same people to which the game has been targeted, instead of just some random people who might have no interest in gaming whatsoever, but are interested in funding a business venture. So, it's kind of a win-win, there. "Sure, I'll give you $60. I was going to do that later to buy the game and play it anyway." Not really so strange of a business model.

Yeah, along the lines of what LadyCrimson said, I don't think it's just inherently bad to have chess-piece characters that you can make from the start, but the game benefits a lot more from the actual introduction of characters throughout the story. As opposed to, say, XCOM, which is pretty much not about the characters at all. Your soldiers' only purpose in XCOM is to play a part in the tactical combat. So, it makes perfect sense for you to just have a full squad of peeps at the beginning (although you don't actually get to create them, still, so it's not a direct parallel to the OP).

Let's not forget to thank Fionavar, the dragon who diligently weaves your titles, day and night, and embroiders them directly into that spot between your name and your avatar, what... 670+ times now? *applause*

That's way too much R. Don't want them to come back as pirates, now do we? We'll all be distracted for a couple weeks, but, rest assured that our razor sharp criticism of the team's progress and design decisions will still be here when you all get back! Haha... Seriously though... Have an amazeful holiday break, Team Obsidian! Hmm... I'm going to get right on crafting a giant horn to place atop a building at the center of your city, so that we can go sound it to call you all back to the battlefront of development after the peaceful respite ends. That would be awesome...

When's the last time you walked "up to a bear" in a video game before it started to become angry with you? You know, instead of "Oh no! You've entered the bear's scent radius, which is 7.3 miles! It naturally wants to murder you now, because it's obviously just a death machine, and not an animal that just so happens to hunt other animals for food when it's hungry. Also, it will never, ever stop chasing you now, ever..."? Because... I wanna play that game. Where you first have to be RUDE to the bear and actually invade its personal space. Like, it's just chillin' in the river rapids, grabbin' fish and stuff, and you come spla****y-splashin' along, like 20 feet away, peeing in the river and whatnot (upstream, even), all over its fishy, fishy dinner. Then, bear goes all hands-on-hips, then charges your arse. That would actually be pretty awesome, humorous exaggeration aside. Not, "I'm a bear, and I have a radar, and if I see a blip on my radar, I ALWAYS murder it!" You could be a pure-metal golem, and it would still just charge right at you, not even having any clue what you are, and knowing you're not even made of meat.

Neither does soul magic (fit 16th century, that is). All I mean is, there's just as much room for different social customs in fiction as there is for magic. Now, I'd very much expect for there to still be various factions/peoples/individuals with extreme gender bias, or, at the very least, just cultural ways of treating males in a different manner than females, even if it's not so much a "you have fewer rights 'cause of your gender" sort of way. As in your finishing line, there, I'd be a bit disappointed, with regard to this, if your character's gender had no bearing on dialogue options and reactivity throughout the gameplay. However, if the whole world doesn't lock their daughters in towers and sell them for baby-birthing capabilities, I'm cool with that fictional deviation. @ Stun: I'm right there with you on wanting more details, but they've actually provided a pretty decent amount of information. Granted, it'll be nice when it's actually all together. As it stands, it's spread across various threads, cross-forum postings, and interviews. Regarding the "there's no round anymore" thing, yes, it basically just means that everything won't be metronomed to the exact same rhythm. It's really not all that different from before, because various actions still took varying amounts of time to perform, even though they all started at the same time in BG and such. If you're not currently performing some other action, you can immediately begin performing an action. But, everything's designed accordingly, so you're not going to just be able to infinitely use/cast some instant ability. Josh has mentioned plenty of things that delay actions, such as switching grimoires, (or I think even cycling weapons), etc. Basically, it's not going to be that the round-rhythm restriction was the only thing referee-ing ability use, and they just ripped it out of the IE games' design or something. The game's designed without rounds in mind. And as for the classes... yes, it's different. But I wouldn't say all classes start "virtually the same." They are no longer defined by extraordinarily hard/absolute restrictions now, but they still are more skillful/more sucky at various things. He's specifically mentioned Fighters getting a bonus to Accuracy with melee weapons, which other classes don't get. So, even as a fresh, baby, LvL 1 adventurer, a Fighter is going to function noticeably differently from a different class.

