Ffordesoon

This is boring. I'm bored.

@J.E. Sawyer: If I may break away from the topic for the moment to show my appreciation, the level of reactivity you guys managed to cram into New Vegas under such tight restrictions was mind-boggling. I still get a big stupid grin on my face every time I think about the fact that you can talk your way into Benny's bed and slit his throat while he's asleep if you play as a woman and take the Black Widow perk. I actually reloaded the game and did the same thing again to be sure I wasn't hallucinating, because I could not believe I was being allowed that much choice in a modern voice-acted RPG. The level of choice there and in Alpha Protocol kind of spoiled other games for me. I'm happy to hear you guys have much more freedom on PE as well, but I just wanted to say how much I appreciated the attention you guys paid to that aspect of New Vegas in every aspect of the design. I realize it's early days right now, and this might not be an answerable question, but do you plan to have an equivalent level of player choice in PE? Perhaps even more? By which I mean all NPCs being killable, different world-states depending on player actions, multiple solutions to quests, et cetera? I don't want to rope you into promising anything you're not ready to commit to, but it'd be cool to know that's something on your minds.

@Kjaamor: Well, you're right that I am a PST fan, and I am as vulnerable as anyone to exaggeration in support of a cause I believe in. And in the absence of hard numbers, both of us are merely hazarding biased guesses. It is even true that positive impressions of the games as wholes color our views of the companions; I felt Dragon Age 2's companions were infinitely more interesting than those in the first game, but because they were a poorly-utilized part of such a tremendously disappointing whole, they are rarely afforded any praise whatsoever by players. And even the preceding sentence is a statement of opinion, as informed by what I would like to believe as what I have observed. It would be dishonest at best not to admit that I, like anyone, have certain biases. However, I think you underestimate how beloved Torment's companions are. Even leaving my personal feelings aside, I really do believe that while many would say BG2 is, on balance, the better game of the two, if you asked the backers of PE which game had the better companions, the winner by a wide margin would be PST. In any discussion of classic cRPGs, I have rarely heard any BG2 companion save Minsc cited as a genuinely great companion remotely as often as every companion in PST, and Morte and Fall-from-Grace in particular. Am I saying that's incontrovertible proof of my suspicions in re the nigh-universal praise PE's horde of backers would have for PST's companions? Hardly. But I am saying that I have observed an unambiguous bias toward PST's companions in the numerous discussions I have been privy to. Even your presumably lowballed sixty percent figure hands PST the decision in the end, which suggests to me that you are not as confident in BG2's chances as you claim. As for your claim that I wouldn't notice if the companions were not as deep as those in PST, I can see the truth in that statement, as far as it goes, but I will make the equally bold statement that it wouldn't matter if I and those like me didn't notice, because nine companions of comparable depth to PST's have already been promised by Obsidian. Any change in the number of companions now would, I promise you, result in many backers' bemoaning the consequent reduction in companion depth for years after the game's release, even if said reduction is entirely in our minds. If you doubt me, consider this: there are still people who say New Vegas was "incomplete" at release because they heard the developers speak after the fact about cut content that simply did not make it into the final build of the game. And these were not things that were promoted in any significant fashion prior to release! They were not "back of the box" features, and their removal was a deliberate creative decision on Obsidian's part. That doesn't matter to the people who call it "incomplete" (and I will stress that I am talking about people who specifically mean the game had content cut out of it in the same way that KOTOR 2 did, not people who are using "incomplete" when they mean "buggy and unpolished," which the game definitely was in many ways). Now imagine that some of those cut features were advertised heavily. Imagine they were central to the game's marketing campaign. Imagine that somebody put cash money down on a pre-order for the game on the strength of one of those cut features. Imagine the anger they would feel when the feature they bought the game for wasn't in it as advertised, even if that feature had only been slightly scaled back from its original implementation. That's the sort of thing we're talking about here. What could have been will always be more attractive to people than what is. Giving them any more fodder for rose-colored navel-gazing than they already possess is, from a marketing perspective, a Very Bad Idea. It inspires feelings of betrayal, and nobody turns all discussions into vicious donnybrooks more quickly than a fan who feels betrayed for a quasi-legitimate reason. The smart play is to deliver what was promised in the marketing above all else.

