Update #53: The Man Who Makes Monsters

[ManifestedISO]

My Wounds-addled masochist monk character officially cannot wait to have his back clawed by a wicked and malicious female figure. Perhaps he will start a walking dead harem.

[JFSOCC]

I guess it's time to do some community promotion: these are the monsters we conjured up! Use them!

Edited May 15, 2013 by JFSOCC

[Tsumoro]

Not to be greedy or anything, but I liked all of those designs... so... can we have them all please. 

 

Thanking you. 

[Nonek]

I just realised where I got the name of the Null monster I designed in that thread, sorry about that. That bloody woman looks like a very strong concept, be interested to hear the lore behind her once it's worked out.

 

Personally I don't mind if you gents release an update once every fortnight regularly, the anticipation is quite pleasant.

[Falkon Swiftblade]

Any chance of giving us an idea of how many baddies are confirmed so far? Using words like "large" is subjective. That could mean a lot of things. What is an ideal amount of creatures for this game to you guys? Personally I'm hoping for at least 4 flavors of each type of beasty where it makes sense. So like a Kobald for example might have a brutish Kobald, a sorcerer type, a scout/ranger type, and maybe one who tosses grenades or make-shift aoe types of attacks. However I hope that they would still vary in size and possibly have a rank system like jewelry they use, or head dress for example and not just recolor them. Maybe one clan is more sneaky and assassin like, while another is more military and strategic in their tactics. 

[zimcub]

I hope you guys won't delete any concept art the artists make or leave it out of the digital collector's book format. I would love to see all of it even the rejected ones!   

[Hormalakh]

good monster. more please. i also second the request to look at community ideas: some of them are actually pretty good.

Edited May 16, 2013 by Hormalakh

[PrimeJunta]

@Ulquiorra, I can direct you to a couple of Tumblrs in case you need to educate yourself about female anatomy.

[dodusieczek]

+1 for including classic monsters. What's a fantasy RPG without ogres or trolls anyway?

Totally agree!

[mstark]

Will there be alternate art versions of monsters that appear in groups? If I encounter a roving band of 5 goblins, will they all use the exact same model?

I know this can be incredibly time consuming, but it'd be nice to see some slight variety (a bald one, a grey haired one, one with long sleeves, one with short...)

Happy to see the return of classic monsters. I hope they, too, will have Glanfathan names in addition to their plain English ones! If the cean gula is a type of Banshee, I wouldn't mind seeing it called so in plain English, in addition to the Glanfathan name.

Edited May 16, 2013 by mstark

[Jajo]

I think most of us (I included) sometimes take for granted how amazing it is that JES and Obsidian are giving us this much insight into the development process on a weekly bases (Let's all go grumble on the Bioware forums about how "phoned in" this week's update from the Dragon Age 3 development team was...oh wait). I understand that the P:E funding model places a higher onus on the developer to be open with backers, but, even then, I know of no other Kickstarter game where the developer has provided as much information at as frequent a rate as P:E. We should keep that in mind and not get too greedy.

 

I sense a growing feel of entitlement among certain readers... and it's not a healthy trend. But then again we get a certain proportion of ungracious grumblers in every update, so perhaps it's just the law of averages at work.

 

Entitlement? No. I'm not demanding anything outside of scope of what Obsidian has pledged to do. I'm just expressing my disappointment about the update, which has - objectively speaking - significantly less information than vast majority of others.

 

Ungracious? No. It lightens my (almost) every Wednesday morning, to read a P:E update during my breakfast and I've expressed my gratitude for the updates many times before. I am grateful for this one too, but that has no relevance to my disappointment about the amount of content in this particular update.

 

Grumbler? This week, yes. But I hope I'm not the only one, that would rather see a trend of a few grumblers every update, than a trend of sketchy updates. I consider that healthy.

 

EDIT:

This will be enough derailment from my side.

Edited May 16, 2013 by Jajo

[LordCrash]

Wow, Full Control was very happy with your support of their game, Obsidian! And it was a really worthy shoutout because the numbers were very good yesterday! And so they decided to immortalize you in Jagged Alliance: Flashback! How cool is that?

