anameforobsidian

Why do you need that at all? What tactical complexity does it add that simply making casters cast the spell normally does not? It's also worth pointing out that while contingency was incredibly useful, you paid a high price in terms of spell slots for that utility. In a more general sense, some of the fixes in this thread forget the somewhat dramatic change to the casting system that's happening. Removing pre-buffing also makes more sense in the context of this game, because this game does not have spell slots the way the IE games did, so there is far less of a limited resource thing going on. Time is a more critical resource than spell storage in this game. This is especially true when you consider that you can change entire books given enough time.

That would technically be quite difficult. I would love an NWN replacement for a wRPG game-maker. I doubt it will be PE though. The art is static. Obsidian is using their proprietary dialogue tool, and I think they've broadly hinted that they don't want to share it. So, this game is not going to be very moddable. SRR looks like the best replacement for a while at least.

There is no healing (of Health) in PoE outside of resting. No, but there's plenty of stamina healing from what I understand.

I see that as more of a strength than a problem. In the first round a mage has the choice to buff party members, ensuring the maximum utility of the buff, shoot off an AoE while the enemies are still in position, shoot off magic missile to interrupt an enemy mage is casting their most important version of a spell, etc. Pre-fight buffing takes that decision away, you always buff and then fight unless a fight is trash. If that's the case, fights are balanced with the buffs assumed. This completely removes them as a tactical choice and turns them into busywork, other than spellbook slots for higher level ones (because stop and rest anywhere removed the need for spell management). I think a roundless system (like PE has) would have improved tactical decision making, because casting time becomes an even greater factor, but I don't think the tradeoff was a bad thing.

I would think that they would just work on AI rather than change the whole system, or maybe have an AI sheet with a bunch of options like DA. It's not a perfect solution, but it does make it easier for those overwhelmed. None of this is answering the real question that needs to be asked: "will there be goodberries?"

Judging from NWN2, you'll probably gather party members slowly. I think it has more interesting implications for the use of skills. The skill layout of the party could drastically affect how you move through dungeons now that it's separated from class.

You're defining the Rogue class as a skill class, which is a bit of an error when thinking about skills in a vacuum (especially since in some IE games, certain classes couldn't dual class, like paladin/thief or paladin/bard in BG). In PE if you want to learn lockpicking, it comes at the cost of the other skills you could have taken. In IE games lockingpicking comes at the cost of potentially lower HD, less weapon specializations or slower spell levels, and less powerful spells. I think it's fair to argue that the existence of less non-skill related drawbacks to picking a skill makes it easier to pick any skill they want, and thus offers greater skill flexibility. From what I can tell, there was a lot of debate about a classless system, but it wasn't seriously considered. These games are supposed to be somewhat faithful to the IE games, and even Torment, which played it hard and loose with PC class, still had a class system. Personally, I like the idea of a classless party based rpg, with most combat skills pushed into feats. That would be hell on earth to balance though. Those extra characters come with a significant weakness though. Yes you gain a significant bonus to positioning and crowd control, but this is a game where even some melee characters have AoEs. Your party would be less vulnerable to stuns and high single target damage, but would take twice the effective AoE damage from a mob with the right stats. There's also the significant possibility of mobs being able to walk past your pets and shrug off their CC abilities. You would have also have no healing, and your tanks would have low health pools. You could probably do it, and it might make some fights easier and others much harder. That's just good balance. An item advantage meaning have both of them in equipment of similar value, not one using the Holy Avenger, and the other using a +1 shortsword. As a separate issue, it's all well and good to theorycraft builds that have perfect access to rare weapons, but if a new player wouldn't know to make a bee-line for them and the build relies on that item, then the build is not worthy of consideration. And one of the (few) counters fighters had to mages was spell interruption. If a mage has five uninterrupted rounds to buff up, than that is not an equivalent fight. It would be a lot easier for me to beat a grandmaster at chess if I was allowed five moves before they had their first one. You're controlling the circumstances to give an advantage to your character that another human player or DM would not give them (and the system does not assume), and then counting that advantage as part of the build.

