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

FeelTheRads

Arcane
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Apr 18, 2008
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I hate when games lock you out into a class as the first, and probably most important, choice of the whole game. I'm not sold in classless systems either, but having a heads up on the skill trees and playstyle and waiting until noobie island is finished to allow them to choose classes is good design in my book.

And keeping a whole game subsystem (magic) locked behind a minute 0 choice is a fucking disgrace.

Yeah, wouldn't want to actually waste time learning the game. Give me everything from the start and let me get to the important stuff: PUSHING THE BUTTAN
 

Roguey

Codex Staff
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Production is scheduled to finish mid-April by my count.

That leaves between 30-36 weeks for Post-production (~8 months)

That's over 2 months per production milestone (Alpha 1, Alpha 2, Beta)

Not a bad post-production schedule.

Pretty keen on the next update. Hopefully the new Lead Animator is good.
Advance warning, I'm going to gloat up a storm when they become feature and content complete after 18 months, while Wasteland 2 won't be until after 25+ and Divinity:OS is coming close to 42+.
 

Arkeus

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Advance warning, I'm going to gloat up a storm when they become feature and content complete after 18 months, while Wasteland 2 won't be until after 25+ and Divinity:OS is coming close to 42+.
Hopefully this doesn't mean the game will be tiny compared to WL2, let alone D:OS.
 

Athelas

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Production is scheduled to finish mid-April by my count.

That leaves between 30-36 weeks for Post-production (~8 months)

That's over 2 months per production milestone (Alpha 1, Alpha 2, Beta)

Not a bad post-production schedule.

Pretty keen on the next update. Hopefully the new Lead Animator is good.
Advance warning, I'm going to gloat up a storm when they become feature and content complete after 18 months, while Wasteland 2 won't be until after 25+ and Divinity:OS is coming close to 42+.
Divinity has a much bigger scope than PoE. And InXile has never made an RPG before, so I don't think it's exactly fair to compare.
 

Roguey

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Divinity has a much bigger scope than PoE. And InXile has never made an RPG before, so I don't think it's exactly fair to compare.
It's bigger in ways that don't matter to me. Multiplayer is a pointless feature as far as I'm concerned because I'm never playing with anyone else. Time will tell which one will become the C&C/reactivity champ, but PoE's world looks a lot more interesting to me and Josh Sawyer's choice philosophy will probably result in more interesting choices to make.
 

Infinitron

I post news
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Enjoy the Revolution! Another revolution around the sun that is. Serpent in the Staglands Dead State Divinity: Original Sin Project: Eternity Torment: Tides of Numenera Wasteland 2 Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 A Beautifully Desolate Campaign Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire Pathfinder: Kingmaker Pathfinder: Wrath I'm very into cock and ball torture I helped put crap in Monomyth
Sawyer has said that PoE is big. WL2 should be bigger than it though, not so much because of development time but because its levels are easier/cheaper to make.

What you should really be worried about is bugs. The hiring of Paradox means that Obsidian is extra worried about that, and they may have reason.
 

Semper

Cipher
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MCA Project: Eternity
What you should really be worried about is bugs. The hiring of Paradox means that Obsidian is extra worried about that, and they may have reason.

in your words it sounds like obsidian contracted paradox because of their marvellous qa, which ain't the case. their primary objective is to market the product. it's only a nice plus that they've also got their own division of lab monkeys.
 

Athelas

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What you should really be worried about is bugs. The hiring of Paradox means that Obsidian is extra worried about that, and they may have reason.

in your words it sounds like obsidian contracted paradox because of their marvellous qa, which ain't the case. their primary objective is to market the product. it's only a nice plus that they've also got their own test monkeys.
http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2014-03-19-paradox-and-obsidian-we-both-know-theres-no-bs
"If we don't think Pillars of Eternity is up to standard, we're going to tell these guys. And we're opinionated people, we're going to come back with tons of opinions. We have a QA team of eighteen people who're going to play the game for weeks and weeks and give their feedback."
 

Semper

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MCA Project: Eternity
yeah, i read that interview. obsidian still searched a publisher to do the marketing and backer gifts to free up huge chunks of time and money. i guess paradox pays all this stuff from their own pockets and will get their fair share of every sold game in return. it's clearly visible why they are interested in a stable and "bug free" product, but that's not why they were hired in the first place.
 

