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

The Real Fanboy
Joined
Oct 8, 2018
Messages
1,121


Josh and Carrie have a new interview about Deadfire and about the ending and the story (tho you have to actually buy the magazine for the full interview)!
 

Luckmann

Arcane
Zionist Agent
Joined
Jul 20, 2009
Messages
3,759
Location
Scandinavia
It seems Avellone was the only one on Obsidian that actually cared about narrative consistency and issues. The more I play, the more Deadfire disappoints me in terms of narrative effort, and I can't help but to recall a time when Avellone said that he had to tell playtesters that he was more interested in narrative "bugs" than technical ones.

There's just tons of quests and conversations that get "out of sequence" if you do them in a way the game does not expect. Conversations about things and locations you haven't actually been informed about yet, quests that resolve themselves in a narratively nonsensical sense, options to present arguments or defenses regarding people you haven't even met, and the list goes on and on and on. And these issues aren't even me resolving things in some arcane fashion, but merely using the tools that were presented in a way that makes sense.

The funny thing is, I can easily pin down where most of this started, and it was from simply not taking the quest from the prince at first (I wanted to recruit Pallegina first), approaching The Gullet from the right instead of the left, pickpocketing a Market Soule, and entering the Old City via the cage instead of through the Narrows and Dereo. This should've been on a list of issues somewhere following a basic playtest.

But apparently, Obsidian doesn't do those anymore.
 

Parabalus

Arcane
Joined
Mar 23, 2015
Messages
17,432
The funny thing is, I can easily pin down where most of this started, and it was from simply not taking the quest from the prince at first (I wanted to recruit Pallegina first), approaching The Gullet from the right instead of the left, pickpocketing a Market Soule, and entering the Old City via the cage instead of through the Narrows and Dereo. This should've been on a list of issues somewhere following a basic playtest.

What went wrong here?

I remember doing Dereo's quest, via just the Old City Cornett, and not running into any issues.
 

Luckmann

Arcane
Zionist Agent
Joined
Jul 20, 2009
Messages
3,759
Location
Scandinavia
The funny thing is, I can easily pin down where most of this started, and it was from simply not taking the quest from the prince at first (I wanted to recruit Pallegina first), approaching The Gullet from the right instead of the left, pickpocketing a Market Soule, and entering the Old City via the cage instead of through the Narrows and Dereo. This should've been on a list of issues somewhere following a basic playtest.

What went wrong here?

I remember doing Dereo's quest, via just the Old City Cornett, and not running into any issues.
There are several, and I didn't take any notes:
  • You are sent to ascertain the source of The Envoy's Badge, but once you have the Marked Soule (pickpocketed from the overseer-type aumaua in the Gullet) and/or have found your way into the Undercroft, you can't even show it to anyone anymore to ask questions about it. Of course, the issue of finding out what goes on in Delver's Row is satisfied by arriving in the Undercroft, but narratively, it makes no sense to just disregard the investigation into The Envoy's Badge. I still have no idea where it came from or what the Vailians had to do with this, since the Delver's Row is all about the Principi.
  • When you arrive in the Undercroft via the Old City and have Tekehu with you, it will prompt a revelation about how the waterbenders are working with the Principi, and you will be asked if you will tell the prince about what goes on in Delver's Row. When this first happened to me, I had not spoken with the Prince about that, had no quest to find Delver's Row or to find out what goes on there, and have legit no idea what Delver's Row was, but the conversation treated it all as if I did. This is ignoring the fact that coming from the Old City, we would have had no idea knowing that we'd even be underneath Delver's Row. All I knew was that I walked out into a cove that had pirates and waterbenders in it.
  • When sneaking out of the Undercroft, I faced a guy that asked me how I got in there. I could show him the Marked Soule, despite having no idea that was the right thing to do; he asked me how I got it. I could lie and say that Dereo gave it to me. At this point I had no idea who Dereo was. None whatsoever. Never met the guy. More or less the same odd sequence of events play out when going to talk to the "Mad" captain in the Undercroft, where I again could talk about things I couldn't possibly have known.
  • When talking to Dereo, he sends me to collect a sea-shell kind of thing, of which I already have one, having come from the Old City. You can tell him something along the lines of "Do you want to hear about the seashell and the temple" at which point he says something nonsensical and your only response is "I trust this concludes our business?" and the entire quest just ends.
  • If you pretend to be retarded and go through the entire quest with Dereo and just not mention that you've been to the temple, go get the second seashell-thing, go back to Dereo, keep playing along like it all makes sense, go back to the temple, look at the mural, and then go all the way back (I want to stress that the NPC that "opens the path" for you from the Undercroft into the Old City still go through the motions... even though you've already opened the path from the other side), you get a ton of extra exposition. But more importantly, if you go straight from the acquisition of the second seashell-thing to the Old City/Ondra's Temple, which makes perfect sense because at that point you know these things are usable in the temple but he hasn't told you to go there yet, you can actually open up an alcove in the temple with some loot. But the seashell-things are consumed, as they are slotted into the wall. Then you go to Dereo, expecting a "Hey, I got the seashell, but I went to the temple instead and.. uh.. it's gone now", you instead get "Is this the seashell-thing you wanted?"; I want to stress that at that point, I literally do not have either of the seashell-things anymore. He then sends you to the temple to look at the mural. You have to go to the mural, look at it (even if you've looked at it three times before by now), and then return to Dereo in order to conclude the quest in a way that makes sense.
Tons of shit like this. Or why not the fact that you can go to the prince and ask about food for the slave-caste in the Gullet, asking him about the queen's inaction, etc. But.. not the queen? She's right there, up on the roof, but it's impossible to raise the issue with her.

