Eternity Josh Sawyer reflects on his failures with Pillars of Eternity

[Giskard]

I'm an old asshurt boomer and I just want to be a kid again

This sums up the Codex to a T, and should be the 'Codex Inc' corporate moto/logo.

 

[Major_Blackhart]

I'm an old asshurt boomer and I just want to be a kid again

This sums up the Codex to a T, and should be the 'Codex Inc' corporate moto/logo.

I just wanna be entertained. I want to enjoy a game when I play it. Why is that so bad?

 

[the mole]

He's too much of a soy beta to give a fuck about fixing his weak erections.

Ironically, he refused to fix core systems after the first game and focused on bloat, eye candy, minigames and talking parrots.

the "fanbase" of crpgs say they want less polish out of poe and more "soul" and "fun" so that's what you get you can't have it both ways

 

[rusty_shackleford]

dumpsterfire failed because it's not interesting enough to entice people to buy it, majority of potential buyers don't give a shit about the rules system or whether the combat is as awful as it was in IE games

 

[the mole]

dumpsterfire failed because it's not interesting enough to entice people to buy it, majority of potential buyers don't give a shit about the rules system or whether the combat is as awful as it was in IE games

it wasn't shilled as hard as dos2, even though dos2 is a broken piece of shit, that's the main reason I'd say

 

[Ismaul]

dos2 is a broken piece of shit

DOS2 is great, PoE doesn't even come close.

 

[the mole]

dos2 is a broken piece of shit

DOS2 is great, PoE doesn't even come close.

you can't argue with stupid

 

[ERYFKRAD]

dos2 is a broken piece of shit

DOS2 is great, PoE doesn't even come close.

you can't argue with stupid

Not gonna stop us from trying.

 

[Cryomancer]

dos2 is a broken piece of shit

DOS2 is great, PoE doesn't even come close.

Nope. DOS2 has awful writing and the worst armor system ever and one of the worst mageries in the genre. Pathfinder Kingmaker is a masterpiece, Pillars is average and DOS2 is too modern.

 

[Giskard]

dos2 is a broken piece of shit

DOS2 is great, PoE doesn't even come close.

you can't argue with stupid

You can Moley, and many around here do, and even make a sport of it
Quite successfully too.

 

[Funposter]

DOS2 has cool environmental/magic interactions and co-op.

 

[the mole]

DOS2 has cool environmental/magic interactions and co-op.

yea but everything else is shit

 

[Rean]

dos2 is a broken piece of shit

DOS2 is great, PoE doesn't even come close.

Nope. DOS2 has awful writing and the worst armor system ever and one of the worst mageries in the genre. Pathfinder Kingmaker is a masterpiece, Pillars is average and DOS2 is too modern.

Correct on all counts.

 

[Funposter]

DOS2 has cool environmental/magic interactions and co-op.

yea but everything else is shit

I'd rather a game did a couple of things well than just being below-average slop the entire way through. That being said, DOS2 is mechanically inferior to the first game so it's really only fun if you want to be able to play as a Lizard or whatever. I also liked the environments more for what its worth. It works well on a first playthrough on Normal (or Easy/Journo) difficulty and is miserable to replay on a higher difficulty where the flaws of the game really start to become apparent.

 

[Takamori]

I'm gonna get murdered for this opinion but even with Armor Pen flaws and the game balance, I found a great joy engaging in combat. What really turned me down on PoE2 was the story, if the game was pure combat and dungeon delving without much concern on what the fuck was going on outside I think I would have enjoyed much more. Just seeking loot and try breaking the balance man game.

But the story is the big focus so I can't simply ignore, if felt like a really shitty wild goose chase with Eothas where they took a huge shit on player agency. Its either ok mah green huge dood, do your thing lmao fuck everything up or fuck you I will get killed and won't even build a *cough* godhammer to fuck you up, even if I knew people who built damn the thing.

 

[Yosharian]

DOS2 has cool environmental/magic interactions and co-op.

yea but everything else is shit

I'd rather a game did a couple of things well than just being below-average slop the entire way through. That being said, DOS2 is mechanically inferior to the first game so it's really only fun if you want to be able to play as a Lizard or whatever. I also liked the environments more for what its worth. It works well on a first playthrough on Normal (or Easy/Journo) difficulty and is miserable to replay on a higher difficulty where the flaws of the game really start to become apparent.

Hmmm. So that's what I've been doing wrong.

 

[Generic-Giant-Spider]

Critical Role will save it.

