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

[Johannes]

But why should they cater to morons who can't reach a high enough level of understanding of the game system so that they can "cheat" it? What he's saying is that he would do the same thing that the present-day popamole developers do, which is that when players discover unintended mechanics and take advantage of them, they swoop in and ban people. With people like these around, awesome emergent mechanics like the rocket-jump of old, or Tribes' skiing would have never existed. I am disappoint of Greg Ziets.

Gamist spotted.

Gamer wants to game, how surprising.

 

[TwinkieGorilla]

One of the youngest and most clear-headed members of the Codex, ladies and gentlemen

Yeah, that was a good post. Been awhile.

 

[Harg Harfardarssen]

Hey, this is supposed to be a game about adventuring and stuffies. Not social commentary and sexual exploration. Fuck this retardery.

Or we could also add furries, footjobs, and carfuckers; so we don't oprese any minority.

Fantasy as a genre has always been used to explore social issues and themes, expanding upon them and shedding new light on them in ways we can't (or won't; it helps avoid sad knee-jerk reactions if you get your players to sympathise with the downtrodden, oppressed orcs or something rather than black people). Whether it's successful at that is another matter, but I don't see why anyone is surprised that Obsidian is doing the same, given their pedigree and penchant for story/narrative-focused game design. We didn't fund a new SSI game here. It's going to have a lot of words, and I'm not going to react with a violent fit of shitting myself and screeching about how dare they attempt to give their writing some level of real-world relevance. Fantasy for the sake of making up cool shit has been boring the hell out of me for a long, long time. It's not going to be some massive 40-hour pride parade; whatever they come up with will be at least more grey than that.They handled gay characters (for example) exceptionally well in New Vegas, by making them genuine, fleshed-out human beings that happened to be gay while still exploring the issue of how the various factions treated homosexuality and making it fairly nuanced (the cartoonishly evil Legion being more accepting than the NCR). When given total creative control, I don't see them putting out anything below that par.

I certainly don't want LGBT issues to be the main focus of the game, but it's frankly ridiculous at this point to suggest they're going to be anything more than acknowledged and/or dealt with as part of a larger schism between races; frankly, if they're going with the latter, I can't wait to see what they come up with, as the idea of nations/races being opposed in part due to innate biological differences which have driven them into incompatible cultures is an interesting one that could make for some great gameplay/C&C scenarios. Either way, it's hardly going to be a reduction to Bioware-level tokenism. I'm looking forward to seeing alien races that aren't just reskinned orcs or sexy sexy blue lesbian masturbation fantasies.

The problem with same-sex romances in bioware games is the "romances in bioware games" part.

 

[TwinkieGorilla]

I made a thread about stealth killing, something I've always wished cRPGs handled better (or at all): http://forums.obsidian.net/topic/60475-stealth-killing/

Join in if you care.

 

[l3loodAngel]

I made a thread about stealth killing, something I've always wished cRPGs handled better (or at all): http://forums.obsidian.net/topic/60475-stealth-killing/

Join in if you care.

Could you turn it into a poll, because Obsi cares more about polls.

 

[TwinkieGorilla]

Done. Let me know if there's a better way of constructing the poll.

 

[IDtenT]

But why should they cater to morons who can't reach a high enough level of understanding of the game system so that they can "cheat" it? What he's saying is that he would do the same thing that the present-day popamole developers do, which is that when players discover unintended mechanics and take advantage of them, they swoop in and ban people. With people like these around, awesome emergent mechanics like the rocket-jump of old, or Tribes' skiing would have never existed. I am disappoint of Greg Ziets.

Gamist spotted.

Gamer wants to game, how surprising.

With opinions like this, this industry will never become an artform.

 

[skuphundaku]

But why should they cater to morons who can't reach a high enough level of understanding of the game system so that they can "cheat" it? What he's saying is that he would do the same thing that the present-day popamole developers do, which is that when players discover unintended mechanics and take advantage of them, they swoop in and ban people. With people like these around, awesome emergent mechanics like the rocket-jump of old, or Tribes' skiing would have never existed. I am disappoint of Greg Ziets.

Gamist spotted.

Gamer wants to game, how surprising.

With opinions like this, this industry will never become an artform.

You say it like it's a bad thing.

"The Industry" doesn't need us to make sure games don't become an artform. They're doing that on their own quite effectively. The standard process is that something starts as a past-time, becomes an artform and then it becomes an industry. That was the case with music, books, movies etc. Gaming jumped almost immediately from newfangled past-time to industry. Them's the breaks!

