Pillars of Eternity #HO

Creo recordar que Avellone dijo que el guión del juego seguiría el estilo Planescape: Torment. Para los que lo preguntaban.

#171 fallout tuvo unos 5 millones alla por el año 1997. Yo creo que es poquisimo dinero para este proyecto.

Y bueno de tiempo ya ni hablamos, como muy poco necesitarian un año mas.

#187 Ellos eran los encargados del pvp, no de la optimizacion y de las animaciones, que de eso se encargaba bioware y era lo que tenia de malo el pvp. Yo aun no entiendo como los Mythic no han mandado a la mierda a EA y a Bioware...

#159 Bueno de hecho antiguos miembros de Bioware son los que están haciendo The Banner Saga que sinceramente tiene buena pinta para mi gusto. Cuando lo descubrí ya se acabó el Kickstarter pero también quería apoyarles.

#194

La saga Diablo y World of Warcraft son simuladores de futbol y shooters respectivamente ¿No? xD

#197

Diablo es un action RPG, o hack and slash como lo prefieras, pero en definitiva tiene muchisimos elementos comunes a cualquier otro RPG (inventario, niveles, objetos, lore, etc).

Para mi entra en el amplio saco de los juegos de rol de toda la vida. Si miras listas de "mejores RPG de la historia" siempre verás a la saga Diablo o sobre todo Diablo II en esas listas.

Diablo es un RPG, y WoW tambien, tan diferente de Baldur's Gate como Baldur's Gate lo es de Final Fantasy VII

Pero vamos, en definitiva me parece acojonante que la gente separe las franquicias de Warcraft o Diablo de otros RPG de siempre, cuando son uña y carne xD

Yo digo que el super mario es un juego de rol porque roleas a ser mario y a hacer rico a nintendo coleccionando monedas.

Más novedades sacadas de Project Eternity que me van llegando al e-mail.

Os lo copio aquí para que haya información en este hilo y sea más cómodo informarse.

Let's talk about armor design. Taken on its own, armor design isn't of eminent importance. It's just one of many subsystems that make up Project Eternity. However, looking at it in detail can expose problems that can be found across our various subsystems: by making something work well in a new system and setting, we can often put it at odds with the nostalgia of the old games (and "realism" ).

Back in the days of 2nd Edition Advanced Dungeons and Dragons, we had all sorts of quasi- or non-historical armor types like banded mail, ring mail, and studded leather. You wore the heaviest armor you could because it typically had the best Armor Class. If plate mail was available, there weren't many reasons to wear splint mail or (horror of horrors) chain.The default rules limited the viability of certain character concepts because most characters of a given class were funneled down a specific equipment path.

E sort of solved this problem by implementing Maximum Dexterity Bonus, which meant that characters with high Dexterity scores would generally equip whatever armor gave them the maximum bonus to Armor Class without capping the Armor Class bonus they received from Dexterity. There were a few problems with this.

First, while it did help make previously "bad" character concepts (e.g., the lightly armored fighter) more viable, generally there were one or two choices per character build. If you had a high dexterity, you were not going to wear heavy armor. If you had a low Dexterity, you might wear light armor, but only for the higher movement rate it allowed.

Second, there was an equipment dead zone in medium armor -- the Maximum Dexterity Bonus caps and movement penalties of heavy armor without the nice Armor Class bonus. Also, if you were a ranger or barbarian, technically you could wear medium armor, but in practice you would never wear it because it disabled several class abilities.

The third issue is a common one with armor design: the ability to wear heavy armor has value (classes receive it as a benefit and it costs feats to purchase in 3E), but it's presented as something with trade-offs. This in itself is not bad, but as previously mentioned, typically the decision of what type of armor to wear can more-or-less be made at the end of character creation. If your character wears a chain shirt at 1st level, there's a good chance he or she will be wearing a +5 version toward the end of the campaign. This is sort of nice because it means that you can have a consistently viable character concept, but there's not a ton of decision making about armor types after your adventuring career starts.

Finally, there's a way of naming and progressing things in A/D&D. Once you get your "base" armors introduced (for our purposes, we will include plate armor and its 2nd Edition kin, field plate and full plate), upgrades are expressed as +1 versions. It becomes pretty easy to understand once the hierarchical relationship and spread of armor types are established.