The hell it is. If I'm building a melee mage in POE, will the build be flexible enough to hold its own in melee with a warrior? Because you could do that in the IE games. Because everything was less rigid. Could you do that without significant pre-fight buffing and an item advantage? If the wizard comes in buffs up, that's a significant time advantage and not really an even contest. Could you do it on your first attribute roll? It's possible that dual classing allows for more flexible character creation, but I don't buy it. For a D&D based game, flexibility can be split into attributes, abilities, and skills. PEs attributes are looking far more flexible. AoE barbarian being the prime example. In IE games, you were lucky if your character used three ability scores. Then, there's skills. PEs skills seem to have about the same amount of importance, maybe a bit more, and they're far more flexible. A druid or paladin who can pick locks is a great example of this. Finally, there's abilities. PE may be less flexible with abilities since dual classing allows a pretty wide array of abilities, but even then, more classes have more abilities, leaving it a toss up. Is a system that allows a gun toting cleric really less flexible than one that allows a self-hating mageslayer mage? Furthermore, is it really fair to compare the flexibility offered by six games to the flexibility offered by one?

I always thought the ranger class had some pretty huge inconsistencies in later additions. Basically, they're trying to combine three wildly different archetypes into one class: Aragorn, who knows lore that is similar to magic and is something of a stealthy fighter; Drizzt, who's a dual-wielding fighter with an ani-pal and is really good at fighting goblins; and Robin Hood, who's just a greater hunter, archer, and stealth character. Even the D&D team has recognized the ridiculousness of this in a system of firm class based archetypes, and deprecated the arrow using side of ranger to Avengers. I think these archetypes would be better served by either talents in a completely classless system, separate sub-classes on fighter, or by just dropping some of the roles. I would say drop the magic, put dual-wielding and favored enemy bonuses as talents, and you're left with a (wo)man of the woods. Even though I never liked the ani-pal mechanic, it's at least thematic.

I don't know about bleeding, poisoned, or diseased specifically, but since there's DoT's in the game I'd be shocked if one of them didn't make it in there. Logically, I wouldn't think that anything about them would make the opponent more susceptible to sneak attacks. "Ow! A paper cut. Where did everyone go?"

I think this is a question that can't really be answered until we play it. JE Sawyer's responses lead me to believe that there will be a strong sort of class differentiation. Stuff like mages being bad tanks even though they can wear plate. I suspect that with all the noise they make about difficulty mechanics (and considering how many difficulty mods JE has put out), that class differentiation will be more strongly represented in harder difficulty modes. A related question might be, how many abilities are too much? Do you really want six people popping of special abilities every five seconds? On a separate note, I wish they hadn't / hope they aren't back-tracking with rangers though. I know a lot of people like Drizzt, but dual-wielding seems wholly inappropriate for a class that lives in the woods and hunts for a living.

This can't be stressed enough. Even simple stealth circles are still a big improvement from the infinity engine games. You're thinking about it from the wrong perspective. Making sound is a property of the individual making the sound, hearing is the property of the individual doing the hearing. It's generally hacky and bad design to attribute properties to the wrong agent. The problem is that you're not creating 3 circles, you're creating five. Agents have the following circles under your design: Investigating a noise, Alarmed by a noise, Investigating a vision, Alarmed by a vision. That means that in a 6v6 adventurer fight setup you have 30 separate circles to keep track of. That takes even more area than just a cone and is pretty visually confusing. You could do something like a light yellow that fades all the way to dark red, but it's still not great. I do agree with the idea that the stealth system should apply to all agents, but I do think that they could do an investigating circle from the player's end very well. Enemies who enter the investigating circle are very transparent. They fade in as they get closer. Furthermore, what does this scenario add that the current system doesn't? Finally, reactions based on position are probably easy to do, especially considering they have to track orientation already. The sound / light qualities could just be a variable they add to every scene to change the sizes of the stealth circles, but that wouldn't really offer the stealth game feel since touching grass and cobblestone would have the same circle in the same scene. So the only other way they could implement it would be by "painting" sound/light values over the scene itself (maybe with global modifiers for ambient effects). That's a significant amount of extra time / money spent on an incredibly tedious and creatively unfulfilling task. I would argue that if they wanted to make an isometric stealth game in this engine they should prioritize the following features: - Perception mechanics where character orientation matters. The core mechanic of a sneaking game is reacting to a guard's actions; guards are who you sneak around. Not too difficult technically, but could get visually confusing with a bunch of mobs / PCs. - Line of sight mechanics. Being able to hide is a very important part of sneaking. Tedious and moderately hard to implement in current engine. - Light mechanics. Staying out of the light is another typical genre behavior. Since the players are humans, we prioritize lights over sound. Very hard to do in current engine. - Reactive materials. Stepping on metal and making a noise is another basic genre behavior. Very tedious and moderately difficult to do in current engine. - Sneak attacks. Players expect them. Trivial to implement by themselves, but require an orientation based perception system. - A tailored skillset. A game about a thief should have more thiefly skills than a game about a full party. - Guard AI. Very hard to do in any engine. - Real time stealth minigames with enemies still active while it's going on. Adds a nice bit of pressure that a skill check lacks. Moderately low difficulty to implement. - Verticality. There's a lot to be said for going over and under enemies. Moderately high difficulty to implement and very tedious. - Stealth kill animations. Looks cool, some players will enjoy, but takes a lot of time to do extra work. Easy to implement, but expensive. - Perception beyond hearing and seeing. Would be cool for animals/monsters/monstrous humanoids. Anywhere from easy to hard to implement. You could do anything from an extra circle to a set of properties affected differently by different materials.

