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Obsidian's Pillars of Eternity [BETA RELEASED, GO TO THE NEW THREAD]
- Thread starter Anthony Davis
- Start date
Wow this resurrection issue is retarded, but then it's Volourn who brought it up so what can you expect?
In games death is either preventable by good tactics or not, and whether there's a penalty to death is directly related to this (compare JRPGs to WRPGs). If there's perma-death in a CRPG you can be sure they expect most people to reload if a character dies in this type of game, and why is this a problem?
Complaining about having to reload because you lost a character, and by extension failed at combat is moronic. Most people reload games when they lose a character in games where you can easily resurrection anyway because they realise this fact (they don't want to 'fail').
The only issue to really look at is when someone isn't reloading (iron-manning) and this is going to come down to how dangerous combat and penalising death is, rather than how "powerful" magic is.
In games death is either preventable by good tactics or not, and whether there's a penalty to death is directly related to this (compare JRPGs to WRPGs). If there's perma-death in a CRPG you can be sure they expect most people to reload if a character dies in this type of game, and why is this a problem?
Complaining about having to reload because you lost a character, and by extension failed at combat is moronic. Most people reload games when they lose a character in games where you can easily resurrection anyway because they realise this fact (they don't want to 'fail').
The only issue to really look at is when someone isn't reloading (iron-manning) and this is going to come down to how dangerous combat and penalising death is, rather than how "powerful" magic is.
~RAGING BONER~
Learned
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logrus
Augur
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I start to get a little hope that 3.5 is possible J If not it will be a really close miss… Is there a place where one can monitor the PayPal pledges/number of backers? My last update on total sum was something around $50K and 1K bakers.
And the mega dungeon becomes game-in-a-game! Sitting on 9 levels and with current rate >1K new backers per days plus PayPalers it can reach 11! I wonder how it will be done – simple “old-school dungeon crawler” or npc/story rich one? It may be quite difficult to keep the initial concept and write a story of Od Nua spanning across 11 levels. Not to mention that it may be quite odd to meet single “lost adventurer” on 8th level ;-) For me the story may be simple, and since such dungeon is 100% optional thing for a playthrough, it could be something designed for the “hardcore” gamers - really hard, heavily (tactical) combat oriented with lots of deadly traps and not-so-obvious puzzles. Maybe on some levels you should have an in-direct time limit f.e. on some lower level after the party blows up the wall the level starts to flood with lava and you are forced to blitzkrieg through the whole level. Or you since high level of undead infestation you get some kind of curse/dieses slowly damaging you primary attributes so you are forced to find a recipe for the cure and the ingredients (some hiden, some being body part of the level bosses, etc.). It should be something that you cannot beat from the ground to the abyssal depths at any time. Rather a challenge for whole party, each level milestone for its development – at first you descend to level three, but 4 is too hard. You make some adventuring and after advancement a couple of character levels you are able to beat another one or maybe two levels. And final levels being chore even for an nearly end-game party. The only one convenient feature would be some form of fast ascend feature, manually navigating your party through 8 levels to reach the surface is not necessary even for the “hardcore” dungeon.
About the rest-spamming in dungeons vs. going back and forth to the town. I think that it could be solved by having “safe” rooms (and tou are not allowed to rest at will in a dungeon). Some rooms (after you clear all monsters in the room and adjacent ones) become “safe” and you can rest in it. Limitation is that you can do it only once. After resting the room becomes “unsafe” and when you try to rest more you are awaken by the bunch of angry monsters. Such approach allows very easy difficulty adjustments (from the developers perspective). On the higher difficulty levels number of “safe” rooms is lower – one or two per dungeon. On lower difficulties there are 3 or 4 “safe” rooms or instead of increasing the number of “safe” rooms you are allowed to rest 2 or 3 times before the room becomes “unsafe”. I think it’s a nice compromise between spamming resting after every battle with 2 baby goblins and going back to inn through 3 levels to get a rest and be forced to descend again (which is not fun at all).
EDIT:
In the open areas "safe" rooms may be in form of empty shacks, small caverns, old camps, glades etc. Also the "survival" skill could be used for checks if you are in "safe" room/place in the open area (or simple red/yellow/green "tent" icon).
And the mega dungeon becomes game-in-a-game! Sitting on 9 levels and with current rate >1K new backers per days plus PayPalers it can reach 11! I wonder how it will be done – simple “old-school dungeon crawler” or npc/story rich one? It may be quite difficult to keep the initial concept and write a story of Od Nua spanning across 11 levels. Not to mention that it may be quite odd to meet single “lost adventurer” on 8th level ;-) For me the story may be simple, and since such dungeon is 100% optional thing for a playthrough, it could be something designed for the “hardcore” gamers - really hard, heavily (tactical) combat oriented with lots of deadly traps and not-so-obvious puzzles. Maybe on some levels you should have an in-direct time limit f.e. on some lower level after the party blows up the wall the level starts to flood with lava and you are forced to blitzkrieg through the whole level. Or you since high level of undead infestation you get some kind of curse/dieses slowly damaging you primary attributes so you are forced to find a recipe for the cure and the ingredients (some hiden, some being body part of the level bosses, etc.). It should be something that you cannot beat from the ground to the abyssal depths at any time. Rather a challenge for whole party, each level milestone for its development – at first you descend to level three, but 4 is too hard. You make some adventuring and after advancement a couple of character levels you are able to beat another one or maybe two levels. And final levels being chore even for an nearly end-game party. The only one convenient feature would be some form of fast ascend feature, manually navigating your party through 8 levels to reach the surface is not necessary even for the “hardcore” dungeon.
