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

[ADL]

Remember when Oblivion tier was an insult? Now games are sub Oblivion tier. Thanks diversity hiring and ESG...

What the hell? I'm not expecting Bethesda-tier NPC scheduling, it's not that kind of game anymore after the pivot, but allied NPCs helping you out when you're being attacked is basic shit.

 

[Artyoan]

That's why I don't rip into Elder Scrolls games. There are some 'small' things about them that would be borderline revolutionary for a game to have today. The real problems were always broken progression/leveling systems, poor combat, and weak attempts to tie its many systems into a cohesive whole. We still talk about them for good reason. There is still no true contender either.

 

[Lodis]

Honeymoon phase already seems to be dying, I've been seeing a lot of complaints about the progression system. Namely how you have to grind materials to upgrade your gear because if you don't then even fighting basic mobs becomes a slog.

 

[aweigh]

Those people are playing Avowed, after having answered that they will not play KCD2, because, I quote: "Vavra is a nigger loving jew traitor that bait&switched DEI garbage into sequel"

Vavra's was a personal betrayal, whereas Obsidian is not something I expected anything different from.

I've said several times KCD2 is probably good; that's completely irrelevant to me. I will *never* touch anything even remotely related to Warhorse or Vavra ever again, simple as. Whether it's good or not is meaningless.

 

[JarlFrank]

Also, you can’t kill a lot of named NPC in Skyrim. But it’s probably due to Bethesda laziness and “good enough” philosophy.

It was a direct response catering to retards who killed quest characters in Morrowind, got told "you doomed the world, better reload" but then saved the game and went on playing because they didn't read the text popup, then went on to complain about it on the forums.

Oblivion made ALL quest relevant NPCs (not just main quest) immortal to prevent retards from fucking up their own game.

Every stupid thing Bethesda does is to cater to stupid people who would otherwise flock to their forums and shit on the game for being "unfair" by punishing their mistakes.

 

[Sweeper]

Those people are playing Avowed, after having answered that they will not play KCD2, because, I quote: "Vavra is a nigger loving jew traitor that bait&switched DEI garbage into sequel"

Vavra's was a personal betrayal, whereas Obsidian is not something I expected anything different from.

I've said several times KCD2 is probably good; that's completely irrelevant to me. I will *never* touch anything even remotely related to Warhorse or Vavra ever again, simple as. Whether it's good or not is meaningless.

Yup. I don't intend on ever playing Avowed, but I'm far more likely to play it than KCD2... or even 1 for that matter. Faggot Vavra killed both games, they're dead to me.
No one had any expectations of Avowed, we all knew what it was gonna be, and it turned out to be exactly what everyone expected.
The entire situation with Kingdom Cum would be kinda funny if it wasn't so tragic.

 

[JarlFrank]

Obsidian would have a budget of a gazillion dollars and they wouldn't think to replicate Oblivion its entirety because that's just not how they think about games. As the artists in the trenches like to gripe about on Glassdoor, they're all about story/narrative/role-playing over all else. Like how this site used to be.

This site used to be about player choice and reactivity, which is not purely story/narrative centered.

Baldur's Gate was disliked by many early Codexers, for example, as an overly story-focused RPG that barely had any choices for the player.
Fallout was considered the gold standard, which has a very open quest structure. It's not at all narrative focused, it's about giving the player one goal and then letting him get there in any way he wants.
Oldschool Codexers also liked Deus Ex as one of the few action RPGs they liked, again because of the open approach to its goals, and the few choices it gives you.

The one storyfag game everyone loved was Planescape Torment, for obvious reasons - it's just really well-written. It also has a lot of micro-choices, little side quests that can have different outcomes and a big focus on giving you dialog options based on character stats.

Obsidian's problem is that their idea of role-playing is too rigidly married to narrative and doesn't go far beyond that.
The old Codex wouldn't have liked Avowed much, either.

 

[Roguey]

A good way to tell if someone is genuinely a fan of RPG's or not is their reaction to a game not having a 'good path', a 'neutral path' and an 'evil path' for most quests.

It isn't terribly difficult to come up with at least three distinct paths through a particular quest that manage to play into different moral standings. Yet so many modern RPG's are deliberately removing anything remotely dark or controversial to appease the dysgenic nutters who don't even flock to these games in high numbers.

Even very watered down RPG's like Skyrim have more interaction with the game world. If you find a particular character to be annoying or you just want to role-play your character as a ruthless serial killer then it is viable to embrace such a path. Hell, as infested with nonsense as Baldur's Gate 3 is you can go through that and kill off pretty much anyone there as well. Quite brutally, even.

So it isn't unreasonable to expect such players to be catered to. I'd wager there's more people interested in an edgy route through any given game than there are those desperate for pronouns to be a priority.

A lot of old games only allow for heroic paths. Bioware's evil choices were stupid and terrible, it was no big loss when they got rid of them in favor of hero/antihero. They couldn't write evil well, a lot of devs can't.

