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

(the insert quote system is broken for me for some reason)

For me it's like I said, my thinking is - I don't particularly like any of its elements - the combat, the story or the characters, quests, character-building options... yet I did spend a couple of hundred hours playing through it and the expansions, so there has to be something that makes it worthwhile, hence, better than the sum of its parts.

 

One thing about BG2 and perhaps BG1 that's definitely better than PoE is the initial part of PoE. The railroading to Caed Nua before it lets you go anywhere else but Gilded Vale feels very linear, discouraging and even boring. It actually made me drop the game first time around when I played it and is Bethesda tier.

Compared to BG2 where you get out of a dungeon/prison (with really hilariously bad dialogue), once you are out you are free to be lost. I feel just removing the part where you have to repair the southern wall in Caed Nua would improve the experience in PoE quite bit, so we are not gated by maerwald from rest of the content of the game.

Which of course then goes back to a general issue of pacing and lack of narrative direction in PoE in general.

 

Thanks, that makes sense.

It also takes the discussion into the realm of the subjective.

I agree about "more unified, disciplined, and restrained construct" by the way. Thing is, that's not unambiguously positive: BG2 for example is anything but unified, disciplined, or restrained, and it's precisely that "lavish buffet" feel that gives it its particular charm.

 

One area where PoE indisputably wins vs the IE games is reactivity and multiple possible solutions/resolutions to every quest. Most of them are not really memorable though, and have no long-term consequences which would affect other quests.

For this I would blame in one part the writing, in another the fact that you don't really get memorable or significant rewards for quests, because of the "+1.6s"-style of the ruleset.

 

I would happily trade reactivity and multiple solutions to quests for better quality writing.

There were a lot of cool quests in baldurs gate 2.

 

BG2 was "everything, plus the kitchen sink". So while there were plenty of memorable quests and okay-to-good writing, there was also lots of "Coo! Come with me then!"

 

And Siege of Dragonspear has more reactivity and possible solutions/resolutions to quests than PoE. Your move.

 

Multi-quoting is also broken for me. After I click "Quote these messages", there is just a black loading bar on top of the screen and nothing happens.

Is this a problem with the game or just the effect of a decade of experience leading you to just scour a map for every quest opportunity before moving on? I know I haven't played BG2 the way you're describing after my first experience with it.

 

Of course it is.

Baldur's Gate 1 has a lot of content in between its chapters. Even if you scour each 'hub' between the Friendly Army Inn and Nashkel, you'll clear a minority of the content avaiable on the southern wilderness. PoE is very much hub based. To make it closer to BG1 you'd need to add lot of room and content around Gilded Vale, Caed Nua and Defiance Bay. As well as removing the gating at the middle.

 

It also has some of the worst writing to ever grace the CRPG genre.

 

What reactivity and C&C? I liked Dragonspear but can't recall any of those. There were well crafted quests/dungeons, but they were pretty linear.

BG1 is a bunch of empty maps you have to map out like an eraser, while walking at snail speed to hit one or two points of interest. Good fucking riddance to that shit.

 

You press a button something awesome has to happen. At every corner something awesome has to happen.

Button = awesome. You can't go wrong.

 

There is a middle ground between empty maps and button = awesome.

By your logic Age of Decadence is the ultimate Awesome Button game.

 

By your logic maps can't be 'empty' and therefore something awesome has to happen all the time. How many points of interest should there be in a map you clear in 10 minutes? You think two is too little. Maybe 10 then? 20? One point of interest every 30 seconds or so?

 

BG1 is that middle ground. Every map has something to do, I don't think there's a single one where nothing is happening or you can't find anything.

Nobody has said anything about C&C. The majority of quests in SoD can be completed in at least 2 ways and the reactivity is token, mostly based on race/class, but it has more of that than PoE, where reactivity to these things are also token.

Not really. Most of PoE's overall writing is worse than SoD's.

 

Nice dodge.

