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Review RPG Codex Review: Darth Roxor on Disappointment, thy name is Pillars of Eternity

set

Cipher
Joined
Oct 21, 2013
Messages
940
Review is trying too hard to be negative.

All his points are right to an extent, especially the whole "combat gives you experience but you 90% of the game is combat" (I was full on-board w/ no combat-xp in PoE but I did not anticipate the level design to railroad you into fighting every goddammned enemy) but the game is still fun. It's better than any recent foray into the genre - but then again, not too many newcomers.
 

Havoc

Cheerful Magician
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Poland
Grab the Codex by the pussy Insert Title Here RPG Wokedex Dead State Divinity: Original Sin Project: Eternity Wasteland 2 Codex USB, 2014 Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 Pathfinder: Kingmaker Pathfinder: Wrath
The sad part about the Fortress? It was done by Tim Cain. While mechanics are there, the rest sucks ass. It's like designers never really cared about the player having a keep, because everything in it is just mechanics. Who is this guy who comes to visit me? Can I speak to him? No? Why is he even here? Do these points matter? What's prestige? Where are my subjects? Why do I get taxes? Who are these bandits that attack my taxmen?
It feels just like bump on the road. For some it's just another bump on the PoE road. For me it was a complete derail. My cart fell over into the ditch and instead of going "Fuck! My cart! I shouldn't have went this way", I went "Maybe the road ahead will be better?"... and you see on the horizon the canyon bridge - Ending of Act II.
 

Jools

Eater of Apples
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Mêlée Island
Codex 2014 Make the Codex Great Again! Insert Title Here Codex Year of the Donut Codex+ Now Streaming! Codex USB, 2014 Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2
It's funny. I tend to concur with most of the review, and the game is really "average at best", and yet I wouldn't classify it "terrible". It really compares to those low-end-of-the-market car models that many high-end brands have released in the few last years. PoE feels like a poor man's blurred dream of grandeur.

Good review, Darth Roxor .

Story: forgettable, totally un-interesting, never managed to get me hooked.
Fictional lWorld: banalshitboring mean average of d&d/FR settings. Fails to actually be interesting.
RPG system: banalshitboring mean average of d&d/FR rulebooks.
Writing: average-to-forgettable-to-tryingtoohard.
GFX: lush. No arguments there.
SFX: really good. My one favourite aspect of the game.
Combat: too repetitive, too shallow, too much.
Stronghold: whatisthisidonteven
Endless Dung(eon): whatisthisidonteven
 
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Quatlo

Arcane
Joined
Nov 15, 2013
Messages
941
Exclusive screenshot of my party during a bossfight:
f37354177d1b70188f5dd2383d7c.jpeg
 

karnak

Arcane
Patron
Joined
Jun 14, 2014
Messages
920
Location
Negative Zone
Grab the Codex by the pussy Strap Yourselves In I helped put crap in Monomyth
You know what will be most awesome ?

That TW3 created by potatos will have better quest system, better story, better C&C, better writting and better characters.
Review is to hard imo but it does point obvious problems.
At least it will have more tits. That's a good start
 

mastroego

Arcane
Joined
Apr 10, 2013
Messages
10,250
Location
Italy
It goes beyond this specific game, its (perceived?) strenghts or faults.
The problem is the Sawyer philosophy and what it is bringing to the table.
This game might even be decent, it might even get decent reviews, but I believe it'll be forgotten soon (and it's already started to happen apparently), as its creator basically theorizes for games to be made to be forgotten (and so far, he delivered on that point); yet it might steer future productions in the wrong way, as commercially it's probably being successful.

I believe support to Sawyerism, in any form, is "dangerous" for the future of our beloved niche.
If the Codex doesn't fight it, who will? :roll: :cool:

 

Black

Arcane
Joined
May 8, 2007
Messages
1,872,592
I really liked playing PoE but now that the vocal minority has completely taken over the discourse with their obsessive autistic yelling and their neverending energy for posting all day erry day, I feel like its time for me to convince myself that I actually disliked it, so I can still be part of the club of edgy haters prestigious gentlemen. I only got to make sure that no one ever finds out that I spent more than 50 hrs playing it, or if the they do, I will just pretend I hated every second of it and did it all for the lulz. It'll work. It always works.

Okay, back to World of Warcraft and DotA2 now, PoE is just too tedious and generic for my monocled tastes.
I love how you lil bitches keep on throwing around crap like "edgy, autistic, haters, trying too hard" instead of actually addressing the review.
Grognards gonna grog.
 

