Shevek

The adventure guild idea is basically what Final Fantasy Tactics did way back when. You could recruit someone for a price and then build them up however you wanted. I like the adventure guild idea too since, the dev said earlier, it would clear up issues with pacing that occur from having too many characters early on.

I love making my own party. In BG2, I would custom make all their portraits. I would choose their soundsets. I would even obsess a bit too long over the details of their histories. From a roleplaying standpoint, I felt more connected to my silent group of adventurers than I did with the pre-fab NPCs. From a munchkin standpoint, nothing matches the replayability in going through the game with a different custom party. That completely changes the combat experience. BG2 was a dream game for putting together a party and running through a bunch of dungeons. I mean, ya, I could do that with IWD 1/2 also but BG2/ToB was so much more expansive. I ran several duos and trios. My fave being a Half Elven Ranger/Cleric (it was cheating in BG2 because it got all Cleric AND Druid spells, lol) and a Fighter/Thief. I sometimes ran it as a trio and added in a Gnomish Fighter/Illusionist. This allowed me to pick up the occaisional NPC for quest purposes. Sometimes, I would ignore the NPCs completely and just make a whole slate of characters. When I did this, I would install all difficulty mods just to see how I would do. No other game gave me this many options in how I could play. Thanks to the modding community and the ability to make custom parties, BG2 was an incredibly flexible game. It was a story driven rpg AND it was a difficult dungeon hack. It was one game that could fit many types of play. I would love to see Project Eternity accomplish the same feat.

As a side note, I would love to see a few less Euro-centric weapons. I would love to have a guy that uses a pata in my party, for example.

To a certain extent, weapon and armor designs have always been a bit wonky in RPGs. Maces, for example, always look like a melon on a stick in games. I do agree, however, that more releastic designs would be way better. Look at Game of Thrones.... that is a fantasy show. Yet, armor and weapons look real. You need to have things grounded in reality for people to buy into the fantasy you are presenting them. I too am not advocating 100% realism but running around with buster swords would be dumb.

I would have liked more options in the first question. Perhaps exploring other PnP game systems might have been the way to go. Anywho, I support any system whereby armor works as it should. In DnD, it works as, essentially, avoidance. That is not how it should be. It should be damage reduction of some kind. I like how GURPs does it. Depending on the rigidity of the armor, well or poorly vs. crushing or impaling attacks. http://ayinger.no-ip.info/fantasyArmor I would like to see something similar where are armor gives resistances to different damage types. I also have to point out that if you are gonna do piecemeal armor, each piece should only protect what it protects. In another words, guantlets should not protect your chest.

Another poll thread exists on this topic but I feel the poll is flawed. It is essentially a push poll that uses very biased languange and a sort of false choice to achieve certain results. In other words, it suggests it is a sort of either or phenomena. It suggests that we get either custom party members OR pre-fab NPCs. That would not be the case. If posting this second poll is against board rules, I will understand if a mod wants to close the thread. I just honestly felt the other thread did not present this question well. I went ahead an used the wording Nub used in another post on these forums. He phrased the question eloquently and I hope he does not mind if I used his wording in this poll.

Also, that poll is badly written. The No option assumes you cant have prefab NPCs by allowing other to choose to have characters they create themselves. That is what is called a push poll. You use biased language to push folks to vote a certain way.

I put this on the kickstarter page. I'll put it here: This does not have to be approached from a purely narrative based standpoint. If it did, then why are they making the game soloable and the NPCs optional? If they make solo play an option then there is absolutely no excuse to exclude player made parties. There are many ways to approach any given game. When I first played BG 1/2, I used the npcs. However, by my third playthrough, I grew bored Aerie's whining and Anomen's hair. I wanted my own crew of adventurers. I crafted their own backstories. I customized their own portraits. I named them. I even got them all their own soundsets and editted them a bit to match what I liked. They may not have spent half the adventure whining about not having wings or moaning about this or that but I feel them to be more than meatbags. I felt a sense of ownership over those characters that I did not feel over the NPCs I was handed. Moreover, by being able to create them and choose their race, stats and class, I could totally change how I approached game battles. I had free reign in how I played the game in a way that I did not have if I was pigeonholed into using set NPCs that someone else had crafted for me. This opened things up tactically in ways that prefab NPCs do not allow. Again, this is not an time consuming development option. Its easy. Its been done. Also, if included, no one would be forced to use it. Its pretty much win-win. Edit: I also posted this: There is no need to question WHY one would like create a whole party. Just look at the history of cRPGs. Most classic cRPGs let you make the whole party, Wizardry, Gold Box, etc. Hell, just look at other IE games like the Icewind Dale games. And, for the last time, you could make the entire party in the Baldur's Gate games. These let you do this because its fun. Hell, for you console gamers, you might remember good old Final Fantasy 1. Any beat it with 4 White Mages? 4 Fighters? 4 Monks? 2 Fighters and 2 Red Mages? Solo Red Mage? Red Mage/Fighter duo? This adds replay value and a certain level of strategic variance in how you play through the game. In BG2, I like to duo my Half-Elven Ranger/Cleric with a Gnomish Fighter/Thief. None of the NPCs let me do that to my liking. I needed to be able to craft 2 of my own character to do that. Also, I sometimes wanted to craft every member and make them to what I felt would be the perfect party and then ratchet up the difficulty to test them out in the games toughest encounters (I tried many, many parties). Again, I could not have this level of replay value if I was stuck with just the prefab NPCs.

