Eternity Pillars of Eternity + The White March Expansion Thread

[AwesomeButton]

"Blood Register" by Paul Kirsch is out.

While conducting a census of rural Dyrwood, Neolas a public servant and his elven bodyguard Gacgen take their assignment into the wilderness of Eir Glanfath: one seeking his family of birth, the other to cure an epidemic.

 

[Infinitron]

Roguey

 

[Roguey]

Blood Register is also awkwardly written, but at least it has a point.

There seems to be a recurring theme of "don't bother doing anything in this world because you'll change nothing and possibly end up in a worse position than when you started." Rebuilding the stronghold in Pillars of Eternity also reinforces this theme.

 

[Infinitron]

Rebuilding the stronghold in Pillars of Eternity also reinforces this theme.

I'm not sure if this is a reference to the alleged pointlessness of the stronghold in terms of providing satisfying gameplay, but what you're saying here is actually true in a purely narrative sense (unless you get to the bottom of the Endless Paths and remove what you find there, that is)

 

[Infinitron]

Heresy: http://jesawyer.tumblr.com/post/132577092566/hey-josh-if-firearms-get-a-bonus-against-arcane

 

[Infinitron]

Seems Josh has more time for Q&A these days.

Infinitron's good ideas:

melnorme asked: IDEA: Split the Prone status effect into two separate afflictions. "Tripped" (for attacks like Slicken that make you fall because your legs give way) and "Knocked Out" (for spells that knock you to the ground with a blow to the torso).

There is already a distinction made between two types as of patch 2.03. Prone is used for someone being on the ground but conscious. Unconscious is used for making someone pass out and fall down and is more severe (currently only used by a small number of abilities). The difference between something like Slicken and Knock Down should be (IMO) what defense it attacks – in this case, Reflexes for the former, Fortitude for the latter. Once they’re on the ground, they’re both just Prone – still able to defend themselves, but vulnerable.

melnorme asked: Was Twin Elms originally supposed to have a more complex plot, where a Glanfathan ally of Thaos would have stopped you from entering Teir Evron and you'd have to deal with him before proceeding? The Three-Tusk Stelgaer leader seems like he may have been meant to play such a role. Helping Thaos because the Hollowborn plague was weakening the Dyrwood. It seems to make a lot of sense.

I double-checked with Eric Fenstermaker and it was was not. There was some material cut after that point, but everything through Teir Evron was implemented more-or-less as originally designed.

And also more linguistic geekery:

marmot01 asked: Hi Josh. A PoE fan over here. I admire the work you've put into constructing fantasy languages. I have a bit of a geeky question on Aedyran sound laws. I've spotted the use of the letter 'y' in the words 'hyl' and 'dyr'. In both cases 'y' is pronounced as [ ɪ ], which I believe is a reduced vowel ([ ɨ̞ ] in US notation). What was the old pronunciation, and have you also devised a sound law that explains it? Also, how is "wood" pronounced in Hylspeak? I'd expect the [ ʊ ] to be a later form?

Before I begin, I should say that I’m not a linguist, and many of Eora’s languages’ orthographies were contrived for the sake of distinctiveness in the written form (because we use relatively little voice-over) and to give familiar readers a sense of inspirational sources (Old English and Icelandic for Eld Aedyran; Italian, Occitan, and French for Vailian; Cornish and Welsh for Glanfathan).

That said, yes, Eld Aedyran always pronounces “y”s as [ɪ]. Dyrwood sounds like “deer-wood”. Hylspeak sounds like “heel-speek”. I should note that both of those words are actually Hylspeak, not Eld Aedyran. Because Hylspeak borrows elements from Eld and “contemporary” Aedyran (English), the latter of which is influenced by Vailian and Glanfathan to the point where the orthography becomes inconsistent, it also has inconsistent orthography. Hylspeak is also used by many people with limited or no reading or writing skills, so a Hylspeak word can have different spellings even within the same community (assuming it’s ever written down).

The Eld Aedyran word for wood is “wode”, and can be seen a unique axe found in The White March, Wodewys.

 

[AwesomeButton]

marmot01 here. I'm surprised he says "Dyrwood sounds like "deer-wood"", because the "i" is short in all the voiced lines I've heard. I hear "DIR-wood" everywhere, and not "DEER-wood".

If anyone hears it like Josh says it's pronounced, please tell me if I'm wrong. I never heard "i" to be as long as the "o" in "dyrwood". Maybe the voice actors weren't instructed how to read the names, idk.

 

[Haba]

DURRRRRRRRRR-wööd

 

[Prime Junta]

Finally picked up Pillars again after the summer, and finished White March part 1. Here's a couple of quick notes on it, and on how the changes in it and 2.0+ relate to the criticisms I made in the review.

Soulbound weapons improve one thing and make others worse. Itemization in Pillars was bland because there were so many effectively interchangeable unique items, and even stuff like Clanfaidiagh and the Blade of the Endless Paths were rather unremarkable. Soulbound weapons are genuinely different and covetable. This is good. However, they still lack one of the major features that made stuff like Carsomyr, Crom Faeyr, or Celestial Fury cool: they don't require any investment in character-building to use. They're also rather easy to upgrade fully, and the way they were handed out was stupid, especially the Grey Sleeper with its upgrades carefully and inexplicably tailored to fit your particular biography. As it is, they're more like Monty Haul freebies than awesome rewards you have to work for. And, of course, they throw the difficulty out of whack even more. So, good idea, execution needs work.