Also Steam achievements for numerous RPGs show that people who play evil characters are a minority. Lot of people do things in role-playing games out of selfish self-interest (e.g. steal everything in sight) but not outright villainy.

 

[Grampy_Bone]

It's just very hard to argue that Obsidian cares the most about "le story" and deep narrative choices when Avowed is 99% non-stop trashmob hack-n-slash, occasionally bookended by Tumblr slashfiction-tier infodumps.

 

[JarlFrank]

Also Steam achievements for numerous RPGs show that people who play evil characters are a minority.

The existence of options I don't choose still enriches the game, because it means that the options I do choose were made out of my own will and not because the game forced me to.

 

[Modron]

The existence of options I don't choose still enriches the game, because it means that the options I do choose were made out of my own will and not because the game forced me to.

I always maintain achievements were a mistake because publishers and developers do use them as metrics to justify including less content moving forward.

 

[Roguey]

It's just very hard to argue that Obsidian cares the most about "le story" and deep narrative choices when Avowed is 99% non-stop trashmob hack-n-slash, occasionally bookended by Tumblr slashfiction-tier infodumps.

Obsidian is Bioware Jr and this is how they do RPGs. You may not like the writing, but they do.

One unspoken time-consuming part of the story process, however, was that we’d get reading recommendations from Feargus – I won’t name the books, but he’d give us a fantasy or sci-fi book he had read that he really liked, which was universally many hours of your life you wouldn’t get back.

I went through with reading them because I was genuinely trying to figure out what elements of these stories Feargus actually liked, because it confounded me – they were all terrible.

Eventually, I realized I couldn’t figure out why he liked this shit, and whenever he’d try and loan me a book, I’d just tell him “no worries, I can get it on my Kindle.”

So another issue with the books is that, at times, Feargus will inflict his story preferences on teams. When this happens, as a Creative Director it is helpful for me to try and ascertain where these story preferences came from and if necessary, argue against them, using the the same books that are upheld as shining pinnacles of inspiring storylines but yet cause brain tumors within seconds to people reading them. This was my job, and why I read these books - to use the very material to argue why we shouldn't do something that undermined the story experience.

 

[JarlFrank]

Obsidian, like Bioware post-BG2, have always been utter trash at encounter design. Honestly I can understand why some people prefer to play those games on "story mode" difficulty because those trash mob encounters aren't fun to fight.

It's like these companies have nobody in their teams who know what a fun combat encounter looks like, but they still want to please the combatfags so they just drop a bunch of enemies into the map and call it a day, thinking that will be fun for people who enjoy combat (because they have no idea what makes combat fun).

 

[Butter]

It's just very hard to argue that Obsidian cares the most about "le story" and deep narrative choices when Avowed is 99% non-stop trashmob hack-n-slash, occasionally bookended by Tumblr slashfiction-tier infodumps.

It doesn't even include a skill system or a CHA attribute for influencing social situations. It's entirely about killing bears and xaurips.

 

[Skinwalker]

It's just very hard to argue that Obsidian cares the most about "le story" and deep narrative choices when Avowed is 99% non-stop trashmob hack-n-slash, occasionally bookended by Tumblr slashfiction-tier infodumps.

How do you know this?

I said how do you know this?

Answer me, Grampy Bone!

 

[Dishonoredbr]

Wokexisters:

1. Infinitroon (decline-enabler)
2. Rougay (decline-apologist)
3. Yosharian
4. frajaq
5. Perkel
6. Sherry
7. Ibn Sina
8. Lord_Potato
9. aweigh
10. Crispy a.k.a. Liberal
11. ArchAngel
12. Heroic Liberast
13. Konjad
14. Camel

Is this like a book of grudges?

 

[Average Manatee]

Remember when Oblivion tier was an insult? Now games are sub Oblivion tier. Thanks diversity hiring and ESG...

What the hell? I'm not expecting Bethesda-tier NPC scheduling, it's not that kind of game anymore after the pivot, but allied NPCs helping you out when you're being attacked is basic shit.

That would require custom animations to transfer between their carefully crafted custom lounging around state and a combat state and would probably entail around 10,000 hours of dev time split across 30 different people to implement.

 

[aweigh]

was just gonna post that video

 

[Roguey]

It doesn't even include a skill system or a CHA attribute for influencing social situations. It's entirely about killing bears and xaurips.

Avowed has six attributes plus backgrounds and there are checks for them in dialogue. You're saying things in dialogue, not doing things through a menu.

 

[Sherry]

Hi.

oh
My
GOSH!

It was a long journey for Miriamele. She wasn't sure if her luck would run out when she stepped onto the docks of Claviger's Landing. The stench of rotting fish, water-logged ships, and the heavy blanket of worry from the Dreamscourge that passed from one conversation to the next, troubled her greatly. Her task was meant to be simple - locate the Ambassador and learn what she could - before reporting back to the Aedyran Empire. Oh, how wrong she was on its simplicity. She did not know it at the time, but her groan of contempt toward the man would only come to grow. Not only had she been tasked to locate a missing Ambassador, she had to babysit yet another member of the Blue Man Group; he called himself Kia.

