Eternity Josh Sawyer reflects on his failures with Pillars of Eternity

[user]

Stopping before every fight and going through your prebuff routine for 10 minutes is so immersive.

Don't be a clicker! Use shortcuts!
But seriously, in P:K challenging dif, I don't have to buff for every fight. I only have to cast /h spells (and /min later in the game when my level is high), one time per rest and as for the rest /r spells, only when fights are too difficult. It surely doesn't take 10 minutes and I enjoy it as well, what can I say.

 

[ScrotumBroth]

Stopping before every fight and going through your prebuff routine for 10 minutes is so immersive.

Only Icewind Dale 2 required prebuffing every 10 minutes.

I'm glad Josh is finally glimpsing in the mirror. Not because I expect a good game out of him, mind you.

New Vegas is inflated because people love Morrowind and Fallout 3 shat on everyone's head. It's the truth deep down everyone knows to be true.
From creative standpoint it's bland, safe and unoriginal.

 

[Farewell into the night]

Hey Josh Sawyer. If your read this, I just want to say PoE games were OK, but they weren't pushing the genre forward to be considered masterpieces.
Larian games are retarded and Kingmaker was based on popular system, so it is not really comparable with PoE.

Don't be a quitter. PoE world is a totally new IP, and I believe that after expanding it, and pumping it up, it can turn into something very special.
Give it some love, man. Let it grow. Push it into fields that weren't ever explored. Let the past stay in the past. Feel, breathe, expand, conquer.

Blessings.

 

[Lacrymas]

If pre-buffing doesn’t exist though, in your example, even if you scouted the encounter ahead you wouldn’t be able to cast a fire resistance spell before triggering the fight, upon which you may be better served just disabling the offending enemies and focusing them down. Strength of buffs would play a big role here, see PoE: priests are overpowered in no small part due to their amazing buffs which kinda have to be to compete with the other ways of damaging or controlling enemies as soon as the combat starts.

Yes, maybe you will be better served by disabling the enemies if there are only 1 or 2 that need fire resistance. But what if there are 4-5? 10? 20? That's the thing, you can choose to disable them, or you can choose to buff yourself with fire resistance, I don't see the problem here. There is no choice in pre-buffing, you *do* gimp yourself by not pre-buffing in every fight, but the less pointless clicks something takes the better, so the buffs might as well be baked into the classes.

And again, if you just refresh the same buff throughout the whole zone because it has run out, that's pointless, might as well make it into a zone-wide buff that is outside of your control.

 

[Max Damage]

What kind of fucking games do you retards play where you have to cast all of your buffs before every fight? This is the most retarded argument ever, sure feels good HAVING to cast that Bless every fight instead of casting it once every few minutes, the perfect answer to the problem that didn't let me sleep at nights. Give me a fucking break.

 

[user]

Immersion is misunderstood and frequently overrated. Sometimes it's beneficial to sacrifice ludonarrative coherence in favor of gameplay and there's nothing wrong with that if it's justified, which it is in the case of PoE's system. You can always think up a reason why mages can't cast outside of combat, you can only ever strengthen with magic when your adrenaline is high for example.

The game has to help you with that too though. It is not great to have to keep imagining things to justify game-y elements. I agree that gameplay comes first - but in this case I think that both were achieved in the traditional formula. Never found pre-buffing to be so tedious - most spells' duration is big enough anyway.

 

[Volrath]

Should have listened to the Codex Joshie boy.

No sympathy.

 

[Sinatar]

https://steamcommunity.com/stats/291650/achievements

Only 13% of people who bought the first game finished it. That's pretty telling. So marketing the second as a direct follow up with character import (all your decisions carry over!) was probably a dumb idea.

 

[Vault Dweller]

One of the mistakes they did was to make PoE 2 a direct sequel, most of the people who played first one didn't finish it, so they probably wouldn't be interested in the sequel, and the potential new players would be put off by direct sequel because they would think that they need to know the first game to get the sequel. Didn't Vault Dweller say that based on his own market studies, direct sequels have almost always sold less copies than the first game?

It's not that they need to know the first game (I don't think anyone cares about that), it's that the popular perception is that a sequel offers more of the same and thus appeals only to the most enthusiastic supporters, those who can't get enough of it. Only 46% of players completed Act 1 (which is the new normal these days, so this stat alone doesn't reflect poorly on Pillars), which means that getting people who didn't even beat the first act to buy a whole new sequel is nearly impossible. Only 25% completed Act 2, so we can take this number as a core audience and work from there. Naturally, the new features (ship combat, island exploration, etc) were bound to attract new players but the features weren't strong enough to attract enough players to replace those who 'moved on'.

Simple as that.

 

[BING XI LAO]

Stopping before every fight and going through your prebuff routine for 10 minutes is so immersive.

Actually..... it IS immersive, because you can bet a mage would want to do that every damn time if he were a real person with no save file. It's immersive, but tiresome.

