Obsidian's Pillars of Eternity [BETA RELEASED, GO TO THE NEW THREAD]

I just want to briefly interject that I wasn't even mentioning the combat when I was praising the game; I'm not saying the PE combat should be anything like DS. But if the quality of the world, of the greater whole matched it that'd be tremendous.

 

I'm so tired of this. Either you can realize that there are amazing games outside of the CRPG-bubble and you enjoy them or you don't. This game stands easily among the ranks of a PS:T, a KOTC, a Fallout; it's the PS:T of console third person experiences: mature, treating you like an adult, quiet, philosophical, earnest, dignified, resting in itself and at ease with what it tries to be. It is whole. Games like this are one in a thousand.

You don't rate games based on what genre they are; you rate them by their own merits in their respective genre. I'm not going to criticize Citizen Kane for not being a very good romantic comedy.

 

Frankly I don't see them getting much concrete inspiration from Dark Souls. The game takes a very minimalistic, show-not-tell approach to narration and mood-setting. A dialogue & story-driven game is almost the antithesis of that.

The entire (fairly impressive) story of the DLC content is inferred from, what, 3 item descriptions and about a dozen lines of dialogue?

 

You do realize that your attitude is retarded right?

Of course there are better games outside CRPG bubble. No one (I hope) says that CRPGs are the only and best. THe problem is forcing one genre to be another.

 

Oh, there's a lot they can take. The best inspiration they could take is to make everything click with itself. Game mechanics, lore, level design, encounter design, music, atmosphere, architecture, etc.: the Souls games do it with such perfect feng shui that it is nothing but admirable. That's something that can and should be taken by everyone. Every aspect of the game needs to work and enhance each other, like one big machine. The anti of this would be the boss encounters in DE:HR. Developed by a different company who obviously didn't know what the main game was going to be like. They feel completely out of place from the rest of the game and shit on pretty much the whole design that the game was building on up until that point.

 

Nobody is forcing that; I was merely pointing out that the non-combat parts of Dark Souls would make a brilliant inspiration for PE. I never said anything about using its game mechanics except for the resting which is something I'd do if I made my own game. That's all I am trying to put across.

 

Yeah, but that's not very concerete is it? It's looking at some people's vision and saying, wow, I want to create something as amazing as that.

Although perhaps it's just as well.

PS. No one can stop the Dark Souls legion. Not even you, Jaesun. It's all too late. All too late.

 

Well, yeah. That's what inspiration is sometimes. There are two kinds of inspirations in this world. One is "I want to be like that" and the other "I want to be that". They don't have to create Dark Souls again, and they shouldn't, but they should look at it as a whole and consider that everything about it is finely crafted and tuned to create a consistent experience throughout the whole game without deviating from what it is.
This may seem to be a simple concept. Like, duh, of course you make a game where everything works off of each other. But the sad truth is that video games aren't like this anymore. Triple A games are made by hundreds maybe even thousands of people. One person animates individual blades of grass, someone makes dialogue for NPCs 1, 5 and 13. Then after all these pieces have been made some guy will glue them all together to make you a majestic cinematic experience. Also, in big companies like EA it's not strange that people working on the same project aren't allowed to talk to each other about what they are doing. i.e grass animator can't tell dialogue man what his involvement in the project is. This creates an inconsistency because no one knows what the fuck is going with what. Not even the project leads know because there's like 10 different visionary leads in each project and everyone has their own idea of what the game should be like.

fake edit: and of course size doesn't really matter. Even with a team of 5 people you can still fuck it up and make a game that has conflicting elements.

 

In other words: Don't intervene, and let your developer studios do what the fuck they want.

We got dat covered.

 

The rest mechanics in an action game makes sense for a tactical CRPG? Since when?

The rest mechanics of DS is built around the concept o punishing players for resting, an activity that is necessary in game with a twich based difficulty where your tactics are NOT the same type as CRPGs.

The resting in CRPGs ought be different since in those games tactics refer to not twitch but rather planning out and assessing more slowly.

Now of course if you want a CRPG to become ARPG you will be forced to change the mechanics to suit it.

This is exactly what I am referring to.

IE games needed frequent rest because of poor encounter design. Don't allow rest and allocate resources and the mechanics in its current form was fine.

 

Prosper is sharing his latest creations:

http://forums.obsidian.net/topic/60...ws-to-wish-you-luck/page__st__20#entry1255926

 

Bros, don't waste time posting in the romance topic, just do this :

 

"I don't want to live anymore."

After reading a few posts of that oevr there Jasede I'm ashamed to know you as a Codexer. You got skooled by a pro romancer in that thread. *shudder.

 

"Nevertheless, it's totally gross how men on the internet just have to comment on a woman's appearance whenever they see one. Whatta buncha losers"

Yeha, because only men do that. Are you fukkin' retarted?

 

I so want to strangle that RetardedSaint every time I read him .
At first I didn't care but now I so hope VD is wrong about the 18 months dev-time not being enough.Having to deal with biotards and lawful-stupid moderators even longer is an horrible thought.

And yeah DS is awesome.I think the way it deals with dungeons(how they're interconnetted and how they gradually change taking you from an abandoned castle to an underground swamp)might be a good source of ispiration for the mega-dungeon.

 

Isn't this from Face Off? That was a hilariously stupid movie

 

Yes it is. A hilariously stupid, but FUN movie.

 

I think we're already in the post-infodump let's-talk-about-completely-obscure-things-or-the-same-exact-thing-we-talked-about-last-week syndrome. Hopefully they'll get regular updates running after a while.

 

I really hope so, Fargo went quiet for ages post Kickstarter.

 

Hope so, but I doubt that subforum will improve much.

 

Woooosh

Glad to ear about your gorgeousness though. I wish my mom did not drink so much when she was pregnant...

 

The funny part is these kickstarter numbers speak for themselves yet we still feel an endless need to defend our tastes.

 

What do these prove? That around 80kish people want an IE type game? L0L

That proves shit.

A professional game developer cna't live of 80k customers or 4mil. Obsidian has 100 employees. No way does that support them as a dev house. FFS

 

No, but twenty-odd developers certainly can. 80,000 backers donating $2 million/year or so allows for an average annual salary of $60,000-$80,000 per developer, depending upon operating expenses. Also, that "80k customers" figure includes backers only. Once the game is released, if it reviews well it will sell hundreds of thousands more copies (a conservative estimate) — pure profit.

Developing old-school games is a sustainable and profitable venture, just not with humongous teams of 100+ developers at a price point of $60 plus DLC. Four coders, three writers, three level designers, three artists, two animators, two sound designers, and a handful of senior staff (producer, lead designer, whomever) who also contribute their development talents to the project should be enough; if not, there's wiggle room for a few more. Obsidian already has a QA department, and playtesting can be done fairly cheaply.

There have been some very successful/admirable games developed by a handful of people, or even just one guy. They won't have full voice acting, a six-hour-long orchestral soundtrack, and millions upon millions of dollars of art and animation assets, but they don't need all that shit anyway.

 

I think you are overestimating the sales post release. I am not saying it won't happen, but you need to understand the niche-ness of the genre.

Games like DA:O and DA2 sold million+ because of certain reasons, none of which had to do anything with IE games. Oh yes, probably there is a definite share for DA:O as a BG spiritual sequel, but the major reason was the new shit and bioware's reputation. Obsidian does have its own army of Obsidrones, most of which think that Obsidian is Bioware mark 2 if the romance threads are any indication. These people are going to be terribly disappointed with the presentation. They will also hate it if it turns out that PE is even slightly difficult than farmville. Which means the future will again be bleak.