Dungeon Seige 4?
Who owns the D&D license after Atari lost it?
As part of the agreement, Hasbro will regain the digital licensing rights to the Dungeons & Dragons franchise. However, Atari will still be able to sell and develop a selection of games under the license, including its recently released downloadable action game Dungeons & Dragons: Daggerdale and the upcoming Facebook game Heroes of Neverwinter.
Alpha Protocol 2 :hyper
torment 2
Has Atari done anything worthwhile since warping into some mobile/social/retro company?
They're pretty active making games nobody cares about.MISSION ACCOMPLISHED.
They're pretty active making games nobody cares about.MISSION ACCOMPLISHED.
It's not AP2 thankfully, they want a game that will actually SELL and be GOOD
Dungeon Siege 3 did middle for both.
If it's Torment 2, it better have the right music.
Wonder if Beamdog can do an update of Torment as well as BG?
It spins thus.
It spins thus.
Wheel of Time RPG?
(http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/d/de/Snakewheel.png)
Project Eternity will take the central hero, memorable companions and the epic exploration of Baldur’s Gate, add in the fun, intense combat and dungeon diving of Icewind Dale, and tie it all together with the emotional writing and mature thematic exploration of Planescape: Torment.
Is it a traditional orcs/elves/dwarves middle-earth fantasy setting?
QuoteProject Eternity will take the central hero, memorable companions and the epic exploration of Baldur’s Gate, add in the fun, intense combat and dungeon diving of Icewind Dale, and tie it all together with the emotional writing and mature thematic exploration of Planescape: Torment.
I dont want to know what they are aiming for, its just horrible if they give all these points up front.
QuoteProject Eternity will take the central hero, memorable companions and the epic exploration of Baldur’s Gate, add in the fun, intense combat and dungeon diving of Icewind Dale, and tie it all together with the emotional writing and mature thematic exploration of Planescape: Torment.
I dont want to know what they are aiming for, its just horrible if they give all these points up front.
How are they supposed to sell this game to fans if they can't tell fans what they're aiming to do?
"We are making an RPG. It will definitely feature dungeons and characters. Combat will also play a role."
It's Kickstarter:
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/obsidian/project-eternity
Not surprised. It isn't like publishers are throwing money at them to make games.
And yeah, this will be successful in no time. I bet it hits 1 million in under 5 days.
It says April 2014.
It says April 2014.
Ok, so 85% finished product released in Nov. 2014 :P
I guess this is the 2nd? time that a major non-indie developer is using kickstarter to fund a game. Doublefine made a ton, but it was also the first of the wave. A half year later, will be interesting to see if Obsidian can get similar results.
I think this is gonna do north of $2.5, possibly $3.0. People like Obsidian and PC RPG fans, as a rule, are white one-percenters in their 30s. The demographics, team, and promised game all add up to a really great value proposition. Other Kickstarters fail because they are lousy games turning to Kickstarter in a desperate attempt to happen at all. This one feels ... there's more ownership, more originality, more drive behind the motivations for starting the Kickstarter. It will do well.
It will hit $1.1M in no time.
Too bad you can't Kickstart projects through Steam. I'd Kickstart something if I didn't have to sign up to yet another thing.
1.1 million, Base Goal – Achieved!
Base game includes three races, five classes, and five companions. We have ideas for these, but we want to hear your opinions on what you'd like to see. Stay tuned to Kickstarter, our website, and our forums to join in on the conversation.
1.4 million, New Playable Race, Class, and Companion!
Expands your options for character creation and adds a companion of the new class.
1.6 million, a Mac Version of Project Eternity and The Story Grows!
We've listened and we’ll make a Mac version of the game at this tier. We're also going to add a new major storyline along with new quests, locations, NPCs, and unique loot (special histories everyone?).
1.8 million, New Playable Race, Class, and Companion!
The options grow for your main character and the roster of your motley crew expands with the addition of a new companion from the selected class.
2.0 million, Player House!
Get your own house in the game that you can customize, store equipment in, and where your companions hang out, or, as the elves say, "chillax".
2.2 million, a new Region, a new Faction and another new Companion! And, dare we say it... ? LINUX!
Great news, everyone! For the Tarball Knights of Gzippia out there, we'll be adding Linux support!
Also, the world of Project Eternity grows in a major way with the inclusion of a whole new faction and the territory it holds. This adds new NPCs, quests, magic items, and hours of gameplay. And yes, you got it, another companion.
Your Party
The maximum party size is the player's main character (PC) and up to five companions for a total of six characters. This does not preclude the addition of temporary characters in special circumstances. Companions are never forced on the player. Players can explore the entire world and its story on their own if they so choose. We feel companions are excellent sounding boards for the player's (and other companions') actions, but the story is ultimately about the player's personal conflict among the larger social and political complexities of the world.
