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Hey guys, so i'm just starting up on a 'South Park the stick of truth' let's play/ walkthrough on my new Youtube channel LETSPLAYMJ. I guess it's more of a let's play because I haven't played the game before. But i'm looking for some newbies to the game to follow my video's on Youtube and enjoy it with me, guess that'd be kinda cool. Please feel free to check it out and give me some feedback, or if you enjoy maybe subscribe and continue to follow me on Youtube. I plan on doing many more let's play/ walkthrough's, guess i'm looking for some followers and ideas of what games to play through, cheers. Just click the following link or copy and paste the link into your search bar to get to my Youtube channel, cheers. https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCtdlyLnlGgjAK270Kczz4dqQ

Do we know what PoE news we might see coming from GDC this week? Another design talk maybe? Or a gameplay video at last? That'd be quite nice. I know we've been told Obs want to wait until the game is polished enough, but come on now. We know what Alpha means, right?

Update by Brandon Adler, Producer After months of hard work we are happy to present to you with Project Eternity's BIG update. We have lots of stuff to go over, so let's get into it. Teaser Trailer Through the hard work of the Project Eternity team we are proud to present our first in-game teaser trailer. Click to view the gameplay teaser. New Name If you've finished the teaser (and you've finished it, haven't you?) then you know we have another big announcement. Project Eternity is now officially known as Pillars of Eternity. In addition to that, we have a nifty new logo courtesy of Kaz: The new Pillars of Eternity logo. Backer Portal Pillars of Eternity now has a new Backer Portal! You can visit it by going here. First things first, let's get into how you manage your pledges. To manage your pledge, click the link in the highlighted area. In the image above you will notice a section outlined in a red box. Inside this box is a link to the pledge management page. There are actually a few different ways to get to the pledge management page (there is also a link on the top bar, for example), but this is the easiest from the home page. Click the link in the box and you will head to the pledge management page. From this page you can manage all of your pledges or link new ones. The pledge management page is your first stop in collecting rewards. On this page you can do the following: Review any pledges linked to your account’s email address.Under the Your Pledges section we will list all of the pledges that are linked to the email address you have listed in your account. You can review these pledges and make sure that everything is correct. Link an additional email address to your account.You may have multiple pledges from multiple email addresses that you would like to associate with your account. By clicking the link in the Your Pledges section you can enter in another email address to link to your account. You will then be sent a confirmation email to the address provided. Once confirmed, any pledges linked to that email address will be shown under the Your Pledges section. Confirm what pledges should be used for.If you have pledged an amount equal to your selected tier on Kickstarter or PayPal the Backer Portal will automatically figure out what your pledge should be used for. On the other hand if you pledged an amount different than your selected tier level you will need to specify what the additional money or pledges were intended for. This can be anything from an add-on, to shipping, to a donation. If you need help you can select the option for Obsidian to contact you. We will contact you as soon as possible and get everything squared away. Keep in mind that if you choose for an Obsidian employee to contact you, your account will be locked until a representative has helped you. This is to prevent any incorrect selections. You can confirm and upgrade your tier on the reward management page. Next, you will be taken to the reward selection page. On this page you will be able to confirm your reward selection by selecting the appropriate tier listed. If you are eligible for a tier upgrade, you can select one of those options instead of what you originally pledged. Don’t worry about the price differences, we will take care of that when you checkout. If you missed any add-ons during the Kickstarter, you can add them here. Did you forget to grab a Pillars of Eternity t-shirt during the Kickstarter? No need to fret, after selecting your rewards, you can choose any add-ons that you would like to add to your pledge. You will find everything from shirts, to mouse pads, to Chris Avellone’s novella. You can review your order before finalizing it. Once you are finished choosing your rewards and add-ons, you will have an opportunity to review your order before checking out. Fill out your shipping info, if needed. If you have any physical goods, you will need to enter your shipping information. If you upgraded or added rewards, you will need to pay with a credit card or PayPal. If your pledge covers all of your rewards and add-ons you have selected then you just need to confirm one last time. If you have selected a more expensive tier or additional add-ons, then you will be prompted to pay with a credit card or a PayPal account. Fill out surveys for any in-game rewards. For those of you that have in-game rewards that require your help (Credits, Memorial Stones, NPCs, Items, Inns, Portraits, Adventuring Parties, etc.) or add-ons that require more information (shirts), we have surveys for you to fill out. Just click on the link once you have checked out or go to your profile to find all of the surveys you are eligible for. Filling out the surveys is as easy as choosing whatever you would like from the various selection boxes and filling out any text for in-game rewards. If you don’t have enough time to fill out the survey in one sitting, just press the save button at the bottom of the page. Your answers will be saved for the next time you enter the survey. Once you are happy with your answers, you can choose to submit your survey. Congratulations! Your rewards are now confirmed and any surveys you have are filled out. All that’s left to do is check out the areas of the Backer Portal. You can find more information about the game, videos, screenshots, and wallpapers. Stretch Goal Poll We've always taken your pledges seriously and we remain committed to giving our backers every stretch goal you reached during the Kickstarter campaign. Budgeting a game of this size can be daunting, but we always remember the cornerstones of our pitch and the features you funded. Even so, there are two things we know a lot of you have asked for: more wilderness areas and more companions. Both of these are very time-consuming, but we understand why so many people want them. Because we've seen these requests more than a few times, we would like to ask the community if you would be interested in new stretch goals to fund additional development. If not, no worries: we're still going to deliver on everything you've backed. Please let us know your thoughts in this thread on our forums. Interviews and Articles That’s not all. We also have a plethora of new interviews with members of the Pillars of Eternity team. Check them out below. GameBanshee Interview Eurogamer Article Kotaku Article PC World Summary Article PC World Interview Rock, Paper, Shotgun Interview VGS - AM 640 Interview (YouTube version here) That’s it for the update. The Pillars of Eternity team and the whole Obsidian crew would like to thank you for all of your support and help in creating the game over this past year. You can’t imagine how rewarding it is to get to work on this game with all of our Backers. Here’s to another great year!

