anameforobsidian

Yeah, especially considering the rave reviews D:OS is getting. People will compare them unfavorably regardless of PE's quality if the price is higher. I see your analogy but you are wrong. In example 1 where Obsidian just had 4 mil and they self fund they then get their 95k sales and boom.... they have their 4 mil back and can self fund again or go to kickstarter for the money and just have 4 mil in the till. In example 2 they had 0, we gave them 4 mil to make Eternity, then they get no sales so they are now back at 0 and either have to go to kickstarter again or lay people off and have nothing in the till and significantly fewer options on how to proceed. You see the key difference is in Example 1 the balance sheet is 4 mil and no one is in danger of losing their job. In example 2 the balance sheet is 0. Sorry, you're right that the two weren't quite equivalent. Although, their balance sheet does hit zero (or the limit thereof) right before the game launches in the first example, and people are in danger of losing their jobs if it doesn't sell. So what if Obsidian had 4 million in the bank, raised 4 million from kickstarter, and spent all the kickstarter money and no one bought it? The relationship of the change is the same. Sales can just be seen as deferred kickstarter pledges and vice versa. I wasn't going to bring this up, but the fact that, when I went to Obsidian, people were thanking me for giving them the ability to keep their jobs (which, by the way, is something I will never forget), it kind of proves that this is not a matter of "oh, they already have $4m in sales". They do already have $4.5m(ish) in income, and the money from those sales allowed a substantial portion of the company to keep operating for two years, thus letting people keep their jobs. The fact that it was important to them and to you has no bearing on the balance sheet; income is income.

Exactly. I'm getting rather tired of people going "but the law says this". It's the same thing as people going "but the dictionary says this" when using stupid phrases like cancer and rape to describe things that are nowhere near context. I don't think using rape out of context is the same thing as using tax law to define what a purchase is. That sounds like a false equivalency. Although, wouldn't you use a dictionary to define things?

Think about it this way. Let's say Obsidian had $4m sitting in the vault and they fund the creation of this game themselves. When the game releases their balance books show -$4.5m. The game sells 95k copies for $60 on steam, their balance books now show 0. Now, let's say Obsidian had $0 in their bank account. They do a kickstarter campaign and 74k backers give them $4m in funds. The spend it all developing the game, but they finish the game and release it to their backers. No one else buys it. Their balance books now show 0. From the basic accounting standpoint there is no difference between the kickstarter pledge and the purchase. Each pledge or purchase is a credit / income; each expense during development is a debit.

A horrific truth of Kickstarter is that each of your backers that pledged to a reward tier equals a sales loss. There's a bunch of problems with a statement that absolute. 1. A kickstarter pledge is a sale. What? No. Yes. At least according to US Federal tax law, and state sales tax law. It's a sale made before the game is made rather than after the game is made with little guarantees that the product actually comes, but a sale nonetheless. Obviously there are a few outliers, like the order of obsidian and no reward chosen, but that is only a minute portion of the money raised. There's hardly a better term for giving an organization money with the express expectation of receiving a product in return. Despite talks of pledges, kickstarter is neither charity nor investment. I take it you either don't run a business or not in any position in management or authority overseeing the day to day running (of their area in) a business. Nice ad hominem. I assure you that my experience as the assistant manager of Newark's only combination strip club / waffle house / shoe repair and leather tooling store make me more than qualified to comment on multimillion dollar game development. I'd like to see the certified internet qualifications of everyone else before this thread goes any further.