Formations
A key element of the classic party-based tactical combat that we are developing is the use of party formations. As in the good ol' games, you can arrange your party in a large number of set formations. You can also construct your own formations if you want to get fancy. When moving companions, you have the ability to rotate formations for more precise positioning.
Character Creation
At a minimum, players will be able to specify their main character's name, sex, class, race (including subrace), culture, traits, ability scores, portrait, and the fundamental starting options of his or her class (gear, skills, and talents). We have not worked out customization details of character avatars, but we believe those are important and will be updating on these specifics in the future.
Hopefully it's like BG where you can wander into areas that are way above your level, no scaling please!
Souls
As we hinted at in our pitch videos, souls are A Big Deal in Project Eternity's world. The mortal world has not unlocked all of the secrets of how souls "work" and differing schools of metaphysical philosophy can be found in virtually every culture. What is known is that sapient souls move through an endless cycle of waking life and purgatorial slumber among the gods. Often this slumber lasts for years of "real" time, but occasionally it is brief, with a soul immediately moving on to a new life.
Far from being a flawless process, souls are subject to "fracturing" over generations, transforming in myriad ways, and not quite... working right. Some cultures and individuals place a high value on "strong" souls, souls with a "pure" lineage, "awakened" souls that remember past lives, "traveled" souls that have drifted through the divine realms, or those that co-exist with other souls in one body. However, the opposite is also true, resulting in negative discrimination and sometimes outright violence.
Through a variety of techniques (e.g. martial training, meditation, ritualistic evocation, mortification of the flesh), some individuals are able to draw upon the energy of their soul to accomplish extraordinary feats. These abilities range from the mundanely superhuman to the explosively magical. Having a strong soul seems to make this easier, but sometimes even people with fragmented souls are able to accomplish the extraordinary. The individual's body seems to act as a conduit and battery for this power, drawing in replenishment from seemingly omnipresent "fields" of unbound spiritual energy in the world around them.
Thinkers, spiritualists, and scientists of the world have theorized for thousands of years about the nature and purpose of this process, but others have turned to prayer for answer. Rather than illuminate the presumed higher purpose of this cycle, the gods have obfuscated the truth, at times spreading cosmological lies, pitting believers and empowered chosen agents against each other, and tacitly approving the prejudices of their followers to maintain power.
Whatever the fundamental nature of mortal souls is, the people of the world accept the reality of what they have observed: that all mortal bodies contain perceptible energy bound to the individual, and that once they die, their energy will move forward in the eternal cycle that they are all a part of -- that as far as they know, they have always been a part of.
Technology
The cultures of Project Eternity are in a variety of different technological states. Though some remote civilizations are still in the equivalent of Earth's Stone Age or Bronze Age, most large civilizations are in the equivalent of Earth's high or late Middle Ages. The most aggressive and powerful civilizations are in the early stages of what would be our early modern period, technologically, even if they are not culturally undergoing "Renaissance"-style changes.
For most large civilizations, this means that all of the core arms and armor of medieval warfare have reached a high level of development: full suits of articulated plate armor, a variety of military swords, war hammers, polearms, longbows, crossbows, and advanced siege weaponry. Architecturally, these cultures also employ technologies found in Earth's Gothic structures, allowing them to create towering vertical structures.
The most recent technologies seeing use in the world are ocean-going carrack-style ships and black powder firearms (notably absent: the printing press). Cultures with large navies and mercantile traffic are exploring the world, which has led to contact with previously-unknown lands and societies and settlement in new lands. Despite their intense drive, these explorers have been restricted from aggressive long-range exploration by monstrous sea creatures that pose a lethal, seemingly insurmountable threat to even the stoutest, most well-armed ships.
Black powder firearms are of the single-shot wheellock variety. Largely considered complex curiosities, these weapons are not employed extensively by military forces. Their long reload times are considered a liability in battles against foes that are too monstrous to drop with a single volley, foes that fly or move at high speed, and foes that have the power of invisibility. Despite this, some individuals do employ firearms for one specific purpose: close range penetration of the arcane veil, a standard magical defense employed by wizards. The arcane veil is powerful, but it does not react well to the high-velocity projectiles generated by arquebuses and handguns. As a result, more wizards who previously relied on the veil and similar abjurations have turned to traditional armor for additional defense.
Reading the above: thank god... I thought this was gonna be another western RPG stuck in dullsville Lord of the Rings land.
Reading the above: thank god... I thought this was gonna be another western RPG stuck in dullsville Lord of the Rings land.
Well it doesn't sound like it, but from the look of things there will be no :uguu either, so you might still want to steer clear
Non-Combat Abilities
Let's talk first about your goals as a player, about the things you would like to do besides fighting. Then I'll talk about our design goals and explain how we are putting the non-combat systems together.