Miriamele crossed the wilderness, circled the great city of Paradis, and fought many-a-foe before she remembered it was the Ambassador she was meant to find; it was why she was there. She came to learn he had ventured northward to a region called the Strangleroot, that was home to a wild growth from the Dreamscourge. He too was interested in gaining knowledge of this supposed sickness, this lingering growth that caused suffering in not only the body, but also the soul. Nothing would stand in Miriamele's way.

A bear touched by the Dreamscourge? Absolutely not!
Another four-legged brown fur-covered abomination that could roar with ferocity and vigor touched by the Dreamscourge?
An Ursus arctos ssp. horribilis using a microfluidic partitioning library construction technique, and the data supplemented with sequencing from a nanopore-based long read platform?

"Sadly, this is what happens if you go out in the woods today,
You're in for a big surprise.
If you go down in the woods today,
You're better to let them slide.
For every bear that there ever was,
Will gather there for certain because...

THEY HAD NO OTHER ANIMALS WITH PAWS!"

Bears aside.... arriving for the first time in Paradis. GOSH!

I was hit HARD. This is when the adventure truly took off for me. The plot THICKENS. It wraps you up in ribbons, each one meant to be sliced by your investigation skill.

There is no picnic from here on in.

IT'S A WELL DONE MEAL.

Thanks,
Sherry

 

[luj1]

I don't get Obsidian popularity or why people think this Sawyer dude is good.

Several years ago Infinitron and Roguey sold the Codex front page to Obsidian when they comissioned a fake review of Pillars to try boost sales of Deadfire (and that's why the settings page of every profile on the Codex has the question "What did you think about PoE")

Since then, everyone hates them lol...

 

[luj1]

Obsidian, like Bioware post-BG2, have always been utter trash at encounter design. Honestly I can understand why some people prefer to play those games on "story mode" difficulty because those trash mob encounters aren't fun to fight.

It's like these companies have nobody in their teams who know what a fun combat encounter looks like, but they still want to please the combatfags so they just drop a bunch of enemies into the map and call it a day, thinking that will be fun for people who enjoy combat (because they have no idea what makes combat fun).

Yes Pillars had notoriously trash encounter design, just look at Caed Nua - which was supposed to be some cool megadungeon - it has floors after floors with endless kobold mobs (rebranded as "xaurip")

Every dev in the world should learn encounter design from Dorateen module for KotC2, Hearkenwold

 

[JarlFrank]

Obsidian, like Bioware post-BG2, have always been utter trash at encounter design. Honestly I can understand why some people prefer to play those games on "story mode" difficulty because those trash mob encounters aren't fun to fight.

It's like these companies have nobody in their teams who know what a fun combat encounter looks like, but they still want to please the combatfags so they just drop a bunch of enemies into the map and call it a day, thinking that will be fun for people who enjoy combat (because they have no idea what makes combat fun).

Yes Pillars had notoriously trash encounter design, just look at Caed Nua - which was supposed to be some cool megadungeon - it has floors after floors with endless kobold mobs (rebranded as "xaurip")

Every dev in the world should learn from Dorateen module for KotC2, Hearkenwold

Pillars is a prime example of different people in the team wanting to do different things.

Sawyer removed combat XP because he wanted to discourage trash mob XP farming, and allow you to get enough XP even if you avoid combat and sneak past enemies or use diplomacy to avoid combat.
But most of the game's encounters can neither be sneaked past nor avoided with a diplomacy check, and the encounter designers filled the maps with boring copypasta trash mobs. So you still get the same problem of endless trash mob combat, except now you don't even get XP for it, which makes them feel even worse because what's the point beyond wasting your time?

Completely schizo development approach, like the different people responsible for different parts of the game never talked to each other.

 

[Beastro]

THIS guy is the first thing you see upon starting the game??

 

[Zed Duke of Banville]

Also, you can’t kill a lot of named NPC in Skyrim. But it’s probably due to Bethesda laziness and “good enough” philosophy.

It was a direct response catering to retards who killed quest characters in Morrowind, got told "you doomed the world, better reload" but then saved the game and went on playing because they didn't read the text popup, then went on to complain about it on the forums.

Oblivion made ALL quest relevant NPCs (not just main quest) immortal to prevent retards from fucking up their own game.

Every stupid thing Bethesda does is to cater to stupid people who would otherwise flock to their forums and shit on the game for being "unfair" by punishing their mistakes.

Oblivion is simply a product of a general attempt to increase sales by casualizing the game and reducing difficulty, appealing to the lowest common denominator, whether in the consolized user interface, the quest compass, fast travel to any location already visited, the generic pseudo-medieval setting, the level-scaling of both enemies and items, minigames, the guilds and quests, regenerating magicka, full voice-acting over text-based dialogue, or the poorly-designed action combat system.

Of course, the attempt at boosting sales worked for Bethesda Softworks.