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Pillars of Eternity by Obsidian Entertainment (Kickstarter) [Up: Teaser]

injurai

Banned
My point was that if eating flesh caused undead to remain near human then there likely wouldn't be any advanced forms of undead.

Ooo big failure of logic on my part. Yeah under the assumption that any meat would sustain them then a healthy diet would essentially sustain the person through their lives. Until their body dies of old age.

I'm not really liking their use of the vampire concept in this. Because to me the vampire stage would be before death, and feeding maintains the immortality. But in this your are already immortal but once your body dies then you have to sustain it on purely the life on others. Which involves eating their bodily composition. At this point you basically become an immortal cannibal which devolves through the various stages of undead.

They don't really clarify the details of the Fampyr stage. "Going through a cannibal stage" Does that mean I'm alive, or seemingly alive because I just died and now I have to sustain myself.

Seems to me you could have had your soulbound 30 years prior and had been living out life as normal. If during that stage you thirsted blood I would understand the fampyr stage, just doesn't make sense to equate the a rigor mortised cannibal as being the same thing though.

I'm happy that Obsidian is trying to buck trends though, because I really like the rest of this conceptual continuum.
 

water_wendi

Water is not wet!
Ooo big failure of logic on my part. Yeah under the assumption that any meat would sustain them then a healthy diet would essentially sustain the person through their lives. Until their body dies of old age.

I'm not really liking their use of the vampire concept in this. Because to me the vampire stage would be before death, and feeding maintains the immortality. But in this your are already immortal but once your body dies then you have to sustain it on purely the life on others. Which involves eating their bodily composition. At this point you basically become an immortal cannibal which devolves through the various stages of undead.

They don't really clarify the details of the Fampyr stage. "Going through a cannibal stage" Does that mean I'm alive, or seemingly alive because I just died and now I have to sustain myself.

Seems to me you could have had your soulbound 30 years prior and had been living out life as normal. If during that stage you thirsted blood I would understand the fampyr stage, just doesn't make sense to equate the a rigor mortised cannibal as being the same thing though.

I'm happy that Obsidian is trying to buck trends though, because I really like the rest of this conceptual continuum.
i didnt get the impression that the vampire stage happened before death. i took away that it started right after they "die." Whether its continuous with no interruption we dont know yet. Do they return to life after a period of time.. like the vampire legends of people being buried and coming back to life changed? Or is it they have a stroke one second, die, and wake up immediately? Or maybe its both and more, dependent on the method used.

i could see if dying outside of a populated area a problem if there is limited humans to feast on. This could also account for undead in remote areas. A small band of head into a dungeon/get lost in the wilderness/get snowed in a cave and perish. One of them (or all of them) were cursed with this. Though they wake up vampire there is limited or no human flesh to consume. By the time they can return to civilization to get more chow they might have lost their minds and degenerated into ghouls or zombies.

i really like their take on undead. Sounds good.
 

zkylon

zkylewd
My point was that if eating flesh caused undead to remain near human then there likely wouldn't be any advanced forms of undead.

well I'd think people would not allow themselves to be eaten so easily :p

like you don't seem to get any special powers from entering "vampire" stage, so if some pale skinned dude approaches you you might just want to unsheath your sword

I think it said it emands more and more flesh from you each time? and
 

mclem

Member
The undead lore is so refreshing and probably one of the best concepts for the undead in fantasy fiction (at least in games).

It's probably too complicated to add, but it sounds like an interesting character to play, too. I wonder where the point of no return lies. I think a Fampyr companion (at first!) is within the realms of achievability.


Looks like Bereghost from Baldur's Gate 1.

That was my first impression, too. I think it's probably unfair, but the cluster of houses in the middle is what set me off.
 

F!ReW!Re

Member
New update;
Update #74: The Mob Rulers: Wizards and Druids and our Partnership with Paradox

Backer portraits;
pe-backer-portrait-combined.jpg


Backer inn;
pe-backer-inn.jpg
 

Sentenza

Member
This is going too far now, the prettiness is becoming almost disturbing.
We'll need some shitty animations to compensate.
 

