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So one of the problems I had with the first game was that the way the game reacted to your character and some of your choices felt lacking in places. It was a well established world that had all kinds of cultural differences and history ect. However I get that there has to be some limit and an rpg can't be tailored around every specific choice. One of the biggest examples of this were the godlike, it's supposed to be this big deal to pretty much everyone yet if you play as one it doesn't come up very often. You can't even talk to Pallegina about also being a godlike (which i found really weird) or any of the gods about it. In Deadfire not only does the game have your character choices to react to but it also has choices you made in the last game as well and in my opinion it is a lot better but there are still some issues. Godlike for example aren't really a problem it comes up all the time and it can be brought up by your character in most relevant discussions. The game often has npc's referring to some aspect of my character's history and even their reputation in this game I think it is for the most part done really well. Also the fact that most of those lines are voiced makes it even more impressive. However sometimes I feel like some of it is actually too much. For example my character is from the living lands and several npc's have commented on this. Now I know the watcher is kind of famous but I did start to wonder why so many random people knew where my watcher hailed from. Like sure some of them would know but even like some random dude in Hasongo brought it up. I guess maybe there is an accent or something. Still it's a minor issue and for the most part I am happy with the reactivity to your character. On the other hand the reactivity to previous choices seems very strange to me. The game forces you to import a save, pick a set history or a created history in the intro and then that history doesn't really seem to matter all that much. There are a lot of lines in the game with the (this is a result of your choices from the previous game) icon but many of them are very pointless and sometimes I am not even sure how the game is supposed to be reflecting that choice, or even what choice it means. Sure sometimes it's great, if you break an oath to Hylea her reaction is hilarious and I think that worked well but if you gave the souls to Woedica it barely even comes up and I feel like this is one of the most impactful choices you could make in the first game. I suppose it's always going to be an illusion of choice, that is really how it has to be for the most part because there has to be a plot that will always be the plot regardless of what choices you made but it seems odd to me that Obsidian would go to so much effort to have you import your choices and bring them up so much only for them to not matter really at all. I didn't refer to import bugs here because they are not what the developers intended to be in the final product. I am Interested to hear what others think on the topic. I do not have experience with every choice and every type of character to fully judge the reactivity here. I do want to stress that I am more impressed than not with what they have done in this area.

Here is a crazy idea I wanted to share: I remember in one of the twitch-streams Josh mentioning that the annotaion system from Tyranny is being moved to PoE2: Deadfire. It will provide not only lore but also translation of foreign languages. Now I assume it is nothing big, just couple words, or phrases here and there. BUT WHAT IF: There are many factions from different regions. They speak different languages. WHAT IF you could only understand languages you know as a character - for example in PoE1 I played as an Orlan from Old Vailia. That would mean my character understands Vailian. The game would provide translation of Valian phrases but not Aedyrian or language of native Deadfire tribes. On the other hand, I might have Aloth in a party and he might act as a translatior for the Aedyrian. It might give your character and party a better sense of belonging and origin. Now, WHAT IF the foreign conversations weren't just small phrases. WHAT IF when walking up to a couple of Vailians talking you would be able to overhear a bit of their conversation. It would be a gibberish if you don't know the language, but you would learn something more, if you do. Some flavour text, get insight into their motivations, extra details about quest etc. Now if that would be implemented into quest design it could get interesting - Opening new ways, hints about possible ways to resolve situations, extra loot stashes. What is more, as a character you might get drawn to the faction which speaks your native language, as your interactions with them would be more... complete so to speak. I think it would be a nice and fluid way of connecting character with his background and the world around him/her. Naturally, the idea isn't simple at all, as it would require dedicated writing and quest design. But hey, just throwing it out there.