About the rest-spamming in dungeons vs. going back and forth to the town. I think that it could be solved by having “safe” rooms (and tou are not allowed to rest at will in a dungeon). Some rooms (after you clear all monsters in the room and adjacent ones) become “safe” and you can rest in it. Limitation is that you can do it only once. After resting the room becomes “unsafe” and when you try to rest more you are awaken by the bunch of angry monsters. Such approach allows very easy difficulty adjustments (from the developers perspective). On the higher difficulty levels number of “safe” rooms is lower – one or two per dungeon. On lower difficulties there are 3 or 4 “safe” rooms or instead of increasing the number of “safe” rooms you are allowed to rest 2 or 3 times before the room becomes “unsafe”. I think it’s a nice compromise between spamming resting after every battle with 2 baby goblins and going back to inn through 3 levels to get a rest and be forced to descend again (which is not fun at all).
EDIT:
In the open areas "safe" rooms may be in form of empty shacks, small caverns, old camps, glades etc. Also the "survival" skill could be used for checks if you are in "safe" room/place in the open area (or simple red/yellow/green "tent" icon).
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Obsidian has said that there will be (somekind of) story tied to the mega-dungeon. I do hope for the dungeon which has puzzles, traps etc and that you would see skeletons and bodies of the people who have been in the dungeon, and maybe something like Toorum's notes in Grimrock, or Balin's Tomb and diary.
Linden
Arcane
As for non-linearity, haven't they said the exploration in the game will be very reminescent of that in BG2? So a sort of story-driven "linear non-linearity" would be my guess.
Dexter
Arcane
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They had a post about exactly that on the Double Fine forums:
Hello backers! One of the key themes of this project is TRANSPARENCY. We really want to share the whole process with you, and that includes something that is usually a big secret on a game: Where does all the money go? Sorry if you don’t talk about money in your family, because we’re going to talk about it here. As you may know, we recently raised quite a bit. $3,446,371 to be specific. But that money has to go towards a lot of different things, and that’s what we’ve been working on figuring out over the past couple weeks. In order to schedule out and staff this game, we first had to actually figure out what the game’s budget would be. And now we can share a bit of insight into that process!
Fees
The first thing to be deducted from our total was Amazon fees. For every payment made through Kickstarter, Amazon took 5%. After that, Kickstarter took their 5%. There were a handful of failed transactions that were never corrected as well, leaving our final total after fees and failed transactions at $3,099,660.
Rewards
The next step of this process was figuring out how much it would cost to make and ship all of the physical rewards we offered. It was important that we set aside all this money up front so we could deliver products that live up to our high standards (holy cow you guys are going to be so stoked when you see this stuff). We also wanted to make sure the process of getting this all shipped out had as little impact on the team as possible, so we hired the amazing folks over at Fangamer to handle manufacturing, storing, packing, and shipping all of the rewards. Here’s the breakdown on where it landed:
It may look like a lot of money, but hey it’s a lot of rewards! These numbers were actually all being run while the Kickstarter project was still underway. Each time we prepared to add a new reward we ran the numbers to see how much it would cost to offer the new reward to existing backers. For each new reward, that amount was covered within hours of adding the item to the project, so this amount paid for itself and then some by enticing more of you lovely backers to sign up.
Documentary
After Kickstarter, Amazon, and rewards had been accounted for, we were left with $2,626,429. At this point we were ready to split the money with 2 Player Productions. Originally, 2PP was asking for $100,000, but just like us they were asking for a bare bones budget and their production has expanded quite a bit in reaction to the unexpected amount of support and interest in the project. It meant not just following us for 6 months, but for an entire year. It also meant covering a lot more travel (they’re in Portland, we’re in SF), buying new equipment, and paying for an amazing score from Terrance Lee. Taking this all into account, we agreed that a fair split would be to give 2PP 15% of the money after fees and rewards. This put the documentary budget at $393,964.
Game
Using the modern miracle that is math, that means we can now deduce that our game budget is $2,232,465. That’s way higher than $300,000! And will most definitely ensure that this game is suuuuuuuuuuper awesome! Here’s a neat lil’ pie graph to help visualize the breakdown:
General Maxson
Arcane
Too bad all those 46,274 people that liked PE, don't also like Obsidian Entertainment... We could have got another level of dungeon, perhaps even two. So far only 22,408 likes for Obsidian, so no chance of getting another level of dungeon in 41 hour.
Also Obsidian should have put that in a more prominent position on kickstarter. Not bury it down in a horde of text.As good as the kickstarter is going though, they should be able to get 2nd big city.
