Eternity Josh Sawyer reflects on his failures with Pillars of Eternity

[user]

Maybe they're waiting for the Deadfire console release so they can release the series everywhere at once? Yeah, that's still not actually out yet.

Didn't the console version come first? ...nm bad joke, none deserved it.

Could the sales of PoE2 have been so bad if they actually go through the effort and risks to try a PoE3?

Their goal was making their IP "mainstream" so that they could improve future iterations, grow as a company, enlarge their scope and create new projects. They may have made enough money to pay their employees and (partially) fund the next one, but not to achieve that goal.

 

[Sigourn]

Here's what's happening Josh:

• Pillars of Eternity did so well because of the time it was released in.
• It also did so good because it was made by Obsidian Entertainment, and people knew Obsidian because of Fallout: New Vegas, mostly.
• By comparison, Pillars of Eternity II: Deadfire released with significant weight on its back:
  • The weight that PoE proved that "being Obsidian" wasn't enough to deliver a quality game.
  • The weight that as a sequel to the original, a lot of people would think they would first need to play through the first game, and ain't nobody got time for that.
  • And if that wasn't enough, the game made much less money on Fig compared to what the original PoE had made on Kickstarter.
• Then add some sugar and shitty writing on top (because people think "lots of words" is good writing) and you've got a recipe for disaster.
• Not to mention the obvious social justice-inclined writing Obsidian has been displaying for a while already.
• And fucking RTwP, but people bought Kingmaker so...

So here, I give you a recipe for success:

• Stop adding SJW stuff in your games. RPGs have historically never bothered about LGBT rights and such, so this sticks out like a sore thumb.
• Dump your shitty self-inserting writers.
• Make the game turn-based.
• Make the game a standalone set in the Pillars of Eternity universe.
• Make characters look GOOD.

 

[Atchodas]

I am not saying that kingmaker didn't have bugs,but that both of them had a ton of them. Difference is that kingmaker fixed it shit and in the end it is a polished game,but deadfire still have many of its game breaking bugs. And yes,i have replayed both of those games after all their patches and dlcs dropped,deadfire is in a worst state bug wise at this point.

Half of Deadfire supporters here played a game for 5 hours and never finished it, it is evident from the shit they come up with which is entirely not true inside the game.

 

[AdamReith]

Here's what's happening Josh:

• Stop adding SJW stuff in your games. RPGs have historically never bothered about LGBT rights and such, so this sticks out like a sore thumb.
• Dump your shitty self-inserting writers.
• Make the game turn-based.
• Make the game a standalone set in the Pillars of Eternity universe.
• Make characters look GOOD.

Great list!

I wonder why, in their quest to elicit nostalgia they dumped genre style writing. Does anybody know if this ever came up in an interview or anything like that?

A high fantasy game without dorky medieval language and beautiful maidens is what exactly? Sure I'm still swinging a sword but why?

 

[Desiderius]

I am not saying that kingmaker didn't have bugs,but that both of them had a ton of them. Difference is that kingmaker fixed it shit and in the end it is a polished game,but deadfire still have many of its game breaking bugs. And yes,i have replayed both of those games after all their patches and dlcs dropped,deadfire is in a worst state bug wise at this point.

Half of Deadfire supporters here played a game for 5 hours and never finished it, it is evident from the shit they come up with which is entirely not true inside the game.

I'm a supporter of PoE. Didn't quite finish it because Thaos is meh, but got through Twin Elms and White March.

I didn't finish Deadfire but got through most of it. Neketaka is very good, Pirate Hideout, 5 level temple island, island to the East all fine. Lighthouse island meh. The rest worse than forgettable.

Liked characters in general. Making Mary Sue a redneck was SJW-subverting genius, but execution was a little try-hard. Other Poz pushing was jarring and off-putting.

Sub-classes and the like were great but overtuned and got worse with patches. Crafting/enchanting as poorly executed as the first game.

Bottom line was lack of meaningful content: when devs don't care enough to populate the game properly it's hard to care enough to finish.

 

[Lacrymas]

Could the sales of PoE2 have been so bad if they actually go through the effort and risks to try a PoE3?

I think the PoE name is already tainted. Maybe in 15 years someone can do a PoE3 and it would sell because it's a name that has been around for a while. That's assuming anyone remembers it in 15 years. The other possibility is that some ridiculously famous streamer/youtuber plays PoE2 and says how extremely good it is, so the game gets a boost in sales. Perhaps SsethTzeentach can do something for it, like he did for UnderRail. AoD should be first on his list though. PoE doesn't seem to be his cup of tea, however, since it's unusually railroady and scripted, so you can't do crazy shit like turn yourself into pizza or feed orphans to desert cannibals.