As of now the developers is implementing a slow down option. Thus they can implement a speed up option with minimum hassle. Why we need speed up? Moving the party from location X to location Y will be less of an hassle. Hearing "You must gather your party before venturing forth" because not all your party have the boots of speed is annoying. Running here and there for quest, merchants, may generate too much idle time waiting for the party to get there that it breaks the mood. Waiting the party to get to the armor / spell / potion/ craft / gem merchmants to buy / sell loots for the hundredth time can be annoying. Waiting for the party to move to the hundredth quest NPC is no fun. If we feel the attack, move and spell animation too lengthy for normal game speed. If we play the game for N number of times that every combat is a sure win even with insane difficulty, have to introduce some other "Hellish" difficulty.

I wanted to talk about the difficulty of P:E. I skimmed the first few pages and couldn't find a topic about it, so I decided to create one. Maybe I haven't looked hard enough, but here we go: I've been replaying DA:O on nightmare and couldn't help but notice how easy it is. When I played it for the first time I found it was more difficult than other games this generation, but that feeling went away when I got used to the mechanics. Now I just wail on the enemies and wait for them to die. That's not good combat. I know Obsidian is trying to capture the IE games, but those weren't *hard* per se, just obnoxiously luck based. I want to use tactics and all tools I have at my disposal. You should be punished for memorizing only damaging spells on your mage etc. The question is: How badly should you be punished? How difficult should the game be? How different should the experience be between normal and hard? How do you define difficulty in RPG's in general? Should anything be designed around luck? I have no idea where to even begin answering those questions, so I'll refrain from having an opinion before I read some of yours.

