New Infinity Engine style game in the works...

[Avoraciopoctules]

I'm guessing three reasons for classes.
1. Nostalgia appeal. A lot of the investor base comes in expecting something remiscent of houseruled AD&D.
2. It's faster and easier to make characters than something more purely point-based.
3. Compartmentalizing people into roles makes differentiating companions easier.

[Avoraciopoctules]

Will Project Eternity use a level system (most RPGs) or an open ended skill upgrade system (Shadowrun, Vampire The Masquerade)?
There will be traditional leveling and advancement options (and classes). However, we want to make sure that a character’s growth is also tied to the world, the lore, and the narrative. So as much as the player levels up, there is also a selection of soul-based advancement elements tied to the world itself – these elements exist outside of your class, and they can be shaped and grow according to a player’s individual choices and backstory.

EDIT:

LDG: I read that it is a more mature themed game. I am hoping that does not mean Dwarf on Elf action? What will the more mature theme mean for Project Eternity?
Tim: By mature, we do NOT mean sexual references or boobs or blue jokes. We mean we want to tackle more than linear stories with a black-and-white villain at the end or quests that are simple “run and fetch” deals. We want the player to think about how his actions affect the world and more than just himself, and we want to introduce scenarios that might not have a “right” answer. If we make the writer for the walkthrough portion of our strategy guide pull his hair and cry that it can’t be done, our job will be accomplished.

[ModelCitizen]

But 4e standard seems to be their vision:

Tim: Yes, we are looking to include many of these features into our close combat system. Specifically, opportunity attacks and flanking are definitely in, as well as charging. We're not sure about reach weapons yet (we need to figure out if that attribute on a weapon will be worthwhile enough in combat and will supportable with the appropriate UI), and while we will support prone positions, you won't be able to attack while prone because the animations involved are too different from attacks while standing that we would have to make every animation twice, once for standing and once for prone. This limitation also means that grappling abilities will not be included. There are too many new animations needed and special case limitations that apply, e.g. how does a human grapple a centaur or a dragon or an ooze?).

Some of it has justifiable reasons behind it, but I'm starting to wonder if this whole thing happened because they went to hasbro asking about the D&D license (whether for 4e or 5e, doesn't matter), and were told to go fuck themselves.

It really would be a fuckton of work to support prone attacks and grapple animations. Especially grapple animations if the level designers can scale models up and down like in NWN2. These aren't excuses or side benefits to cutting grappling because they heart 4e design flaws so much, if that's what you think happened.

[Whipstitch]

And as much as I would like to perform a Macho Man memorial elbow drop on some trolls, I don't actually think that thematically it's a big deal at all.

[Pedantic]

This sounds ripe for a spin-off tabletop game sometime down the line, though admittedly that's pretty wild speculation right now. Still, if Dragon Age did it, I don't see why this project wouldn't want to. It sounds like a lot of the core game engine is going to be exportable to one.

[John Magnum]

But AD&D has literally existed for decades. What would be the point?

[MfA]

"Tim: By mature, we do NOT mean sexual references or boobs or blue jokes."

So no brothel with a sheep this time Tim?

[Voss]

But 4e standard seems to be their vision:

Tim: Yes, we are looking to include many of these features into our close combat system. Specifically, opportunity attacks and flanking are definitely in, as well as charging. We're not sure about reach weapons yet (we need to figure out if that attribute on a weapon will be worthwhile enough in combat and will supportable with the appropriate UI), and while we will support prone positions, you won't be able to attack while prone because the animations involved are too different from attacks while standing that we would have to make every animation twice, once for standing and once for prone. This limitation also means that grappling abilities will not be included. There are too many new animations needed and special case limitations that apply, e.g. how does a human grapple a centaur or a dragon or an ooze?).

Some of it has justifiable reasons behind it, but I'm starting to wonder if this whole thing happened because they went to hasbro asking about the D&D license (whether for 4e or 5e, doesn't matter), and were told to go fuck themselves.

It really would be a fuckton of work to support prone attacks and grapple animations. Especially grapple animations if the level designers can scale models up and down like in NWN2. These aren't excuses or side benefits to cutting grappling because they heart 4e design flaws so much, if that's what you think happened.

I wasn't even thinking of the shit they cut (cause, honestly, fuck grappling, though shit grappling rules leading just tossing it out is a D&D trope in its own right at this point), but this list of charge bonus, flanking bonus, OAs and worrying about reach weapons feels like someone just summarized the combat chapter of 3e or 4e.


@MfA - pshaw. They save the bestiality shit for their non-mature titles. They gotta top the goopy ghoul dominatrix cowboy action now. And robot fisting.

@Avo- I've missed that bit on classes- are they planning bioware style companion romance melodrama bullshit or create-your-own-party of faceless drones Icewind Dale bullshit?