Which is understandable considering they made 4X as much money as originally planned for the April date. And yet, less than 4X the production timeline! 8D Efficiency, FTW!

The explanations are much appreciated. Basically, I had no idea they weren't simply "drawn" (manually created, bit-by-bit, via a 2D process). I figured that they probably had some software setup that helped calculate the viewing angle (as you're viewing the ground plane at that slightly-downward angle -- as Sawyer showed in the video way back when, if you move the camera around in the Unity scene to where you're looking straight-on at the ground plane [just like a basic 2D game], everything's all stretched and skewed), etc. So, when people started distinguishing that it was "pre-rendered 3D," I suspected it had something to do with the process of actually creating the finished 2D image. Just didn't know the details. Again, thanks muchly, ^_^

I'm sorry. I was very torn, for what it's worth. I figured it was best to avoid 17 comments of "OMG, this thread hasn't been posted in in like a month! Even though it's still perfectly relevant!" And yeah, the trend has been to sort of make such stuff (if it's even the game in a manner that affects several different scenarios) rather binary. "Oh, you've got someone with lots of tracking? YOU FIND THE THING YOU'RE LOOKING FOR! Oh, you didn't have someone with tracking? You can't even just grid search the entire area and find it. It's now impossible to find. Your party doesn't even know how to search an area, much less track something." It's great when things have layers. When perception allows you to see the extremely-faded symbol that was embroidered onto a corpse's bloody clothing, and knowledge skills allow you to be aware that the particular pose of the corpse means something in particular, or maybe where someone of this order would have a secret pocket sewn into their robe/clothing to keep some valuable ring/artifact/money/item-of-non-monetary-value-but-strategic-lore-value, etc. But, yeah, that in particular always irked me. Not that there was a scenario at all that had the player simply visually track something, but that that was all you ever ran into. Especially when there were like... wrong ways to go and stuff, but the bload-soaked trail was blatantly the right way. I wasn't aware a human body had THAT much blood in it. "Guys, this blood trail is 3 feet wide, and we've gone like 300 yards already... it's still a solid drag-trail of blood! WHAT DIED?!"

This ^. Healing is essentially negative damage. Or, rather, damage is negative healing. When an enemy hits you for ten damage, he's just adding -10 hitpoints to your health pool. So, when someone heals you, they're basically just hitting you for -10 damage (or positive 10 hitpoints). The potency still applies, which is exactly why the number value "10" applies to both in equal measure. You could say that a 10-point heal and a 10-damage attack are equally powerful. Hence power/potency applying to both.