I have thought about this idea for rpg's for a few years and I think you may be able to pull this off. In real life we meet and loose companions and sometimes run into them again and again, A companion role has been for the most part stagnant they level up but never really grow. Loves and enemies crop up from time to time, they may go off and have families. They should age and evolve based on the relationship with the Player Charachter. for example: in the Fallout universe we acquire companions based on our karma etc. they travel with us and exchange weapons etc. but the charachter of the NPC never changes they don't age their wounds don't make them feel different. What if Fawkes found you to be morally upstanding and offered a quest to help the super mutants be less violent and learn to grow? What if you said no and a resentment began? What if you take a companion to a town where they are not well liked? just being associated with them makes the location and npc's of that town harder to deal with. conversations in the background about your companion are mentioned fingers pointed etc. giving you the feeling you may want to loose this companion or try to right the wrong they have commited. Life choices have a true effect on them as they age and evolve next to you. Say you dismiss a companiom and months later find what not getting together has done to them. Charon a freed slave has become a freedom fighter and has created a merc group and is hunting down slave owners, since you spurned him in an earlier part of his life he has been leaving exidence that you are the leader. Thus a new line of hostility is created towards you within that area of questing. Charon a purchased slave holds resentment towards you and at night you notice you are becoming ill and loosing health because he is slowly poisoning you. Charon a freed slave and now friend has stuck with you through thick and thin and in order for you to live sacrifices himself. Charon a freed slave has follwed you for months and realises you are evil and must be destroyed. Charon a freed slave meets an NPC that converts him to be a follower of the atom and he guides you to do their work As you can see the different gameplay would offer various and unfinishing quests and choices. You would need a few writers to come up with the various courses of life that could take place it would offer DLC's in abundance and create a new form of gaming evolution. I would love to hear from all of you about this and hear what your thoughts on the matter will be.

I'd love having the ability to shift-click to queue up movements (aka. waypoints), even if the pathfinding works flawlessly it'd be a nice feature to have to navigate in close quarters. Also, playing BG2 again, after having played a number of more recent squad/group based games, I've missed being able to tell a character to cast a spell, then shift-click an enemy to queue up an attack command. The commands would be executed in order, and discarded if impossible. I understand adding the ability to queue up any amount of actions can have a number of implications on gameplay, but it's something I actually reflexively started trying to do in BG2 (annoyingly cancelling any other action I had just given that character), because it felt like it should be there. Clicking an action would assign a new command (cancelling the action queue), shift-clicking an action would queue it, clicking an action in the queue would remove it from the queue. Any thoughts? Would adding queued actions remove some of the fun in combat, or would it ease up on tedious micro control, and let you focus on making broader tactical decisions? I like how the queueing system would concentrate the micro management in bursts (which can arguably be equated to making it more fun). Simple fights would be made less tedious, while hard fights would not benefit from queuing more than 1-2 actions, as you never know how they'll play out & you need maximum control.

(Warning-this may be long). Let me start out by a childhood story. I was at the local Fred Meyer's as a child. So young I had to be held up by my armpits to play the arcade boxes. This game called "Dragon's Lair" cought my eye. I was so totally enthralled with it. I begged my Dad and Uncle to play it. The response (Son, that is not a game, it's just a cartoon you have to put quaters in to watch and hit buttons every once in a while) Once I got older, and found an old box, I realized they were correct. It was not a game at all. Several years later, and home/PC gaming was introduced to the CDrom. I remember playing some PC Lawnmower man, and wodered what the hell I was even doing. Just totally on rails. This was right at the start of the FMV hell period in gaming. "Cinimatic" experience played out via a few button presses. Fast foward to today, and video games are rendered in greater detail, in real time then alot of those old FMV's. But the effect is the same. I just came off of a Halo4 playthrough, and just put the controller down during the 2nd campaign playthrough. Weapon's dissapearing, quick time events, sandcrawler rails section, rooms that you just went through locking for no appearent reason, wave combat, after wave after wave.... Yeah sure, the story was always a linear on rails affair, but the gameplay. It had a wave scenario, or a turret scenerio sprinked in here and there, but the battlfield was emergant. Here is where you have to go-have fun getting there. The modern military shooters have become a running joke as of late. Even Bioware, the old masters of the RPG has went down this "cinecraptic" experience hell-hole from where gameplay cannot escape. FFS, if I want a cinematic experience, I'll go to the damn cinema! I love really pretty graphics and the occasional cool as hell cut-scene just as much as the next guy. But where is the gameplay? "Press button to watch next in game scripted sequence". Thats not fun, that's the Dragon's Lair of 20 some-odd years ago with photo-realism esque graphics. Whats the difference? I can turn my head a bit-if I'm lucky? Hack down dude A before dude B? Maybe I"m preaching to the choir here, but the whole "cinimatic experience" is not just ruining my hobby-video games, it's actually removing the game out of games. They are hardly games anymore. Give me agency. Create an interesting world, with interesting characters, with good fun mechanics and let me loose. I'm at the point were I'm just going to not buy the latest AAA release and watch it on youtube. At this rate-is there really much difference? 60$ for 7-9 hours of gamplay with little to no replayability? I don't care how pretty it looks, or how well scripted the events are-that is just not very good value for the money. Sorry-just had to rant a bit. In my opinion, the cinicraptic experience is ruining every game it touches. Or maybe just like the FMV hell hole of years past-it will die a horrible death. (Here is hoping at least).

