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Review RPG Codex Review: Pillars of Eternity, by PrimeJunta

Lhynn

Arcane
Joined
Aug 28, 2013
Messages
9,824
"Maybe in an alternate universe, there's an Obsidian Entertainment where story-centric games like KOTOR2 and Alpha Protocol were huge The Walking Dead-caliber breakout hits, leading the company to become a big budget CYOA interactive movie developer with Chris Avellone in a Ken Levine-like creative guru role. "

Remember, this is exactly what happened to Bioware, except replace Chris Avellone with David Gaider, and 'story-centric' to 'romance-centric'.
No, it is in fact nothing like what happened to bioware.

In the scenario you are painting suposedly we would at least get AAA with GOOD writing. Not the tired, childish shit we get from bioware. And to be perfectly honest, i wouldnt mind at all if that were to happen, i would not mind PST level of writing and detail without the combat every other year.

It is the opposite of what happened to bioware, bioware now makes shitty action games with poor writing that panders to minorities.
 

a cut of domestic sheep prime

Guest
Really, now that we've come this far, I would be very disappointed if we didn't get Review 5: Prosper's Graphic Illustration, Review 6: Cleveland Mark Blakemore's How I Played POE And Also Got Totally Ripped In Under 2 Weeks, and Review 7: Admiral Jimbob Comic.
Imma 'bout to beat them all to the punch:
Pillars_Of_Eternity_Review.png
I propose we put this review as official Codex one :D
Probably best describes most of the Codex members opinion on PoE, then, during and after.
I second this. I also want the pseudo quote at the end to be the blurb on the steam curator.

Edit:
I'd imagine it would have saved quite a bit of time and effort to do a system that mimics BG2's version of D&D (in function) with a limited number classes and then focused on story, characters, and quests.
It's not like it's the same people doing system design and writing. It would still be trash
It's less about time and more about budget. Either you are paying a writer X to write 2000 lines of dialog, or you are paying an army of testers and devs to fix your broken system that nobody really wanted except you anyway.
 
Last edited by a moderator:

Tigranes

Arcane
Joined
Jan 8, 2009
Messages
10,350
"Maybe in an alternate universe, there's an Obsidian Entertainment where story-centric games like KOTOR2 and Alpha Protocol were huge The Walking Dead-caliber breakout hits, leading the company to become a big budget CYOA interactive movie developer with Chris Avellone in a Ken Levine-like creative guru role. "

Remember, this is exactly what happened to Bioware, except replace Chris Avellone with David Gaider, and 'story-centric' to 'romance-centric'.
No, it is in fact nothing like what happened to bioware.

In the scenario you are painting suposedly we would at least get AAA with GOOD writing. Not the tired, childish shit we get from bioware. And to be perfectly honest, i wouldnt mind at all if that were to happen, i would not mind PST level of writing and detail without the combat every other year.

It is the opposite of what happened to bioware, bioware now makes shitty action games with poor writing that panders to minorities.

And here I thought my allusion to Bio's well known "fans want it" romance-drive was obvious enough. But yeah, sure, that's all true.
 

Azarkon

Arcane
Joined
Oct 7, 2005
Messages
2,989
"Maybe in an alternate universe, there's an Obsidian Entertainment where story-centric games like KOTOR2 and Alpha Protocol were huge The Walking Dead-caliber breakout hits, leading the company to become a big budget CYOA interactive movie developer with Chris Avellone in a Ken Levine-like creative guru role. "

Remember, this is exactly what happened to Bioware, except replace Chris Avellone with David Gaider, and 'story-centric' to 'romance-centric'.

David Gaider, in the years before he went big:

wrote the characters HK-47, Jolee Bindo and Carth Onasi for Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, and was the lead writer for Neverwinter Nights: Hordes of the Underdark, on which he wrote both Deekin and Valen Shadowbreath.

