Is Pillars of Eternity worth playing?

[aleph]

The long comparisons in the Iliad are great.

Yes they are, because they're written by Homer, not by failed wannabe novelists, who went into game industry because their creative output was too shity to stand on its own.

Where is SMA when we need her classical expertise?

 

[Shevek]

Hehe, "written by Homer." Nice catch.

 

[IHaveHugeNick]

 

[Trashos]

What's the problem with "written by Homer"? I understand that there is a debate, but is it settled?

 

[AwesomeButton]

There is no evidence yet of Homer ever having lived as a real person, and not being just an allegory for adressing an unknown number of storytellers, whose stories have been written down.

 

[IHaveHugeNick]

Yeah, plus if I'm not mistaken, it wasn't actually written down, but passed down orally and got only put in writing later.

 

[OndrejSc]

The writing is Homer style, where he could go on for paragraphs describing just one object by just stacking adjectives and comparisons. Literature in its infancy.

Homer only used that style because ADHD was not yet invented.

 

[tred]

I agree. The writing is totally Homer's style.

 

[Grape_You_In_the_Mouth]

In this thread, I see a bunch of fags who'd just be better off fucking each other than talking.

 

[Dwarvophile]

The writing is Homer style, where he could go on for paragraphs describing just one object by just stacking adjectives and comparisons. Literature in its infancy.

Metaphoric descriptions in Homer´s work were quite pragmatic in their purpose : to help transmit the text as correctly as possible in times when it was only existing as an oral tradition.

What propose serve the stacking of adjectives and comparisons in PoE is another question. Personally it didn´t bother me so much, self indulgence is a very common vice among young writers. It might be cause english is not my mother tongue. I find people here are very intolerant with this aspect of PoE when I don't see that many games with outstanding writing.

Frankly I am much more bothered by gameplay aspect. The writing´s quality might fluctuate but I find the overall atmosphere to be unique and graceful. This world have a melancholic feeling.

 

[Theldaran]

This is especially hilarious advice for people like me to read that remember all the people that before release said things like "now that Obsidian is their own master, they got nobody holding them back" or "no producers to cut their content or force worse content".... hahahahhaa

Apparently, the issue now is that the money from the Kickstarter isn't enough to fund a modern gem of a videogame. Even though it's one of the most successful KS ever. They might be just very right, but in that case what you need to do is shrink your ambitions and focus on few well done content, instead of promising and not delivering like politicians.

 

[Saxon1974]

On my first play through and at about level 3. My fighter and paladin do hardly any damage at all to the shadows and shades down underneath the temple in Guilded Vale. I can't find any better weapons anywhere near. Do they sell better ones in Defiance Bay?

 

[Ninjerk]

DR-reducing weapons should work well, IIRC. I think I used a mace on my many abandoned STC paladin runs. I think you can get a quality estoc in one of the wilderness areas before the temple (and you can probably buy one from the blacksmith).

 

[AwesomeButton]

On my first play through and at about level 3. My fighter and paladin do hardly any damage at all to the shadows and shades down underneath the temple in Guilded Vale. I can't find any better weapons anywhere near. Do they sell better ones in Defiance Bay?

Freaking shades in Eothas temple have super high deflection and high DR I might have to come back later for those.

Fire damage, a tank with high DR, and someone with an estoc, that's how I got past them (PotD). A priest will help a lot too.

Another advice is to craft and use a Bulwark against the elements potion, it raises your DR vs cold (and other elemental) damage to crazy levels. Use it on Eder and your other front liner (one clicking "Craft" produces two potions).

I crafted a couple of Fan of Flames scrolls too, and gave them to my front line characters. The ones with the best Perception and Might is who you should give them to anyway, for maximum chances to hit and maximum damage.

I beat them with 4 party members (myself, Aloth, Eder, Durance) on lvl 3, I used consumables (food and drinks) and potions to raise some base stats and DR mostly.

I was also kind of lucky to find Rymgrand's Cloak at some early point, as random loot in some container. It gives +5 DR vs cold (Shadows, Shades and Phantoms only do cold damage), and returns 20% of the cold damage as healing, so Eder was pretty much untouchable, unless flanked.

 

[Ninjerk]

Yeah I think the loot table with Rymgrand's Cloak is accessed in the upper level of the inn, a buried treasure in small ruins with the wolves on the map with the hunter and the bear cave, and also possibly the crate in the SW corner of the 1st temple level.

EDIT: Also, if it's still possible to kill the backer NE of the temple you can get a full suit of platemail (high generic DR with no exception made for Freeze damage, which is what that particular enemy attacks with).

 

[Saxon1974]

Thanks AwesomeButton, your awesome

 

[Zibniyat]

I didn't want to start a new thread, so I guess this one shall suffice.

I'm playing POE w/o expansion(s), I got the game some year(s?) ago and since then it was sitting on my HDD unused. Couple of days ago I started playing it, I'm around 15 hours in and have a few questions to ask. Playing on hard.

1. From what I've seen so far, almost (and by that I mean 90%+) all rooms in interiors/dungeons, and almost all outside/wilderness areas are choke full of (trash) mobs. I don't play RPGs just to have near-continuous several-hours-long battles (till I clear a dungeon for example), it is not entertaining nor enjoyable in any way for me. Is this how it's going to be the entire game? I'm tempted to lower the difficulty to easy (except with some more interesting encounters and bosses) because I don't have time nor patience for this shit.

