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

[Lacrymas]

The game is not designed for per-rest and it shows. It also makes classes and subclasses who don't need to rest even more overpowered (Chanters, Blood Mages, Ciphers, some melee) and makes the challenge basically pointless if featuring a party heavy with those. The challenges in general are not very good and aren't thought through, they are a collection of random ideas you have to find a way to cheese through instead of actually increasing difficulty (the only truly good one is Galawain).

 

[jf8350143]

That statue looks pretty sweet, but I don't have a console.

 

[Orma]

 

[S.torch]

I don't know what is worse. The fact that they tried to emulate Forgotten Realms or the fact that he wouldn't put elves and dwarves in his own fantasy setting, knowing the tendency to desfantatize fantasy.

 

[Orma]

 

[Orma]

 

[Delterius]

The challenges in general are not very good and aren't thought through, they are a collection of random ideas you have to find a way to cheese through instead of actually increasing difficulty (the only truly good one is Galawain).

There's a third category: some environmental things that were considered to be no more than a hassle, such as Skaen (darkness and stealth), Ondra (bigger storms you have to sail around) and Rymrgand (food spoils). I like them tbh.

 

[Silly Germans]

Are menu like gui's really that difficult to implement in Unity ? I had hard time believing that the ship combat was difficult and expensive, but the same goes for a simple comparison window ?
I have no experience in Unity, but creating a gui for some of my python scripts was not that hard. Is Unity such a clunky piece of code ?

 

[Lacrymas]

As far as I know, it's a combination of Unity not being the best engine ever written and having to have competent developers to be able to optimize the game. As we've seen, Obsidian don't really have competent programmers, soooo, yeah.

 

[Prime Junta]

imma just leave this here

 

[gestalt11]

It depends on the build. The most interesting things were gutted (my beloved Skaen Priest) and require multiclassing for it to work the same way it did before (or similar), some things can have analogues. I'd say the rule of thumb is if the build is pretty straightforward, then yeah, but if it's something actually interesting, then no.

Ahahahahaha you think Skaen priest is gutted. The first two ultimate winners were Skaen priest + something else. Considering the Ultimate requires you kill all super bosses solo while making sure the child escort stays alive I would not call it gutted. They did change it a lot though.

Anyway POE 1 builds don't really translate to POE 2 builds due to multi-class and sub-class system. You could have a "spiritual successor" build but having the same build makes little sense.

 

[Lacrymas]

It is functionally gutted, you don't get sneak attack anymore, you have to multiclass to Rogue to get the same thing, but you also double down on abilities due to the Skaen Priest's specialized spells. It makes 0 design sense.

 

[Atchodas]

Are menu like gui's really that difficult to implement in Unity ?

Its hard for fat purple haired lesbians that work at obsidian

 

[Atchodas]

Ahahahahaha you think Skaen priest is gutted. The first two ultimate winners were Skaen priest + something else. Considering the Ultimate requires you kill all super bosses solo while making sure the child escort stays alive I would not call it gutted. They did change it a lot though.

Anyway POE 1 builds don't really translate to POE 2 builds due to multi-class and sub-class system. You could have a "spiritual successor" build but having the same build makes little sense.

Skaen priest is pretty useless outside Ultimate

Ultimate is retarded in Deadfire as it requires you to use one specific class : priest

And Skaen priests just happen to have Invisibility which makes the game much much easier when soloing

 

[JarlFrank]

I don't know what is worse. The fact that they tried to emulate Forgotten Realms or the fact that he wouldn't put elves and dwarves in his own fantasy setting, knowing the tendency to desfantatize fantasy.

Elves and dwarves are already "defantasized". There is nothing fantastic about them anymore, like there was in LotR or early clones of it. Nowadays elves and dwarves are as mundane as it gets. Bland and boring.

If you want to up-fantasy your game, take inspiration from the pulp era or from weird exotic fantasy settings like M.A.R. Barker's Tekumel and add in unique races that haven't been used 50000000000 times before.