Admiral jimbob

gay as all hell
Joined
Sep 29, 2009
Messages
9,225
Location
truck stops and toilet stalls
Wasteland 2
Piracy is wrong, you cunt
But yeah it's an okay game, better than I expected but I had exactly 0 expectations. I'm glad I pirated it and there's nothing really memorable about it, but there's something about it that's nice and relaxing to play. Shame all round, as a lot of expressly minor tweaks could have added up to make it really great, but too much of its design seems calculated to be blandly inoffensive. I was going to write a longer post/review of it, but frankly I can't even be bothered, and I guess that says enough.
 

karnak

Arcane
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Joined
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Messages
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Negative Zone
Grab the Codex by the pussy Strap Yourselves In I helped put crap in Monomyth
a feeling of ennui

A good way of describing my feelings playing PoE. It was just so bloody dull. I gave up mid way through Act II...I just couldn't be bothered any more.

I swear I must be playing a different game to all the fanboys though...they seem to love it.
I began playing PoE and started to have strong, vertigo-like feelings of Deja-Vu. It almost looked like I was playing a Baldur's Gate expansion. It was fun, yes. But I felt like I had played it before.
After some time I stopped playing it and began playing Avernum: Escape from the Pit, which is really fulfilling my CRPG needs.

PoE collected almost 4.000.000$ in KS
Avernum costed what? 10.000$ to be made? I don't know.

Honestly I don't think PoE deserved those millions of dollars.
Or maybe I'm just a crazy guy who doesn't know what a good RPG is.
1270887-lunatic.gif
 
Self-Ejected

Ulminati

Kamelåså!
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Joined
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DiNMRK
Googled "RPGCodex" "Pillars of Eternity" "review". This was all that came up:

http://www.reddit.com/r/projecteternity/comments/33capq/rpgcodex_review/

Really? You couldn't think of one positive thing to say about a game (outside of the aesthetics and music, but I mean come on) that has a 9/10 on Steam? That right there is what told me that no matter how well this game was developed, right from the get-go this guy had no intention of saying anything positive about it.

This review should not be taken seriously.

:butthurt:
 

ZagorTeNej

Arcane
Joined
Dec 10, 2012
Messages
1,980
Review is trying too hard to be negative.

All his points are right to an extent, especially the whole "combat gives you experience but you 90% of the game is combat" (I was full on-board w/ no combat-xp in PoE but I did not anticipate the level design to railroad you into fighting every goddammned enemy) but the game is still fun. It's better than any recent foray into the genre - but then again, not too many newcomers.

I agree mostly, it's still an enjoyable game and a good foundation to build the series on now when the biggest hurdles are gone (creating and introducing new setting and systems, working with new engine and creating assets, kickstarter obligated content etc.). I'm just glad that there's now a review that points out game's flaws, it could end up being ignored of course (even for a relatively niche game like this I don't think Codex matters all that much in the big picture) but atleast it's out there, well written and easy to read. Besides, a (I expect) more positive Codex review is gonna come out eventually anyway, to balance it out and reflect opinions/impressions of Codexers who like the game.
 

Perkel

Arcane
Joined
Mar 28, 2014
Messages
15,807
I agree with review on Nua. They should scrap it and instead of focus on polishing other parts of game.
 

Carrion

Arcane
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Joined
Jun 30, 2011
Messages
3,648
Location
Lost in Necropolis
I enjoyed the game, but I can generally agree with a lot of the stuff in the review. There are a few parts that are fairly exaggerated or even flat-out false, though. For example, I agree about the general complaints about the character system, how everything fills a bit samey and how there aren't that many interesting options, but the attributes affect two or three different things and are a bit less straightforward than described. Perception, for instance, also boosts your deflection and reflex defences aside from your interrupt chance, which makes it a potentially very useful attribute, and it might also be the stat that sees the most use in conversations (flavor or not). You also didn't mention chanters, which in my opinion are the most original character class in the game (even though their actual usefulness is debatable).

Also, this part
For example, the health/endurance dichotomy. Having your characters get knocked out in combat instead of dying promotes carelessness, nearly invalidates all healing spells (because they are bad to begin with, and also because they effectively make your character take more damage that ‘counts’ during combat by healing endurance and not health) and completely eliminates the need to manage resources. In the IE games, if you weren’t resting after every fight, you had to carefully consider using every healing potion and spell, and memorise cure spells for poisons, diseases, etc, to manage your global party health reserves. This literally never happens in PoE. All ill effects end after every fight, all endurance regens back to full, all fallen party members rise as if nothing happened.
is dumb, because health is still a resource you need to manage unlike in the IE games where you can rest as much as you want to without any kind of a cost, meaning that long-term resource management is nonexistent save for some extremely rare areas. Sure, you can choose to not abuse the rest mechanic, but it's still available for you every time you run into a tough fight, and you can do the exact same choice in PoE if you want some added challenge. Of course, PoE is so easy and has such a broken economy that camping supplies also become a non-issue very quickly, but this is still one area where the game actually improves on the IE games by adding some kind of a cost to resting, even if it's still not quite enough.

