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

Dunno what you guys were doing in Dragonfall for it to take longer than South Park

 

Restarting to min-max their characters, presumably.

 

http://www.howlongtobeat.com/game.php?id=21118

Speedrun playthrough: 21h
Longest playthrough: 38h

 

I need to check when I get home from work, but I very much doubt my playthrough took that long.

 

The only trash you touched after Wasteland 2 launched is your obnoxious mother while fingering her for an honest buck and the viewing pleasure of all the wankers in the world.

 

It's hard to take your opinion seriously when you're quite obviously one of the WL2 head writers.

 

In fact I applied for the job at inXile but I was politely rejected for being too edgy.

 

It's not uncommon. Lots of people just buy a game and never play it. Others like to mess around for a few hours. Others just play it until it's not fun anymore and stop.

I bet if we had stats on BG2 from back in the day, it would look similar.

 

The more I play Lords of Xulima the more I think about the attribute system of PoE and why I dislike it so much. The two attribute systems are pretty similarly designed. The aim is to have all attributes be almost equally useful for all classes. Yet when I receive an attribute point in Lords I feel heaven blessed and I see a notable change in the game. I can cast more spells, deal more damage, my characters take longer to die, they eschew that armor penalty they had and so on. There are many factors assigned to each attribute and they all feel worth taking for most classes.

The point is that Lords of Xulima somewhat accomplishes Sawyer's goals, but without reducing the attributes to +2% to something each.

D:OS did not do anything to warrant me finishing it. I finish 90% of the games I play, even most bad ones I start, yet I didn't finish D:OS even though I really liked the first fourth of it. The last half of the game was a huge chore.

 

I know, I'm not saying they should be provided at level up, I'm saying the system is superflous and superficial and that "they must be there 'cause BG but I don't like attibutes so they won't matter" is a bad argument. Josh had two choices:

1) get rid of the attributes

2) design a sawyerist attribute system

What the attributes are currently is halfway to both and thus all the way to nowhere.

I like Sawyer's design philosophy, but I detest the way he compromises.

 

Since you can't change them after character creation, all the more reason to have them being critical on how your character plays, with huge bonuses and huge drawbacks

 

Or, well, detest is much too strong of a word. I just hate to see all that massive amount of design work go into what is basically just a tiny customization option.

They don't have to be critical exactly, like the way some stats completely define characters, just enticing and exciting.

 

A properly designed unleveling attribute system would have bonuses that scale with the character's level. The difference between a +1 bonus and a +4 bonus would matter more as the character leveled up. Maybe some skills/abilities add the stat boni more times depending on their level, for instance. The difference between a +1 bonus and a +4 bonus added three times to damage is quite significant.

Sawyer's system already does this, it's just that the boni are a bit small and hard to notice. Maybe I'm judging it wrong, I dunno.

 

I went through and checked completion rates of any vaguely rpg thing I could on steam.

Fallout: New Vegas has 4 main quest achievements so we don't know exactly what percentage got at least 1.
Wild Card 12.5%
Eureka - 6.6%
All or Nothing - 4.8%
Veni, Vidi, Veci - 3.1%

So somewhere between 12.5-27%

Skyrim - about 30%

Grimrock - 9.2%


So I suppose D:OS completion rate is significantly below these, but it has been out for less time.

 

DOS drop in quality after the first map is indeed quite sharp, it doesn't surprise me a lot of people just didn't bother with it.

 

In a shockingly bold new design decision, the stats have actually been changed recently to give a much bigger bonus.

Show Spoiler Hide Spoiler

They now give 3%.

Show Spoiler Hide Spoiler

Though I believe Resolve, Perception and Intelligence provide a 6% bonus per point now. Will have to wait for the next patch to be sure.

 

Eh? Like I said, it's basically what PoE does already (+% damage for instance), it's just that the impact is too insignificant.

4th edition does it

 

They could also compress the attribute range. It would feel much better if it was a 5 point scale instead of 15, but it has to go from 3 to 18 because AD&D apparently.

 

Yeah, I also thought they should have reduced the number of points you get to assign during chargen while increasing their impact.

 

No I'm not. You misunderstood me. i'm talking about te rest of the system drawing differently on the attribute system. Like a level five ability would add the bonus trice instead of once. It'sbasically a less fluid version of percentile progression. 4th ed already does it, like I said.

My problem with the system as is remains that it has little reason to exist at all.

 

I wouldn't go that far. The difference between the lowest and highest Might (3 and 20) is 50% damage, i.e. doing 10 damage versus 15 damage (simplying damage ranges into an average base damage to keep the example simple). The gap will be bigger when you factor in the enemy's DT, which will block out a part of the less Mightier character's attack and the fact that it's a % boost, meaning weapons with higher base damage benefit more from the stat. I'd like to have seen more significant bonuses, but it's certainly not 'tiny'. I'd argue it's greater than the effect of the strength stat in the IE games in chargen.