It seems pretty useless to point out their resource-efficiency chart as a reason why adding things to their taskload wouldn't be a good idea, considering that the very fact that the additional tasks would ONLY stem from the attainment of additional resources via stretch goals. *chin rub* Fair enough on the lack of a clear indication, but you've also not seen a clear indication that it WON'T be done in the manner proposed as possible. For what it's worth: "Rope Kid" is Josh, by the way. At least I'm pretty sure. While he doesn't provide details, he claims that the amount of additional content they're even considering possibly adding in would not increase the overall development timeline by much at all. Now, if I knew absolutely nothing else about Josh, and this were the first statement of his I'd ever read, I'd say "Hey, how long is 'not dramatically'?!!!" But, since I've read pages and pages of word-for-word interviews and seen lots of talks hes given regarding various aspects of design, I know that his idea of "not much" isn't 7 months. Basically, I trust his reasonability, so while I realize that additional content is going to add SOME amount of time onto the timeline, hardly anyone here is thinking of any scenario other than "do the 200 (made up number) days' worth of work to finish the game, THEN do like 50 more days' worth of work?! That's ridiculous!" People are looking at this like a gauge. As if: A) Every single member of the team is working 12-hour days, every single day until the second the game comes out, and B) More funding (which is, again, a given from the sheer mention of stretch goals) would allow them to hire more manpower. I realize ALL the work isn't just grunt work. But, there's almost no process that can't be helped by addiitonal manpower/additional overtime, etc., either of which costs the same thing: Funds. Therefore, more funds would allow them to do significantly more in significantly less time, as opposed to simply having the additional time be directly proportionate to the additional amount of work. It is folly to judge the timeframe of such added content by their current set of resources/budget, since they would have additional resources. I can't tell you exactly what that will mean, detail for detail, for the expedience of the additional content (were it to be stretch-goaled into existence and implemented), but I CAN tell you, with certainty, that it would allow more to be done in less time than if they simply tried to do more with the exact same amount of resources they have now. No no, my apologies. The quoted part was, indeed, laced with humor. I can see how it would be easily misunderstood. Sorry about that. All I was trying to say was, basically, that it's not just going to be simple addition. They're not just taking their existing resource set, and adding some more things to the work queue. And, as I mentioned, even if they're partially doing that, there are people in various positions who have varying workloads as the development process progresses. There are people who would be free to work on new stuff before the existing stuff even gets the finishing touches put on it. The biggest things that would cause delay would be polishing and QA testing. And, even those things would have an efficiency boost from going through the entire rest of the game's assets/components already. That's understandable. But, I think the reason his OP didn't provide such details is that they simply wanted to find out if anyone was even the least bit interested in such a thing. If 90% of the people, even without any details, just said "NO!", and not "Hmmm... could I have some more details?", then they'd know not to waste any more time with it. Instead of wasting days preparing this big, elaborate detailed plan in update form, only to have everyone say "That's great, but we just want the game to finish, at this point, and aren't even remotely worried about adding anything else to it right now, especially if we've got to fund it via stretchgoals." As for the latter part of that... why wouldn't Obsidian do anything that you see as terrible? You really have no way of knowing. You've got to trust something at some point. I trust that they're either competent and honest, or are a giant organization of con men. And I very much doubt it's the latter. So, I can either trust their word and their judgment, or just second guess every single thing they ever say until some kind of future predicting machine can prove to me with visions of the future that their claims are true. And I don't see that as a very feasible or constructive approach to the situation. So, yes, I choose to trust. Also understandable. On a purely subjective note, I personally wouldn't mind a delay of approximately 1 month. The closer that gets to 2 months, the more wary I am. And beyond that, it's a flat-out "Nah... not even interested." And I understand that that's just my preference, and that other people have their own, some of which are "I don't even want it delayed another HOUR if I can help it!". And that's fine. But, either you feel the delay is worth consideration, or you don't, in that regard. Second-guessing everything doesn't serve a purpose. Asking for details is understandable, also, but having developers say "No, we don't want the game to be super delayed either. The delay would be minimal.", I don't see much point in wondering if "minimal" actually means a really long time, or if they're just flat-out lying, etc. But, you know, we've got to be realistic, too. Like with the whole "they keep lying about the big update!" shenanigans... the development team is not omniscient. They can only estimate things. With a lot of first-hand knowledge, granted. But, still. They can't even tell us right now that the game WILL release in winter of 2014. They're going to work on it until it's done, or until they absolutely cannot work on it anymore if it isn't quite done (if they were to run out of funding, for example). But, they don't know exactly what bugs and problems they're going to face in completing it, etc. They don't know exactly how many days it's going to take to get it to the point it should be for delivery. All they can do is be as accurate as possible. Just... if you don't like the amount of unknowns/risk with this idea (stretchgoals for more content), then don't like it. That's totally fine. No one's gonna attack you. But, 1,000 people in this thread all nitpicking and being like "Well, I'm interested, but is it going to take an extra week, or maybe an extra 2 weeks? I mean, if it's going to take an extra 2 weeks, then I'm totally against it. How much content are we talking, exactly? If you can't tell me exactly every detail of what's going to occur should this plan go into action, then I'm against it. But I'm actually kind of for it, so I kinda really want to know all the details, because if it turns out it was something I DO want, then I'll be mad if I just was against it because I didn't have precise knowledge of the plan."... It's a little much, really. Did people scrutinize the project this much when it was initially funded? They didn't even know HALF the stuff they were dealing with. Hell, this is their first time to use Unity (I think?) on a project, and they didn't even know many specifics on ANYthing, and yet we all gave them about 4 million dollars? And now, armed with even more accurate knowledge of what they can and cannot do in a given amount of time, with their own, hand-forged product, everyone's being awful demanding and particular about a simple "Hey, would you be interested in maybe providing more money for a little bundle of extra game we think would really top off this game?". We're all "WHOAH, how do you know that's a good amount? Are you adding 7 years worth of stuff? I need to know how much it is, and then judge, because I don't trust your judgment regarding your own handiwork, u_u..." I mean, is that not mildly silly? Is it really that strange for me to trust their assessment of "this would be good stuff to put in the game, and this wouldn't delay it much" over my own? Info would be welcome, as always. But I'm hardly going to demand to know how many brush strokes they're going to make, and exactly how many people they're going to need to pay to do all this, then determine myself whether or not they can do it in a feasible amount of time to produce minimal delay. I believe they're quite capable of determining such things in an intelligent fashion, then telling me what they've determined.

