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Eternity Josh Sawyer reflects on his failures with Pillars of Eternity

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Thac0

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Well, Deadfire has way more distinction between classes then a Wizardry title.
No, and I think that is in a large part why the game fails.

All of Pillars classes can be sorted into two different playstiles.
Martial - Reliant on the autoattack, abilities support and enhance the autoattack
Caster - Reliant on abilites, the autoattack is secondary

Wizardry has four.
Fighter
Rogue
Cleric
Mage
and classes mix and match of those four identites to get their class fantasy.

Deadfire and Pillars 1 have a lot of classes, but they have very little class fantasies, which makes the classes feel like less many options.
I will expand on this later, particularily why Wizardries four archetypes are much more distinctive than all Pillars archetypes despite technological limitations, little time now.
 
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Thac0

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Since pillars has no element of attrition anymore all classes are very samey. All of them work by firing on all guns as soon as the battle starts, just the aforementioned casters fire a bit harder at first and then fall off more, the martials fire more consistently throughout the battle.

Old Wizardries are very attrition based.
Fighters are classes that suffer zero from attrition. They are at their most efficient just choosing the attack command, later sometimes berserk. They can't do anything outside of combat. They are gonna do all the heavylifting on generic random encounters, and level ups/more gear on them makes normal progression much much smoother.
Thieves have no attrition aswell, but they also have less direct combat utility than fighters. They disarm traps, open chests, lockpick doors, and generally make your progress through the dungeons more smooth. They are the attrittionless out of combat class.
Mages are the attrition combat class. If they use their spellslots they are trendemously influential, and will be generally the most important character in hard fights and bossfights. They have a few spells that work out of combat (and which generally makes them the most important class in the game in good old fashioned caster supremacy) but mostly they are the nuke you try to keep at full power throughout the dungeon, to burn down the boss with.
Cleric are the attrition out of combat class. They don't really cast that many spells in combat, throwing out a buff or two or a few healing spells if the battle really goes dire. But their spell slots are frequently drained throughout the dungeon, and if your Cleric can no longer heal you basically have to abandon your run.

This is the class balance of AD&D, and from those first four classes (three that is, as the rogue joined them later) there are the four general archetypes that a unit can have. Later Wizardries make things a bit more complicated with psionics and alchemy, but even at its most basic there are four big class fantasies which give Wizardry games their class distinctions.

Sawyers games on the other hand try to have as little class distinction as possible.
The distinction between the fighter and the rogue is the weakest in Wiz, since both just want to use their auto attack in combat.
I'd say even that distinction is bigger than the distinction between any two classes in the pillars games, even if you take the druid and the monk.
Sawyer's balance philosophy is so disdained since it takes the edge from things.
 
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IHaveHugeNick

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Didn't play deadfire so I can't really comment on this, but if there's so much out of whack and exploitable, unintentionally I assume, then Sawyer is a terrible rules lawyer and an autist.

That's what I mean, most of this stuff seems unintentional and/or an oversight.

I mean, Deadfire's biggest strength is excellent itemization and large amount of class variants. These two aspects combine into gigantic amount of possible builds. I guess you could say it's intentionally unintentional that some builds would end up broken - they left it for the players to figure out, but they knew exactly what kind of system they were making.

Bottom line, "no OP builds" doesn't apply to Deadfire at all and people need to quit repeating sensukisms from 10 years ago and acting like they've made some insightful observation.

I have talked about this before, but I think the biggest downfall of PoE's system is the symmetrical balance of the classes. This "everyone can do everything" thing is very, very suspect and leads to weird streamlining and the tiniest of changes lead to disastrous results in terms of balance.

I made a Fighter therefore he has to be a tank because nothing else is gonna work = complexity
I made a Wizard but I designed him to be a tank by carefully picking unusual attributes, items and spells = streamlining

Okay.
 

Haplo

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Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire
Since pillars has no element of attrition anymore all classes are very samey. All of them work by firing on all guns as soon as the battle starts, just the aforementioned casters fire a bit harder at first and then fall off more, the martials fire more consistently throughout the battle.

