Project Eternity - Pets, Mod Support, Combat Answers
 

The 16th update for Project Eternity brings news of an optional pet for >$50 backers, some new high-end rewards and some possible light at the end of the mod tunnel:
There's also a great Reddit Q&A (edited version on the Obsidian boards) with Tim Cain on combat:
More information.

Colour me intrigued!


Also, fuck yeah, mod support. In Obsidian's case it might work as an excellent crowd-sourced QA. :D

Some more information about the pet. Feargus mentioned in the comments section that everyone get pets, backers at tier 50+ get a special looking one.

Too many people cried over them not getting it I guess.

Pets are never a pirioty in my rpg playing. Reminds me of the cybernetic dog in ME3. I know its a huge factor in many F2P RPG's but I'll just ignore it when I play the game.

Yeah, I used to think sports fans were the whiniest people on the planet. I was mistaken. ;)

Actually it all depends on how the pet is integrated into the game. Some games that have pets integrate them as an integral part of the game and some make it optional or totally useless. There are many single player rpgs that have very useful pets so depending on how they implement it will determine if I use it or not.

I really like how they are implementing magic and the first part is similar to a system I designed a long time ago.

PS. Please allow mods to be part of the original game along with separate adventures if you can.

The only takeaway I got from that announcement is that they don't want to promise mod tools yet.

Opening a Nexus site doesn't mean anything. For example, there is a Dark Souls nexus site, and I think hell will probably freeze over long before Namco Bandai releases mod tools.

Modders don't need mod tools. There were none for KoTOR or the Infinity Engine games and that didn't stop people from adding content. Modders only need easy access to the game content, which is what Obsidian promised us here.

Actually, I think not having mod tools is a good thing. Too much commitment required, which mean only the dedicated modders will bother with it.

Also, if you feel like it, any Unity game can be "modded" by Unity (except that the Pro Version isn't free).

The spellcasting mechanics seem potentially neat and, AFAIR, something that wasn´t done exactly this way before.
I´m not quite sure how they intend the grimoires to work, but it might be pretty cool if these would sometimes come with a prescribed unique spell which is not possible to learn on level ups.

Now, where´s that George Ziets stretch goal?

I don't think Wizards will learn spells on level up. Josh Sawyer mentioned finding grimoires (on dead mages) with spells in them. His example was finding a girmoire with cloud kill in it, despite you not being able to use it yet.

Do you have a link?
For some reason I assumed (probably because I thought it might be interesting :)) that learning a spell basically means learning to "insert" it into a grimoire, whereas what spell a mage can cast would be determined solely by what spells a grimoire contains.
Aka, player´s mages would be able to customize grimoires with spells they know how to scribe, but some grimoires would come with an already prescribed spell that they would be able to cast too, even though they haven´t learned how to scribe it yet (either because it´s higher level, or, as I´ve already suggested, a spell that´s totally exclusive to a grimoire).
Learning a scribing procedure on level ups (plus maybe some additional means, like a scroll or an NPC describing it) seemed like it´d go best with this (additional obvious assumption here is that learning the procedures from grimoires would not be possible).
This doesn´t necessarily sound mutually exclusive with the above load of assumptions :).

Regardless, my sentiment basically was that it´d be cool if some of the grimoires would bring something unique to the table long-term and a unique spell exclusive to a grimoire was the first thing that came to mind. Obviously there could be some other ways how to achieve this like, for example, some grimoires would make spells of certain school (or element) stronger, but would hold lesser amount of spells, etc.

The games with officially supported mod tools have so many more mods, and much better mods.

They also have 3000 "remakes" of Eye of the Beholder made by people who can't produce art, write scripts or do anything but draw the map in the editor. Not that I'm against mod tools! I'm all for 'em. Access to the game content is already good, though!

Anyhow. I'm sure that since everyone's using Unity, they'll be chatting it up through all this and we'll probably end up with mod tools that are functionally very similar for most of the games.

Yeah, not necessarily mutually exclusive. As for the link, it is on the SomethingAwful forums, here.

edit:

He also gave an example of the cooldown system on his formspring.

Thanks!
That actually sounds potentially fairly close to what I was imagining, but since apparently the grimoire thing is not set in stone yet, who knows where the specifics will spin it to
in the end :).

That´s how I understood it´ll work from Cain´s update and I think it has potential.
Both the cooldown implementation and the grimoire stuff seem like a quite fresh take on things.

Companies that release games with official tools (TES, NWN) spend a lot of developer resources on it and they designed it with mods in mind. Unless this project reaches well over $3MM I dont expect a construction kit.

What I hate is when the only tool released is a level editor. Witcher, Fallout 1&2 fell into this this territory initially and there were virtually no mods.

My experience is a majority of mods people want are retextures, parameter/script tweaks, and community bug fixes. The next level is new content by adding static models like weapons then animated items like armor and then you get into custom animation/creatures which are years away from initial release.

In that mix is custom houses, quests and what not but usually that takes years to get released properly event when tools are available on release. After that is stuff like MMM, OOO, Nehrim which are basically new games and require extensive tools.

I think they can satisfy the community with releasing file format documentation, script compiler, script source, a skeleton rig for blender,max or maya and an exporter. The more source released the better but the community can reverse engineer (with some amount of blessing) from the documentation in many cases. Even Bethesda did not release skeletons or modeling support tools and people had to use community tools or the Civ4 Tools.

My understanding is Unity will not support the last three at all and is up to the developer to release tools. Perhaps with Unity Pro but I didn't get a sense that was a really good solution. Anyway if they stagger tools so that simple mods like scripting, retextures, custom weapons/armor are possible initially and then a level editor after at least I would be happy. I just don't see a construction kit being done initially though. Maybe another kickstarter? Of course its chicken and egg, if they do it up front then it helps them as well I suspect.