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Eternity Pillars of Eternity II Beta Thread [GAME RELEASED, GO TO NEW THREAD]

Cross

Arcane
Joined
Oct 14, 2017
Messages
2,983
What quest line would that be?
Lord of a Barren Land
Sorry to disappoint you, but Fenstermaker wasn't responsible for that quest.

And while I agree that it's the best quest in the game, it also highlights how disjointed PoE's narrative is. You have this big quest about a tyrant driven mad by the Hollowborn crisis and terrorizing his serfs and peasants, and it ends with you deposing him of his castle and bringing peace to his lands. A perfect pretext for setting up a player stronghold, right? Except it's not. Instead, the player stronghold is some generic monster-infested ruins that you inherit for no other reason than to remove the rubble from the gate so that you can proceed (why you can't simply walk around Caed Nua is never explained).

I thought Eder's character was pretty forgettable, so I'm rather ambivalent about Fenstermaker's involvement (or lack thereof).
 

Quillon

Arcane
Joined
Dec 15, 2016
Messages
5,214
I remember josh saying the grimoires would act as a source of spells in addition to the learned ones, so you'll have fewer learned spells and the rest will be based on your book. How's that working?

Not too many grimoires to speak of in the beta, so can't say. In any case, that's just wizards -- priests and druids are SOL.

Any other "class trinkets" in the beta?
 

2house2fly

Magister
Joined
Apr 10, 2013
Messages
1,877
What quest line would that be?
Lord of a Barren Land
Sorry to disappoint you, but Fenstermaker wasn't responsible for that quest.

And while I agree that it's the best quest in the game, it also highlights how disjointed PoE's narrative is. You have this big quest about a tyrant driven mad by the Hollowborn crisis and terrorizing his serfs and peasants, and it ends with you deposing him of his castle and bringing peace to his lands. A perfect pretext for setting up a player stronghold, right? Except it's not. Instead, the player stronghold is some generic monster-infested ruins that you inherit for no other reason than to remove the rubble from the gate so that you can proceed (why you can't simply walk around Caed Nua is never explained).

I thought Eder's character was pretty forgettable, so I'm rather ambivalent about Fenstermaker's involvement (or lack thereof).
It would have been great to roll Caed Nua and Raedric's Hold together, but at least a part of why they didn't do that may be that the quest can also end with you not deposing him.
 

Sentinel

Arcane
Joined
Nov 18, 2015
Messages
6,632
Location
Ommadawn
What quest line would that be?
Lord of a Barren Land
Sorry to disappoint you, but Fenstermaker wasn't responsible for that quest.

And while I agree that it's the best quest in the game, it also highlights how disjointed PoE's narrative is. You have this big quest about a tyrant driven mad by the Hollowborn crisis and terrorizing his serfs and peasants, and it ends with you deposing him of his castle and bringing peace to his lands. A perfect pretext for setting up a player stronghold, right? Except it's not. Instead, the player stronghold is some generic monster-infested ruins that you inherit for no other reason than to remove the rubble from the gate so that you can proceed (why you can't simply walk around Caed Nua is never explained).

I thought Eder's character was pretty forgettable, so I'm rather ambivalent about Fenstermaker's involvement (or lack thereof).
The Raedric's Hold questline was one of the most well-regarded ones in the game. A multi-area set-piece, lots of choices, lots of approaches, multiple actors with their own agendas. Most of Pillars of Eternity's quests weren't as elaborate and it really stood out. As the designer of Fallout: New Vegas' remarkable Beyond the Beef quest, you're no stranger to that sort of thing. Can you tell us more about the making of the Raedric quest? Can we expect to see more quests like that in the future?

We all liked that one internally, too, and you'll see a similar paradigm for a couple of our larger quests in White March Part 2.

In my position, when I'm writing, I'm usually focused on the critical path, and I don't often get a whole lot of time to help flesh out side quests, but this was early in production and there was some opportunity to work with the level designers in conceptualizing the storyline for the quest. So I think that one, on the narrative side, began with the image of Raedric on his throne, half-crazed, after slaying his wife and child. We wanted strong ties to the central crisis of the game, to help the player begin to understand the stakes of the plot.

Then the level designers ran with the quest design and added some nice touches to the plot there as they went - Kolsc, the would-be usurper you could prop up or kill off, for instance, and the NPCs inside the keep that give insight as to Raedric's state of mind. Olivia Veras, who does writing as well as level design, did most of the writing for the quest and I thought executed it beautifully. Because it was early, that quest got a lot of scrutiny and a good amount of iteration, and I think it came out so well as a result of strong collaboration among the team.