Soooo, fetch quests. "You there. Bring me 10 rat butts!" Rat butts may not even be useful for anything else. But this guy wants them. "Thanks! 8D!" You are awarded 50 XP and 50 gold. Awesome. Right? Yeah, so those are lame, and we should kill them. With fire, preferably. Right? But, wait... what if they weren't forced into the role of "give player some means of acquiring gold and items and XP," but instead were allowed to actually just be an event in the game world that you had a choice of whether or not to even handle, or even find out about, for that matter? What if, instead of being captured and dressed up and made to dance in a cage, they were set free, and allowed to roam for miles in their natural habitat? What if someone in town needs herbs? And, if you supply them with herbs, they just thank you and go on about their business. First of all, let me just say that herbs should be pretty useful to you, too. Not just some item that's pretty much worthless, anyway, that this person happens to need. Annnywho, back to the example scenario, this person actually needs herbs. Meaning that if you give them herbs, they actually do something with them that somehow comes into play in the rest of the story. Or, to put it more simply than that, at the very least, SOMEthing happens if you give them the herbs they need that's DIFFERENT from what happens if you don't. But it's not about you. You don't even get called over to them as you walk down the street, in "Hey, YOU look like you're skilled at herb-fetching!" manner. Maybe there's not even quest text and all that jazz. You just find out they need herbs. Maybe you know a little more than that. They're some sort of healer, etc. So, you give them herbs, and on down the line, hours further into the game, some crazy shyte is going down in that same area, and you need to garner support to take down some lord. Well, since you supplied that healer with those herbs, it turns out she was working with the local underground to help counter-act the local lord's unbeknownst-to-many-at-the-time cruel, terrible treatment of significant portions of the populous. So, now, not only are more people alive than would've been if you hadn't helped the healer get her herbs, but they're already willing to help you out. If you HADN'T given her herbs, because, who has time for herbs?! Heh... If you hadn't, then, you could maybe still garner support from those same people, but maybe it turns out there aren't as many, because they were thinned out by whatever disease/wounds she was treating. But, they don't HATE you, because they never specifically asked you, in uber-official quest form, to gather some herbs for them, specifically, and you never said "Yes, I will totally do that," and put it down in your "Things I will totally do or people will call me a liar and also I won't get XP or gold" ledger. That's just one simple example. You could give some seemingly harmless old man some wyvern eggs or something, and he could end up creating friggin' medieval Jurassic Park, which you later have to deal with. The point being that people who live in places and exist in the world need things that they may not obtain if someone doesn't help them get them, and those people perpetually exist and actually do something different with what they get when they get it, than when they don't get it. So, it's only really when they pretty much only exist in the game to supply you with a task, just so that they can give you a reward for that task, then warp to another dimension, apparently, that they become the dreaded "fetch quests." I'd love to see oodles of little "events" here and there like this, with bunches of different outcomes depending on how exactly you handle them, or whether or not you even do. I'm also aware I'm not inventing something here. This type of thing can be seen in many other games, but it's most prominently in the form of some optional quest objective or some kind of "hey, invest some money with me, and you won't regret it!" 'quest.' The reason I bring up fetch quests is that, they're so seemingly insignificant (because in most games they're programmed to actually be insigificant) that it would be pretty awesome to actually have them be significant in the long run, in various ways.

Okay, so this is something that I just thought of while responding to something in my Arcanum thread, but I think it's good enough to warrant it's own thread. It has to do with "game world reactivity". I apologize if there is a more "correct" term for it, but I don't know all the vocabulary associated with gaming. Basically, the discussion was about whether it is "acceptable" for the equivalent of months/years to pass in the game world, vice days/weeks. I am of the opinion that it is, because it is more "realistic", in that very few events are accomplished in days or weeks. The Civil Rights struggles of the 60s/70s took years, wars typically take at least months, Bruce Lee didn't become a master in weeks, it took Columbus over a year to "find" the New World, etc. So, I just like for the game world to have time progress a little more quickly, because it ultimately makes it feel "more authentic". Not only that, but I get a greater sense of accomplishment out of it, when I think that my character has literally spent months or years working to "defeat the threatening evil" or "subjugating the lands", or whatever. But this isn't directly about days/weeks vs. months/years. This is about how the game "reacts" to you. Below is the method I thought of and really like, though I don't know how feasible it would be to program, as it sounds pretty complex. I made a poll of the various other methods I could think of off-hand, so I'd love to see what everyone else thinks about it and why. For me, it doesn't have to all be continuous, never-ending adventure, where I'm going from fight to fight, finding the next NPC to get a quest from. I like for their to some sort of sense of urgency to the main quest, but I prefer to be something that is encouraged through game mechanics, rather than being forced on me. So, instead of, "you need to complete this within 24 hours" (which might be nice occasionally, as there are things that if they aren't taken care of immediately, will result in disastrous results- like Paul Revere not making his ride, for instance), it goes like this: if it is not completed within 24 hours, the game "responds" by doing x; if it isn't within 72 hours, y; if it isn't with 96 hours z; etc. Basically, as time goes on, more bad things happen as a result of not "attending to" the issue. So if you don't take out a group of bandits like you have been contracted to do, merchants start providing fewer goods. Then, they become unwilling/unable to participate in trade. Then, bandits begin attacking inside the village, and so on. That way, there are direct results from choosing to accept quests and not completing them, or possibly even from just being made aware of them and not taking some sort of action one way or the other. You could potentially even have triggers that are independent of that, where they just begin as soon as you get to an area. So, all the "quest" options for an area are on a countdown. As soon as you get to that area, the countdown begins. If you don't find out what the actual "quests" are, either by stumbling upon them or being told about them, it doesn't change the "escalations" of the situations. So if you begin wondering why it is that there are more bandit attacks, or abductions, or less goods, whatever, you will find out there is a quest related to it.