Another incredibly useful feature of the Infinity Engine console was the ability to trigger random conversations. I was able to hear so much more dialogue that I would have never been able to access anyways, thus substantially raising my appreciation of the game.

I misspoke. LoS, where the enemy's vision is blocked by objects would have the same problem as lighting. It would be fairy easy if you had a strictly 2D perspective, like this game, but this game doesn't. For this, you would have to put isometrically rendered objects on top of the scene as well as have someone sketch LoS barriers on top, turn the whole thing invisible, and shoot rays from the mob to the object to check LoS. So you're duplicating the work that a 3D game does once (albeit with no modelling etc.), you're wasting spending a bunch of money / time less than optimally. It could be doable, depending on what the artist's do before they render (like if they make pillars before hand). But it's certainly not trivial, and it would take artists / bugfixers doing mostly that for months. What I was proposing was far more simple than that. They keep it 2D, they just change the shape and track orientation for mobs (or maybe make a 3D cone object rotated to the camera angle and show where it intersects the plane). That's still more work, but not much, and it offers some basic LoS stuff.

Instead of circle, use half-cirlces. That leaves a blind spot for vidual detection. Audio detection is another matter. And in which direction would the half-circles face? That was the difficulty he was mentioning in regards to line of sight as far as i could tell. Don't get me wrong line of sight would be a great mechanic but I think the circles are a huge improvement over I.E. systems and in my mind they represent audio and visual in an abstract way (the semi-circle behind the facing direction of the enemy could be considered audio and the semi-circle in the facing direction could be considered visual). It's not perfect but its certainly not bad. It's a matter of interpretation, but I read that as him saying that it was too complex for the player to deal with six separate entities and however many guards. Then there's the weird problem of mixing 2D and 3D, which would make lighting a difficult (but certainly not impossible technical challenge). They would probably have to have a small group of artists (or whatever) make / place invisible objects over the pre-made maps, which would add a significant amount of work for a game with 20 devs. Then It gets even more difficult when you take the problem of moving objects on maps with baked lighting (which is why the Torment promo vids looked weird, the spinning wheel didn't have a shadow). The actual movement part would be ridiculously easy technically. You would make a 2D cone (or whatever), and make it a child of the mob object. Then, rotating an object toward another object is only a line or two of code (vector3.lerp etc.) Showing all that in real time in a way that doesn't overwhelm the player in a game that is ostensibly RT is much more difficult. I do think it's an area they could profitably pursue in an expansion / sequel.

