Eternity Pillars of Eternity II Beta Thread [GAME RELEASED, GO TO NEW THREAD]

[Ulfhednar]

I know the IE games didn't have any speed sliders or modes, and combat is playing out quite smoothly. Why should it have to be so difficult?

It wasn't as simple as a slider, but you could easily adjust the game speed in th IE games

 

[santino27]

There is a lot of video game sites huh.

I had no idea some of these existed or that others (shacknews?) hadn't died long ago.

 

[FreeKaner]

The combat speed slider is essentially slow-mo and has nothing to do with game balance, it is optional because apparently for people slow wasn't slow enough and they want bullet time.

 

[Riddler]

Adding a slider for everything is well and fine, but where is your role as a designer? I think there is a limit to how much customization you can allow before your efforts to make it possible for "everyone to play as they want" start hurting the quality. Let's see how this plays out.

I know the IE games didn't have any speed sliders or modes, and combat is playing out quite smoothly. Why should it have to be so difficult?

IE games had far less active abilities, both among the PCs and enemies. The ability bloat makes it next to impossible to play at reasonable speed on the higher difficulties in PoE (only PotD really).

 

[AwesomeButton]

I know the IE games didn't have any speed sliders or modes, and combat is playing out quite smoothly. Why should it have to be so difficult?

It wasn't as simple as a slider, but you could easily adjust the game speed in th IE games

That's anecdotal evidence, but neither I nor many people I know have been doing it.

I believe the issue with game speed, ergo with needing to pause at the right moment, stems from the fact that PoE simply has way too many buttons to click, and click them in each and every combat encounter, than the IE game's player could ever dream of. This makes PoE's combat feel and play increasingly different from the IE games' combat, the more you advance in the game.

How much of this "different" translates into "improved", or "enhanced" ( ) is up to you to decide.

IE games had far less active abilities, both among the PCs and enemies. The ability bloat makes it next to impossible to play at reasonable speed on the higher difficulties in PoE (only PotD really).

Yup, it's the answer I was writing, and I know we've discussed this before, just wanted to see what people will say.

 

[Trashos]

Adding a slider for everything is well and fine, but where is your role as a designer? I think there is a limit to how much customization you can allow before your efforts to make it possible for "everyone to play as they want" start hurting the quality. Let's see how this plays out.

I know the IE games didn't have any speed sliders or modes, and combat is playing out quite smoothly. Why should it have to be so difficult?

Agree with your 1st paragraph. I don't know what you mean by "smoothly" in IE, in BG2 hard fights I pause every .2 nanosec. But I enjoy that, that's where most of the gameplay is.

PS. Where did you get that awesome tag?

 

[Ulfhednar]

That's anecdotal evidence, but neither I nor many people I know have been doing it.

No, it was a built in option in the system config that you could open and change before launching the program.

That changed when Beamdog released the EE, so that you had to manually edit baldur.ini with a text editor, but BG2 has always had an easy way to adjust the game speed.

 

[Ulfhednar]

Hehe, it actually is a slider...

Spoiler

 

[Infinitron]

https://www.pcgamesn.com/pillars-of-eternity-2-deadfire/pillars-of-eternity-ii-companions-custom-ai

Pillars of Eternity II's programmable AI makes combat a tactical treat

Pillars of Eternity II: Deadfire rethinks companions. As an RPG born from the Infinity Engine mould - which birthed Baldur’s Gate and Icewind Dale - a heavy emphasis is placed on party-based combat. Its predecessor replicated Baldur’s Gate’s combat perhaps a little too faithfully, creating a system that was not only deep, but often confusing. With Deadfire, the team at Obsidian aim to rectify those problems, leaving behind not only the problems of its predecessor, but making your companions smarter and more engaging to be around.

A few key changes have been made to Pillars of Eternity II’s party system. You can expect to see:

• Cleaner combat mechanics that don’t sacrifice the original game’s depth.
• A new AI system that provides more challenging enemies and smarter companions.
• The ability to write AI behaviour routines for your companions.
• A new multiclass system that allows you to craft highly diverse characters.
• Companions that can argue or even fall in love with both you and each other.

A band of fierce, calculated warriors (and wizards)

First and foremost, a good RPG companion should have your back. Whether it is a bar brawl or a fight on the cliffs of eternity with a hydra, your party needs to be able to sling spells and fire arrows with calculated precision. This was not quite how it worked in the original Pillars of Eternity: the six-member party suffered from too many characters eager to get lost in the swirl of confusing afflictions, stacking rules, and spell particle effects. Combat was brutally difficult and far from easy to manage.