There should be no perks for playing solo. There should never be incentives to ignore party embers in a party based game. This is not to say it should be impossible. They said you can play solo. I would go so far as to state it would be cool if players earned "bragging rights" achievements for downing certain monsters with only one character. However, players should not be encouraged to go that route by tangible in game feats or items. Going solo should be done for additional challenge. Giving players advantages for going solo negates said challenge while discouraging party play in a party based game.

I do not play on a typical monitor. I use a wireless keyboard and mouse and play 7 feet away from my 40 inch TV. With the advent of HDMI cords and wireless peripherals, its pretty easy to set this up. For those of us that play this way, it is often difficult to read text in games. I downloaded a mod to increase the text size in NWN2, for example, and that helped a little but it is still tough to play through MotB this way. I would really like the option to scale the ui as much as possible. Meaning, primarily, I want to be able to increase font size by a significant amount. I know this can lead to having to scroll through text a bit more but I am cool with that.

The benefit should be bragging rights and maybe an achievement. If there are any other tangible benefits then that takes away from the success.

Hehe, if you guys really want to design an NPC, just shell out $10,000 on KS and then make a forum post about it, lol. Truth be told, the detail of these NPCs should be left to the devs. We should give them input on the general stuff but the details belong to them.

Multiplayer in BG2 does not undermine anything. I will say multiplayer in BG2 was bad. The only thing good about multiplayer in BG2 was being able to craft the entire party and that could be done without multiplayer (see ToEE). Guys, MP is a pointless and expensive feature for this kind of game.

Developer Bobby Null mentioned the possibility of an Adventuring Guild where players can create more characters for a cost (remind me of Final Fantasy Tactics). I am all for that as a stretch goal. I want to be able to create the entire party on certain play throughs. Also, to the poster above, co-op multiplayer seems to me to be silly for this kind of game. The only reason most people used multiplayer in BG2 was to create additional PCs to play the campaign with. They would make a MP game, create the entire party, save and then move the save file from the MP folder to the SP folder.

I agree with this.

Sound is huge. I loved the background noice in taverns, dungeons, etc. They really set the tone quite nicely. On a related note, I hope they have good soundsets for PCs. I also want to be able to make my won ala IE games.

Make a slideshow like Fallout 1/2 that shows that consequences of your actions. This should be relative simple to do while also rewarding player choice, giving a nod to story and all that. This avoids the kind of crap we get in Mass Effect 3.

I will not be shelling out 5 bucks a pop for a bunch of mini-expansions meant to bleed me dry. I would have raged back in the day if I had to pay extra for Trials of the Luremaster. I will shell out cash for meaningful expansions like Throne of Bhaal.

I don't understand why some folks are against people being able to craft their own party. This does not seem to be a very development intensive feature to me. Sure, if you go that Adventuring Guild way, that does sound very involved and perhaps a bit costly. However, just allowing the player to make more characters on creation should not cause PE to go over budget or slow development to a crawl. Also, being allowed to make more than one does not force you to make more than one. If you just want PCs + NPCs, you should be able to do that too. This game should be about options. Being able to craft the entire party was a significant option in several previous titles and it should be an option in PE.

You should be able to make as much of the party as you want. That was a big part of the fun in BG 2, IWD and ToEE. In all those games, there was a way to make the entire party.

The only thing I used MP for in BG2 was for making my entire party. Useless feature.

I made the mistake of making my own thread when this thread already existed. This is what I wrote: Thus far, devs have stated that you can make one character and then get joinable NPCs. They have also stated that NPCs will NOT be required. If this is so, I would like to put forward this question: Since NPCs are not required, why not allow us to craft the entire party? I know I really enjoyed doing this in BG2. I would go into multi-mode, make a party, save and then drag the save file to the single player save folder. I mean, sure, the first couple times you play the game, its fun to get the NPCs, do their quests, etc. You see them fight eachother, hit on you, you learn about their past, talk to them, etc. That's all quite engrossing, no doubt. However, once in a while, its munchkin time. Sometimes, I wanna craft the ultimate band of heroes myself in order to achieve the best orc village killing time. ToEE let you do this right off the bat. You could make a whole bunch of party members AND get NPCs. Can't Obsidian do something similar here? Maybe the first guy you make is the "main" PC for story purposes and the others are just his friends or something.

Doh, apologies, I will copy/paste my musings there.

I beleieve you have a map that matches the kind of game you are making. For a sandbox style freeroaming game like FO1/2, that map worked. For a more story based title like the IE games, the hotspot version works. I like PE is going for IE style story, so I say IE style maps.

Voices are nice, no doubt. However, the money to do it just isn't worth it. I would rather have more dialog and less voices. Just greetings, battlesounds and the occaisonal off color remark, ala-BG2.