2. What's the point of limiting the number of camping supplies to 2 in hard mode, exactly? Once I'm out of them (and thanks to trash mobs it does happen fairly often, especially with lenghty dungeons), and my casters are out of their per-rest allowed number of spellcastings - I have to return to some tavern and purchase them, return to where I left and continue. What? It makes no sense logically either: 2 camping supplies can be used by 1 party member (the player for example) as well as by 6. The cost is the same.

3. Weapons, armour, trinkets etc. all seem so boring, disgustingly so. There's almost nothing special in the game at all. Almost all (95%+) of them only modify 2-3 things at the most, which wouldn't be problem if it weren't for the fact that modifiers are 1. usually only as high as 20% for increased stats and 2. the fact that they all have some drawback. Strange. There are no (thus far) unique effects, many "unique" (i.e. have unique names) items are just marginally better than the regular "fine" items, all of which makes me feel as if I'm playing an Excel-spreadsheet turn-based strategy (I can like those though, but not when I expect an RPG first).

Considering when I got the game, and that in the meantime there was a bunch of patches, updates and expansions and whatnot, my question is: have the issues I mentioned been corrected with all those patches (last one is 3.07 it seems) and is the game now better because of it? Because, frankly, if trash mobs, bland characters, rather forced mythology, boring items etc. have all stayed, then I'm unsure if I want to continue.

Thanks.

 

[Trashos]

...

I haven't played the game for a while, but I also played strictly w/o expansions, so here is what I remember:

1. Yes, later patches reduced the number of trash mobs in the base game.

2. The game tried to discourage players from abusing the rest system. I did not like the end result much either, but I can see what they tried to do.

3. Agreed.
In the last patched version I played, a soulbound weapon from the expansions made it into the base game, which was kind of cool. I did like the crafting system though, even though I know that others often don't. It was fun taking notes on what hurts some pain-in-the-ass monsters, and building weapons just for their ass.

 

[CptMace]

2. What's the point of limiting the number of camping supplies to 2 in hard mode, exactly? Once I'm out of them (and thanks to trash mods it does happen fairly often, especially with lenghty dungeons), and my casters are out of their per-rest allowed number of spellcastings - I have to return to some tavern and purchase them, return to where I left and continue. What? It makes no sense logically either: 2 camping supplies can be used by 1 party member (the player for example) as well as by 6. The cost is the same.

The more I read these testimonies, the more I realize people actually do that.
I had trouble the other way around with supply limit. Usually, I'd find a camping supply while being already at 2, so it would basically work as a checkpoint "time to rest".
Anyway. Just play on easy, dude.

 

[Zibniyat]

Easy always feels like cheating. As for camping supplies, very rarely did I find them in dungeons/wilderness. Maybe it's just bad luck.

 

[CptMace]

Easy/Medium/Hard only modify the composition of enemy packs. It doesn't alter enemy stats or game mechanics (besides the supply limit).
So, it's actually a good way to fix the 1st and 2nd points you made imo.

 

[Jezal_k23]

2. What's the point of limiting the number of camping supplies to 2 in hard mode, exactly? Once I'm out of them (and thanks to trash mods it does happen fairly often, especially with lenghty dungeons), and my casters are out of their per-rest allowed number of spellcastings - I have to return to some tavern and purchase them, return to where I left and continue. What? It makes no sense logically either: 2 camping supplies can be used by 1 party member (the player for example) as well as by 6. The cost is the same.

The more I read these testimonies, the more I realize people actually do that.

Yep, I (and obviously, Obsidian too) had always thought that the camping supply limit would push people to make more careful use of their resources. What seems to actually happen is people constantly go back to town to buy more. I still find that puzzling even today.

 

[Zibniyat]

Well,

1. Obsidian is guilty of stuffing the areas with trash mobs which necessarily expend whatever resources you have fast, especially with multi-level dungeons.

2. I (and those others) are guilty of not using the game mechanics properly and allowing myself the luxury of sub-optimal party composition (i.e. not really thinking about that much). Since I just started playing, I do intend to actually rectify that which will make the point 1. less important.

3. Some personal/subjective preferences. For instance, I always hated rogues and thiefs, use fighters only because I must. I like magic and mages. Was thinking of creating an all-druid party lel... Maybe I should actually...

 

[Zboj Lamignat]

The only reason you don't need to rest is the plebeian and ridiculously opaque difficulty of this game. After a very short initial period when the combat is actually demanding, you just auto attack through pretty much everything outside of very few encounters like dragons, and that is on hard.

And this is not fixing, this is sheer autism not understanding how these games work and what makes them fun (dangerous word to use in Obsidian HQ). In order to minimize rests you need to refrain yourself from actually using quite a few available classes. If you want to play a mage as a mage, not auto-attacking-with-wand-retard-pseudoarcher-from-eraly-shitty-hns-games then you need to rest quite a lot, especially on the early levels. And when you make a decision like that, another shitty decisions follow, like complete lack of mage duels which were super fun in BG2 and typically used up a lot of spells and so on and so forth. And then you get PoE. And codex makes 7 reviews. And things get super weird.

 

[FreeKaner]

Don't forget to play it on last patch. I never felt there were trash mobs in 3.0.