Eternity Avowed - Obsidian's first person action-RPG in the Pillars of Eternity setting - coming November 12th(?)

[Heroic Liberator]

But I am rating the games. When Swen first appeared on the stage to reveal Baldur's Gate 3 gameplay for the first time he showed us gameplay consisting of running around a beachfront that looked identical to the beach zones in Original Sin 1/2. Then he stacked wooden barrels on top of each over and jumped on them to reach something.

Then he did the whole "You see that puddle of oil, there? If I shoot a fire spell at it, I can create fire!"

Was that what we've been waiting 20 years for an actual BG3 for? Swen's clown game rebranded as Baldur's Gate?

I rated the game right then and there. And nothing that followed redeemed it in my mind.

See, but what you're doing isn't rating the game for what it is. You're rating it against your expectations for what it should have been (as a proper BG successor). Which is fine and I mostly agree, but things become silly when you use that sort of metric to compare different games. Both Avowed and DA4 will most likely be way more mediocre than BG3 (although on the flipside, they might be less frontloaded which would be a big plus in my view).

 

[Heroic Liberator]

I really like BG3.

They butchered both my wife Minthy and my best bro Gortash, so meh.

 

[TedNugent]

I am really impressed by the fact that this looks exactly like Microsoft Studios made Pillars of Eternity.

 

[Drakortha]

See, but what you're doing isn't rating the game for what it is. You're rating it against your expectations for what it should have been (as a proper BG successor). Which is fine and I mostly agree, but things become silly when you use that sort of metric to compare different games. Both Avowed and DA4 will most likely be way more mediocre than BG3 (although on the flipside, they might be less frontloaded which would be a big plus in my view).

I'm rating it based on how much I can enjoy playing the game. I wouldn't enjoy playing BG3 at all. I played Original Sin 2 and I thought it was shit. I couldn't believe they made the same game again and called it Baldur's Gate. But then again it's not so hard to believe because consumers love to eat shit. It's proven scientific fact.

Avowed could be a mediocre game but at least it doesn't go around calling itself something that it's not. And that's something I can more readily get behind and enjoy for what it is (and not what it's pretending to be).

 

[NaturallyCarnivorousSheep]

This is a frankly audacious thing for her to claim, given the way TOW ended up.

See this is the thing. I don't like savages but I sided with the huana in deadfire because other factions would let roparu(shudra caste in their society) roam free, absolutely despicable. This is a part of the clever faction design(Huana aren't noble savages, they are weird hindus and you can let them do their things, one of their things being a caste system, accept it or help le colonizers) was why they became a kind of design formula for Obsidian. Obviously New Vegas had even better setup, but that was the past. Is the TOW era obsidian capable of replicating this? TOW obviously failed at it, will Avowed?

 

[frajaq]

I sided with the imperialist/colonialist Royal Deadfire Company back in PoE 2 and liked it, hopefully I can stay loyal to Aedyr and stomp natives

 

[Heroic Liberator]

I sided with the imperialist/colonialist Royal Deadfire Company back in PoE 2 and liked it, hopefully I can stay loyal to Aedyr and stomp natives

Seems that the paths are proper imperialist path by siding with Woedica and the inquisitor she inhabits, cringe Aedyran centrist path and native woowoo path.

 

[ArchAngel]

"When the player feedback is like, 'Oh, this doesn't look great,' you're like, okay, we need to prioritize that polish, like, immediately. So we jumped on that," he explains in regards to how fans reacted to the combat.

This gives me a slight glimmer of hope, because at least they're acting like rational humans. "Our audience didn't like it, better change it."

As opposed to the Dragon Age route of ignoring massive backlash and turning on the shill faucet.

a part of me sort of agrees, but also part of me thinks the devs dont really know how to make the combat fun, which tells me there is a lack of vision

It is really not that hard. They just need to add cool animations to our attacks and more effects to enemies getting hurt. Limbs hacking, body parts missing, some enemies hit by hot flames running around screaming and stuff like that.

 

[Wesp5]

Few new articles about Avowed out https://videogames.si.com/features/avowed-interview-carrie-patel

• Avowed will have a shorter length similar to The Outer Worlds, around 20 hours of gameplay.
• The game features multiple open zones with distinct characters and aesthetics, unlike a single open world.

I'll take a shorter good game with zones over a longer open world game anytime! Bloodlines is a great example of a game where that worked wonders, although TOW shows that it can be done badly as well .

 

[Heroic Liberator]

although TOW shows that it can be done badly as well .

You've probably spoken about this in some other thread already, but I'd be curious to know what are some of your favorite RPGs from the 2010s onwards.

 

[Barrow_Bug]

First piece of major dialogue they show in the new gameplay is some furry freak flirting with the protagonist. My god these people are boring. No nuance, no intrigue - just retards obsessed with their creepy genitals.

 

[Barrow_Bug]

why do rpgs even need different factions? which game started that trend? im kind of sick of it

Factions are literally what makes RPG's interesting. Different world-spaces have different kinds of people with competing values and beliefs. Literally every good CRPG has factions. Why would you want to play something that has no inter group conflict?

 

[Spike]

why do rpgs even need different factions? which game started that trend? im kind of sick of it

Factions are literally what makes RPG's interesting. Different world-spaces have different kinds of people with competing values and beliefs. Literally every good CRPG has factions. Why would you want to play something that has no inter group conflict?

Maybe he wants a classic heroic fantasy avenchure.

 

[SmoothPimp]

With all those optimistic interviews, game steadily become pre-order or release day must buy.

 

[Barrow_Bug]

With all those optimistic interviews, game steadily become pre-order or release day must buy.

Jesus Christ, this website has gone down hill.

 

[Wesp5]

although TOW shows that it can be done badly as well .