Well, at least I hope so.
Arkeus
Arcane
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- Oct 9, 2012
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Assuming that paypal will reach a minimum of 100k (it's already close to 90K), we need 250K in the next 41hrs, which means a 6K/hr average. We are currently doing better than that, and this is a "slow" part of the day.As good as the kickstarter is going though, they should be able to get 2nd big city.
We need to keep momentum, but we have VERY good odds are doing it.
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Assuming that paypal will reach a minimum of 100k (it's already close to 90K), we need 250K in the next 41hrs, which means a 6K/hr average. We are currently doing better than that, and this is a "slow" part of the day.As good as the kickstarter is going though, they should be able to get 2nd big city.
We need to keep momentum, but we have VERY good odds are doing it.
And it's already picking up again after couple slower hours, probably because europe has woken up.
J_C is very happy with the last update. The documentary is cool, but I hope they really don't use KS money for it, because according to Double Fine, it costs a lot. Although they used a professional team for it. I could settle with less professional dev videos, if that means that more money goes into the game.
The deck of cards is awesome, we play cards a lot at home. But I don't want to wait for those until 2014. I want my deck of cards as soon as possible.
The deck of cards is awesome, we play cards a lot at home. But I don't want to wait for those until 2014. I want my deck of cards as soon as possible.
- Joined
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J_C is very happy with the last update. The documentary is cool, but I hope they really don't use KS money for it, because according to Double Fine, it costs a lot. Although they used a professional team for it. I could settle with less professional dev videos, if that means that more money goes into the game.
The deck of cards is awesome, we play cards a lot at home. But I don't want to wait for those until 2014. I want my deck of cards as soon as possible.
As I said before, I don't think they're gonna use Kickstarter funds to manufacture and make the rewards since they said they're gonna use just the Kickstarter for the game, also the wording on the update concerning the documentary hints at this: "We talked about it more last week and decided that we don’t have a visual history of one of our games, even after almost ten years as a company."
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PayPal: $86,819.74, approximately 1790 backers (using an earlier average of $49.50/backer) -Darren
They say it explicitly:J_C is very happy with the last update. The documentary is cool, but I hope they really don't use KS money for it, because according to Double Fine, it costs a lot. Although they used a professional team for it. I could settle with less professional dev videos, if that means that more money goes into the game.
The deck of cards is awesome, we play cards a lot at home. But I don't want to wait for those until 2014. I want my deck of cards as soon as possible.
As I said before, I don't think they're gonna use Kickstarter funds to manufacture and make the rewards since they said they're gonna use just the Kickstarter for the game, also the wording on the update concerning the documentary hints at this: "We talked about it more last week and decided that we don’t have a visual history of one of our games, even after almost ten years as a company."
"We are not going to use the Kickstarter funding to do this however, since this is something we decided to do anyway. To us, it is a thank you to all of you for supporting us over the last month in making Project Eternity a reality and a historical record for everyone at Obsidian as well."
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- 6,733
They say it explicitly:J_C is very happy with the last update. The documentary is cool, but I hope they really don't use KS money for it, because according to Double Fine, it costs a lot. Although they used a professional team for it. I could settle with less professional dev videos, if that means that more money goes into the game.
The deck of cards is awesome, we play cards a lot at home. But I don't want to wait for those until 2014. I want my deck of cards as soon as possible.
As I said before, I don't think they're gonna use Kickstarter funds to manufacture and make the rewards since they said they're gonna use just the Kickstarter for the game, also the wording on the update concerning the documentary hints at this: "We talked about it more last week and decided that we don’t have a visual history of one of our games, even after almost ten years as a company."
"We are not going to use the Kickstarter funding to do this however, since this is something we decided to do anyway. To us, it is a thank you to all of you for supporting us over the last month in making Project Eternity a reality and a historical record for everyone at Obsidian as well."
Ah, nice. Missed that part.
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- 100,134
Hey, that interview is awesome.
I can't help but think that the future of the PC role-playing game is brighter than it's ever been when I stop by the Project Eternity Kikcstarter campaign and see that it's nearly tripled its original $1.1 million funding goal with two full days to go. Here's to hoping the publishers who have no interest in funding an RPG that isn't filled with "visceral action" stand up and pay attention.
But there are 47 hours left as of this writing, and I'd love nothing more than to drive that message home even further. So to fuel the crowdfunding energy even further and glean a few more details about the game at the same time, I fired off a second set of questions to Obsidian Entertainment's Josh Sawyer and Feargus Urquhart. The bevy of answers can be found below, but you may also want to check out our first interview and consider participating in our "Immortalized!" promotion for even more Eternity goodness:
Buck: You've stated that you're taking an open world approach with the game, but will there be some areas where a more linear design makes more sense? When do you think a linear approach makes the most sense?
Josh: I'd like to avoid linear sequences whenever possible, but there are usually a few choke points the player will have to go through even in open games. For example, you have to get the water chip and deal with the Master in Fallout. There are a lot of ways to actually do those things, but you can't avoid dealing with them in some way. That's as "linear" as I'd like to get.
