Eternity Josh Sawyer reflects on his failures with Pillars of Eternity

[rusty_shackleford]

if you intend for a class to have buffs up all the time just make it an aura
if you don't, then stop making buffs that last for long periods of time

 

[Kyl Von Kull]

Automation is a separate issue. No reason not to make pre-buff scripts available.

But then what's even the point of having prebuffing in the game?

Action economy.

The lack of pre-buffing is emblematic of a larger problem that got worse in Deadfire, which is that there’s no meaningful attrition so each fight is entirely separate from the last. A fun combat oriented CRPG should have three layers: strategy (character building, gear), resource management (health, spells, consumables) and tactics (what you do in any given fight). Deadfire bends over backwards to remove resource management. Your health regenerates between fights, your only real per rest resource is empowerment, and like most CRPGs it’s no good at making you use combat oriented consumables.

That means each encounter is an island. You never need to think longer term when you’re fighting. For me that removes a big chunk of the fun. Same problem as IWD2 with its infinite rest spamming, but IWD2 at least had much better encounter design.

In his zeal to remove rest spamming, Sawyer built a system where you pretty much autorest after every fight. But the problem with rest spamming isn’t that it’s tedious, it’s that it trivializes resource management. He took out the tedium and kept the problem.

Kingmaker does it right—you penalize rest spamming with timers. Both POE and Deadfire would’ve been great candidates for time limits: you wait too long and you’ll go insane of have your soul ripped out.

 

[Prime Junta]

^
Preach it, bröther.

I can't think of a better example of throwing out the baby with the bath water than this.

 

[Maculo]

That was surprisingly candid about the state of PoE and his faults, which few developers seem willing to do. It does not excuse the issues with the series, but I give him some credit for that.

PoE2 appeared designed by committee, but I am not sure that sufficiently explains the problem anymore. There were just huge swings in quality, content, and tone. For example, I thought the Eothas scenes were decent, particularly when he shrugged off a volcanic eruption, a tsunami, and krakens. The problem was that those scenes were scarce, whereas we had overly drawn out "meetings with the gods" that were just god awful. It baffles me that the same set of writers developed, edited, and approved those scenes.

Gameplay-wise, Sawyer needs to chill.

 

[rusty_shackleford]

Kingmaker does it right—you penalize rest spamming with timers. Both POE and Deadfire would’ve been great candidates for time limits: you wait too long and you’ll go insane of have your soul ripped out.

Most buffs last long enough to clear any map though, and you're forced to rest after traveling so you're always fully buffed. You can even essentially keep haste up all the time with an extended metamagic rod + that item that gives +50% haste duration.

 

[overly excitable young man]

Automation is a separate issue. No reason not to make pre-buff scripts available.

But then what's even the point of having prebuffing in the game?

Action economy.

The lack of pre-buffing is emblematic of a larger problem that got worse in Deadfire, which is that there’s no meaningful attrition so each fight is entirely separate from the last. A fun combat oriented CRPG should have three layers: strategy (character building, gear), resource management (health, spells, consumables) and tactics (what you do in any given fight). Deadfire bends over backwards to remove resource management. Your health regenerates between fights, your only real per rest resource is empowerment, and like most CRPGs it’s no good at making you use combat oriented consumables.

That means each encounter is an island. You never need to think longer term when you’re fighting. For me that removes a big chunk of the fun. Same problem as IWD2 with its infinite rest spamming, but IWD2 at least had much better encounter design.

In his zeal to remove rest spamming, Sawyer built a system where you pretty much autorest after every fight. But the problem with rest spamming isn’t that it’s tedious, it’s that it trivializes resource management. He took out the tedium and kept the problem.

Kingmaker does it right—you penalize rest spamming with timers. Both POE and Deadfire would’ve been great candidates for time limits: you wait too long and you’ll go insane of have your soul ripped out.

Both BGs have the same problem and are the "best games ever made".

 

[Prime Junta]

PoE2 appeared designed by committee, but I am not sure that sufficiently explains the problem anymore. There were just huge swings in quality, content, and tone. For example, I thought the Eothas scenes were decent, particularly when he shrugged off a volcanic eruption, a tsunami, and krakens. The problem was that those scenes were scarce, whereas we had overly drawn out "meetings with the gods" that were just god awful. It baffles me that the same set of writers developed, edited, and approved those scenes.

Gameplay-wise, Sawyer needs to chill.

The story issues in Deadfire are a whole different topic, but the mechanical problems are all on Josh, and they're attributable to him trying to figure out what players want by analysing what they do, and drawing some of the wrong conclusions. There are improvements, mind -- for example related to visual clarity, and I don't thin dropping the party size to 5 was a bad call. But the attrition thing was a supremely bad call and it was driven by a particular bugaboo of his, namely his quixotic quest to eliminate degenerate strategies once and for all.