Player Goals
When you are not fighting, that's when non-combat abilities come into play. We plan to add abilities that will let you become better at achieving four different non-combat goals.
Learning new things. This includes finding out previously unknown information, like the location of town or a hidden door, or uncovering secret knowledge, like a potion recipe or the true name of a demon. Or maybe you just want to know a good place to gather materials like ore or herbs. We will make abilities that let you find things out.
Traveling around the world. You will want to improve your movement capabilities (such as sneaking around some ruins), or traveling across the world map faster or more safely, or even teleporting directly to your destination. And sometimes movement requires removing barriers like locks or traps, so you will need some way to unlock and disarm. We'll add abilities for these actions.
Getting new items. If you are not going to kill a creature to take its things, then we will give you the means to make new items, buy them, or steal them. Or maybe you will choose to support NPC's by bringing them the materials or the recipes needed to make new items for you. We congratulate you on your non-violent and cooperative plans of wealth acquisition, and we'll give you the means to do it.
Interacting with companions. Once we have added many interesting and useful NPC companions, we will have to give you ways to recruit them, improve their usefulness, and keep them from dying (or even worse, disliking you!). We will make non-combat abilities that interact with your companions, so you can keep them alive and filled with a grudging respect for you.
Now each of these goals represents a whole slew of related non-combat abilities. For example, for player traveling, we could have all kinds of abilities, including stealth and teleport abilities, as well as abilities to make world map travel faster, less likely to have encounters, and able to make use of alternate transportation routes such as over mountains using passes or over water using ships.
Design Goals
In putting together our non-combat system, we have made a list of goals for the design of these skills and the rules they need to follow.
Non-combat skills are gained separately from combat skills. You shouldn't have to choose between Magic Missile and Herbalism. They should be separate types of abilities, and you should spend different points to get each one.
Non-combat skills do not use the same resources as combat skills. You don't spend the same stuff for a non-combat skill as you do for combat skills. Some don't use anything at all to use, so you will never find yourself unable to blast an opponent if you get caught sneaking.
All non-combat skills are useful. If we add lockpicking to the game, we will make sure that there are locks to pick and worthwhile rewards for getting past them.
All non-combat skills can be used frequently. If you take disarm traps as a skill, you should expect more than two traps in the entire game world. Frequency of application has a large impact on how useful something is.
Combat can be avoided with non-combat skills. There will often be ways to avoid fighting. Yes, we will have the standard methods of talking your way out of a fight or sneaking around an encounter, but there will be other ways too. Perhaps you can re-sanctify a desecrated cemetery to prevent any further undead from rising, or maybe figuring out a way across a ruined bridge will always avoid the bandits on this side of the river.
Avoiding combat does not lead to less experience gain. You shouldn't go up levels any slower by using your non-combat skills rather than your combat skills. We plan to reward you for your accomplishments, not for your body count.
Q: Why Kickstarter?
Feargus Urquhart: A lot of it is what crowdfunding is all about. It's an opportunity to go to fans with something and ask for their opinions, their help, their money to make something you believe in. And we really believe in our role-playing games. We love making the big ones, but we believe in this old school, harder core RPG, and some of those things that are a little bit harder to get funded in the traditional publisher model. That's nothing against publishers. This is just a different model, and it's great to go back to something that is our roots.
Q: Did you try to pitch Project Eternity to publishers before you Kickstarted it?
Feargus Urquhart: We've talked with publishers a lot over the years and the last six months. We never went in with a Powerpoint and a proposal and pitched the full thing or anything like that. It's just different. It's not retail, but maybe we'll have a retail SKU after the game comes out. It's digital, but not a little digital game. It's weirdly in the middle. It falls into a no-mans-land a little bit about how products are being considered.
Q: Were you worried about backlash to Kickstarter projects, especially from established studios?
Feargus Urquhart: I'll be honest. We didn't really think about that. Maybe a part of it is we think a little too highly of ourselves… We go into things like this with the best intentions. We truly want to make this, so we didn't question whether someone would question if we were doing it for alternative reasons.
Q: What happens if development hits a snag and the game takes longer or costs more than expected?
Feargus Urquhart: There are a couple different ways. We're going to be careful with the money because all game development hits snags. So a portion of the money will be set aside. Think of it as something like an escrow account. As development goes and goes, we'll spend more of that money because there's only so much development left where we could hit snags, so we don't need to reserve as much. And at the end, we've spent all the money and made a great game.
Q: How important is transparency in the process of explaining to your backers how the game's coming along, the creative decisions you're making, even with the budget?
Feargus Urquhart: I think we have a lot of responsibility to keep people apprised. They've given us a lot of trust, and we take that very seriously. Our biggest responsibility is letting people know what's going on that's good, what are some challenges we're having and how we're dealing with them. I think it's like anything in life where you're kind of invested in something. It's when you get your periodic updates as to what's going on and you feel better that progress is being made. We understand it's a big responsibility and we can't just disappear off into the ether.
