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Eternity Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire + DLC Thread - now with turn-based combat!

AwesomeButton

Proud owner of BG 3: Day of Swen's Tentacle
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PC RPG Website of the Year, 2015 Make the Codex Great Again! Grab the Codex by the pussy Insert Title Here RPG Wokedex Divinity: Original Sin 2 A Beautifully Desolate Campaign Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag. Pathfinder: Wrath
Anyone found the way to remove voiceovers from game?
It's possible if you replace the voiced lines' files with a zero length file, but it involves hunting down all the voiced lines you want to mute.
 

Yosharian

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I was able to remove 99% of the female narrator by renaming the following directory:

<POE2 Install Directory>/PillarsofEternityII_Data/StreamingAssets/Audio/WIndows/Voices/English(US)/Narrator

I renamed it to NarratorSTOP

Boom no retarded narration (aside from a few instances where the narration is packaged with the character's voice rather than in a separate file like this)
 

Butter

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I was able to remove 99% of the female narrator by renaming the following directory:

<POE2 Install Directory>/PillarsofEternityII_Data/StreamingAssets/Audio/WIndows/Voices/English(US)/Narrator

I renamed it to NarratorSTOP

Boom no retarded narration (aside from a few instances where the narration is packaged with the character's voice rather than in a separate file like this)
You didn't like the 16 year old girl reading her creative writing homework for the class?
 

Yosharian

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I was able to remove 99% of the female narrator by renaming the following directory:

<POE2 Install Directory>/PillarsofEternityII_Data/StreamingAssets/Audio/WIndows/Voices/English(US)/Narrator

I renamed it to NarratorSTOP

Boom no retarded narration (aside from a few instances where the narration is packaged with the character's voice rather than in a separate file like this)
You didn't like the 16 year old girl reading her creative writing homework for the class?
I'm probably a misogynist, or something
 
The Real Fanboy
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Oct 8, 2018
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I sooo wonder if they have anything cool planned for the 1 year anniversary next week!!!

Carrie and Kate with a tiny insight into writing Deadfire!:




:heart emoji:
 

Lacrymas

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Sep 23, 2015
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Pathfinder: Wrath
They should focus more on the larger picture, not on the nitty-gritty sentence structure and word usage. DF's many plots and subplots are painfully irrelevant and lackluster.
 

IHaveHugeNick

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They should focus more on the larger picture, not on the nitty-gritty sentence structure and word usage. DF's many plots and subplots are painfully irrelevant and lackluster.

Pretty sure the #1 complaint with the first game was excessive thesaurusing, so setting up some standards for word usage is definitely important.

That said, I don't know why would they obsess about dialogue attribution specifically when it's visually marked in the interface which character is talking.
 

rashiakas

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Pathfinder: Wrath
16oSCHR.png


quality thread
 

Lacrymas

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Pathfinder: Wrath
They should focus more on the larger picture, not on the nitty-gritty sentence structure and word usage. DF's many plots and subplots are painfully irrelevant and lackluster.

Pretty sure the #1 complaint with the first game was excessive thesaurusing, so setting up some standards for word usage is definitely important.

That said, I don't know why would they obsess about dialogue attribution specifically when it's visually marked in the interface which character is talking.
The most egregious problems were the story was unstructured, the characters wooden and irrelevant, and the plot contrived. People just missed the forest for the trees. With many words they said nothing, in DF they continue to say nothing, but with fewer words. The words must be enough, no more and no less, a very engrossing story can get away with many words.
 

Shackleton

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Codex 2016 - The Age of Grimoire Make the Codex Great Again! Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag. Pathfinder: Wrath I'm very into cock and ball torture
They should focus more on the larger picture, not on the nitty-gritty sentence structure and word usage. DF's many plots and subplots are painfully irrelevant and lackluster.

Pretty sure the #1 complaint with the first game was excessive thesaurusing, so setting up some standards for word usage is definitely important.

That said, I don't know why would they obsess about dialogue attribution specifically when it's visually marked in the interface which character is talking.

