Eternity Avowed - Obsidian's first person action-RPG in the Pillars of Eternity setting

[Kem0sabe]

It was even part of their Outer World press campaign preceding release. "this is not new Vegas in space, temper your expectations"

 

[Cryomancer]

I don't think that reducing the scope is a bad thing. Quality > Quantity. In Gothic 2, there is a total of ONE main city, very memorable, full of interesting stuff. In Skyrim, there are many "major cities", all boring and uninspiring.

As for 2 races, IMO they should have added at least a 3rd race. Humans, Dwarves and Elves.

 

[Roguey]

I don't think that reducing the scope is a bad thing. Quality > Quantity. In Gothic 2, there is a total of ONE main city, very memorable, full of interesting stuff. In Skyrim, there are many "major cities", all boring and uninspiring.

As for 2 races, IMO they should have added at least a 3rd race. Humans, Dwarves and Elves.

Height differences are a mess. Notice that no Elder Scrolls lets you play as a short race.

 

[SpaceWizardz]

I don't think that reducing the scope is a bad thing. Quality > Quantity. In Gothic 2, there is a total of ONE main city, very memorable, full of interesting stuff.

This cope has been already expended, Obsidian has spent the past decade repeatedly failing to make a reduced scope (relative to AP/NV) translate into more sophisticated design.

 

[Butter]

Obsidian are a AAA studio who have convinced players that they're AA.

 

[Mebrilia the Viera Queen]

"Obsidian: lower your expectations". It's sad.

I doubt they can go any lower lol.

 

[Zed Duke of Banville]

I don't think that reducing the scope is a bad thing. Quality > Quantity. In Gothic 2, there is a total of ONE main city, very memorable, full of interesting stuff. In Skyrim, there are many "major cities", all boring and uninspiring.

As for 2 races, IMO they should have added at least a 3rd race. Humans, Dwarves and Elves.

Height differences are a mess. Notice that no Elder Scrolls lets you play as a short race.

Morrowind introduced different heights (and weights) by race/gender combination, with male bosmer (wood elves) being the shortest, though the difference is less extreme than for the usual fantasy dwarves and halflings.

 

[Cryomancer]

IMO Obsidian declined a lot. Just compare FNV with outer worlds, FNV has a lot of interesting factions, lots of cool weapons, and OW has neon weapons and revolves around "corporations bad", hence I'm not hyped for this game. Can be good? Sure. But so far, the unique good things that I saw are the spell effects.

 

[Child of Malkav]

IMO Obsidian declined a lot. Just compare FNV with outer worlds, FNV has a lot of interesting factions, lots of cool weapons, and OW has neon weapons and revolves around "corporations bad", hence I'm not hyped for this game. Can be good? Sure. But so far, the unique good things that I saw are the spell effects.

It has more mechanics, more features (disarming mines, dragging bodies etc.), traits, perks that are actually interesting and affect gameplay as well as appear as dialogue options (a few of them but still), highly moddable. Tow pales in comparison.

 

[Cross]

I don't think that reducing the scope is a bad thing. Quality > Quantity. In Gothic 2, there is a total of ONE main city, very memorable, full of interesting stuff. In Skyrim, there are many "major cities", all boring and uninspiring.

As for 2 races, IMO they should have added at least a 3rd race. Humans, Dwarves and Elves.

Height differences are a mess.

Sounds like another excuse for incompetence.

 

[HoboForEternity]

I don't think that reducing the scope is a bad thing. Quality > Quantity. In Gothic 2, there is a total of ONE main city, very memorable, full of interesting stuff. In Skyrim, there are many "major cities", all boring and uninspiring.

As for 2 races, IMO they should have added at least a 3rd race. Humans, Dwarves and Elves.

Height differences are a mess.

Sounds like another excuse for incompetence.

It's not first person though.

 

[Roguey]

Obsidian are a AAA studio who have convinced players that they're AA.

Obsidian has never had Bioware-sized teams until they were bought by MS. Scaling up always causes problems.

Sounds like another excuse for incompetence.

Dragon Age Origins let you play a dwarf and it caused a lot of additional work. Dragon Age II only let you play a human to reduce the workload because they absolutely did not have the time or the people available to get it working right. With Inquisition they had TOR money coming in so they could bring them back. Obsidian is having enough problems as it is making Avowed. Adding dwarves and orlans wouldn't make it a better game, in fact it would result in the exact opposite.

 

[Cryomancer]

And in this game, there are areas where only manlets can get into.

Hell, Gothic 1 had scrolls of polymorph to allow access to specific areas, becoming a small animal was required for some quests.

 

[Cross]

Sounds like another excuse for incompetence.

Dragon Age Origins let you play a dwarf and it caused a lot of additional work. Dragon Age II only let you play a human to reduce the workload because they absolutely did not have the time or the people available to get it working right. With Inquisition they had TOR money coming in so they could bring them back. Obsidian is having enough problems as it is making Avowed. Adding dwarves and orlans wouldn't make it a better game, in fact it would result in the exact opposite.

This makes no sense. Dragon Age II has a playable dwarf character, Varric. They didn't let you pick a race for the protagonist because you were playing as the pre-defined character of Hawke and BioWare was under the delusion that they were crafting some deep personal drama.

The Neverwinter Nights, Kotor and Dragon Age games all have playable characters both smaller and bigger than humans, so it can't be that hard.

It's not first person though.

Sure, but I don't see why it would be so hard to make a few changes to convey a character's height in first-person, like changing the FOV.

 

[copebot]

Mandatory companions written by women, so you can be nagged by virtual women while you game.