Also, its a kickstarter project. There are no investors, just idiots tossing money in the air to claim some ability to suck the cocks of the 'original black isle team'

[Pedantic]

@Avo- I've missed that bit on classes- are they planning bioware style companion romance melodrama bullshit or create-your-own-party of faceless drones Icewind Dale bullshit?'

Both, assuming they get 2.6 million. You can either go find companions or go to a specific location and make your own, limited to the same pace you could find a party.

[FatR]

Tim: By mature, we do NOT mean sexual references or boobs or blue jokes. We mean we want to tackle more than linear stories with a black-and-white villain at the end or quests that are simple “run and fetch” deals. We want the player to think about how his actions affect the world and more than just himself, and we want to introduce scenarios that might not have a “right” answer. If we make the writer for the walkthrough portion of our strategy guide pull his hair and cry that it can’t be done, our job will be accomplished.

I haven't played Obsidian's recent games, like New Vegas or Alpha Protocol, is there anything in them suggesting that Obsidian writers are actually capable of pulling this? Because main stories in P:T, KotOR 2 or Icewind Dales were linear as a railgun and even in P:T which had most endings (access to which was more determined by your character build than by choices, IIRC) you could clearly see what one was the best.

[Username17]

New Vegas has an ending system wherein you get people to fight on your side or not and you pick a side and then after the ensuing major battle at the end there are one of four factions in charge and then you get a little ending blurb about what happens to a bunch of other people and minor factions. There are 27 ending slides with multiple possibilities on them, and one has as many as 15 options. Combinatorials being what they are, New Vegas technically has billions of potential endings, although many of them differ only slightly and for practical purposes there are four.

-Username17

[hyzmarca]

They might go the same route that Bioware did with Mass Effect 3, which your actions hypothetically have major impact on the world, but you don't get to see any of that in the end.

[John Magnum]

Alpha Protocol lets you do most of the major missions in any order, and unless you go out of your way to be an extreme outlier the major differences will be which NPCs end up on your team, a few dialogue acknowledgments that you did X before you did Y instead of vice versa, and a few theoretical world-affecting "choices" (Save the President of Taiwan or stop the riots? Rebel against Halbech or join them?) whose effects on the narrative are not actually mentioned or shown and whose effects on the game content are absolutely minimal.

They even have the ME3 thing where the final cutscene is literally identical except for swapping out a single element, only instead of having a choice of which color explosion you get it's a choice of which butthole is your companion in a boat.

But because Obsidian is the PLUCKY UNDERDOG STOMPED ON BY PUBLISHERS and Bioware is THE FORMERLY GREAT DEV HOUSE RUINED BY EA, one of these is enraging stupid shit and one of these is brilliant challenging writing.

[hyzmarca]

Its more because Mass Effect 3 has two games and several years worth of hype leading up to the end. Alpha Protocol, on the other hand, was relatively understated. I didn't even know that it existed until this thread.

The moral of the story is that you shouldn't make promises that you don't have enough man-hours to keep.

You can make a perfect game with bajillions of real endings, but if you start making it now the console it is released on will plug into a port on your skull instead of using a controller.


As Duke Nukem Forever so aptly demonstrated, Perfect is the enemy of both Sufficient and On Time and Hype is the arch-nemesis of Satisfaction.

[Voss]

Nah, that isn't it. People are generally satisfied if there are roughly a handful of 'real endings,' as it means they can go through several play-throughs before getting entirely bored and moving on to the next title. But the endings have to be legitimately different. ME3 just didn't differentiate the endings in any meaningful way (and the fact that they are all vaguely 'bad endings' doesn't help), and then tried to defend it by gibbering about artistic vision. So people said fuck you, there isn't any reason to go for that second or third play-through, and got vocally butthurt.

Setting it up so it is you can just load a save game before the final button press just makes it worse, since people were expecting the actual game to produce the ending in some fashion. It has very little to do with the either 'EA ruining everything' or a lack of man-hours (as the cut-scene guys have very little to do while the game content is still being worked on).

As for duke nukem, what you said made no sense. The game was shit, short, years late AND a terrible effort. Perfection wasn't even involved in the equation, let alone opposed to the other variables. Someone finally just phoned it in to get the damn game out and finally bury a shitty franchise.

[mikayel]

As a person who was hopeful, I have begun to lose inertia and interest in the project for lack of any real information and for whatever tidbits of "yes, cooldowns are in, but they are awesome cooldowns".

Also, the forum is flat out scary. The things people want... they... they don't even know what they don't know.

Anyway, Hoping this turns out decent but I will not be supporting the KS -- there's hardly any info about the game and the investment time is nearly at a deadline. If it turns out well, I'll gladly buy it post-production but until then Obsidian is banking on hype and vague, vague promises.

They did get Ziets, who was the creative designer behind the amazingly enjoyable Mask of the Betrayer, so there's that at least.

[rampaging-poet]

As for duke nukem, what you said made no sense. The game was shit, short, years late AND a terrible effort. Perfection wasn't even involved in the equation, let alone opposed to the other variables. Someone finally just phoned it in to get the damn game out and finally bury a shitty franchise.