Old Wizardries are very attrition based.
Fighters are classes that suffer zero from attrition. They are at their most efficient just choosing the attack command, later sometimes berserk. They can't do anything outside of combat. They are gonna do all the heavylifting on generic random encounters, and level ups/more gear on them makes normal progression much much smoother.
Thieves have no attrition aswell, but they also have less direct combat utility than fighters. They disarm traps, open chests, lockpick doors, and generally make your progress through the dungeons more smooth. They are the attrittionless out of combat class.
Mages are the attrition combat class. If they use their spellslots they are trendemously influential, and will be generally the most important character in hard fights and bossfights. They have a few spells that work out of combat (and which generally makes them the most important class in the game in good old fashioned caster supremacy) but mostly they are the nuke you try to keep at full power throughout the dungeon, to burn down the boss with.
Cleric are the attrition out of combat class. They don't really cast that many spells in combat, throwing out a buff or two or a few healing spells if the battle really goes dire. But their spell slots are frequently drained throughout the dungeon, and if your Cleric can no longer heal you basically have to abandon your run.

This is the class balance of AD&D, and from those first four classes (three that is, as the rogue joined them later) there are the four general archetypes that a unit can have. Later Wizardries make things a bit more complicated with psionics and alchemy, but even at its most basic there are four big class fantasies which give Wizardry games their class distinctions.

Sawyers games on the other hand try to have as little class distinction as possible.
The distinction between the fighter and the rogue is the weakest in Wiz, since both just want to use their auto attack in combat.
I'd say even that distinction is bigger than the distinction between any two classes in the pillars games, even if you take the druid and the monk.
Sawyer's balance philosophy is so disdained since it takes the edge from things.

Nicely written. And you have a point. "Classic", simple classes have their place in an attrition based game.
You keep them.

I'll take the beautiful complexity, nuances and synergies of a more robust class system, such as Deadfire.
 
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Thac0

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Nicely written. And you have a point. "Classic", simple classes have their place in an attrition based game.
You keep them.

I'll take the beautiful complexity, nuances and synergies of a more robust class system, such as Deadfire.

Oh I appreciate expansive class systems.
My favourite modern class system has 24 classes, you can have one primary class and a secondary class, you can swap classes on the fly and you can equip up to 5 passive abilities even from classes you are not using currently. That curbstomps Deadfire by sheer numeric comparison.
Before anyone asks, it is a JRPG, Bravely Default II

But if you do not bother to expand the amount of different valid character archetypes that your class system is based on, adding more classes has diminishing returns.
Deadfire has only two valid character archetypes, and so all of the classes end up being just skins of either a fullcaster or a combatant with vaguely reflavored abilities.
 

Chippy

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Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag.
I found this article on a site while I was researching DOT3/DOT5.1 brake fluid. I think Josh Sawyer should read this article: https://stasosphere.com/experience-life/book-sex-safe-bike-seats/ an excerpt:

In this book you will learn:

  • How your perineum is not designed to be a shock absorber
  • How there is no such thing as a one-fit-all bike seat
  • How the science can’t come to an agreement on the subject
  • How the industry responds to this issue
  • How you need to listen to what your body is telling you about your bike ride
  • Why women aren’t safe either
  • How to correctly configure your bike seat
  • Strategies to reduce pressure on perineum
  • and much more…
  • Bonus: 3 simple techniques that will help improve your sex life.
  • Bonus: 16 bike seats to choose from
  • Bonus: 16 scientific studies on the subject
Buy this book NOW and cycle to a Better Sex Life.

