Codex Review RPG Codex Retrospective Review: Pillars of Eternity Revisited

I'm not sure I agree because base level IE game AI isn't that much better than base level PoE AI. You can end huge encounters with enemy mages in BG1 that were clearly meant to be big, difficult showdowns by casting a single spell that kills all of them because of their insignificant hp levels.

EDIT: or well, I agree completely that enemies that fight back changed this, but more than fight back, it's about defense. The crux of Sword Coast Stratagemens for instance is pre-buffing and the AI using spells and abilities that set up key defenses. And it's also the concession that Sawyer gave grognards on 2.0 and forward: enemy defenses are what make the player switch tactics if you can't make sufficiently diverse abilities and encounters to ensure that the same strategy isn't equally good in every encounter.

 

The keywords system in P2 is actually pretty interesting from this PoV. It would be trivial to write an AI that uses it perfectly, much better/faster than a human could, instantly countering anything you throw at it. I think most players would find that really frustrating.

On the other hand, with a more human-like and less perfect AI, it could make for some quite interesting mage duel type situations. But it's all in the execution.

 

Are you kidding me?
You can still distribute your skill/attribute points randomly as everything influences everything to a degree, and play just fine with that character. The minuscule differences from an "optimized" build don't even matter on PotD, except for maybe a handful of fights, and that's hardly an argument.
The only "build option" is your choice of class, but from that point on, it's all the same. In the IE games you at least had to understand the system to create a good starting build. But from that point on, both the IE games and PoE offer very little in terms of advancement choices.

And in Pathfinder/D&D3.5 there were many ways to build very different but working characters within the same class. Because it has feats that are actual game-changers and not just a few % here and there.

Really, what will make one druid build notably different from another?

 

It read like an excuse - ie "the plot was focused on Thaos but the game couldn't reveal much about Thaos because it depended on a twist that you shouldn't learn about until the last two hours." Maybe that wasn't your intention. Either way, the problem with the game's plot wasn't that it depended on a twist or that Thaos's intentions couldn't be known to you. It's the fact that the writing lacked focus and tried to fit a traditional adventurers' wandering into an urgent mission. This is indeed a general problem with new generation CRPGs, but that isn't an excuse, either.

Gilded Vale is no more than a standard fantasy town. The Hollowborn crisis, though original, was never explored in-depth. The most you do is convince a woman there is no cure for the crisis and kill the local lord who's hanging people because of it. Could've replaced that with any standard motivation and it'd have fit just fine. Compare that to the settings and interactions in, say, Neverwinter Nights 2: Mask of the Betrayer, and the difference is obvious.

Why would you praise him for a feat he didn't accomplish, and why should we care about whether you think he could've accomplished it? I think that's a serious lapse in objectivity. We can give credit to Sawyer for seeing the error of his ways - but in praising him for his initial failed design, you're trying to have the cake and eat it too.

There are very few 'outright useless assets' in Dungeons and Dragons, unless by that description you're talking about sub-optimal builds, which, in the current version of Pillars of Eternity under Path of the Damned, are also plentiful - by necessity. There's no way to design a system in which build decisions matter for success, and yet there are no sub-optimal builds. Those are contradictory goals.

More than Baldur's Gate 1? Sure. More than Baldur's Gate 2? Not sure. More than later editions of Dungeons and Dragons? No way. But that doesn't even begin to address the actual relevance of build variety. Most Pillars of Eternity character builds are no more than exercises in minutiae - it's no where close to the different mechanics introduced by multi-classing and prestige classing in Dungeons and Dragons. Just consider how Bioware had to build an entire undead pets system just to accommodate the Pale Master prestige class in Neverwinter Nights, an entire shapeshifting back end for the Shifter class, etc.

Dungeons and Dragons, and that includes Advanced Dungeons and Dragons, was built upon a solid foundation of tactical war games. While the rule set has many inconsistencies - which you were quick to list - they are minor flaws compared to the deep, fundamental flaws with Pillars of Eternity's initial design. Nobody is ultimately prevented from enjoying Dungeons and Dragons due to high strength values being represented as 18 00 instead of 19, or by having to learn to hit armor 0, or because clerics have 7 spell circles instead of 9. People were, however, prevented from enjoying Pillars of Eternity due to the utterly ridiculous 'balance' of the initial design, which ensured that nearly all combat became generic one-strategy affairs. Dungeons and Dragons never had that problem, and for that alone, it was a class above the original Pillars of Eternity.

