Eternity Pillars of Eternity II: Deadfire Pre-Release Thread [BETA RELEASED, GO TO NEW THREAD]

I watched Sawyer's stream and I dunno what I feel about it, how this empower thing will work out, from what I got, you have empower points that you can use as mega buffs for spells and abilities. Those empower points are limited and can only be recharged with resting. This opens a few tactical opportunities like, you are facing a really nasty fampyr that must be neutralized ASAP, you could use an empower point to buff your knockdown and turn it from a 7 seconds prone ability to a let's say... 30 seconds prone ability.

Let's say you have a paladin and a character is about to die, you use an empower point to turn your lay of hands from a mediocre heal spell to a full heal spell. All characters would have those empower points what is an interesting idea.

The negative side of it is what they gonna do with the spells? Are they going to make nerfed versions of the spells to be used per encounter? Are they going to use the spells as they are on PoE and just make their empowered versions stronger? Let's say, an empowered web instead of just causing a hobbled effect would actually root enemies on place?

This could so easily go wrong depending on implementation, if they keep things similar they are on PoE, it could mean you would have infinite cones of fire but instead of infinite cones of fire it would be infinite high level spells and this would lead to spamming. Now as the player can spam high level spells, the encounters would need to be designed to take this spamming into account what would lead to those encounters to only be winnable through spamming (clicking cast fireball on every single fight would become annoying quick) or otherwise you could easily break the game leading to a massive drop in difficulty later on.

If the spammable version of the spells are powerful enough to deal with the threats, for all purposes, PoE 2 would have a cooldown system but instead of based on number of turns, based on encounters what would be a dumb down from PoE 1. If the spammable versions are too weak, the annoyance to cast them every fight would be bigger than their usefulness and they would rarely be used, if their usefulness is big enough it would lead into spamming as why not cast 8 fire cones per fight even if a single fire cone is weak, a bunch of them are not and fire cones are rechargeable after each encounter.

The bonus you get when empowering a spell could be not big enough to justify all the work of having to rest and recharge them and the encounters you face might not even justify it as the normal spammable spells are more than enough.

 

In b4 everyone hoards Empower points like they were potions, scrolls, etc.

 

Feargus
DEVELOPER

@Andreas - We will have announcement on Tuesday that I think will cover at least one of those things. Our other challenge is we are being honest about what we have already planned and budgeted for, so we don't want to pretend in the Stretch Goals. For instance, we have a Big City, we already have our stronghold system although we are already planning on big changes with it. The decision we made was to do the crowdfunding later, because we felt we needed to show everyone we are far along - we felt that there has been a lowering of trust in the crowdfunding community, so we needed to make sure we earned your trust again.
We are listening though - tuning what we will be announcing and trying to make sure we have a balance between what we now we can do, what we should do, and added stuff that we could do if we get more funding.
Feb 5, 2017 | 08:16 PM

 

My main fear is that they'll go the Tyranny route and severely nerf the base power of all spells, but considering the powerlevel of lowlevel spells like Slicken and Fetid Caress, I'm cautiously optimistic.

 

Yeah I wonder what could possibly have caused that?

Nice to hear that they're not pretending in the stretch goals. That certainly explains why they are what they are. Localisation is easy to budget and do, all you need is to pay for it. I still think "twice the VO" is a bit pretend-y, since we don't know what the baseline for it is.

We'll see if they have any slightly riskier ones down the pipeline. While another Od Nua would be a Bad Idea, it'd be cool to see something more exciting than an AI scripting interface or another localisation.

 

I am glad they acknowledged some of the crowdfunding fuckups as of late.

Offtopic, how feasible do you all think a Fallout 1&2 exploration map would be for PoE2? Specifically, you move around the map to reveal cities or hidden locations with the possibility of random encounters. I think that would make a lot of sense, at least on the sailing portions of PoE2 (I am just going assume that is a given).

 

Big dungeons aren't a bad idea, they are only bad if you've already feature saturated your game to the point of being impossible to fulfill them well. PoE1 is a testament to that.

 

What are you talking about? PoE's dungeons weren't bad because of feature saturation (whatever that's supposed to mean), they were bad because they boiled down to wave after wave of trash fights.

If PoE2 has level design of TWM's caliber: more scripted interactions, fun little environmental bonuses (like the robber in Galvino's Workshop), greater enemy variety and better encounters, alternative routes to solving problems (like the Monastery in TWM2), then dungeons will be much less of a chore like they mostly were in the base game.

 

Got a partial answer to my question:

 

I'm kind of imagining it as the galaxy map from Mass Effect, which was a slightly more interactive way to do the same thing. That kind of thing is probably better done in controller games though; a Fallout map would be pretty cool and leave it open to random encounters as well.

 

Yes, and it turned out the way it did because they were spread too thin due to too many kickstarter promises, duuuuuh. OR they are just incompetent and can't design a dungeon, pick one.

 

There were some good dungeons (like the lauded Raedric's Hold) even in the base game, and TWM show they can indeed design good ones.

 

Od Nua wasn't all bad either.

 

The Ogre floor and the Drake floor were great.

 

That's a solid 13% rate of quality.

 

If everything is the same quality, none of it can be memorable

 

Vithracks were pretty cool too

 

Most dungeons are serviceable at the least. The most tedious and boring might be the Skaen temple for most people, but even then it has some good stuff and you can bypass a lot of it. Outside of that, the ones that aren't good are just unremarcable, not outright bad.

Temple of Eothas is good, Lle a Rhemen is also notable, Noonfrost is pretty fucking great (not Raedric levels, but it's the only dungeon that can be completed purely with stealth)... I really don't agree that the game had bad dungeons.

 

Am I the only one that doesn't give a shit about the main plotline most of the time (since they are usually garbage) and am more interested in well written and good scenarios for side quests? Something that can tell a story, have a bit of adventure, and then actually be resolved in a number of manners in a timely fashion? Main plots are always so retarded when it comes to how dire the event is like "you've got to save the world from this asshole who is spreading disease and blight every where among the land" meanwhile even in the main plot quests you end up dicking around wasting time and literally saying "I'm going to save this world, but at my leisure..." so dumb

 

The Watcher is not a Chose One? I really don't see any point in arguing about obvious things. Either you refuse to admit the obvious out of hypocrisy, or you are blind.

If you put "the" in front of a name by which the protagonist is known... that argument is already lost, I think.

Ok, by the same logic, in DA:I "the Inquisitor" (!) was not a chose one because he didn't earn being special, he "accidentally" got the ability to close rifts.

 

Dungeons in PoE may lack sometimes good encounters or content, but i have to say they were all pretty atmospheric

 

The dungeon I disliked the most was Cliaban Rilag - apart from a few scripted interactions, the entire thing was dull: druids, trolls, automatons - rinse, repeat.

Which was a shame, because, being Engwitihan ruins, it could have easily been much better.

 

Tthe visual design in Cliaban Rilag was nice, but the layout was boring and the encounters were unmemorable. At that point in the campaign they really should have had something bigger and more involved.

Hell yeah, Noonfrost was awesome.

 

I think part of the problem was that Cliaban Rilag was one of the earliest dungeons they designed and built. It might have even been the first or second vertical slice, IIRC.

 

Even the weakest dungeons of WM2 wipe the floor with everything in the base game.