Clott

Member
I really want to ask the team about what they are doing for people that have a really beefy rig, there is a huge emphasis for the lowest denominator when it comes to specs but I hope people with amazing rigs also gets some love.

For example uncompressed textures, or for super sampling to be built into the settings. I know they crawl Neogaf so I hope we could get that cleared up.
 

Minsc

Gold Member
They're aiming for low-end? Are there min/recommended specs in the wild?

I'd imagine it's not exactly going to be a powerhouse type game like Crysis or anything, I mean, I wouldn't expect specs to really even be relevant for either end of the spectrum (high or low end) unless your PC is way outside the norm (maybe Macbook Air or something). I'd expect that if there's options to toggle besides resolution, they should have nothing to do with performance, and more to do with personal taste when it comes to UI/shadows/etc.
 

Woorloog

Banned
Oh i'm not really worried. Just curious. Still, if it is something my laptop could run maxed out (1600x900, assuming it has options that affect looks and performance), it would be nice.
Though i fear that won't happen even if the game has rather low requirements, anything (usually and in practice only shadows) pushing my GPU too much overheats this laptop. Interesting engineering...
It is HP laptop. What did you expect?
 

zkylon

zkylewd
I hope they do aim for low end, want to play the game on my shitty ass laptop.
will prolly scale pretty well

like unity allows you to turn off shadows and set their resolution, which is the one big intensive thing they're doing here.

i think they already said they have like different resolution backgrounds too?

i forgot
 

injurai

Banned
will prolly scale pretty well

like unity allows you to turn off shadows and set their resolution, which is the one big intensive thing they're doing here.

i think they already said they have like different resolution backgrounds too?

i forgot

I remember them saying something about trying to figure out ways to best handle compression and resolution. Not sure if we have heard anything conclusive, but I think they are certainly offering different resolutions.
 

Sentenza

Member
I remember them saying something about trying to figure out ways to best handle compression and resolution. Not sure if we have heard anything conclusive, but I think they are certainly offering different resolutions.
I sincerely hope they aim for something that works fine at a very high resolution with the option of scale/zoom in; it would make the game future proof.
 

injurai

Banned
I sincerely hope they aim for something that works fine at a very high resolution with the option of scale/zoom in; it would make the game future proof.

I honestly don't think 2D images even at high resolutions take up all that much space. Especially if they are using even a minor for of compression. Taking into account most of the games size will be it's assets and audio I don't see why they wouldn't just throw a bunch of different resolutions in for the game.

They can just tier them on vertical pixel count and crop horizontally for differing aspects rations, it should be that exhaustive in terms of covering resolutions if they did it that way.
 

Minsc

Gold Member
I honestly don't think 2D images even at high resolutions take up all that much space. Especially if they are using even a minor for of compression. Taking into account most of the games size will be it's assets and audio I don't see why they wouldn't just throw a bunch of different resolutions in for the game.

They can just tier them on vertical pixel count and crop horizontally for differing aspects rations, it should be that exhaustive in terms of covering resolutions if they did it that way.

They're not images though, they're animated and should take up a decent amount of space. Think of the backgrounds more as videos than static images. I'd put a ballpark file size at somewhere around 20 gigs, with a 10gb variance +/- (so somewhere between 10-30GBs) depending on compression level and supported resolutions.
 

injurai

Banned
They're not images though, they're animated and should take up a decent amount of space. Think of the backgrounds more as videos than static images. I'd put a ballpark file size at somewhere around 20 gigs, with a 10gb variance +/- (so somewhere between 10-30GBs) depending on compression level and supported resolutions.

Certainly they are not videos. I'd Imagine they are drawing layers of animated sprites. Some of the stuff will be handled with invisible 3D meshes when it comes to lighting and volumetric effects. I can certainly see 10-15 GB, the 20-30 range estimate seems like a lot to me.
 