Immunities are a really welcome addition. They force you to change tactics instead of repeating rote good-enough ones. Bump up the difficulty a notch and the system would really start coming into its own.

Party AI is also a welcome, if low-key addition. It removes some of the rote clicking from combat, without making it into a watch-the-game-play-itself kind of thing. I found the overall gameplay experience was smoother with it on, without drastically altering the way I play it.

The expansion itself was OK. There was a quite a lot of content crammed into a few pretty small maps, and it slotted nicely into the larger context. Everything except one optional fight was pretty easy though, and the extra XP and phat lewt will certainly turn the endgame into a yawn.

Overall I'm still enjoying the game -- even playing it again, even after playing it really intensively for the review. I'm not entirely sure why. The setting is probably a big part of it; I really dig the way it hangs together, including the conlangs which are related to each other in believable ways.

 

[Florian Gheorghe]

I am enjoying it as well. Great thing that they are making the game more challenging now that the majority moved on. Only the veterans will play and finish part 2.

Trimis de pe al meu Galaxy Nexus folosind Tapatalk

 

[Arthandas]

Spare me traversing through the previous 78 pages, is The White March an improvement, step back or just more of the same?
Is anyone planning a review?

 

[Infinitron]

New spell coming in White March Part 2: https://twitter.com/jesawyer/status/662765896168001540

Spare me traversing through the previous 78 pages, is The White March an improvement, step back or just more of the same?
Is anyone planning a review?

PROTIP: Use search to find posts by people you trust and read their opinions.

 

[Arthandas]

PROTIP: Use search to find posts by people you trust and read their opinions.

I tried but apparently Jesus wasn't very active in this thread.

 

[AwesomeButton]

I tried but apparently Jesus wasn't very active in this thread.

It's an improvement if you liked the base game. If you hated the base game, you probably won't see TWM as enough of an improvement to make you care.

Read my 20 kb ramblings on TWM in a seprarate thread.

 

[Infinitron]

Seems Josh has more time for Q&A these days.

Continued: Josh Sawyer goes simulationist with "Keywords"!

melnorme asked: "The difference between something like Slicken and Knock Down should be (IMO) what defense it attacks – in this case, Reflexes for the former, Fortitude for the latter" Well, the reason I bring this idea up is that now that affliction immunities are in, you might want to give flying monsters an immunity to the former but not the latter.

I think that’s something that could best be served by our Keyword system. We didn’t use Keywords that much in PoE and we didn’t communicate them well to the player, but it’s an easy way to assign a piece of metadata for narrow-focus discrimination. We currently have keywords for poison, disease, dragon breath, webs, and a few other things.

We could add “Ground Attacks” for attacks that affect non-fliers. Tanglefoot, Slicken, etc. could have that keyword and the flying creatures could be given keyword immunity to Ground Attacks.

 

[Copper]

The 'all we are is dust in the wind' theme that runs through Pillars always seemed very badly handled to me, and ran head-long into the 'new age of exploration' idea, completely derailing it. Instead of themes similar to, say, the Mission or westerns, where a particular way of life is about to be obliterated, and you can't fight the change on an individual level, almost everything in the game world is old, worn down, broken, or somehow failing, so the whole thing has a bit of hopeless despondency to it.

 

[Dorateen]

The Dwarves of Stalwart are better off for our party's intervention, and rekindling of the White Forge.

 

[Prime Junta]

Spare me traversing through the previous 78 pages, is The White March an improvement, step back or just more of the same?
Is anyone planning a review?

The expansion itself is more of the same.

The changes to the mechanics and AI in version 2 are (for the most part) improvements.

 

[Roguey]

Josh continues to backpedal on his decisions, going with what Sensuki suggested all along

for the future i think a base combat speed close to (or slower than) our slow speed with an option to speed it up would have been better.

 

[Sensuki]

I don't recall suggesting that though?

 

[Roguey]

I don't recall suggesting that though?

You said the base speed needed to be slower though.

 

[Sensuki]

Yes I did, but I was mostly referring to movement speed and damage - that's what feels off (and I said that, I didn't say that animation speed should be slower). In the IE games as a martial character, unless you're performing a backstab as a Thief, you can't really deal more than about 25 damage on a hit at the end of TOB, but in Pillars you can get very high damage very early in the game. With enemies, it's somewhat the same - lots of enemies deal very high per-hit damage, whereas in the IE games, there was danger against save vs death stuff, but actual per-hit damage wasn't that high, and thus combat had a better pace.

Just slowing down the speed is a bandaid solution to a problem but it is completely in line with the majority of their 'solutions' to problems since the beta.

This solution is not aimed at fixing the combat speed, it's just making it so that any Tom, Dick or Harry can deal with the pace of the game without pausing much.

 

[Roguey]

Read The Reaping. The funniest and most entertaining one so far.

It breaks the theme of the previous two though, Eder makes a difference.

 

[Infinitron]

Yep!

 

[Beastro]

Blood Register is also awkwardly written, but at least it has a point.

There seems to be a recurring theme of "don't bother doing anything in this world because you'll change nothing and possibly end up in a worse position than when you started." Rebuilding the stronghold in Pillars of Eternity also reinforces this theme.

Yup.

Pretty shitty when you're main theme in a game is apathy that is both reflected thematically and actively in the gameplay.