Eternity Josh Sawyer reflects on his failures with Pillars of Eternity

[Desiderius]

Or you could, you know, let the dude get his joy of discovery from learning how to pre-buff. Like you did Josh. So much that you played too much at University.

"I've been trying to get through this for two and a half hours."

I doubt Brian Mitsoda (that's who it was) would have been able to figure it out on his own

(1) who said anything about on his own? There’s this thing called the internet now. In game hints whatever.

(2) That’s not how the mind works anyway. Just because you blew two hours on one approach it doesn’t follow that your mind won’t come up with something else in the background by the time you come back to it with fresh eyes the next day.

This does require the meta knowledge that this sort of process (failure-> overcoming failure) is in fact enjoyable/doable/as designed, knowledge which has been cruelly denied to too much of the present player base. It’s still true and always there to be built upon and does in fact beat dumbing down.

 

[Roguey]

(1) who said anything about on his own? There’s this thing called the internet now. In game hints whatever.

He showed him how to do it, what more do you want?

(2) That’s not how the mind works anyway. Just because you blew two hours on one approach it doesn’t follow that your mind won’t come up with something else in the background by the time you come back to it with fresh eyes the next day.

This does require the meta knowledge that this sort of process (failure-> overcoming failure) is in fact enjoyable/doable/as designed, knowledge which has been cruelly denied to too much of the present player base. It’s still true and always there to be built upon and does in fact beat dumbing down.

You overestimate people. Lot of great stories here https://rpgcodex.net/forums/index.p...expansion-thread.100006/page-133#post-4409223

Particularly relevant:

my expectation really was that players would test the boundaries of northern and eastern routes and either find a way through or make a strategic decision to follow the marker. what i actually saw in the released game was an unending stream of people who would die against deathclaws, cazadores, or super mutants, reload the game, and make the same attempt again in the exact same way. no variation in approach or selected gear, no use of chems or other consumables to raise their stats, no additional scouting for a better view of what was ahead. they would just repeatedly do the exact same thing and die again in the exact same way and eventually get furious.

Cue complaints about how New Vegas "railroads" you into going south and then north.

 

[Desiderius]

What’s simpler about them? Stripping two types of armor before you can CC is actually pretty convoluted.

Character building! You also have far fewer potential options in combat.

Srsly? I ended up with too many to keep track of/fit in my slots just before I quit (twice) just before Nameless Isle.

BTW, that one boat battle in D:OS 2 was both more complex and more challenging than anything in base Deadfire, on land or on board.

D:OS 2, like Diablo 2 and BG 2 before it, is anything but a simplistic faceroll. What it has, like those other two, are devs who caught the bug that made the originals sell so well and so made sequels to celebrate what they loved.

That shit sells big and deserves to.

 

[Desiderius]

He showed him how to do it, what more do you want?

For him not to eliminate it from his games because he’s too lazy to show anyone else, dipshit.

You overestimate people

Jesus Christ, another ubermensch here to enlighten us about the wretched masses who can’t tie their own shoes.

I’m not overestimating anything. It’s not about over or under. Josh (and you!) are mismeasuring man altogether. Humans are learning machines. If they’re not learning what you want them to learn you’ve got to design the game better, not take all the learning out altogether.

I’ve been mastering RPGs a helluva lot harder than PoE for forty years and I had to look up how the fuck you were supposed to get to Defiance Bay.

 

[Xeon]

Yeah, if the game is fun, people will just learn it. I played the IE games after I came to RPG Codex and didn't know anything about D&D. Little by little I learned the rules and spells and whatever and it was a lot of fun.

 

[hexer]

If PoE1 was a smashing hit, how come some people claim PoE2 had a smaller budget?

 

[Daidre]

If PoE1 was a smashing hit, how come some people claim PoE2 had a smaller budget?

Maybe because Deadfire has a lot less backers 73,986 vs 33,614?
I'd hesitate to use it as argument personally, because Obsidian spent a lot of their own money on development and that factored into later MS sellout.

