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

I'm on the opposite side of that. I found it extremely jarring that when bunch of trolls are tearing my kingdom apart, one of the thousands people under my rule still expects me to find her son, and I can't even send someone to do it for me.

Most of the side quests in Kingmaker didn't feel like something a Baron would do, more like something Baron would send people to deal with. Maybe they should let you play as Baron's right hand man like in the DLC, instead of the Baron, it would be more fitting.

In Deadfire you don't really have a define motivation to find Eothas other than the gods force you to do it, it's up to you to decide your character's real motivation.

You can play as someone who don't really give a fuck as long as the gods don't show up to tell you hurry the fuck up.

 

Sorry but I'd rather take the word I quoted, of the lead designer of BG and the co-lead designer of BGII, James Ohlen, over yours. I think he's more likely to know exactly how it was done, don't you?

I mean, to some extent it's partly semantics, since unless they're based on photographs, most textures are "painted" in a sense. But he's clearly talking about 2-d painted backgrounds (with IIRC vaguely from another interview with someone else, 3-d meshes that fit exactly with the notional contours of the 2-d objects, for pathing). Whether maybe they used a few bits and bobs as normal 3-d objects, copied and pasted, then 2-d rendered - that may be true, but it doesn't alter the fact that the main thrust of what they were doing seems to have been large areas hand-made in 2-d.

 

Not really. The methods of how the maps are created are well known. Juat because some developer decided to call it a “painting” doesn’t really mean anything. But for the sake of argument let’s assume it is a painting because it is a 2D image. It’s not hand painted. these are 3D assets that are rendered in 2d and then touched up digitally.

I’m just kinda annoyed at this point that people keep reiterating this obviously flawed statement that BG was ever “hand-painted”.

You want to see hand-painted backgrounds? Look at Disco Elysium. Those use 3D models but most of the texturing is truly hand painted.

 

https://www.google.com/amp/s/kotaku...k-baldur-s-gate-after-17-years-1768303595/amp


“Hand painted”

 

As I said, most textures of any kind are literally hand-painted (digitally). When the developer says "beautiful hand-painted backgrounds" I think people understand he's not talking about digitized oil on canvas, but about the level of digitally hand-painted detail possible with gigantic images (5120 x 3480 even with the original BG) rendered from 3-d to 2-d being much, much higher and more bespoke than would have been possible in a realtime 3-d engine at that time.

 

I disagree, but no sense in hijacking this is thread any further. Let’s just both agree that whatever the method is they did make good maps back then.

 

I can see you are a developer. Please let me know the name of your game, so I can NEVER buy it.

 

Just play on Path of the Damned and it will be plenty hard.
I'm playing PoEI and got mauled by starting areas bears/spiders

Now I'm lvl6 and kicking ass (sort of)

 

Hard counters are not hard encounters. It means that there is no paper-scissor-stone system of countering magic spells like in the Infinity Engine games. This makes mage battles less fun.

 

wtf. There's a dialogue option with Xoti where you get to literally tell her that maybe if she killed someone close to us, she would feel better. I mean it's cool and all, but it came out of nowhere, she doesn't respond to the statement directly, and it's never brought up again. What is going on?

 

Shit writing

glad I could clear that up for you

 

Why?

 

Instead of "9.5% increase of effectiveness for 3 seconds" you have a clear system where every spell can be counteracted by another spell.

Mage battles are in fact one of the best parts of the Infinity Engine games and I have no idea why Sawyer didn't try to create a similar system.

 

It's because mages are i m b a l a n c e d.

 

I'd say it only creates automatic responses to the thing you are trying to hard counter. If I were making an RPG system, I'd make CC and powerful debuffs in general very rare (perhaps even a consumable) and have a long casting time, both for the players and mobs, so you have to really think about using it and when mobs use them against you you wouldn't have an immediate automatic response to them.

 

You're talking about it as if it is some theoretical concept. Play the Infinity Engine games, the hard counters there are done pretty well.

 

Nah i did the rest of her quest and it all makes sense now. Certainly not shit writing.

 

Hard counters also are not unique to mage battles. Things like Negative Plane Protection and Mace of Disruption vs vampires, Protection from Petrification and Potion of Mirrored Eyes vs basilisks, fire protection spells and potions and cold damage spells vs fire salamanders and elementals, it goes on and on. If you try to ignore the enemy special ability it can be fatal.

What a medium-high level party has is versatility and hard counters give you an enjoyable way to use it, instead of just finding the min-max combo that always works and that you use every battle.

 

Hard counters are an example of horizontal scaling, which is a good thing in general.

However for it to work properly in a game, the encounter design must be fairly carefully fitted to the party capabilities. If you're throwing wraiths at a party which simply has no negative plane protection at its disposal, you're creating a blocker.

BG2 in particular did this extremely well. AD&D is such an immensely rich system and it was so comprehensively implemented in it that this would pretty rarely be the case. (Even so, the first time I played it, I sold all my +1 junk expecting to find something more suited to my proficiencies soon enough... and then walked into the circus tent. )

 

Keldorn is my answer to mage battles.

 

BG 2 has brutal permanent debuffs like level draining and petrification and permadeath for party members.

When Deadfire designers were almost religiously afraid to inconvenience player with any impactful debuff, requirement for protection spell from specific spellbook or even simple encounter-to-encounter HP-pool managing and healing.

End result is so damn... sterile that could never compete even with 20 years old original BG, not mentioning BG 2.

 

Yes BG1 also had its share of basilisks, enemies requiring magic weapons to even hit like vampiric wolves and flesh golems, the dreaded web traps, sirenes with charm, enemy casters using Horror etc. You really had to pay attention to what you were facing and things could go south quickly if you weren’t.

Was playing last night and a battle started and Viconia had to decide “Do I cast Command to knock out one of their archers temporarily? Silence to try to negate their casters? Hold Person on their front liners?”

Durance yelled from offstage “Interdiction, you dummy. Always.”

 

Question: do you guys actually think it's good design to simply have items that completely nullify enemies?
oh man I'm fighting beholders this is gonna be tou— oh wait I bought a shield of balduran lol

 

Lots of entertainment is built around one person - Frodo, Buffy, whoever - being the key person in a situation (but not every situation) so that person’s fate and effectiveness become key concerns in that situation.

Yes your main is wearing the helmet of Charm Protection. All is going well till a Sirene you didn’t see charms your hasted Kagain. Oh shit.

 

Much better than "Amulet +5% Damage to whole party is overpowered, we need to nerf it to +3%".

Mind it, Shield of Balduran required collector edition for trader with cheaty items. I played BG 2 for years before seeing it for the first time thanks to internet + mods. Reflection cloak solves the same enemies, but at the time it is available beholders are barely a problem.