Something little I enjoyed in older RPG's (mostly before voice acting) was the ability to change the names of your dev made follower NPC's. I think this would be a nice addition to P.E. and make your play-through just a little bit more personalised. I know it's something very small so please don't shout at me for making this thread I know I am foolish xD

So I'm a huge fan of the first Dragon Age game (and a huge not-fan of its sequel, so let's set that aside for a minute). At the time, DA:O represented a really significant and explicit attempt to pay homage to Baldur's Gate and the like, sidelining Bioware's ongoing trend of focusing the protagonist over their party and producing ever more cinematic gameplay. If we're talking about a return to the values and tactical play of the Infinity Engine classics, then it might be worth pondering DA:O's solutions to essentially the same problems, and figuring out what it got right and what it got wrong. Especially since DA:O's successes are often eclipsed by the failings of its sequel, which did a pretty good job of tarnishing the entire franchise in most people's eyes. Maybe I'm alone in this, but the combat and tactical play in DA:O felt really good to me; it still does. Playing as a thief and lining up those satisfying backstabs, with the big numbers showing just how many hitpoints you were chunking away from a bad guy... that was special. So was positioning your mage for a precise cone of cold, freezing every enemy and not one of your own party. And there's some really deep and rewarding characterisation and NPC interaction in this game as well. I mean, I really think it set a standard for making a friend out of a videogame character. This is all stuff I'd love to see in Eternity. What about Dragon Age's failings? No where near enough character/class creation options, for one thing, and ultimately a very limited set of abilities to choose when levelling-up. Overall not enough content, I'd say. Though I liked the large-scale, in-depth quests, the game fell signifcantly short of the (I think perfect) balance of questing achieved by BG2. What do you guys think? Are there lessons to be learnt from DA:O, or should Eternity pretend it never happened?

Hey kid, we have different stories about it. What do you think about building storyline mechanics with respect to different difficulty options? I mean that gameplay would vary not only in difficulty, but in storyline or amount of quests that player receive. It may look like developer have to build handful unique stories and will demand double of money and HR. My idea is to build one complete main plot and set of side stories/quests, and until certain difficulty modes (suppose those 3 special most difficult goals) player wont get all side quests (developers may even randomize offered set) and may be restricted to go through some predefined shortcuts of main story. Another possibility (along with hiding some secondary quests) will just end main plot and propose to continue (or even restart) on full difficulty to see extension of story. P.S.: I know that this may require additional funds, however perhaps not as many compared to the interest shown by players. Many games struggle to attend audience more than once. Such feature may add motivation, and different gaming experience. Instead of single pass, players will become interested to go through the game again. And of course, adding more arbitrariness of gameplay will reduce significance of pass-through "manuals" which will inevitably rise over the internet with time.