 

[fantadomat]

self-inserting writers.

It is not a problem in it self,the problem is that they could write only a self inserted characters and nothing else. Good writer could make a good self insert as the villain or a well written side character.

 

[deuxhero]

I hope Owlcat gets this, and makes Pathfinder: Kingmaker 2 completely new/own thing.

We already know the sequel is going to be based on a different adventure path. At most we'll see a save import to reference the kingdom being built (most APs take place in the middle of Kingmaker, including Skulls and Shackles, Iron Gods, and Hell's Rebels, which are the three most likely to be adapted due to being the least linear by far.)

Pathfinder: Kingmaker 2 completely new/own thing.

i am sure it is. you can't escalate the PF:K anymore unless you go to absurd epic level and ended up with JRPG tier over the top story like throne of baal.

there are tons of campaign they can choose from.

or just make it the rasputin PF campaign lol

Problem with Reign of Winter is the plot outright prohibits backtracking, which is an issue in a cRPG.

Spoiler

Book one has the players step through a one way magical portal that takes them 2000 miles away and places them under a Geas like effect to follow the main quest. Book two and the rest end with Baba Yaga's hut taking them to a new place, often with OP enemies in hot pursuit that would be waiting for the PCs if they came back.

 

[Desiderius]

OP enemies in hot pursuit that would be waiting for the PCs if they came back.

They just gave the players the tools to go over the top of OP enemies in P:K. They could do the same with Reign.

 

[PrK]

If there is anything Josh has done well in terms of gameplay design, it is to remove pre-buffing. It might make sense to pre-buff yourself from a narrative standpoint, but from a gameplay perspective it's just tedious busywork that adds nothing. It's muuuch better to actively think whether to buff or to use other things in combat.

If you are casting the same buff every encounter, or have it constantly up anyway, there's something wrong. Either the encounters are trashy, copy-pasted time-wasters, or pre-buffing exists but should be baked into the classes and not be an extra button to push after every rest. What I mean is that it's better to weigh the pros and cons of buffing, debuffing, damaging, healing etc. than the buffing layer being exclusively out of combat. It just makes more sense gameplay-wise.

I’d like to present some counterarguments vis a vis the removal of pre-buffing.

A lot of buffs are situational. You don’t always want to have them on. There are hard counters: they can be dispelled. You then have to reapply the buff or do something else. They have varying lengths. You can’t pre-cast every buff and expect it to last the whole fight let alone the whole dungeon. They take up spell slots! The most obvious one, they compete with other spells. For every Defensive Harmony you have one less Cure Serious Wounds. I’m not even going to get into sequencers/contingencies.

More specifically concerning your points:

It's muuuch better to actively think whether to buff or to use other things in combat.

Pre-buffing doesn’t negate that, you still have to make the decision mid combat whether to reapply a buff that run out/got dispelled, cast one for the first time or do something else, as well as having to make an additional choice before an encounter regarding the type or number of buffs to cast.

If you are casting the same buff every encounter, or have it constantly up anyway, there's something wrong.

Certainly, shit like Mass Cat's Grace etc do work in favour of your point, but that is the uninteresting spells’ fault, not inherent to pre-buffing.

or pre-buffing exists but should be baked into the classes and not be an extra button to push after every rest.

That would be straight removal of tactical choice, which is decline, and as I indicated pre-buffing does not equate to mindlessly casting things after resting.

What I mean is that it's better to weigh the pros and cons of buffing, debuffing, damaging, healing etc. than the buffing layer being exclusively out of combat

Having all of the tactical decisions be made during combat (apart from leveling/memorisation phase) constricts the design space for interesting spells. During combat actions that affect your opponents are the most apparently pressing and the time scale to make them is smaller; buffs that may be cool but are obviously a weaker choice get ignored.

Note I haven’t played Deadfire yet after I tried the backer beta and got triggered by the reduced party size and everything per encounter inanity. Still, concerning Sawyer’s choice of pre-buffing absence from PoE despite being a big part of IE games, I give it an adamant thumbs down.

 

[Trans-Financial-Man]

The world of PoE is interesting. It was just presented in such a cold and lifeless way in the first game. Unfortunately, Pillars 1 was the game with the good writers and designers. So whilst Obsidian did take on board the criticisms of PoE 1. They didn't actually know how to improve upon it because PoE 2 was made by the blue haired twink crowd, for the phantom blue haired twink market that does not exist.

 

[Frozen]

The same people who claim Pathfinder wasn't bugged also claim that Greedfall has no backtracking and fetch quests.

Connect the dots.