Roguey

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Sawyer has said that PoE is big. WL2 should be bigger than it though, not so much because of development time but because its levels are easier/cheaper to make.
PoE's going to have the better level design thanks to those pre-rendered backgrounds though. :)

What you should really be worried about is bugs. The hiring of Paradox means that Obsidian is extra worried about that, and they may have reason.

Adler said Paradox is mostly handling localization and compatibility testing, things they would have had to seek an outside contractor for regardless. :M It's pretty important for non-English languages to make sense and for it to work on hardware configurations that don't exist at Obsidian.

But yeah of course it's going to be full of bugs, it's a role playing game. Good thing Obs will have a lot more time to polish it than inXile or (presumably) Larian.
 

coffeetable

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446
Advance warning, I'm going to gloat up a storm when they become feature and content complete after 18 months,
lolwhat

the critical path is scheduled to be content-complete by the end of this month. the rest of the features on the triage list, well

BjSj1w3CQAA1WkL.jpg


was posted by rope kid yesterday. 66%.
 

Roguey

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Good thing Obs will have a lot more time

Uh but you just bragged about how their development time is turning out to be a lot shorter. Can't have it both ways.
Yes I can. They will become feature/content complete faster than those two, meaning they have more time in the schedule for full testing. From the ToEE post-mortem:
The "why" part of this could probably fill several pages worth of notes and such, but the main thing to throw in here is that there were only two real months in the schedule for full-team testing. And with a game as complex as ours, we obviously needed at least two more months in our schedule just for testing. We delivered our first full-content product about August 8, so in one sense we were only a week late, and in another, we only gave ourselves 22 days to test the final completed product.
...
The more complex a game is, the more time you need to put into the schedule for testing. There need to be several milestones when a game is this complex that read "TESTING ONLY" as their milestone requirement. Our game went alpha one month, beta the next and final the next. Even though we got some testing before alpha, most of the testing didn't kick in until we hit alpha, which meant only two months for full testing. Outside beta testing might even have been a good idea to pick up some of the more complained-about features such as NPC looting and full magic item descriptions.
Wasteland won't be feature/content complete until late-May at the earliest, and they do want to release it this year, which gives them less time for full testing than Obsidian. Larian has a similar deal, especially since they want it out in spring/summer and they haven't even hit beta yet.
 

coffeetable

Savant
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Dec 18, 2012
Messages
446
troika built their own engine and toolset for ToEE. its not a good comparison.

in fact, i don't think any of the old RPG's schedules are a good comparison. the dev tools of the 1990s may as well have been made out of flint
 

Infinitron

I post news
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Enjoy the Revolution! Another revolution around the sun that is. Serpent in the Staglands Dead State Divinity: Original Sin Project: Eternity Torment: Tides of Numenera Wasteland 2 Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 A Beautifully Desolate Campaign Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire Pathfinder: Kingmaker Pathfinder: Wrath I'm very into cock and ball torture I helped put crap in Monomyth
Yes I can. They will become feature/content complete faster than those two, meaning they have more time in the schedule for full testing.

Ah, but you see, my assumption is that Wasteland 2's content is being built up in a slower, more iterative and methodical fashion, making it inherently less buggy once complete. ;)
 

Roguey

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Ah, but you see, my assumption is that Wasteland 2's content is being built up in a slower, more iterative and methodical fashion, making it inherently less buggy once complete. ;)
Doesn't look like it now! :)

the critical path is scheduled to be content-complete by the end of this month. the rest of the features on the triage list, well
http://forums.obsidian.net/topic/65617-adam-at-work/?view=findpost&p=1428027
We have a similar definition of Alpha. Not only do we have all the features, but all of the content is in the game as well.
http://forums.obsidian.net/topic/65617-adam-at-work/?view=findpost&p=1428100
Game: It's a lot of stuff, no doubt, but I am confident that we will be able to wrap everything up in time. This game is pretty far along at this point. Even the portions of the crit path that aren't finished yet aren't more than a few weeks from being in and working.
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/obsidian/project-eternity/posts/745223
Our designers are working hard to implement the designs that our higher tiered backers have come up with. If you have a survey that needs to be filled out, please do so by March 31st. It's important that you get your surveys completed by the deadline because we are closing in on Alpha quickly.
 