It is similar with P:K - Owlcat openly admits that they used Kickstarter only as proof-of-concept and bigger fractions of the game budget came from other sources. (I'd bet on my.games).

 

[Gangrelrumbler]

If players abusing rest is such a huge issue to the game design then the game should just not let players rest or retreat after entering the dungeon, or have everything respawn after the player leaves the dungeon. And if you chose the later also punish the player for retreating midway-through. Only allowing him to take part of the loot.
At its core BG-style RPGs are basically RTS with character development and exploration. Nobody expects an RTS game to let him quit halfway through the mission, and then return to finish-off the leftovers.
Nobody Sure it's gamey, but it's a video game so who cares? You can explain it by saying that it's too dangerous to rest in the dungeon, and that you leave in the middle because monsters would just move to a different dungeon, and take all the treasures with them or something. They didn't bother to find an explanation unlimited sack for storing items, arbitrary limit of active part members or most of the other mechanics.

 

[Trashos]

Desiderius , Roguey has a point, in the sense that there are people who are so mentally challenged that they can't tie their shoelaces. And some of them may even be Obsidian's testers. I vaguely remember a "horror story" about some FONV tester who kept dying because he couldn't see the deathclaw on his screen.

The question is what made these "special" people the intended audience. I claim that it is because of Obsidian's culture, and not because of any financial masterplan.

 

[hexer]

I wouldn't be surprised if he would come over and work for a German or an Austrian RPG developer in a couple of years

 

[Trashos]

? Eder, Grieving Mother, Pallegina, etc. aren't ugly (in Pillars 1 at least, Pillars 2's portaits suffer from Baldur's Gate 2 syndrome).

I am not willing to go deep in this discussion again, as it was discussed in length in the past, and eventually got retardoed. But I give you PoE1's Eder. Now, compare the ladies with the babes in DAO, Witchers, and Bethesda games (including mods).

 

[Daidre]

I am not willing to go deep in this discussion again, as it was discussed in length in the past, and eventually got retardoed. But I give you PoE1's Eder. Now, compare the ladies with the babes in DAO, Witchers, and Bethesda games (including mods).

Grieving Mother is beautiful.

Spoiler

https://www.deviantart.com/katorius/art/Grieving-Mother-527741806

Would not qualify her as "babe" though.

 

[Jarpie]

I wonder if you could simply design resting options/resources into each dungeon in an organic way.

E.g. some dungeons might simply involve finding blockadable rooms that are strategically placed - beat a boss, that room turns out to be blockadable, after a single rest it's no longer usable because you have to break down another section of the wall to go deeper into the dungeon or someshit.

Or another dungeon where you find a stack of wooden beams or someshit that you pick up and use to blockade & rest at a room of your choosing.

All of which involves a small degree of contrivance, but the point would be that every single dungeon, the designer has thought about what kind of resting might be made available to the player, and can take that into account to design better paced areas, and discourages backtracking and other bullshit without being annoyingly draconian about it.

Obviously, no matter what you do, some people will insist on traveling back to city to rest then complain it takes 20 minutes, but who cares? That's their prerogative, no need to go out of one's way to forbid them.

Knights of the Chalice let you only rest in specific spots, and it worked fine.

 

[Zero Credibility]

Maybe we need another PoE review to really get to the bottom of all this? RPG Codex Pillars of Eternity Re-Retrospective Review: Well, what do you know, it was shit after all.

 

[Cosmo]

Knights of the Chalice let you only rest in specific spots, and it worked fine.

No one took KotC's lessons at heart...
Incidentally the limited spell selection (compared to D&D or even BG) mitigated a lot of the late game pre-buffing chore.
I said it then and i'll say it now : PoE had way too many spells and abilities for its own good. It was a brand new system after all.

 

[Daidre]

Fortunately, thanks to Kingmaker, whenever another "old school" RPG shits the bed, we can point at Owlcat and say "They could do it. Why can't you?"

