Sylvius the Mad

The one feature that makes one-handed play viable is having a clickable pause button in the UI somewhere. That way the game becomes playable with just the mouse even without having extra buttons on your mouse. Also, it's not just disabled players who would use such a feature. Many of us have kids now. It's a lot easier to play these games with a baby on your lap if you only need one hand (otherwise you risk having the baby roll onto the floor, and that's an awkward one to explain to the wife).

An excellent example. The D&D Documentary was clearly not going to make its funding target, but then 7 days out, Paizo promoted the campaign in their regular e-mail flyer. And they tripled their funding in two days.

I think Shaker looks really good, but I think it's been poorly marketed so far. I doubled my pledge to Shaker earlier today.

If you think it costs $100K to pay someone $100K, you've never run a business. I would estimate the cost of employing someone to be 2.5 times their base salary (not including benefits). So if you pay someone $50K, the total cost to you for employing that person is about $125K. There's infrastructure and insurance and payroll taxes and all sorts of other costs. Frankly, that Zeits only costs $100K tells me that they're only paying him $40K for his work on the project.

The low-level advancement rate was slowed considerably by the regular character death.

this is a very good point. The first few levels really are pretty dull combat-wise because of a lack of abilities and spells. I really hope we don't go through most of the game that way. I completely disagree. I vaslty prefer low-level gameplay in the IE games.

That would work for me, yes. That would make either the gaps between the levels quite large, or make the whole game primarily low-level gameplay. Though I think I'd need a game to be 80 hours before I would call it "pretty lengthy". 50 hours would be something more like "adequate".

BG - Hold Monster This is based on a single event from the first time I ventured into Durlag's Tower. I didn't know I was near the end of the dungeon, and I decided to pop into the next room before resting. I had a mage-heavy party, and I was low on spells. Lo and behold, through the door I found the final encounter - the Demonknight - and I was pretty much out of tools. So, in desperation, I had Viconia cast Hold Monster at him. The Demonknight had 95% magic resistance, but on this occasion I got the roll I needed, and he was Held. A bit of hasted archery later and he was dead. I stumbled into a major boss fight completely unprepared, and still won, because I rolled a 20, basically. It was awesome. That's something AD&D did really well. The crazy outcomes that were always possible (but usually extremely unlikely) made for great stories.

Depends on the abilities. Remember, in 10 hours you'd see all six party members gain a level. How all those abilities work together creates many possible permutations.

I love the Adventurers' Hall because it's probably the only way I can indulge my complusive need to use as many wizards as possible. My standard BG and BG2 parties had 5 wizards in them. Since Obsidian probably isn't going to provide us with 4 wizard companions, I'm going to have to make my own.

On this issue, can we have some prty members stay stealthed (or behind cover, or generally placed where we want them) as long as they're not the ones doing the talking? I can see why it might be necessary to move the speaker, but leave the rest of the party alone. And further, can the speaker be someone other than the PC? Can we send in a companion to speak on behalf of the party if it makes sense for our party to do so? As I mention in my signature, I will pay money for this feature.

To some degree it depends on how much advancement each level represents, and whether all of the characters level up together. I've made it clear that, on the second point, I don't think characters should all level up together. I think they should earn XP independently, and perhaps even have different XP/level tables for each class (like AD&D did). Having characters level up separately makes levelling up a more common occurence, suggesting that each character should level up less often. On the first point, I like to learn how to incorporate any new abilities that came with my new level before moving on to the next one. So I level up, gain some abilities, laern how to use those abilities effectively, spend some time enjoying that effectiveness, and then level up again. If the new abilties that come each level are only marginally different, or if there aren't many of them, then we can level up more often. I've previously stated that I think 10 hours of gameplay per level (for a single character) is appropriate. So if you have 6 similarly levelled characters, in 10 hours of gameplay they'll each level up once.

Why do you care how the designers intended the game be played? Play it how you like to play it.

I saw those, too. I kept trying to pause the video right then to see if there was a hidden message.

Yeah, what's 1650x1050? Should have been 1680x1050 16:10 is my preferred aspect ratio.

It is, unequivocally, not the game designer's job to protect us from ourselves. Every product in the world should come with an "I am not an idiot" button which I can press and then fiddle with it without interference from those features that are supposed to keep me from doing it wrong.

Those really old CRPGs actually port quite well to mobile. Oubliette (whose creator, Jim Schwaiger/Victor Helsing, actually accused Wizardry of stealing his idea) was released for the iPhone last year, 34 years after it debuted on the PLATO mainframe. The only gameplay difference is that you cast spells by choosing them from a menu rather than having to type in their names (which was, admittedly, part of the fun, because the guy had invented his own magical language that you kind of had to learn - I have fond memories af casting Fieminat or Geibor).

IT'S OLD SCHOOL. What more did you need? Considering their credentials it's obviously going to be a first-person, platforming tactical RPG. Brenda tweeted that it's a first-person interface like Wizardry. They need to put that in the Kickstarter proposal.

The OotS Kickstarter really was impressive. Rich only wanted to raise $57,000 to reprint some of his books, and he got about $1.2 million. OotS demonstrated that an established online community can and will band together to support the thing that brought them together, and support it a hell of a lot. DFA then demonstrated that game designers have loyal followings. Wasteland 2 demonstrated that gamers will flock to the promise of old school gameplay, particularly if there's nostalgia involved. Project Eternity demonstrated that even larger, well-established game developers can bypass traditional publishing.

I just increased my pledge.

I am not against it, but I doubt it, just because of the huge extra overhead of writing new dialog for every character besides the main PC. If they do it the way BG did it, there's no extra writing at all. None. Not one line.

That's one down. The Adventurer's Hall fulfills one of my two major requests for Project Eternity. I promised to double my pledge if you offered both of them, so this gets some money from me. All that remains is for Obsidian to let us know whether we'll be allowed to use any party member as party spokesperson (like BG, IWD, or SoZ). That's my other request. You'll see it again below in my signature.

Strictly adhere to the same rules as the PC. Now, that's not to say that different races can't have different rules, and companions can't be races unavailable for the PC. No, only that if the PC could be a member of that race, those same rules would apply to him. Moreover, I'd like to be able to assign all of the companion's abilities, regardless of at what level the companion is encountered. Let me build that character - within the pre-assigned race and class - from the ground up when he joins the party. That way we get more freedom in party construction - if I want 3 archers, I can have three archers, even if only one of the companions was actually intended by Obsidian to be an archer.

Unless they have significant mass. But yes, smaller stacks, I think, are a better idea. I wouldn't go higher than 40.

I like limited ammo because I like bows to be powerful. With unlimited arrows, powerful bows are grossly unbalanced, so then limited ammo is required to bring bows back in line with other weapons. Honestly, I think BG handled this well. If you wanted to carry enough arrows to supply a pure archer through any significant adventuring area, you needed the inventories of 2 characters to carry those arrows.