Obsidian's Pillars of Eternity [BETA RELEASED, GO TO THE NEW THREAD]

No, I admitted it was problematic if you wanted to focus on the plot and the story rather than on dungeon crawling and adventuring.
I do hate the idea that you're implying I'm not a 'traditionalist' (what the hell odes that mean? what's more traditional than killing things in a dungeon?) just because I'm simply saying that there are positive aspects to the quest structure in question.

 

Correction, many/most BG2 fans have a serious hard-on for that model, Athkatla (along with those cheesy/degenerate/unfair/confusing/metagamey mage duels) is often cited as one of the best things about BG2 by CRPG players.

And yes I'm well aware that they mentioned all IE games in their pitch but I bet that people wanting another BG2 fix made up the biggest part of the backers (goes without mentioning that BG2 was/is the most popular IE game).

And there's a reason people loved Athkatla as well, it managed to convey the feeling of a busy, sprawling metropolis by some distance better than most other CRPGs, not in small part due to concentration of (quality) content in that one place.

 

Infinitron pulling the traditionalist card! What next? Stay tuned for more great comebacks!

Jasese, did you know you like the quests in BG2 because you like big cities? It's not actually good for anything, though. In fact it's very problematic.

 

If a motherfucker says "Problematic" one more time I am going to make it rain grenades in this bitch. I swear to god. I SWEAR TO FUCKING GOD.

 

I sincerely hope PoE structure won't look like this:

-Prologue

-Chapter 1, city/village#1 and 3 wilderness areas.

-Chapter 2, city/village#2 and 3 additional wilderness areas.

-Chapter 3, city/village#3 and 3 additional wilderness areas.

-etc. (throw in a Stronghold and Mega dungeon somewhere along the way).


But hey I guess that would be great because content would be divided equally among different chapters and poor players won't feel confused/threatened (even quit the game!) by being bombarded by so many evil sidequests.

 

I don't think BG2 would have been as good if Athkatla wasn't so bustling with stuff to do.

 

In what way? And how do BG2's quests stop that? Still have to explain that except saying that it does.

You're arguing for some kind of textbook design again which apart from being bad on its own it's also Sawyer's textbook which makes it even worse.

 

Link to an in-progress solo BG2 playthrough by a super-cool Codexian dude. All available sidequests were finished in Chapter 2. Of course, levelling is easier when the XP is not split between party members.

 

I think the main reason BG2 is iiked is the fun combat, it's easily got the best encounter design of IE games. I don't know how it's much of a BI/Troika style game really. It's a D&D game done well, with a staggering amount of varied content.

But that is retarded. Many of my favorite RPGs don't tend to have such an obvious line of progression, but allow for that free roaming and make you think to yourself, "what next?", whether it is about which sidequest to embark on or how exactly to progress on the main questline. It's much more fun when the next thing to do isn't always spoonfed to you, even if the game technically allows you to go off the beaten path. It's an accomplishment when you finish a tough quest, regardless of how much trekking you have to do to get to the next questgiver.
I also like how it makes the difficulty of different quests more difficult to gauge - in Fallout you can be sure enemies will get tougher the farther you get from the vault, but in BG2, well also BG1, it's more exciting when you don't know exactly how tough opposition you'll be against. And the combat system allows you to pull decent punches even when underleveled.

Going from Shady Sands to Junktown to Hub etc., is kinda boring in the way that once you've been to a location, and explored it, there's very little to come back to. Whereas in Athkatla, you're going around switching your locale regularly, and there's stuff going on, stuff to do all around you for a long time until you've depleted all the various quests.

 

A lot of players were overwhelmed by the amount of content to do in chapter 2.

A lot of other players might have liked more to do in later chapters and less in chapter 2.

It's not like there were dozens of BG2s made with differing design decisions made. So the only thing you can do is point to BG2 as the best IE game and say no one should do anything different from it because no one managed to surpass it.

Spreading content out doesn't seem like a particularly controversial move. Don't you want to see new designers try some things new?

 

You should already know what the answer to that question is going to be.

 

So? This is pretty much the main argument for dumbing shit down. A lot of players are overwhelmed let's cut content because we can't overwhelm with too much content!

They had the option to do it in later chapters.

Something new? By Sawyer? If something new is copy/paste from MMORPGS and lolas or mobas or whatever they're called then certainly not.

 

Don't feel the troll Infinitron.

 

Butthurt detected

 

*PS:T: isnt exactly the industry standard. But you are right. Havent gotten around to play it yet tho, so i keep forgetting how good people say it is.

*I dont remember that moment but its true, they should have added another dialogue option there. And you are free to completely ignore irenicus, you can even imagine him killing imoen, absorbing her essence and becoming a god while you talk two kids in the gates of the city into being together and ignoring what the others have to say about it.

 

It would've been cool if there had been a timer of some sort. Not to bring up a game over-screen, but just something to make that fake urgency of the main quest into something more interesting and less dissonant. Something, anything, happening when you sit on your ass for too long.

 

Yeah, but then again, quests that wait for you is a thing in almost all rpgs, and when you get timed quest you see people saying how fucking annoying that is because it doesnt let them play the game at their own pace.

 

I think that the only timed quests in BG1/BG2 were the Marek poisoning quest and a few of the Underdark ones, respectively.

 

You could finish the game before the poison got to you tho, right?

 

Yes, I actually tested this in '99 and rushed through the game, but needed to summon Drizzt (wink, wink, nudge, nudge) for the final fight. Or maybe it was the chickens... I was a total newb.

I remember reading about a bug in the game that caused the poison to become incurable if the player killed Marek when encountering him, or didn't finish Lothander's part of the quest, or killed him without talking to him the second time he encountered him.

It would be hilarious (but pointless) if a BGT mod would remember the quest state and kill the PC a week later if he never found the cure.

 

It depends on where the code that kills you is located. If it's in the generic heartbeat script, then it probably would kill you even after transitioning to BG2 unless a modder manually flipped the variable that controls it off.

I might look into that with infinity explorer later.

Edit: Or I might do it now.
The variable that controls whether you're poisoned (PARTYCURED) shows up in DPLAYER2.bcs and DPLAYER3.bcs, at least on my (heavily modified) installation of BGT. DPLAYER2.bcs isn't referenced anywhere that I can find, but DPLAYER3.bcs is player's heartbeat script. I also couldn't find any references to PARTYCURED outside those two scripts, so it's not turned off when you transition to BG2.

So yes, unless I'm missing something, if you don't get the cure before beating BG1 you'd be completely fucked starting BG2 as you would be unable to get the cure at that point, although you could still use the console to set the variable to 1 which would accomplish the same thing.

 

Most likely the PC would die even before Irenicus captures him, or Irenicus being the cool dude he is, would cure it.