What exactly is the difference between just-plain-2D, and pre-rendered 3D? I mean, I know the plane of the ground exists in a 3D world, and the models and such are on top of that, in actual 3D gamespace. But, the environments are like 99.9% just one big 2D ground image, correct? So, does "pre-rendered 3D" just mean they actually created 3D trees and such, then flattened them into a 2D "snapshot" (for lack of a better word)? I mean, the result is actually still just a 2D image, right? In that video, Josh rotated the scene in Unity, and it was just a painted "ground" plane, and that's it. Except for a couple of other planes, like the waterfall, etc. (still 2D, just on a separate plane from the ground). I'm genuinely just asking, in case it sounds like I'm pulling a "I'm judging the fact that people are calling it that, because they shouldn't be" here. I'm just sincerely curious as to the details.

I think only the dev team can really answer that question objectively. I'm certainly open to the possibility that the game could benefit from more wilderness areas. As it's sort of like more quests, or more foes, or more weapon variety, or more locked things to unlock with the lockpicking skill. The lore calls for an awful lot of world, and the game certainly isn't going to represent every single traversable bit of terrain in the whole world. And yet, exploring that world is a part of the game. Granted, not every inch, but where can you really just draw the line and say "Yep, that's exactly how much area we should have to interact with, and have things occur in. Any less would be problematic, and any more would be problematic, u_u"? So, with my limited knowledge, I have to trust the devs' judgement in even considering "more wilderness areas" a feasible thing to potentially stretch-goal towards. As for companions, I could've sworn they specifically stated that 3 more companions would allow them to have one for every class in the game. That's not so much for replayability (although it would obviously offer it, I suppose, what with only being able to have 5 at any given time in your party), as is it, first and foremost, for first-playthrough variety. There won't be 3 classes that you can ONLY fill with your PC or a lifeless Adventurer's Hall Drone. There will be 3 more personality-ripe companions who actually affect your playthrough. One for each class. I think that's not an unreasonable goal. If these things are only going to be done once new stretch goals are met, and are only going to tack a couple of weeks or so onto the production timeline, then I'm all for them. If they're going to cost months, then I'm not for them. Or, if they were just considering doing this stuff without specifically meeting new funding stretch goals, I'd immediately say "no." But more funds = more manpower = more stuff in almost the same amount of time. And it doesn't seem like they just drew random additional content out of a hat. "More robots... annnnnd... more cheese items! Let's do it!" So, I'm all for it, given the circumstances and planning under which it will be executed.