A horrific truth of Kickstarter is that each of your backers that pledged to a reward tier equals a sales loss. There's a bunch of problems with a statement that absolute. 1. A kickstarter pledge is a sale. Furthermore, for digital goods it's a sale with a 10% store cut, which is better than many digital stores. A $45 kickstarter pledge makes the devs more money than a $60 day one sale. 2. Many of the reward tiers have goods that are significantly cheaper to produce than a final copy of the game would be. It's asinine to assume that Obsidian "lost money" over traditional game development for tiers over $65. 3. The money was given two years before the project will be sold, which makes it an interest free loan. They've have gained as much as (some caveats) $129,811 in purchasing power just from having that much money for two years. If the game is sold at $60, that's 2100 day one sales from their site; it's equivalent to 25,000 purchases from moderately interested steam sale buyers. 4. Each backer has a vested financial interest in the game, which means that they had a major incentive to act as free advertising during the campaign, and a minor incentive to act as free advertising during development. 5. The size of the kickstarter itself made the news frequently, which again means free advertising. Bear in mind that advertising is so important to Obsidian that they gave away a portion of the profits to Paradox to pay for advertising. 6. It's hardly horrific because the number of kickstarter backers on even a successful campaign is relatively low compared to the total number of sales for a good product. Divinity Original Sin has had more concurrent users than backers. Wasteland 2's early access sales gave it double the budget. The Expedition Conquistador team told me that that kickstarter pledges weren't a significant proportion of their sales. This is even more comforting if you have a kickstarter for a game that turns out to be bad. It means that you lost far less of your budget, and were far closer to breaking even than without the kickstarter; your backers took the risk and lost. As to your other point, there are two counters. One is that Obsidian doesn't care that much about the profit on this game. They repeatedly said having their own IP is more important to them than money. The second is a hypothetical. Let's say Obsidian makes games for the next twenty years through a series of kickstarter campaigns, they never make a profit, but they never lose money either, and they are constantly producing. All their employees are regularly and fully paid. Why should we care that they don't make a profit?

That's not quite true. Plenty of devs have had massively successful campaigns and then assumed that everyone knew the launch date was getting pushed back because of stretch goals / general expansion, and then had to come out and say it officially later. Obsidian almost certainly knew it was going to have to change the delivery date before the campaign ended, and that was probably less stressful. That's just the nature of kickstarter. Although feature creep brings for projects already well underway by the time of their kickstarter can bring on all kinds of problems.

I think romances can be done well and poorly, and I certainly am not zealous about keeping romantic / erotic content from a game. However, all I saw of Dragon Age II was particularly terrible in this regard. It relied waaaaay too much on trope in general, and romances in particular. Isabella in particular lacks any consistent set of goals or motivation, and orbits around player decisions. That said, Dragon Age II removed one of the age old problems of romance in games: the vaguely rape-y aspect of it. Since characters in rpgs are really just systems and particularly simple systems at that, and systems can be gamed / have no free will, the only person with agency is the player. This means the player is free to create conditions where the character cannot refuse sex with the player, which has some pretty dark undertones. Dragon Age II solved this problem by removing the vast majority of player agency; since both characters are a collection of binary switches it's romance is more like a movie and less like a game.

Probably on Obsidians radar, but still a good read: http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/220463/Divinity_Original_Sin_is_the_game_Larian_Studios_waited_15_years_to_make.php At the same time, Original Sin has sold itself on its systems. The reviews I've read give only cursory notice to the writing, and then gush over the systems. I'm not so certain if that's the best way to go with a game that's selling itself on story. Also, Obsidian faces a tough choice, where allowing reviewers early access to the game might increase their already harmful reputation for bugs, but might reduce the number of bugs in the long run.

Additional funding goes to bug squashing, so it does go to development.

I thought this thread needed reviving what with all the monster discussion going on. Here's my go: Door Speakers Door speakers are agents of death who seek to recapture those who have avoided their natural end through unnatural means. They use little offense on their own, and are forbidden from killing living creatures save those who stand between them and their rightful target. Rather than attack enemies they merely open doors to the underworld and use waves of force to push their enemies in. Creatures near the doors of the underworld are stunned by the howls of the damned and frozen by the unnatural chill. If they spend too much time near the door, black appendages called the "hands of the dead" will drag them closer to the door. After a short period of time the hands of the dead drag those nearby inside, and the doors close. Then the door speaker opens one last door and walks inside.

I would expect a game that's pitched as heavily on nostalgia as this one was to show mainly nostalgic creatures. There's precedent too, the New Vegas ad I constantly saw on TV didn't even show Cazadores and they were one of the most memorable enemies in the game for me. Also, of the bestiary Obsidian has released, I think they have at least three neat and relatively new enemies: Ardra Beetles (yes, NWN II had giant beetles, but most games do not), Vithrak (we'll see how they're implemented, but I like them a lot so far), Wichts, Skulldr. Four out of twenty-four shown or mentioned thus far is not that bad, plus or minus herve caen gula and staelgar brings it to about 20% of total creatures shown.