Duke Nukem Forever was terrible because the original team kept trying for perfection until they ran out of money. If they'd been willing to settle for a good game instead of a perfect game on the latest hardware (while hardware was advancing faster than they could make the game), it would have been finished much sooner and probably wouldn't have been completely shitty.

[Whipstitch]

Its more because Mass Effect 3 has two games and several years worth of hype leading up to the end.

It goes a bit deeper than that, but yes, context and managing player expectations is certainly the biggest part. ME 1&2 for the most part taught you that yes, Commander Big Damn Hero certainly could decide the fate of the galaxy. Random space aliens would totally fall over themselves talking about how great you are and would mention how you have that special something that makes people just want to follow you into hell and polish your knob on the way there. I mean, yeah, sure, you lost a squaddie here and there but you had a large degree of control over even that. Your actions impacted the fate of pretend billions. Do enough extracurricular activities and you could even tell Wrex to sit down and shut up as you undo the work that could revive his people. And remember, the ability to control your environment is the ultimate power fantasy. Yes, even moreso than running people down in GTA.

Then the ME3 ending came along and kicked over the sandcastle. Its big theme is that things actually do happen that you have no control over and yes, the universe is bigger than even Commander Fancy Pants. Which, you know, is true, and the basic lesson of god knows how many stories. But that particular message runs counter to the lessons of the previous games and people didn't want that shit jammed down their throat in the 11th hour by a pure exposition character who they were only just now introduced to. People predictably responded to it as a bait 'n' switch. That feeling of betrayal is the reason why people who probably raved about traditional railroad endings like that of Shadow of the Colossus or PoP:Sands of Time but started bleating about player agency at the end of ME3.

Expectations management is also why many people didn't get too mad about the AP ending even if they were happy to crap on the game in general--I actually sorta hated everything about AP that wasn't the writing. But one thing that could have helped mitigate the nerd rage engendered by the ME ending was introducing more uncertainty over the course of the series in general--aside from stuff like the Rachni queen you could feel assured that most decisions were merely about whether you wanted more Paragon or Renegade points. In AP they really went out of their way to include decisions that weren't just morally grey but outright shots in the dark about whether they would even work in the way the character intended. Now, typically these choices were way inconsequential in the long haul, but overall the feel of a game will be much different if you are playing a character like Michael "Kill the gelato guy, maybe?" Thorton instead of Commander Omniscience.


Anyway, yeah, also agree about DNF. That game was a product of its times. There was no GTAIII, Source or Unreal engine at the time of its inception and the Shenmue developers had not yet taught publishers the hard lesson that spending 50 million dollars on forklift mini-games is unlikely to get good returns on investment.

[Voss]

As for duke nukem, what you said made no sense. The game was shit, short, years late AND a terrible effort. Perfection wasn't even involved in the equation, let alone opposed to the other variables. Someone finally just phoned it in to get the damn game out and finally bury a shitty franchise.

Duke Nukem Forever was terrible because the original team kept trying for perfection until they ran out of money. If they'd been willing to settle for a good game instead of a perfect game on the latest hardware (while hardware was advancing faster than they could make the game), it would have been finished much sooner and probably wouldn't have been completely shitty.

Ah, that makes more sense. I didn't realize we were taking the way back machine to the original team. I tend to think of that as vaporware, and only really care about games that are actually made.

[John Magnum]

It DID get made. My understanding is that Gearbox basically took the turds 3D Realms had left them, polished them as quickly as possible, and dumped the result into stores. Although Randy Pitchford seems fairly proud of the end result, crazy bastard that he is, so maybe they really were putting their own mark on it.

[Avoraciopoctules]

This is supposed to be a screenshot showing what environmental design will look like.

http://media.obsidian.net/eternity/medi ... 0x1080.jpg

[MfA]

I think it's 2D art with some 3D effects and models ala ToEE.

[Avoraciopoctules]

Early on in the Kickstarter campaign, we told you that we wanted to make maps the Infinity Engine way. That is, we wanted to build 3D levels, render them out as 2D images, and then have our artists paint in beautiful details, highlights, and color-tweaks before they went into the game. Looking back at the levels some of us worked on for Icewind Dale, we were still thrilled with the quality that we could achieve with this approach. For Project Eternity, we're using 10 years of improvements in rendering technology and hardware to get the job done, but we still love what we can do the "old-fashioned" way.

[sake]

Damn. So much for the hopes of any sort of movable camera type thing.

[FatR]

Its more because Mass Effect 3 has two games and several years worth of hype leading up to the end.

And the developers more or less explicitly promised that the ending won't be what it actually was. And besides "Choose the color you like, all of your decisions up to this point are irrelevant", both the nature of the choice and the proposed options were fucking retarded. And ME 3 was a high-budget game, so expectations were justifiably high.