@Kjaamor: I can see your point, and I'm sorry you didn't care for PST's companions, but the fact is that if you polled all the backers, I would bet money on ninety percent of them or more having loved PST's companions to death. I would also be tremendously surprised if a company co-founded by Chris Avellone didn't employ a large number of PST fans. I don't remember the exact number of backers, and I'm too lazy to look it up right now, so let's make it easy and say there were sixty thousand. If I'm the head of the PE team, and (say) five hundred backers want more companions to choose from at any cost, and fifty-five thousand backers and most of my team members want PST-level (and perhaps PST-style, I really couldn't say) companions, and I've already agreed to put the Adventurer's Hall in and make no companion mandatory in deference to those five hundred people, why should I go against what both the vast majority of the backers and my team want in order to please a tiny slice of the, um, backer pie? (That was a dumb metaphor, yes. ) You see my point, surely? I hate to turn this into a pure numbers game and risk accusations of indulging in the argumentum ad populum fallacy, but it is simply not a fallacy in this case. From a purely utilitarian standpoint, attempting to please five hundred people out of sixty thousand is foolish, and attempting to please five hundred who already have systems in the game designed to cater to their needs is downright insane - especially when a sudden change in the production schedule like that one would delay the game for all backers. In an ideal world, Obsidian could make everyone equally happy at no additional cost, but you may have noticed in the course of your life up to now that the world we live in is by no means an ideal one. Barring any miraculous happenings during the course of production, which neither we nor the PE team should be planning for, every choice made during production is likely going to be a tradeoff, and we have to assume that it will always be one for even the simplest nips and tucks. While you might indeed be pleased as punch if you get twelve companions with reduced reactivity instead of nine at the currently proposed level of reactivity, a sizable number of backers would not be pleased at all, and even more (like myself) would be okay with the decision, but still quite disappointed. Would the benefit of that approach to you be worth the cost to us, in your opinion? And, nightmare of nightmares, what if you play the game and find all twelve companions do not suit your fancy? If the companions are truly PST-style (i.e. written in the same style as those in PST - which would be difficult, considering that Avellone wrote something like eighty percent of that game, and PE's companions are being written by a number of people, but it's a possibility) rather than PST-level (i.e. written in a variety of styles to suit every sort of player, but as reactive as the companions in PST), surely no arbitrary number of talking skulls and not-Scottish not-tieflings would be enough to satisfy you? That is a risk, however remote. How would you feel if that came to pass? I posit these scenarios and ask these questions not to make your desires seem less valid than mine, but because I want you to grasp why the change you are proposing is unlikely to occur. I'm not even saying you're necessarily wrong - I'd have to play two versions of Project Eternity from alternate universes to completion before I could confidently make that call. I'm only explaining why I believe Obsidian's current stance on the issue is a sensible one.

@Nonek: I'm the one who should apologize. I failed to make clear that the latter half of the post you quoted (the angry-sounding part) was a belated response to Chrononaut's posts a few pages back. Your attitude, I have no problem with. The part before I get all sweary was the one directed at you. As to your point about the Outdoorsman skill, I agree that it on its own is not game-breaking. There are probably better examples, even in Fallout itself (having to abruptly switch from building your Guns skill to building your Energy Weapons skill halfway through the game is another good example of an imbalance that only makes itself clear through play). It's just that Outdoorsman is famously useless, and most people here have probably played Fallout at least once, so it's an example that makes sense to people. I could have also mentioned Charisma, which is pointless if you play as a "good" character and virtually useless if you play as a character who's "bad" enough. But reading the manual (which I always do, particularly if I'm about to start playing a classic computer game - not just because it's good standard practice, but because I like the old manuals and their focus on being enjoyable reads) does not tell you that Outdoorsman is going to be essentially useless. I've copied the description straight from my PDF of the manual to show you what I mean: Now, if you can intuit what on God's green earth that description means in game terms without looking it up on the Fallout wiki, you clearly possess precognitive powers of some sort, because all I see is an entertaining description followed by the formula used for calculating the percentage - which would be very nice, if it was at all clear what the skill actually did. My point: sometimes those old manuals, despite being tremendously fun to read, can nevertheless be misleading. As such, solving the puzzle of the character creation screen is not always a matter of simply reading the manual. That's all I'm saying. Again, I apologize for not making it clear that I wasn't yelling at you in the latter half of my post. My bad. EDIT: @Agris: Oh, nobody's saying it can't be complex! I'd be very disappointed indeed if it weren't! My only point is that a meaty, complex character creation system doesn't have to be (and, in my opinion, shouldn't be) a battle of wits between player and designer. But I absolutely want the people who like to "go deep" during character creation to be able to do so.