I wouldn't put elves and dwarves in my own fantasy setting either, because they have become utterly mundane.

 

[S.torch]

Elves and dwarves are already "defantasized". There is nothing fantastic about them anymore, like there was in LotR or early clones of it. Nowadays elves and dwarves are as mundane as it gets. Bland and boring.

If you want to up-fantasy your game, take inspiration from the pulp era or from weird exotic fantasy settings like M.A.R. Barker's Tekumel and add in unique races that haven't been used 50000000000 times before.

I wouldn't put elves and dwarves in my own fantasy setting either, because they have become utterly mundane.

Neither elves nor dwarves are mundane, what is happening here is that, since LoTR, the reason why these races are put has been missing out. The bad writers do it because they think it is a requirement or obligation, they don't understand what they want to do nor the fantasy, they don't want to add anything new to those races or make their own interpretation. Then it's like you say, if you don't want to put those races in your setting, I think it's right, it's each author's decision, the problem comes when you see races that could easily be haflings or elves, but they are given another name or they get subvert the base of these beings and believe they have the job done, just as PoE did. The point here is creativity, a bad writer could reduce a fantastic setting to a rural town, and a good writer could make a simple idea something incredible.

In cases like this, when someone says they are going to remove those races, it is not that they will make another fantasy, it is that they will do something even worse. The setting of PoE in the best of the cases is mediocre, I don't even want to imagine that it will come out of a 100% original setting. Because if you couldn't handle the "basic" fantasy races, how are you going to handle totally original races that require even more work?

 

[Will Zurmacht]

Spoiler

Guarantee you there would be graceful knowledge loving peaceniks and no-nonsense, stubborn hardworking folks of lower than average stature; no elves or dwarves though. You can't do away with not-elves, not-dwarves, and not-orcs because those are transmutations of human ideals and stereotypes into flesh. Fantasy consumers cannot relate to and for the most part do not want their stories filled with sentient amoebas, talking clouds, awakened AI hivemind machine-folk who don't immediately outthink and subjugate every meat race, and assorted surreal bullshit as part of the main experience.

 

[Delterius]

Neither elves nor dwarves are mundane

elves are from finland and dwarves are from bavaria

you can't get more mundane than that

 

[JarlFrank]

Neither elves nor dwarves are mundane, what is happening here is that, since LoTR, the reason why these races are put has been missing out. The bad writers do it because they think it is a requirement or obligation, they don't understand what they want to do nor the fantasy, they don't want to add anything new to those races or make their own interpretation. Then it's like you say, if you don't want to put those races in your setting, I think it's right, it's each author's decision, the problem comes when you see races that could easily be haflings or elves, but they are given another name or they get subvert the base of these beings and believe they have the job done, just as PoE did. The point here is creativity, a bad writer could reduce a fantastic setting to a rural town, and a good writer could make a simple idea something incredible.

I wouldn't add elves or dwarves to my fantasy setting, nor would I put in any races derived from or similar to elves, dwarves, halflings, gnomes, etc etc, because those have been done a thousand times over. And adding anything new to them or adding my own interpretation would also be a well-trodden path: Elder Scrolls (at least Morrowind-era ES) already did interesting enough things with elves. Witcher turned them into downtrodden people living in ghettos. Anything you can think of with elves and dwarves has already been done. I'm not interested in exploring elves and dwarves again, like a hundred authors have done before me, and I can completely understand Sawyer when he doesn't, either.

In cases like this, when someone says they are going to remove those races, it is not that they will make another fantasy, it is that they will do something even worse. The setting of PoE in the best of the cases is mediocre, I don't even want to imagine that it will come out of a 100% original setting. Because if you couldn't handle the "basic" fantasy races, how are you going to handle totally original races that require even more work?