Same thing with the proliferation of classes and subclasses. It's just completely nuts and it's obvious his heart isn't in it. They're there because Josh thinks the fans want it because BG2 had a ridiculous proliferation of classes, kits, multi-classing, and dual-classing. He would've been much better off building all that into the classes based on the P1 system, as perks/talents/whatever you get to pick. He prefers classless systems anyway, so taking the game further in that direction would likely have helped.

IOW I'll go back to what I said earlier: it's clear his heart isn't in this anymore, and he needs to find it and listen to what it's saying. Then if it tells him not to make games anymore, do that. Or if it tells him to make the most autistically detailed historic Darklands tribute, then find a way to do that. Just stop pandering to an imaginary audience based on meticulous analysis of metrics, all that'll give is a soulless, empty husk of a game.

 

[Desiderius]

Kingmaker does it right—you penalize rest spamming with timers. Both POE and Deadfire would’ve been great candidates for time limits: you wait too long and you’ll go insane of have your soul ripped out.

Most buffs last long enough to clear any map though, and you're forced to rest after traveling so you're always fully buffed. You can even essentially keep haste up all the time with an extended metamagic rod + that item that gives +50% haste duration.

Only min/lvl and above, and only midgame and later on those. There are many valuable rnd/lvl buffs that it takes careful planning to have up when they're needed, and/or tradeoff decisions on using those vs longer duration vs offensive spells.

Not sure what your point is.

BTW, once you get the hang of the game its not about penalties (you've got plenty of time to do what must be done) as rewards for minimizing rest in the form of better artisan items and kingdom-wide immunities and the like.

 

[IHaveHugeNick]

It's a captain hindsight situation honestly, I don't think anyone could have predicted that 90% of Pillars 1 players will blow all their spells every fight and then backtrack for more camping supplies.

 

[Kyl Von Kull]

Kingmaker does it right—you penalize rest spamming with timers. Both POE and Deadfire would’ve been great candidates for time limits: you wait too long and you’ll go insane of have your soul ripped out.

Most buffs last long enough to clear any map though, and you're forced to rest after traveling so you're always fully buffed. You can even essentially keep haste up all the time with an extended metamagic rod + that item that gives +50% haste duration.

Depends on what level you are, but pre-buffing is just one example. The point has more to do with HP and spell slots. I don't care about any of these mechanics in particular. No pre-buffing, fine. No Vancian casting, fine. Regenerating health between encounters, fine. Just give me some meaningful form of attrition so that my decisions in one fight have a real impact on the next fight.

Both BGs have the same problem and are the "best games ever made".

I like Kingmaker more than either Baldur's Gate, in part because it doesn't have this problem. Also, BG 1 & 2 sometimes hit you with random encounters when you try to rest; those fights are usually pretty easy, but at least they provide a disincentive. In IWD2 you will never get attacked for trying to rest. That's closer to the Deadfire experience.

 

[Maculo]

The story issues in Deadfire are a whole different topic, but the mechanical problems are all on Josh, and they're attributable to him trying to figure out what players want by analysing what they do, and drawing some of the wrong conclusions. There are improvements, mind -- for example related to visual clarity, and I don't thin dropping the party size to 5 was a bad call. But the attrition thing was a supremely bad call and it was driven by a particular bugaboo of his, namely his quixotic quest to eliminate degenerate strategies once and for all.

Same thing with the proliferation of classes and subclasses. It's just completely nuts and it's obvious his heart isn't in it. They're there because Josh thinks the fans want it because BG2 had a ridiculous proliferation of classes, kits, multi-classing, and dual-classing. He would've been much better off building all that into the classes based on the P1 system, as perks/talents/whatever you get to pick. He prefers classless systems anyway, so taking the game further in that direction would likely have helped.

IOW I'll go back to what I said earlier: it's clear his heart isn't in this anymore, and he needs to find it and listen to what it's saying. Then if it tells him not to make games anymore, do that. Or if it tells him to make the most autistically detailed historic Darklands tribute, then find a way to do that. Just stop pandering to an imaginary audience based on meticulous analysis of metrics, all that'll give is a soulless, empty husk of a game.

I had the opposite take. I don't think the issue stems from Josh overthinking what the audience wants. Instead, I think it is an combination of Josh having to create a streamlined RPG for the masses (e.g., the lack of attrition mechanics) and Josh pushing what he wants out of an RPG system (no pre-buffing).

 

[rusty_shackleford]

Kingmaker does it right—you penalize rest spamming with timers. Both POE and Deadfire would’ve been great candidates for time limits: you wait too long and you’ll go insane of have your soul ripped out.

Most buffs last long enough to clear any map though, and you're forced to rest after traveling so you're always fully buffed. You can even essentially keep haste up all the time with an extended metamagic rod + that item that gives +50% haste duration.

