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So in my last post I complained about how badly the characters, namely Pallagina and Xoti, were written. To balance things out i wanted to complement this game on its worldbuilding. The factions and cultures are extremely well drawn. I have trouble deciding whose vision to side with. It all seems very realistic and there is very little if any bias weaved into the narrative. Brandon Sanderson once said something to the effect of 'there are two kinds of writers, worldbuilders and character writers. I think Obsidian must just do a better job at he worldbuilding. There are noble natives with backward traditions; a monarchy with good vision but strong feelings of entitlement and ethnocentrism; there is even a republic run by business interests with a reckless bend toward science. All well conceived, and made to make the audience think, yet still relevant to current philosophical discourses. I havent finished the game yet but I am very impressed with this aspect of the game so far.

In real life, the reason that there are 24 hours in a day, 60 minutes in an hour, 60 seconds in a minute, and 360 degrees in a circle are because those numbers all have a large number of integer factors. In the days before we had calculators, this made them much easier to work with than base 10. In Eora, the day length is 27 hours. 27 has factors 1, 3, 9, and 27, whereas 24 has factors 1, 2, 3, 4, 6, 8, 12, and 24. It would make much more sense for any mathematically-inclined culture to simply define minutes, hours, days etc. to be derived from the second (so a minute is derived as 60 seconds, and a second is not defined as 1/60th of a minute), and redefine the second to be a little longer in such a way that its derived quantities are numbers with a lot of factors. My suspicion is that the number "27" was chosen for the number of hours in a day so that the setting would not seem like it had lazily been copied from real life - but sometimes, things are the way they are in real life for a good reason. It's unlikely to change at this point, however, so what are some ways in which it could be justified in-universe?

Hey guys, you might know me from the Project Eternity forums. My first few threads were a bit of good-natured trolling, but I would hope that since then I've proven that I'm very interested in discussing games on a deep and serious level. Like many of you my gaming background includes playing classic RPGs by great developers like BIS and Obsidian, and I've played more recent RPGs as well in addition to other genres of games. In an age of blockbuster titles with huge budgets, it's remarkable what Obsidian (and several other studios including inXile) has achieved via Kickstarter, and I believe that this bold and innovative move on the part of the developers has great potential to benefit gaming in general. However, I think that if progress is to be made, we can't simply rely on the production end; the consumers must make efforts as well, and there are many ways to do this, ranging from talking with one's wallet to simply creating and sharing new ideas. In fact, I think that activists, critics, designers, and theorists all have a part to play in the progress of gaming, and I want to foster these efforts by creating a common home for them. The level of discussion in the Project Eternity forums has been very inspiring to me, and I've actively participated in a lot of exciting discussions. I suppose I can only speak for myself, but in my eyes the thing that tends to happen is that, in the course of giving suggestions specific to Project Eternity, we reference other games, and then we find ourselves making theoretical statements about RPGs in general, and finally we end up dreaming up cool stuff that is probably beyond the intended scope of Project Eternity. While I'm ultimately sure such ambitious suggestions don't hurt, it's got me thinking about whether there might be a better place for some of the brainstorming. Project Eternity will be a great game, but it's obviously not going to include all of our crazy ideas. However, that doesn't mean that the ideas that are left out aren't great ideas, and I think it would be a shame for such ideas to languish, buried by tons of other Project Eternity-specific stuff. Needless to say, I'm not proposing a replacement for the Project Eternity forums, but I think all parties stand to benefit from there being a place where broader discussion can take place among like-minded individuals, and to promote other games similar to Project Eternity. To that end I've been doing some searching for a gaming community based around discussing the theory of game design and ideally also promoting more grass-roots development and consumer activism. The thing is that I have not really found anything that entirely suits these purposes. RPGnet seems to be the place to go for tabletop RPGs but it's a bit lacking in video game-related content. The Forge used to be another popular place for such things, but now it's closed. Gamasutra has some quality blogs, and there are a lot of other cool game design blogs out there, but ultimately I don't quite think blogs achieve the objective. I'd like to see a place where everyone, not just the minority who are committed enough to run their own personal blog, can share their ideas about game design and promote projects they feel are worthy. I just don't know of such a place currently, though feel free to correct me if you do. With this in mind, I was just like "what the hell, I'll give it a go". Yesterday I started messing around with creating a free forum, and I'm a complete noob at it, but I'd really like this to succeed because I think something like this could greatly improve the gaming experiences of those involved. If any of this resonates with you or you've always wanted somewhere to post your ideas about RPGs or gaming in general, I encourage you to come visit what I've got so far. As you can tell the work has only just started, and there are plenty of opportunities for anyone to help out and have their own influence on this endeavor (nothing's quite set in stone yet, especially the name). Please feel free to post in there or on this thread if you have input or suggestions, or if you feel like this is enough of a worthwhile endeavor that you'd like to assist me. -mcmanusaur