@Agris: You wanna know what? I totally disagree, but that's the first post bemoaning the attribute system I've seen in this thread that I feel is well-argued. You explained the appeal of potentially making a "bad" character in a way I could understand, and you did so without belittling those who feel otherwise or acting as if your preference is an objective reality all must accept. Kudos. Seriously. And, for what it's worth, although I disagree with your ultimate conclusion, I do actually think you're onto something with the "optimization problem" idea. I think that certain players (the math-oriented ones especially) really like the feeling of superiority over others they get when they create a well-optimized build, and don't quite grasp why others don't feel the same way about it. They see it as an element of the game they enjoy being removed, and they don't see the value in the system replacing it. To them, knowing how to make a good character is a skill that should be necessary for all cRPG players, and those who - in their minds - "refuse" to learn that skill should be "punished" with inferior builds. If you'll permit me to take some folks to task, the problem with that idea is simple: it is necessarily elitist, and that sort of "you must know the secret handshake" elitism among core genre advocates is not conducive to the growth of the genre. It is not conducive to growing the market. I recognize that many of you view "growing the market" a necessary evil at best, but you must consider the secondary and tertiary effects of a static market. No growth in the market means little to no room for experimentation with the "old-school cRPG" format. No room for experimentation means the genre doesn't evolve - and I mean really evolve, not "be more like action games for Call of Duty monies" evolve. Do you really want "Be exactly like this old game I enjoyed to the point of replicating its flaws which I myself have complained about!" to be the outer limit of cRPG developers' ambitions? At the end of the day, if you truly care about the continued health of the classical cRPG, you gotta let newcomers into the clubhouse. That means sacrificing at the altar of progress a few mechanics that result in a demonstrably worse experience for ninety percent of players and a small ego boost for ten percent of them. And yes, it is absolutely about ego to some degree. Maybe not a lot, and maybe not for everyone, but it is. I hear many people on the "bad build" side of the fence also decrying "player ego-stroking." That cuts both ways. Just as excessively egalitarian computer role-playing systems (your Mass Effects, your Skyrims) result in bland but playable generalist builds for every player, excessively meritocratic computer role-playing systems tend to result in bland but playable well-optimized specialist builds and a ton of suboptimal builds that range from kind of crappy in most situations to downright unplayable. Is the boost to your ego you get from crafting a well-optimized build really worth turning off players who crave a meatier cRPG experience than what's out there now, but aren't D&D lifers? Because it's hypocritical in the extreme to hate on "ego-stroking" and then turn around and complain that character creation should be an inscrutable puzzle that only the "wisest" (read: random people who are the best at intuiting developer whims and word choices) among us should be able to solve. "Stroke me, I'm the bestest ego of all!" is just as bad as "Stroke all the egos!"