One of the things that kind of bothered me about Baldur's Gate was the automatic deduction of reputation once you'd done something bad. Most of the time it was fine but say if you killed a lone commoner asleep in the top floor of their house, you'd lose 5 reputation or something. I hope that in Project Eternity, when you're doing something that might upset another faction, that it's not an instant deduction from your reputation but rather there's a reason for it. This is a quote from the recent Wasteland 2 update I am hoping that in a situation like this, that your reputation would only be affected if the local resident saw you and made it back to town to speak of the tale. There are other ways around this though (magic, investigation) etc etc that could be used to explain away the reason for automatic reputation deduction, but it would be cool if you had the opportunity to exercise your ability to get away with stuff as well.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Uyzap5FcgI This update is going to be a little different. Instead of doing an update on a topic that we chose, we asked readers on reddit to submit questions and vote them up or down, and on Friday we took the five highest scoring questions to answer here. You can visit the Project Eternity reddit group here: http://www.reddit.co...rojecteternity/ and the Q&A subgroup is here: http://www.reddit.co...ns_answered_by/ Let us know if you like these Q&A updates, and we can look into doing more of them. Tim. AtheistBots asks... Class vs. Classless systems You're most famous for classless systems involved in Fallout and Arcanum. It sounds as if Obsidian will be using a class based system. What do you see as being the advantages of a class based system that you're hoping to leverage in Project Eternity? Answer: We are designing a class-based system because we want the different characters in your party to fill different roles, and classes are the best way to achieve this goal. In a skill-based game, it's harder to tell if a companion gives you the skills you are looking for, especially before you recruit them. In a class-based game, you know what each class can do, so you can decide that you want a particular class even before a potential companion offers to join you. And when you have a lot of companions and can choose which ones you want to take on a particular adventure, classes make it easier to form the group and be assured that you have your skillsets covered. Bonus question: Are you considering multiclassing? Answer: Bonus questions are cheating…but yes, we are considering adding multi-classing to the game. A better way to put this answer is that we are not ruling them out at this time. If they work well with our final system, we will offer them. Kaaaboom asks… I was a bit discouraged when I heard that the combat was going to be RTwP (real time with pause), myself being a big fan of TB (turn-based) and the possibility of tactical combat that it lends to a game. My question is then: how are you going to make the combat in P:E tactically interesting despite it being RTwP? Answer: Hmm, this is a bit of a loaded question, as it implies that real-time games aren't tactically interesting while all turn-based games are. Believe me, I have played plenty of dull turn-based games with very few options on what to do on each turn, and there are lots of real-time games that are incredibly tactically rich. Look at all of the real-time strategy games out there! So to answer your question, we are going to make sure that the distinct abilities that our classes will have will each provide different roles to those characters in combat, and that you will always have choices to make in combat about how to best position yourself and use your attacks. In addition, we are going to design the enemy encounters to be ever-increasing challenges, so that one way of fighting won't carry you through every encounter. You will be forced to mix it up a bit, tactically speaking, and use all of your combat skills to make it through to the end of the game. Let me add that as an Infinity Engine inspired game, our pillars of design include isometric exploration of a fantasy world, a reactive storyline with interesting and believable characters, and real-time with pause combat. Those elements are expected in our game, and we feel strongly about providing them. Elthosian asks… How much reactivity can we expect from the world based in our character's race and sub-race? Answer: We will provide a lot of reactivity in our game to your choice of race. We are planning on giving each race a set of traits that the player can pick from, and those traits affect everything from dialogs choices to skill bonuses to what kind of options you will have to finish some quests. There probably won't be quests that are just for one race, but one thing we are not going to do for certain is make race-restricted items. While many items have a cultural connection to some races, they will still be useable by members of other races. It might be unusual to see humans in elven chain, but they can wear it. NeuroArcanist asks… What aspect of cRPGs missing from modern games do you most want to recapture with Project Eternity? Answer: I can answer that in one word: parties. I like playing cRPG's that allow the player to control big parties of characters, and by control, I mean you can pick the actions of each party member if you want. We will have lots of pause conditions in our combat, and if you want to have the game pause whenever a party member can perform a new action, you can do that. Most modern games only let you control one character, or if they give you a party, you only control one member of that group. In this game, I want to control all of them. Zinicel asks… Will there be modding capabilities for this game? I know it's a tall order for this style of game, but I've wanted a definitive answer to this question. Knowing Unity, I know it's somewhat unlikely to offer this. But it'd still be nice to know for sure. Answer: That is a very good question, but unfortunately, I don't have an answer for you. We are still looking at Unity and how it bundles up content in the shipped game, and we will have to see how much of that we can make available to the player. I can say that we want you to be able to mod the game, and if it's possible, we will allow you to do it. It's not our primary focus, which is to give you an amazing single player experience with our game, but we know a lot of people will want to tinker with the game and make their own content, so we will let you know how this objective is faring when we are further along in development.