I can't fucking wait for their next game. Just give it the BG II treatment: bigger

I shudder at the thought of Owlcat attempting to make bigger game than Kingmaker.

 

[Riddler]

Fortunately, thanks to Kingmaker, whenever another "old school" RPG shits the bed, we can point at Owlcat and say "They could do it. Why can't you?"

I can't fucking wait for their next game. Just give it the BG II treatment: bigger

I shudder at the thought of Owlcat trying to make bigger game than Kingmaker.

They adapt 3 adventure paths at once and make them converge for the end game, lvl16-20, content.

 

[Daidre]

What's the incentive in sticking to a scenario where your exhausted party trying to rest in the wilderness eventually fought the ambushing enemies off growing even more tired and resource depleted if you can quickload endlessly until you don't get ambushed and the party wakes up fresh as daisies

Spawning random enemies that worth some decent xp usually works for me. Adding hidden checks that party is more likely to be ambushed when it is wounded and out of spells could be a nice twist on top of it.

 

[Van-d-all]

What's the incentive in sticking to a scenario where your exhausted party trying to rest in the wilderness eventually fought the ambushing enemies off growing even more tired and resource depleted if you can quickload endlessly until you don't get ambushed and the party wakes up fresh as daisies

Pride and accomplishment (tm) of knowing you're not a save scammer.

 

[Trashos]

Now all Codex threads are Kingmaker threads.

 

[vortex]

I shudder at the thought of Owlcat attempting to make bigger game than Kingmaker.

They have to, man. Double the mapsize of current one.

 

[Xeon]

Kingmaker felt huge already, I'll probably be happy if they decrease the numbers of locations and increase the side of the locations so you don't get a lot of areas with one encounter and move on.

 

[Taurist]

Knights of the Chalice let you only rest in specific spots, and it worked fine.

No one took KotC's lessons at heart...
Incidentally the limited spell selection (compared to D&D or even BG) mitigated a lot of the late game pre-buffing chore.

You outright cannot prebuff in KotC. Pierre was right again.

 

[Desiderius]

Fortunately, thanks to Kingmaker, whenever another "old school" RPG shits the bed, we can point at Owlcat and say "They could do it. Why can't you?"

I can't fucking wait for their next game. Just give it the BG II treatment: bigger

I shudder at the thought of Owlcat trying to make bigger game than Kingmaker.

They adapt 3 adventure paths at once and make them converge for the end game, lvl16-20, content.

Diablo 2 style.

 

[Roguey]

He showed him how to do it, what more do you want?

For him not to eliminate it from his games because he’s too lazy to show anyone else, dipshit.

You overestimate people

Jesus Christ, another ubermensch here to enlighten us about the wretched masses who can’t tie their own shoes.

I’m not overestimating anything. It’s not about over or under. Josh (and you!) are mismeasuring man altogether. Humans are learning machines. If they’re not learning what you want them to learn you’ve got to design the game better, not take all the learning out altogether.

I’ve been mastering RPGs a helluva lot harder than PoE for forty years and I had to look up how the fuck you were supposed to get to Defiance Bay.

Sawyer doesn't think this kind of gameplay experience is worth preserving though for reasons already gone over.

If PoE1 was a smashing hit, how come some people claim PoE2 had a smaller budget?

It didn't...? They spent a lot of money on graphics and full voiceover.

No one took KotC's lessons at heart...

Sawyer looked at KotC, and decided that would be too punishing https://rpgcodex.net/forums/index.p...checks-obsidian-cant-cash.99149/#post-3913366

We've talked about it, but for now we're going to see how the rest areas work on their own. Some people on the team believe that if we limit the use of the rest locations it will be excessively punitive.

Knights of the Chalice generally allows players to re-use rest sites, but there's at least one area I remember that doesn't and I saw a lot of negative response to it.

Personally, I do worry about the potential for player dissatisfaction either if resting removes all challenge or if restricted resting makes things too frustrating. In any case, it's something we're going to be looking at and thinking about more as we continue development.