What are they not doing that's important for an IE-style game? They're making an isometric party-based RTwP cRPG with a high level of reactivity to player actions, a class-based character creation system with a ton of classes that play very differently, deep tactical combat, (presumably) great writing, a rest system, dungeons with puzzles, traps, and combat, a PC-driven narrative with large and small hubs full of quests and secrets, companions who aren't forced on you but all have arcs and quests to unpack if you so desire... I mean, if it's not an IE-style game, it's some sort of super-IE game with all of the benefits and none of the flaws. Just because they've taken out some D&D mechanics that I've never seen any remotely positive argument for beyond "LOL CASUALS" doesn't mean the game as a whole is not clearly taking quite heavily from the IE games. They're just, you know, making a spiritual successor to them, meaning that they are carrying on the games' spirit without feeling unduly beholden to mechanics that have outlived their usefulness and are celebrated only out of nostalgia. Personally, I think that if your only argument in favor of a given mechanic that doesn't rely on pure nostalgia or mismanaged expectations is "I always got by just fine with this system, therefore I'm smart and people who don't like it are dumb," that does not acquit the mechanic. All it does is make you sound like a jerk.

I started both DA games on Normal, and switched to Casual before the end in both. Not because I was having a difficult time with the fights, but because the difficulty was almost entirely attrition-based, and that's the most boring sort of RPG design imaginable. I should be intellectually engaged at any given moment during combat; the DA games both fail utterly at this.

Ugh, this always bugs me. NPC Merchant: "How art thou, o virile fellow! Might I interest you in wares procured from the four corners of the world? Poultices brewed in the forests of Jikabo? Deadly venoms extracted from the Veryllian Leaping Platypus? Perhaps a refreshing box of spicelick shavings scraped from the shores off Volteus Harbor? What can I interest you in, my young friend?" 1. "What do you have for sale?" 2. "I have items to sell you." 3. "Bye." I know I'm not supposed to care what it says, but when I pick 3 after that long spiel, I feel like such a jerk. I'd rather it said "Say your goodbyes" or something equally nondescript so I could imagine my character extricating herself in a polite way.

Not true. The manual tells you what a skill is supposed to do, not how it actually shakes out in gameplay. Look at Fallout. If you've never played it, and therefore have no idea what's already in the game, Outdoorsman might sound like the perfect thing to put a bunch of points into. Then you play the game, and it barely affects anything, and you've sunk precious points into an essentially useless ability. To someone who's never played Fallout before, Outdoorsman has just as much of a chance of being useful as Guns and Energy Weapons. Yes, you could ask someone who knows what the viable builds are, but that's no fun, and it limits what character concepts you can actually play without worrying about going back to the beginning. And yes, starting over until you figure out which classes are viable by arsing around with numbers is bull****, and I don't care what anyone says. If you like starting over as different builds before you find the one you like, more power to you, but it should be a literal choice between which build you like playing the most, not a question of which will be the key that opens the game's lock. You should be thinking, "Hmm, well, I really like being able to dodge stuff and pick locks, so I might take the Rogue. On the other hand, I'm controlling a party, so the Paladin's group inspiration mechanics might offer a nice buff to total party effectiveness, even if I'm not too keen on roleplaying a Paladin." Et cetera. Isn't "What will I like the most?" a better question to be asking than "What will I hate the least?" If trying every key on a keyring until you find one that fits sounds like a good time to you, well, bully for you, but I don't think games - casual or hardcore (which is a false if occasionally useful distinction anyway) - should be made to cater to the five people who think that not being able to get into their house is an enjoyable pastime. The rest of us would like to enter our houses and get on with our days, thanks.

Monte Cook's outright admitted that he hates beginner's traps and that they put too many of them in 3 and 3.5. I'll restate my refrain: the character creation screen shouldn't be the game's first puzzle.