Hello, members of the Order! I'll just post something I was discussing with some of your friends in the Kickstarter page. It's about XP System, and started with someone saying that doens't agree with the XP gain from killing a monster. As I never liked it, I said something I used to do in my days of pen and paper rpg. Here's what I wrote in KS page: "As for XP system everyone's been talking about, I'll write something I said earlier: I always felt like killing people/monsters and level up really makes no sense to me. As for leveling up I imagine you as a experieced player (as it's what xp means), I don't get how experienced you might be just killing people. So, I don't agree with gaining much xp out of random kill. If it's somehow attached to your objective, then ok, it makes sense. But just randomly walking through the woods and killing a bear shouldn't make you lvl up. You may get some XP out of it, but very little, and only if it adds to the gameplay. What I think killing a bear in these conditions should do is give you an bonus. Like a Pro Efficiency. You spent your day in the woods, hunting. At the end of the day, you haven't finished any quests. You haven't seen many of what the world can give you. But you have indeed hunted a lot of wild creatures. So, what you actually are doing great is at killing bears, hunting and using your bow. So let's say you get a bonus after X hours doing that. Bow Pro Efficiency +3 and Bear Trapper + 3. After that, you spent a whole month in a dungeon, without seeing the sun. So you'll loose your Bear Trapper Pro Efficiency +3, it'll go back to 0. As you're in a dungeon, you may get some bonuses, like Dungeon Crawler Pro Efficiency + 8 (now you're much more experienced in dungeon crawling, seeing paths and solving puzzles much faster than before). Ok, so you got out of your Dungeon and got back to the Woods. Now you'll start loosing your Dungeon Crawler Pro Efficiency slowly. Let's say you spent another whole month without stepping into a Dungeon. But now your Dungeon Crawler Pro Efficiency is not 0 as it was when you got away from the Woods for a while, it's only +3. What happenned is that you spent so much time in a Dungeon that you're good at it, even if you pass three years of your life out of it, you'll remember when you get back. That's the minimum your Pro Efficiency may get. The same would've hgappenned with your Bear Trapper Pro Efficiency, if you spent so much time doing so. And it can even add some lore to the game. You may have a companion that is Dungeon Crawler Pro Efficienct lvl 8, so exploring the dungeon with him is much easier and safer. Your companion hunter may teach you a little of Bear Trapper if you ask him to do it. These are not skills, just Bonuses you accumulate. Your skills in battle still add to your Pro Efficiency, so you can get really good at Bear Hunting if you spent a lot of points in a Marksman skill and spent a lot of time in the Woods. The difference is that one you achieve only with experience, the other only with your time on that especific situation. I'm saying that just to share with you guys what I used to make in my old days of paper and pen RPG. And that's how I've approached in a game like Skyrim for example. I liked the new system, but I don't like the fact that I'm leveling up by raising my Sneak skill since I'm playing a Barbarian character. Of course, in a RPG table it's much easier to balance, since you have the master and etc. In a video game that'd be a lot harder not to make it boring or overpowered." "Like, you're a Hunter and use a Crossbow. If you use it a lot, you'll get your Crossbow Pro Efficiency +X. If you don't, you won't get it. Maybe you've choosen a Bow or another weapon. Or maybe you're using a two handed sword, and then you need to revisit your char, 'cause you may be spending a lot of skill points in something you're not using. It have to be something natural, like something you'd naturally do after raising a skill, since your point in raising that skill is to become better at it. The difference is that it adds many ways of being better at something" Some things already said about it: much work to implement something like that; it needs to be completely balanced to work, or it's just be boring/overpowered/frustrating; some people may find it boring to have to actually kill a lot of Bears to be the best at it; it has to reward the player in a way that he feels it's worth doing so, or it'll just be worthless, and at the same time it may get overpowered. And of course, there's a whole lot of people who won't agree with me, and that actually think that killing a monster and obtaining xp to raise your Skills makes sense. I don't think that makes sense in every situation, but you may not agree, and I totally respect your point of view. I'm only sharing this to see what you guys think. If you like it and play a pen and paper rpg, try it out. Maybe it already exists (probably). Maybe a video game already tried it (I haven't played them all, of course, so I don't know). Maybe you have more ideas and I can use it on my future pen and paper sessions - if such time is yet to come again ))): Thansk for your time and interest!