Maybe after reading this he will get his mojo back to where it was in New Vegas?. Or at least a suitable bike seat:
:dgaider:
 

Cryomancer

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but they have very little class fantasies

Yep. Sawyer scarified too much of class fantasy and immersion for the sake of balance and the result is not a balanced game. For example, there are anyone here who believes that a Transmuter or a Conjurer is good as a Evoker in Pillars 2? The benefit for a transmuter is just assume a "ogre" form which is silly IMO. Meanwhile, on kingmaker, a transmuter can assume plant, elemental and animal shapes, can enlarge and reduce allies size, transform enemies into CR 1 animals, disintegrate the enemy transforming then into dust(...) and this only looking into low and mid level spells.

And conjuration? Is the WORST implementation of conjuration ever. Nothing cool to do with it. "Malignant cloud" is just the a extremely worst version of cloudkill who lasts nothing and deal no damage. The "mage" class on Base BG2 can appeal to people who like all types of fantasies. Is a diehard fullmetal alchemist fan and wanna transform things? Alteration/Transmutation. IS a diehard necromancer fan? Necromancy. Wanna be a blaster? Evocation? Wanna be a conjurer summoning demons and elementals to do your binding while conjure lasting effects like cloudkill? Conjuration. Wanna be a illusionist magician who tricks and trolls the enemy? Illusionist. The guy who enslaves your enemies? Enchantment. Produce all types of crazy inconsistent stuff? Wild mage.

You have dozens of fantasies in a single class. While on PoE2, you have only one. The blaster.

Pillars 1 did a massive success cuz the promisse of a BG style game in a world with :
  • Diablo 3
  • WoW Cataclysm
  • Dungeon Siege 3
  • (...)
Where everyone was removing the RP from RPG games, was a amazing idea and everyone was hyped. Sadly, they become too focused on ""fixing"" the (non) problems of old IE games, instead of improving on it and bringing new things. And the solution was worse than the (non) problem. And since everyone was wanting a BG style CRPG, everyone bough the first one. The second game, din't launched in a "desert of zero good RPG", was launched in the same year of Pathfinder Kingmaker and people prefered to play PF:KM.

----------------------------

I like Pillars? A bit. Is a decent game. Not a masterpiece like Kingmaker but a decent game. However, I an grateful to Sawyer, cuz is thanks to him that companies started to develop RPG's again. We would't get OwlCat games if he din't had make pillars.
 

the mole

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how many times did you have to look up why you were stuck on kingmaker

I've watched reviews and it not only looks like shit, but it looks broken, storywise gameplaywise, looks like it was never tested
 

Major_Blackhart

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Well I can't comment on kingmaker because I never played it. But I bought Pillars. And I bought the expansions to go with it too.

I played PoE. Without the expansions. It wasn't good. I played it with the White March expansions. It was better. But still not... enjoyable.

I've played it twice. Last obsidian game I've bought.

Edit: Played it twice. Beaten it once. I've meanwhile put 1k hours into underrail, kenshi, and FONV respectively. You guys figure it out.
 

Old Hans

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Well I can't comment on kingmaker because I never played it. But I bought Pillars. And I bought the expansions to go with it too.

I played PoE. Without the expansions. It wasn't good. I played it with the White March expansions. It was better. But still not... enjoyable.

I've played it twice. Last obsidian game I've bought.

Edit: Played it twice. Beaten it once. I've meanwhile put 1k hours into underrail, kenshi, and FONV respectively. You guys figure it out.

yea I just finished white march part 1. everyone said it was the coolest thing ever, but man I thought it was pretty mediocre. the dwarf ghosts sounded like a bunch of whiny complaining cowards
 
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Thac0

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Where everyone was removing the RP from RPG games, was a amazing idea and everyone was hyped. Sadly, they become too focused on ""fixing"" the (non) problems of old IE games, instead of improving on it and bringing new things. And the solution was worse than the (non) problem. And since everyone was wanting a BG style CRPG, everyone bough the first one. The second game, din't launched in a "desert of zero good RPG", was launched in the same year of Pathfinder Kingmaker and people prefered to play PF:KM.

----------------------------

I like Pillars? A bit. Is a decent game. Not a masterpiece like Kingmaker but a decent game. However, I an grateful to Sawyer, cuz is thanks to him that companies started to develop RPG's again. We would't get OwlCat games if he din't had make pillars.