The difference is that PE was sold to us as a successor to Infinity Engine games, four of which used AD&D 2E and the other using 3E. If not a D&D style system, what else is an "IE-like" game about? Would you say the only thing Obsidian meant by "IE-like" is isometric perspective? That's it? They namedropped BG, PST and IWD and yet the only influence this game seems to be taking from those games is completely cosmetic? If I knew OE was going to run in the completely opposite direction the second the KS ended, and make decision after decision which did nothing but distance themselves from making a computer ruleset which emulated D&D, instead of a system which draws it's gameplay influences from MMOs, MOBAs and RTSs, if I knew that now I would have never contributed. I find it completely dishonest that OE are just going about developing a game which from all updates about it's mechanics will play nothing like BG or IWD (it's not even round-based where each character as a "turn" of six-seconds FFS!), they are just keeping the cosmetic trappings of IE while making a party-based Diablo. It's a bit different say from InXile making Wasteland 2 and using THE EXACT SAME ruleset which tweaks in order to be loyal to the fans. cRPG fans who act as though everything beyond the character creation screen in cRPGs is "cosmetic" and therefore meaningless always baffle me. That's not even an insult. I literally just do not get it. It's like putting down a novel because you don't like the font, to me. The meaningful part of a creative work is the content, not the form that content takes. (And I'm sure there's someone angrily typing "MARSHALL MCLUHAN, MOTHERF***ER!" at me right now, to which I would say, "Yeah, but you see my point, surely?" )

So you can't comprehend why someone would be alright with that system (which may or may not be in PE), but you can comprehend the intricacies of that system before they're announced? I love the fact that a modicum of empathy is the deciding factor between what you can comprehend and what you can't. It's almost as if you are not actually precognitive!

@Jethro: Well said. However, you should be aware that this is the nature of online fandom in all its various guises. Every new tidbit of information the creators deign to share with the fans is the apocalypse until it isn't. The best way to manage the cacophony is to wait for it to die down, then collate the useful bits of data from all the noise. Because none of these people will care about this by the time PE comes out, but they will care if it sucks.

AHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA That may seriously be the craziest thing you have ever posted. Slow clap.

I think it sounds lovely. "Gamey" or not, I've always said that there should be no "correct" options on the character creation screen. Some people say that reduces the number of potential builds, and they're not wrong, but if the builds aren't viable (for "viable," read: can get to the end of the main quest and see an ending), there's no point putting them in the game in the first place. That said, I do hope there will be serious advantages and disadvantages to every build. But that desn't necessarily have to be reinforced solely through attributes. In fact, that's a pretty annoying way to do it, IMHO, because there's often a discrepancy between the effect attributes say they have on gameplay and the effects they actually have. Say I'm a player who knows nothing about D&D except that there are probably some dungeons and at least a few dragons in it. If a game is a pure dungeon crawler with the traditional D&D attributes, and I put a bunch of points in CHA, shame on me, right? No. Because the inclusion of CHA as a statistic in a pure dungeon crawler makes no damn sense unless the scenario the game designers have prepared allows me to be a charismatic MF so often that they'd have to include it. That's what I, as a player, am thinking at the character creation screen. And then I get into the game, and it's really f**king hard from the opening on. Now, some players would have a problem with that, but I don't, necessarily. Just because I know nothing about D&D doesn't mean I can't reasonably assume picking CHA as my main attribute is going to make the combat harder for me. Let's say I manage to cheese my way through the game, slowly but surely, until I reach the end credits. It might be a fun game, but I'm disappointed, because there was maybe one token CHA check that didn't really affect anything. (Side note: Yes, I'm aware that fits my definition of a "viable" build, but it's on the borderline, and the point of this example is not about the viability of my build, but the dishonestly of including an attribute that might as well not exist in the game.) Sure, you could argue that the developers might have had their hands tied by WotC, or that it's tradition to have CHA in D&D games, or that I could have roleplayed the charismatic character in my head rather than waiting for a mechanical acknowledgement of my choice, blah blah you all know the standard arguments blah. I should not need to know any of that stuff. What I know is that I wanted to play a charismatic character, that the game acted like I could, and that that implicit promise was ultimately a lie. Much better to, say, create a list of disadvantages the player can take in exchange for more attribute points, or force the player to take a disadvantage for every advantage she takes, or whatever. That creates an interesting choice that isn't dishonest.

