Here's a summary of the latest Q&A with Feargus on the KS comments page:
Q: Does the in-game KS item apply only to the backer or also to any extra copies of the game that may be gifted?
A: If the question was about all the copies getting the KS item - they will.
Q: had an idea related to pledges. what if pretty much everything could be done as an add-on? i'm not talking like the make an NPC type thing, but like adding a boxed set of the game, a collectors edition, just the cloth map, etc. i know a lot of people want some of those things, but they don't want to move off the tier they're currently on, or don't want to lose the early bird spot. basically make it possible for them to make a custom tier using add-ons. that way people that wanted more than one of something on the tier their on could do that as well.
for me personally (on the 250 tier), i'd love if i could upgrade the collectors book to hardcover and get the autographs moved to that instead of the collectors box. i don't know how possible that is, but i know things like that being available (or customizable since so many people love that word in the comments) would help drum up some more pledge money. and i'd think that the more of a specific thing you were printing/getting made, the more costs for said thing would go down. at least that's how i understand things like that to work most of the time.
also, things like signatures on boxes and making characters and things of that nature would only be on those particular tiers, because really, that's what makes those tiers special.
thoughts?
A: We are looking at making the book at the $250 level a hardback. Should update on that soon. As for other physical add-ons we are having the already getting physical goods or not, international or not problem. We might open up our own store that can figure that stuff out more automatically. Darren and I have been talking about it. [Darren - co-founder of Obsidian and forum/web/IT guy]
Q: Hi Fergus. Will the mega dungeon some kind of random generated dungeon that is differnt each time you visit it? The "But the courses of Od Nua's madness run far below the surface" kind of sounds like it.
A: We are thinking right now that it will be a custom dungeon that we create by hand. Partly, so that it fits in with the rest of the game from a balancing and content perspective. We have talked about a random dungeon, but as something we would release (potentially) after the game comes out.
Q: So Chris Avellone is working on Wasteland 2 as well as P:E? Is there one he is focusing more on?
A: Chris is wraping up his work on Wasteland 2 in the next few weeks. He's put in a ton of time on it over the last four or five months. He will still be checking in on Wasteland 2 and helping out a bit here and there, but he'll be primarily on PE.
Q: You might look to the Numenera campaign, and Monte Cook, for book shipping stuff. He had a lot of physical rewards, especially books, that needed pledges increased for shipping.
A: Good idea. We know Monte from our D&D days and also backed Nuenera (under my personal account). For some reason, didn't think about talking to him. We also know the White Wolf guys really well - they haven't been making a lot of books - but probalby still worth a conversation.
Q: ooo... hardback! *drools*
would there be anyway i could get the signatures from the collectors box shifted to the book though? i'd really rather have them on something a bit more sturdy than a game box.
A: That's a thought. Maybe both. I'll sent that along.
Q: I was wondering if the Player House would include the crafting and enchanting. Will we be able to do those things there? That'd be really in keeping with it being our house
A: That's the plan, but we want to make sure you don't just have to be there to do it.
Q: Are your prepared to sign off on everyone's medical leave after they develop severe tendonitis from signing all that stuff?
A: LOL, but we are totally living in denial right now about the number of copies that will have to be signed. Although notice how my name isn't on there?
But.... I will be signing all of them as well. Curse you parents for giving me 15 letter in my name!!
Q: I wanted to say how good the new stretch goal and mega dungeon are
. I like a LOT you've come up with a tangible and fun thing that more backers will produce (the dungeon
). And I think of crafting and enchanting as essential; they're more or less a game in themselves; one I'd like very much to play
A: Thanks! We have been looking all over the other Kickstarter campaigns and also really trying to listen to everyone. What would really help is that everyone could get the word out that just new backers gets us to new goals.
Q: Will you do the level/power of the creatures scaled? Im really worried about that, I'm playing a new "RPG" (aka hack and slash adventure game) and I hate how the NPCs are harder everytime. Same guys, just more power. I mean, Im a kind of demigod or something, then, the vulgar thief of the town spank me. Thats annoying! Please, say "no level scaling!"
A: We are going to use a number of different systems. Some creatures will be fixed based upon where they are in the world. Some will scale and then be fixed based upon where you go in the world first. Why we do it that way is so we can have the world be non-linear in places. For instance, if you can goto three adventure areas in any order you want, we have to scale them to make sure that they all remain challenging when you get to the second and third ones.