Yeah this sounds like a good guess on why they failed.
Honestly it is so confusing, since while both Pillars games are flawed, none of the flaws should be big enough to kill the game.
Something, between low class fantasy, a short and shallow story, fierce competition for the first time, bad writing that continues with the god shit from Pillars 1 while noone finished that game, an unusual setting, bad ship combat and the wrong focus on self declared flaws of IE style games, sank the game. But no individual flaw is big enough.
Somehow Pillars is less than the sum of it's faults.
 

Cryomancer

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, bad ship combat

The ship combat had potential, if they din't made it a "gimmicky" dissociated from the gameplay and made you able to control your ship like you control a character in RtWP/TB mode and cast spells to manipulate the wind, water and so on, that would be so cool and unique.

I an playing a retroclone of D&D called Swords & Wizardry. So far we had a total of ONE naval battle in our campaign and was very interesting. There are no cannons on S&W but just imagine how cool would be raising ice walls to protect your ship from enemy cannons, trying to control the wind in your favor and being counterspelled, trying to cast freezing sphere to create a "small iceberg" in front of enemy ship. High fantasy ship combat would be so amazing... But obviously it could't work on PoE 2 cuz "it is too unbalanced"... The Watershaper companion would be "OP" in naval combat.

PS : If I could play as a watershaper, I would give another chance to PoE2. Water is a underrepresented element. IDK why they decided to restrict it to a companion...

I'm trying to play through Beast of Winter right now having slogged through SSS. The boredom, good lord. I can't stand this fucking game.

I played a bit of PoE 2 but never finished. Once as a Wizard and once as a Cipher. Now, Kingmaker, I have over 700 hours on it...
 

Brancaleone

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Yeah this sounds like a good guess on why they failed.
Honestly it is so confusing, since while both Pillars games are flawed, none of the flaws should be big enough to kill the game.
Something, between low class fantasy, a short and shallow story, fierce competition for the first time, bad writing that continues with the god shit from Pillars 1 while noone finished that game, an unusual setting, bad ship combat and the wrong focus on self declared flaws of IE style games, sank the game. But no individual flaw is big enough.
Somehow Pillars is less than the sum of it's faults.

You could say it's the anti-Baldur's Gate 2. BG2 does nothing exceptionally, but everything is done at least competently enough, and the result is greater than the sum of its parts.
Pillars does nothing awfully, but everything is no better than meh, and the result is lesser than the sum of its parts.

Of course, I'm not talking about audio-visual quality, which is very good in both cases.
 
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Lyric Suite

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I think along the way it seems Sawyer forgot why RPG classes exist in the first place.

I.E., the archetype comes before the system. The system is there to rapresents the archtype where as it seems Soyer convinced himself the archetype was holding the system back.

But this begs the question: if the class wants to escape the archetype that is intended to be a simulation of, why bother having classes?
 

Brancaleone

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I think along the way it seems Sawyer forgot why RPG classes exist in the first place.

I.E., the archetype comes before the system. The system is there to rapresents the archtype where as it seems Soyer convinced himself the archetype was holding the system back.

But this begs the question: if the class wants to escape the archetype that is intended to be a simulation of, why bother having classes?
I've always got the feeling that this is the symptom of a wider problem, that is, the belief that system comes before content.

In other words, Sawyer appears to have, so to speak, a sort of alchemical mindset: since acquiring huge quantities of gold is very, very difficult, and it requires a huge amount of competence in either mining and refining, or in trading, or in acquiring and wielding power, or in [insert specific field] (and so on and so on), well, if I can focus on finding the alchemical formula that transmutates vile metals into gold, not having any of those competences becomes irrelevant, since I can just turn anything into precious metal.

I'd say he's at least partially aware of the fact that he's singularly untalented when it comes to content creation, and that's why he focuses obsessively on the systems, being under the delusion that if he only manages to devise the perfect system he will be able to throw any kind of tripe at it and it will get turned into great content.