 

[Roguey]

This makes no sense. Dragon Age II has a playable dwarf character, Varric. They didn't let you pick a race for the protagonist because you were playing as the pre-defined character of Hawke and BioWare was under the delusion that they were crafting some deep personal drama.

Varric is not a PC. They have to alter pretty much every cinematic for the player character if the PC is a dwarf. Story decisions are downstream of resource-availability. The writers don't define the parameters of the game.

Neverwinter Nights didn't have cinematics so height of the PC didn't matter.

 

[Fedora Master]

More races isn't going to magically fix this mess.

 

[IHaveHugeNick]

What on earth, how about not bother altering anything at all, because no one will pay attention if PC's POV is slightly too high.

 

[Cross]

This makes no sense. Dragon Age II has a playable dwarf character, Varric. They didn't let you pick a race for the protagonist because you were playing as the pre-defined character of Hawke and BioWare was under the delusion that they were crafting some deep personal drama.

Varric is not a PC. They have to alter pretty much every cinematic for the player character if the PC is a dwarf. Story decisions are downstream of resource-availability. The writers don't define the parameters of the game.

Again, this makes no sense. You can control Varric directly in combat and he participates in cutscenes. So if they wanted to allow the player to play as a dwarf, they could just reuse his character model and animations. With a few exceptions, that's how all these games work, with the playable characters sharing the same character models and animations as the NPCs.

Neverwinter Nights didn't have cinematics so height of the PC didn't matter.

 

[Roguey]

Again, this makes no sense. You can control Varric directly in combat and he participates in cutscenes. So if they wanted to allow the player to play as a dwarf, they could just reuse his character model and animations.

From the PC's perspective it wouldn't work.

Here's a slightly related example of what I'm talking about.


Original Jade Empire had a fade-to-black instead of a lesbian kiss. They never made an animation for this scene. Someone modded it so that it used the same animation as the male/female kiss. You can see how wrong it looks. There's a lot of this kind of thing when you build all your cutscenes for a player character of a specific height and then replace that character with a character with an extremely different height and build.

Your example is from NWN2 which is a lousy game that shipped with a million problems. "We have to make cutscenes for player characters of radically different heights and builds" was likely a contributing factor.

 

[Cross]

Original Jade Empire had a fade-to-black instead of a lesbian kiss. They never made an animation for this scene. Someone modded it

We're talking about existing games, not mods. This just shows how nonsensical your whole argument is.

Your example is from NWN2 which is a lousy game that shipped with a million problems. "We have to make cutscenes for player characters of radically different heights and builds" was likely a contributing factor.

What about the Kotor games? Wookies were bigger than human characters. T3-M4 and G0-T0 were smaller than even dwarves. There were lots of other droids and alien races of differing heights, all of which participated in cutscenes.

 

[whydoibother]

"We have to make cutscenes for player characters of radically different heights and builds" was likely a contributing factor.

Its the same for armor, in theory. In practice, the armor is just a tattoo on the character's chest, taking their shape and stretching as they do.
If you aren't going for great visuals, you can get away with shit like that. You can get away with the animation being bad, cutting half the distance with bad posture from the tall guy, and half with the short guy floating a bit, so they meet in the kiss animation.

There were lots of other droids and alien races of differing heights, all of which participated in cutscenes.

But they didn't participate in hugging, or punching, or other specific animations. They just existed in the cutscenes, as furniture, and not as actors. I can't even recall if a wookie ever gets a hug, or grappled, or punched in that game.
The general argument is true, in that you want all your humanoids that will interact up close to each other and touch each other to be the same size, so you can use the same skeleton for animations. But the thing is, you can use the same skeleton for shorter humanoids too, just hack it a bit so it matches. Its extra work, but not THAT much extra work. A guy can do that in a couple of hours, if the expected result is what we see in these games.

 

[Roguey]

We're talking about existing games, not mods. This just shows how nonsensical your whole argument is.

Seems kinda hopeless to try to explain this to you since you just can't comprehend it. It takes extra work to make it look right. They have finite resources. They have to make choices early on figuring out what they can have and what they can't. This isn't Pillars of Eternity 3, it's Avowed, a spin-off. Similar to how Redguard was an Elder Scrolls spin-off that only allowed you play as a very specific Redguard character. It's an easy decision to make to avoid this particular workload so they can focus on things that are far more important when it comes to making a full-scale RPG from scratch.

It's also within the realm of possibility that that dummy Parker did have playable dwarves/orlans/aumaua as part of his design and they had to be cut after the project reboot.

What about the Kotor games? Wookies were bigger than human characters. T3-M4 and G0-T0 were smaller than even dwarves. There were lots of other droids and alien races of differing heights, all of which participated in cutscenes.

Why are you using kotor as an example when those games only let you play as a human character despite the existence of all these fantastic creatures for the reasons I've mentioned?

 

[Wayward Son]

Damn I just learned that this is a thing. Just another game to look forward to in the next couple years.

 

[Cross]

Why are you using kotor as an example when those games only let you play as a human character

This is not true. There are multiple sections in Kotor 2 where you only play as T3-M4. In fact, T3-M4 is the first character you play as when the game starts.

And obviously you can control other non-human party members in combat like you would the human party members. Nothing stops you from playing through the entirety of the Kotor games with a Wookie or Droid as your active character in combat (other than the parts where they're not available for story reasons, obviously).

Similar to how Redguard was an Elder Scrolls spin-off that only allowed you play as a very specific Redguard character.

That game was not an RPG, it was an action-adventure game. You almost always play as a pre-defined character in those games.