Shit like this, over and over and over again. This might sound nitpicky, but these are fairly major narrative issues because they completely break the narrative sequence of events, resulting in a nonsensical experience, despite the quests resolving. It's like they tried to create a complex weave of interacting plots in Neketara, but at some point said "Eh, fuck it, close enough."
 
Last edited:

Luckmann

Arcane
Zionist Agent
Joined
Jul 20, 2009
Messages
3,759
Location
Scandinavia
I must say, now when I'm lvl ~10/11, playing with Woedica's Challenge feels just about right, especially with the Empower system to back it up - although I never actually Empower anything, I just use it to refresh limited uses of my combat resources. In some ways, it's actually much better than in PoE, as I now find myself managing everyone's resources, not just the spellcasters. That said, I still rest extremely rarely, which feels a bit off. It's odd that you don't rest automatically when traveling.

Skaen's Challenge is occasionally a bit "off", especially when indoors in areas that don't feel dark at all. It's a bit weird when you suddenly run into some NPC that just appears in front of you. In dungeons, however, it feels really appropriate. I'm getting a "skulking the dungeon" feeling that PoE1 never instilled at all.

I really regret activating Berath's Challenge, though. I had underestimated just how swingy the system can be at times, and how fast you can go from riding high on full health to lying plastered on the floor, and even though I have no less than three companions capable of resurrection now, going on a resurrection roll with such limited uses is often a lost battle. I didn't think it would annoy me this much, but the system is really not built around near-instant permadeath. I wish I could turn it off but there appears to be no functional console commands for it.

It is also my understanding that the level cap is lvl 20, which is weird, considering that you get to level 10 just by going to the main city and finishing all you can finish in it, and hit Lvl 11 just shortly after. Just like in PoE1, the leveling curve seems to be massively over-inflated, and they should probably have cut all XP awards in that entire city by ~30% or more. The leveling rate doesn't seem to be slowing down, either. I don't understand why they keep making this simple mistake.
 

Prime Junta

Guest
I don't understand why they keep making this simple mistake.

It's got a ton of optional content. If you just beeline the main quest you can finish the game really fast. At a leveling rate that would be appropriate for a completionist playthrough you'd probably be at around level 9-10 when playing it that way. I guess their telemetry said that most people beeline and only play a bit of side content and calibrated the leveling for that.

I agree that it feels really off if you're at all thorough, when I hit level 20 it felt like I had only played like maybe half the game.
 

Delterius

Arcane
Joined
Dec 12, 2012
Messages
15,956
Location
Entre a serra e o mar.
Tons of shit like this. Or why not the fact that you can go to the prince and ask about food for the slave-caste in the Gullet, asking him about the queen's inaction, etc. But.. not the queen? She's right there, up on the roof, but it's impossible to raise the issue with her.
I do remember you can try after Hasongo, she'll just brush you off and tell you to talk to Aruihi about normie shit.
 