Running around a map with the sole purpose a finding 1-2 points of interest (since everything else is random useless thrash encounters) is boring to me, remniscent of MMOs. Few of them have any connection to the greater story, there are better ways to hand side content out.

Citation needed.

 

The citation will come when someone makes an encyclopedic list of both, maybe I'm wrong about the amount of reactivity to race/class, but I'm not about the possible solutions. Also remember that SoD is 20ish% the length of PoE, so the overall % of reactivity may still be higher in SoD.

 

I'll take lore dumps over fantasy trannies and stoned (fully voiced) surfer dudes any day.

SoD fails writing at the most basic, fundamental level. Just take a look at this conversation you have with Korlasz at the very beginning of the game:



Only the first option is something a sane person would believably say (even though it, too, is weirdly worded), the second one is an awful attempt at humor ("bone boys", fuck me, that's bad), and the third one... well... only a very specific kind of low-INT Paladin would conceivably talk like this to some inconsequential starting mook.

Awful, just awful.

 

Who are the bone boys? Does SoD have alt-rock bands?

 

You can always find something, but often that thing isn't worth the trouble. Like that wilderness map with the Xvart village/fort. Just you running into lots of Xvart, no reward at the end, no long-term consequence, no dialogue at any point, nothing.

 

Bad lore dumps. Which the game is filled to the brim with. SoD has one tranny, who is painfully pointless, yes, and one stoned guy who actually gives you an interesting toy to play with. SoD doesn't fail at the most basic level, which is making sense. SoD's main quest, as a self-contained entity, makes more sense than PoE's. Yeah, SoD has a lot of OOC moments, like with Korlasz, but otherwise it tries to be constrained and give you at least one neutral, sane option to respond with, so at that it's pretty similar to PoE. SoD's writing is too contemporary, ideologically infused in some places, nu-Bioware style, but isn't as pretentious as PoE and I enjoyed it more than PoE's. Don't take this the wrong way, though, both are very bad.

I was actually thinking about that map when I was writing that, but you and I seem to have remembered it, so it has that going for it. It has dialogue, though, the Xvart announce that the bears they are keeping as pets will kill you, but then the bears turn on them IIRC.

 

SoD is so rail-roaded you can hear the train whistles. You can't even revisit the maps. Check and mate.

 

So what? It has more stuff to do on each map. The story in PoE is on-rails, too, the only difference is that you can't return to a previous clump of locations in SoD, which makes sense in the story. It's not like there's a reason to return to most maps in PoE, anyway. I don't think the linearity of critical maps is that big of a deal in SoD, you can do everything in each map before moving on. I wouldn't like if every RPG is like this, but as a once-in-a-while thing it's not a deal breaker. It also works in SoD because the level-range is incredibly small, there's no room for having an unbeatable encounter in the first map that you can come back to in 3-4 levels. If you can beat something at the level cap of 10, the chance of being able to beat it at level 9 is very high.

 

Like I said. You press a button and something awesome has to happen. Like actual MMOs.

 

Compared to this crap, PoE's lore dumps are Pulitzer material.

It also has established characters changing their behavior to suit Beamdog's agendas, conversations where you're given no option at all but to behave like a butthurt feminazi (like the "wench" one with Voghlin), etc.

SoD fails at its very inception, as it is a pointless, cash-grab pseudo-expansion, set in a period no one but the most fanfic-penning fanboys and fangirls ever gave two thoughts about. The entire Beamdog's EE line, topped off with SoD, is nu-Star Wars tier in their utter uselessness.

A self-contained entity that can be (and should be) safely ignored. I. e. - not a very good one.

I'm pretty sure PoE usually gave us more than one. SoD often does not give us even the one.

Don't know what to say. I very rarely thought that PoE's writing was full-on pretentious, while I often thought that exact thing about SoD's. As in - you can see that it was written by a very poor writer, who actually thinks they are really very good, and so tries to cram in "humor" and that certain brand of aggressive leftist propaganda every chance they get.

The difference being that PoE's could have used an editor, and SoD's could have used an entirely different writing team