Only min/lvl and above, and only midgame and later on those. There are many valuable rnd/lvl buffs that it takes careful planning to have up when they're needed, and/or tradeoff decisions on using those vs longer duration vs offensive spells.

Not sure what your point is.

Many of the important buffs are not round/level, I have no idea where you got that idea from.
Communal delay poison, communal resist energy, communal protections, death ward, good hope, heroism, enlarge person, legendary proportions, remove fear, freedom of movement, mirror image, and probably a bunch of others I'm forgetting.
These are things that all last long enough to cast when you rest and still be up for the rest of the map past the first chapter.
Other than haste, which are these oh-so-important round/level buffs?

 

[IHaveHugeNick]

Everyone is obsessing about PK outselling PoE, but the question is by how much. Is it 10% more, 20% more? If it's just that, there probably is still a ceiling for this type of game that RtWP cannot cross.

Sawyer's sense of the market was proven accurate by the smashing success of DOS. His mistake is settling for half-measures of trying to tinker with what is ultimately a cancerous combat system even in the best implementations, instead ofgiving it a TB chemotherapy.

 

[Cross]

Everyone is obsessing about PK outselling PoE, but the question is by how much. Is it 10% more, 20% more?

Deadfire has 4289 Steam reviews. Kingmaker has 8578.

Take a guess.

And that's with game journalists either ignoring Kingmaker or reviewing it negatively, while the polar opposite is true for Deadfire.

 

[Desiderius]

Many of the important buffs are not round/level, I have no idea where you got that idea from.
Communal delay poison, communal resist energy, communal protections, death ward, good hope, heroism, enlarge person, legendary proportions, remove fear, freedom of movement, mirror image, and probably a bunch of others I'm forgetting.
These are things that all last long enough to cast when you rest and still be up for the rest of the map past the first chapter.
Other than haste, which are these oh-so-important round/level buffs?

You can look in your spellbook as well as I can. Transformation, Sense Vitals, Greater Invis, Displacement, Divine Power/Favor/Eaglesoul/Holy Sword, etc.. and of course Haste, which you can't keep up constantly until late midgame if then.

You're also mixing together min/lvl, 10 min/lvl, and 10 min spells. I lean toward the longer duration since they're better value and I don't rest much, but until you get all the extend rods it's not trivial to keep even the min/lvl ones up all the time, and you're certainly not clearing the big maps in 10 min either.

Still not getting your point.

 

[IHaveHugeNick]

Everyone is obsessing about PK outselling PoE, but the question is by how much. Is it 10% more, 20% more?

Deadfire has 4289 Steam reviews. Kingmaker has 8578.

Take a guess.

And that's with game journalists either ignoring Kingmaker or reviewing it negatively, while the polar opposite is true for Deadfire.

First Pillars has 8,574 and we know it sold well over a million and much more than P:K. So I don't think number of reviews can any give the measure of sales, more like P:K was review bombed early because of all the bugs. It's still sitting at 73% compared to 83% of Deadfire.

 

[rusty_shackleford]

Everyone is obsessing about PK outselling PoE, but the question is by how much. Is it 10% more, 20% more? If it's just that, there probably is still a ceiling for this type of game that RtWP cannot cross.

Sawyer's sense of the market was proven accurate by the smashing success of DOS. His mistake is settling for half-measures of trying to tinker with what is ultimately a cancerous combat system even in the best implementations, instead ofgiving it a TB chemotherapy.

Problem with the argument that RTwP sells badly is dragon age origins which was one of the best selling games of its time.
And realistically, RTwP is a very blurry line. At what point do you draw the separation? Does it include any real-time RPG with pausing? Is Mass Effect RTwP? Does it mean you have to be capable of managing all party members? What about DA:I then? Does it require it to be using a round-based system simulated in real-time?(That actually would exclude DAO/PoE)

 

[Shadenuat]

I like prebuffing, d&d and killing kobolds in the mines

 

[IHaveHugeNick]

Global achievements are more interesting - 65% of players finished Deadfire's tutorial island, compared to 85% who finished P:K's tutorial castle.

 

[rusty_shackleford]

The castle is much shorter.
Probably about the length of time it takes you to get to Port Maje tbh.

 

[Cross]

Everyone is obsessing about PK outselling PoE, but the question is by how much. Is it 10% more, 20% more?

Deadfire has 4289 Steam reviews. Kingmaker has 8578.

Take a guess.

And that's with game journalists either ignoring Kingmaker or reviewing it negatively, while the polar opposite is true for Deadfire.

First Pillars has 8,574 and we know it sold well over a million and much more than P:K. So I don't think number of reviews can any give the measure of sales, more like P:K was review bombed early because of all the bugs. It's still sitting at 73% compared to 83% of Deadfire.