 

[Wise Emperor]

UPDATE #6

At Obsidian, we have always tried to choose the engine and toolset most suited to the game we are making. When making a sequel to an existing game, we use the engine from the original game so that we don’t waste time recreating the inner workings and gameplay behavior in a new engine before we can even start developing new content. When creating a new game from scratch, we evaluate the options available to us and choose the one we think fits best. In the case of Project Eternity, we feel the best fit is Unity.
Unity enables small teams to be very productive. Unity has an amazing development environment that makes it very easy for programmers, artists and designers to work together to build great games. In a very short time we have already made great progress prototyping some of the core functionality for Project Eternity.
We do intend to use some of our in-house tools in conjunction with Unity where it makes sense, such as in the case of creating conversations and editing some of the RPG-specific game data. Unity makes it very easy to extend not only the game engine but the development tools as well, and we feel integrating some of the tools that have already proven effective on previous Obsidian games will get us off to a great start on the development of Project Eternity.
Unity also supports a wide range of target platforms. We knew that a likely request from the community was going to be support for Mac and Linux versions of the game, and we wanted to make sure we were in the best position to do that. While we could have ported Onyx, our internal engine technology, to those platforms, the time and effort required to do so would reduce the budget we have to make the game and result in less of the awesome gameplay and content our fans desire. Mac and Linux will still require time and effort from us to test, maintain and support but Unity gets us most of the way there. In fact, our experience with Unity so far has made us confident enough that we have decided to remove Linux support from the stretch goals and just commit to providing a Linux version right here and now! Of course, we can’t take something away from our stretch goals without putting something else in its place, so what is that going to be?
The $2.2 million stretch goal will still include a new Region, a new Faction, a new Companion and all the hours of additional gameplay, quests, NPCs and items that go along with those things. But we’ve also got something new coming to this stretch goal, and it’s big enough that it’s deserving of its own update to talk about it! So tune in this coming Monday, September 24th where we will reveal our new stretch goals, unveil a fun new tracker for them, and announce our schedule of guest stars for the week!
Thank you for supporting Obsidian and Project Eternity!
Chris Jones
CTO, Obsidian

Guest Star

: x

 

[evdk]

The guys from Unity really must thank god every day for kickstarter and Fargo.

 

[Digital Monocle]

The guys from Unity really must thank god every day for kickstarter and Fargo.

Does this mean Drocon is going to talk about how much Unity sucks again?

 

[made]

Unity engine confirmed, first screenshot leaked:

oh yeah

 

[Wise Emperor]

Drocon was finally destroyed in Great Alt Purge of '12.

 

[evdk]

Unity engine confirmed, first screenshot leaked:

oh yeah

Even with perspective taken into account the door is too small for the doorway. Aaargh.

 

[Jarpie]

What's so bad about Unity?

 

[made]

Even with perspective taken into account the door is to small for the doorway. Aaargh.

who cares as long as the backgrounds are beautifully hand painted

 

[Digital Monocle]

Drocon was finally destroyed in Great Alt Purge of '12.

Such a shame, the butthurt that he would have incited today would have been great

Edit: Anyways, I upped my pledge from 65 to 100 after these past two updates

 

[TwinkieGorilla]

This made me LOL: http://forums.obsidian.net/topic/60...her-romance-thread/page__st__180#entry1200122

The butthurt is glorious.

 

[Clockwork Knight]

Best part is you can easily play any RPG as a gay. Just don't follow any sex related dialogs with the opposite sex.

Isn't that LARPing?

With a proper background and presentation (like, written by a man, not fat fugly female with mental issues), it's quite interesting concept: people closer to colonial organisms than humans, almost alien society organised in a fully artificial way. Like Tlailax in FRank Herbert's Dune.

But we all know it would end with furries splashing their fluids at monitors. So thank God those people, both Obsidians and their retarded forum residents, lack neccesary imagination.

Or golems, or genderless incsectoids...funny how all of those choices would be monstrous demihumans, at best. Perhaps it's a sign of this being a terrible idea?

Someone should ask them if they really want to put mexican surgery clinics in a fantasy world.

"It's fantasy, I'm telling you"

"How are you so sure?"

"It's clean"

 

[IDtenT]

I wonder about Unity's performance. Kind of saddened as the Onyx performance for DSIII was excellent.

That said my only experience with Unity has so far been good. I played a bit of Tiger Woods Online last year and it was both light-weight and had more than decent performance. At the very least it doesn't seem to suffer console-related performance issues, as a bunch of other shit engines.

 

[Spockrock]

With opinions like this, this industry will never become an artform.

wat o_O
I don't need "art" in all my games. I want game in my games, thank you very much.

 

[Merkwürdigliebe]

This made me LOL: http://forums.obsidian.net/topic/60...her-romance-thread/page__st__180#entry1200122

The butthurt is glorious.

It's nice to see all that dumbfuckery confined to a single thread. Now most of the visible threads seem to be about reasonable relevant topics such as game mechanics or art design, some definite incline there.

 

[crojipjip]

Unity3D developers a crash on startup bug between updates. Sometimes its specific projects, other times damnit men. It is why I am just going to use a flow chart to illustrate my game.

 

[Digital Monocle]

The project has now hit 1.8 million, onto the Codex Player House

 

[Infinitron]

All races and classes unlocked?