We had a similar thread, but it seems to have sort of died off. So, instead of necro-ing a thread, I figured I'd just whip up a new one. This is for all those little ideas you get for things that could apply to P:E. Basically, not really super-in-depth discussion about how to design systems, or do things from the ground up, or whether or not to put in crafting, etc. Just various "I just happened to think of this" things. For instance, what I just thought of, whilst playing a game in which I ran into an "Investigate this area, and look for any clues to what happened/this person's whereabouts" situation, was this: How about having Perception (or perception-related skills/stats, abilites, etc.) affect your detection of clues in such a situation? The common thing I've seen is a big, blatant blood splotch on the terrain every 15 feet. And yet, people are all "Hmm... it's a mystery the details of what happened here. Who knows where this person might've been dragged off to?". So, what if your perceptive capabilities (your character's/party's, whatever) determined whether or not you find blood and/or other clues very close together, or very far apart? What I mean is, maybe you see blood, so you know to look generally in this direction. But then, there's not anything so blatant for another... I dunno.... 50ft? So, with good Perception, your character might notice broken branches/little bits of clothing, etc. You know... tracking-type clues. so, you'd say "Yep, they were here" about every 10 feet, because of your exceptional perception checks. But if you had crappy perception, you wouldn't be able to find any clues until the next big blatant one. Which, being decently far off, would have you actually searching around more before finding the exact trail something/someone took. This could work for blood, or really anything that would leave clues behind. And, obviously, some situations aren't going to be much of a mystery, and some situations are going to have easier-to-find clues than others. But, if there's any kind of Survival/Tracking-type skill at all in the game, or anything that could even partially cover that, I think it would be pretty great. Especially if there are going to be "Hey, I wonder what happened to this guy who went out into the woods" scenarios. Something a little more nuanced, instead of just "obviously there's a huge blood splotch on the ground every 10 feet... You can literally see like the next two, on the screen, within your sight range. No player would EVER not-know which way to go at ANY point in this entire 'search'." Please share your own miscellaneous ideas, as you think of them, and feel free to weigh in on individual ones. Although, if the discussion of a given idea gets pretty extensive, it'll probably be best to make a separate thread just for that idea/topic.

No, not currently, it would seem. As, once you finalize, you are no longer managing a pledge (because you can't anymore). That's what BAdler was trying to say, methinks. They're looking at allowing for add-ons as separate from the management process (which would, I think, mean that, even after you've finalized your pledge, you could go in and purchase add-ons, without actually having to add them on via pledge management.) So, hopefully in the near future? *fingers crossed* As to the second question, I'm afraid I do not know. 8(