 

[Funposter]

DOS2 has cool environmental/magic interactions and co-op.

yea but everything else is shit

I'd rather a game did a couple of things well than just being below-average slop the entire way through. That being said, DOS2 is mechanically inferior to the first game so it's really only fun if you want to be able to play as a Lizard or whatever. I also liked the environments more for what its worth. It works well on a first playthrough on Normal (or Easy/Journo) difficulty and is miserable to replay on a higher difficulty where the flaws of the game really start to become apparent.

Hmmm. So that's what I've been doing wrong.

Play a Wizard on normal difficulty and turn your brain off while enjoying the way all of the magical elements can interact with each other before it all just turns into a Necrofire clusterfuck. Maybe stack Fire resist. If you play a Lizard you can easily get enough Fire resist so that it heals you by endgame!

 

[Riddler]

dumpsterfire failed because it's not interesting enough to entice people to buy it, majority of potential buyers don't give a shit about the rules system or whether the combat is as awful as it was in IE games

it wasn't shilled as hard as dos2, even though dos2 is a broken piece of shit, that's the main reason I'd say

That's the major reason people liked Dos2.

 

[luj1]

dumpsterfire failed because it's not interesting enough to entice people to buy it

Amazing you still don't get it. It failed because the first game sucked.

 

[rusty_shackleford]

dumpsterfire failed because it's not interesting enough to entice people to buy it

Amazing you still don't get it. It failed because the first game sucked.

if how much a game sucked correlated with sales then a lot of video games would sell less copies

 

[Gargaune]

I'm gonna get murdered for this opinion but even with Armor Pen flaws and the game balance, I found a great joy engaging in combat. What really turned me down on PoE2 was the story, if the game was pure combat and dungeon delving without much concern on what the fuck was going on outside I think I would have enjoyed much more. Just seeking loot and try breaking the balance man game.

But the story is the big focus so I can't simply ignore, if felt like a really shitty wild goose chase with Eothas where they took a huge shit on player agency. Its either ok mah green huge dood, do your thing lmao fuck everything up or fuck you I will get killed and won't even build a *cough* godhammer to fuck you up, even if I knew people who built damn the thing.

Abso-fucking-lutely, yes. I actually had a fair bit of fun sailing around and exploring, but the main quest is probably the worst narrative design since Dragon Age 2 and it soured the whole experience in retrospect. You can build an RPG plot around failure as a theme, but not futility, and it's amazing how Sawyer refuses to accept that feedback. Then again, this is the same bloke who held a long (and very interesting!) GDC .ppt about how players relate better to +X increments rather than PoE's percentage upgrades, then carried on with the exact same thing in Deadfire.

 

[Orud]

I got an even dumber reason as to why I couldn't be bothered that much with Pillars 2.

Now, I liked Pillars 1. I didn't think it was the best thing ever, but I liked it enough to be interested in more. One tiny thing that definitely irked me however, was that it was a setting about to lead into a renaissance era rather than a medieval fantasy setting. I didn't mind it as much, but at the end of the day boring old 'swords and sorcery' is my jam and 'muskets, rapiers and magic' aren't.

When I saw the marketing for Pillars 2 it felt like they went full out renaissance colonialism, with a whiff of piracy sprinkled on top, I and couldn't be bothered any less with it. I immediately decided to buy it at a later point, and did, but not at launch. In comparison, I bought Kingsmaker and Pillars 1 instantly. Kingsmaker and Pillars 1 felt like they'd offer me something similar to Baldur's Gate, while PoE 2 wouldn't.

I know of others that didn't, and still haven't, bothered with it for that same reason. While I do enjoy non-medieval RPG's, it's certainly something that determines if it's an instant buy or not, and how fast I'll pick it up to play it.

 

[AwesomeButton]

If the IE games were an attempt to translate PnP into an RTS-like game, PoE/Deadfire is an attempt to translate that translation into what Josh perceived as "modern sensibilities" while maintaining the outward guise of "old-school CRPG". It's kickstarter backers' money being used to fund a casual game that on the surface resembles old school CRPGs, but with all their "faults" "fixed" by the unerring and infalliable master of systems design Josh Sawyer.

To give him credit, he didn't do bad with the system design at all.

There is even a way to configure Deadfire difficulty so that its combat is challenging, and I don't mean by intentionally gimping your characters.

I'm playing it again now, this time in TB mode, and TB mode while being an overall better experience, really emphasizes how there are actions which the player can perform to give himself an advantage with no cost attached to those actions, if the player doesn't mind the repetitiveness.

 

[JarlFrank]

arcanum is turnbased thus takes longer

There it is. The most retarded sentence I have ever read on the Codex. Congratulations.