Buck: How do you intend to integrate challenging, tactical, and ultimately rewarding battles within Project Eternity without requiring long resting periods between each fight? And what are your thoughts on regeneration and early access to character resurrection?
Josh: I think that capturing the dungeon-delving feeling of the Icewind Dale games and many tabletop AD&D adventures means that there should be both strategic considerations and tactical considerations in exploration and combat. To me, that means that there's some level of upfront resource planning going on as well as a moment-to-moment consideration of "is it worth spending Resource X now or should I save it for later?" I.e. a tactical consideration can also be a strategic consideration if resources are part of a running series of battles (as most dungeons are).
However, I don't think all resources need to be per-rest, only the more powerful ones at a character's disposal. For casters, this means shifting slightly away from the AD&D/3E paradigm of most spells being linked to a per-rest spell count. Within a battle, there should be tactical considerations to using any spell, and we don't want resources to be spam-able, but a caster's base abilities will likely not require a full rest to recover.
As for regeneration, I'd like to experiment with handling health in a manner somewhat similar to the 1992 RPG Darklands. Characters have two health resources: Stamina and Health. Proportionally, the character takes much more Stamina damage from an attack than Health damage. Stamina recovers relatively quickly on its own (and with the aid of magic) but Health damage requires rest. If a character hits 0 Stamina, he or she will go unconscious. If a character hits 0 Health, he or she dies.
This sort of a system provides a buffer for characters so they can be temporarily defeated in combat without being brought to the verge of death every time. Similarly, allowing a character to recover to full Stamina over a short period of time does nothing to help his or her Health, so walking around with full Stamina and low Health would be extremely dangerous.
As far as resurrection goes, Project Eternity will not have any form of in-game resurrection. Healing magic of any sort is extraordinarily rare in this world and resurrection would pull at the fabric of the mortal reincarnation cycle. However, we may include an option to turn off permanent character death. Naturally, this would be disabled in Expert Mode.
Buck: Can you give us a better understanding of how skills will be performed and function within the game world? Will there be cooldowns associated with many of them, and how many factors will be taken into consideration when determining success and failure?
Josh: For non-combat skills, we want every skill to have both a systematic application and the ability to develop scripted interactions. For example, we may have a Mechanics skill that covers picking locks. Lockpicking is a more-or-less standard interaction. Either your Mechanics skill is high enough to pick it without any resource (lockpick) cost or you fall short. If you fall short within a small enough margin, you can spend lockpicks to pick the lock anyway. We may allow the Mechanics skills of other party members to marginally contribute to the overall cost, but otherwise the interaction is standardized every time you find a lock.
However, we may put some sort of crazy mechanical apparatus in a level that the player can interact with to accomplish a variety of goals. This will also allow the party to use their Mechanics skills, but the manner of interaction can be narrated through text and handled in a way that's scripted very specifically.
Buck: Hard-to-master puzzles, lethal traps, and even secret doors are almost non-existent in modern CRPGs. How much of a focus will you be putting on these elements?
Josh: We will have these elements when they make sense, but I don't want to force them in. Often, dealing with them feels less like gameplay and more like guessing until you get lucky.
Buck: How much of an emphasis are you putting on enemy AI? Will the enemies we face employ tough strategies of their own, such as using the environment to their advantage or even setting traps for the party?
Josh: We will probably develop encounters in a manner similar to the IE games, hand-placing groups of enemies in the environment for staged encounters and using patrolling or wandering enemies to add in a "wild card" element. To me, it's not as important to make enemies clever as it is to make enemies distinct in their behaviors and strengths. It's up to the designer to be shrewd about how the encounters are staged and scripted.
Buck: We understand that Ciphers are essentially the psionic class of Project Eternity, but how will you be handling their abilities? Will they have a similar number of combat and utility "spells" as the wizard and priest? Since they're not a pure spellcaster, will they be more formidable in melee?
Josh: Ciphers are going to have an odd assortment of powers, much like psionicists have in most editions of A/D&D. They will likely have fewer total potential abilities than wizards or priests, but with more unique mechanical capabilities and effects. Some of their powers will be designed for close-quarters use so you can get your Psylocke on.
Buck: How about barbarians? You've stated that they're reckless and induced with rage, but how will this affect the way we play them as opposed to a fighter?
Josh: Most barbarians will not be able to take as much punishment as a standard fighter. While they are raging, their Stamina may become much more resistant to attacks, but their Health may not be protected, meaning they can endure a short period of extreme abuse without being knocked out, but may actually drop dead from wounds. In some ways, the play of a barbarian will likely be something that has more severe ups and downs in combat as the player has to choose the right time to rage and use the barbarian's other special abilities.
Buck: How integral will crafting and enchanting be to the game experience? Will we constantly be finding and acquiring mundane components that will allow us to forge new items when we return to a workshop of some kind?
Josh: Probably not constantly, but you will be finding ingredients frequently. These ingredients will be segregated into their own inventory space to prevent them from cluttering up your inventory UI. The use of forges, alchemical labs, or other interaction points will allow you to perform crafting. It will not be integral to the game experience but will give the player many more options for customizing their gear and consumable items.