Why do you even need other races in fantasy? Most of my favorite fantasy novels feature only humans as a sentient race with a developed society. Others feature weird alien creatures that aren't protagonists, but whose cultures are encountered by the protagonists and add something fantastical to the story. The cool thing about fantasy is, you can do with it whatever you want. The only rule is to keep the worldbuilding internally consistent. China Mieville's Perdido Street Station featured weird humanoids with bugs as their heads, cactus people who perform photosynthesis, and other strange humanoid and non-humanoid beings. And it was a lot more fascinating to read about than yet another re-interpretation of long-ears and long-beards.

And even if a setting is human only, it's not any less fantastical or more mundane. There are settings with generic elves and dwarves that feel a lot more mundane than human-only settings with weird magic and strange artifacts. The entire sword and sorcery genre is testament to that.

I see the lack of elves and dwarves as a good thing.

 

[Will Zurmacht]

Jaded perspective. Like a movie critic who thinks he's seen everything under the sun and is no longer titillated by mundane pleasures and tight, well-told tales in the classic style. He yearns for the "new," the "innovative," and the "provocative;" he praises directors who "push the genre forward," not realizing or not caring that only connoisseurs and jaded, decadent critics care about crap like that. Most consumers want competence and continuity, and are in fact uncomfortable when the artist pushes the envelope too far.

Josh would never be allowed by his publisher nor would he ever actually be able to create a fantasy setting that didn't have relatable not-elves, not-dwarves, not-orcs and not-halflings somewhere near the core of the experience. That revolutionary RPG where sentient cacti with alien psychologies drive a compelling narrative will forever remain an unrealized pipe dream. A narrative where cactus people have prickly personalities, prefer dry humor, and are good at heart, just looking for a place to put down roots with their family, however, i.e human-all-too-human cacti, could do well.

 

[S.torch]

Why do you even need other races in fantasy?

And here you can see how you completly missed my point. You don't need to put other races in fantasy, I explictly said that is the decision of every author to put fantasy races in their stories. But is up to them to make it interesting. I doubt a lot that you liked those things that you mention only because they had strange creatures, rather it was because of their good execution.

Now, I'm here arguing because these type of reactions in which people said they won't put elves or dwarves in their settings and somehow that would magically make it more interesting are completly out of place. If your setting is bad, is not because of elves or dwarves or any other fantasy theme you can think, is because author couldn't not write it well. So if you come, and do other settings but without these races, nothing will change because these things are NOT the problem, but your own ability.

And this is the problem here, thinking that you would get a better setting because if features "humans only", realism, or whatever other thing you can think of. Rather than because you wanted to tell a interesting story.

 

[Quillon]

2 things I don't like about fantasy races:

1. Practicality. As a storyfag I want writers to focus on 1 playable race: humanses when writing shit for the game and not bother coming up with reactivity for all the shit PC can be.(When they bother to do it the content spreads far too thin, when they don't you feel the lack of reactivity straightaway)
2. They never tackle life span differences seriously; it is a fucking big deal if a race can live x2 to x10 of humanses. If I had a thousand year lifespan, I'd be patient & cautious as fuck living through it, wouldn't go adventuring/murder hoboing fo'sho. It was a fucking big deal in LotR f.i. But this kinda stuff became "flavor" nowadays; Aloth is 62 years old... he just is, who cares? Days are 27 hours long, why? just cos. FUCK YOU.

Spoiler

3. Fuck fantasy.

 

[Prime Junta]

Days are 27 hours long, why? just cos.

One of my pet peeves. An hour is a subdivision of a day. Even if it was 27 Earth hours, (1) what difference dies it make in the game and (2) why did they divide the day into 27 instead of 24, 10, or something actually sensible like 16 or 32?

 

[Atchodas]

Well Sawyer wanted to make unique stuff so he made Fampyrs and 27 hour days to show off his immense imagination

 

[Verylittlefishes]

Well Sawyer wanted to make unique stuff so he made Fampyrs and 27 hour days to show off his immense imagination

Fampyrs vere vreat inemies vlease gon't unsult zhem