The xaurips are obviously kobolds, but kobolds are fun. The vithrack mindflayer connection is a lot more tenuous. So they're psychic and the live in hives; why aren't they compared to thri-kreen instead of mindflayers? Or the buggers from Ender's Game? As far as I know, the Vithrack don't take slaves, don't have subservient semi-intelligent species like Umber Hulks, don't have an elder brain or dark and evil gods that give them psionic powers from the future. We don't know why they're xenophobic, if they're bellicose, or what they really want or value. That's more important than some basic similarities. Also, I disagree with the idea that everything has to fit the thematic goals of the setting. I think it's more important that you have believable characters within the setting than characters within the themes. The best example of this is Kotor 2; Kreia was an authorial rejection of the themes of the setting. Many of the characters were deconstructions of the themes of the setting, and the game has far better writing than the first because of that.

That is horrifying. Deeply and truly horrifying.

Eh, it sounds very similar to early medicine, where practitioners would have to pay grave robbers for corpses to learn about anatomy. Dissection was seen as an unnatural process. Also, they could do some good, but often much harm. That's debatable, but I won't press the point here.

The ultimate amount of customization will depend heavily on how many Talents we are able to implement. This is the last character-oriented gameplay content we are implementing and almost all of it will be developed in reaction to how the core classes wind up being used by QA and backers. If we wind up with a lot of good, solid Talents, there will be more flexibility in how core class abilities are received/selected/modified. The Talent system is fully implemented and we have a lot of flexibility in how the class structure allocates things as characters level, but we still need to finalize the content. In a future update can we get some examples of talents?

I really don't feel strongly either way, but Gothic 2 definitely had "romance" of a sort. It was available if you had the right amount of coin. That's all, continue with your screed. More than Deionarra? Either way, I'd hate to think the only people we find interesting are psychopaths and addictive personalities. Isn't that the codex? Also, nomancers is a better term.

It's a good joke, but it's about twelve paragraphs to short to be accurate satire.

To be fair, being in a highly abusive relationship describes all of the Planescape NPCs, particularly Ignus and Dak'kon. There was far, far more of that than actual romance in Torment.

I think ciphers are going to have a lot of synergy with barbarians in general. After all, the barbarian is supposed to dive into a clump of enemies, and the cypher can be played ranged. Barbarian dives in, Soul Shock, Ectoplasmic echo, mind wave, and constant AoE damage from the Barbarian. That's an npc blender. Anyways, it seems like most of the classes have some form of CC, but wizards really pump it out.

I think I responded to previous ones, but I could be wrong. Skill classes are a bad idea for this game, since it separates combat from skills anyways. It helps to think of possible classes if you think like 4e and divide it into striker, tank, controller, and leader roles: strikers are focused on pure damage usually single target; tanks are focused on taking hits; controllers are focused on disabling enemies and AoE damage (a strong argument could be made to separate these two); leaders are focused on buffing and healing allies. Consider each class role and sub-role. Here's a list role first, subroll second (most of these are debatable and I exercised my best judgment). Barbarian - Tank / Striker Chanter - Commander / Controller Cipher - Striker / Controller Druid - Controller / Striker Fighter - Pure Commander Monk - Tank / Controller Paladin - Commander / Tank Priest - Pure Commander Ranger - Striker / Controller (very debatable) Rogue - Pure Striker Wizard - Pure Controller That means there's room for: Striker / Tank, Striker / Commander, Tank / Commander, Commander / Striker, Controller / Tank, Controller / Commander So my suggested classes are: Warlord, Alchemist, Beastmaster, Shaman, Woodsman First of all, I would get rid of ranger and split it into two class. Woodsman and Beastmaster, beastmaster for everyone that wants an anipal, woodsman for specialist ranged weapon attackers and trap setters. The Beastmaster would fight in melee, including two swords if people wanted -- sigh. They would be controller/tanks, who were able to use summons and their exuberant vitality to help control the flow of battle. The Woodsman would be a striker / controller who worked by setting traps on the field. Next comes the Shaman / Hedge witch. Shaman is an amazing fit for this setting with it's animancy. Shamans commune with the "wild" souls, mainly nature and the dead but not reborn. Shaman are controller / commanders who focus on cursing enemies and buffing allies. After that we have the Doctor. They have powerful single target healing and a few stimulant based buffs, there are even some who break their oaths and administer poison to enemies. They are commander / strikers. They dash into the battlefield, cure the fallen and stab with poisoned daggers, and then try to extricate themselves. The tank / commander is the Warlord or Stalwart. They have seen more then their fair share of fighting, and have a high deflection to show for it. They have also picked up snippets of chanter lore, and can exhort their comrades to greater action. Their buffs are usually static radii. I ran out of ideas there, but there's still room for a beefier striker (tough? assassin? mercenary?) and a striker that heals / buffs their allies (warlock?, soul thief?).