Sentenza

Member
I honestly don't think 2D images even at high resolutions take up all that much space.
well, actually 2D games can become very big rather quickly when you start ramping up the resolution... But that's mostly when you have hundreds of animation frames and so on.
In this case we are talking about a game with 2D backgrounds that should rely on 3D assets for creatures and animated parts, so you are more or less right.
 

charsace

Member
I honestly don't think 2D images even at high resolutions take up all that much space. Especially if they are using even a minor for of compression. Taking into account most of the games size will be it's assets and audio I don't see why they wouldn't just throw a bunch of different resolutions in for the game.

They can just tier them on vertical pixel count and crop horizontally for differing aspects rations, it should be that exhaustive in terms of covering resolutions if they did it that way.

High res images can take up a lot of space. And in this case I'm gonna assume that there are multiple version of each images to use shaders.
 

PFD

Member
They discussed resolutions in detail back in update #36

Here's what they had to say

Resolution and Scaling - We want to run the game at various resolutions and scale properly. We've been talking about our target resolutions and looking at the best way to implement scaling. If you've played any of the Infinity Engine games lately, you may have noticed that running at high resolutions can make the game look like an RTS. Though it's nice to be able to scale up and see more of the environment, at a certain point dungeons start looking like ant farms. That's what happens when you take a game designed for 640x480 and run it at more than double the resolution. It is now the year 2012, so we're looking at supporting a range of resolutions that runs from modest laptops to Macs with crazy Retina displays.

To do this, we're going to render the game out at a target high resolution and a target low resolution. Currently, we're looking at a base resolution of 1280x720. A large number of laptops run at this resolution or its slightly bigger brother, 1366x768. It's not quite twice the resolution of the original games (640x480) due to the 16:9 aspect ratio, but pretty close. We believe that this base resolution will scale well up to 1920x1080, which would be roughly equivalent to going from 640x480 to 1024x768. In the old IE games, this gave you a slightly larger view of the world, but didn't get too crazy.

766573b5bae4948277052095a585e49d_large.jpg


For our higher resolution, we are likely going to render out to a ~2560x1440 screen size, as we did with our environment during the Kickstarter campaign.

We will likely downsample these to run at 1920x1080. With resolutions above "mere" Retina displays, we will zoom out, which should allow the backgrounds to scale into outer space (close enough, anyway).

a7b167b02232dcde4f080500ee6010e8_large.jpg


Full size image
 

zkylon

zkylewd
new update

no april's fool pranks just normal update with like stuff in it

stuff about animating monsters and crap

well maybe a bit of april's fools stuff

Hey, guys. Brandon here.

Here at Obsidian, we know that DRM can be a touchy subject so we got together with our friends at Paradox to think of a better solution, because you know, rights need to be managed. What came out of those discussions is... the Pillars of Eternity A.R.M.

pe-code-wheel.jpg


Pillars of Eternity A.R.M. (Analog Rights Management)

Much like the code wheels of old, players will be greeted with a large, glowing question rune on the title screen. In addition to the question rune, ten smaller runes will also be displayed. Players will then have to use the Pillars of Eternity A.R.M. code wheel to decode the question rune and select the properly revealed rune. It's fast and (somewhat) easy.

Be careful, though, because two incorrect selections in a row and your copy of Pillars of Eternity will become locked down for 72 hours while our customer service department investigates possible fraud.
that actually looks kind of cool

i now kind of want to have one lol
 

zkylon

zkylewd
edit: fuck it i'm never linking kickstarter things again

music's got a real lord of the rings vibe i think

i like it

no inception horns and it doesn't remind me of skyrim
 

PFD

Member
I really admire the audio director's dedication to improving himself (daily Bach), attention to detail, and constantly being on the lookout for inspiration. Sounds like he really loves his job
 

zkylon

zkylewd
small art update up on kickstarter (not linking anymore but you guys can check your inboxes)

lots of pretty stuff

pe-anslogs-compass.jpg


pe-hall-warriors.jpg


and my favorite

pe-cliban-rilag.jpg


armors are looking alright too tho after playing so much dark souls it's hard to be impressed :p

pe-armor-plate.jpg


seems like there'll be some good variety tho, even if it's minor and mostly texture-side, which i really appreciate

pe-armor-scale.jpg
 
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