The thing to know about a quest like this is that it is expensive. Introducing layers of complexity like multiple start and end points inherently takes much longer to implement, and generates far more bugs (geometrically, I'd say) than a simpler, more linear quest. There is a quest in Defiance Bay with a wizard masquerading as a drug dealer, and one in Dyrford about someone hiding from the local crime family, and those quests both had those types of complexities about them, and both required substantial iteration to make serviceable, and had to essentially be scrapped and redone multiple times. Those quests then start to eat into time that could be spent polishing other content, and it's not always clear-cut whether the quest will be worth the trouble. Over the course of production, we've gotten better at making that judgment and identifying red flags, but it's always a little risky. All of that is to say, we love doing that kind of quest - maybe too much - but if we tried to do every quest like that, the game would be a disaster, so we try to choose our battles based on the ones we think will pay off the most.

On New Vegas I worked on Beyond the Beef but I also did one of the vaults - Vault 11. Vault 11 was a relatively linear, exploration-based quest and probably had half a dozen bugs reported total during production. I probably spent triple or quadruple the amount of time I worked on Vault 11 working on Beyond the Beef. So much of it depended on nondeterministic systems (AI, scheduling, pathing...) that the whole thing was a nightmare to debug. And when the game came out, it was interesting to see that Vault 11 got a lot of public praise, but hardly anything was said about Beyond the Beef. I'm glad people like it now, but at the time it did teach me that there are many ways to make a memorable quest, and some are harder than others.

He still wrote the 2 best companions in the game as well as the best companion questline (Secrets of the Tacan). No matter how you try to play it, losing Eric is a massive blow to Obsidian.
 

Lacrymas

Arcane
Joined
Sep 23, 2015
Messages
17,948
Pathfinder: Wrath
The best companion is Durance, no contest. I haven't checked out the White March companions, though. Eder is, like I've mentioned too many times now, too normal and unremarkable to the point of being background-y. It's easy to write normal people, you interact with them all the time, but good art can't be and isn't about normality, you also don't see anything new by interacting with normality, it's routine. I also wouldn't say the writing of Raedric's is very good. Sure, you have a bit of a power struggle, but they don't do anything until you show up and even then you still do everything. Raedric is a bit one-dimensional and he is written as a monster who kills his wife and child over perceived slights and superstitions, you really can't defend his choices, nor the way he rules his land, he's simply a tyrant with no redeeming qualities. The quest is remarkable because it gives you so many choices and the non-linear map is great, not because of its writing.
 

Sentinel

Arcane
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Messages
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Location
Ommadawn
Durance would have been great if he didn't represent everything wrong with the game's writing: overly long descriptive walls of text everytime you interact with him. Because of that he gets demoted to "good". He had a couple funny comments here and there though.
 

Infinitron

I post news
Staff Member
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Codex Year of the Donut Serpent in the Staglands Dead State Divinity: Original Sin Project: Eternity Torment: Tides of Numenera Wasteland 2 Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 A Beautifully Desolate Campaign Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire Pathfinder: Kingmaker Pathfinder: Wrath I'm very into cock and ball torture I helped put crap in Monomyth
Durance's various amusing comments and reactions in other conversations were the part of him that Eric Fenstermaker wrote, IIRC. :M
 

Sensuki

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New North Korea
Codex 2014 Serpent in the Staglands Shadorwun: Hong Kong A Beautifully Desolate Campaign
Durance would have been great if he didn't represent everything wrong with the game's writing: overly long descriptive walls of text everytime you interact with him. Because of that he gets demoted to "good". He had a couple funny comments here and there though.

On the contrary, I would say that he represented the only instance in the game where that style actually worked.
 
Self-Ejected

CptMace

Self-Ejected
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Die große Nation
I second sensuki's statement there. Imo Grieving Mother would represent overly verbose descriptions better. I still, to this day, have no idea what all her shit is about.
 

Lacrymas

Arcane
Joined
Sep 23, 2015
Messages
17,948
Pathfinder: Wrath
Whatever technical qualities his writing has, including the lack of editing, can be ignored since he has actual character that utilizes the setting, its history and has dramatic flair. He is the only one who has convictions and understandable doubts about himself and his choices and changes when confronted with the truth. And he's still not as overwrought and overwritten as everything else, he just suffers from the overly inquisitive nature of the PC, just answering questions the PC asks him among his more interesting and personal rants, but I suspect that's an artifact left over from the PS:T era.
 

Quillon

Arcane
Joined
Dec 15, 2016
Messages
5,214
Oh, how nice, another MCA dick sucking session.

He is the only one who has convictions and understandable doubts about himself and his choices and changes when confronted with the truth.