Copper

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Messages
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Sawyer has said that PoE is big. WL2 should be bigger than it though, not so much because of development time but because its levels are easier/cheaper to make.
PoE's going to have the better level design thanks to those pre-rendered backgrounds though. :)
Irrelevant. Sure, the environments LOOK better, for all the quibbles, but that has nothing to do with the layout of the level's encounters, etc. However, that's also the flaw to Infinitron's logic - sure, you can crank out pure 3D art faster when you don't have an artist touching up and elaborating on features, but you're either going to get a lot of empty wastes, or poorly balanced trash encounters. Giving encounters TLC should take longer than art. I'd actually expect Wasteland to be smaller, if they put a bigger emphasis on reactivity/different routes within areas. (Of course, Eternity will actually have different encounters for different difficulty levels, so that might concentrate their design budget a bit.)

EDIT: Fucked up quoting
 

Roguey

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Irrelevant. Sure, the environments LOOK better, for all the quibbles, but that has nothing to do with the layout of the level's encounters, etc.
Wasteland 2 is a resource hog, wide open levels would be unplayable on modern machines.

Josh has stated in the past that given enough time you can make an engine do anything, but there are goals that require a really heavy investment to accomplish given what you're working with. A Wasteland 2 that isn't a corridor-crawl is one of those things.
 

Roguey

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"inXile created corridor-levels because they have to" is a whole lot kinder to them than "inXile created corridor-levels because that's their vision."
 

Infinitron

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Enjoy the Revolution! Another revolution around the sun that is. Serpent in the Staglands Dead State Divinity: Original Sin Project: Eternity Torment: Tides of Numenera Wasteland 2 Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 A Beautifully Desolate Campaign Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire Pathfinder: Kingmaker Pathfinder: Wrath I'm very into cock and ball torture I helped put crap in Monomyth
"inXile created corridor-levels because they have to" is a whole lot kinder to them than "inXile created corridor-levels because that's their vision."

It is, but contrary to some people's beliefs I'm not a mindless fanboy. I do lean towards inXile creating "corridor levels" (they aren't really corridors, but whatever) because that's how they were used to creating 3D games, and due to a lack of awareness that fans were expecting something else.

To be absolutely sure we'd have to ask somebody, of course. Brother None doesn't know because he wasn't employed by them then. If he was, they would have been aware of those fan expectations.
 
Last edited:

sea

inXile Entertainment
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I don't know too much about that stuff but I would wager that the technical capabilities of Unity have little to no bearing on the level design, other than the sheer size of the terrain mesh and stuff like the amount of textures and assets possible (since Unity doesn't do much in the way of texture/asset streaming as far as I know, and thus can be memory-limiting).

If we're talking "corridors vs. fields" I don't think the engine is at all a factor and I doubt Obsidian would be limited in any similar fashion (probably less so, though don't underestimate how big those high-res background images can get).
 

Roguey

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"inXile created corridor-levels because they have to" is a whole lot kinder to them than "inXile created corridor-levels because that's their vision."

It is, but contrary to some people's beliefs I'm not a mindless fanboy. I do lean towards inXile creating "corridor levels" (they aren't really corridors, but whatever) because that's how they were used to creating 3D games, and due to a lack of awareness that fans were expecting something else.

To be absolutely sure we'd have to ask somebody, of course. Brother None doesn't know because he wasn't employed by them then. If he was, they would have been aware of those fan expectations.
HEI$T was an open-world game that was canceled because it wouldn't work on the PS3. :P

http://www.neowin.net/news/interview-inxiles-brian-fargo-on-wasteland-2
I always thought that was a good concept but we were sunk trying to create an open world sandbox game using the Unreal engine. We had to commit to creating a PS3 version before the specs of the machine existed. Once we did get the specs we informed them it couldn't be done. They would not relent on this issue and we were hamstrung by the lack of memory and performance of the PS3 (keep in mind this was Unreal open world specific). We begged to drop this version but were turned down and thus unable to ever get the frame rate up. Surprisingly the game was 98 percent done.
 

felipepepe

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And let's not forget that Fargo multiple times teased a W2 console release...
 

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