2 words: autistic Germans

 

[Trans-Financial-Man]

The same people who claim Pathfinder wasn't bugged also claim that Greedfall has no backtracking and fetch quests.

Connect the dots.

2 words: autistic Germans

Ah yes, the same people who say Gothic 3 is good.

 

[Frozen]

"Gothic controls are perfectly fine!"

" What do you mean you don't use legs while gaming?"

 

[Lacrymas]

PrK, all of that can be countered by saying that you could still have situational buffs, but they can be cast only in combat. Say, fire resistance. You go into the plane of fire and start seeing some rock elementals and 1-2 fire elementals, do you buff fire resistance in this fight or go straight for something else? That's a choice. Then you go deeper and deeper, encounters start consisting mainly of fire elementals and perhaps greater fire elementals. Do you cast fire resistance during these fights? Almost certainly. Also, having situational spells that you will only ever use in one zone in the entire game is pointless. There are no "tactics" involved in pre-buffing, it's only ever strategic, and dumb strategy at that because you'll cast the buff and forget about it throughout the whole plane of fire unless something specifically dispels you. All your points are still directed at combat usage of buffs (reapplying them in combat if they are dispelled, taking up spell slots that can be used for different things, etc). PoE has spell slots, so you aren't removing that layer at all.

Purposefully choosing to gimp yourself by not casting buffs before every fight (especially because it's tedious) is not a feature of the combat system, it's an indictment.

 

[ERYFKRAD]

Gothic controls are perfectly fine

They are fine, you üntermensch.

 

[BING XI LAO]

I thought PoE and PoE2 were both perfectly good except for 2's writing being mediocre and tryhard
Isn't PoE2 especially one of the best looking games out there of its type?

 

[user]

The world of PoE is interesting. It was just presented in such a cold and lifeless way in the first game. Unfortunately, Pillars 1 was the game with the good writers and designers. So whilst Obsidian did take on board the criticisms of PoE 1. They didn't actually know how to improve upon it because PoE 2 was made by the blue haired twink crowd, for the phantom blue haired twink market that does not exist.

Was not too fond of the watcher plot and how it was introduced. Oh, shit happened, you have powers now, hanged old lady at next town will explain in a creepy voice with a gypsy accent for bonus extra effect.
Surely got the concept from MotB, which kind got it from BG. And nothing wrong with that it's a fun concept and allows for alignment decisions, but they barely added any of these anyway. And the way they served it to the player made me cringe at certain points.
Castle was nice with sufficiently enough options of how to proceed. Later on, liked the sanitarium part and thought I would have to solve some mystery with different results - but when it ended, I was like "was that it?".

I thought PoE and PoE2 were both perfectly good except for 2's writing being mediocre and tryhard
Isn't PoE2 especially one of the best looking games out there of its type?

Agree to that. The world design is nice, the assets are beautiful.

 

[Infinitron]

Two observations about prebuffing and PoE:

1) As people have said before, the game actually has prebuffing. Food and modals are effects that you can apply on yourself before combat. What they have in common - they're effects that are long-term or permanent. One thing I can imagine an RPG offering is a prebuff with a short duration that only starts counting down when combat begins, so there's no bullshit where you have to make sure you cast multiple buffs in the right order and then rush immediately into combat to maximize their duration.

2) Something I think people might be doing is unnecessarily conflating all forms of "out-of-combat effects" with prebuffing. Remember, in PoE it's not just that you can't buff yourself with a beneficial status effect outside of combat - if you're poisoned during a fight, the poison effect disappears once combat is over. I can imagine an RPG that removes most prebuffing but keeps the "post-buffing" spells that deal with the damage you took during fights. I think that would retain the most important part of the strategic survival element of roleplaying that is lost when you adopt a strict combat/non-combat separation.

 

[deuxhero]

OP enemies in hot pursuit that would be waiting for the PCs if they came back.

They just gave the players the tools to go over the top of OP enemies in P:K. They could do the same with Reign.

Spoiler

Even if the PCs could cheese their way to victory, there's the small problem of the foe that stops them from going back to the stuff in book 2 and late book 1 being one of the main antagonists and the entire country. It would completely short circuit the plot to allow them to.

Basically you'd have to do this since the plot is so heavily broken.

 

[user]

Two observations about prebuffing and PoE:

1) As people have said before, the game actually has prebuffing. Food and modals are effects that you apply on yourself before combat. What they have in common - they're effects that are long-term or permanent. One thing I can imagine an RPG offering is a prebuff with a short duration that only starts counting down when combat begins, so there's no bullshit where you have to make sure you cast multiple buffs in the right order to maximize their duration and then go immediately into combat.