What if I told you.... I actually often like the companions I get first and 90% of the characters you mentioend I don't really like? If you told me that, I would say, "Um, okay." I find that people tend to dislike the companions they get first, but I'm not saying everybody does. It's just something I've noticed. I have not forced everyone I know to take exhaustive surveys about which companions they liked and which companions they didn't. I'm not in any way suggesting it's the Only Logical Conclusion. If it came across that way, I apologize. I was thinking out loud more than anything. Which always seems to get people hacked off at me for some reason I can't quite fathom. They seem to have this idea that I am making pronouncements from atop a hill, when all I'm really doing is examining ideas in public and seeing if I hit on something worth exploring. Maybe it's the lack of what they percieve as direct engagement with their points that annoys them? I dunno. :/ @Micamo: I suppose. I think there's something to the idea I proffered, but you're not wrong either. The extent to which I'd say there's a genuine difference between Western and Japanese (and I very deliberately did not say Western and Eastern, because the design and stylistic choices I'm talking about are largely specific to Japanese RPGs, and because I don't have much knowledge of RPGs from elsewhere in Asia or the Middle East, and the ones I do have knowledge of have a noticeably different sensibility to them) RPGs has as much to do with the commercial realities of the Western market as it does Western design sensibilities. I think there's a conscious desire to not "waste the player's time" in WRPGs, especially modern console-centric ones, and while I think that desire is often a noble one, there's a certain artfulness in the methodical pacing of Japanese RPGs (and, indeed, Japanese games in general - at least, when they're not trying to be "Western") that Western RPGs (and Western games) have sort of lost. You are correct that what I was talking about in the previous post is as much about pacing as it is NPC dialogue. My point, as obtuse as it probably was, is that it is easier to buy into a world in which not everything is about making the player happy. I've seen many here express similar sentiments, though taking the rhetorically circuitous route to that point seems to have been a poor choice. Coming back to Persona 4, I don't think that game would be nearly as good as it is if it was paced any differently. The time the player puts into getting to know the town of Inaba and its inhabitants allows the player to form a strong bond with the fiction. The plot alone might be interesting and enjoyable, but it wouldn't be half the game it is if all the days that weren't "plot-relevant" were removed. It's because so many days are comparatively insignificant that the plot-relevant days have the impact they do. I think it would be very difficult for a Western team to make the same game (or, if you like, a Western equivalent, since P4 is pretty steeped in Japanese culture), especially if they didn't have the precedent of Persona 4 to follow. They would have to be indie, and might not be able to raise funds on Kickstarter - not without a lot of work ahead of time, at least. It'd be a damn miracle if they succeeded at it despite being funded by a publisher in the current market. Which is not to suggest that it would be any easier to get something like it made in the current Japanese market, but it is at least a proven formula there. Some people might read this as "Project Eternity should be like Persona 4." That's not true of this post or the previous one. I want both games to do what is uniquely their thing as well as they can do it. I'm suggesting Persona 4 as a possible source of inspiration, not something to copy. I am as against homogenization as anyone here. What I'm talking about in these posts are the benefits of an approach to design that is often criticized as "counterintuitive" and "backward" - and not always without cause, to be sure. But there's a focus on rewarding patience and creating an atmosphere in many Japanese games that many Western developers either forget entirely or attempt to monetize, and my point is that underestimating the player's attention span - and forgetting that there is occasionaly value in overestimating it - can be a mistake.