We've got a crowdfunded project with many many rpg veterans chipping in. I'm ready for some innovation and experiments. Here are some features of my imaginary, perfect 'Project Eternity', add your own below! Resting Spells/abilities regenerate instead of becoming unavailable after use until the party rests. The party acts at 100% efficiency when well rested, but gradually becomes more vulnerable and loses effectiveness in all skills when tired. Spells not only cost mana, but tire casters independently. The same holds true for physical skills without consuming mana. The party can rest anywhere to regain up to e.g. 50% efficiency, but can only recuperate to 100% in designated resting areas. Familiar: As a tactical asset, it can spy, explore, steal, poison, play tricks etc. either on enemies/neutrals or companions. It's got character (I always thought Morte was a good familiar, if overpowered as a fighter.) It's not an ugly beetle. Dialogue Regular people share parts of a huge knowledge pool. Besides the traditional dialogue window, a kind of "google autocomplete searchbox" displays possible questions relating to the key words typed in. E.g. "Mr. X" would permit the questions: "What do you know about Mr. X?", "Where does Mr. X live?", etc. Choices Some painful, some impossible, and some to be proud of Example: "You paid dearly for doing the right thing. As a child slave, you decide to help a friend avoid punishment. You get caught and your hand is chopped off in retribution. Later on, you can't use bows and 2h-weapons. Furthermore, the wound is a stigma of a caught and convicted petty thief." In the later game, those friends' actions have special significance to the player, and create immersion. If later on a magic liquid metal hand that restores lost abilities, can shapeshift and execute killmoves happens to be found, it'll be enjoyed all the more. On the other hand, any injury can be avoided by not helping the friend in the first place. Not paying attention makes it easy to inadvertently go down the wrong path. You want to be a good guy? Be prepared to swallow rage and forsake the satisfaction of vengeance. Vigilante killings are recognized as such by society. It's not easy to be just, and almost impossible to entirely avoid being manipulated. Prudent choices such as "bringing someone in" instead of killing them outright are available. It's impossible to succeed every time, and players are confronted with moments of intense frustration. No guiding hand An immersion breaker in modern games is the relentless pace. Not in Project Eternity. Here it is important to pay attention to the dialogue. Little is gained by following quest markers or checking objectives. Facts are recorded, but the player jots down his/her own conclusions in the journal next to them, and chooses his/her plan of action. The minimap is not a substitute for looking at where you are going, players need to familiarize themselves with the game world. Help is readily available by talking to people, but the right questions need to be asked. Superior solutions to quests apparent only with understanding and immersion are available next to regular endings. Mystery The player is placed in a wondrous place, and is not all that powerful nor important. He/She isn't able to battle everything, and might need to run from a conflict without ever having a chance of besting an opponent. In PST the lady of pain set a great mood. Beating everything into submission does not solve anything, nor does it even seem a worthy endeavor. Themes Philosophy is fun and fascinating. Kierkegaard and Hobbes inspire fascinating dark characters whose dispositions and actions give a special flair to this RPG. There is no arch enemy, per se, the player develops a philosophy he/she needs to see through. Combat The trade-off for tactical mastery in turn based combat is the static feel. Especially during unchallenging encounters, parties approach each other, find the right distance, stop, and lose health until one dies. Not in Project Eternity. To start with, enemies have hit boxes which can be individually targeted. Moreover, terrain, obstacles, distance, position and stance are integrated as tactical elements. Attacks and spells can knock targets around. More action oriented players such as myself appreciate timed active actions (block, parry, riposte/counter, chain...), although these are optional in the game menu. Both classic rpg lovers and action oriented gamers appreciate differentiated combat stages, where party characters dynamically adjust their standard attack according to distance. Long range, mid range, and melee. A melee character needs to consider how to approach through a debuff focused mid range without penalty (by fog, evasion, cover, long range stun/knockdown...), thus making the "approach and hack" tactic less feasible. Different armors equal different strengths and weaknesses. Weapon changes during combat are quick and necessary. Semi-scripted melee and spell combos bring joy to all (thief hamstrings an opponent from behind, fighter bashes his head in) Romance During the last years games have opened up a lot in this respect. We saw more LBGT friendly interaction, and a lot more skin. Since all bases are covered in Project Eternity, a large cast of characters is needed. Most characters are regular boring heterosexuals, not that much interested in sex in any case, because immersion doesn't permit otherwise. A true romance (and with good reason not everyone wants to go there) seeps out of the confines of dialogue. Combat changes, as do expectations from partner and party. Interaction is more frequent and natural. A darker side of romance is the power to influence/manipulate/control one's partner, and some evil bastards take advantage of that. Leveling A Fallout approach is chosen in lieu of fixed classes. It's possible to pick up formerly unknown skills during the story which are not included in a skill tree/pool, and different types of equipment have unique actions. Toolset Whatever wishes stay unfulfilled, a toolset brings them to life. Modders not only add or change content, they change gameplay, fix bugs and update graphics. A toolset for a game is the gift that keeps on giving. (Check out the oblivion/skyrim/fallout3/falloutnv nexus if you haven't already, it is insane what these people deliver)

