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

[Parabalus]

I don't really give a shit if it's pseudo-D&D or if it's standing on its own. All that matters is, are the mechanics good, do they facilitate meaningful tactical choices? Deadfire's elimination of attrition mechanics is to its own detriment.

I disagree. Deadfire is not a dungeon crawler like the first game. It's almost all setpiece encounters with very few trash mobs. Attrition mechanics do not work well with its design.

Seeker, Slayer, Survivor is the perfect representation of what I think Pillars 3 combat should be. Every fight should be a boss fight that requires using all your abilities and items to succeed.

This is what they should have done, instead of cucking out halfway. They'd have to just rebalance the few per rest items, and that's it basically.

Safav Hamon That is partially true, but as v1.0 POTD showed, it's very very hard to have open world, get rid of all attrition, and still maintain appropriate challenge. I don't think we'll ever get a game where even the hardest difficulty makes every battle like a boss fight for a veteran Codexer, sadly.

Have you played Seeker, Slayer, Survivor yet? It's tough at max level and there's not a single trash mob out of 40+ fights.

You have to finish Magran's Teeth for that, right?

 

[IHaveHugeNick]

The first game required perfect positioning and buffs at the beginning of each battle.

 

[Infinitron]

Josh Sawyer on the Wheel:

Spoiler

 

[Infinitron]

https://www.scribd.com/document/391034134/GIC-Leading-the-Charge

lol

 

[AwesomeButton]

Josh Sawyer on the Wheel:

Spoiler

So... it's a classic case of retcon then? Honestly I didn't even notice or think about it.

 

[fantadomat]

Josh Sawyer on the Wheel:

Spoiler

So... it's a classic case of retcon then? Honestly I didn't even notice or think about it.

Classical case of retarded writing.

 

[Parabalus]

Josh Sawyer on the Wheel:

Spoiler

So... it's a classic case of retcon then? Honestly I didn't even notice or think about it.

Don't think it's a retcon though, the gods refer several times to "before the wheel" as chaotic, but souls have still been flowing.

 

[IHaveHugeNick]

They could retcon Engwithans into aliens and Eothas into Jesus and I couldn't give a slightest amount of fuck. The less pointless god lore the better.

 

[Parabalus]

They could retcon Engwithans into aliens and Eothas into Jesus and I couldn't give a slightest amount of fuck. The less pointless god lore the better.

It's the least pointless lore out of all PoE though.

 

[Grunker]

Genuinely surprised there are people that give a fuck about this, yeah

 

[Lacrymas]

PoE would've been better without any mention of any gods. When you've dedicated a whole encyclopedia to your little aborted world's gods, but DA:O still managed to do better, it's time to reconsider. I would've missed Skaen, the only interesting thing about the gods, but eh.

 

[Parabalus]

but DA:O still managed to do better

It did? Barely recall any gods.

 

[Infinitron]

 

[Lacrymas]

It did? Barely recall any gods.

Yeah, the humans' religion is basically a retelling of Christianity, but they infused enough creativity to make it count. The organized church's presence is also better integrated into the world and I found the characters' various attitudes towards it believable. PoE's attempt, however, comes off as extremely forced and fake. I cringe every time someone brings up any god.

 

[AwesomeButton]

They could retcon Engwithans into aliens and Eothas into Jesus and I couldn't give a slightest amount of fuck. The less pointless god lore the better.

It did? Barely recall any gods.

Yeah, the humans' religion is basically a retelling of Christianity, but they infused enough creativity to make it count. The organized church's presence is also better integrated into the world and I found the characters' various attitudes towards it believable. PoE's attempt, however, comes off as extremely forced and fake. I cringe every time someone brings up any god.

Partially agree. The pantheon is constructed well and the descriptions - once again, at the level of design documents only - are great, but it's at the execution level where things crumble.

At execution level - the gods should have remained a mystery, instead of being turned into participants of (badly written, and even worse-narrated) parody office meetings. The proof of this is Rymrgand - the god that remains most mysterious and most detached from the rest of the pantheon is the one that ends up being the most interesting one.