“Part of the reason people play these games is they like the deep tactical combat,” Josh Sawyer, design director on Pillars of Eternity II tells us. “If you have a tactically deep game that’s hard to understand it’s pretty hard to have fun with it.” As a result of this thinking, Obsidian have aimed to clean up and clarify Pillars’ combat, maintaining depth but enhancing readability.

“With Deadfire we changed how we rendered a lot of the visual effects,” Sawyer says. “We actually allow them to dim down when you pause the game so you can see what the hell is going on. We’ve slowed the pace of combat down to make things easier to process and understand.”

The most dramatic change to the basic principles of combat is the fact that the party size has been reduced by one, down to five combatants. This helps you more easily keep track of every move being made, and eliminates the chance of there being a floating companion who offers nothing to the fight. “The goal was really to provide an increased amount of tactical depth, which I think we’ve achieved, while making it easier to understand,” Sawyer says.

Obsidian’s changes drill deeper than just top-level changes, though. The surgery being performed on combat reaches right into the system’s cerebral cortex: the AI that powers both allies and enemies. Sawyer admits that the first game’s logic was “fuzzy,” and the rewritten AI system - rooted in three layers of conditional logic - ensures Deadfire’s approach is clearer cut.

“That has allowed us to do a couple of things,” Sawyer explains. “One is that our enemy AI can be much much more challenging. But the benefit from a player perspective is if you really want to customise your character’s AI you can go really, really crazy with it.”

Manually rewire the AI

In Deadfire you have complete control of every one of your companion’s AI routines. Using the system’s three layers of logic as a framework, you can dictate, for example, that when an ally suffers a poison status effect your party’s caster automatically performs a curative spell. That is the system at its most basic, as it comprises countless conditions which, when threaded together with companion abilities, creates a web of almost impenetrable intelligence. Create an AI plan for every eventuality and your team can become a self-sufficient combat unit. “We have great in-depth options, you can do lots of wild and crazy stuff,” Sawyer promises.

The system has two very strong influences. “If you really like stuff like the Final Fantasy Gambit system or the AI settings from Dragon Age: Origins, those are the games we used as inspiration for Deadfire’s AI,” Sawyer says.

For anyone not looking to spend hours rewiring the brains of each of their companions, a series of AI presets allows you a comprehensive but simpler method of governing AI behaviour. Each character has a primary and secondary set of rules, so should they be unable to do their most important actions, perhaps due to a status affliction, they will always have back-up procedures to fall back on.

One class is never enough

Possibilities in combat do not just come down to AI, of course: the skills of your character are dictated by your chosen class. If you have ever found yourself debilitated by choice while working through an RPG character creation screen, Deadfire’s new approach may help. Why have one class when you could have two? Why have just a class when you can subclass?

OK, perhaps this is not so great for the indecisive. But Deadfire’s new subclass and multiclass system means creative players can really spread their wings. “We’re running our backer beta right now and people are making all sorts of crazy characters,” Sawyer says. “If you want to make a rogue paladin, or a druid ranger, or any sort of combination that you can come up with, you have the ability to do that.”

Each class has between three and five subclasses, with each providing layers of lore and statistics for your character. These components slot into an improved RPG system that splits skills into active and passive categories, with levelling granting points to spend in both to ensure you can build both trees equally. The whole system allows for the creation of niche, focused heroes - rogues built specifically for DPS using daggers, for instance - or characters that have a broad library of abilities chosen from the trees of multiple classes and subclasses.

Pals and paramours

Your character and companions’ place in Deadfire extends beyond a team looking to slice up everything in sight. Story and relationships remain important to the Pillars of Eternity universe, and the sequel aims to bolster this by focusing more intently on the personalities that make up your band of adventurers.

“We have an increased emphasis on companion relationships,” Sawyer reveals. “Your companions are much more reactive to the things that not only you do, but what other companions do. They can get upset with each other, they can get into arguments, they can form very strong bonds, including romances, with each other or with the player. And unlike in the base game, companions can get fed up with you and leave if you are too antagonistic to them.”

As such, you can expect your companions to contribute far more dialogue to your journey, chipping in on your decisions and reacting to events. And it is not just your party who have increased personality as Obsidian have put effort into making the whole crew of your seafaring headquarters feel alive and valuable. It is clear that the studio want you to consider their characters as more than just swords and chainmail, and to remember them for years to come.

It is easy to get distracted by Pillars of Eternity II’s flashy new additions. The striking Deadfire Archipelago - the stage for grog-laden ship battles and tropical exploration - seems to promise a game cut from a very different cloth than the original’s traditional green and brown European leathers. But underneath the new additions lie more familiar elements that are receiving no less attention. From just a few hours of hands-on time with Deadfire it is evident that the new AI rules and combat changes have produced a far more enjoyable experience than seen in its predecessor. Deadfire is still Pillars of Eternity, and by extension still Baldur’s Gate: 21st Century Edition, and so yes, it still deserves to draw plenty of interest from fans of classic RPGs.

