Update #28: What We're Up To

[chisled2bone]

it also the opening line of "Good morning America" show...

[LadyCrimson]

It's the opening of the chorus of The City of New Orleans, though people probably aren't familiar with that song.

 

http://www.youtube.c...0JgqoF2W4#t=38s

More familiar with Guthrie's rendition...but they're both good.

 

it also the opening line of "Good morning America" show...

To this day the line now first brings to mind Robin Williams and the movie.

[GhostofAnakin]

In terms of size of the game, I wonder if the physical copy is going to reach 4 CDs like BG2 did, or if the technology nowadays will allow them to optimize it better.

 

They invented these things called DVDs recently, they're pretty good.

 

 

Dee...vee....what?

 

You kids and your fancy lingo.

[Nebuchadnezzar]

Don't worry guys, next time Josh will read out all of the countries in the world at the beginning at the video.

[Starwars]

And he will read out each country name in that native language. ONLY THEN WILL WE BE SATISFIED!

[Hornet85]

Its funny I was browsing this other Kickstarter project Star Citizen which I think many may have heard of by now, and they actually made "monthly dev team webcast" as a stretch goal. I thought to my self, so if no 4 million you're not going to be as enthusiastic in keeping the supporters up to date?

 

I'm so glad Obsidian is keeping us up to date with these video after the project finishes and the real work begin. Looking forward to next week's update.

[TwinkieGorilla]

ITT people find new ways of whining about new things to whine about. #goodmorningamerica

[barmaglo]

If I can just ask one thing...can you please have some mechanic allowing the characters to carry as much loot as the have earned. Was playing some more Skyrim last night and there is nothing more annoying than having to travel back and forth between a dungeon and town multiple times just to sell off the loot.

 

Edited October 24, 2012 by barmaglo

[Amentep]

tl:dr translation

 

"I hate you all for giving us this much money... My migraines are all your fault. This is to much game.

 

P.S. I hate you all" -Josh

 

Definitely picking up a "Dear God - how is this going to all work?" vibe from this video

 

And in the back of the minds of everyone at Obsidian creeps in an ugly thought: "Did gamers really pledge 4 million dollars and make the game as big as it could possibly be...simply because they secretly hate us and want to see us suffer?"

 

Edited October 24, 2012 by Amentep

[Forber]

Stop 16 level we do not get?

[InHuMan]

And even when they're rendered out, they can be pretty darn big. We actually sat down and calculated out at--I think we targeted like a 1080p resolution for minimum screen size and then did something like Baldur's Gate. Uh, well, I hope you have a lot of Blurays because that's not small.

When BG1 came out, it was 5 CD (That was insane back then ). So if I could choose between graphics quality and game size, I definitely choosing graphics quality. I do not care if it takes even 100 GB on my hard drive and it it distributed on 4 Blurays. Let's make it nice, space is cheap...

[Frisk]

I do not care if it takes even 100 GB on my hard drive and it it distributed on 4 Blurays. Let's make it nice, space is cheap...

 

Well, what about the poor guys who only download the game...perhaps over a slow link?

 

By the way, does anyone know what the largest PC game to day is...and how big it is (in GBs, excluding expansions and optional "extras", just the core game) ?

[April]

Oh god, that would be annoying to install. If it turns out in anyway like Baldur's Gate II with loads of mods and stuff like that, then having to reinstall 100gb because of a slipup in the install order of the mods would be a major PITA.

[InHuMan]

I do not care if it takes even 100 GB on my hard drive and it it distributed on 4 Blurays. Let's make it nice, space is cheap...

 

Well, what about the poor guys who only download the game...perhaps over a slow link?

You can always ask a friends to download it for you, surely someone of them have access to high speed internet

Oh god, that would be annoying to install. If it turns out in anyway like Baldur's Gate II with loads of mods and stuff like that, then having to reinstall 100gb because of a slipup in the install order of the mods would be a major PITA.

I know what do you mean. It took almost 3 hours to install BG2 on my computer But this is because BG2 is not so mod friendly. Hope PE will handle mods better.

Edited October 24, 2012 by InHuMan

[metiman]

Is there some problem with distributing on both bluray for those of us who have bluray drives and multiple dual layer DVDs for people who don't? I don't mean shipping out both. I mean allowing us to choose which version we want. A very large game size is fine given todays hard drive sizes. I don't like when Microsoft thinks like that because an operating system has no need to take up a large portion of your hard drive, but for applications it's no problem at least for the end user. High resolution bitmaps take up a lot of space. That's just the way of things now. If the bitmaps are uncompressed you can certainly compress them but that's all you can do.

 

I'm assuming it's just a distribution cost issue. Either lots of dual layer DVDs or 1 or 2 blurays. For people with slower connections it might take weeks to download though. I suppose such people still have time to upgrade to the full boxed game if they have the money. Otherwise they just have to commit to weeks of downloading.

 

As far as compression, their bitmap formats are probably already compressed and even if they aren't compression isn't exactly new tech. I'm sure most of the devs are already familiar with the fact that bitmaps are compressible.

 

My monitor is only a 1600x1200 20". That's at least somewhat fewer pixels than 1920x1200. But I realize most people have either 1920x1200 or 1920x1080 24" monitors these days. It probably makes more sense to standardize on 1920x1200 bitmaps since that's the screen size that most people have. Although that does leave out people with 30" monitors. I want to get one of those one day too.

