Cubiq

Oh yeah one thing i would like to know, will the money from pledge rewards be included in the stretch goals, or will this be funded with only donations? If you add a stretch goal and i bought a beta key after, will that get funded?

If you can make a better game with more content by me donating some more money, yeah i'm game. I think it's going to get delayed anyway so i'm not really bothered about the release date.

Interesting, just what i wanted to know. I guess i'll wait a few days to decide if i want to add additional addons before finalizing my pledge.

I have a question about the pledges. If i finalize my pledge now and confirm my rewards, will i be able to add and buy additional rewards to my accounts in perhaps 2 days? Or do you get only 1 shot at this and after that it's locked?

I did not read the whole thread but from reading some posts, i get the feeling that some people are saying that because the troll doesn't have to have a typical lore concept that they can look like anything they want without any measure of whether the design is good or bad. I disagree and i believe the Eternity Trolls are badly designed/presented inside the environment they are in. I have no comment regarding the concept design that was presented in 2d to the 3d artists, but the 3d model created from it lacks distinctiveness or any special interest (or shall we say that they are really hard to notice). They have no distinctive shape. They look like hunched humans if you squint your eyes and you can barely spot the horns. The difference caused by contrast whether in light, color or shape is the basics of art theory. The eye is always drawn to these points of interests; and they are called points of interests because they cause interest in humans. Pretty much every concept artist will teach you that the silhouette is the most important thing for character identification or action recognition, especially if they are far away. The silhouette can be defined by any of 3 those things (and probably something else i forgot) and i think none of them defines the Troll specifically. The values are obviously very similar to other monsters/characters because of the lighting, the color makes them blend in to the environment nicely which is a step toward intended realism they are going for, so the only thing that it can have going for them is shape. This was posted in the official "ART!" thread where the screenshots were shown that gives a great explanation http://media.steampowered.com/apps/dota2/workshop/Dota2CharacterArtGuide.pdf Yes making an interesting design/silhouette with realistic proportions is a very very very hard thing and no one said it was easy. However i don't think it's wrong for me to point out it feels lacking, simply because that is the concept path they decided to go down with. It would be a lot easier for 3d artists if the 2d troll concept had disproportioned arms or legs. Now you can argue that they don't have to stand out for some reason, but for a personificated objected, that's simply a bad design (successful games will prove that). They are supposedly living beings that are out to attack you (or maybe even talk to you) and you want people to connect to them and for that you have make them interesting, that's pretty much every concept artist's goal. You already have plenty of uninteresting objects that blend in the background (terrain). Unless the whole point of those Trolls, Obsidian is making, is that they are inconspicuous or camouflaged, people will simply not find them interesting as a stand alone monster because there is nothing much distinctive about them from the isometric view we are looking at. Perhaps adding a 2d painting or a 3d blown up model to view on demand in game, where the player could see the creature up close to more easily imagine and connect with it next time they face it, would help. Maybe them having a distinct animation and how they behave will make them more interesting, however they are fighting an uphill battle with that 3d shaped silhouette.

Hahaha you have to admit the news was pretty late. This is what i imagine the developers were thinking when they were deciding when to tell everyone about the bad news.

I was kind of really hoping that obsidian would be able to add such dynamic lighting to eternity maps, where you would be able to have mornings or evenings looking like that, since i presume there will be day/night cycle. But you can't do that with 2d images as far as i know. What a shame.

Ohh i was wondering what happened to the game, since i saw it on Gamespot last year. I didn't know it turned to kickstarter. Once i get home i'll check the alpha demo and probably back it.

I don't think that's what he was getting at, i think he was bashing both screenshots, as the one in bg1 are also pretty small, they look like small trees you would usually see in orchard, not the overgrown ones you usually see in a forest. Though i don't really mind much

I'm actually glad there won't be full voice acting, because the content is then limited to voice acting budget. Which can get pretty huge depending on the number of people you employ. I can't confirm if the numbers are accurate since I didn't get them from their official report, but Mass effect 2 supposedly had 450,000 words recorded +maybe another 50k that wasn't recorded (and I think I'm being generous) while Baldur's gate 2 had 1.2 million written words. And you usually end up with a game that reuses the voice actors for different characters, and you end up with a game like Skyrim where every faction guard or child has a single voice actor, which completely breaks the experience.

As far as the maps being void of interesting things, i don't think we are seeing the whole map, just a part of it. If you compare the size of IE games outdoor maps to this, i think the size difference is about 1:6 the least.

I can bet you it won't catch on. It's a huched humanoid with horns. If you squint your eyes you could actually mistake them for humans. The concept on paper the artist drew might looks super awesome but the 3d siluet show here looks indistinctive. There are more interesting interpretations of trolls out there.

I agree i think i would prefer trolls bigger. Infact because they are such common lore creature they should be made a lot more menacing to make them stand out more, pehaps making them as big as Ettin in bg2 underwater city pit fight. The Witcher 2 trolls were a nice example. When you met them you went ohhh shi....

I prefer the left one, because you slightly lowered the value (light) of the trolls which lowered the contrast even more between them and the grass. I think they are harder to spot on the right one than on the left.

I'm actually really impressed with the concepts forest shrine. It may looks simple but i really get the feel that it doesn't look forced at all and feels really natural.

Oh so that's how we will be able to upgrade the backer rewards, maybe i can buy a beta key...

I don't really mind if the map looks like that, but we did reach the stretch goal of having 2 major cities, and i hope one of them isn't the upper left that looks more like a village.

He was jokingly bragging that, that is the right way to play it. And that everyone else who doesn't do it is a pleb. (i added the last bit ) But i got the feeling he was starting being serious, after he said that if we don't like it we should have to rely on mods. Which is a strange statement to say for a joke....

OK so we will be able to turn off indications on what type of answer we will give, that's good. I just hope it won't come down to every conversation having only 3 answers 1 for Hateful 1 for kind and 1 for clever. I hope there will be multiple agressive and multiple clever lines that give you more or less points towards the personality you chose, like in IE games, and not like in Mass effect.

Ok i didn't actually check but i'm assuming the Torment: Tides of Numenera shares the world with Planscape: Torment right? From what i saw the concept looks very similar. And i wanted to say i never liked the concept or lore of the Planscape: Torment, therefore i am sad that more people supported Torment: Tides of Numenera. If it's not the same world, then nevermind.

yeah sorry bout that.

Wow, Torment actually got more backers than eternety project. I'm a bit sad that more people were interested in it than eternety, because for some reason i never liked the concept or lore of the Torment world.

just a thought.. perhaps making metal armor just a bit brighter/shinier would help create a higher contrast between clothes and armor on people, and should help distinguish a bit more between less armored and more armored characters?

So it's going to be like in the 3rd edition rule set in Nwn and Iwd2? Can't say i'm a fan of that mechanic. The dificuly level of traps/locks you encountered during playthrough were on a skill level intended for rogues. You usually had trouble with locks or traps if some other class tried to put points in to it that they weren't proficient with.

Not really, if you play by your own rules, there's no "knowledge" that you can reload. As i mentioned in the post above, i'm currently playing BG2 that way atm. No reloads unless a bug. On my 5th playthrough atm. Plus there's the issue in IronMan, if a bug kills you, you're screwed. ooor they could make it for everyone, make more money, and people like us have the choice to play the way we want without any need for mods.