Frog Helms Fan Club — What is your answer to the accusation that,...

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See, that’s what the app is perfect for.

Sounds perfect Wahhhh, I don’t wanna

melnorme asked:

What is your answer to the accusation that, compared with BioWare's Infinity Engine titles, the encounters in the Black Isle-developed IE games over-relied on melee enemies at the expense of interesting ranged opponents?

This is a very dramatic question!  Also, I don’t think so, at least not consistently.  BG2 did have more ranged enemies and by proportion of casters, I would say those enemies were interesting ranged opponents.

BG1 didn’t have a large proportion of ranged opponents and of their ranged opponents, a large number of them were straightforward archers.  Archers can certainly make mixed melee/ranged battles more tactically interesting, but IWD had standard archers as well.  Creatures like BG’s sirens and basilisks were very dangerous, but IWD also had ranged casters like yuan-ti priests, orc shamans, etc.

I think it’s best to mix ranged and melee whenever possible and I think the best battles in the IE games (IMO) featured both types of opponents (or singular opponents with different ranged and melee capabilities).

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frunglez asked:

I believe reading that Aedyr has a tropical climate, and that the fair-skinned wood elves did not originate entirely in the area. Does the same go for the fair-skinned meadow folk as well; are they not native to Aedyr? If so, where did they come from, and who were the original inhabitants (if any) of Aedyr?

Yes, the origins of Meadow Folk are described in the in-game lore as being from the far north.  We have not yet discussed who, if anyone, lived in Aedyr when the Thyrtan and Sceltrfolc arrived.  However, Aptapo (mountain dwarves) lived there and left long ago.

grimotter asked:

In many RPGs, once whatever intro/tutorial portion of the game is done and the player enters the first big city hub, they are often presented with a glut of quests all at once. It can feel overwhelming and I know that I've personally dropped off (sometimes for good, sometimes temporarily) a game because of it. Is there a way to avoid this that doesn't involve putting the player on rails?

Taking Neketaka as example, I think I would work harder to phase in quests by act or using some other metric of game progress, so maybe half of the city’s quests are available immediately, then some event occurs that prompts the player to revisit areas in the city to see new content.

That’s not a fully formed idea, but I think in general, phasing in content is better than dumping it on the player.

katistrophe asked:

For Pillars, how does the magic in Chanting work? If a Chanter for some reason for example decided to sing a normally recited phrase to the tune of a drinking song, or conversely kept the melody of a sung phrase and *most* of the words but changed some to be silly/bawdy, would it still have an effect if the Chanter meant it to? (The same effect, or...?)

This is explained somewhere in The Lore, but chanters are tapping into the collective memories of soul fragments in the In-Between.  It goes like this: a sapient being lives a life and has experiences that become memory.    When they die, their soul enters the In-Between, is drawn toward the light of a living adra pillar, and enters the Beyond for “a while”.

When the body dies and the soul enters the In-Between, the trauma of the experience usually cracks off little bits or big chunks of memory.  Those fragments of memory are usually not fundamental to the identity of the person, but may contain cultural touchstones – songs, stories, epic poems, etc. – that they’ve heard repeated over and over.  They permeate the individual’s soul.

And remember that souls get recycled, so there may be layers of cultural memory compressed over generations in a single fragment.  One person’s soul could have Eora’s equivalent of Hey Ya!, Hey Jude, and an Elizabethan Hey Nonny Nonny thrown in for good measure.

A chanter is calling to the In-Between to awaken memories in the dormant fragments of souls floating around in there.  To continue the dissonant Hey Ya example, imagine a chanter invoking the mighty Shake It Like a Polaroid Picture.  A bunch of soul fragments in the In-Between hear this echoing voice and even though they aren’t sapient beings, the words resonate with memories in the fragment, and the fragment does the equivalent of mouthing along with Now all the Beyoncés, and Lucy Lius, and baby dolls with the chanter, sending power back to them through the In-Between.  That power manifests as the concept of the phrase or invocation.  In this case, a huge Polaroid slapping your enemies around.

