Codex Review RPG Codex Retrospective Review: Pillars of Eternity Revisited

In the early beta, combat was a completely unmanageable clusterfuck. Additionally, in the initial build, those beetles were like unstoppable fucking necro-panzers.

Edit: good times. I still have a holy terror of beetles from that beta.

 

Just don't fucking rest all the time. Good God. This display of excellent autism isn't representative of the wider world at all. Baldur's Gate was perfectly balanced for you to wade through most adventures and dungeons with minimal if any resting.

The game gives you an excessive amount of resources to burn through. If you rest all the time you won't have to drink potions, use scrolls or wands at all. Pillars is the same thing. Even at PotD the game gives you a shitton of camping supplies and resting options to last you through the game. There's no real point to the Crafting system if you just keep resting all the time. And that is considering most people are going to play on Normal anyways.

These discussions are always the same. A less than a handful of exceptionally autistic people who ruin these games for themselves assume that its natural to do so just because Baldur's Gate et al didn't have the balls to outright forbid resting in places. Its the same thing about the Stash. Nobody picked up every 20gp studded armor that fell from random bandits beyond whatever they could carry anyway. People cared for things like diamonds, magical weapons and winter wolf fur. And if you did you were an idiot. Its time to learn new things in life. Like how 20 of those armors amounted to 400gp of the 20K you earned half way through the game.

 

The majority of players actually. Obsidian has seen the data, they would know.

 

It's perfectly balanced if you ignore its own mechanics for an arbitrary number of times. In other words, shit.

 

What data? These ridiculous assumptions go way back, before PoE was even on beta. There is no data. There's a handful of retards on the internet and a legion of people who think they are reasonable.

What the hell are you even talking about?

 

He wants to namedrop Age of Decadence (as a, in his mind - perfect example of perfection) into the conversation. His usual MO.

That's why he's always talking in vague generalities.

 

How silly. Age of Decadence isn't even a very good RTwP RPG game. Its turns seem frozen in time or something.

 

There is nothing vague or general about it. It's really specific. In order to have some challenge in BG2 you need to gimp yourself by ignoring one of its central resource management features: resting. In other words, it's a poorly designed game with bad gameplay. By following Delterius magic line of reasoning we could say that Skyrim's gameplay is good as long as you ignore your armor. It's a fallacious reasoning.

 

^
Lurker King has a point here. Stopped clock, twice a day and all that.

 

in other news, KotC master race reporting in once again

 

KotC handles it beautifully, but it's also a simpler design with instanced missions. Do you think PoE detractors would commend a decision to instance dungeon crawls in an open world RPG?

 

In ten hours, only the Grimoire Master Race remains.

 

(actually I believe that's how Chaos Chronicles was going to handle it - HobGoblin42 might know)

 

You precocious little fanboy - just because something is possible to do, does not mean you actually have to use it all the time.

That would be like saying the only right way to play Fallout 2 is to make a beeline straight for the Power Armor as soon as you get out of Arroyo. I mean, it's a game feature, it's doable - that must mean it's supposed to be played like that.

Or that you should tag Athletics as a major skill in Morrowind, jump in a stream and hold down the forward button until the skill is maxed out (in a day or two, real time ).

Or that you should grind XP and gold in any game where that's possible until you become a billionaire.

Or - well, you get what I mean. Or most likely you don't

BG2's resting system is broken, but you are not compelled to abuse it. Same as with PoE's "hike back to the inn after every battle". Some people will always abuse it, but those people are likely the same ones who are obsessed with always having their HP/spells/items/etc. at the full maximum, and would do that regardless no matter what.

 

The only one ignoring anything in here is you. All of the IE games spawn monsters when you rest in dangerous areas. It was clearly never intended for people to rest spam their way like scrubs.

Besides, what resource management is there when you have infinite resources? Because that's what save scumming and rest spamming leads to.

If you ignore armor in Skyrim you take a bad Action game and make it harder. Not any better.

If you don't rest spam in the IE games you take a solid game and don't scum your way through it.

But hey, feel free to ruin games for yourself.

 

I think they can be kind of interesting when enemies have them; they force the player to change their tactics (IE, the shadow teleport ability can be seen as a hard counter to the "tank and spank" strategy). On the other hand, I think players having access to simplistic hard counters against enemy attacks - stuff like "Enemy uses dominate, use priest spell that grants immunity to dominate" or "Enemy lich casts XYZ defensive spell, cast Pierce Magic to counter spell" (which the BG2 "MAGE DUEL!!!" fans seem to love) - are kind of stupid. They're about as tactical as a turn-based rock-paper-scissors competition.

 

It is possible to find ways to enjoy games even if their incentives are set up to reward rote gameplay, by modifying your behaviour so you actively look for alternative ways to play the game.

Exhibit A: the IE games and rest-spamming.
Exhibit B: Arcanum and Harm spam.
Exhibit C: Pillars of Eternity at release and tank-and-spank.

Funny how so many people felt that Pillars of Eternity was tremendously improved when they adjusted things so it didn't reward rote gameplay anymore though. Exhibits A and B would have been similarly improved, had they been adjusted to disincentivise their respective degenerate strategies.

 

Very high defences serve the same purpose. DR 60 is functionally almost identical to full immunity.

 

Sawyer already said that 'hard counters' are an integral part of PoE 3.0 and they weren't added earlier because they were afraid of confusing games journos and SA scrubs. Which was the whole point of the graze/hit system. People graze their way towards victory without needing to learn the game. That was a criticism of the system going back to the Sensuki/Roxor era.

There's no real reason to slightly reinvent the wheel when 'hard counters' already put us in a spot where things 'play very well'. And Sawyer always knew that. Shed off your Roguey memes, everyone.

 

Can't fathom how anyone who has completed an IE game can play PoE on less than PoTD. It's the intended difficulty for RPG gamers, everything below is an insult.

 

Watch the PoE 2 gameplay demo - it's a friendly-fire clusterfuck...

 

Oh, no. Some random people calling me a bunch of names. I think I will quit the internet forever and cry!

You can talk all you want, but you can’t make the basic facts go away and the basic facts are these: if the rest system is integral to gameplay and the game allows you to abuse the rest system, then it is poorly designed! Blaming players that abuse the system is like including night vision devices in hide and seek and then complain that your game is wonderful, but some idiots are ruining the game with their gadgets.

That’s metagaming. You need at least to know the ins and outs of the game. To rest in BG2 you need to press a button.

Quoting another broken game to make BG2 look good is not necessarily the most convincing argument one can conceive. Just saying.

You are compelled to abuse it because your spells have number of uses per rest limit and your characters moan like babies when they are tired after traveling, which is most of the time, really.

And you can kill them like flies, because the game is so fucking broken. Otherwise, you wouldn’t be arguing that you need to avoid resting to make the game interesting in the first place, would you?

That’s precisely my point.

But the fact that you need to gimp yourself in order to make the game challenging is a proof that is poorly designed.

 

That is on story mode though

 

You can rest when you fire off all of them - like a player that's not a moron - or when you cast just one tiny spell. It's your own choice, the game isn't compelling you to do that, it's your own playstyle choices.

You... listen to your NPCs

Did you also buy cheeses in Divinity: Original Sin - so you could have many friends?

 

MotB solved the rest issue perfectly. Spam rest and soon you will run out of SE and forced to sacrifice xp to stay alive.

Want to rape all encounters with an Eldritch Knight/Sorcerer Gish with them Rank 9 spells and buffed up hits? Good luck leveling up any time soon.