Buck: Given the addition of crafting and enchantment, how will inventory management and encumbrance be handled in the game? Will be carrying around a set number of items per character, making use of a grid system, or working with another system entirely?
Josh: We haven't talked about inventory management in depth yet, but we want to make sure it's easy to manage and both allows the player both carry the gear he or she wants as well as requiring him or her to make strategically important decisions about what to carry into the field.
Buck: Will there be some sort of damage type system in play (bludgeoning, piercing, slashing), and what steps are you taking to ensure that all weapon types (two-handed, sword/shield, dual-wielding, and ranged) are balanced and, ultimately, viable pursuits?
Josh: I'm not sure if there will be or not. I don't want to introduce so many moving parts to the damage, weapons, and armor systems that we become unable to present player choices that are meaningful and coherent. That is, depending on how many factors the player is expected to analyze when selecting a weapon for any given task, we need to make sure that the range of choices the player can make feel like they have clear, solid benefits and drawbacks instead of coming across as a bunch of "mush".
The first step in ensuring that weapon types/combat styles are viable pursuits is saying, "All weapon types and combat styles must be viable pursuits." If that's your high-level goal, design decisions should always be framed in that context. If someone says, "Daggers are the bad weapons for characters who suck!" that clearly flies in the face of the stated goal.
I think some editions of AD&D have really struggled with this. The rules seem to want to structure weapons in a certain way that promotes trade-offs, but mechanics are in conflict and produce a bunch of choices that feel dead in the water outside of niche circumstances. If you ever look at a choice and say, "Obviously everyone should take this," or "I would never take this," there's probably something wrong with how they've been balanced.
Buck: Why did you feel it was important to add early firearms to the game and how integral will they be to the tactics employed by a typical character party?
Josh: I didn't necessarily feel that firearms were important, but I wanted the world to feel like it was more technologically advanced in some (but not all) ways than a standard fantasy setting. I had an early idea that firearms would be interesting in a setting where warfare included dealing with enormous beasts and magic, meaning that their single-shot potency at range was not as much of a "game changer" in mass combat as it was in Earth's history. Having a reload time that's more than three times as long as a crossbow is important when you're being charged by something twice the size of a human that's moving at 30mph.
We will have to experiment with firearms to see how integral they are to strategic loadouts and what their different tactical applications are. I want them to feel similar to historical firearms: inaccurate, powerful, and slow to reload, but I want them to be a real choice compared to other ranged weapons. It comes back to the high-level design goal: if we're including something in the game, it needs to be a viable option, not a marginal gimmick or no-brainer.
Buck: How important will currency be in the game, and what steps are you taking to ensure that there are enough money sinks to keep it important from start to finish?
Josh: I think currency is really interesting and it says a lot about the state of the world and the cultures in it. My interest is not necessarily shared by everyone, so I don't know how important individual currencies will be. What we use as money sinks will depend in part on how our stretch goals turn out. We already have a player house and that can be a good money sink. If the stronghold is funded at $3 million, that can be a huge money sink. Additionally, some crafting options and the Adventurer's Hall can serve as money sinks.
Buck: Was the vast cross-platform support of Unity the main reason why you chose to develop the game with it instead of Onyx? Do you anticipate using the Onyx engine for any future games beyond South Park?
Josh: Cross-platform support was important as was its general flexibility. We were able to prototype a lot of ideas very quickly, which is fantastic. I don't know what the future of Onyx is like, but we're still using some of our internal Onyx tools on Project Eternity. Our tools programmers have hooked up our string and conversation editors to work with Unity, which is enormously valuable for us.
Buck: Have you put any consideration into the UI yet? Aside from the Infinity Engine games, has the UI from any other titles inspired the direction you're taking the interface in Project Eternity?
Josh: We have. The Infinity Engine games' UIs did a good job of feeling like they were part of the world, but they had a lot of scaling issues. By Icewind Dale II, we had worked out most of the functional issues and I think a lot of people enjoyed having most of the major options at the bottom of the screen. But there's still a lot that could be improved.
The other big source of inspiration has been Temple of Elemental Evil, since that had an elegant UI that managed to handle a huge spectrum of D&D spells and abilities. I've also looked again at the UI for Dark Sun: Shattered Lands, since that had some nice context-sensitive UI elements that kept the screen mostly clear of icons while exploring. Finally, I've always liked Darklands' method of handling special interactions in the world, using a simple "ink" and "watercolor"-style image with descriptive text, almost like a mini choose-your-own-adventure.
Buck: How long before the game releases do you anticipate having a beta version available to those backers who pledged enough, and will there be multiple phases of testing?
Josh: I really can't say. It depends on when we target our alpha and how the alpha goes. Personally, I'd like to do two phases of beta testing but we'll have to wait and see how things go.
Buck: What are your thoughts on add-ons for Project Eternity? Given the time and resources, would you prefer to release several bite-sized DLCs or one major expansion pack? Would any future additions be funded through Kickstarter or would they be developed using the proceeds from sales of the main game?