You've probably spoken about this in some other thread already, but I'd be curious to know what are some of your favorite RPGs from the 2010s onwards.

As I prefer first person view games there weren't that many. My favorite is Cyberpunk 2077, I found TOW mediocre at best, I stopped playing Bethesda games after FO:NV and I never finished Kingdom Come: Deliverance because of the loading times. I don't know if it counts as a RPG but I was recently positively surprised be Ghostwire Tokyo, if only for the atmosphere of the city and the developer's love for their culture. That is one game that certainly wasn't made for common western audiences !

 

[NaturallyCarnivorousSheep]

With all those optimistic interviews, game steadily become pre-order or release day must buy.

Jesus Christ, this website has gone down hill.

It would if he ordered collector's edition but good codexer only does this for Piranha Bytes games(rip)

 

[Lemming42]

Factions are literally what makes RPG's interesting. Different world-spaces have different kinds of people with competing values and beliefs. Literally every good CRPG has factions. Why would you want to play something that has no inter group conflict?

I think he means factions who form the main quest by offering the player a questline that leads them to the finale, like in NV. Obviously you could argue that Khans and Shady Sands are "factions" in Fo1, or that guilds are "factions" in TES games, or that EotB has "factions" in the sense that the Dwarves are fighting the Drow, but they don't work the same way as the big centrepiece faction quests in more recent games.

 

[Roguey]

I think he means factions who form the main quest by offering the player a questline that leads them to the finale, like in NV. Obviously you could argue that Khans and Shady Sands are "factions" in Fo1, or that guilds are "factions" in TES games, or that EotB has "factions" in the sense that the Dwarves are fighting the Drow, but they don't work the same way as the big centrepiece faction quests in more recent games.

In the original Fallout, allying yourself with the Brotherhood of Steel faction means they will send some paladins to help you clean the Military Base and Cathedral out if you ask. Not the best of ideas if you intended to explore those areas non-violently, but it's something that affects the endgame.

 

[Saint_Proverbius]

I think he means factions who form the main quest by offering the player a questline that leads them to the finale, like in NV. Obviously you could argue that Khans and Shady Sands are "factions" in Fo1, or that guilds are "factions" in TES games, or that EotB has "factions" in the sense that the Dwarves are fighting the Drow, but they don't work the same way as the big centrepiece faction quests in more recent games.

This kind of depends on the writing itself. It's always kind of silly when you present the player with a world ending threat as well as fairly powerful factions in the game that the player can join and side with, and then those factions all seem to fuck off near the end when the player faces the world ending threat. If you're going to toss those two things together in the same game, you're going to have to do some masterful writing to explain why those factions have no interest in saving themselves, because they're part of the same world that's going to get ended if the player fails.

In the original Fallout, allying yourself with the Brotherhood of Steel faction means they will send some paladins to help you clean the Military Base and Cathedral out if you ask. Not the best of ideas if you intended to explore those areas non-violently, but it's something that affects the endgame.

They stay outside, which is kind of weird, but we're dealing with late 1990s scripting. If they do go inside Mariposa, I've never seen it happen and eventually I stopped asking in play throughs.

 

[CthuluIsSpy]

Ditto with the Followers. You can ask Nicole to send you some Followers to the Cathedral with you. I wouldn't recommend it; they're pretty bad. They just have spears and metal armour. They are only really good for drawing some aggro, but then you can infiltrate the cathedral and get some dialogue.

 

[CthuluIsSpy]

They stay outside, which is kind of weird, but we're dealing with late 1990s scripting. If they do go inside Mariposa, I've never seen it happen and eventually I stopped asking in play throughs.

It's a design choice. Fallout Fixt allows them to follow you into Mariposa, and they will block you from leaving the elevator due to the narrow doorway. So the devs just didn't allow them to follow you down there instead of coding a "get out of the way feature", which they did add in Fallout 2.

 

[Lemming42]

This kind of depends on the writing itself. It's always kind of silly when you present the player with a world ending threat as well as fairly powerful factions in the game that the player can join and side with, and then those factions all seem to fuck off near the end when the player faces the world ending threat. If you're going to toss those two things together in the same game, you're going to have to do some masterful writing to explain why those factions have no interest in saving themselves, because they're part of the same world that's going to get ended if the player fails.

Yeah, this is the issue. I think New Vegas handled it well but you still get the feeling that nobody except you is really proactively doing anything, and whoever you pick is guaranteed to win as they're blssed with having the most important person in the universe on their side. People in the world do at least mention how they're preparing to take over the Strip but when it comes down to it, nobody can do anything without the player. It's even more odd in a game with so many sidequests because the entire conflict will pause until the player does something to activate it, with both sides in stasis until the player's ready.

There's also the weirdness of how quickly you tend to rise up the ranks in these sort of games - you from from being a random civilian postal worker to being effectively the most prominent and most trusted agent of NCR/House/Legion in the space of about a week.

I guess games like M&B avoid all these by having the player fight against NPCs of equal agency and proactivity who can do all the same things as the player. I wonder if there's a way to implement a system like that into something like NV/Avowed.

 

[Saint_Proverbius]

I guess games like M&B avoid all these by having the player fight against NPCs of equal agency and proactivity who can do all the same things as the player.

That's the thing that I don't quite get about modern CRPGs. Mount & Blade was released in 2008. A huge chunk of fantasy media involves fairly decent sized battles. Yet, there's never really been a successful marriage of the two. You can still have your player power fantasy story, but when you're doing faction quests, you're typically not only building your reputation but you're also building up that faction. New Vegas' fight at the Hoover Dam was pretty close to it, though, but it still feels somewhat scripted.

 

[Lemming42]

Yet, there's never really been a successful marriage of the two.

Only once:

Spoiler