All that is to say that fundamentally changing the words or the melody of a phrase or invocation would probably result in it simply not working.  The soul fragments wouldn’t recognize the modified version so they wouldn’t respond to it at all.

theovf22stuff asked:

Given how harsh you tend to be when talking about Deadfire, what do you think were the game's greatest successes? What was excellent about it? What did you and the team nail in concept and execution? I honestly don't think the game earns how harshly you look back upon it. I'll say that sometimes it sounds a bit like you are wallowing in regrets, and I find it hard to understand since I honestly think that Deadfire is a solid, well made game. But the lower sales do warrant further investigation.

I made a follow-up post on that topic a while back:

https://jesawyer.tumblr.com/post/185760161266/hey-josh-your-deadfire-postmortem-and-follow-up

guiltyscapegoat asked:

I'm playing Fallout 2 for the first time and I'm really enjoying the companions, both for their diversity and for how many you can end up recruiting at once, and it got me thinking about New Vegas. I really love the NV companions, but I'm wondering what the reason was for the lower party limit? Was it for balancing, not being able to implement party banter, an engine limitation, or simply just a creative decision? Anyways I love your work and thank you for taking the time to read this.

It was first and foremost an engine limitation.  The companions have a large (for PS3/Xbox 360) memory footprint.  I mean, it was sort of also for balance, to the extent that there was balance in F:NV.

damonomics asked:

Hi Josh, what are your thoughts on DotA 2, League of Legends, and other MOBA games? I've never seen you opine on them, hence my asking.

I played LoL for a while many years ago.  It was fun, but I never really got into it (or other MOBAs) like a lot of people did.  They’re well designed to do what they do, but what they do is not something that is highly appealing to me.

betteroff-elsewhere asked:

Hi Josh. I recently got done playing Pillars of Eternity and was wondering what the linguistic inspiration was for the gods' names? Are they based on (a) specific language(s)?

They weren’t based on any particular languages because they were (at Obsidian) developed prior to most of the cultures/languages.  IIRC, George Ziets developed most of the basic concepts and names for the gods.  I guided some of it, lightly.  Let’s just assume that whatever you like about the gods’ names and general vibes is due to George and whatever you don’t like is my fault.

The only thing I specifically remember shaping was Woedica’s name.  It was something else and I changed it to Woedica both for the obvious “woe” and a really superficial connection to Boudica.

masterscrat asked:

Hello there! I’m a lifelong fan of the Infinity Engine games. My understanding is that the IE assets where initially created in 3D, then rendered as isometric sprites. I know that the original 3D assets were lost, but... have they *all* been lost? I would love to see how the maps or characters looked like in 3D! Did any model or maybe screenshots survive?

You know, I think we have SourceSafe backups of a lot of things somewhere.  I think with enough time (a lot), you could reconstruct those scenes, but I think most of them were created in 3DStudio Max… maybe some of them even with Lightwave?

Characters are also tricky because BioWare created all of the BG1/BG2 sprites, Black Isle created all of the PST/IWD/IWD2.  Again, I think they were all created in 3DS Max.  I don’t think they look very good close up, because they weren’t meant to be seen close up.  Some of the most impressive detail 3D was in the levels created by Aaron Brown.  The statue of Tempus in Easthaven is a particularly good example (the render was made into an IWD loading screen).

Sorry I don’t have more encouraging news.

deotterguy asked:

(Pillars 1 and 2 spoilers) As much as I like the game, I always felt like Deadfire's story was a bit...disjointed. The faction questlines felt separate from the Eothas plot both in terms of plot and theme. Is there something I'm missing, or was the game deliberately or accidentally designed as a looser narrative experience?

It was intentionally designed as a looser narrative overall / more open, but the faction questlines/struggle for the Deadfire not melding with the Eothas plot was just poor execution on my part.

My hope was that the factions would initially start off considering the Eothas threat to be either a) not real or b) not something they needed to be concerned about.  They have enough problems between them without having to think about a colossus stomping around the archipelago.  I tried to develop the story in such a way that the factions became increasingly concerned and eventually focus all of their attention on Eothas.

I wanted their individual squabbles / pettiness to tie into the gods’ arguments about how mortals aren’t ready to control their own destiny.  While that does come up, I don’t think it felt that great in execution (obviously a lot of fans feel the same way).

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