Good evening all,
I'd like to take a few minutes to discuss a few things. The goal/vision of this project is to capture the magic (old school feeling) of the Infinity Engine games. Many of the long time folks at Obsidian are just as big of fans of old school RPGs as you are. We are not interested in "capturing the biggest market" or making a game that "caters to everyone" for this title. We just want to make the best possible PC RPG we can, that lives up to the vision I stated above. Those games did very well for the publishers of their day, and since we don't need to deal with a publisher and are going direct, we are more than happy to ship this game to a smaller fan base, i.e. you.
This bears repeating. We want to capture the OLD SCHOOL feeling of the Infinity Engine games. We know the lack of cinematic dialogue or using an isometric camera is not enough to accomplish this. This obviously doesn't mean we are making a BG or IWD clone, however. We want it to feel like those games... with improvements. Not to stream-line it or dumb it down, just to make it better.
I'd like to share a good example of this philosophy from the 3rd edition D&D rules. In the olden days, classes in D&D leveled at different rates. Rogues leveled faster than everyone else and wizards were the slowest, others fell somewhere in the middle. This was built into the system and each class had different xp requirements for each level. Without getting into why the old systems did this, most people hated it. Of course there was a die-hard fan base that thought it was great. When WoTC released 3rd edition they got rid of it... or did they?
I'm using a pen and paper example here because not all of the CRPGs that used the system implemented this. If you played a rogue and disarmed a trap (without anyone aiding you), you got extra xp. Looking at the rules as written (RAW) in the DMG, that character overcame a CR challenge alone. Doing so gains quite a bit of XP and if the DM allowed this, caused a rogue to level much faster than any other class.
Conversely, the Wizard received the Scribe Scroll feat for free at 1st level. If you wanted to be ready for any situation, you crafted scrolls and memorized your core spells. Crafting scrolls (and any other magic item) cost XP, sometimes A LOT of it. Result: every wizard I ever played, played with, or DMed, leveled slower than everyone else. This was now a player choice to level slowly and he was rewarded for it. IMO, this is MUCH better design that accomplished the same thing in most cases as the old system.
These are the types of designs we are striving to implement into PE. We want this game to feel like the games you loved, while not implementing clearly poor design choices. Much like our community, many of us on the team are passionate about certain aspects of RPG design. I tend to fall into the hardcore, old school, group. Part of my job is to be the voice for that community (I've championed turn-based combat on multiple occasions). I know what you guys don't want. Josh and I have discussed this on multiple occasions and I have every confidence in his vision.
Lastly, nothing is currently set it stone. Game development doesn't typically work that way. This will be an evolving process to get us to the goal of making a great strategy system, that feels "real" if that makes sense. Josh's vision of combat will get input from a lot of folks that have a lot of experience in playing and making RPGs. We'll get it right.
Sawyer's already deadset on trying the spells-recharge-between-battles-via-cooldown idea, and if it doesn't make it in it'll be because it sucked, not because several dozen people told him they hate cooldowns.
) instead of giving constructive criticism.