 

[Lacrymas]

The game has to help you with that too though. It is not great to have to keep imagining things to justify game-y elements. I agree that gameplay comes first - but in this case I think that both were achieved in the traditional formula. Never found pre-buffing to be so tedious - most spells' duration is big enough anyway.

Tediousness is not pre-buffing's most egregious sin, though, it is its pointlessness in the system. Like I said before, if the buffs can be cast every combat, it's more beneficial to bake their effects into the classes without having unnecessary clicks or exclude them entirely and balance around that. If they are extremely situational (like 1 zone in the entire game requiring fire resistance) it's better to have a quest which buffs you with fire resistance throughout the whole zone. I just don't see what pre-buffing adds to the combat that is absent in PoE's system.

 

[BING XI LAO]

The ideal solution to pre-buffing is have a UI that lets people easily make their own pre-buffing scripts.

 

[Lacrymas]

Why, though? Why would you want a feature that is automatic and adds nothing other than pointless clicks or having to write your own scripts to automate the pointless clicking?

 

[IHaveHugeNick]

Stopping before every fight and going through your prebuff routine for 10 minutes is so immersive.

Actually..... it IS immersive, because you can bet a mage would want to do that every damn time if he were a real person with no save file. It's immersive, but tiresome.

Somehow I don't' remember Gandalf casting bunch of buffs on the fellowship of the ring every time it looked like there's enemy in the distance.

 

[user]

Tediousness is not pre-buffing's most egregious sin, though, it is its pointlessness in the system. Like I said before, if the buffs can be cast every combat, it's more beneficial to bake their effects into the classes without having unnecessary clicks or exclude them entirely and balance around that. If they are extremely situational (like 1 zone in the entire game requiring fire resistance) it's better to have a quest which buffs you with fire resistance throughout the whole zone. I just don't see what pre-buffing adds to the combat that is absent in PoE's system.

I can get your point about a simple recursive click being pointless. Because if it's just that and it's nothing you actually have to think about, even a bit, it is indeed just a pointless recursive click. But why remove that click and bake it into the character, and not give that click some tactical element instead? Why streamline that element instead of giving it purpose and deepening it?

Rations and encumbrance are a good step towards that end imo. Woedica's Challenge would also feel great if the game was actually designed for it from the start and food was rarer/costlier.

 

[fantadomat]

Why, though? Why would you want a feature that is automatic and adds nothing other than pointless clicks or having to write your own scripts to automate the pointless clicking?

It is not a feature,it is an option. Nobody is forcing you to prebuff. Why would you like less options in a RPG??? From your logic,then why do we have to attack enemies instead of having a full on party AI doing?

 

[user]

Stopping before every fight and going through your prebuff routine for 10 minutes is so immersive.

Actually..... it IS immersive, because you can bet a mage would want to do that every damn time if he were a real person with no save file. It's immersive, but tiresome.

Somehow I don't' remember Gandalf casting bunch of buffs on the fellowship of the ring every time it looked like there's enemy in the distance.

Wrong. Check this: https://www.quora.com/What-kinds-of-spells-did-Gandalf-cast and scroll to the 3rd or so answer. He did cast bless, enlarge person and light, he was just a lowbie and party spec.

 

[MRY]

Stopping before every fight and going through your prebuff routine for 10 minutes is so immersive.

Actually..... it IS immersive, because you can bet a mage would want to do that every damn time if he were a real person with no save file. It's immersive, but tiresome.

Somehow I don't' remember Gandalf casting bunch of buffs on the fellowship of the ring every time it looked like there's enemy in the distance.

Blessings before battle are actually quite thematic. (Here's a dumb example: https://youtu.be/cTLMjHrb_w4?t=44) There are sufficiently few battles in LOTR, that it actually wouldn't have been absurd in that setting. It becomes absurd at the level of frequency in most cRPGs. Most importantly, it's boring and unstrategic. It basically never hurts to engage in the stupid rest/buff/fight/rest loop, it's just a huge waste of time. My favorite example was in the Spiderweb games where you actually would get these mass-prebuff spells but they were more costly than doing it individually -- literally the game was offering to trade you IRL time for in-game MP.

Regarding POE2, I really don't know what the market wants any more, but the relative success of Kingmaker makes me wonder whether "traditionalist" rather than "progressive" fantasy is just more marketable.

 

[IHaveHugeNick]

Why, though? Why would you want a feature that is automatic and adds nothing other than pointless clicks or having to write your own scripts to automate the pointless clicking?

It is not a feature,it is an option. Nobody is forcing you to prebuff. Why would you like less options in a RPG??? From your logic,then why do we have to attack enemies instead of having a full on party AI doing?

If I die because I didn't prebuff, I now wasted more time than it would take to pre-buff. Therefore prebuffing is not-optional at all, because it doesn't save me time and saving time is the only reason to skip it in a first place.