Q: I don't think this has beem asked yet, but do areas re-populate its "mobiles" after a time or do they renain cleared and empty after the adventuring party has cleared it? It would be nice if it remains empty but will respawn after say 12-24hours real time.
Also, will the Mega Dungeon respawn eventually, or remains cleared where our heroes have passed through?
A: That is something that we are still talking about. There are people on both sides of the debate - ones who think we should re-spawn and others that areas should remain cleared. What I can say is that we want to make sure that players don't feel like they have to clear areas again just to get from A to B (can get annoying).
Q: Maybe it would be good if you post at the Update 13 comments also that the Mega Dungeon is handcrafted to have a bether visibility for this answear
A: E-mailed Adam to see how he wants to update the update.
Q: I think it would really help the drive to have about six more stretch goals to reach. Then people can see where the drive is'going' (even if the goals are being invented as they are met!), and decide if they really want to plough in or not. I believe that had a lot to do with Planetary Annihilation's success on Kickstarter
I mean of course six *above where the project is at any given time*
A: You have just dived into one of the big debates. We have gotten a lot of advice with the stretch goals. Not sure yet what we are going to do.
Q: Since you had to leave earlier, would you now share your thoughts on my two primary concerns with cool-downs, and whether they would apply to your system?
My concerns: 1) Skills need to be balanced, of course, in order to encourage players to use many of them. Cool-downs are a very artificial way to balance skills, that just tell the player "I know this skill is the best, but you can only use it once a minute", which waters down the decision making, imo. I usually find I want to use the "big ones" as soon as they are ready, because often their only disadvantage is the cool-down. 2) Cool-downs are very meta. Why would one skill have a "reload time" of a minute, while another one has one of 10 seconds, with no interference between the two? It's very detached from anything that tries to model an actual world with real rules. A shared resource such as mana makes more sense since it could represent the mage's stamina pool, for example, from which *all spells* are drawn.
A: I totally understand your point. The thought on cool down is that it allows for less powerful and more powerful abilities/spells. Going back to the spell memorization system, the balance and tactics were created by only being able to memorize so many fireballs, while a lot more magic missiles.
Q: It might have other drawbacks, but I think having short stretches (100K or 200K at the most) for several future stretch goals (like quicktooth suggests) will drive current backers to up their pledges, since you're always close to the next level. Plus it feels like a lot is happening, which generates interest. That might be more suitable for the last week of the campaign though.
A: We are going with the $100K levels right now,and for instance we will probably release the next stretch goal when we get over $2.25M. Also, having the backer goals should help a bit as well. Particularly when Rob gets the graphic done.
Q: I wanted to ask you whether you can elaborate more about the contents of the strategy guide.
Funny thought. is it only now that you'll add it to each order or whether each person who joined the Obisidian order basically added himself one?
A: At the end of the campaign, you'll get the survey and can say how you would like to spend that extra $8. Oh, and the strategy guide will be a real strategy guide. Not one of those 8 or 10 page ones that get thrown in with a game.
Q: Since this is a homage to IE games, which one of the weakest element is the animation on the characters during fights and everything else. My question is what are your plans to remedy this with the amount of budget that you got so far.
A: The challenge with animation in the IE games was that the characters were sprite based (2D) so every frame was a piece of artwork and could only be rendered at so many angles (eight I think). For PE, we are using 3D charactes so we can have much smoother animations, not just the eight angles and lots more animation variations.
Q: I'm very happy for the spanish traslation But 25 $ for the Beta access, it's very expensive for me
A: We tried to follow the Planetary Anhilation model for figuring out the BETA/Early Access key amount.
Q: would there be anyway to make the cooldowns influence each other? like with what you're doing making the character more tired. like if you spam a bunch of cheaper actions, it'll eventually make everything else take longer because you're wearing the character out?
A: Interesting idea, I'm wondering if it gets to a point where we are trying to model too many things. For instance, another way to do that would just to make sure the original cost made it so you couldn't spam. Just a thought.