 

[Infinitron]

WTF: http://www.gameinformer.com/b/news/...eternity-ii-deadfire-coming-to-consoles.aspx?

Pillars Of Eternity II: Deadfire Coming To Consoles

Pillars of Eternity II: Deadfire is nearing completion for PC, Mac, and Linux, with a release planned for April 3. For players without a dedicated gaming PC, you can still look forward to a chance to try out this sequel, as Game Informer has learned that Deadfire is set to come to PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and Switch during the holiday season of 2018.

While Obsidian heads up primary development duties for Pillars II on PC, the game is being ported to consoles by developer Red Cerberus. Versus Evil and Obsidian are working together to publish the game.

For more on Pillars of Eternity II: Deadfire, check out our four-page feature in the latest issue of Game Informer, releasing today.

Our Take
The original Pillars of Eternity was a fantastic isometric role-playing game, and there’s good reason to believe that its sequel will continue the tradition of excellence. The original game released last summer for Xbox One and PlayStation 4; it’s good news that console players won’t have to wait quite so long for the sequel. Undoubtedly, Nintendo enthusiasts should also be excited to see the game heading to the Switch, a platform that is still establishing its cred as a role-playing game destination.

lol did Josh know about this? This is what he says in the TheSixthAxis preview: http://www.thesixthaxis.com/2018/02/06/taking-to-the-high-seas-in-pillars-of-eternity-ii-deadfire/

For those on console, looking to continue their journey from the first game, it might be a long wait, if it happens at all. The first game’s port was created by a team at Paradox Interactive, but Obsidian have partnered with a different publisher for the sequel. Even so, Josh said, “I think there’s the possibility for it, but what I’ve said, and this is honest, is that everything we focus on for this game is about PC, Mac and Linux. Clearly Paradox Arctic showed you can port this style of game to console, and to their credit it seems like the people that bought it on console really seemed to enjoy it. Whether or not the audience is there, I don’t know because I don’t have the sales figures, so I would say nothing would prohibit the game being on console, but the main platforms are PC, Mac and Linux.

 

[tripedal]

How can Sawyer not know the console sales figures of PoE?

 

[Infinitron]

How can Sawyer not know the console sales figures of PoE?

Because it belongs entirely to Paradox, probably.

 

[Cross]

With the reveal of a console release and the prospect of using a gamepad to play a mouse-driven RTwP RPG, suddenly the emphasis on sophisticated party AI scripts that lets the game play itself makes a lot more sense.

 

[Cassar]

Watching the first one play on consoles is some of the most absurd shit ive ever seen in my life. I mean, the way it works on console, thats the gameplay i was thinking of when i would say this style of games isnt possible on consoles. Thats just playing for the sake of saying you plalyed something

 

[Sentinel]

WTF: http://www.gameinformer.com/b/news/...eternity-ii-deadfire-coming-to-consoles.aspx?

Pillars Of Eternity II: Deadfire Coming To Consoles

Pillars of Eternity II: Deadfire is nearing completion for PC, Mac, and Linux, with a release planned for April 3. For players without a dedicated gaming PC, you can still look forward to a chance to try out this sequel, as Game Informer has learned that Deadfire is set to come to PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and Switch during the holiday season of 2018.

While Obsidian heads up primary development duties for Pillars II on PC, the game is being ported to consoles by developer Red Cerberus. Versus Evil and Obsidian are working together to publish the game.

For more on Pillars of Eternity II: Deadfire, check out our four-page feature in the latest issue of Game Informer, releasing today.

Our Take
The original Pillars of Eternity was a fantastic isometric role-playing game, and there’s good reason to believe that its sequel will continue the tradition of excellence. The original game released last summer for Xbox One and PlayStation 4; it’s good news that console players won’t have to wait quite so long for the sequel. Undoubtedly, Nintendo enthusiasts should also be excited to see the game heading to the Switch, a platform that is still establishing its cred as a role-playing game destination.

lol did Josh know about this? This is what he says in the TheSixthAxis preview: http://www.thesixthaxis.com/2018/02/06/taking-to-the-high-seas-in-pillars-of-eternity-ii-deadfire/

For those on console, looking to continue their journey from the first game, it might be a long wait, if it happens at all. The first game’s port was created by a team at Paradox Interactive, but Obsidian have partnered with a different publisher for the sequel. Even so, Josh said, “I think there’s the possibility for it, but what I’ve said, and this is honest, is that everything we focus on for this game is about PC, Mac and Linux. Clearly Paradox Arctic showed you can port this style of game to console, and to their credit it seems like the people that bought it on console really seemed to enjoy it. Whether or not the audience is there, I don’t know because I don’t have the sales figures, so I would say nothing would prohibit the game being on console, but the main platforms are PC, Mac and Linux.

