Question:
Right, sometimes in New Vegas the speech (or speak?) skill did feel like an instant win button.
Avellone
Yeah, there were two points where it broke convention because I felt it needed to - one was with Lanius, and the second was with Ulysses. If you kept spamming the Speech button and choosing the first option without really listening to what they were saying, you'd end up screwing yourself. The reason I don't feel good about that is because that wasn't the precedent set with other conversations, so I don't know if I'd do it again if I had the chance.
But in Project: Eternity, I definitely want to do this. People who don't care about dialogue shouldn't take Speech skills anyway - those that do should have fun exploring the conversation and seeing what they can take away from it.
Question:
What about people simply acting differently if you have a high skill in (for example) intimidate? Rather than giving you specific "intimidate" dialog choices the NPCs just react to you as though you are intimidating.
Avellone
We sometimes would assume auto-reactions based on perks and traits, although we feel it's more fair to a player to choose when and where they want to flex their mental muscles. Even someone with Terrifying Presence may not be having a terrifying day or want to role-play that at the moment.
Race reactions and more obivous elements (like in Fallout, people would react to what you were wearing), I feel clicks more with a player and is fine.
Question:
I've seen a lot of designers say that they've enjoyed working within the confines of another world. However, in the case of giants like LucasArts and Hasbro/WoTC, there's an almost censorship-level restriction of where you can take a story. (...)
Since everything in P:E is essentially a new design, I imagine you guys would have to work in a way that you're having to continually outsmart yourselves (and your creations).
Avellone:
I feel creating a world (and slang and culture) often is just as time-consuming as researching someone else's franchise (for example, Star Wars required a lot of research into the expanded universe, not just to become familiar with it, but to understand what stories and elements had already been told). As such, we only had 5-6 comments on our story from LucasArts over the whole course of the project because we'd done our due diligence.
And we don't work on franchises because we don't have our own ideas, it's just the way things have shaken out. I feel we've had opportunities to examine those franchises in new ways that players appreciate (K2 and Mask of the Betrayer).
Someone joking:
Stretch goal for 3.6 mil: Chris Avellone completes Arcanum.
And stream it live.
Avellone:
Chris Avellone nods at this very good idea. And he's not joking.
Question:
What are your plans concerning the loot system of the game? Personally, I loved the Baldur's Gate approach of items beeing set in one specific location of the game/ with certain characters. It motivates to explore every corner of the game and once you figured everything out gave you the experience of really knowing the world. Random loot should be very limited imho.
Sawyer:
We will rely more on placed loot than randomized loot. The IWD games had a huge amount of unique items and most of those were hand-placed (e.g. Pale Justice). I like writing the unique histories of those items, anyway.
There might be a tiny amount of randomization, but that will likely happen at that the individual gear level. E.g. 5 bandits are placed on a map. When the map loads, each will randomly be given a pair of shortswords, a longsword and shield, or a bigass mace.
Question:
This one piece of art from Project Eternity had me intrigued since it gives of a Lovecraftian vibe. So I might as well ask, will there be quests, story elements and the like that have Lovecraftian influences?
Sawyer:
I don't think we're necessarily going FULL LOVECRAFT, but I do want the dark and scary places of Project Eternity to feel appropriately terror-inducing, even from an isometric perspective. Eír Glanfath's ruins are supposed to contain some scary stuff, so we don't want the player to yawn when they kick open the door and face Skeleton #242.
Question:
Along with the gameplay-related features, I'm extremely curious as to how personally developed the party characters will be. How well can you get to know them and will there be quests/extensive dialogue that helps develop them?
Sawyer:
The companion characters will be very well-developed. It's something we love doing and we feel that companion reactivity can provide a lot of information about the world and a continual criticism (or praising) of the character's actions. Companions will have their own quest lines that you can not only complete, but determine the outcome of. Player choice will be important throughout the game and your interactions with companions will be no different in that regard.
Question:
What was the first or most impact-full RPG experience you ever had?
Avellone:
For me it was Fallout 1, when I first started talking to someone and realized that even the dialogues would shift depending on my character build. It changed how I approached the dialogue in Torment, for certain.
I would add Ultima Underworld, Wasteland 1, and Chronotrigger to this list as well. For Ultima Underworld, there were so many quests and twists that I feel have never been replicated (at the end game, the main guy I'd come to for help had NO IDEA how to defeat the badguy and asked ME what I thought we could do - awesome), Wasteland 1 (proof that game mechanics in the right context can make amazing moments, like going through Finster's Android Brain and fighting adversaries with your IQ skill), and Chronotrigger for the brave story choices they took and reactivity to that (no spoilers).
I have a whole bunch of games I consider to be "design document" games because they do a lot of design elements so well - Dead Space and System Shock 2 are among them.
Question:
What would your dream development project be? As in, if you weren't constrained by budget, time or technology, what would be the thing you'd produce?
Sawyer:
Personally, there are two settings/ideas I'd like to explore. One is a setting called Antebellum that is an alternate Earth stuck in the late 19th century at the outbreak of the Civil War after spirit armies swarm over the American South, Ireland, India, and a variety of other places. I'd mostly like to explore the idea of different power groups (e.g. slave owners and slaves) being paralyzed by inaction due to the thread of reactive spirit groups coming to the defense of any party being victimized.
The other game I've wanted to make for a long time is one in which you play a player-defined St. George in the 3rd century Near East who enters a land terrorized by the Dragon. All conversation is abstracted into incomprehensible foreign language and the entire game looks like it is a moving Greek Orthodox icon painted on wood and plaster. As George suffers in the world, the icon fades, cracks, and chips away over time. I'd want it to be more about mood, atmosphere, and subtle body language/character interaction than a scripted narrative and fierce gameplay.
