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

[rusty_shackleford]

The problem is that the explanation -- the ending -- is absolute shit.
None of it matters to you at all. You have zero impact on what happens(unless you include early fail states.) Everything you did across two games doesn't matter in the least. Eothas is going to do what he's going to do, you will be Berath's puppet, nothing you do matters, everything turns out shit, the end.
Don't like it? GAME OVER. There must be at least a dozen instances where if you decide to call out the gods on their bullshit they just zap you and you die.
Yeah I know someone will respond with "bla bla deities too powerful bla bla"
You know what I see there? Railroading. Trying to obfuscate it with deities doesn't make it any different.

The ending would have been exactly the same if you simply weren't there at all so it doesn't even matter. None of it matters. The entire thing is tinged in libtard nihilism.

 

[Yosharian]

Oh, and I finished POE2 for the first time today as well, on my "scratch" character (I still intend to get the two games and all DLC done with one consistent character, a cipher who I'm going slow and immersed with through POE atm).

What's all the fuss about the ending? You get a goodly set of choices, all with cost/benefit scenarios attached. It's a difficult, sticky choice that you have to ponder for a bit, which makes you think about your own preference ranking.

Is the problem that there's not one clear good ending? In a way, I can see the complaint that the moralltiies of the choices are just a reflection of lame liberal "balance" and fence-sitting - everyone must get prizes, and at the same time everyone must feel equally slightly dissatisfied too. But I thought that bar the obligatory snarky jabs of anti-White-colonialism, the options and the costs/benefits were quite realistically and maturely drawn, on the whole.

If I remember clearly, there's no reason for Eothas to care what you have to say, but he listens anyway just 'cause.
It's like convincing the Master to blow himself up in Fallout 1 - except instead of having to acquire research proving that Mutants are sterile, you can just spew some emotional BS.

There's another crucial difference, the Master is actually an interesting character

 

[gurugeorge]

The problem is that the explanation -- the ending -- is absolute shit.
None of it matters to you at all. You have zero impact on what happens(unless you include early fail states.) Everything you did across two games doesn't matter in the least. Eothas is going to do what he's going to do, you will be Berath's puppet, nothing you do matters, everything turns out shit, the end.
Don't like it? GAME OVER. There must be at least a dozen instances where if you decide to call out the gods on their bullshit they just zap you and you die.
Yeah I know someone will respond with "bla bla deities too powerful bla bla"
You know what I see there? Railroading. Trying to obfuscate it with deities doesn't make it any different.

The ending would have been exactly the same if you simply weren't there at all so it doesn't even matter. None of it matters. The entire thing is tinged in libtard nihilism.

Yeah I can see that. But while your presence or absence makes no difference wrt what Eothas is going to do, it does make quite a big difference to the people you've interacted with. So you have no impact on the biggest thing, but you have a big impact on some merely big and medium-sized things - like how kith will come out of the situation, whether there'll be a future orientation to animancy, whether the Huana get stronger or fall apart, etc. That's not nothing. Especially since those are the entities you've been building or breaking actual relationships with, sympathising with or not, etc.

 

[Desiderius]

So you’re playing Soyer’s prayer simulation, except with fake gods.

 

[Haplo]

So is it worth replaying deadfire for the DLCs and turn based combat? I played and completed deadfire on release and I thought it was decent but I was really disappointed at the ending. I also thought the story of chasing Eothas was really nonsensical. The exploration and world-building were top notch though.

DLC - yes, they are very good. Particularly Forgotten Sanctum. But Beast of Winter is very solid too.
And SSS, as an arena DLC, has some of the best combat in the game. Some nice items too. It's the most skippable if you didn't enjoy Deadfire combat that much, I guess.

Turn Based mode - no IMO. Its a lazy implementation that's inferior to Real Time mode. Although it can be fun as a caster (turn based action economy heavily favors casters - a spell is usually worth a lot more then one sword swing).

 

[Luckmann]

There are very few movies you can't tell what the ending is going to be after about 10 minutes in, but they can still be worth watching, because you want to see how they get to that point.

Stop watching movies made in an age of decline.

 

[gurugeorge]

There are very few movies you can't tell what the ending is going to be after about 10 minutes in, but they can still be worth watching, because you want to see how they get to that point.

Stop watching movies made in an age of decline.

True, but you have to go quite far back for movies that aren't predictable, maybe the 60s or 70s? 80s on, everything starts becoming formulaic and iconic.

 

[Desiderius]

Decadent ages like this one are famous for great art as the most capable are squeezed out of the corrupt institutions and turn to art to imagine what’s next.

