Pillars of Eternity Beta Discussion [GAME RELEASED, GO TO NEW THREAD]

We knew that. I couldn't think of a Black Isle joke though, so I went along with the Natalie Imbruglia song.

 

BTW, we have got a new Torn game,

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MM Text based browser game, kinda business tycoon.

 

I guess this shows how much of a dipshit I find Sawyer to be, I'm actively hoping my 90 bucks go down the drain just for the satisfaction of seeing the piss taken out of this douchebag.

I find the petty victories of life bring more joy to the heart than actual acomplishements.

 

He gambled, and failed on a crowd pleasing DAE hate Sawyer?? attempt

 

If the game is a failure, Obsidian will propably stick to AAA garbage and russian shovelware, so no, i want this game to be a huge success

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but i would be exctatic if the game is praised to high heavens for it's narrative while everyone complains about the combat being bland compaired to BG2, and magic system be a complete joke. Plus if people on You Tube that Sawyer loves watching play the game on easy and just enjoy the narrative. And Bester/Sensuki mod gets half a million downloads and become the must be mod to play PoE

 

I figured out a better way to 'remove' engagement as well.

 

Uninstall.exe?

 

In the next patch they have added an option to disable the movement stop/auto-attack clause on Engagement for the party (at least I think that's what it does). All we have to do then is simply remove disengagement attacks and maybe some of the UI stuff. The AI will behave the same and the player will be given freedom of movement.

I will still have to modify a fair few items/abilities/spells etc but it should work a lot better than it currently does.

 

For that to happen most players should be people like us (us as a forum, I mean), that have deep undersanding of how mechanics work and why they do it that way.

A great number of players don't know how the IE really work. Hell, you can see a lot of people not knowing the diferences between Icewind Dale and the Baldur's Gate, and I know a certain amount of people that has BG2 as their absolute favorite game and to this day they don't understand the mechanics more than to a basic level.

A lot of the Baldur's Gate fanbase are somewhat Biodrones with a little tendency to enjoy the kind of stuff the Codex likes (a lot of people that I know that loves BG2 enjoy deeply KOTOR's combat, and think is very similar, for example).
Hell, the majority of the audience that PoE will have probably isn't capable on seeing the fundamental changes, both mechanic and design wise, from Fallout 3 to New Vegas. I would be surprised to not see in general gaming forums a lot of people saying that this is exactly like Baldur's Gate, or even people complaining that it's too similar (although that I expect it more from some reviewers).

 

I know intricately how IE works and I am nowhere near the solid conclusion you guys seem to be at. Point being that mechanical understanding of the IE games doesn't automatically lead to the conclusion that PoE gameplay sucks. Even if it is vastly different from the IE-games as well, it might still be very good.

We'll see come release.

 

I haven't backed the project (being inherently a distrustful sort has its perks), but I second the sentiment.
Feelings trump monetary considerations

 

Just to clarify, I don't think PoE gameplay sucks. I'm quite happy with it, without having played the beta more than 8 hours.

Just trying to say that a lot of people won't reach the same conclussions that the people here in terms of similarity to the IE games.

 

While i find PoE combat boring, i wouldn't say it's a complete betrayal of IE if someone accepts that it will not be D&D. It is the fact that i dislike the design direction on very basic level.
To me it feels like IWD2's combat, stripted of D&D, and i dislike that.
If it was BG2 combat stripted of D&D i wouldn't have a problem. But since i only truly liked the combat in one IE game from the five (BG2), take my opinion with a grain of salt

 

Do you mean the encounter design, or what? 'Cause mechanically they were all pretty damn similar weren't they (other than the 2nd to 3rd edition thing in IWD2)?

 

Thanks! I will try to dig it there then.

 

Will it extend to nullifying enemy attacks against the moving party member due to engagement mechanics (being engaged and disengage)?
(I assume by auto-attack you mean the reaction of a party member AI to engagement after stop)

 

Jim the Dinosaur BG and IWD played differently, due to the differences in magic system and creature design. IWDs had way less hard counters and no puzzle like approach to combat encounters.
Compair battles against mages in BG2 and IWD2. Then do the same with illithids, liches,dragons.
IWD2 combat felt way closer to PoE, it was just mitigated by the D&D rules.

And because the reason i loved BG2 combat was the hard counterish spell and counterspell and the puzzlelike approach to encounters (plus i dislike the uniformity of PoE's ruleset), PoE's combat felt boring to me. Mind you, i stopped playing the beta after the first built, so i'm not exactly up to date, but even if they manage to implement everything perfectly, exactly how Sawyer dreams it, i still have the suspicion that i will find his perfect,balanced,tactical gameplay boring and bland.
And i prefered the way power armor and plasma weapons worked in Fallout 1+2 than FNV, even if it invalidated player consepts making them subpar. I don't give a fuck.
Same with itemization in General were i loved BG's, was meh about IWD's

 

Nah just the bit in brackets - party member AI.

 

On the money so far.

edit 2: as predicted

 

Next patch will likely be the last

Very different approach to inXile and Larian, who both provided updates closer to the end. Personally I'm a bit disappointed that I won't get to play an optimized build.

Gonna need to go hard out in early Feb to get that final feedback in - need to do some auto-attack stuff, animation stuff etc

 

What advantage is there to stopping updates to the BB 2 months from release? The day zero game is going to be a mess.

 

Compiling, testing and deploying new user-ready beta builds takes time they probably would rather spend fixing bugs.

 

But what better way to test optimization bugs than to get that patch out to thousands of different PC builds?

 

I concur, it's strange not to make use of the large pool of backers for performance testing :/