This is one of a few areas where Western RPGs can learn from JRPGs. I know that sounds weird, but I'm not saying you should just be able to get one line out of a dude standing in one spot with no variation. I'm saying that while I love having the level of choice in conversation that Western RPGs provide, there are far too many characters who are just there to make the gameworld feel populated, but don't add anything unique to the table. As inane as most JRPG "conversations" (which aren't real conversations most of the time, since you're mainly just advancing through speech bubbles of characters talking at you rather than bringing anything of your own to the table), they rarely populate the world with junk NPCs who all say the same five things. If you look at, say, Persona 4 Golden, there are like three or four NPC models for about eighty NPCs, and only a few of them move, usually in a straight line. But, because of the way dialogue is structured, each of them comes to feel like a character in his or her own right. And a lot of that is due to exactly the sort of small talk the OP describes. The lady outside the PC's house during the day who struggles to get her mother-in-law to like her cooking is completely pointless from a pure gameplay perspective. I think she does maybe one thing that's vaguely relevant to helping your character? Maybe? But she feels more vividly drawn than any NPC in Skyrim, and all of the non-voiced NPCs in Fallout, give or take a couple. Because she has a little story arc that plays out over the course of the game, one that is beautifully irrelevant to the overarching narrative. Her mother-in-law never becomes a monster, and it's never revealed that the food is mind-control food or something. There's just this lady, completely oblivious to your wants amd needs, yammering on about the most boring subject imaginable. And yet, if you follow along with her little story to the very end, when she tells you her mother-in-law finally liked something she cooked near the end of the game, you're genuinely happy for her. This is a character who I'm pretty sure has not one frame of animation. She is literally just a character model. But she (and, to be clear, all the other unvoiced, unnamed characters playing out their own little stories while you're doing Important Work) is a unique character with her own wants and needs, and those wants and needs are entirely separate from the protagonist's. Contrast that with the hundreds of generic NPCs that populate Oblivion or Skyrim (which at least did a slightly better job with them in that their lines were separated by region and/or occupation), who mostly exist in a bubble and occasionally talk to each other about a few generic subjects per region, all of which are of interest to the player. Persona 4 has a tiny number of locations you can go to and characters you can talk to, and Golden only adds a couple. But because there are no NPCs that are obviously there to dispense quests, and because many of them literally will not dispense quests until you get to know them a little better, even when they give you quests to complete, it's like, "Oh, what's the problem, dude?" rather than "GIMME GIMME GIMME COME ON SHUTUPSHUTUPSHUTUP I WANT DAT XP SON." I think this is also why the NPCs in the Souls games are so beloved and memorable, beyond just being deeply weird characters; anything you get out of them must be extracted from them at their pace rather than yours, which forces you to get to know them. Torment, as much as it does suffer from generic-NPC-itis, is still probably the closest I've seen a Western RPG get to the idea of interesting characters who don't immediately proffer an explanation of who they are, what they do, and why you should care - which, oddly, seems to be the secret, or a secret, to getting players to care. If you look at the lists of the most popular characters in almost any given RPG series, Western or Japanese, they're always the ones who don't proffer information about themselves freely. Yes, even in Bioware games: HK-47, Tali (she does give you information freely, actually, but they got away with it by putting her face behind a mask), Death's Hand, Thane Krios, Jolee Bindo, Shale, Sten, Morrigan, Legion, Mordin Solus... It also might be why the companions nobody likes in any RPG tend to be the ones you get first. (One-sentence rant, BTW: If I never, ever play another RPG where my first party member is the Chirpy Childhood BFF/Most Likely Love Interest/Imoen, it will be too soon.) Actually, it's why companions are so popular in the first place, isn't it? Because you have to put work into getting to know them before you benefit from their full power. I don't know that every character in PE should be an evasive jerk or anything, but I would like to see a mix of straightforward characters ("HOW 'BOUT THEM DRAGONS, HUH?"), characters who are evasive until you get to know them ("We can talk... but not about me."), and characters who never entirely give up the goods ("A lady must have her secrets."). I do like the idea of a "small talk" option as well. Maybe that could work a bit like a JRPG conversation, where you just hit small talk and find out a little tidbit of information about them.

Normal. May use Expert mode, with a few tweaks. I'm OCD as all hell in RPGs, so I'll want the waypoint markers just to know where not to go until I'm ready to move on. Any extra systems I have to manage, though? Fantastic. Love it.

Honestly, unless especially low and/or especially high intelligence results in a substantially different game than a playthrough with average intelligence, I find the stat essentially worthless for cRPGs - especially when there's also Wisdom and Charisma, which together cover everything Intelligence tends to cover in most cRPGs. It's a good stat for PnP, because it can have an enjoyable effect on roleplaying, but it tends to feel redundant in a game where Ugg the Skullcrusher, a barbarian with 3 INT, still speaks in complete and grammatically correct sentences. Not to mention that it's tremendously difficult to write super-intelligent characters well without having them come across as either wise or charismatic, especially in fantasy worlds, where the science is necessarily false.