I can see the utility of a circle that bulges out Instead of circle, use half-cirlces. That leaves a blind spot for vidual detection. Audio detection is another matter. I can see the utility of something that bulges out, perhaps like this: Red is noticed you, yellow investigating. It's circular near the human since that's affected more by hearing, and vision extends conically from the entity. You could even have a formula which made the yellow decrease faster with sneak ability than red. For ninja death attacks, you could have characters dash in with sneak attack ready before their target raises the alarm. If they succeed and kill the mob, the dying character makes a ping, which hits the other detection shapes and interacts normally. That way it isn't DX:HR levels of ridiculousness where you can muffle guys from their buddies five feet away, but it still allows the option in the gameplay. The problem is that you would then have to make / test / debug several different types of perception cones. While the first models human perception, this might model skulldr perception: Eventually that becomes a lot to implement, test, debug, etc. They could do archetypes, human, beast, dragon, undead, etc. But that still turns into a substantial amount of work for a less important subsystem. That would be an amazing job for a modder though (although this is going to be pretty hard to mod from what I understand). Or, it's work for obsidian to do in a game based on this technology. The great thing about Project Eternity is that it's just the first, and other games can build substantially on its capabilities.

I'm quite taken with the idea of a cooldown for per rest abilities, and a shorter one for per encounter abilities.

I absolutely loved Broken Age and enjoyed Shadowrun Returns, so I'm feeling pretty good about PE. If a game doesn't quite match a brilliant classic it pays homage to, it's still a great game.

Have any of the maps they've released shown the Endless Paths yet?

IMHO you are missing a big big point. Multiplayer and co-op are 2 completely different things, while I agree with you concerning the multiplayer, the co-op limited to 2 max 4 players could be an option. Co-op does not require any external server or anything special to work. For example in BG it is possible to do co-op it is far from being stable or bugless still people can enjoy play BG with friends. So for me +1 for co-op! Local coop would be hellish for game designed to use a wide range of the mouse and keyboard and play by email isn't possible for a RT game, so there's effectively no difference. If you're talking about LAN play, you absolutely do need special code for that, but not servers.

That is a terrible idea. Here's why: they're trying to make a mini-Baldur's Gate with the budget of Costume Quest. A budget of $4 million is not a lot. Neverwinter Nights, which wasn't even a good game, but was feature complete with multiplayer and had minimal bugs, took 160 person years of work. The average game dev salary is $84,337. That's $13.5m now. Furthermore, multiplayer is far from trivial to implement. You don't put #include<the.internet> at the start of the code and be done with it. You have to buy servers then build frontends for it, or integrate pre-built mulitplayer framework most of which doubles as DRM which would be against the campaign promises, or build a custom p2p connection framework. Testing is a fresh hell of problems. And this is technology which Obsidian, wonderful though they are, have very little experience with. Let's not forget that their website (which is far easier to make and maintain than a game) crumpled under an entirely predictable load. So, you have a simple request for them to make a wildly expensive unbudgeted feature with a fair degree of technical difficulty that is not high on the list of wanted features they already don't have the money for. http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/131327/postmortem_biowares_neverwinter_.php?page=4 http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/189893/Industry_in_flux_What_we_learned_from_Game_Developers_2012_Salary_Survey.php

Part of that month included Christmas and New Years. Chill. That said, Sawyer's had some good post on the forums.

There will not be a companion of each race and class as it stands, this might expand as they get more money (companions were the top of the list for stretchgoals). There are eight companions so far. Here's the list of companions so far: Eder: Human Rogue Cadegund: Human Priest (with guns!) Forton: Human Monk Sagani: Dwarven (Boreal) Ranger Aloth: Elven Mage Unnamed: Heath Orlan Cipher Unamed Godlike class unknown. One companion remains unknown. I would suspect that whatever they are, he or she will probably be Amaua. Of the remaining classes, there's Barbarian, Chanter, Druid, Fighter, Paladin. Also, there are ten subraces if you discount Godlike: Amaua Hearth/Wild Orlan Pale/Wood Elf Mountain/Boreal Dwarf Meadow/Savannah/Ocean Human

Raistlin as a character was nothing more than an explanation for really bad min-maxing in the writers' D&D campaign.

By the way, I just asked the Expeditions Conquistador team (the closest analog) what percent of their total sales kickstarter backers are, and this was the response: The Kickstarter backers are a very very small percentage of our total sales But the game would never have happened without them, of course, so it's a very very important very very small percentage. From that, I take it maybe five percent. Bear in mind that Expeditions Conquistador received only 2% of the total number of backers that PE did, but still....