Basically, he wrote two comic relief characters - HK-47 and Deekin, two romance interests for women - Carth Onasi and Valen Shadowbreath, one above average character - Jolee Bindo, and led a NWN expansion in which you stopped a darkspawn drow invasion led by an archdemon archdevil.

Sounds to me they got exactly what they wanted/deserved when they put him in charge of Dragon Age.

As for Avellone, he was the lead for PST, KOTOR 2, and Alpha Protocol. The first is a masterful deconstruction of fantasy RPG cliches that nonetheless managed to be emotionally impactful, the second is an ambitious deconstruction of the Star Wars universe that failed due to time/resource constraints, and the third is a modern day, over-the-top spy game with well-presented characters. From this list, I gather that Avellone is a fairly versatile writer, is at his best when he's allowed to take creative control of a game from the ground up, that he designs compelling characters, deconstructs genre cliches, knows how to build an intelligent story around a set of themes and ideas.

So -

Gaider: romances for women and comic relief

Avellone: compelling characters, genre deconstruction, intelligent themes and ideas

So yeah, I agree, Bioware is a great example of a studio that put its faith in a specific designer and got what it wanted/deserved... And Obsidian is a great example of a studio that, despite having of a designer of vastly higher caliber, didn't.
 
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Cowboy Moment

Arcane
Joined
Feb 8, 2011
Messages
4,407
With Pillars of Eternity, Obsidian set up a lot of great ideas, but failed to deliver the presentation. Think about the first act of the game. The setup was great: a local lord driven mad with grief, children born without souls, opportunistic nobles fighting in the background, a demonic wind outside the town, people made desperate by suffering, etc. All the ingredients of a great drama. But do you deal with any of this in a dramatically compelling way? No. Instead you walk up to Raedric's castle, beat up his guards & him, and move on.

There's a great analogy here with Witcher 3's first act. There, you also deal with a local lord driven by grief, a child born dead, monsters outside of towns, people made desperate by suffering, etc. But there, the game actually makes a dramatic story out of it, one that has been rated one of the best quest chains in recent years. Imagine the baron quest in Witcher 3 being just you walking up to the baron's castle, beating up his guards & him, and then he gives you a paragraph about where Ciri is. It'd have been terrible - yet that's exactly what Pillars of Eternity did.

I don't think that's a good comparison in spite of surface similarities. Witcher 3 has, all in all, a very grounded and character-driven story which focuses on people and their motivations, and only deals with more abstract elements like the politics, witch hunts, Wild Hunt threat, or even the impending end of the world, insofar as the characters are affected by them. The Bloody Baron storyline only really works because of how him and his family are characterized; otherwise it's just a series of fetch quests.

PoE, on the other hand, wants to be a story about ideas and values, like PST or MotB, and I think a comparison with the first act of MotB would be more interesting. After all, both saddle you with a mysterious and troubling condition and have you seek explanations and possibly a cure for it. However, where MotB makes the curse a big deal to the point where an angry god lays siege to a city just to get ahold of you, being a Watcher means very little in practice. Hell, you have little reason to get involved with the whole Raedric problem in the first place. Maybe your Watcher powers should have somehow gotten you into trouble and forced you to participate in the power struggle (which is woefully underdeveloped in general) - that would also impress upon the player that his condition is serious and made the trip to Caed Nua more than an arbitrary checkpoint on the way to Defiance Bay.

I agree that the game is desperately lacking an emotional core, cheesy as it may sound. The souls gimmick is actually decently well-developed, someone obviously put some thought into what the implications of this kind of metaphysical arrangement would be, and came up with some varied and cool ideas. Problem is, they never moved beyond ideas and failed to construct a narrative around them, in the way that the narrative of Waidwen's invasion is expressed through Durance and Eder, for instance.
 

Volrath

Arcane
Patron
Joined
May 21, 2007
Messages
4,297
RPG Codex: Mercilessly taunting Obsidian for a decade about how their games are "flawed gem" disasters that only "storyfags" can appreciate, yet expecting them to keep on making them. Newflash, kids. When you repeatedly tell a game developer he's really bad at something, eventually he's gonna divert resources towards that addressing that something.