As for the quests, I don't think it's correct to criticize them for being mindless fetch quests when they're rarely about completely mundane stuff (not much errand boy stuff that I remember) and there's some kind of a choice involved in almost all of them. The exceptions are labelled as "tasks", and even those often give you two or three different outcomes. The general structure of the quests is usually fairly linear with some choice thrown in the end, and there really aren't all that many different ways to do them, but if you use the IE games as a reference point, PoE doesn't fare too badly and probably surpasses those games in many areas. There are parts where it gets very stupid and doesn't take into account some obvious ways to do the quests, though, like the Rogue Knight quest that was referred to in the review, or how the alliances are handled.

All in all, it's still a nice review that manages to address all of the major issues in the game. I got what I expected.
 

Naraya

Arcane
Joined
Oct 19, 2014
Messages
1,513
Location
Tuono-Tabr
I'm going to chime in and say that while I do not regret backing it, PoEt is a regrettably forgettable and dull experience overall with some high (graphics, overall polish), low (music, questing) points and everything else being incredibly generic.
 

Black

Arcane
Joined
May 8, 2007
Messages
1,872,592
Googled "RPGCodex" "Pillars of Eternity" "review". This was all that came up:

http://www.reddit.com/r/projecteternity/comments/33capq/rpgcodex_review/

Really? You couldn't think of one positive thing to say about a game (outside of the aesthetics and music, but I mean come on) that has a 9/10 on Steam? That right there is what told me that no matter how well this game was developed, right from the get-go this guy had no intention of saying anything positive about it.

This review should not be taken seriously.

:butthurt:
Funny, skyrim has 98% approval rate on steam, will this dumbfuck defend it too?
Fucking plebbit and its userbase of pop-culture retards.
 

ZagorTeNej

Arcane
Joined
Dec 10, 2012
Messages
1,980
is dumb, because health is still a resource you need to manage...

Do you? In practice, how often did character's health get to his endurance level before fatigue kicked in (and you had to rest anyway)? I doubt it's a controversial thing to say that in most fights your tank takes the brunt of the damage and those guys (Fighters especially) are HP spounges with very high overall defense.
 

felipepepe

Codex's Heretic
Patron
Joined
Feb 2, 2007
Messages
17,274
Location
Terra da Garoa
PoE is a very hard game to criticize... it's almost impossible to talk about it without bringing in comparisons to other IE games, and that only makes it worse, leading to historical context debates. And those are a pain in the butt.

Thing is, you can't directly compare PoE with BG without compensating for almost 20 years of innovations - things like D&D 3 and 4th edition (which PoE takes a lot from), better UI theories, hardware (BG ran on 166 MHz + 16MB RAM at 640x480, FFS), design tools, dev team experience, etc... Having textures won't automatically make an RPG better than Wizardry I, and releasing a perfect Wizardry I clone today expecting it to have the same critical acclaim it got 30 years ago is just retarded.

My personal opinion: is PoE objectively on par with Baldur's Gate I? Yes. It sucks at encounter design, itemization and the character system, but it has better role-playing possibilities, better companions and a gorgeous presentation. It's a tie, so to speak.

HOWEVER, that's still a big fucking disappointment after all this years. Having better presentation than a game from 17 years ago is nothing less than the minimal obligation of a dev today, and role-playing elements like PoE has are the norm today. Every damn RPG in the last decade or so has those - Obsidian itself delivered much more on this with Alpha Brotocol and MotB. And Baldur's Gate reinvented RTwP combat, PoE adds nothing new of its own.

So really, what does that leave PoE with? It took the formula of a 17-year old game (while ignoring the formula of the vastly superior BG2), added modern design sensibilities every RPG has today and then proceeded to fuck up on the actual system underneath. Everything that doesn't come from BG's original formula or from the "How to design games and make friends in 2010" book is just lackluster - the battles, the dungeons, the items, the story, the setting, th quests, the villain... (ok, Durante is cool).

The most memorable part of PoE is Raedric's Hold. Now compare that with Redcliffe Castle in Dragon Age and realize how banal that is even next to Derp Age.
 
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