Obsidian is also currently working on South Park: The Stick of Truth for THQ.
Q: Do your stretch goals threaten your game design? Like instead of making the right number of character classes for the game, you have to make X number of them to fulfill a promise to backers?
Feargus Urquhart: Well, when you're making an RPG, that makes stretch goals easy in some ways. RPG campaigns and games are all about adding more stuff, in a lot of ways. It's about more choices, and having another class to play is a great thing to have in an RPG. But there's a certain point at which there are just too many and they're not impactful anymore. So we're not going to continue to just add another race every X hundred thousand [dollars]. There's not going to be 17 races in the game; we're going to think of other cool things to add in that expand not only what the game is, but potentially what our high level backers are getting.
Q: How do publishers feel about studios who Kickstart projects?
Feargus Urquhart: I think publishers are curious about the model and curious about what that can do. I think ultimately publishers are looking for good developers to make great games for them. They have their internal staff to make great games, and sometimes they need a particular type of developer to make a particular game for them. So I don't know if that changes things a whole lot on the bigger console level. On the smaller level, I think some publishers may really like the model. It's pretty scary when you're a publisher and you have to fund games because that's what you need to go ship. But now maybe some titles can come to you secondarily, or for distribution, or something like that where you don't have to worry about a cash outlay so much.
Q: Do you think Kickstarter is changing the balance of power between publishers and developers now that smaller studios just have other options?
Feargus Urquhart: I think so, but it depends on which part of the market you're talking about. For the $20-40 million, multi-SKU console game, that's not the Kickstarter world. I think what Kickstarter gives developers the capability to do-and this is how we're looking at it-is we're getting the opportunity to go build a brand, and it's a brand that we own. And that's what changes the power a little bit. Now I have a game that we're going to go make, and I have a brand. And I own that brand. And it's now something that if I go talk to a publisher to talk about doing something different with a brand-and this is years from now-they're not going to get to own that brand. That definitely changes whatever you call it, power or leverage… it changes the discussion. Absolutely.
Q: Recent years have seen Respawn, Bungie, and Insomniac get a little bit more ownership over their games. Could things like this have been possible 10 or 15 years ago?
Feargus Urquhart: I think ownership of your IP was easier to actually arrange 10 or 15 years ago. When the numbers weren't so high, when publishers weren't paying $25 or $30 million, the IP was more on the table as to whether you could own it or not. Over the last five or six years, it's gotten harder and harder. Bungie and Respawn and Insomniac, with such a track record, it's a value proposition for the publishers. "We want the next Call of Duty. Hey, these guys made Call of Duty. We're willing to give up some aspects of ownership because we're not in this segment of the market to the extent we want to be, but we'll trade what we would want normally to get into it." It's really become harder and harder for independent developers to own IP when you're talking to a publisher about $20- $30- $40 million.
Q: You mentioned in the Kickstarter project page that a publisher proposed you raise the money and they would publish the game and keep the IP. Was that just an overly aggressive business play, or do publishers fundamentally not understand Kickstarter?
Feargus Urquhart: I think the publisher understood, but I don't think it was aggressive, and I don't think it was even spiteful or something like that. Everybody has to walk in everybody's shoes, you know? Right now, publishers have a huge amount of pressure as it relates to the money going out and coming in. And there's a console transition, and console transitions are hugely scary. So a lot of them are looking at how they protect the cash they have and not have more cash outlays. That's just first and foremost in their mind so much right now that they're just looking at all the possibilities. And what comes out of that is that they might not think of what they're really asking of the developer. It's possible one of the publishers who approached us that way was thinking, "Could I get away with it?" But I don't know that at all. Most of the people I know at publishers aren't bad people by any stretch of the meaning. They're trying to do the job the best they can within the scope of what they have.
Q: You've essentially got 40,000 preorders for a game targeting a niche audience. Do you worry at all that the addressable audience for the game will have already been addressed once you launch?
Feargus Urquhart: I'm not, actually. And that's entirely Feargus data. It's my own way of looking at the world. Baldur's Gate sold between 2-4 million units, and that was 10 years ago. It still sells today. The GOG guys put up packages of sales for the D&D games because they still sell. I think there's absolutely a market for them. I don't know what that market is. I couldn't tell you if it's 200,000 or 300,000 or 400,000, but there's definitely a market and it's hopefully more than the number of backers we'll have.
Q: Are you surprised publishers don't back projects like these considering the millions the previous ones have sold and their longevity?