 

82 monster types, how many of them are just humanoid reskinned ? Do you have to adapt your strategy to any of them ? No ! tank and spank worked for 99.99% of the encounters , except that one dragon fight( in the "megadungeon" one big corridor Bethesda dungeon's design team wouldnt deny) where you have to kite. Tyranny allow to make your own spells that's why i rate it slightly better, that doesnt mean extraordinary. Good RTWP combat is always inferior to good turn based combat ,and it's not even good...As for the writing only MCA parts are good ,thats not a whole lot amongst that sea of inane writing.
Now when i am reading rpgwatch reviews they sound edgy compare to codex ones.

 

You can build an uber-squishy paladin that burns enemies with divine wrath for tons of damage very fast or a hefty tank with short bursts of key damage spots as well as a multitude of stuff in between.

Meanwhile the games we're all applauding and comparing PoE to doesn't even offer you much choice beyond some basic utility differences in builds.

The hyperbole is obvious, as is the fact that every succes of PoE gets glossed over while every failure of the IE games gets marginalized.

Man... you're totally right! How could I not see this! I should have written something like that in my review... perhaps something like:

Anyways, what you state here is also true of PoE. Otherwise, tell me how a controlling Wizard in PoE is exactly the same as a self-buffing, meleefighting, transformation-based Wizard?

It's not, not even in the slightest.

 

My friend, if you can read my scathing criticism of PoE's main plot as an excuse, I dare say you're perhaps taking my review as a more one-sided deal than it actually is. Except for the last couple of hours which I like, every word I dedicate to the central plot of Pillars of Eternity is criticism, criticism, criticism.

This is reductive in the most apparant way. I could make equal reductive arguments about anything. The fact is that the Hollowborn crisis is a harrowing piece of lore which is actually presented by a few examples rather than just "here be Hollowborn"-type Wikipedia NPCs and that the majority of the quests you solve - main as well as side - in the area, are connected to it.

...I don't? I'm saying specifically that he DID NOT accomplish it, and chose to fix the issue by reinstating hard counters. What you deem praise - perhaps again because of your bias telling you everything I write about the man/game must be praise? - is me saying I believe you can make an RPG function without hard counters.

The part about praising him about the initial design is lauding his goals and then acknowledging that they initially failed.

A lie, apologism or just ignorance. Either way, two builds in 3.5 and Pathfinder will vary so much that one player will not even be able to dent enemies while they will one-shot him, while the other player cannot be dented by the same enemy and can one-shot them.

This is not the case in Pillars of Eternity, and which you prefer is largely a matter of taste and affinity for balance. Either way, calling the difference between two builds where one literally cannot defeat an enemy while the other doesn't lose a hit point the difference between "sub-optimal" and good builds show your bias here. You are not actually trying to argue the objective merits of each system - you're just overstating the flaws of one while understating the flaws of the other.

Then, in the words of an immortal member, youa re dumb. Some BG classes don't even have customization at all beyond kits and starting stats!

Which merits does Advanced Dungeons and Dragons have for a video game beyond the spell system? None.

 

This “play the game on the hardest mode” excuse is ridiculous. It never worked in any cRPG, and it certainly will not work with Pillars. Games with difficult modes are designed to be played on normal. If the systems are poorly designed, they will still be poorly designed when you play the game on hard. Try playing Arcanum on hard and see if you can “appreciate” what the combat is about. You could just as well be playing without armors to make the game "more enjoyable”. Have some dignity and self-respect. No broken system is worthy of so much effort.

 

Make one druid with INT 3.
Make another one with INT 20.

Have each of them cast an AoE spell.

There's your answer.

Edit: okay, if you want a longer one...
https://forums.obsidian.net/topic/83775-class-build-batsht-crazy-disabling-druid-tank/
https://forums.obsidian.net/topic/85505-class-build-hungry-like-the-wolf-spiritshift-aggro-druid/

There are a whole bunch more ways you can bulid druids. A glass cannon back-row CC + firearms build will work too. And yes they will play differently.

 

Mein Gott, Obshitians are literally retarded...

 

Your previous reply was to the effect that you didn't both praise Sawyer's initial design principles and his decision to recant them. Yet, in the review it is obvious that you DID - the first because you admired his goals and believed in his cause; the second because, well, it made for a better game and it was intellectually honest. If you call that criticism, then I don't know what's apologetics. What makes White March better is in no small part because Sawyer reneged on core, initial design principles. Provided you actually supported those principles, this should be a disappointment, not an opportunity for more praise, since it moves the game system closer to Dungeons and Dragons, rather than away from it. Your personal opinion about whether Sawyer could have succeeded had he tried harder should not factor into the analysis, since there is absolutely no proof either way.