 

[Nano]

All of these debates about vancian/non-vancian, prebuffing/no prebuffing, health/stamina/wound/mana/whatever are easily solved by one simple trick - leave RtWP in the 90s where it belongs along with the Spice Girls and the Backstreet Boys and go turn based already.

But vancian spellcasting sucks regardless of whether the game is turn-based or RTwP.

 

[Vault Dweller]

Regarding POE2, I really don't know what the market wants any more, but the relative success of Kingmaker makes me wonder whether "traditionalist" rather than "progressive" fantasy is just more marketable.

It's not just that. Kingmaker offered a new system with new classes to experiment (vs PoE 2 being more of PoE, i.e. more of the same) plus kingdom management, which despite the flaws stood out as a major new feature, far bigger than PoE2's ship combat.

 

[CappenVarra]

on first looking into sawyer's whatever

oft of one wide expanse had i been told
that deep-brow'd Sawyer ruled as his demesne;
yet did I never breathe its pure serene
till I heard Sensuki speak out loud and bold:

 

[fantadomat]

Why, though? Why would you want a feature that is automatic and adds nothing other than pointless clicks or having to write your own scripts to automate the pointless clicking?

It is not a feature,it is an option. Nobody is forcing you to prebuff. Why would you like less options in a RPG??? From your logic,then why do we have to attack enemies instead of having a full on party AI doing?

If I die because I didn't prebuff, I now wasted more time than it would take to pre-buff. Therefore prebuffing is not-optional at all, because it doesn't save me time and saving time is the only reason to skip it in a first place.

Ahhh no,it just means that you are shit at the game lol. So i take it that you want RPG where you could just every single fight without dying because it will be a waste of time!? Your opinion is pretty retarded mate,you can't just quantify "waste of time". I personally don't think a good and hard battle that makes you reload a few times is a "waste of time ".

 

[IHaveHugeNick]

Stopping before every fight and going through your prebuff routine for 10 minutes is so immersive.

Actually..... it IS immersive, because you can bet a mage would want to do that every damn time if he were a real person with no save file. It's immersive, but tiresome.

Somehow I don't' remember Gandalf casting bunch of buffs on the fellowship of the ring every time it looked like there's enemy in the distance.

Wrong. Check this: https://www.quora.com/What-kinds-of-spells-did-Gandalf-cast and scroll to the 3rd or so answer. He did cast bless, enlarge person and light, he was just a lowbie and party spec.

Note that I was talking about casting buffs every time. No one has an issue with pre-buffing as a concept. Half of victory in battle comes from preparation. Even drawing from real history, there's no shortage of historical examples of armies celebrating religious ceremonies before battle. To stretch the analogy, one could use an example of soldiers getting hammered or bomber pilots taking amphetamines as an example of real life pre-buffing.

It's just that in a real world most of military campaigns consist of marching, foraging for food and sitting around waiting for something to happen. Months could pass before you had to "prebuff" your soldiers, whereas in a game you have to do it constatly every couple of minutes. It's the repetitive nature of doing it over and over that gets annoying and absurd quite quickly.

 

[PrK]

One thing I can imagine an RPG offering is a prebuff with a short duration that only starts counting down when combat begins, so there's no bullshit where you have to make sure you cast multiple buffs in the right order to maximize their duration and then go immediately into combat.

Reading the description of a spell and taking note of its duration is not the end of the world, besides you don’t have to vomit all your memorised buffs before every single fight: apart from a few long lasting universally applicable ones, you first scout ahead and decide what to cast depending on the upcoming encounter composition.

Something I thing people might be doing is unnecessarily conflating all forms of "out-of-combat effects" with prebuffing. Remember, in PoE it's not just that you can't buff yourself with a beneficial status effect outside of combat - if you're poisoned during a fight, the poison effect disappears once combat is over. I can imagine an RPG that removes most prebuffing but keeps the "post-buffing" spells that deal with the damage you took during fights. I think that would retain the most important part of the strategic survival element of roleplaying that is lost when you adopt a strict combat/non-combat separation.

Not being able to cast anything outside of combat - as well as your aforementioned out-of-combat status divide - is indeed much more egregious than simply the absence of pre-buffing.

Yes, maybe you will be better served by disabling the enemies if there are only 1 or 2 that need fire resistance. But what if there are 4-5? 10? 20? That's the thing, you can choose to disable them, or you can choose to buff yourself with fire resistance, I don't see the problem here. There is no choice in pre-buffing, you *do* gimp yourself by not pre-buffing in every fight, but the less pointless clicks something takes the better, so the buffs might as well be baked into the classes.

That is only ever true for a sorcerer type class in which case it is indeed always preferable (as long as it is a universally positive buff) to pre-cast a spell because you have a permanent spell book.

But sorcerers are boring and for classes that make full use of vancian casting it is an actual choice whether and in which way to pre-buff, again because of limited duration as well as slots.