Q: but then you lose the feeling that you're actually effecting your characters. which is really the point of it. do i want to use all these little spells, and possibly make it so i can't use the big one when i need it, or hold off on them and use them at judicious moments, and possibly just use the bigger spells to maximum effect. it adds to the tactics/thinking about the situation a whole lot more, and is really fairly simple/intuitive to understand. everyone gets tired from doing something. think like the way harry gets tired in the dresden files. sure, he can still do more, but it's less effective because he's literally worn himself out.
A: True and gotcha. Need to think about how many different systems though - however, you are right there are systems that use a pool (like mana) plus cooldown.
Q: Hey Feargus, have you guys talked at all about adding a scrolling combat/text log like in Fallout or more preferably Baldur's Gate?
A: We haven't, but getting added to the list right now.
Q: I know strategy guides as explanations of mechanics and revealing every spot in the game. will yours be just that or fill a whole different purpose? like being an encyclopedia for the game lore.
A: The strat guide will be a walkthrough of the game and then information the mechanics and the items as well.
Q: I'm latin, but there are a lot of comments about a Russian translation. I guess you could make something like "if Russia gets 5000 backers, Russian translation!" Even Japanese could be there if there are enough people of Japan interested. That would attract some target people and will encourage the actual backers to find more friends and bring them here.
A: That's true. It's hard to get from people where they are from though. However, we should have something cool to announce on Russian and Polish really soon.
Q: I would say a memorization system has two advantages: 1) less restrictive, you can burn your spells whenever you want, not tied down to a frequence, and 2) you might have a reason to save spells for an upcoming battle. You need to plan ahead.
A: True. Some of that does get handled by a cool down system - not everything and not suggesting that. I'll e-mail the guys and say that this might be something good to talk about in more detail soon.
Q: maybe kind of how skyrim does the respawn might work? it's like every thirty days (in game), and you actually have to sleep in a bed instead of just rest. personally i really liked that because it means if you want things to respawn you can make them, but if you don't then you just don't sleep in a bed.
also, it ties into a bigger question. how do you want to set the max experience, because if things respawn then you can basically grind things if you really feel like it and then make other things easier. in some ways it can be game breaking, but if you limit it the way i said it can work out decently.
or maybe, depending on how time is going to go in the game, have it be every few months that things respawn. that would be a lot more organic i think. like bandits think the spot really was good, don't know what cleared it last time and move back in. same for animals and things like that.
A: Gotcha on the re-spawn comment. I'll put it on the list of stuff for the guys to read.
Q: Any lessons learned while developing Stick of Truth that you could see being used in PE?
A: Hmmm.. That's a good question. Almost all the systems are very different. This is totally a tools thing, but we did change our conversation system a bit. We created a new conversation file that handles all of the branching upon entering the dialog that then branches to individual conversation paths. That helped structure them a little cleaner.
Q: With cool downs, Standing-Still spamming could be worse than rest spamming. With this mega-dungeon, after completing one level you will just Stand-Still spam on every level and never run out of spells, before going down to the next level. In the IE games, the only way to get the spells back is take the chance of sleeping in the dungeon and possibly get attacked. I hope the dev's take this into consideration.
A: Copied a lot of the thoughts on cool-down directly into an e-mail to Josh, Tim and Chris.
Q: cool. but above all, we're just making suggestions, giving suggestions, and trusting you guys to make a great game. i don't think any of us would be here if we didn't trust you guys.
A: Appreciate it, and I really am happy to talk about this stuff. Believe me we have many, many debates about our games at Obsidian.
Q: We got the 2.2mil stretch goal. It adds a "new faction, with its region". So.... What exactly is a "faction" in this game?
A: A good example would be a faction from Fallout: New Vegas like the NCR or Caesar's Legion. They have a very big impact on the game and whole areas that they are found in.
Q: my brother's here, and i just asked him what the one thing he disliked the most about IWD2, and he said it was how you ALWAYS used the same weapons through the game. like how you'd use the widow maker throughout the entire game, no matter what you found. and it was something you could get at the very beginning of the game. it just made things kind of boring. and this is a guy who played heart of fury with level one characters, survived and made it nearly to the end of the game doing this.
A: That sounds really odd about the Widow Maker - I'm wondering if that was a bug. We are generally pretty good about making sure you can't get items that are that powerful very early. Thanks for pointing out.
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