2) Something I think people might be doing is unnecessarily conflating all forms of "out-of-combat effects" with prebuffing. Remember, in PoE it's not just that you can't buff yourself with a beneficial status effect outside of combat - if you're poisoned during a fight, the poison effect disappears once combat is over. I can imagine an RPG that removes most prebuffing but keeps the "post-buffing" spells that deal with the damage you took during fights. I think that would retain the most important part of the strategic survival element of roleplaying that is lost when you adopt a strict combat/non-combat separation.

1) What is wrong with the game rewarding you for knowing your character and spells? Don't think it's too much of a hassle to separate the /min and /round spells for example. There is value at knowing and choosing how to handle your resources e.g. when you decide to waste a slot for that /round spell pre-combat. Of course these hardly matter when you are able to click and win.

2) For me it's not only the strategic element that is lost. It's immersion, suspension of disblief. I am a bloody wizard, but I can only cast that spell only when "inCombat = true". Do I have to be reminded every single time I open my spellbook that someone put that artificial restriction there in order to balance the game?

 

[IHaveHugeNick]

Stopping before every fight and going through your prebuff routine for 10 minutes is so immersive.

 

[PrK]

PrK and all of that can be countered by saying that you could still have situational buffs, but they can be cast only in combat. Say, fire resistance. You go into the plane of fire and start seeing some rock elementals and 1-2 fire elementals, do you buff fire resistance in this fight or go straight for something else? That's a choice. Then you go deeper and deeper, encounters start consisting mainly of fire elementals and perhaps greater fire elementals. Do you cast fire resistance during these fights? Almost certainly.

If pre-buffing doesn’t exist though, in your example, even if you scouted the encounter ahead you wouldn’t be able to cast a fire resistance spell before triggering the fight, upon which you may be better served just disabling the offending enemies and focusing them down. Strength of buffs would play a big role here, see PoE: priests are overpowered in no small part due to their amazing buffs which kinda have to be to compete with the other ways of damaging or controlling enemies as soon as the combat starts.

There are no "tactics" involved in pre-buffing, it's only ever strategic, and dumb strategy at that because you'll cast the buff and forget about it throughout the whole plane of fire unless something specifically dispels you.

Strategic are the attribute/skill/feat etc choices at levelup, pre-buffing is absolutely tactical. You can’t cast and forget because they have more often than not limited duration or may not stack with each other.

All your points are still directed at combat usage of buffs (reapplying them in combat if they are dispelled, taking up spell slots that can be used for different things, etc). PoE has spell slots, so you aren't removing that layer at all.

In PoE though the spells that in IE you would cast before an encounter are either absent or made overpowered so you actually have a reason to use them instead of a fireball when face to face with an enemy. In a sense yes, that indeed alleviated the loss of pre-buffing, however it still is tactically diminished simply by virtue of having fewer stages in which to make choices.

Purposefully choosing to gimp yourself by not casting buffs before every fight (especially because it's tedious) is not a feature of the combat system, it's an indictment.

You chose to not cast a certain buff before the fight mainly because you want to conserve resources - you may need it further down the dungeon for a more difficult fight - or simply because say Protection From Petrification wouldn’t do anything for you in that instance. You are not gimping yourself, and if you find even that tedious you can instead memorise only spells applicable during combat.


I’ll give you this though, NWN2 pre-buffing was tedious. In IE games on the other hand, which are the ones PoE was supposed to imitate it was more than fine.

 

[Lacrymas]

People who accuse PoE of "balance" and that that "balance" is at the heart of the problem with the system don't know why balance exists in general methinks. It's not so much for the player, but for the encounter design. If you have 1 or 2 very overpowered builds, how do you balance the mobs? Do you balance them for the other builds or do you balance them for the overpowered builds because it's assumed you'll use them anyway? The point is consistent challenge, not stopping your fun. Where is the fun in steamrolling all opposition? Then you complain it's too easy.

2) For me it's not only the strategic element that is lost. It's immersion, suspension of disblief. I am a bloody wizard, but I can only cast that spell only when "inCombat = true". Do I have to be reminded every single time I open my spellbook that someone put that artificial restriction there in order to balance the game?

Immersion is misunderstood and frequently overrated. Sometimes it's beneficial to sacrifice ludonarrative coherence in favor of gameplay and there's nothing wrong with that if it's justified, which it is in the case of PoE's system. You can always think up a reason why mages can't cast outside of combat, you can only ever strengthen with magic when your adrenaline is high for example.

 

[IHaveHugeNick]

All of these debates about vancian/non-vancian, prebuffing/no prebuffing, health/stamina/wound/mana/whatever are easily solved by one simple trick - leave RtWP in the 90s where it belongs along with the Spice Girls and the Backstreet Boys and go turn based already.