I was thinking about magic use in RPGs and would really love it if this game did not use the massively over used mana system. I think it'd also be pretty cool if magic wasn't mostly reactive and combat based. Some random ideas and things I'd like to see... Spells you had to plan ahead to use Maybe you need reagents the use of symbols/runes/glyphs on your gear/weapons or the ground an altar of some kind sacfice something to gain something all of the above If I'm playing a mage I'd like also to see and use magic in every aspect of the game, to see/feel/hear things others don't, to bypass problems that other classes may have greater issues with. I don't want it just to be the magic unlock and the magic persuasion. I'm no game designer and so I'll leave it up to you lovely devs to sort it all out, but I just thought I should throw that out there. Anyone else have any thoughts on the matter?

I understand it's hard to put a protagonist in peril but something that super bothered me about BG and IwD (probably the only thing that bothered me) was the amount of time my 18 int mage character walked into a trap that I, as the player, spotted from a mile away. I'm not talking about a physical trap, but the moment the enemy jumps out from behind a sofa and goes 'BWAHAHAHA you did exactly what I wanted you to! Ambush!' and I let out an audible sigh as I the story forced me into that situation. I know it's picky but it does get frustrating

Being able to play through the game again when you have finished it with your already somewhat levelled character would be great. I really like new game plus in other games and it encourages me to play through a game more than once. This could be especially significant if the game has meaningful choices or hidden things, an option to change race would also be great but not absolutely needed. Enemies would be appropriately levelled of course.

i still dont catch if the game will be 2D like BD2 or 3D like neverwinter nights 1 or 3D like neverwinter nights 2 this is very important, i like the way nwn2 works cus we can get nice isometric look and we can close up the camera to the companions to see in details how they are