Self-Ejected

MajorMace

Self-Ejected
Patron
Joined
May 6, 2018
Messages
2,008
Location
Souffrance, Franka
The funny thing is, I can easily pin down where most of this started, and it was from simply not taking the quest from the prince at first (I wanted to recruit Pallegina first), approaching The Gullet from the right instead of the left, pickpocketing a Market Soule, and entering the Old City via the cage instead of through the Narrows and Dereo. This should've been on a list of issues somewhere following a basic playtest.

What went wrong here?

I remember doing Dereo's quest, via just the Old City Cornett, and not running into any issues.
There are several, and I didn't take any notes:
  • You are sent to ascertain the source of The Envoy's Badge, but once you have the Marked Soule (pickpocketed from the overseer-type aumaua in the Gullet) and/or have found your way into the Undercroft, you can't even show it to anyone anymore to ask questions about it. Of course, the issue of finding out what goes on in Delver's Row is satisfied by arriving in the Undercroft, but narratively, it makes no sense to just disregard the investigation into The Envoy's Badge. I still have no idea where it came from or what the Vailians had to do with this, since the Delver's Row is all about the Principi.
  • When you arrive in the Undercroft via the Old City and have Tekehu with you, it will prompt a revelation about how the waterbenders are working with the Principi, and you will be asked if you will tell the prince about what goes on in Delver's Row. When this first happened to me, I had not spoken with the Prince about that, had no quest to find Delver's Row or to find out what goes on there, and have legit no idea what Delver's Row was, but the conversation treated it all as if I did. This is ignoring the fact that coming from the Old City, we would have had no idea knowing that we'd even be underneath Delver's Row. All I knew was that I walked out into a cove that had pirates and waterbenders in it.
  • When sneaking out of the Undercroft, I faced a guy that asked me how I got in there. I could show him the Marked Soule, despite having no idea that was the right thing to do; he asked me how I got it. I could lie and say that Dereo gave it to me. At this point I had no idea who Dereo was. None whatsoever. Never met the guy. More or less the same odd sequence of events play out when going to talk to the "Mad" captain in the Undercroft, where I again could talk about things I couldn't possibly have known.
  • When talking to Dereo, he sends me to collect a sea-shell kind of thing, of which I already have one, having come from the Old City. You can tell him something along the lines of "Do you want to hear about the seashell and the temple" at which point he says something nonsensical and your only response is "I trust this concludes our business?" and the entire quest just ends.
  • If you pretend to be retarded and go through the entire quest with Dereo and just not mention that you've been to the temple, go get the second seashell-thing, go back to Dereo, keep playing along like it all makes sense, go back to the temple, look at the mural, and then go all the way back (I want to stress that the NPC that "opens the path" for you from the Undercroft into the Old City still go through the motions... even though you've already opened the path from the other side), you get a ton of extra exposition. But more importantly, if you go straight from the acquisition of the second seashell-thing to the Old City/Ondra's Temple, which makes perfect sense because at that point you know these things are usable in the temple but he hasn't told you to go there yet, you can actually open up an alcove in the temple with some loot. But the seashell-things are consumed, as they are slotted into the wall. Then you go to Dereo, expecting a "Hey, I got the seashell, but I went to the temple instead and.. uh.. it's gone now", you instead get "Is this the seashell-thing you wanted?"; I want to stress that at that point, I literally do not have either of the seashell-things anymore. He then sends you to the temple to look at the mural. You have to go to the mural, look at it (even if you've looked at it three times before by now), and then return to Dereo in order to conclude the quest in a way that makes sense.
Tons of shit like this. Or why not the fact that you can go to the prince and ask about food for the slave-caste in the Gullet, asking him about the queen's inaction, etc. But.. not the queen? She's right there, up on the roof, but it's impossible to raise the issue with her.

Shit like this, over and over and over again. This might sound nitpicky, but these are fairly major narrative issues because they completely break the narrative sequence of events, resulting in a nonsensical experience, despite the quests resolving. It's like they tried to create a complex weave of interacting plots in Neketara, but at some point said "Eh, fuck it, close enough."

I had the exact same issue at release. Don't remember how but I did the whole undercroft backwards.

Crookspur / natives was/is broken as well.