The most egregious problems were the story was unstructured, the characters wooden and irrelevant, and the plot contrived. People just missed the forest for the trees. With many words they said nothing, in DF they continue to say nothing, but with fewer words. The words must be enough, no more and no less, a very engrossing story can get away with many words.

Yeah I'm trying hard to get into Deadfire now but the basic problem is I just don't care about the main plot in the same way I did about POE1. Children being born without souls was a pretty good hook, especially if you're a parent yourself and I wanted to both find out why it was happening, and stop it. In POE2 Eothas harvesting souls from Adra just has me shrugging my shoulders and thinking how long it is until my next level up.

It's brought home to me just how important the main driving plot is in an RPG. Most of the mechanics are the same, improved even, but I don't care enough to find out what's going on.
 

Sizzle

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The hook - someone stole your soul - is fine in and of itself (worked well in BG2), but the issue was that they didn't do anything with it.

The PC has no agency in the story, he just tags along after Eothas, always one step behind him. At the end, all the PC can do is slightly influence him. It's an awful way to frame a game - which is essentially a power fantasy - by reducing the player to a passive witness.
 

Lacrymas

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Pathfinder: Wrath
Everything can be done well, but a plot like DF's needs a serious philosophical grounding. MotB was also tagging along after a god, but it was focused on characters and their relationships, especially with themselves when faced with inevitability.
 

Sizzle

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Everything can be done well, but a plot like DF's needs a serious philosophical grounding.

Insisting that everything needs deep philosophical undertones is what makes many games today so messy on a narrative level.

You don't need to be deep and serious in order to be interesting, fun, and engrossing.
 

Lacrymas

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Pathfinder: Wrath
Not everything, only DF's story needed that. They wanted to have their deep narrative about powerlessness against the gods or fate, or divine intervention, or whatever (DF doesn't really have a theme), but they didn't explore that at all. I was just saying that such a story can be good, and DF didn't fail because of the premise of trailing behind Eothas, but it needs a different focus.
 

Sizzle

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You're focusing too much on the narrative and too little on the gameplay part. The "trail behind Eothas" wasn't bad (only) because it was a shitty story, it was bad foremost because you, as a player, didn't have the option to affect anything about it.

It could have been the best-crafted story in all of gaming, but that wouldn't change the fact that it fails to take into account that it is a game first and a story second.

That's the biggest difference between PoE2 and MoTB - in the former, you are letting shit happen to you without taking action (why shouldn't you try and wriggle out of Berath's control - maybe by using animancy, or by enlisting some other powerful beings?), while in the latter, you take a proactive role towards saving yourself.
 
Last edited:

Shackleton

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Codex 2016 - The Age of Grimoire Make the Codex Great Again! Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag. Pathfinder: Wrath I'm very into cock and ball torture
The hook - someone stole your soul - is fine in and of itself (worked well in BG2), but the issue was that they didn't do anything with it.

To be perfectly honest, I'd forgotten he even had my soul. So far, (15 hours in or so) it has had zero gameplay implications and it may as well be saying 'Eothas stole my lunch money' for all the fucks I give.
 

Lacrymas

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Pathfinder: Wrath
You're focusing too much on the narrative and too little on the gameplay part.
Those two are intimately connected if you want it to be like your theoretical example of maybe trying to get out of Berath's control. Tbh, this game's story fails on a lot of different levels. There is nothing particularly wrong about having a linear story without you having much of an impact, so maybe they should've focused more on that than on having agency, and then go full-on agency for a hypothetical third game. The very fragmented structure of the whole game didn't help, this is the most chaotic title I've ever played, and it contributed to the feeling the plot doesn't matter and is weak. It kinda turned out nothing in it matters narrative-wise, because you hop from one unrelated story to the next, and they aren't very good on their own.

I don't think DF stood a chance at having a good story or much success sales-wise anyway, it's obvious now that PoE1 failed to retain/create fans, so ehh. I don't think their writing team is up to snuff, Tyranny's writing is also carcinogenic and that's the closest they've gotten to interesting in terms of writing since New Vegas.
 

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