4. Speaking of arcane veils and such, one of the most praised features in BG2 was the mage duels. In BG a wizard was an annoying pest lurking behind fighters and waiting to be shot full of arrows. In BG a wizard was an impregnable juggernaut, capable of wiping out your entire party, if it was caught unprepared. What should we expect in Project Eternity?
Personally, I believe AD&D elevated the "glass cannon" conception of wizards to an un-fun place. It's cool that, especially in 2nd Edition, wizards had so many spells to use, but in Baldur's Gate II, I believe it resulted in more-or-less strict combat puzzles rather than loose combat puzzles or tactical challenges. If the only viable way through a fight is to use a specific sequence of spells, that's not something that you tactically opt to do -- it's the thing you must do to move forward. And in many of those fights, the only way to figure out what spells to use is to trigger the fight, get wiped, reload, and try again.
I think we can still have powerful, high-threat wizards in Project Eternity without using rock-paper-scissors defense and counter mechanics. I'd like to present players with challenges that make them think of a variety of solutions. I want them to feel like they can be flexible and adaptive when an unforeseen challenge appears. If the game comes out and I see walkthroughs that all suggest the exact same tactics for going through a tough fight, I believe that's a failure on my part.
5. Stamina, health, and regeneration. A lot has been speculated on the topic, so would you mind clarifying it? What are the advantages of a "dual-bar" system? What does it do that a single-bar system can't? What role does stamina regeneration play?
The "dual-bar" or two resource system allows the player to have separate tactical and strategic resources for their characters' survivability in combat. In most versions of A/D&D, you have hit points that determine how much damage a character can take before he or she can no longer perform actions in combat. If you're playing in a more forgiving edition, you also have "Death's Door" rules that allow the character to dip into negative hit point values without being killed outright.
Many A/D&D adventures have an expectation of periodic healing, so if your party members have a rough fight, the party cleric, druid, or maybe paladin has to spend resources to make you viable for the next fight. This leads to the "healing battery" expectation, where someone in the party has to devote strategic resources to healing between fights -- or you're stuck walking back to a resting location with high frequency. Neither of those options are particularly enjoyable for many players.
With Stamina and Health, Stamina represents short term damage (shock, impact trauma, initial pain) and Health represents "the bad stuff" (burns, cuts, bruised ribs, etc.). When you take damage, you lose Stamina, but you also lose Health at a fixed ratio to the amount of Stamina damage you took. Currently it's at 1:4 Health:Stamina. When you run out of Stamina, your character gets knocked out, just like hitting 0 hit points in most editions of A/D&D. You're effectively out of the fight and you're not going to get back up without outside assistance.
If you're conscious, Stamina will regenerate quickly. "How quickly, Josh?" I don't know, man, but... pretty fast. It's the thing you're most likely to run out of in combat, but you'll probably get most or all of it back before you start another fight. You can also recover Stamina through the use of spells or class abilities, so it's something you can choose to tactically manage in combat. Between fights, it's really not an issue. No one has to cast ten healing spells in a row to get characters back into fighting shape because the Stamina will return in short order.
Health damage doesn't regenerate and you can't get it back with magic. You have to rest to recover Health. If your Health hits zero, you'll either enter some form of maimed/critically injured (and unconscious) state or, optionally (and all the time in Expert mode), be killed outright. If you explore far away from rest locations and keep getting your faces pounded in, you can have characters with very low Health and high Stamina. That's a dangerous circumstance to be in because even one or two blows could lead to a character being maimed or killed.
Ultimately, the mechanics are present to allow "hit points" and unconsciousness to be a real threat in individual combats without necessitating the presence of a healer or resting to allow for more exploration.
6. What are your thoughts on combat difficulty? Where is the line between challenging and frustrating? Would we have to download "Sawyer's Hardcore Mod!" separately (btw, loved the mod, great work) to enjoy Project Eternity properly or would it be a challenging experience "out of the box"?
Thanks. You should not need to download a separate mod for a challenge, but there will be a pretty big gulf between playing on standard difficulty without Expert and playing on higher difficulty with Expert (not to mention the other two challenge modes). My opinion on challenge is that accomplishments you achieve without some measure of frustration often feel unfulfilling, but every player has his or her own comfort zone for frustration. Some players only feel satisfied if the frustration level is high and the game is kicking them in the virtual groin. Other players really don't deal well with adversity and would rather overcome conflicts with minimal resistance.
I do think it's worth saying that tactical combat is a core part of the game, as it was for almost all of the Infinity Engine games. If someone simply doesn't like combat, Project Eternity may not be the game for them. There are ways to avoid combat or gain a distinct advantage in combat, but a good chunk of the game is built around it.
7. Tim Cain said that "Non-combat skills are gained separately from combat skills. You shouldn't have to choose between Magic Missile and Herbalism." May I ask why?
Everyone in a party contributes to the party's overall combat efficacy and failure in a combat challenge is a game-ending (or at least reloading-invoking) event. With combat, you can fail or succeed by degrees. Failure in a non-combat challenge is usually not in degrees, but in absolutes, and there's not much (if any) tactical decision-making that can change the outcome. Additionally, combat is always a way through areas. While we are going to give players many different ways to navigate areas and resolve conflicts, combat will be a common means of moving forward.
Because combat will usually be more dominant than any single other means of conflict resolution, and because every character contributes to party combat efficacy, increasing an individual character's combat capability is always a strategically sound decision (assuming you aren't metagaming every non-combat challenge). The thing is, we want people to use non-combat skills to navigate through the environment and solve problems, so we want characters to have those skills! Dividing combat and non-combat skills into separate resources allows parties to be good in and out of combat, but a party still will not be able to cover all "bases". The system we're making doesn't assume that you have maximum combat capabilities and are buying skills like a 3E rogue with an 18 Intelligence.
This should be interesting... 