EDIT : technically speaking, I don't think the former is broken. I think it's just flawed in the core design to begin with. Crookspur however was broken.
 

Luckmann

Arcane
Zionist Agent
Joined
Jul 20, 2009
Messages
3,759
Location
Scandinavia
I don't understand why they keep making this simple mistake.

It's got a ton of optional content. If you just beeline the main quest you can finish the game really fast. At a leveling rate that would be appropriate for a completionist playthrough you'd probably be at around level 9-10 when playing it that way. I guess their telemetry said that most people beeline and only play a bit of side content and calibrated the leveling for that.

I agree that it feels really off if you're at all thorough, when I hit level 20 it felt like I had only played like maybe half the game.
Imagine making games for people who don't play them.
 

Sharpedge

Prophet
Joined
Sep 14, 2018
Messages
1,061
I don't understand why they keep making this simple mistake.

It's got a ton of optional content. If you just beeline the main quest you can finish the game really fast. At a leveling rate that would be appropriate for a completionist playthrough you'd probably be at around level 9-10 when playing it that way. I guess their telemetry said that most people beeline and only play a bit of side content and calibrated the leveling for that.

I agree that it feels really off if you're at all thorough, when I hit level 20 it felt like I had only played like maybe half the game.
It feels even worse when playing solo. The first game's difficulty curve actually feels pretty good solo throughout much of the game, although they do tend to throw too many monsters at you so it does feel like you are constantly cutting through weeds. Llengrath, Concelhaut, the Adra Dragon and the Alpine Dragon do sort of make up for it by being fun fights to do though.

Solo in the 2nd game you basically hit level 16ish just at the first city and get to level 19-20 shortly afterwards. Most of the boss fights don't take much in the way of being creative and are just repetitive spamming of a few powers.
 

Desiderius

Found your egg, Robinett, you sneaky bastard
Patron
Joined
Jul 22, 2019
Messages
14,131
Insert Title Here Pathfinder: Wrath
The funny thing is, I can easily pin down where most of this started, and it was from simply not taking the quest from the prince at first (I wanted to recruit Pallegina first), approaching The Gullet from the right instead of the left, pickpocketing a Market Soule, and entering the Old City via the cage instead of through the Narrows and Dereo. This should've been on a list of issues somewhere following a basic playtest.

What went wrong here?

I remember doing Dereo's quest, via just the Old City Cornett, and not running into any issues.
There are several, and I didn't take any notes:
  • You are sent to ascertain the source of The Envoy's Badge, but once you have the Marked Soule (pickpocketed from the overseer-type aumaua in the Gullet) and/or have found your way into the Undercroft, you can't even show it to anyone anymore to ask questions about it. Of course, the issue of finding out what goes on in Delver's Row is satisfied by arriving in the Undercroft, but narratively, it makes no sense to just disregard the investigation into The Envoy's Badge. I still have no idea where it came from or what the Vailians had to do with this, since the Delver's Row is all about the Principi.
  • When you arrive in the Undercroft via the Old City and have Tekehu with you, it will prompt a revelation about how the waterbenders are working with the Principi, and you will be asked if you will tell the prince about what goes on in Delver's Row. When this first happened to me, I had not spoken with the Prince about that, had no quest to find Delver's Row or to find out what goes on there, and have legit no idea what Delver's Row was, but the conversation treated it all as if I did. This is ignoring the fact that coming from the Old City, we would have had no idea knowing that we'd even be underneath Delver's Row. All I knew was that I walked out into a cove that had pirates and waterbenders in it.
  • When sneaking out of the Undercroft, I faced a guy that asked me how I got in there. I could show him the Marked Soule, despite having no idea that was the right thing to do; he asked me how I got it. I could lie and say that Dereo gave it to me. At this point I had no idea who Dereo was. None whatsoever. Never met the guy. More or less the same odd sequence of events play out when going to talk to the "Mad" captain in the Undercroft, where I again could talk about things I couldn't possibly have known.
  • When talking to Dereo, he sends me to collect a sea-shell kind of thing, of which I already have one, having come from the Old City. You can tell him something along the lines of "Do you want to hear about the seashell and the temple" at which point he says something nonsensical and your only response is "I trust this concludes our business?" and the entire quest just ends.
  • If you pretend to be retarded and go through the entire quest with Dereo and just not mention that you've been to the temple, go get the second seashell-thing, go back to Dereo, keep playing along like it all makes sense, go back to the temple, look at the mural, and then go all the way back (I want to stress that the NPC that "opens the path" for you from the Undercroft into the Old City still go through the motions... even though you've already opened the path from the other side), you get a ton of extra exposition. But more importantly, if you go straight from the acquisition of the second seashell-thing to the Old City/Ondra's Temple, which makes perfect sense because at that point you know these things are usable in the temple but he hasn't told you to go there yet, you can actually open up an alcove in the temple with some loot. But the seashell-things are consumed, as they are slotted into the wall. Then you go to Dereo, expecting a "Hey, I got the seashell, but I went to the temple instead and.. uh.. it's gone now", you instead get "Is this the seashell-thing you wanted?"; I want to stress that at that point, I literally do not have either of the seashell-things anymore. He then sends you to the temple to look at the mural. You have to go to the mural, look at it (even if you've looked at it three times before by now), and then return to Dereo in order to conclude the quest in a way that makes sense.
Tons of shit like this. Or why not the fact that you can go to the prince and ask about food for the slave-caste in the Gullet, asking him about the queen's inaction, etc. But.. not the queen? She's right there, up on the roof, but it's impossible to raise the issue with her.