What "people", in the general sense of "mortals" and "humankind", can do and commit, while their worldview is defined by religious doctrine and manipulated by ambiguous interference by the divine - this in itself is a huuuge canvas on which to draw epic stories, which can still have their didactic or moralistic (for the player) thread to them, if the story writer wishes to include such a thread. You will find practically none of that in PoE/Deadfire though. This would have been interesting historicism, and it's what DA:O has. But, again, I am not convinced any of this could happen with these Obsidian writers.

Instead what you find is "omg huge conspiracy, the gods actually used to be people 2000 years ago! And not only that but they are cynical and indifferent to the humans", as if the player, not the player's character has to feel outraged by this and it has to serve as some sort of eye-opener for the player...? Enlightenment-era values undermined by a cabal of cynical "world government"? Obsidian, is this your idea of a captivating and original story? Not even considering your pretense of your game being a "spiritual successor" to Torment... I'm getting mad the more I think about this.

 

[IHaveHugeNick]

They could retcon Engwithans into aliens and Eothas into Jesus and I couldn't give a slightest amount of fuck. The less pointless god lore the better.

It's the least pointless lore out of all PoE though.

How so? The first game had a lot of pointless fluff, in the second game reaped the benefits of Sawyer's historical autism and the lore relating to the mortal plane is often expertly done. Factions are interesting, coherent and fit to the setting like a glove. If you were to take out all the mystical woo-woo, it could well pass for a believable alternative universe version of the XVII-century Caribbean politics . And that's no small feat.

 

[BING XI LAO]

Factions are interesting, coherent and fit to the setting like a glove. If you were to take out all the mystical woo-woo, it could well pass for a believable alternative universe version of the XVII-century Caribbean politics.

Except the anti-racist anti-slavery hipster pirates

 

[AwesomeButton]

Factions are interesting, coherent and fit to the setting like a glove. If you were to take out all the mystical woo-woo, it could well pass for a believable alternative universe version of the XVII-century Caribbean politics.

Except the anti-racist anti-slavery hipster pirates

Yet in their defense, knowing they are based on real life hipsters changes the perspective somewhat.

 

[Grunker]

PoE would've been better without any mention of any gods. When you've dedicated a whole encyclopedia to your little aborted world's gods, but DA:O still managed to do better, it's time to reconsider. I would've missed Skaen, the only interesting thing about the gods, but eh.

I like Rymrgand as well. And Skaen, while cool, is just as stock as the rest of them. Combining Loki and Cthulhu-cultism isn't exactly novel

 

[Lacrymas]

I like Rymrgand as well. And Skaen, while cool, is just as stock as the rest of them. Combining Loki and Cthulhu-cultism isn't exactly novel

We've had quite the extensive debate (it's a split thread) of what Skaen is and how a couple of us see him. I have to see how they've handled Rymrgand in BoW to form a more concrete opinion of him.

 

[AwesomeButton]

What Skaen "is" in theory and how much of that is represented in the game are two different things, and this applies to any one of the gods.

 

[Lacrymas]

Yeah, like I said in the other thread, the representation is of bad horror villains because Obs don't know what they've done and what they've come up with. They can't use the lore they've created well and that's sad.

 

[Tigranes]

as v1.0 POTD showed

You mean the bugged release version which didn't scale enemy numbers? I hope you get to replaying Deadfire sooner. IMO it's the best PoE-style combat of all the games/expansions/game versions to date.

And resource management can and should be brought back, by "mods will fix it".

I did play whatever version it was that fixed it - 1.03? - and my verdict was that POTD difficulty in Deadfire was now decent, not massively different from POE1, up to level 12 or so. After that, the nonlinearity, multiclassing, and good old RPG tradition of difficulty curve breaking down mid-late game for almost every RPG in existence, comes into play.

 

[Jarpie]

https://www.scribd.com/document/391034134/GIC-Leading-the-Charge

lol

Didn't Garsten leave Obsidian? So which one was the stalker?

 

[IHaveHugeNick]

Yeah difficulty is now okay, even if its highly dependent on how much gamey tactics you're willling to use in order to jump ahead of the power curve.