Josh: After we finish Project Eternity, we're planning to develop an expansion pack in the vein of Tales of the Sword Coast, Heart of Winter, and Trials of the Luremaster. We'd prefer to use the sales of the main game to fund development of the expansion.
Buck: What are your plans for supporting the Project Eternity community up to and beyond its release? Have you considered the possibility of releasing any content-inducing patches or even a toolset of some kind?
Josh: Our testing and beta processes will minimize the need for patches, but we like to support the longevity of our products. We recently made an update on what our plans are regarding mods. We've partnered with the Nexus Network to host mods. Additionally, we will be releasing file format information and leaving a lot of our data tables open for easy modification.
Buck: I know that Obsidian Entertainment owns the Icewind Dale franchise assets and that you've approached publishers in the past about the prospect of pursuing Icewind Dale III. Given the success of your Project Eternity Kickstarter, what are the odds that we may yet see an ID3 in the near future, crowd-funded or not? Hypothetically, what direction would you take a third entry in the series?
Feargus: You are correct, we approached Atari a number of times about doing Icewind Dale 3. We hope that with the success of Project Eternity that it might be possible to talk to Hasbro / Wizards of the Coast about those games again. However, our focus right now is Project Eternity. We would not want to start working on something like IWD3 soon, since we don’t want anything to compromise Project Eternity at all. If we were to do IWD3, I think we would continue the focus of what the IWD series was all about – a great dungeon crawling counterpoint to Baldur’s Gate and Torment.
Buck: Thanks for your time, guys!
But there are 47 hours left as of this writing, and I'd love nothing more than to drive that message home even further. So to fuel the crowdfunding energy even further and glean a few more details about the game at the same time, I fired off a second set of questions to Obsidian Entertainment's Josh Sawyer and Feargus Urquhart. The bevy of answers can be found below, but you may also want to check out our first interview and consider participating in our "Immortalized!" promotion for even more Eternity goodness:
Buck: You've stated that you're taking an open world approach with the game, but will there be some areas where a more linear design makes more sense? When do you think a linear approach makes the most sense?
Josh: I'd like to avoid linear sequences whenever possible, but there are usually a few choke points the player will have to go through even in open games. For example, you have to get the water chip and deal with the Master in Fallout. There are a lot of ways to actually do those things, but you can't avoid dealing with them in some way. That's as "linear" as I'd like to get.
Buck: How do you intend to integrate challenging, tactical, and ultimately rewarding battles within Project Eternity without requiring long resting periods between each fight? And what are your thoughts on regeneration and early access to character resurrection?
Josh: I think that capturing the dungeon-delving feeling of the Icewind Dale games and many tabletop AD&D adventures means that there should be both strategic considerations and tactical considerations in exploration and combat. To me, that means that there's some level of upfront resource planning going on as well as a moment-to-moment consideration of "is it worth spending Resource X now or should I save it for later?" I.e. a tactical consideration can also be a strategic consideration if resources are part of a running series of battles (as most dungeons are).
However, I don't think all resources need to be per-rest, only the more powerful ones at a character's disposal. For casters, this means shifting slightly away from the AD&D/3E paradigm of most spells being linked to a per-rest spell count. Within a battle, there should be tactical considerations to using any spell, and we don't want resources to be spam-able, but a caster's base abilities will likely not require a full rest to recover.
As for regeneration, I'd like to experiment with handling health in a manner somewhat similar to the 1992 RPG Darklands. Characters have two health resources: Stamina and Health. Proportionally, the character takes much more Stamina damage from an attack than Health damage. Stamina recovers relatively quickly on its own (and with the aid of magic) but Health damage requires rest. If a character hits 0 Stamina, he or she will go unconscious. If a character hits 0 Health, he or she dies.
This sort of a system provides a buffer for characters so they can be temporarily defeated in combat without being brought to the verge of death every time. Similarly, allowing a character to recover to full Stamina over a short period of time does nothing to help his or her Health, so walking around with full Stamina and low Health would be extremely dangerous.
As far as resurrection goes, Project Eternity will not have any form of in-game resurrection. Healing magic of any sort is extraordinarily rare in this world and resurrection would pull at the fabric of the mortal reincarnation cycle. However, we may include an option to turn off permanent character death. Naturally, this would be disabled in Expert Mode.
Buck: Can you give us a better understanding of how skills will be performed and function within the game world? Will there be cooldowns associated with many of them, and how many factors will be taken into consideration when determining success and failure?
Josh: For non-combat skills, we want every skill to have both a systematic application and the ability to develop scripted interactions. For example, we may have a Mechanics skill that covers picking locks. Lockpicking is a more-or-less standard interaction. Either your Mechanics skill is high enough to pick it without any resource (lockpick) cost or you fall short. If you fall short within a small enough margin, you can spend lockpicks to pick the lock anyway. We may allow the Mechanics skills of other party members to marginally contribute to the overall cost, but otherwise the interaction is standardized every time you find a lock.
However, we may put some sort of crazy mechanical apparatus in a level that the player can interact with to accomplish a variety of goals. This will also allow the party to use their Mechanics skills, but the manner of interaction can be narrated through text and handled in a way that's scripted very specifically.