Maybe in an alternate universe, there's an Obsidian Entertainment where story-centric games like KOTOR2 and Alpha Protocol were huge The Walking Dead-caliber breakout hits, leading the company to become a big budget CYOA interactive movie developer with Chris Avellone in a Ken Levine-like creative guru role. In that universe, MCA is considered the great betrayer of true RPGs on the Codex and Josh Sawyer is the underdog hero who keeps on trying to introduce oldschool mechanics where he can. Meaningful stats and skills are his equivalent of Durance and the Grieving Mother.
What the fuck did I just read?

Everybody here knows you as an apologetic shill, but don't transcend those levels man.
 

Azarkon

Arcane
Joined
Oct 7, 2005
Messages
2,989
I don't think that's a good comparison in spite of surface similarities. Witcher 3 has, all in all, a very grounded and character-driven story which focuses on people and their motivations, and only deals with more abstract elements like the politics, witch hunts, Wild Hunt threat, or even the impending end of the world, insofar as the characters are affected by them. The Bloody Baron storyline only really works because of how him and his family are characterized; otherwise it's just a series of fetch quests.

PoE, on the other hand, wants to be a story about ideas and values, like PST or MotB, and I think a comparison with the first act of MotB would be more interesting. After all, both saddle you with a mysterious and troubling condition and have you seek explanations and possibly a cure for it. However, where MotB makes the curse a big deal to the point where an angry god lays siege to a city just to get ahold of you, being a Watcher means very little in practice. Hell, you have little reason to get involved with the whole Raedric problem in the first place. Maybe your Watcher powers should have somehow gotten you into trouble and forced you to participate in the power struggle (which is woefully underdeveloped in general) - that would also impress upon the player that his condition is serious and made the trip to Caed Nua more than an arbitrary checkpoint on the way to Defiance Bay.

I agree that the game is desperately lacking an emotional core, cheesy as it may sound. The souls gimmick is actually decently well-developed, someone obviously put some thought into what the implications of this kind of metaphysical arrangement would be, and came up with some varied and cool ideas. Problem is, they never moved beyond ideas and failed to construct a narrative around them, in the way that the narrative of Waidwen's invasion is expressed through Durance and Eder, for instance.

What compelling idea and value is conveyed through having the player slaughter Raedric's guards and then having the choice of 1) slaughtering Raedric 2) slaughtering his cousin?

In what way is Witcher 3 not light years ahead in quest structure and resolution?

It's not about what the game is trying to be; it's about what the game is. The Raedric plot is a cliche "kill the tyrant" story with zero twists and no emotional investment. The Bloody Baron plot, on the other hand, is a tragic display of human error and the suffering it causes, and manages to draw sympathy for an otherwise monstrous character, thereby furthering the game's theme of monsters and men.
 
Last edited:

mastroego

Arcane
Joined
Apr 10, 2013
Messages
10,250
Location
Italy
Truly, enough is enough (no disrespect meant to the author).
I only read the first review, found it to be truthful, and that was it.
 

Sceptic

Arcane
Patron
Joined
Mar 2, 2010
Messages
10,871
Divinity: Original Sin
RPG Codex: Mercilessly taunting Obsidian for a decade about how their games are "flawed gem" disasters that only "storyfags" can appreciate, yet expecting them to keep on making them. Newflash, kids. When you repeatedly tell a game developer he's really bad at something, eventually he's gonna divert resources towards that addressing that something.

Maybe in an alternate universe, there's an Obsidian Entertainment where story-centric games like KOTOR2 and Alpha Protocol were huge The Walking Dead-caliber breakout hits, leading the company to become a big budget CYOA interactive movie developer with Chris Avellone in a Ken Levine-like creative guru role. In that universe, MCA is considered the great betrayer of true RPGs on the Codex and Josh Sawyer is the underdog hero who keeps on trying to introduce oldschool mechanics where he can. Meaningful stats and skills are his equivalent of Durance and the Grieving Mother.
This is Drog-level lulz. Didn't expect this even from you.
 