What does this mean for Project Eternity? It means designing a new armor system that rectifies deficiencies of older systems while maintaining a familiar feel is tricky. Additionally, the more dissimilar the armor relationships are to those found in A/D&D, the more they will be re-evaluated for verisimilitude (i.e. "realism" ).

We would like our armor system to accomplish the following goals:

• Make wearing different types of armor a real choice for the player based on both character build and circumstance. E.g. a swashbuckling lightly-armored fighter will tend to wear one of a variety of light armor types (maybe a gambeson or leather cuirass), but in a circumstance where protection is of utmost importance, the player may still choose to wear heavy armor with a loss in build optimization.

• Disassociate armor value from class type in favor of different build types. E.g. a wizard can wear heavy armor and be a different type of wizard instead of just "a wizard who is bad".

• Allow a character to maintain a character concept throughout the game without suffering extreme mechanical penalties. E.g. a character who starts the game in some form of light armor can complete the game in some form of light armor with appropriate gameplay trade-offs compared to wearing heavy armor.

Introduce new or upgraded armor types throughout the game instead of using ++ versions (which in itself would pose problems unless we directly duplicated A/D&D's d20-based attack mechanics).

Even with these three goals, there are a number of problems to solve. One of the biggest questions is how to break up and "advance" armor by type. In AD&D, you had something that looked like this:

Padded
Leather
Studded Leather
Hide
Scale
Chain
Splint
Plate (Tier 2)
Field Plate (Tier 3)
Full Plate (Tier 4)

Players typically couldn't afford plate, field plate, or full plate at character creation, but everything else was often within reach. It's not uncommon to see a hierarchy of armor types like this in many fantasy games, despite some of the questionable elements (did studded leather exist? Is raw hide armor actually better than cuirbolli leather?). You can get plate/field plate/full plate later in the game, but otherwise, you're getting +x versions of the base types at higher "tiers" of character advancement.

We could (as an example) structure some of Project Eternity's armor advancement like this.

Tier 1
Doublet
Hide Armor
Scale Vest

Tier 2
Gambeson (from Doublet)
Leather Cuirass (from Hide Armor)
Scale Armor (from Scale Vest)
Mail Shirt

Tier 3
Armored Jack (from Gambeson)
Leather Armor (from Leather Cuirass)
Lamellar Armor (from Scale Armor)
Mail Armor (from Mail Shirt)
Half-Plate

This could probably accomplish our stated goals (we can assign them whatever stats we'd like, after all), but it does raise some questions for us:

• Should something like hide armor be supplanted/made obsolete by leather as an "improved version" or does that effectively kill the visual concept of the rough-hewn rawhide-wearing ranger or barbarian?

• If armor types like hide (or scale, or mail) should remain viable on their own, how should that "upgrade" be expressed to the player? Functional descriptors like "fine scale", "superior hide", etc.? Cultural or material descriptors like "Vailian doublet", "iron feather scale"? Olde tyme numerical descriptors like "scale armor +1", "half-plate +2"?

• Is it okay for an upgrade from a visual type of armor to maintain its relative position to other armor types even if "realistically" that upgraded armor is now probably superior in protection to other armor types? E.g. an armored jack or brigandine armor is probably more protective than even nice suit of leather armor... but mechanically, we're presenting it as an upgrade of a padded (doublet) armor type.

These are the sort of things we have been discussing and I have been thinking about. And while it is just one subsystem in Project Eternity, we will likely face many similar considerations as we approach the design of weapons, classes, spells, and other aspects of gameplay. I'm sure a lot of you have opinions on what you'd like to see, so please let us know on our forums!

Our next design update will be in two weeks and will focus on lore and story elements. Thanks for reading!

FUENTE

Today's update is different from what we've done so far, and is to give you a look at what's going on at the studio. During the making of Project Eternity we want to give you an idea on how our games are made. Making games is not magic - game development just boils down to a lot of work from a lot of talented people. I would like to pull back the curtain, and give you the who (the talent) and the what (the work that they do) to make Project Eternity a reality.

The Stuff

RPGs are large and complex games that have a ton of stuff, and much more stuff compared to most games. Characters, companions, dialogues, areas, monsters, abilities, spells, items, weapons, armor, sound effects, visual effects, interface art, music, crafting recipes, animations, textures, crates and quests are the bits of stuff in Project Eternity... and the list goes on and on. At the time that we finally ship the game, we will have hundreds of thousands of bits of stuff in the game. Managing and creating this stuff is one of our major problem when creating RPGs. Our task is to make all of the stuff as efficiently as possible with a high level of quality.