Buck: Hard-to-master puzzles, lethal traps, and even secret doors are almost non-existent in modern CRPGs. How much of a focus will you be putting on these elements?
Josh: We will have these elements when they make sense, but I don't want to force them in. Often, dealing with them feels less like gameplay and more like guessing until you get lucky.
Buck: How much of an emphasis are you putting on enemy AI? Will the enemies we face employ tough strategies of their own, such as using the environment to their advantage or even setting traps for the party?
Josh: We will probably develop encounters in a manner similar to the IE games, hand-placing groups of enemies in the environment for staged encounters and using patrolling or wandering enemies to add in a "wild card" element. To me, it's not as important to make enemies clever as it is to make enemies distinct in their behaviors and strengths. It's up to the designer to be shrewd about how the encounters are staged and scripted.
Buck: We understand that Ciphers are essentially the psionic class of Project Eternity, but how will you be handling their abilities? Will they have a similar number of combat and utility "spells" as the wizard and priest? Since they're not a pure spellcaster, will they be more formidable in melee?
Josh: Ciphers are going to have an odd assortment of powers, much like psionicists have in most editions of A/D&D. They will likely have fewer total potential abilities than wizards or priests, but with more unique mechanical capabilities and effects. Some of their powers will be designed for close-quarters use so you can get your Psylocke on.
Buck: How about barbarians? You've stated that they're reckless and induced with rage, but how will this affect the way we play them as opposed to a fighter?
Josh: Most barbarians will not be able to take as much punishment as a standard fighter. While they are raging, their Stamina may become much more resistant to attacks, but their Health may not be protected, meaning they can endure a short period of extreme abuse without being knocked out, but may actually drop dead from wounds. In some ways, the play of a barbarian will likely be something that has more severe ups and downs in combat as the player has to choose the right time to rage and use the barbarian's other special abilities.
Buck: How integral will crafting and enchanting be to the game experience? Will we constantly be finding and acquiring mundane components that will allow us to forge new items when we return to a workshop of some kind?
Josh: Probably not constantly, but you will be finding ingredients frequently. These ingredients will be segregated into their own inventory space to prevent them from cluttering up your inventory UI. The use of forges, alchemical labs, or other interaction points will allow you to perform crafting. It will not be integral to the game experience but will give the player many more options for customizing their gear and consumable items.
Buck: Given the addition of crafting and enchantment, how will inventory management and encumbrance be handled in the game? Will be carrying around a set number of items per character, making use of a grid system, or working with another system entirely?
Josh: We haven't talked about inventory management in depth yet, but we want to make sure it's easy to manage and both allows the player both carry the gear he or she wants as well as requiring him or her to make strategically important decisions about what to carry into the field.
Buck: Will there be some sort of damage type system in play (bludgeoning, piercing, slashing), and what steps are you taking to ensure that all weapon types (two-handed, sword/shield, dual-wielding, and ranged) are balanced and, ultimately, viable pursuits?
Josh: I'm not sure if there will be or not. I don't want to introduce so many moving parts to the damage, weapons, and armor systems that we become unable to present player choices that are meaningful and coherent. That is, depending on how many factors the player is expected to analyze when selecting a weapon for any given task, we need to make sure that the range of choices the player can make feel like they have clear, solid benefits and drawbacks instead of coming across as a bunch of "mush".
The first step in ensuring that weapon types/combat styles are viable pursuits is saying, "All weapon types and combat styles must be viable pursuits." If that's your high-level goal, design decisions should always be framed in that context. If someone says, "Daggers are the bad weapons for characters who suck!" that clearly flies in the face of the stated goal.
I think some editions of AD&D have really struggled with this. The rules seem to want to structure weapons in a certain way that promotes trade-offs, but mechanics are in conflict and produce a bunch of choices that feel dead in the water outside of niche circumstances. If you ever look at a choice and say, "Obviously everyone should take this," or "I would never take this," there's probably something wrong with how they've been balanced.
Buck: Why did you feel it was important to add early firearms to the game and how integral will they be to the tactics employed by a typical character party?
Josh: I didn't necessarily feel that firearms were important, but I wanted the world to feel like it was more technologically advanced in some (but not all) ways than a standard fantasy setting. I had an early idea that firearms would be interesting in a setting where warfare included dealing with enormous beasts and magic, meaning that their single-shot potency at range was not as much of a "game changer" in mass combat as it was in Earth's history. Having a reload time that's more than three times as long as a crossbow is important when you're being charged by something twice the size of a human that's moving at 30mph.
We will have to experiment with firearms to see how integral they are to strategic loadouts and what their different tactical applications are. I want them to feel similar to historical firearms: inaccurate, powerful, and slow to reload, but I want them to be a real choice compared to other ranged weapons. It comes back to the high-level design goal: if we're including something in the game, it needs to be a viable option, not a marginal gimmick or no-brainer.
Buck: How important will currency be in the game, and what steps are you taking to ensure that there are enough money sinks to keep it important from start to finish?