At least, this is my "It was Aliens" theory about it.
 
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Thac0

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if I can focus on finding the alchemical formula that transmutates vile metals into gold, not having any of those competences becomes irrelevant, since I can just turn anything into precious metal.

No, when you listen to Sawyer speak he believes that the gold is in the systems. His alchemy creates fools gold, Pyrite, and he can't tell it from the real. It is not like he willfully abandons an aspect of his game, he just overfocusses on the fact that the system should strive to his ideals. He thinks this is gold already, a reason to play his games above the competition.
The fact that every class combination should be viable permutates the entire system, and it is not really anything even casuals give a fuck about. Casuals want the default classes to be strong, Fighter, Wizard, Rogue. Even they are not pleb enough to play an intelligence Barbarian and then rage because it is weak.


But this begs the question: if the class wants to escape the archetype that is intended to be a simulation of, why bother having classes?

Not entirely sure what you mean by this.

I.E., the archetype comes before the system. The system is there to rapresents the archtype where as it seems Soyer convinced himself the archetype was holding the system back.

But this is on the money. The system exist to let you live the fantasy of a warrior/wizard/cleric/rogue/druid/warlock/barbarian/monk etc. The rules have to be secondary to the class fantasy, a tool to enhance it, and not primary to it.
 

Lyric Suite

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Yeah but if the rules make you step out of the bounds of the archetype to the point there's really no line of demarcation between classes, why bother with classes?
 

Brancaleone

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No, when you listen to Sawyer speak he believes that the gold is in the systems. His alchemy creates fools gold, Pyrite, and he can't tell it from the real. It is not like he willfully abandons an aspect of his game, he just overfocusses on the fact that the system should strive to his ideals. He thinks this is gold already, a reason to play his games above the competition.
The fact that every class combination should be viable permutates the entire system, and it is not really anything even casuals give a fuck about. Casuals want the default classes to be strong, Fighter, Wizard, Rogue. Even they are not pleb enough to play an intelligence Barbarian and then rage because it is weak.
That's more or less what I meant. His system is gold, therefore any content to which that system is applied must be automatically worth it. And since he's untalented when it comes to creating content (in the sense of content worth playing), he has no means to discern between good and bad content, which goes back to strengthen his 'the gold is in the system' belief.
 

Brancaleone

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I'll try to go out on a limb:

Casuals who seek emphasis on the power aspect of the power fantasy won't find it, since Sawyer is always all too careful to leave it out completely.
Casuals who seek evasion from drab reality won't find it, since playing a character who gets sort of goodish at several unrelated things within a world full of small invasive rules is not evasion from reality, it's real life.
Combatfaqs who seek challenge won't find it because of his 'balancing' approach.
Combatfags who seek good encounter design won't find it because of his delusion that a great system would automatically take care of it.
Those who seek emergent gameplay will be disappointed, since his philosophy is that you solve encounters by the iterative application of a great number of small impact actions.
Those who want classes/archetypes that feel really distinct won't find them, because he believes that they should all be equally viable, and that inevitably lead them to be samey.

No wonder his games turn out meh all around.

I'm sure I'm leaving out quite a few categories of players, but you get the gist.
 
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Thac0

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Yeah but if the rules make you step out of the bounds of the archetype to the point there's really no line of demarcation between classes, why bother with classes?

Oh yeah Sawyer wants to make a classless archetype and Avowed will not feature classes.

Combatfaqs who seek challenge won't find it because of his 'balancing' approach.

The games certainly can be challenging on max difficulty. I however let my run fizzle out because of long load times, high tankyness of enemies and strange bugs particularily with the new turn based combat.
Fighting a few thugs for half an hour, then dieing because an opponents makes an attack outside of his turn because the engine spergs out, seeing a 5 minute loading screen before you try again just doesn't feel very fun. Maybe it is better by now, my run was very shortly after release of turn based mode.
 

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