Wow, this thread is a lot more civil then I thought it would end up being.
I am happy!
Probably because I haven't been participating in the thread.
I do think though, that if you're going to say "Advertised: ", you should follow it up with an ACTUAL quote. Like if I watched a car ad say "Gets 6.2 L/100 km", I could not then say "Advertised: Never stop for gas again!" and complain that I was being ripped off when the car ran out of gas.
Additionally, Kickstarters are almost always for games which are by definition unfinished. While the ideas are given in broad strokes, the finer details are not filled in yet. And the details are where the complications with actually implementing the ideas set in. (In fewer words, "SH-T HAPPENS".)
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1) Here is the quote on the kickstarter page:
At the start of the game, you pick a single character and determine your starting stats, race, and origin story.
While in isolation, that does indeed seem to indicate that race is separate from chosen origin story, looking at even the Island Heir(ess) example from the Kickstarter demo, it seems clear that origin and race would need to be tied together in most cases. The island discriminates against Dwarves and is ruled by Humans. A Human Lord with the player as a Dwarf Heir wouldn't work, nor would a Dwarf Heir player with Dwarf Lord parents work in the context of the island culture.
Perhaps you will meet your old friends and allies along the way engrossing your own personal character in this world.
Just a reminder that the first act takes place in a concentration camp located on Horrible Torture Amusement Park Island, so we can't use Act 1 to declare that the "meeting old friends and allies" part is false.
Or you can play 4+ characters that Larian made themselves.
Well how exactly do you think Origin stories are supposed to work in a computer game? Computer games cannot work on the same rules as Pen and Paper RPG's with a Human Game Master controlling everything. Every single thing in a computer game, every NPC, every line of dialogue, everything must be put in by hand by someone from Larian. Then, it must be sealed up into a box and sent out into the wild for the public to use. It is expected to work without Larian being able to step in and make changes.
I suppose it might be possible to have lots of little tiny setpieces which are randomly chosen, but that would not make for a coherent origin, nor would it seem carefully crafted.
and instead settles for letting you play their character with less personality then a JRPG character overall.
This is a fair enough point. One way they could give more personality to characters might be to replace the generic "*Say that...*" dialogue with individual lines for each origin plus a generic line, but that depends on time, budget, workload, and even then interpretations of the exact same character can vary from player to player.
2) I agree that the parallel questing thing is inherently going to be problematic largely because of engine and optimization limitations. Because only one map at a time can be loaded in memory and there are only certain ways to progress from one map to the next, and you need to all go at the same time, that requires cooperation at certain points. That severely undercuts the point of competitive questing in my opinion.
Of course, I am not at all a fan of competitive questing, as I only really play single-player, and competitive questing is - to single-players - a useless waste of time and resources.
No, I do not at all believe Swen's claim that it makes the single-player better. I believe that he talked along similar lines for D:OS 1, in which allowing the party to freely roam around and split up made it better by forcing them to not take shortcuts. That was a lie, because they still took the exact same shortcuts as single-player games, what with instant flags and teleporting NPC's.
Those same immersion-breaking shortcuts are still in D:OS 2. Just look what happens if you have one person up near the Seeker's camp at the same time as a second person tells Garath that the way is clear the boats. The Seekers shuffle around the camp a little bit then instantly teleport to their camp. Just as instantly a bunch of traps and a Magister instantly appear in that area as well, and the Magister is surprised when you talk to him, even if you were literally standing on the stone pillar where he appears when he appeared. Along the same lines, as a prisoner you can be out of sight of the guards for ages doing all kinds of sneaky things, but the instant you leave the fort, you are flagged as an escapee to be killed on sight if you return, even if you were only away for 20 seconds.
3) First, basic crafting is not in the game yet - this is still Patch Zero, much less skill-crafting. It's a bit soon to declare skill crafting as a failure (which does not mean that it will not eventually end up being a failure, just that it is too soon to write it off).
Secondly it should hopefully have been obvious to most people that Larian probably would not allow you to use Combined Skillbooks (created through combining Normal Skillbooks) in crafting to make a second crafted skillbook. That would quickly get out of control as people mashed crafted skills together to make incredibly absurd skills ad infinitum.
So while "Oil + Summon Spider = Summon Oil Spider" sounds like a potentially valid combination, I don't see how adding fire would do anything except turn your oil spider into a "Dead, Flaming Spider".