What I'm passionate about is mutual understanding. I don't just say things because it's some kind of privilege for others to receive my thoughts. You presented your worries on the matter, and I presented reasons why I believe you needn't worry quite so much about it. Things I believed to be worth consideration, in case they were not being considered already. To boil it down, something along the lines of "Hey, trolls are actually less specific in established nature than you think; maybe look at a broader scope of troll lore, and re-consider your feelings on the current troll design." Now, you can either do that, or don't. Either is fine by me. If your response had been "Awesome, but here's why I still feel like it would be better to design the troll a different way, or not call it a troll," that would've been completely reasonable. It's not about you being wrong. But, instead, you argued against my very simple reasoning for encouraging a more open-minded approach to the matter. Which is just plain silly, to be honest. Open-mindedness is wrong? And somehow it's "blind acceptance"? That's kind of rude. I take the time to explain my perspective, and you call me out for arbitrarily holding such a perspective. Like I said, if you've misunderstood something I was saying, then I'll gladly attempt to make myself more clear. I'm not the master of communication or anything, so misunderstanding does not mean ignorance or stupidity has occurred, and it doesn't imply some superior intelligence on my part or anything. But, you either haven't misunderstood and can explain to me why you haven't (and why/how I, therefore, have), or you have misunderstood, and my clarification helped, or you can continue to seek understanding, or just give up. However, pretending I've just spent hours passionately arguing with you about troll design instead of attempting to achieve mutual understanding regarding our presented points is not very helpful. I have no intention of "winning" a troll design discussion with you. Never have I said you're wrong to frown upon the troll design. I've only pointed out that the scope and variety of troll lore in no way excludes the presented design from trolldom. Again, if you dislike it, then dislike it. But, an argument over whether or not it is or isn't a troll is fruitless. I'm not even arguing that it's blatantly a troll; that troll lore SPECIFICALLY says "the PoE screenshot is exactly what a troll looks like." Simply that lore is varietous enough to allow for a smaller, humanoid, nature-based creature. Especially when you mix in the fact that it's an original IP, and the design is only partially based directly on existing lore, etc. That was one of the reasons I used a demon as an example, so far up. A designer might look to the Bible, for example, for descriptions of demons. But, they're not going to just slap a Biblical demon into a game that isn't accurately depicting an exact replica of real-life Christianity and Biblical lore. So, they might still use the word "demon," and yet it could stray a decent bit from the actual descriptions of demons in the materials used for inspiration. I don't know how to make it any clearer, and I'm sorry if I somehow came across as simply challenging your opinion of the troll design. I don't mean this in a hostile fashion, but I really don't have anything else to say on the matter (and feel that further discussion, at least on my part, would approach thread derailment, making the topic more about clarification of my words than about actual troll design). But, I'll see you around, different perspective and all.

Personally, I'm going to make an Aumauan Monk at some point, and his special ability (role-played, of course) shall be called Hawaiian Punch.

From the previous page:

By that same token, a bunch of the stuff that's already on the "to be included/finished before release" isn't "critical" to the game itself, and therefore is simply delaying the game past some prior release date. I mean, it's completely understandable to not want further delay. Don't get me wrong. I just don't see adhering so strictly to a "well, let's just say if it's not really critical, it's probably unnecessary and shouldn't be added to the game" condition and calling it a day as being a very good idea. It's about cost-benefit. If they were to do stretch goals for this stuff, that implies that there would be certain additional-funding conditions that would need to be met for them to even BEGIN shooting for the extra content. Thus, most of the extra time of extra content could be mitigated by the use of that funding to procure extra manpower. I mean, if you suddenly have 2 environment artists instead of 1 (for example... I'm well aware they have more than 1 environment artist), then you're going to get 16 man-hours of environment art out of an 8-hour work day, instead of 8. So, like Josh said, adding stuff would require a little extra design time. But it's not like all the grunt work would just be tacked onto the end of the current production timeline. "Okay, once we've gotten the game to where it WOULD'VE been finished for release, let's start working on additional environments and companions! 8D!" So, back to cost-benefit, if the game takes 2 more weeks to iron out all the extra design stuff, for 3 more months' worth of environment and companion work to be added to the game (extra-funding-hired workers, churning out the stuffs after designs are ironed out, alongside current workers), then I'm all for it. Beyond that, there's nought left but preference. If you just plain don't want the game to be delayed any longer than it has to be, regardless of reasons or benefit (doesn't matter if the game were 1000% better, even), then that's a perfectly understandable desire. The line has to be drawn SOMEwhere, and maybe some people just want it to remain drawn where it is, on principle. That's fine. But, as far as all the worries over their delaying the game for minimal additions that won't really benefit the game much, I just don't think that's the case. It might've been in the Update 69 thread, but I think Brandon (or Adam?) already stated, in reference to this "Do you want more Stretch Goals?" question, that, if it was going to significantly delay the game's release (beyond just a wee, tiny extra bit of design ironing out...ing...?), they wouldn't even be considering it as an option. Basically, this isn't a poll about taking all the expansion development and mashing it into the current game's development timeline. It's a poll about things they would've liked to do already with the current game, but had to draw the line pretty much solely due to budget constraints. Again, why they're petitioning to do stretch goals, and not just "Hey, do you want us to tack more stuff onto the end of the timeline?"