Feargus Urquhart: How do I put it? It's like we all need to really do the numbers. Any publisher can ship N games every year. If a publisher normally ships 50 games or something, it's very hard to ship 100 games because they're not going to increase the number of people they have for a year just to ship 100 games or something. So publishers have to make sure they're shipping the right number of games at the right level. It takes a lot of effort to support a big console game; it takes much much less to support an XBLA game. And a game like this falls in some weird middle. Do we take it to retail? It's not just a download. But it's not a $500,000 budget XBLA game. It's niche… And it's hard for them to evaluate the upside and where to put it. And I think that's what's hard. It's not anything negative or bad; it's a question of what to do with it.
Q: Are consoles or tablet versions on Project Eternity's stretch goal list?
Feargus Urquhart: No they're not. It's a game that goes back to the roots of the great RPG games of the past and the focus of those was keyboard and mouse. Not that console games aren't great; they're just different. There's a big difference between Baldur's Gate: Dark Alliance [for consoles] and Baldur's Gate II [for PC]. And we don't want to create some camel in the middle to try to straddle a line. It's do one thing or another, and we're going to try to do the PC and do that right.
Q: Thanks again for the interview.
We love giving players options: character build options, personality options, story options -- all the options you might want to play around with. We recognize that many players also want to play the game their way and have an experience that matches their particular RPG tastes. RPG fans share a lot of common ground, but on matters of visible mechanical feedback, complexity, and the overall level of punitive face-punching a game provides, there's a big spectrum of opinions. In a lot of cases, it's not too hard for us to provide options to turn an individual feature on or off, so we want to make that possible when resources permit us to do so.
Additionally, even among the ranks of RPG superfans, there exists a subset of players who can't get enough challenge. They want all of the difficulty features set to "I am pro." Collectively, we've worked on a bunch of these challenge modes in the past and enjoyed the results. Project Eternity seems like a very appropriate place to highlight suites of these difficulty options as distinct gameplay modes that players can opt-into at the beginning of any game. We've come up with three modes we'd like to support, which also includes the ability to turn many of their sub-features on and off on an individual level in an ordinary game: Expert Mode, Trial of Iron, and Path of the Damned.
Expert Mode will disable all of the common ease-of-use / in-case-you-missed it gameplay elements like the display of skill thresholds, influence/reputation modifiers, and similar "helper" information. In a fashion similar to Fallout: New Vegas' Hardcore Mode, Expert Mode will also enable more punitive and demanding gameplay elements, in and out of combat. We're not saying we're going to have weighty gold (for real, we're not saying that), but if we did, you can bet that would be automatically turned on by Expert Mode.
If you guessed that Trial of Iron is like Temple of Elemental Evil's Ironman Mode, you guessed right. When you start a Trial of Iron game, you have one save game that persists for the entire campaign... or until you die. And if you die, your save game is deleted. Enjoy!
Path of the Damned is a spiritual successor to Icewind Dale's Heart of Fury mode. In our encounters, we like to turn individual combatants on and off based on the level of difficulty. If you come into an area on Easy, maybe casters are replaced with weak melee enemies. If you come in on Hard, maybe the casters are augmented by a tough melee enemy or two. With Path of the Damned, that goes out the window. All enemies from all levels of difficulty are enabled and the combat mechanics are amplified to make battles much more brutal for everyone involved.
The first question you may have is, "Can I enable multiple challenge modes at once?" Yep, you sure can. They have to be selected at the beginning of the game, but if you want to play with two or all three at the same time, you can certainly can do so. If you're not quite sure you want all of the elements that come along with a given mode, this funding level will also cover implementing the ability to enable and disable the individual sub-features.
Along with these modes, we also want to introduce the Godlike races. These folks have been described previously as being similar to the humanoid "planetouched" in D&D: aasimar, tieflings, and genasi. That is a good high-level description of them, but they are viewed differently by various factions, faiths, and cultures in the world of Project Eternity. Godlike were "blessed" before birth by one or more of the meddling deities of this world. Though their appearances vary, they are unmistakeably otherworldly when anyone gets a clear look at them. Sometimes, the reaction they get is overwhelmingly positive. Many times, the reaction is overwhelmingly not. For better or worse, the physical "gifts" that mark them as Godlike always come with supernatural blessings (and curses) of their own.
The first question you may have after reading this may be, "Hey, what about the other races that have already been funded?" Those races are in the process of being fully designed and concepted -- and they can't be summarized quite as simply as "sort of like planetouched". We'll have more for you on those guys in the not-too-distant future. Thanks again for your support, your patience, and your questions.
Souls, the supernatural, a fantasy setting, mature themes... These are just a few of the big ideas behind Project Eternity's story and world. As with any great CRPG story, music plays an important role in communicating those ideas. This was true for the Infinity Engine games as well. Looking back they all had one thing in common with regards to music: all are known for having strong and memorable soundtracks that drew you in as a listener and set fire to your imagination. That's exactly what we're aiming for with the music for Project Eternity.