Kingmaker wasn't review bombed, otherwise there would be a disclaimer listed next to the review score. I guess you could argue that Pillars and Deadfire were so incredibly boring that few of its players could even sum up the effort to leave a review, but that seems like a stretch, as much as I enjoy shitting on the games.

Problem with the argument that RTwP sells badly is dragon age origins which was one of the best selling games of its time.

It didn't sell well because of RTwP. Most of the sales occured on console, where players only controlled a single character while letting the AI handle the rest, so it might as well have been an action-RPG.

 

[Desiderius]

Global achievements are more interesting - 65% of players finished Deadfire's tutorial island, compared to 85% who finished P:K's tutorial castle.

That Drake Panther whatever battle is the hardest in the game. So was Gorecci Street before they nerfed it.

 

[Nano]

It didn't sell well because of RTwP. Most of the sales occured on console, where players only controlled a single character while letting the AI handle the rest, so it might as well have been an action-RPG.

Are you talking about DAO? It sold a ton on PC. According to SteamSpy the regular version sold between 500k to 1 million, and the Ultimate edition (all DLCs included) sold between 1 million to 2 million. That's not including physical copies (which didn't activate on Steam) nor GOG or Origin sales.

Also, plenty of PC gamers let the AI handle things in RTwP games.

 

[just]

i dont want to read the whole thread
so is he a hack or not

 

[Lacrymas]

Ugh, it's as if nobody ever reads anything that is posted on here. Let's get some things out of the way.

1. "The BG series did pre-buffing and resource attrition perfectly so there was no need to change anything!"

No, it didn't. You always, ALWAYS had the option to rest and recharge whatever you wanted, effectively removing any sort of resource attrition that might've been intended (which we know it wasn't, BG was a dumbed down game for casuals). There wasn't a single fight in the whole game which required you to empty your entire spellbook to force you to think whether to use the spell slots for buffs or damaging spells. Both of these things combined means the Vancian system was mangled and wasn't used at all for the purpose it was created.

2. "Nobody complained about pre-buffing in ye olden days!"

Even if this is absolutely true (which it isn't) and nobody ever complained, that doesn't mean it's not a degenerate mechanic that only serves to waste time and only ever truly rewards metagaming even if done perfectly. If done perfectly, you wouldn't be able to scout out a fight, change the spells, rest and then do the fight, you'd be locked in your choice for a duration of time/the whole dungeon, so only metagaming can ever be rewarded. When there is no pre-buffing, at least you get the knowledge to not use that spell you've memorized in that fight when you scout and save it for later. Sawyer might be the first person to ever notice it and that wouldn't make it less valid.

3. "It's action economy!" (in the sense that it frees you to do other stuff during combat)

There are other ways to eliminate buffing to let you do other things in combat, whether that is permanent auras or feats, lack of buffing in general, permanent buffs you get from quests, etc. There's no need for it to be a time-waster the way it is now. It also removes a defensive layer in combat, you can only ever use your spells offensively if this is taken to the logical extreme. The exceptions being healing spells and if a buff runs out in combat, which people praise, but that can be applied to all buffs to always add that bit of choice. Which leads to -

4. "It adds a tactical choice!" (and it's conspicuously only when a buff runs out in combat)

I don't know why people do this, purposefully ignoring their own arguments. You praise the addition of tactical choice, but condemn it when it's actually present. It's only ever a choice when there is another, equally valid, choice to make in its place. That means that you EITHER buff OR do something else, not have the option to do both at the same time, which pre-buffing allows. The counter argument here is that it's resource conservation to choose to not use the slots for buffs, but that is not an inherent pro in pre-buffing. You can still have spell slots AND no pre-buffing, like PoE showed. Let's transpose this to a D&D game with no prebuffing, you choose Armor, Burning Hands and Blindness, so you are now free to cast those spells in combat. You cast Armor in the first fight (instead of before the first fight) and bam, that spell slot is already used. You could've chosen 2 times Burning Hands instead of Armor. There is no argument here because this can be present when there is pre-buffing and when there isn't. I.e. this is irrelevant.

5. "You can choose not to pre-buff if it's that tedious; or there is no need to pre-buff for every fight, so there is no tediousness involved!"

I didn't know not using the system to your fullest advantage is a virtue. I really don't know what else to say here, the argument is basically that it is tedious but you can make it not tedious by not using it. How is this a defense and not an indictment?

People only like pre-buffing because it makes them feel smart compared to people who don't pre-buff. Like they've found the Holy Grail. It's a shiny veneer that seems intelligent because it makes you win fights, but in actuality it enabled everyone to win by increasing the stats of your characters to such high levels before combat that it's almost impossible to lose without actually having to do any thinking or make any erudite choices.

If you have any other arguments, come at me.