Hopefully, it'll be as "finished" in beta as KOTOR 2 was on release.

There are games in which item durability makes sense. PE does not strike me as one of them. It seemed to me a bit of tedious busywork with no real experiential benefit. It wouldn't have necessarily made the game worse (implementation is everything), but I don't see how it would be better, either. It's just another thing to spend resources/money on, and not a particularly interesting one at that.

A friend of mine once argued that a good ending is one that answers the central question posed by the story. I tend to agree with that, more or less. Crap example: in a romantic comedy about a shoe salesman named Dan and a secretary at a shoe factory named Misha who meet-cute in some cloying/adorable way, the question at the heart of the story is "Can Dan and Misha find love and happiness in each other's arms?" If they can, and the author answered the question honestly and without betraying the audience's trust, that's the ending. If they can't, and the author answered the question honestly and without betraying the audience's trust, then that's the ending. Not that that necessarily works well for games, but I do think it's an interesting point.

That may be true, but it's also irrelevant to the argument. The point is not that it is objectively better to go for quality over quantity, but that it is more efficient for Obsidian to do so given their relatively small budget. I'm sure everyone involved in this project would love to have a hundred companion NPCs with the depth of the nine we're getting - I certainly would. But that is impossible, whether or not we like it, because Obsidian does not have infinite money and infinite time. Nine fleshed-out companions (give or take a couple) are all the developers have time and money for. That is a fact. The creation of each of those companions takes a substantial amount of time and money, because the small group of people making PE are human beings, and thus have to eat and sleep and perform other tasks necessary to ensure that they and those around them do not, you know, keel over dead. Ensuring their continued survival takes money and time. The whole point of raising the money on Kickstarter was to give the people working on the game the financial security to work on a project that is not safe and AAA-friendly. And those people have looked at the amount of money we gave them and said that for that amount of money, they can produce nine PST-level (not necessarily PST-style, but with an amount of mechanical and narrative depth greater than or equal to PST's companions) companions. Which means - assuming that estimate is absolutely dead-on and nothing bad happens during development and all the other qualifiers in the world - that if they created eighteen companions instead of nine, those companions would be half as deep as the nine we're getting. If they created thirty-six, they would be a quarter as deep. If seventy-two, an eighth. You presumably see the problem. Those of us who like deep, reactive, well-developed, PST-level companions - which is, I'd wager, quite a lot of us, and certainly more than a few of us - are essentially screwed if the number of companions goes up much higher than it already is. Assuming the PE team's estimate is correct, anyway. Now, there are some players who don't like companions in the first place. They believe that the Icewind Dale model in which the player creates the party is a superior one. There are other players who simply will not like a single one of the prewritten companions, even though they do like companions. Obsidian cannot entirely satisfy the second group, because that would require more money and time than they have, but they can at least placate that group while satisfying the first by making all companions skippable and allowing the player to roll up his or her own party at the Adventurer's Hall instead. Which also has the nifty side effect of not forcing you to take companions you don't like with you on adventures, thus satisfying those who choose to take companions with them based on personality rather than stats. From an efficiency standpoint, the Adventurer's Hall is a genius idea; it satisfies the needs of multiple types of players while not costing a whole lot to implement. It isn't a perfect solution to every player's problem, but nothing is. But there is no way you will get more prewritten companions with all the depth of the promised nine (heh, "The Promised Nine" sounds like the name of a fantasy novel) unless the Eternity team cuts a feature. Which they may, as game development is not an exact science, but they seem to be sticking to the plan so far. The above may or may not look like six posts awkwardly mashed into one, but I am very very tired now and as such refuse to edit it. So be glad you got a succinct response to your post along with a load of rambling nonsense. I could have just written the nonsense, you know.

It's entirely possible to employ the best game writers in the world and still have a crap ending, for any number of reasons. See also: KOTOR 2, NWN 2 OC. That's not to say that good writers aren't an important part of the process, but they're still just a part.