Lhynn

Arcane
Joined
Aug 28, 2013
Messages
9,824
The Raedric plot is a cliche "kill the tyrant" story with zero twists and no emotional investment

Actually, Raedric has a lot of depth as a character, and I still indeed prefer to side with him and forgive his past sins. He gets better after the Hollowborn situation is solved in end game.
The tyrant and uxoricide with a heart of gold.
 

Crescent Hawk

Cipher
Joined
Jul 10, 2014
Messages
642
Actually, Raedric has a lot of depth as a character, and I still indeed prefer to side with him and forgive his past sins. He gets better after the Hollowborn situation is solved in end game.

I sympathized with him as well, but that tree and killing his own wife is going overboard, I understand his grief but at best he could just exile all those people. He we was insane and got what was coming to him.
 
Unwanted

Irenaeus II

Unwanted
Dumbfuck Repressed Homosexual The Real Fanboy
Joined
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Messages
3,251
Location
Rio de Janeiro, Cidade Desespero
Actually, Raedric has a lot of depth as a character, and I still indeed prefer to side with him and forgive his past sins. He gets better after the Hollowborn situation is solved in end game.
The tyrant and uxoricide with a heart of gold.

I sympathized with him as well, but that tree and killing his own wife is going overboard, I understand his grief but at best he could just exile all those people. He we was insane and got what was coming to him.

Gilded Vale remained under the harsh rule of Lord Raedric, who reigned unopposed after the death of his cousin Kolsc. He continued to terrorize the people of Gilded Vale, looking for Eothasians in their midst.

But to Raedric, the sudden and unexpected end to Waidwen's Legacy came as a sign of the success and righteousness of his efforts, and in time his own people came to believe it, too. He relaxed his use of authority, no longer seeing his own people as potential threats, and Gilded Vale began to regain some of it's old luster

All is well when it ends well.
 
Self-Ejected

Excidium II

Self-Ejected
Joined
Jun 21, 2015
Messages
1,866,227
Location
Third World
He's a superstitious murderer. That ending seems just to reward people for resolving the quest in the non-obvious way.
 
Joined
Apr 27, 2015
Messages
821
Location
Isometric realm
New things I noticed while playing today : an attack on the Stronghold with fighting some trolls ( I remember on my first play there were only attacks without actual participation ). The animations and graphics are some of the best I have seen in a CRPG.
 

Cowboy Moment

Arcane
Joined
Feb 8, 2011
Messages
4,407
I don't think that's a good comparison in spite of surface similarities. Witcher 3 has, all in all, a very grounded and character-driven story which focuses on people and their motivations, and only deals with more abstract elements like the politics, witch hunts, Wild Hunt threat, or even the impending end of the world, insofar as the characters are affected by them. The Bloody Baron storyline only really works because of how him and his family are characterized; otherwise it's just a series of fetch quests.

PoE, on the other hand, wants to be a story about ideas and values, like PST or MotB, and I think a comparison with the first act of MotB would be more interesting. After all, both saddle you with a mysterious and troubling condition and have you seek explanations and possibly a cure for it. However, where MotB makes the curse a big deal to the point where an angry god lays siege to a city just to get ahold of you, being a Watcher means very little in practice. Hell, you have little reason to get involved with the whole Raedric problem in the first place. Maybe your Watcher powers should have somehow gotten you into trouble and forced you to participate in the power struggle (which is woefully underdeveloped in general) - that would also impress upon the player that his condition is serious and made the trip to Caed Nua more than an arbitrary checkpoint on the way to Defiance Bay.