Edited October 24, 2012 by metiman

[metiman]

I do not care if it takes even 100 GB on my hard drive and it it distributed on 4 Blurays. Let's make it nice, space is cheap...

 

Well, what about the poor guys who only download the game...perhaps over a slow link?

 

By the way, does anyone know what the largest PC game to day is...and how big it is (in GBs, excluding expansions and optional "extras", just the core game) ?

 

 

And what about people who don't have an internet connection at all? And what about people who cannot afford a computer or who can only afford a netbook or Chinese tablet? Or who only have an 80286 cpu running DOS 5.0? At some point you have to strike a balance between excluding some people and lessening the experience for the rest. If you have a slow internet connection you can either just be patient even if downloading the game takes a month or spend the extra money for the boxed DVD or Bluray version.

[Gfted1]

Don't worry guys, next time Josh will read out all of the countries in the world at the beginning at the video.

 

[metiman]

Even North Korea.

[Frisk]

At some point you have to strike a balance between excluding some people and lessening the experience for the rest. If you have a slow internet connection you can either just be patient even if downloading the game takes a month or spend the extra money for the boxed DVD or Bluray version.

 

Well, in my own case I am fine - I have a fiber-optic connection to my house, and anyhow, I'm getting the boxed (collector's) version as well - no, my concern is with people around the world who may not be able to download, say, a 100GB game. Maybe this is a non-issue - maybe the number of those people will be insignificant 18 months from now, but I am pretty sure that today it would be a real issue for some.

 

(Having said that, I really, really doubt the game will be 100GB - maybe 30-40GB would be my guess.) Anyhow, I guess Obsidian will be able to give a size estimate at some point next year, but for now this discussion is kind-of pointless.

[LadyCrimson]

By the way, does anyone know what the largest PC game to day is...and how big it is (in GBs, excluding expansions and optional "extras", just the core game) ?

Don't know about the biggest, but I remember noticing that Rage was something like 21GB to download from Steam (that's compressed, of course...it took up more HDD space than that), which was the largest I'd dealt with. But I don't DL tons of games so maybe if I did that wouldn't seem unusual.

[Piccolo]

If I can just ask one thing...can you please have some mechanic allowing the characters to carry as much loot as the have earned. Was playing some more Skyrim last night and there is nothing more annoying than having to travel back and forth between a dungeon and town multiple times just to sell off the loot.

Please no.

 

I hate this mentality where players feel they have to pick up and sell every last scrap of loot they find. It's just as bad as grinding out kills for XP.

 

I'm in favour of limited inventories and actually having to think and make choices when it comes to what you carry.

[LadyCrimson]

I hate this mentality where players feel they have to pick up and sell every last scrap of loot they find. It's just as bad as grinding out kills for XP.

I only do that/have that mentality in games where it feels like you have to because everything in the stores is priced out of your range from the getgo, unless you sell everything. (1 plain iron longsword, 100,000 gold pieces...and I have 4000. wtf?)

 

...so limited inventory is fine if the monetary/store system is also fair. Otherwise, gimmie big inventory space.

[Clammo]

If I can just ask one thing...can you please have some mechanic allowing the characters to carry as much loot as the have earned. Was playing some more Skyrim last night and there is nothing more annoying than having to travel back and forth between a dungeon and town multiple times just to sell off the loot.

 

Assuming you play Skyrim on PC (seeing as PE is a PC only game) then I believe you can modify the weight restriction by opening the console and entering the command "player.modav carryweight X". Obviously without the quotation marks, and where X is the value of weight you want your character to be able to carry.

 

But for this game I'd rather not, this is an old school game where restrictions like that have to be taken into account when building characters. And bear in mind you'll have a group of characters to distribute the loot load between.

Edited October 24, 2012 by Clammo

[Monte Carlo]

If I can just ask one thing...can you please have some mechanic allowing the characters to carry as much loot as the have earned. Was playing some more Skyrim last night and there is nothing more annoying than having to travel back and forth between a dungeon and town multiple times just to sell off the loot.

Please no.

 

I hate this mentality where players feel they have to pick up and sell every last scrap of loot they find. It's just as bad as grinding out kills for XP.

 

I'm in favour of limited inventories and actually having to think and make choices when it comes to what you carry.

 

[Hornet85]

Well, what about the poor guys who only download the game...perhaps over a slow link?

 

By the way, does anyone know what the largest PC game to day is...and how big it is (in GBs, excluding expansions and optional "extras", just the core game) ?

Max Payne 3 is about 30GB if I'm not mistaken. Not that I know if its the biggest ever, but I don't recall it ever being a issue. Didn't come across anyone complaining about it.

 

Please no.

 

I hate this mentality where players feel they have to pick up and sell every last scrap of loot they find. It's just as bad as grinding out kills for XP.

 

I'm in favour of limited inventories and actually having to think and make choices when it comes to what you carry.

Most probably it can be easily changed in one of its parameter files. They have said they plan to make stuff editable by simple text edits for modding.

 

So, everyone can have it the way they want it. I hope it doesn't bothers you though.

Edited October 24, 2012 by Hornet85