What? That's Eder. Durance is an arrogant fuck up until the point he learns the truth which he should have realized way earlier, after which he screamed like WAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHH and said "I know kung fu, watcher" or some shit, it was very late in the game to observe any change while Eder had his quests resolution earlier and another about gods similar to Durance towards the end.
 

TT1

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Make the Codex Great Again! Grab the Codex by the pussy Insert Title Here RPG Wokedex Strap Yourselves In Codex Year of the Donut A Beautifully Desolate Campaign Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire Pathfinder: Kingmaker Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag. My team has the sexiest and deadliest waifus you can recruit.
Raedric is a bit one-dimensional and he is written as a monster who kills his wife and child over perceived slights and superstitions, you really can't defend his choices, nor the way he rules his land, he's simply a tyrant with no redeeming qualities.

I dont think that Raedric is written as a monster or we cant defend his choices. In my playthroughs I never kill the Raedric and, indeed, his animancer, Osrya, is the only person in the whole game that really know suspects that the Legacy is the fault of lack of souls in newborns.
 

Lacrymas

Arcane
Joined
Sep 23, 2015
Messages
17,948
Pathfinder: Wrath
I dont think that Raedric is written as a monster or we cant defend his choices. In my playthroughs I never kill the Raedric and, indeed, his animancer, Osrya, is the only person in the whole game that really know suspects that the Legacy is the fault of lack of souls in newborns.

What is the justification for doing what he is doing, apart from vague superstitions?
 

2house2fly

Magister
Joined
Apr 10, 2013
Messages
1,877
I dont think that Raedric is written as a monster or we cant defend his choices. In my playthroughs I never kill the Raedric and, indeed, his animancer, Osrya, is the only person in the whole game that really know suspects that the Legacy is the fault of lack of souls in newborns.

What is the justification for doing what he is doing, apart from vague superstitions?
If he was wrong to do it, surely the gods would tell him so.
 

ga♥

Arcane
Vatnik
Joined
Feb 3, 2017
Messages
7,587
How people could prefer Eder over Durance it's beyond me.
Eder (well, actuallly, Aloth as well) was (is?) totally dull and bland.
And it's not asslicking MCA. He was objectively the only character with some personality.
 

cannondwarf

Scholar
Joined
Apr 11, 2015
Messages
100
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Sørvesten
How people could prefer Eder over Durance it's beyond me.
Eder (well, actuallly, Aloth as well) was (is?) totally dull and bland.
And it's not asslicking MCA. He was objectively the only character with some personality.
I'd say Hiravias and Zahua are fairly interesting characters as well
 

DeepOcean

Arcane
Joined
Nov 8, 2012
Messages
7,394
Is Hiravias that retarded little hobbit druid that was eating a carcass raw when you meet him? I found him a try too hard to be funny kind of character, got rid of him pretty quickly, too annoying.
 

DeepOcean

Arcane
Joined
Nov 8, 2012
Messages
7,394
Hmm. What if I didn't care about my father and don't want to get revenge.
Well, if that dude hired assassins to the point when you can't turn a corner and someone wants to murder your sorry ass, then you will start caring very quick.
 

Iznaliu

Arbiter
Joined
Apr 28, 2016
Messages
3,686
Is Hiravias that retarded little hobbit druid that was eating a carcass raw when you meet him? I found him a try too hard to be funny kind of character, got rid of him pretty quickly, too annoying.

If you come in with a negative attitude from the beginning, then of course you'll feel that everything is shit.
 

Bonerbill

Augur
Joined
Nov 25, 2013
Messages
302
Location
North Carolina
What quest line would that be?
Lord of a Barren Land
And while I agree that it's the best quest in the game, it also highlights how disjointed PoE's narrative is. You have this big quest about a tyrant driven mad by the Hollowborn crisis and terrorizing his serfs and peasants, and it ends with you deposing him of his castle and bringing peace to his lands. A perfect pretext for setting up a player stronghold, right? Except it's not. Instead, the player stronghold is some generic monster-infested ruins that you inherit for no other reason than to remove the rubble from the gate so that you can proceed (why you can't simply walk around Caed Nua is never explained).

The problem with that scenario is evil, neutral, and pacifist characters would be out of luck because they would be forced to kill Raedric for a stronghold. I never kill him in my games, so I'm perfectly happy with the normal way you get the stronghold.
 
Last edited:

DeepOcean

Arcane
Joined
Nov 8, 2012
Messages
7,394
If you come in with a negative attitude from the beginning, then of course you'll feel that everything is shit.
I liked the Grieving Mother, Durance and Eder, that is almost half the companions, I didn't have a negative attitude whatsoever about them, maybe that they saw too little action but they were decent characters. I just hated the rest because they were weak.
 

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