I'm still not getting why everyone's perfectly fine with plain-and-simple finite hitpoints (in PoE's case, "Stamina"), so that if you can't kill stuff before everyone runs out of hitpoints, you just straight-up die/lose/HAVE to reload the game and try again. But then, you simply add in a "Hey, you're going to get all your hitpoints (again, "Stamina" in PoE terms) back approximately 4 times before you actually have to worry about dying! 8D!", and suddenly there's some giant issue. "OMG, why would you let me go beyond immediate-encounter hitpoint restrictions in such a nice fashion, and yet limit me eventually to some kind of 'you're going to have to go out of your way to heal some, or you're going to die' scenario? *GASP*" I just... I don't know. I'm not comprehending how that's not a paradox. Are people just looking at this in a vaccuum? Imagining some ridiculous scenarios that will somehow force them to begrudgingly run backwards (every single time, of course... it's somehow statistically impossible that you'll ever get low on health when you're near the "next" rest site) to campfires every 3 seconds, instead of just "Hey, you can only go so long before you're going to have to heal," which is true of almost any game in the entire universe that utilizes finite hitpoints? I have this feeling people are doing something like imagining BG, but without rest-anywhere capabilities. As if they're not building this game from the ground up around the very idea of Stamina, Health, and specified rest spots. And you're actually going to need Health every 3 fights, but the rest points are all going to be 17-fights apart.

I get it. I do. I know I'm being difficult. I'm not trying to say "Yeah, that's nice, but none of it makes any sense." It makes perfect sense, in the way that it does so. But, very much like your steps for roasting the marshmallow, if you JUST want to roast a marshmallow, you don't need 8 hours worth of firewood gathering/preparation. Again, I understand that it's a mental thing, and thus it has to do with rigorous mental stuff, and probably requires a lot of proper rest and alertness, etc. But, quite literally everything else in the universe is variable, while that still remains an 8-hour (plus 1-hour, which is less of a big deal) thing. How preposterous would you think it if a Fighter couldn't swing his sword unless he'd rested for 8 hours beforehand? Maybe he gets 10 sword swings per day, then, he's just incapable of swinging his sword. He must perform 8 hours worth of stretching exercises, then 15-minutes-to-an-hour (depending on how many times he wants to swing his sword that day) meditating with his sword. THEN he can perform any amount of sword-swinging, whereas before he could perform exactly none. He couldn't go in fighting and just suck. He couldn't have a -10 to his attack roll. He just couldn't even do anything. That's my sentiment with that whole 8-hours of sleep thing. If you want to prepare the spell Move A Bread Crumb One Inch, it's still SO complicated of a mental process that you need 8 entire hours of preparation before you can even BEGIN to prepare that actual spell. Or, you can prepare Merge All Planes Onto The Enemy's Face, and it takes the same amount of time. My line of thinking is... why WOULDN'T it take more time (regardless of how much... just relatively more) to prepare the latter than the former? Why am I not mentally capable of preparing a spell (not even doing anything magical yet... just mentally fixing a spell in my mind) until such a rigorous process, but I can cast it in like .000001 seconds? Those are questions I ask. And then I think, "Hmm... couldn't that have been done a little differently?" It's just so disconnected from everything else in the rules. Like they just thought "Hmm, we'd better make sure Wizards don't get to use their spells too often. How about they can only do it after they sleep? I mean that's something people'll be doing. Sleeping for like 8 hours, standard." Then they just rolled with it, and explained it with "because it's... uhhh... really really difficult to... uhh... study spells?" AKA, I don't think "yeah, it takes me like 8 hours to even be able to do ANYTHING remotely magical" is a very valuable asset to the lore, and there are 17 other ways of functionally accomplishing the very same level of control over Wizard spell-prep frequency/balance.