Codex Review RPG Codex Retrospective Review: Pillars of Eternity Revisited

So what are the conclusions about it?

Is it more "Exercise in Minutiae: The Saga", or "Icewind Dale 3, With Extra Equality of Outcome"?

 

For all of AD&D's mechanical faults, at least it tended to encourage some kind of consistency between gameplay and setting. A paladin was inherently non-squishy; kobolds were inherently weak scavengers. You didn't need loredumps to tell you that, it came forward in simply playing it. Sawyer's philosophy of making each portion of a game as functionally sound as it can possibly be seems to inevitably undermine the way these portions interact (a pure DPS-stat suddenly is treated like physical strength in text adventures, etc.).

talking about sawyerism again feels nice, we should have a review like this again in a couple of years, feels like a reunion of sorts

 

Stat distribution wasn't supposed to be a form of character progression in Advanced Dungeons and Dragons. It was supposed to model the intrinsic capabilities of your character. The goal of the system was to allow for a variety of basic ability profiles, not to min/max your super hero. It was part of the strategic matrix - you adapted to your character's limitations and did the best you could with the cards you were given, just like in life. The whole idea of rolling the dice until you had 18/18/18 is considered munchkin behavior and strictly a product of poor Infinity Engine implementation.

The arrogance of thinking that the designers of table top games were that stupid... It gets me every time.

 

Could we have a futurespective neutral positive review of PoE2 based on the kickstarter updates please? I already have the title "Did Sawyer surpass Leonardo da Vinci, the answer is yes!" by Roqua

 

No one is saying they are stupid, just that in twenty years of iteration, we have learned some things.

 

By the time Deadfire is released, Sawyer will already be canonised and you will be referring to him as St. Sawyer.

 

This is an important concept, but one that is often missed or dismissed by people who are mesmerized by Sawyer's intellectualizing. Advanced Dungeons and Dragons gets bashed for having certain unintuitive rules, but there is nothing more unintuitive than Pillars of Eternity's system where you have classes with well-defined roles at creation, but the talents can make the class completely unrecognizable. Why make it class-based, then? Why not just make it skill-based? Sawyer's only explanation has been that he wants to capture the old Infinity Engine feel and so the game must have classes; but in that case he failed completely because the game doesn't capture the old Infinity Engine feel because of the very fundamental changes he made to the system.

Same with the ability scores. Might sounds like it wants to be Strength, but it's not Strength, it's an abstract concept of the ability to project force through the universe. Dungeons and Dragons at least tried to have a semblance of verisimilitude, so that you could make rough analogies to living persons. Pillars of Eternity acts like anime: a wispy wizard who spent his whole life studying magic can kick down a wall just as well as a warrior who body built like Schwarzenegger on drugs, because they both have SOUL MIGHT. A HEALER should pump Might, because being strong makes you ... Heal more. Intelligence increases the area of effect of your abilities because, well shit, IT JUST DOES, OKAY? And why is Resolve the way to increase your ability to deflect attacks? Shouldn't that be Constitution or Might?

The bottom line is: character definitions are abstract, convoluted, constantly changing, and the only justification for all of it is so that Sawyer could say he accomplished his ideological goal of making ability score choices not obvious and classes not required. What the fuck? Shouldn't the system reward common sense, rather than punish it? This is the central flaw of much of the design behind Pillars of Eternity - it is driven by ideology, rather than sense.

 

"Actually playing Pillars of Eternity: The White March reminds me why I still own a PC. Nothing less."

 

Sensuki's therapist told him to stay away from PoE discussions.

 

So when PoE2 comes out for tablet, ps4, and blahblah all the cucks will just use their PC Mac to post pics of their cuckbeards on instagram, I guess.

 

POS2 has
-less chars
-unvancian mmo casting
-instant retargeting
-resting gone
-scrapped injuries
-same linear graze mechanics on erything

Guys! Lets practice our cocksucking arguments for the future neutal positive reviews of an offline feminist anime mmo!

 

Better than Baldur's gate! woohoo!

 

what's bad about this

false

false

what does this mean

 

There was a limitation on how many camping supplies you could carry and guess what, people kept using them all up after every battle and backtracking. Josh does not want people doing that, period.

 

Poe is a good game.

 

The intent was that it was supposed to be a gamey convention to discourage you from going too crazy with per-rest spells in dungeons and wilderness areas.

No, because people will just keep reloading until they don't get one.

 

Fixed seed yo.

 

Backtrack to an inn it is then.

 

That's the worst solution; if it incentivizes anything, it incentivizes constant resting. Either the random encounters are easy, in which case they don't make a difference either way and are just a waste of time, or they are difficult, in which case you're better off facing them with 75% health and spells than with 25% health and spells.

 

Monster respawn with no xp for second kills.

ETA:

The punishment isn't the encounter, it's that you don't complete your rest and have some additional resource depletion. So resting is a risk in that you may have even fewer resources than when you started (Just don't give xp for the encounter.)

Or hell, just disable resting and respawn monsters with no xp. What do I care.

 

Whatever retards say they do in SA is not representative of reality.

 

In the run up to PoE's launch, Sawyer had said that "Hard" was his ideal difficulty (they designed Hard first, removed tough enemies and replaced with weaker ones for easy/normal and bumped things up for Path of the Damned). Has there been anything from Obs to suggest this changed to PotD at any stage during development?

How about for PoE2? Anything been said to suggest that an attempt has been made to bring Hard closer to what PotD is for PoE? Or are those that vastly prefer PotD in the original best off jumping straight in to PotD2?