So what will the music sound like? Great question! Describing music with words alone can be a tricky thing to do because so much of that is subjective and wide open for interpretation. Even still it's important to have some sort of plan in place before writing a single note. You need an idea that will guide you towards creating an effective score. To help paint that picture more clearly, here are three words that we believe best describe what the score will ultimately sound like:
Mystical
Ancient
Emotive
Now you might be wondering, out of all the possible descriptive words, why these three? The answer to that goes right back to those big ideas mentioned above.
We chose mystical because of the importance of souls and the supernatural in Project Eternity's world. Ancient because we want the music to be grounded and appropriate to the setting. Emotive because the role of music in any game is first and foremost to provide dramatic and emotional context for the player. At the end of the day, that's what we want out of Project Eternity's score. We want you to be swept away by the music and the imagery it evokes. By keeping these three descriptive pillars in mind while developing the score, we’ll be able to support and enhance the narrative goals of our game.
Of course these three words are not all the music will ultimately be. It'll also be adventurous, ethereal, and wondrous when appropriate. Ominous, dark, and mysterious when called for. Scary and horrifying at just the right moments. And yes, driving, bold, and colossal when absolutely necessary.
Along with defining what we do want the score to sound like, there are also some things we know we don't want it to sound like. It won't be overly heavy or oppressive, nor will it be bombastic and grandiose from beginning to end. We want the score to be as dynamic and nuanced as the story it serves, and the last thing we want to do is weigh that story down with leaden music.
As you can see Project Eternity's music will be many things when all is said and done. But perhaps most importantly, its music will have a unique and original voice that we hope will leave a lasting impression, the same way the music of those awesome Infinity Engine
omg that environment
We will certainly be adding animations to our backgrounds. The trees should sway, there will be birds or butterflies or insect clouds, depending on where you are, and the water in rivers and waterfalls will flow. We are using a rendering technique similar to the one we used in Temple of Elemental Evil, where the background is a pre-rendered 2D image and the characters and some props are 3D objects. This gives us the advantage of exquisitely detailed environments without the polygon cost, along with lots of animation without the memory cost that 2D sprites would entail.
Will there be low intelligence/charisma dialog?
Yes, we will have these dialogs. They are a great deal of work, since it means writing two versions of every dialog in the game, but I am sure that our wonderful writers are up to it. I really want these dialogs too! I find it fun to replay the game with a low intelligence character, just to see how the NPC's react to my slow-witted attempts to help them.
That new city is going to be sweet. :rock
We do know this will be a 75% completed bug filled jankfest, right? :-\ I'm not trying to kill the buzz, just temper it some. I mean, I'm still going to play the shit out of it.
Was New Vegas a "75% completed bug filled jankfest"?
Get the f outta here old man.
We do know this will be a 75% completed bug filled jankfest, right? :-\ I'm not trying to kill the buzz, just temper it some. I mean, I'm still going to play the shit out of it.
They've already committed to fan tweaking/patching, so we're good to go.
Alpha Protocol [on PC] didn't have very many bugs and Fallout: New Vegas [on PC] had a few bugs at launch at most of those were ironed out with a patch after a few weeks [don't say that around Eel though :lol ]. Also, Dungeon Siege 3 was pretty much bug-free, as well.
And there shouldn't be as much of problem with Project: Eternity since they won't have to worry about a console dirt person version. :smug
$4M is a lock now.
Biggest game related Kickstarter in history, wow.
thanks for funding this game I will pick up on steam for $20 guys
well, $20 plus 2 yrs of interest
well, $20 plus 2 yrs of interest
I think it'll get made, but the important bit about Kickstarter is that your money is going away with no guarantee of shipping. So Cormacaroni's $20 would be for a download, while everyone else's is for the promise of a download.
I'm sure it will come out, if anything by getting all this dough some publisher might jump in and add another mil or two.
well, $20 plus 2 yrs of interest
So, about $20.37, then.
You've stated in the past that you don't like romances in games—at least to the extent that they've been done in games thus far. Were you to implement a romance subplot in Project Eternity, what would it involve?
Not a big fan of romances. I did four in Alpha Protocol because Chris Parker, our project director, demanded it because he thinks romance apparently is easy, or MAYBE it’s because he wanted to be an asshole and give me tons of them to do because I LOVE them so much (although to be honest, I think he felt it was more in keeping with the spy genre to have so many romances, even if I did ask to downscope them). At least I got to do the “hatemance” version of most of them, which makes it a little more palatable.
Also, the only reason the romance bits in Mask of the Betrayer worked was because George Ziets helped me with them since he was able to describe what love is to me and explain how it works (I almost asked for a PowerPoint presentation). It seems like a messy, complicated process, not unlike a waterbirth. Don’t even get me started on the kissing aspects, which is revolting because people EAT with their mouths. Bleh.