I agree that the game is desperately lacking an emotional core, cheesy as it may sound. The souls gimmick is actually decently well-developed, someone obviously put some thought into what the implications of this kind of metaphysical arrangement would be, and came up with some varied and cool ideas. Problem is, they never moved beyond ideas and failed to construct a narrative around them, in the way that the narrative of Waidwen's invasion is expressed through Durance and Eder, for instance.

What compelling idea and value is conveyed through having the player slaughter Raedric's guards and then having the choice of 1) slaughtering Raedric 2) slaughtering his cousin?

In what way is Witcher 3 not light years ahead in quest structure and resolution?

It's not about what the game is trying to be; it's about what the game is. The Raedric plot is a cliche "kill the tyrant" story with zero twists and no emotional investment. The Bloody Baron plot, on the other hand, is a tragic display of human error and the suffering it causes, and manages to draw sympathy for an otherwise monstrous character, thereby furthering the game's theme of monsters and men.

I don't disagree that Witcher 3 is much better here; I'm saying that you're effectively comparing a ripe, delicious orange to a rotten apple, and remarking on how much tastier the orange is. Sure, it's true, but doesn't really tell us anything about what a tasty apple would be like.

Or, in other words, if you directly transplanted the Bloody Baron storyline into PoE, I don't think it would be nearly as compelling as it is in Witcher 3. If Obsidian wanted to improve their storytelling for PoE 2, I think they should rather look for inspiration in MotB and PST. Seems to me like that's what they were going for, but were hamstrung by some other decisions they've made, in addition to just plain ineptitude.
 

Shadenuat

Arcane
Joined
Dec 9, 2011
Messages
11,955
Location
Russia
Selecting a unit or a group, moving, rotating a formation, or picking a target has the same crispness and feel of immediate feedback as in the originals. <...> The characters respond instantly, and there's the same pleasurable and "connected" feeling of direct control.
(closes page and gets to sleep)

No, actually I looked through review and found it as interesting as reading contents of air cleaner for toilets
It may have arguments but one can take only so much of reading about 6 balanced stats and resting system

Seriously this has to stop. End this now, somebody. Ban PoE reviews
 

Lhynn

Arcane
Joined
Aug 28, 2013
Messages
9,824
Selecting a unit or a group, moving, rotating a formation, or picking a target has the same crispness and feel of immediate feedback as in the originals. <...> The characters respond instantly, and there's the same pleasurable and "connected" feeling of direct control.
(closes page and gets to sleep)

No, actually I looked through review and found it as interesting as reading contents of air cleaner for toilets
It may have arguments but one can take only so much of reading about 6 balanced stats and resting system

Seriously this has to stop. End this now, somebody. Ban PoE reviews Infinitron
 

hell bovine

Arcane
Joined
Sep 9, 2013
Messages
2,711
Location
Secret Level
David Gaider, in the years before he went big:

wrote the characters HK-47, Jolee Bindo and Carth Onasi for Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, and was the lead writer for Neverwinter Nights: Hordes of the Underdark, on which he wrote both Deekin and Valen Shadowbreath.

Basically, he wrote two comic relief characters - HK-47 and Deekin, two romance interests for women - Carth Onasi and Valen Shadowbreath, one above average character - Jolee Bindo, and led a NWN expansion in which you stopped a darkspawn drow invasion led by an archdemon archdevil.

Sounds to me they got exactly what they wanted/deserved when they put him in charge of Dragon Age.
I have to disagree on HotU. You could sell your annoying NPCs into eternal slavery in Cania. In how many games can you play the romance only to sell them to the devils? (which is the only proper evil romantic ending, in my opinion) You could also use the true names to command them. For a dungeon romp, HotU had some fun evil options to play.

The bad part about HotU is that they had to remove the really good endings on demand of WotC. You could edit them back in, though; I liked the inn one, now that is how an evil and insane character would deal with their fallen enemy.
 

Tigranes

Arcane
Joined
Jan 8, 2009
Messages
10,350
In how many games can you play the romance only to sell them to the devils?


Pillars of Et-

:troll:
 

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