A metric ****ton of flexibility is going to be available just from expanded gear choices. That was a major reason for dual classing in IE. I expect a gun cypher wearing leather will play fairly differently from a dual-dagger cypher wearing plate even if they had the same abilities.

After the latest update I think I might try to break the rigid party and try three off-tanks rather than a main build. Two barbarians, Cypher, Chanter, Cleric, and Mage. That does have the weakness of being low on single target damage (actually the cypher might take care of that), but it has a lot of resilience and control over the battlefield which means the characters will have more health when they go to those critical boss fights. I want to use my barbarians to dash past the line and then cluster enemies for AoEs.

Fine, I'll drop that aspect of the discussion. Lets go back to discussing Balance. Why is that, exactly? It's a single player party based game, remember? If your Thief isn't as powerful as your mage then what does it matter? You can have both in your party. Or double of both. Or none of either one. You can also form unlimited tactics and game plans around such un-even party makeup. You can have one be the support for the other. You can Challenge yourself to beat the game using nothing but under-powered characters. Or you can powergame by making a full party of nothing but the over-powered class. Balance does nothing in a single player, party-based game but LIMIT the player's freedom to do the above. Balance is important for ALL kinds of games. Only through balance players can get a fair challenge during all their playthroughs. Let's say that a particular game allows players to build blatantly overpowered parties, like D&D games do, and you build your party that way, because of your deep understanding of the system or simply because you are lucky. What do you earn? A couple of hours of fun during your planning phase and dozens of hours of unchallenging (= boring) combats during the rest of your game. Great trade-off, umh? And with an underpowered party? Probably a frustrating experience, and certainly something that an additional difficulty level could do better. A decently balanced game (of course, perfect balance is out of reach in RPGs. It's damn hard to achieve even in games with no character development), with enough difficulty options, can provide a fair challenge to any kind of party/player. A blatantly unbalanced game simply can't... It's worth pointing out the difference in games that let you build parties and games that do not. There's the potential for far greater imbalance when you create your own party rather than choose from developer created characters. In Baldur's Gate you may have a very strong character, but that could be as little as 1/6th of your total fighting force. Honestly, I think that's where PE is going to shine. There will be less focus on building good characters, and more focus on building good parties. I imagine there will be insane builds with three chanters and two paladins who all have different effects that stack on rogue. Or four barbarians who pump out the AoE damage, etc. In a way that's more appropriate for a party based game.

Their stamina to health ratio combined with Stamina healing = Tanking I understand why you guys are going with, 2x hitpoints = can tank, I simply disagree. Afaik, the Barbarian cannot "hold a line" which to me is a critical function of a tank. Why can't they? They still get disengagement attacks, they have a ton of heal and health boosts when they kill mobs, they have flanking protection, and they're probably better at harassing more mobile enemies since they can sprint after them. If the party was fighting an opposing party with three rogues, the difference could be awful for the party with a fighter. Also, I disagree with the notion that each class has to fit such a rigid role or that the optimal tactics always involve such a rigid line. This is especially true since all lighter classes can wear plate to survive a couple hits.

Anyone can dual-wield. Here are the relative trade-offs of fighting in any given "style": * Dual Weapon - Fastest attack rate and highest overall damage output vs. relatively light armor. * Two-Handed - Standard attack rate. Highest per-hit damage output vs. relatively heavy armor. * Weapon & Shield - Standard attack rate. Highest Deflection of any style. Heavier shields grant more Deflection, reduce Accuracy proportionally. * Single Weapon - Standard attack rate, all attacks made with +15 Accuracy. Why are single weapon attacks made with a static bonus rather than a proportional one? Just curious.