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

why didn't anyone post the new update?

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/obsidian/project-eternity/posts/367466

don't people care? or did I miss it?

 

Speaking of the "game length" issue, when it comes to cRPGs, I prefer them fairly long. 40-50 hours is pretty much the minimum I'll be content with, 70-90 is ideal, and I'll tire of nearly any single-player game with fixed content after 100-200 hours (at least until I take a break and return to it some other year). 30 hours or fewer of game length, and it had better be a pretty special cRPG in other ways.

'Course, my estimates include some amount of completionism and taking one's time to read dialog and item descriptions, explore and so on, rather than rushing through as quickly as possible.

 

If that's the case, I hope it's replayable and you can't finish all the content in 70-90 hours.

 

I used to be a member of the longer is better camp, then I played Dragon Age and it's incredibly boring ways to artificially increase game length. Now, I'm content with anything around 30 hours of actual game and not "here's a random encounter you can't run away from because we need travel to take at least 20 minutes to pad our game length".

 

tuluse but that's like increasing HP for enemies to make it more difficult, i.e. that's designers that are lazy not trying. that isn't a good reason for you to say enemies should be easy/games should be shorter.

 

tuluse, you essentially just stated that you've allowed the decline in a single made-for-console popamole title to dictate your taste in the length of an RPG.

What the fuck is the matter with you?

 

Make the game take X long is an artificial constraint on game developers and if they're trying to think of ways to meet some arbitrary time length, there is always going to filler content.

I would rather they just focus on making interesting content and it takes as long as it takes.

Edit: Also my first playthrough of Fallout took around 30 hours and it's my favorite RPG. I think I would rather have 2 30 hours games than 1 60 hour one. I like the tighter focus of the shorter games, though obviously not too short.

 

If they aren't creative enough to come up with content that isn't filler, they should quit their jobs and go do something else. There are plenty of people who can come up with good engaging content.

It isn't that they can't come up with it. It's that they're jerking off their time with "romances" "graphics" and other totally uninteresting things.

 

Casuals agree, which is why we now have literally six-hour-long games that cost $60 (Portal/Portal 2 and adventure games are forgiven, also they're typically cheaper).

Of course the content-to-padding ratio must be maintained, but even if they don't aim for a certain quantity of hours, they surely must aim for a certain preponderance of content. Granted, if it's a super-dense and amazing 20-30 hour RPG (or an old-school dungeon crawler), it might be good.

 

I didn't say 20 hours. I said around 30.

 

I don't mind longer games as long as they are long because of actual content and not filler. If the game is BG2 in size i'm OK.If it must have filler to add to the length then shorter is better.

 

It is literally impossible to create dozens of hours of gameplay without filler. Those old RPGs were full of repetition.

 

I don't really mind filler to some degree so as to make the game world feel less depressingly hollow and limited in scope. Depends on how it's distributed. Would you rather it be like the side quests in Oblivion where every seemingly unremarkable retrieval/dungeon quest had some super crazy mindblowing plot-twist that was sometimes interesting but other times simply dragged out the basic objective you'd hoped to be done with to take twice as long?

Plus if every aspect of the game is a complete novelty I almost feel as though it has a weaker sense of identity. It's weird I know, but in some ways all of the random dungeons and the like in old RPGs were nice now and then. Things like trash mobs and backtracking, yeah, that doesn't offer much.

 

Are you implying that the entirety of Oblivion isn't filler?

 

BG2 is one of the largest RPGs ever and a monstrous creation by all accounts. It's ludicrous to set that as a minimum expectation for any game.

I find any "game must be X hours" demand pointless since we don't even have a standardised metric, and there are so many different ways to deliver the X hours, and that itself doesn't actually guarantee any enjoyable experience. Besides which, I haven't found many games that I thought were good but wish were shorter, except perhaps DX1.

 

Enjoyable experience is a separate and necessary issue.

Long game means more value per money. It is at least as important as the game quality.

 

Exactly. People talk a big game about not pressuring developers to load cRPGs up with filler (please define filler and provide examples, by the way) just to meet an arbitrary "game must be X hours long" requirement. That all sounds very nice and sophisticated, but I guarantee you those same people wouldn't want to pay more than $5-10 for a five-hour-long cRPG, no matter how dense the content. Actually, they probably wouldn't want to buy it at all.

One hour is far too short. One hundred hours is asking a bit much, though it isn't necessarily too long, depending upon the game. Obviously there is a happy medium. I think 40-60 hours is a very happy medium, one that by no means necessitates a particularly noticeable amount of filler. Adjust that figure to 20-30 for extreme rushers, or 70-80 for completionists who like to really take their time.

 

And remind me which CRPG release in the last 15 years worth our attention/hope has not been in this broad 'medium' zone of "20-30 for rushers, 70-80 for completionists"? Fallout 1/2? Icewind Dale series? Risen 1/2? New Vegas? KOTOR 1/2? Witcher 1/2? Discounting indie games which have a different price-point anyway, we can point to Alpha Protocol as one title on the short-side, though that game has more replayable content packed in it than most, and whether you hated or loved it, length didn't really play a big role.

Of course I don't want a 10 hour RPG. The point is most RPGs worth talking about are already in that broad medium zone, so if you still continue to insist on length as an important factor, then either you need to provide some standardized metric to show why you want BG2 length not FO1 length, etc, etc, or, you can choose to be one of those people that wish every game is as big as Oblivion if it was actually full of stuff to do.

If P:E had raised only their target of a million I think I would have been worried, or expected, it to be shorter than most of the IE titles. As it is, I think it'll be 'medium' enough.

 

Oh, I completely agree. I've had that in mind myself throughout this discussion. Most of the Codex favorites and nearly all of my favorites are somewhere in the 40-60 hour range.

 

I took some time to get stuff sorted out, and only contributed through Paypal after the Kickstarter was already finished.

Still, here's a question I'd like answered:

Has anybody who likewise got in late (or donate through Paypal in the first place) gotten any feedback from Obsidian?
Its been a over a month since my payment was confirmed, and they haven't even sent me a email...

 

Tell that to Knights of the Old Republic, Divinity 2, Risen, The Witcher, Neverwinter Nights 1 and 2, and so on.

 

I didn't pay late, but Obsidian hasn't given news to anyone yet as far as i know, and they will for knowing what add-ons to give/etc.

 

NWN2 OC took me more than 100 h to finish.

 

Yeesh. I was going by http://howlongtobeat.com/gamebreakdown.php?gameid=529 where most people took about 60 and ignored the few that took 100+. I assume they spent most of that time in menus or inventories, as I often do.