Carlo

I would love to have a pair of epic pants. There are so many possible mind-blowing/funny/weird things that can be done outside of weaponry.

So true. I still voted "story" as without interesting story possibilities and progression, I wouldn't bother picking up a cRPG game in the first place. Gameplay that is lacking can still detract from or ruin the experience, though. This is true in terms of game design (way too much/too little loot, etc.) and things like the interface/controls. If it's not a pleasure to play, then it's not a pleasure.

This sort of grinding tends to wreak havoc with play balance in a closed-ended campaign (what PE essentially will be). Game designers need to understand roughly how powerful a party will be or should be at certain key points, in order to have challenging plot-centric encounters. Repeatable quests, unless there's a large amount of time in between repetitions, makes it almost certain there will be large variations in party experience level at these points. On a related note, I hope there will be few to none respawning encounters, as these can have the same effect if the party is able to rest/recover in between them; you can just play whack-a-mole until bored.

If Obsidian stays true to form in engaging the community, I would expect at some point a private consulting group/forum will be created by invite for those interested in developing modding tools (and perhaps some representatives from the ranks of modders in general). That would be a smart move, in order to leverage all of the community talent, motivation and work time that is now waiting to be tapped. Although this may sound somewhat heretical in a modding thread, I don't think Obsidian should focus overly much on creating modding tools prior to launch, as that would by necessity take away limited resources from the massive requirements of developing the game itself. Instead, I would be happy to see the developers keeping future modding requirements in mind from the start and deliberately create an easier-to-mod game architecture. If basic but functional editing tools for the community are a natural offshoot of the development process, however, that would certainly be nice to see available in beta or at launch.

I second this, I completely agree with Carlo (carlo one maybe?) and frisk. This two part process is the way I have taken with my latest project as well and it seems to be work great. Since maps are just 2d images, they can be created in many different ways depending on your skill level. It also sounds like they will have 2d backgrounds, but the characters will be 3d models...not animated sprites. That should be fun for all those max and blender community members (hopefully no granny this time!) Yes, that's me. I've actually been on the Obsidian boards long enough (originally for NWN2) to have taken "Carlo" before someone else did, so didn't have to tack on the "One", heh. Very glad to see the post above from Luridis about the free Unity editor (Unity3D), although I imagine the devil will be in the details for modders in terms of how easy an editor will be to operate with PE. Also good to see that per slowdive's quote on map creation, that part of the process should not be overly difficult. However, while I was able to teach myself C (more or less) for NWN/NWN2 scripting purposes, no way will I be able to teach myself to be a graphic artist. Unless somebody wants an Order of the Stick-type mod. Adam seems to be throwing down the creative gauntlet above, bully for him. I have one project storyboarded and in mothballs that was intended to be a single-player NWN/NWN2 mod (with some creative MP plugin possibilities) that I would love to do in a PE mod. My focus in the past was always MP - I simply prefer the multiplayer experience in general and the possibilities inherent with a live DM (still do) . However, developer comments are that MP won't be incorporated, at least for the initial release. Looks like a good opportunity/excuse to create a SP experience, then.

If a game is done in an action RPG style, I think pack animals work well. Then their magically following you around without being hurt, and/or ability to defend themselves in combat, isn't so jarring. Plus, action RPGs deliver tons of loot as part of the design. For something like PE, the mechanics of doing a "realistic" implementation would probably make them not particularly helpful (i.e. they'd get killed a lot). Epic dungeon delving and mules usually don't mix too well.

It doesn't seem that the tech model will allow for a full toolset-type editor, at least in the NWN or NWN2 sense, because the environments won't be either tiled or painted. However, I could envision using a hybrid game editor that allows the user to take a separately-generated 2D area and work with it; this is essentially what the developers will be doing. We would then have a two-step process for modding, with the area creation function separate from the game editor. Given the highly talented people who enjoy coming up with prefab areas for the artistic challenge, I could see an original modding community flourishing with a model like this, along with those who might prefer to mod the original game.

My bottom line is that a loot system should be realistic enough to provide logical rewards, but not slavishly so to the point that its mechanics become burdensome or bog the game down. Some randomness is also nice to see for variety's sake, both in general and with special cases. I've recalled a few times when a particular loot drop has given a class-specific or otherwise tailored item depending on the main character, which makes it more meaningful. In my own mods (NWN/NWN2) I have mostly gone the realistic route and have NPCs drop everything they're carrying, since I'm aiming for a high realism/immersion factor. However, I also do not design mods that have hordes of monsters or enemy NPCs to be faced in combat, so that kind of model is manageable. When faced with lots of lower-level or more generic enemies, a random selection from a selected loot table probably makes more sense in terms of accumulation and can also effectively model things like equipment being destroyed or otherwise lost in combat.