I am pretty damn sure I can design a Pillars of Eternity character that can't even dent the adra dragon, and another that can defeat him solo. In fact, the latter has already been done so it's really just a problem of throwing one of the many builds that DON'T work at him. A trivial refutation to your premise.

Neither are you, but at least I try to be objective with respect to the average player, who is not likely in either system to build a character that is completely useless.

You're completely ignoring multi-classing, dual-classing, attribute and skill choices.

A simple yet effective itemization system, combat variety necessitated through hard counters, low actions per minute conducive to party control, lack of a retarded engagement system that works terrible with real time, ease of AI implementation, relatively simple character design and progression, etc...

 

But no one is saying it's 11/10! FFS, the "shill's review" has an entire section - over 900 words - just talking about how bad the "wikipedia lore dump" is:

It really looks like people don't even bother to read the article. This isn't "shills vs. critical gentlemen", is "the patches & expansions really improved some parts of the game vs. POE IS WORSE THAN GARBAGE!!!1".

 

I supported those principles provided there was sufficient encounter diversity to encourage tactics-switching. There wasn't. Your entire point here is to just group my arguments together and treat them as one, it's nonsense.

Except it only works because you use a monster specifically made as an optional encounter to test system knowledge. Are you actually disagreeing with the premise that the "floor" compared to the "ceiling" of character power in 3.5 and Pathfinder are MUCH farther apart compared to Pillars of Eternity? Are you that biased?

I worked with afterschool care for young adults from high school until just before getting my master's. I have played Pathfinder and 3.5 with every conceivable type of player. Most people build shit characters, characters that are not even functional on a basic level compared to what a competent player can make. A party without the guidance of a skilled GM or player among them will contain characters with vastly different power levels, often leading to one or two characters doing all the work in encounters while the rest make irrelevant cannon fodder or simply have much less impact on fights.

What I don't understand is why you are even trying to refute this point. Most PoE-detractors embrace it and call it a deficiency that PoE hasn't got this.

That's just class selection, not build variety within classes.

Mate, come on. Are you really arguing that building a Fighter in BG and PoE, you have the same attribute diversity? Calling me out on how trivial it is to refute my premises and then using the literally braindead 18-18-18-whatever-whatever-whatever stat line of an IE fighter as an example of AD&D build diversity is obviously complete bias.

And before you cling to the obvious strawman here: no, not all attributes are equally useful in PoE. But in BG the attributes contain no actual choice. You have the wrong way, and you have the right way, and that's it.

Don't make me laugh.

PoE 3.0 has nearly as good if not better itemization than Shadows of Amn.

Many systems without AD&D's problems have that, it's not unique to AD&D.

Many systems without AD&D's problems have that, it's not unique to AD&D.

True, not much to implement when "beeline for first character" is pretty much the only option for most monsters, except casters, which are not at all simple to code, negating your point.

Clicking "OK" to level up is now an actual, bonafide system advantage! This is the length AD&D-fans will go to to defend this dinosaur. In case of convulted rules, argue: "omg complexity gewd", in case of non-existing customization, argue: "omg simplicity gewd"

Q-E-fucking-D.

 

Oh so I had to soak myself in mobs of brain dead HP sponges to see first trivial Hard counters... I am speechless.

 

They weren't originally hard. They just bumped up your defence by a large amount rather than giving you outright immunity.

---> tangent

I'm still not convinced the hard counters are strictly necessary. The problem was the interaction between soft counters and the graze/hit/crit system. With status effects, a graze is often almost as bad as a hit, with the main difference that you can wait it out rather than having to Suppress Affliction or whatever. The soft counters would often just downgrade crits to hits and hits to grazes, which meant that they just didn't do the job all that well unless you stacked them. And of course because arithmetic was involved, they weren't as transparent to the player as immunities.

Hard counters solve the problem and the end result plays very well, but I think it would've been possible to end up at more or less the same place by tuning numbers on the soft counters and/or tweaking the graze/hit/crit system. For example, just drop the fucking grazes; as it is all they do is make dumbfucks think the way to win battles is to graze everything into oblivion.

 

acute mental debilitation, no saving throws hard counters

 

You can't tank and spank in PoE any more than you can in any party-based RPG. Besides, what's wrong with having frontliners, anything but mage duels aren't acceptable anymore?

Your complaints about RTwP and turn-based are irrelevant. This is such a stupid complaint that can be summarised as "RTwP shouldn't exit because I don't like them", if you don't like RTwP play something else.