 

[Goldschmidt]

Turn Based mode - no IMO. Its a lazy implementation that's inferior to Real Time mode. Although it can be fun as a caster (turn based action economy heavily favors casters - a spell is usually worth a lot more then one sword swing).

Turn based mode is true decline. I tried it out on Deadfire and battles become a true slog and feel completely unnatural. Real pirate ship combat is full of carnage and chaos. Which pirates fight each other on turn? That is so gay!

Real-time as a true pirate fight:




Example of 20+ minutes turn-based battle which should have lasted 1-2 minutes.

 

[BING XI LAO]

Replayed this again to level 12, got bored, quit. Uninstalled because it's so large.

PoTD+upscaling isn't very hard, and IDK what's interesting in the fights.
DO I want Eder to use his special abilities that make him very tanky? Yes. Do I want him in the stance designed for engaging many enemies? Yes.
Do I want to cast my spells? All of them, one by one? yes. Starting with whichever AoE disables have the best hitchance every time, then it's whatever.
Most enemies get caught in the pit of magical doom in front of Eder. The ones that get past I have to deal with by making sure my backliners have a mix of healing scrolls and the arcana to cast them, escape abilties from boots/cloaks, summons like Writhing Tentacles or Blights to occupy these backline sneaks.
Feels like that's basically it. Same every time

Game feels too balanced and nuanced in its combat. And its loot. Yes, surely -5% to X is OP if you stack it and combo it with this or that, but I simply can't bring myself to care about all these trinkets with janky conditional buffs that you have to open a tooltip with a fancy lyrical name to read.

I actually like various concepts like engagement, the whole debuff/buff shtick, INT giving bonus AoE and duration to effects. The graphics are superb, the writing is well-executed if at times ill-conceived.

One immersion-ruining thing that happened a few times is receiving quest rewards without asking, for quests I hadn't even taken, but had already completed. Queen Onekaza was persuadable to let me keep working for her without a skill check even after I released that dragon from the Watershaper's guild. Maia was fine with me accepting a bounty for a Rauatain captain, merely observing that "he ought to give us a worthy fight!"

It feels too comfy and too balanced. Even the setting is a comfy mishmash of real history on the mundane end, and a libtard rehash of the "latry-centric" D&D concept of gods (by which I mean the way gods are dependent on worshippers in D&D, a completely 'tarded idea). In Pillars the Gods are created by humans, a different way to make the mortals the prime agents of divinity. White March had good divine plots, but Pillars is still inherently annoyingly preachy leftist on this.

And instead of going really edgy with it like Woedica, which I could appreciate - a false God imposing herself - most of the gods are total fannies about it, at least while talking to the Watcher.
If they'd even just made Rymyrgand an actual God - some spirit from the Beyond, or something, I'd feel much better about it.

So in many ways the game feels too polished.

 

[rusty_shackleford]

If they'd even just made Rymyrgand an actual God - some spirit from the Beyond, or something, I'd feel much better about it.

Spoiler

he is, he's unrelated to the other deities

 

[Saduj]

stuff

You do realize that it would have been possible for you to honestly show two videos of complete, similar fights and that the real time fight would have still been shorter than the turn based fight? Instead you show a "real time" video where the pre-boarding part was skipped and the actual fight is heavily edited and incomplete and therefore not truly in real time. Then you show a complete turn based encounter where the optional pre-boarding shit wasn't skipped and the player is taking the time to explain everything he's doing, which is going to drag things out. I don't get the point of what you just did there. Are we supposed to be fooled?

 

[Desiderius]

Latry->laity (people, as opposed to priests, not God)

The point of the Reformation was to get the Priests out of the way so that the (laity) people could directly experience and appreciate the sovereignty of God therein to find the courage and direction to master themselves and trust one another to do likewise. This is known as the Priesthood of all Believers (literally trusters-> high trust society).

This has now degenerated into Soyer’s No Gods No Masters with predictable results, particularly the decline in self-mastery and the trust it engenders.

 

[Goldschmidt]

stuff

You do realize that it would have been possible for you to honestly show two videos of complete, similar fights and that the real time fight would have still been shorter than the turn based fight? Instead you show a "real time" video where the pre-boarding part was skipped and the actual fight is heavily edited and incomplete and therefore not truly in real time. Then you show a complete turn based encounter where the optional pre-boarding shit wasn't skipped and the player is taking the time to explain everything he's doing, which is going to drag things out. I don't get the point of what you just did there. Are we supposed to be fooled?