Passage of time in RPGs Quite some time have passed since the birth of RP video games, and we have seen innovation after innovation deepen the immersion and revitalize not just a game genre but also a culture. The introduction of 3D did a lot to the first-person branch of RPGs for example, and the obvious demonstration would be the Elder Scrolls series. The advancement of internet also did a lot to RPGs which by nature is based on gameplay including several players, if you consider their origins, and today we have a genre called MMORPG. I have always thought of the element and mechanics of time's passage as one of these things that could really revolutionize, or at least explore a very neglected aspect of gaming in general and worldbuilding specifically. I mean, today we can explore a sprawling and ever-so-detailed world with grass swaying in the wind and NPCs going about their daily tasks and talking to each other. But it's still like you're walking around in a world frozen in a time stasis. Nothing happens until you show up. If you can play for months or even years in-game why wouldn't you be able to see the seasons go by? I'm talking about using time as something more than just a decorative day and night cycle, or as simple quest requisites, as in "meet me here tonight". I'm talking about having the passage of time being an integral part of the game world and how things in it functions. It would be a difficult task to implement in a game like Skyrim for example, considering the massive, open, and minutely detailed 3D world it has, as regards to the pure amount of data it would require. But take something like what Project Eternity wants to create, and you can at least start to see ways of actually doing this. Brainstorming! So, let's take some basic aspects of RPG gameplay and expose them to the element of time and see what happens. Items and keeping inventory Items and the use of an inventory is elementary in RPGs, but since most of the things in an RPG inventory are probably made out of metal, paper, cloth and so on, there's really not much gong on in there. But let's say food and drink are important things for the wellbeing of a character, just like in pen-and-paper RPGs and many other games. So if food and drink are made important, you could actually have drinks going stale, bread molding, and meat rotting and becoming poisonous. Perhaps it would be wise to throw out old food if you don't want rot to spread to the other foodstuffs in your inventory. But then again, there's potions and healing... Potions and healing are the natural enemy of food and drink. Why go through all the pain of enabling players to satiate their hunger and thirst, and doing so to recover and maintain health, when you're just a couple of pots or hand movements away from full health at any moment? If food and drink is to be implemented it will compete with potions and healing since they all share the same use, namely that of keeping you healthy. Now, if everyone knew how to heal, then even potions would be superfluous, but not everyone does, and usually the healing is limited to X uses per day or something like that. If you think about it, potions and healing are almost exclusively used during combat, because that's where you often need to regain vast amounts of health in a matter of seconds. We all know only magic and futuristic auto-injectors are capable of doing this, not apple pies and dried meat. So that's out of the question. But what we do know is that a man's gotta eat and drink at some point, and hopefully not just to squeeze the local going-ons out of some poor tavern patron. What if potions actually were a rare and perhaps expensive commodity, I mean, where are all the factories supplying this ridiculous amount of potions at these prizes located anyway? If food and drink were to be made useful it would mean you somehow lost health or otherwise suffered outside of battle. I know there's a lot of people who would oppose themselves to that, believing the world outside of battle to be the safest place of all, and perhaps it aught to be in world where the urgency of time only is applied to battle, but as soon as you introduce time to the world as a whole I believe you should be able to feel it and act upon it, even outside of battle. Maybe your max health decreases if you don't eat and drink, or you become more vulnerable to some things (like poison and disease), less resistant to magic, or less efficient with your skills. Perhaps then players would feel inclined towards only using their few and valuable potions and heals when they really need them, during battle that is, and making room for the gastronomical adventure while making camp or as a non-contrived way of meeting and agreeing to help strangers at taverns. World and travel I've always wondered why some games have elaborate calendars with fancy names and mythology and the only purpose it seams to serve is to organize your saved games. Why not tie all these names and mythology to things that happen in the world? Most places located in temperate regions celebrate harvesting season for example, usually there's festivities and markets. Maybe there's a tourney every year to celebrate the local king's birthday or your own heroic deeds (after completing a quest). Maybe most shops are closed a certain day of the week, or perhaps the a local elven trader leaves town a few days to celebrate the coming of spring with his kin. There are many things going on in a town for example, many of which are daily tasks that aren't really worth plotting out in any great detail, but seeing the streets change from a sprawling social meeting place during day, to a dark, nail-biting gauntlet by night is something a lot of games have done before and with good results. Besides these area-specific events taking place you can have people moving about between towns and villages, like merchants or a traveling circus for example. Having different modes of transportation is also something that will make the game more interesting when you add the element of time. Will you make it in time to wherever you need to be if you just travel by foot, or will you need to buy horses or hire a carriage? Questing How is it that no matter how mundane or urgent a task it is, an NPC will accept no help but yours? What I'm proposing here hasn't been done in any RPGs, at least to my knowledge. To actually turn quests into their own processes of events, and if you want them to take certain path you need to intervene, and if you don't, they' will "solve themselves". Quests of the type "find the cure..." will likely only have one consequence if left undone, assuming you're the only one able to solve it. But let's say the quest is saving a merchant's daughter who have been kidnapped by bandits instead. If you never show up to take the quest, the quest will start solving itself after a while. Perhaps the merchant hires someone else to do the job, and maybe you run into this person by chance in the wilderness and he asks if you want to join in on the reward, allowing you to still pick the quest up. Perhaps you never meet the hired sword on his quest and maybe he fails, but you run into the bandits much later, and if you talk to them instead of fighting them you discover one of them was once a merchant's daughter who actually ran away from her overbearing father. Other quests might evolve in more complex ways, not always random, and you are able to intercept the quest anywhere as it travels along its' timeline and hopefully completing it, with different outcomes depending on where. This means you can't pick up every quest in the game in only one playthrough, at least not from their start, since you can't be everywhere simultaneously. Perhaps you have to make though choices based on that fact. Your choices, and at what time you make them, will have a profound effect on the story and the gaming experience of each playthrough. The replayability that implementation of time offers is immense. I'm not sure how far this project has gone and if this kind of input is "too late" so to speak, but it might still offer some food for thought.

Hi guys I'm trying to find out if I can swap items between players and/or have different characters buy stuff. It looks like you can only buy using your main character but at the moment I have Lucas running around with loads of gear and Anjali with practically nothing. Any assistant would be appreciated Thanks A