LMAO
a lot of design decisions suddenly make more sense

 

[Starwars]

Gotta get that console cash, oh yeah!

Not really surprised given that the first game was ported and was (I think?) actually received pretty well.

 

[Cassar]

LMAO
a lot of design decisions suddenly make more sense

list some. i havent followed the press releases about this game at all

 

[Infinitron]

Problem: Many of the changes that people (including IE grognards) demanded of PoE1 also happen to make it more console-friendly.

That said, no big surprise here, we all knew it was going to happen. The only surprise is that it was announced before D:OS 2 for consoles (what's holding that up, anyway?)

 

[Rev]

What a disappointment.
They keep trying to chase the console market despite the fact that these kind of rpgs sell like shit there, and only so much as to repay the porting costs, just like PoE, T:ToN and almost every other rpg of this kind.
I guess PoE3 will go even more casual, hoping to chase those console gamers that don't care in anything more complex than Dragon Age, probably failing to get more buyers anyway and maybe even losing some of the old customers.

Next time they'll go to crowdfunding they can do so without my money.

 

[Bonerbill]

WTF: http://www.gameinformer.com/b/news/...eternity-ii-deadfire-coming-to-consoles.aspx?

Pillars Of Eternity II: Deadfire Coming To Consoles

Pillars of Eternity II: Deadfire is nearing completion for PC, Mac, and Linux, with a release planned for April 3. For players without a dedicated gaming PC, you can still look forward to a chance to try out this sequel, as Game Informer has learned that Deadfire is set to come to PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and Switch during the holiday season of 2018.

While Obsidian heads up primary development duties for Pillars II on PC, the game is being ported to consoles by developer Red Cerberus. Versus Evil and Obsidian are working together to publish the game.

For more on Pillars of Eternity II: Deadfire, check out our four-page feature in the latest issue of Game Informer, releasing today.

Our Take
The original Pillars of Eternity was a fantastic isometric role-playing game, and there’s good reason to believe that its sequel will continue the tradition of excellence. The original game released last summer for Xbox One and PlayStation 4; it’s good news that console players won’t have to wait quite so long for the sequel. Undoubtedly, Nintendo enthusiasts should also be excited to see the game heading to the Switch, a platform that is still establishing its cred as a role-playing game destination.

lol did Josh know about this? This is what he says in the TheSixthAxis preview: http://www.thesixthaxis.com/2018/02/06/taking-to-the-high-seas-in-pillars-of-eternity-ii-deadfire/

For those on console, looking to continue their journey from the first game, it might be a long wait, if it happens at all. The first game’s port was created by a team at Paradox Interactive, but Obsidian have partnered with a different publisher for the sequel. Even so, Josh said, “I think there’s the possibility for it, but what I’ve said, and this is honest, is that everything we focus on for this game is about PC, Mac and Linux. Clearly Paradox Arctic showed you can port this style of game to console, and to their credit it seems like the people that bought it on console really seemed to enjoy it. Whether or not the audience is there, I don’t know because I don’t have the sales figures, so I would say nothing would prohibit the game being on console, but the main platforms are PC, Mac and Linux.

 

[Sentinel]

Infinitron can you please link me to the Josh Sawyer tumblr posts where he reassured some guy that the game was a PC exclusive & was only being developed for PC? I need a laugh.

 

[Infinitron]

You mean this?



I don't believe he was lying. They have a publisher and the publisher demanded the rights to do a third party port job.

 

[Ulfhednar]

Pretty sure this is higher up the chain than Josh. Developing PC in house and outsourcing consoles is the best way you could do it so that it doesn't affect the quality of PC ... but it definitely leaves some murky water regarding design decisions.

 

[Kem0sabe]

The slowing down of the combat, the new ai, the reduction of the number of npcs in the party... All take an entirely new outlook, as features designed to allow an easier console port

 

[Rev]

You mean this?



I don't believe he was lying. They have a publisher and the publisher demanded the rights to do a third party port job.

Stop the shilling. There's no way he didn't know that there was gonna be a console port of the game way, way before today's announcement. Maybe he wasn't in favour of this decision, but he knew it, and if it's gonna be released in summer it's been in the works for quite some time already.

Also, Versus Evil is basically a no name that only published way smaller games before, it's not like they can go to Obsidian (which is probably a bigger studio than they are) and order them to make a console version of the game, if Obsidian is against it.