Josh: I think currency is really interesting and it says a lot about the state of the world and the cultures in it. My interest is not necessarily shared by everyone, so I don't know how important individual currencies will be. What we use as money sinks will depend in part on how our stretch goals turn out. We already have a player house and that can be a good money sink. If the stronghold is funded at $3 million, that can be a huge money sink. Additionally, some crafting options and the Adventurer's Hall can serve as money sinks.
Buck: Was the vast cross-platform support of Unity the main reason why you chose to develop the game with it instead of Onyx? Do you anticipate using the Onyx engine for any future games beyond South Park?
Josh: Cross-platform support was important as was its general flexibility. We were able to prototype a lot of ideas very quickly, which is fantastic. I don't know what the future of Onyx is like, but we're still using some of our internal Onyx tools on Project Eternity. Our tools programmers have hooked up our string and conversation editors to work with Unity, which is enormously valuable for us.
Buck: Have you put any consideration into the UI yet? Aside from the Infinity Engine games, has the UI from any other titles inspired the direction you're taking the interface in Project Eternity?
Josh: We have. The Infinity Engine games' UIs did a good job of feeling like they were part of the world, but they had a lot of scaling issues. By Icewind Dale II, we had worked out most of the functional issues and I think a lot of people enjoyed having most of the major options at the bottom of the screen. But there's still a lot that could be improved.
The other big source of inspiration has been Temple of Elemental Evil, since that had an elegant UI that managed to handle a huge spectrum of D&D spells and abilities. I've also looked again at the UI for Dark Sun: Shattered Lands, since that had some nice context-sensitive UI elements that kept the screen mostly clear of icons while exploring. Finally, I've always liked Darklands' method of handling special interactions in the world, using a simple "ink" and "watercolor"-style image with descriptive text, almost like a mini choose-your-own-adventure.
Buck: How long before the game releases do you anticipate having a beta version available to those backers who pledged enough, and will there be multiple phases of testing?
Josh: I really can't say. It depends on when we target our alpha and how the alpha goes. Personally, I'd like to do two phases of beta testing but we'll have to wait and see how things go.
Buck: What are your thoughts on add-ons for Project Eternity? Given the time and resources, would you prefer to release several bite-sized DLCs or one major expansion pack? Would any future additions be funded through Kickstarter or would they be developed using the proceeds from sales of the main game?
Josh: After we finish Project Eternity, we're planning to develop an expansion pack in the vein of Tales of the Sword Coast, Heart of Winter, and Trials of the Luremaster. We'd prefer to use the sales of the main game to fund development of the expansion.
Buck: What are your plans for supporting the Project Eternity community up to and beyond its release? Have you considered the possibility of releasing any content-inducing patches or even a toolset of some kind?
Josh: Our testing and beta processes will minimize the need for patches, but we like to support the longevity of our products. We recently made an update on what our plans are regarding mods. We've partnered with the Nexus Network to host mods. Additionally, we will be releasing file format information and leaving a lot of our data tables open for easy modification.
Buck: I know that Obsidian Entertainment owns the Icewind Dale franchise assets and that you've approached publishers in the past about the prospect of pursuing Icewind Dale III. Given the success of your Project Eternity Kickstarter, what are the odds that we may yet see an ID3 in the near future, crowd-funded or not? Hypothetically, what direction would you take a third entry in the series?
Feargus: You are correct, we approached Atari a number of times about doing Icewind Dale 3. We hope that with the success of Project Eternity that it might be possible to talk to Hasbro / Wizards of the Coast about those games again. However, our focus right now is Project Eternity. We would not want to start working on something like IWD3 soon, since we don’t want anything to compromise Project Eternity at all. If we were to do IWD3, I think we would continue the focus of what the IWD series was all about – a great dungeon crawling counterpoint to Baldur’s Gate and Torment.
Buck: Thanks for your time, guys!
Dexter
Arcane
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- 15,655
If you actually saw the Double Fine documentary e.g. the episodes that are already out, you would quickly change your mind. They've been really really cool and honestly were already worth the money alone, without even considering the game.
I don't think they want or they'll be able to do it on the same level of quality like 2Player Productions though.
The first episode is actually free for everyone, but it only gets a lot better as they get into the development and art and stuff:
SwiftCrack
Arcane
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- Oct 3, 2012
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- 1,836
Despite Obsidian not spending money on the documentary, that's still a lot of money
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- 100,134
Despite Obsidian not spending money on the documentary, that's still a lot of money
My guess is that it goes out of Obsidian's dedicated PR budget. They'll make something that can be used to advertise the company's talents for years to come.
Of course I saw them, I backed the project. And I loved them, loved the production value. And honestly, I'd like Obsidian's to have the same production values. But if I have to choose between production values and more money for the game, I'd choose the latter. Good thing is - as others pointed out - the KS money won't go to the documentary, so likely we don't have to make a compromise.
That's really cool!
Personally, not much of a fan of the idea of two big cities. One is already too much. Well, in general. If they can make you feel less lost (while yet still being lost); change the tone (while still being in the same city); keep you occupied in non-dialogue objectives (while still having a lot of dialogue) it'd be great.
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