 

 

 

Tribute Sector

 

As a thanks to our friends at Obsidian, we’ve decided to make a special sector in their honor. The 5000 backer sector will be an Obsidian mine, where a secret cult of scientist resides and are trying to develop a new formula to become immortal, called “Eternity”. We thank the community for coming up with these awesome suggestions :D As Jesper is still hard at work finishing the diorama the visualization of the sector will have to wait, but we’ll get it up as soon as possible and also come up with the 5500 sector.

 

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/2079547763/jagged-alliance-flashback/posts/482679

[WDeranged]

Good update, it's nice to see the art direction taking on a more interesting style, I've not been blown away by the character designs before but these monsters look sufficiently monstery

[Woldan]

Reminds me a lot of a female version of the white Walkers in Game of Thrones.

[Giantevilhead]

Once again, the undead have been unfairly disparaged. I had thought that Obsidian would be above exploiting these long held prejudices against unlife.

[milczyciel]

Thumbs up for courage. I've always thought that clothes which rot off selectively so they could cover "those" areas are pretty cheap. Plus it's make a creature even more disgusting, repulsing as Ulquiorra reaction clearly proved :> 

And I think many of us will agree that it's exactly how we should feel about undead in the first place.

@up no offence

 

I hope you guys won't delete any concept art the artists make or leave it out of the digital collector's book format. I would love to see all of it even the rejected ones! 

Good Lord yes! We beg You Obsidian, keep all of them, even those most sketchy ones for umm... future generations?

Oh ok, I want 'em on my digital collector's book :D

<greedy me>

 

PS

Thanks for reminder about JA:F. Now where did I wrote down that password for amazon payments...

Edited May 17, 2013 by milczyciel

[Jajo]

I hope you guys won't delete any concept art the artists make or leave it out of the digital collector's book format. I would love to see all of it even the rejected ones! 

YESPLEASE.

[Solviulnir the Soulbinder]

These drawings, man. They bring back the memory of the day I first saw hand drawn concept art from BG. Been a long time.
I hope that Obsidian will use them as in-game assets to cank up the atmosphere even more - i'd love to see them as illustrations placed in the in-game books, like bestiaries. I'm not sure whether PE will immitate the estethics of the inventory system found in BG games (with hand drawn images of the equipment) but surely you could utilise all the conceptual artwork that is being made at the prototyping phase and include it in the game. 

Thanks.

[Torgo]

I just wanted to say that I find the overall design of the Blood Woman to be pretty interesting.  I do they accomplished the goal of familiar but with a little added flare.  I would also like to add that the design reminds me of the type of preservation found in bog bodies.  As an aside, if you have never seen what happens when a body is preserved in a bog then you should really google it as it's pretty fascinating.  I would love to see some more inspiration for other undead creatures to be taken from this type of source.
Some of the images of these preserved bodies are pretty unsettling, but could possibly be interesting for creature design.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bog_body
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_bog_bodies
 

[Ninjerk]

I love seeing some good concept art.  Thanks for they update, Bobby!

 

Could the JAF people go offtopic, though, please?

[Forlorn Hope]

Thanks for the nice little update. And really nice of you, Josh Sawyer, to mention JA:F. It helped a lot. Small effort but big help. Looking forward to future updates!

[Sheikh]

Too bad it had boobs in the final concept. It should have been as ugly as possible instead.

[rjshae]

Too bad it had boobs in the final concept. It should have been as ugly as possible instead.

 

Sigh.

 

Okay, why?

Edited May 23, 2013 by rjshae

[Lephys]

Too bad it had boobs in the final concept. It should have been as ugly as possible instead.

Even ugly, "evil" things have to feed their young. u_u

 

Elsewise, they go extinct, and there's nothing to stop you from getting to treasure chests and/or complete quests. Except pretty things that can feed their young, apparently.

[exodiark]

Concept art for the Blood Woman is great!

It even looks like my GF on her bloody period. Perfect!

Edited May 26, 2013 by exodiark