So if I were to implement a romance subplot in Eternity - I wouldn’t. I’d examine interpersonal relationships from another angle and I wouldn’t confine it to love and romance. Maybe I’d explore it after a “loving” relationship crashed and burned, and one or both was killed in the aftermath enough for them to see if it had really been worth it spending the last few years of their physical existence chained to each other in a dance of human misery and/or a plateau of soul-killing compromise. Or maybe I’d explore a veteran’s love affair with his craft of murder and allowing souls to be freed to travel beyond their bleeding shell, or a Cipher’s obsession with plucking the emotions of deep-rooted souls to try and see what makes people attracted to each other beyond their baser instincts and discovers love... specifically, his love of manipulating others. You could build an entire dungeon and quest where he devotes himself to replicating facsimiles of love, reducer a Higher Love to a baser thing and using NPCs he encounters as puppets for his experimentations, turning something supposedly beautiful into something filthy, mechanical, but surrounded by blank-eyed soul-twisted drones echoing all the hollow Disney-like platitudes and fairy tale existence where everyone lives happily ever after.
Dude sounds like a charmer.
Also this MMORPG has no exp and levels.
it's F2P, uses "target" system (when you click on a character ans use skills, I don't play such MMOs, so I don't know what that means), 15 classes will be available.F2P, good. I suppose.
I don't understand. Choose your own adventure cutscenes? How does that even work out? So you're pointin and clickin and all of a sudden you get to a cutscene whose art aesthetic is totally different from the rest of the game, choose what to do, and then the game continues? I don't like text rpgs unless they're pen and paper. Is there an update with actual gameplay yet?
Was hoping for something better.
:shaq2
Was hoping for something better.
:shaq2
In what way?
How are they doing the character models? The backgrounds are done in some fanciful pre-rendering way, no?
That looks great, hope it wont launch buggy.Hope is the right word to use, yes...
We are in our Alpha phase right now.
We are currently going through all of our previously created areas and revising anything that we think needs more work - both art and design.
Programming is nearing feature complete. We are tracking to be feature complete in a couple of weeks. This means that we are feature locked and most of the programming team will be diverted into bug fixing, feature polish, demos, etc.
Narrative will have a full pass done in a few weeks, as well. We are almost completely finished with the first pass on our crit path narrative.
Audio and VFX are still a ways off and won't be finished until July or August. They come onto the project later than the other teams because they require that content exists in a locked down form before they can do their work.
Character Art is working on creature variants, armor variants, and other miscellaneous items. Soon they will be adding in unique armors and weapons. Also, they will be creating head and hair variants in the next few weeks.
Animation is finishing up the last remaining A priority tasks and is moving on to some of our B priority animations (special attacks and whatnot).
UI/Concept Art has most of the UI in at an Alpha level. Kaz is finishing up things like Scripted Interaction slides and special UI screens. Also, he has a ton of portraits and areas to paint in the near future.
Production is figuring out project finalization, localization, Kickstarter rewards, convention plans, expansion planning, and a ton of other small things.
So this is basically like Diablo?Like Baldur's Gate and Icewind Dale.
I WANT THIS POUNDING MY BUTTHOLE IN THE MANNER OF A FERAL BEAST
Supposed to release by the end of this year, right? I'll enjoy launch next June.
So yeah, next June.Supposed to release by the end of this year, right? I'll enjoy launch next June.
From their updates, it sounds like they're just about finished with content creation and about to move to polishing and bug fixing.
It's like the Infinity Engine hasn't aged a day. If you were a teeanger 15 years ago, when legendary Infinity Engine games such as Baldur's Gate and Planescape Torment were redefining the computer RPG, Obsidian's Pillars of Eternity is probably exactly what you see in your mind's eye. In reality, those old pre-rendered backgrounds are now plasticky and microscopic on high-res monitors. Pillars of Eternity is how you remember those games looking: moodily lit, each isometric scene packed with evocative tiny details. And from the short demo I saw at E3, Obsidian has done exactly what its 73,986 Kickstarter backers want: create a 1999 RPG with a 2014 graphical shine.
Obsidian showed off an introductory area of Pillars of Eternity, which opens with your character traveling through the Eastern Reach with a ragtag caravan. A few minutes in and the caravan is attacked, people die, and you lead a couple surviving companions through some nearby ruins. It was a short presentation, about 20 minutes of gameplay, that assumes some baseline knowledge of past Infinity Engine RPGs. Obsidian didn't spend time explaining the basics of isometric RPGs or digging into stats or classes or even showing off dialogue. Instead, they focused on what's new and different.
There are 11 classes in the game, but Obsidian focused on wizards, which have gotten a nice boost since the days of Baldur's Gate. "In the old Infinity Engine games, once you spent all of your spells, your wizard was kind of useless," said Brandon Adler, lead producer on Pillars of Eternity. "We wanted to avoid that, so one of the things we're doing is [giving wizards] rods and wands and they can shoot projectiles out of that and do a lot of damage." Wizards will start with a blast ability that will do AOE damage around the enemies they hit, which Adler said will be good for mopping up mobs.
