Eternity Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire + DLC Thread - now with turn-based combat!

[AwesomeButton]

BruceVC , a piece of advice. This game's sound mixing is quite bad. The ambient sounds of game areas are controlled with the Effects slider in the audio options, which also includes the weapon and spell sounds. Normally the ambient sounds are way too quiet to make out. In my experience the best course of action is to set Master Volume and Effects Volume at 100%, Voice Volume to 33% and Music Volume to whatever you like. Then increase your speakers/headphones volume as much as needed. This way you get to hear the area's ambient audio with a proper loudness. Going to the "Spire of the Soul-Seers" is a different thing when you can actually hear the humming of the animancers' machinery, which I think is also described in text.

 

[Desiderius]

Sympathetic villain wasn't convincing enough so we'll make your allies complete unsympathetic cardboard cutout morons that you'll hate every step of the way.

Many such cases

No Lords no villains

 

[Morality Games]

Every RPG from now on will be a BG3 clone.

Wouldn't go that far. Making BG3 was difficult, technically complex, and consumed vast amounts of time and resources.

 

[Modron]

Wouldn't go that far. Making BG3 was difficult, technically complex, and consumed vast amounts of time and resources.

Games won't change much besides making them that much more aggressively gay.

 

[AwesomeButton]

I only now grasped the irony of the whole Engwithan Digsite area. I even wrote a question on Josh's tumblr to ask who came up with the idea.

The thousand years old arena, laying forgotten in the jungle. My party happening to be the first new gladiators to "perform" on it in so many centuries. Unwilling gladiators, surely, yet how many have ever been willing? How a place carries its history and compels those who occupy it to reenact this history. A space and the past having power over us, which we don't think of in our everyday activities.

The fact that I had never thought of that previously, and that my characters would likely be as oblivious to this symbolism brought me an old-forgotten feeling of identifying with my player characters.

And when you go deeper into the area, you find that this place where kith and beast souls would be daily released, was built with purpose on top of an adra pillar, and then the choice to design the area as an arena of all things, clicks into place once again. It's a cool concept, you have to admit.

 

[HumanMaleFighter]

Every RPG from now on will be a BG3 clone.

Wouldn't go that far. Making BG3 was difficult, technically complex, and consumed vast amounts of time and resources.

Yo, I hate to be "that guy," but the difficulty is going to diminish rapidly as LLMs grow more capable.

You wouldn't even need source code. You could train a model on a speech-to-text database of BG3's audio files. Then have the model discretize interactions, branching paths, other elements -- and force it to modulate them. Keep the form, the scope and the reactivity, but change all of the narrative details to suit your story, however you deem fit.

It a matter of time -- and not much time, at that -- before this "difficult, technically complex, time consuming" task is absolutely trivialized.

 

[Lacrymas]

The thousand years old arena, laying forgotten in the jungle. My party happening to be the first new gladiators to "perform" on it in so many centuries. Unwilling gladiators, surely, yet how many have ever been willing? How a place carries its history and compels those who occupy it to reenact this history. A space and the past having power over us, which we don't think of in our everyday activities.

While I appreciate the analysis, gladiators don't just fight in a circle-shaped building, it's an institution that entertains. When there are no spectators and no systems feeding into it, it's hardly gladiatorial combat. You might as well say the same for Lara Croft in TR1 because she fights in an abandoned coliseum.

 

[Desiderius]

The thousand years old arena, laying forgotten in the jungle. My party happening to be the first new gladiators to "perform" on it in so many centuries. Unwilling gladiators, surely, yet how many have ever been willing? How a place carries its history and compels those who occupy it to reenact this history. A space and the past having power over us, which we don't think of in our everyday activities.

While I appreciate the analysis, gladiators don't just fight in a circle-shaped building, it's an institution that entertains. When there are no spectators and no systems feeding into it, it's hardly gladiatorial combat. You might as well say the same for Lara Croft in TR1 because she fights in an abandoned coliseum.

It's a single-player game, man. What do you care how I play?

 

[AwesomeButton]

The thousand years old arena, laying forgotten in the jungle. My party happening to be the first new gladiators to "perform" on it in so many centuries. Unwilling gladiators, surely, yet how many have ever been willing? How a place carries its history and compels those who occupy it to reenact this history. A space and the past having power over us, which we don't think of in our everyday activities.

While I appreciate the analysis, gladiators don't just fight in a circle-shaped building, it's an institution that entertains. When there are no spectators and no systems feeding into it, it's hardly gladiatorial combat. You might as well say the same for Lara Croft in TR1 because she fights in an abandoned coliseum.

Then you and the party are like living ghosts - which the PC is - you are performing for the amusement those forgotten people who used to occupy the ruined seats rows. I don't know how much they thought all of this over, but someone must have. I wondered why would they make the area an old areha of all things.

 

[Desiderius]

We (mostly) play RPGs for our own amusement.

When that isn't enough we come to the Codex.