Right now we are knee deep in pre-production. Pre-production is the period of time at the beginning of development where everything is planned and prototyped, production schedules are made, and pipelines are constructed. I'm not talking about oil pipelines here - I'm talking about asset pipelines. An asset pipeline can be described like an oil pipeline - First the asset is made by a content creator (like an artist), next the asset is processed by a tool so that the game understands what the heck it is, and finally the asset is placed into the game world in its final location. All of the different types of assets (stuff) require a custom pipeline. Pipeline creation is one of the many problems we are tackling right now in pre-production.

The Team

We have many different roles (sometimes called "hats") on the Project Eternity team. Most of the team fall into three categories: content creators (makers of stuff), programmers (making the stuff work), and production (making sure the stuff gets made). Our role percentage breakdown is a bit different than what we typically have on a project. If you look at my fantastic pie-charts below, you can see that we are content focused because we have larger design team, and since our team size is small we don’t have the need for a large production staff.

All of these roles are equally important and are all vital for making the game great:

Art

• Animation: Animation adds life and movement to the game. Every moving object in the game requires an animator to be involved.

  [*] [b]Effects Art:[/b] Spell effects, sword swings, fire, smoke, and blood are animated and designed by an effects artist.
  
  [*] [b]Environment Art:[/b] The environment artists make the world look beautiful. They do a pretty good job at it.  
  
  [*] [b]Character Art:[/b] Character artists create the characters, companions, and monsters. They also model and texture all of the weapons and armor. 
  
  [*] [b]Concept Art:[/b] Concept artists paint and illustrate environments and characters that fit within the art and design vision. Their art is used by the rest of the team for reference on style, mood, color, size and proportion. They also paint the 2D portraits and touch up the 2D pre-rendered environment scenes. 
  
  [*] [b]User Interface Art:[/b] All of the buttons that you push, the interfaces that you interact with, and all of the mouse/item/weapon/spell icons in the game are designed and crafted by the UI artist. 

Audio

• Audio Design: Audio design is responsible for any and all of the audio that comes out of your speakers. This includes the creation and production of all of the music and sound effects, and making the character voices sound great.

Design

• Area Design: All of the cities, towns, dungeons, and wilderness areas that you can explore are designed by area designers. They take the environments and characters made by the artists to construct a rich and believable world. They also fill the game with quests and combat encounters.

  [*] [b]Narrative Design:[/b] RPGs contain thousands of lines of branching dialogue and huge non-linear storylines. The world, story, companions, factions, lore, and themes are created by the narrative designers. 
  
  [*] [b]System Design:[/b] Rules and systems specialists. They like numbers and spreadsheets. Combat, abilities, spells, non-combat skills, and items are designed by the systems designers.

Production

• Production: The producers organize the team. They make sure everything is running like a well-oiled machine. Producers have the responsibility for making sure the game is delivered on time, on budget, and is awesome when it's shipped.

Programming

• Engine Programming: The engine programmers deal with system, rendering, and physics code. Unity handles a lot of our engine-level programming for us, so we can focus our programming time and energy on gameplay.

  [*] [b]Game Programming: [/b]The game programmers implement the game design including the rules, combat, and abilities. They also code up gameplay systems like dialogues, quests, stores, and create artificial intelligence for monsters. 
  
  [*] [b]Tools Programming:[/b] Pipelines and tools used by the team are made by the these programmers. Most of their code lives "outside" of the game code.

Quality Assurance

• Quality Assurance Testing: The QA tester reports in-game problems to the rest of the team. They make sure that all the stuff is working together and functioning properly.

We want to go into more detail on what each person does on the team in future updates. A two sentence description trivializes the responsibilities for each team member, so in the future we will dig deeper and take a closer look into the disciplines.

Next week Josh has an update with lore and other fun worldly things.

Update by Adam Brennecke

FORUMS: Discuss the hats of the project and stuff on the Project Eternity Forums

Obsidian y QA. Dos cosas que nunca había pensado ver juntas en uno de sus proyectos

#209 Cuestiones técnicas, comparaciones de como se hacia un juego clásico antiguamente y como lo afrontan ahora, temas personales del equipo, opiniones sobre otros juegos de rol, etc.

Es una charla interesante.