Shit like this, over and over and over again. This might sound nitpicky, but these are fairly major narrative issues because they completely break the narrative sequence of events, resulting in a nonsensical experience, despite the quests resolving. It's like they tried to create a complex weave of interacting plots in Neketara, but at some point said "Eh, fuck it, close enough."

This is where my first playthrough ended in combination with the whole game being faceroll until the Old City stepped up the difficulty several lvls for no obvious reason (not triple red).
 

Quillon

Arcane
Joined
Dec 15, 2016
Messages
5,214
I don't understand why they keep making this simple mistake.

It's got a ton of optional content. If you just beeline the main quest you can finish the game really fast. At a leveling rate that would be appropriate for a completionist playthrough you'd probably be at around level 9-10 when playing it that way. I guess their telemetry said that most people beeline and only play a bit of side content and calibrated the leveling for that.

I agree that it feels really off if you're at all thorough, when I hit level 20 it felt like I had only played like maybe half the game.
Imagine making games for people who don't play them.

Maybe they should just make optional reduced XP progression balanced for completionists as one of them starting checkboxes.
 

Parabalus

Arcane
Joined
Mar 23, 2015
Messages
17,432
Spending time at max level is fine.

I've seen some estimates that you still have 30% of content after hitting level 20, which isn't that bad considering that all the DLCs are for max-levelish chars.
 

Roguey

Codex Staff
Staff Member
Sawyerite
Joined
May 29, 2010
Messages
35,653
It's a problem that can be solved with low level caps and reasons other than xp for doing side content (e.g. better items of course)
 

Luckmann

Arcane
Zionist Agent
Joined
Jul 20, 2009
Messages
3,759
Location
Scandinavia
Spending time at max level is fine.

I've seen some estimates that you still have 30% of content after hitting level 20, which isn't that bad considering that all the DLCs are for max-levelish chars.
Spending some time at max level is fine.

Outleveling most content because you chose to actually play the game and then stop character progression at an arbitrary point with significant amounts of content left is not.
 

Lacrymas

Arcane
Joined
Sep 23, 2015
Messages
17,948
Pathfinder: Wrath
You can also just not press the level up button.

You get a bit spammed with the sound effects though.
The only game in which this is a good idea is surprisingly KotOR1, you can get more Jedi levels if you don't press level up button before becoming one.
 

Luckmann

Arcane
Zionist Agent
Joined
Jul 20, 2009
Messages
3,759
Location
Scandinavia
Last edited:

Roguey

Codex Staff
Staff Member
Sawyerite
Joined
May 29, 2010
Messages
35,653
The high levels themselves are the problem because they trivialize the difficulty by giving you too many options. Both PoE1 and 2 would've been better with a level cap of ~10 and slower leveling.
PoE's base level cap of 12 is fine. Additonally after the xp patch, you're pretty much required to do every sidequest (except bounties and the Od Nua) to hit the cap which you also need to do to have a decent chance against Thaos. The mid-game expansion ruined the balance, but that's inevitable.
 

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