 

Then why did you praise Sawyer's decision to recant his principles in White March, which you described as having "sufficient encounter diversity"? I called you out on it because it's blatant fanboyism. Sawyer's ego is sufficiently inflated without the fucking Codex praising him in an official retrospect.

Actually, it was you who brought up the "floor" vs. "ceiling" argument. It's quite obvious to me that later editions of Dungeons and Dragons have always had greater build variety, both in power level and in play style. But the criticism I'm addressing is your claim that Dungeons and Dragons is full of "useless assets." Just because an asset isn't optimal, doesn't make it useless. The existence of overpowered builds in Dungeons and Dragons is in principle no different from the existence of overpowered builds in Pillars of Eternity. The end result is practically the same when applied to CRPGs - in both Baldur's Gate 2 and Pillars of Eternity, you can build characters which can solo the game, while most characters can't. The difference in degrees is what's actually subjective, yet you were trying to act like the higher ceiling in Dungeons and Dragons is an objective flaw.

Anecdotal "evidence" isn't actual evidence, and the premise I'm refuting is that the average player doesn't build useless characters in either game. You have to try very hard to build a character that can't do anything right in Dungeons and Dragons. Either that or you didn't even read the instructions. Thus, the fool proofing provided by Pillars of Eternity's original design was unnecessary, especially since it came at the cost of intuition and depth.

Classes are a construct. You're just arguing semantics now. Whether a character building system is defined through variety within classes, across classes, or without classes, shouldn't matter to the debate.

You realize that most people multi-classed or dual-classed in Baldur's Gate 2, right? There's certainly a variety of attribute builds across even the same selection of classes, depending on end goal, and the nature of the Dungeons and Dragons character system meant that each and every level was potentially very significant. Thus, when dual-classing or even multi-classing there was a dramatic difference between a build with enough wizard levels to access level 9 spells, and a build that didn't, given the total amount of experience that was expected to be available.

You can laugh all you want, but weapon skills are part of every fighting build in Baldur's Gate 2. It's not just a trivial decision, either. Many builds were based around specific artifacts, just like in White March.

So your argument is: "Advanced Dungeons and Dragons is fucking terrible for video games because ... there are other game systems with the same features! And because ease of implementation and use is not a benefit at all!"

There's no arguing with this. I'm done with this sorry excuse of a retrospect.

 

Jesus people. There's a difference between design principles and design decisions. Using scalars instead of booleans isn't a design principle, it's a design decision.

"The class and attribute system must support and reward player creativity in creating builds" is a design principle. "Defences should be implemented using scalars rather than booleans" is just a plain old decision.

 

In the end followers of Gospel of Sawyer grows.

 

The principles I was referring to are the classic Sawyerisms, all of which are not merely design decisions but ideologies with respect to how games should be built; everyone should know by now what they are.

Examples: "there should be no hard counters in CRPG systems"; "builds should all be balanced against each other"; "receiving experience for combat leads to degenerate gameplay."

These are, in fact, principles.

 

No way

 

You really don't, and I can only surmise that it's been a while since you've seen players of different experience levels play in the same party without someone present to make sure that there is some sort of median in the power level of players, or at least that everyone has something to contribute.

The definition of a fanboy is someone who is loyal to something or someone regardless of the facts. I have no such loyalty to Sawyer or to PoE, which should be evident from the fact that my comments in Vault Dweller's first review and about PoE at launch in my review are fairly scathing.

Meanwhile, you cling in to such obviously false claims as there being an even remotely comparable level of build variety in a game that has blatantly obvious stat lines for each and every class, have nearly no character customization options and even has what little variety there is between different classes - like the Paladin and the Fighter, for instance - being a very limited selection of activated abilities and passive boni. The differences between a Paladin in the Fighter in AD&D is completely neglible even compared to two differently built Paladins in PoE.

Your claim to the contrary is preposterous, nothing less. Nevermind the overall qualitative comparison for a minute and just focus on this: to actually claim build diversity in AD&D relative to PoE, you have to be apologetic about AD&D's lackings and reductive of PoE's strengths. This is painfully obvious, and most grognards have not argued this point but instead have attempted to argue that build diversity is some newfag bullshit and that true monocled gentlemen like their classes static and their level up screens devoid of choice. You take this one step further by claiming that a game with next to no choice at all - and sometimes literally no choice after character creation is done - has comparable amounts of customization to a game with an abundance of choices both in character creation and during play. It's completely ridicoulous.