Classes won't be restricted from using different weapons. A wizard, for example, could wade into battle with a sword, but stats would affect his skill with the weapon. He'd likely end up clumsily missing attacks until a monster gave him a good stabbing.
Obsidian skipped through most of the story in the demo, but I spotted the long blocks of dialogue, descriptive flavor text and multiple dialogue options that defined Infinity Engine RPGs. The big storytelling addition for Pillars are "scripted interactions" that play out like storybook sequences. Instead of animating small plot points in-engine, Obsidian paired illustrations with narrative text to tell short vignettes. The parchment background and flat presentation surprised me, at first, but I immediately liked it—it's a great callback to pen-and-paper RPGs more expressive than the engine's pulled-back isometric camera.
"Whenever we want to really emphasize something in the story we do one of these," said Adler. "It's very similar to [a choose your own adventure book]." One scripted interaction towards the end of the demo presented the party with a damaged stone wall. It was an ability check: with the right items or party skills, it was possible to break through the wall and take a shortcut.
I saw a few scripted interactions in the short 20 minute demo of Pillars, so I expect they'll be common in the full game. Pivotal story moments will still mostly be presented in-engine.
The last interesting mechanic Obsidian touched on was the disposition system, which works similarly to alignment in Baldur's Gate or Planescape. "You'll see diplomatic, honest, passionate," Adler pointed out at one point. " Depending on how you respond in various conversations, it'll track that throughout the game, and people will respond to you differently based on that. As an example, if I was to choose the cruel option and was a jerk to everyone, that'll get out ot the public at large at some point, and that'll change how people react to me. A priest may not want to deal with me because I'm cruel. Then again, somebody inside the village I'm dealing with will go 'I don't want to mess with that guy, so give him whatever he wants.' "
After the demo I got a few interesting details out of project lead Josh Sawyer. In the intro section I saw, it's possible (even likely) to have your two starter companions die or abandon you based on your decisions. The same goes for the rest of the companions you'll encounter throughout the game—they can die or leave your party, and it's theoretically possible (though extremely difficult) to fight through the entire game solo. Sawyer said no one at Obsidian had tried yet. If you do get all your companions killed or decide you don't like them, you'll be able to recruit other generic companions—they just won't have the fleshed-out personalities and story arcs of the eight companions Obsidian is focused on.
Pillars of Eternity is feature locked at this point and heading towards a beta phase, where quests and systems will be tweaked, art will be polished and bugs will be squashed. Backers will get their hands on a beta build of the game in the next few months before the final release in winter 2014.
Obsidian is intentionally keeping a shroud pulled over the story of Pillars of Eternity out of respect for backers who don't want to be spoiled. And everything rides on that story. Right now, Pillars of Eternity looks like the successor to some of the most legendary RPGs ever made. It just has to sound like one, too.
Just come out already
I played Shadowrun for my rpg fix but its not that hot, not being to save anywhere is really a bummer in such a game
Just come out already
I played Shadowrun for my rpg fix but its not that hot, not being to save anywhere is really a bummer in such a game
Shadowrun's got save anywhere now, plus the Dragonfall campaign is better than the base game.
Just come out already
I played Shadowrun for my rpg fix but its not that hot, not being to save anywhere is really a bummer in such a game
Shadowrun's got save anywhere now, plus the Dragonfall campaign is better than the base game.
When did it get patced? I played it last month.
http://www.giantbomb.com/videos/quick-look-ex-pillars-of-eternity/2300-9224/
:hyper
The read the text while everyone is standing still nostalgia trip also looks awful, antiquated, and outright archaic.
Why should I buy this and not Baldur's Gate 2 Enhanced Edition instead?
The dialogue choices in Divinity don't really have much affect on things, for the most part. It's more about how a quest is solved through your actions. It does have a pretty big world, though, with a lot of sidequests to do. Combat in Divinity is incredibly fun, lots of depth and interesting ways of taking down tough enemies. I'd say that side of it is where it really shines.
Why does Himu-chan have to be such a hater :-\
also worth noting the game isn't done yet and the youtube video was poorly compressed.
uglyness
ugly
Dunno what people are talking about, the game looks exactly like in the screenshots minus the picture quality? Plus at least in the youtube vid it was all night scenes whoch obviously aren't going to look as impressive as day scenes. Also no idea how you can judge the gameplay from a 20 minute vid ??? Also, the Baldur's Gate games were much more sophisticated games than a NES platformer and more complex than most modern rpg, much less in need for an update.
Which, going by every kickstarted cRPG release besides Divinity OS, means that it will be in actual retail release state about 3 months of patches following that.
Will play it in the summer.
Sweet, can't wait for this.
But then again I wont have time to play it.