I know that and the point was not to fool anyone. I just couldn't find a similar real-time deck fight on youtube as every codexer is on youtube playing it in tb. Nonetheless, there is like 15 minutes of fighting going on in the turn-based mode in the second video. My actual point still stands that it all feels very unnatural. My secondary observation was that if the fight was done in real time, it would be over in 1-2 minutes. No sane pirates will backstab eachother in a turn-based fashion.

I just don't like turn-based and since divinity original sin we now got ourselves stuck in a situation that every upcoming rpg is turn-based. You would think the codex would rejoice at such a fact but they still shit on every rpg that comes out. You can't please the codex but it is because of the codex rpg-fans won't ever have real-time rp-games anymore. The codex has won by shitting all over RTWP for years and you would think they'd be happy but they don't. They are just bitter oldfags.

 

[Lacrymas]

RTwP deserves to be shat on. There is nothing specific to TB that makes it slow. Quite the contrary, it should be faster than RTwP when you know what you are doing or enemies have simultaneous turns like in roguelikes, but the developers should allow us to skip animations or speed them up considerably. Something which all 3 of Larian's recent offerings and PoE2 didn't do. I had to mod D:OS1 to speed it up.

 

[gurugeorge]

RTwP deserves to be shat on. There is nothing specific to TB that makes it slow. Quite the contrary, it should be faster than RTwP when you know what you are doing or enemies have simultaneous turns like in roguelikes, but the developers should allow us to skip animations or speed them up considerably. Something which all 3 of Larian's recent offerings and PoE2 didn't do. I had to mod D:OS1 to speed it up.

I know! Let's not bother having animations at all. In fact let's just have a card game!

 

[BING XI LAO]

RTwP deserves to be shat on. There is nothing specific to TB that makes it slow.

Well of course there is, less happens in any given IRL time period in TB, because fewer units are acting at once.

Quite the contrary, it should be faster than RTwP when you know what you are doing or enemies have simultaneous turns like in roguelikes, but the developers should allow us to skip animations or speed them up considerably. Something which all 3 of Larian's recent offerings and PoE2 didn't do. I had to mod D:OS1 to speed it up.

Perhaps the animations could play slowly as long as the action they represent takes effect immediately - the animation could play afterwards, which might be janky but would allow full animation with no timewasting. But this sort of fix is just one of the countless fixes an ideal TB system wants but rarely gets.

 

[Lacrymas]

In roguelikes, everything happens instantly regardless of how many enemies there are on screen, so it's infinitely faster than RTwP.

 

[copebot]

I think the issue POE2 has with its real time system is that it is so heavy on the pause aspect because of the class design. Your powers come back every rest. Every class has a full array of active use powers. This makes it so that unlike most other RTwP games, you either lean on the AI (possible on the normal difficulties, less so on the harder POTD fights) or are constantly pausing to issue new orders and queue them up. You kind of lose the benefit of a real time system because of the other unrelated game design choices. By comparison, in the BG games even at high levels you are generally not chain casting, and even then you are only casting spells on 1-3 characters, and your fighters/rogues are just auto attacking since they have no abilities except for when they are level a million in TOB.

POE2 would have been better as a turn based game from the start, but it's tacked on TB mode is just not balanced for the attributes it has nor the class system.

 

[gurugeorge]

I think the issue POE2 has with its real time system is that it is so heavy on the pause aspect because of the class design. Your powers come back every rest. Every class has a full array of active use powers. This makes it so that unlike most other RTwP games, you either lean on the AI (possible on the normal difficulties, less so on the harder POTD fights) or are constantly pausing to issue new orders and queue them up. You kind of lose the benefit of a real time system because of the other unrelated game design choices. By comparison, in the BG games even at high levels you are generally not chain casting, and even then you are only casting spells on 1-3 characters, and your fighters/rogues are just auto attacking since they have no abilities except for when they are level a million in TOB.

POE2 would have been better as a turn based game from the start, but it's tacked on TB mode is just not balanced for the attributes it has nor the class system.

You only have to pause regularly in the hardest fights. With the AI conditionals being as good as they are (especially with the added mod), even on PoTD your characters do pretty well for themselves a lot of the time, and you just have to keep a weather eye on things.

That's why, to me, it's beautifully done. Even in hard fights, there's a nice rhythm to the gameplay on account of the way the abilities are timed (e.g. how long buffs/debuffs last) vis a vis how often you have to pause proactively to keep an eye on things. I find it very satisfying anyway.

It really feels to me much more like having a party of characters with their own minds who you're giving orders to, rather than actually controlling in every little detail. And that's just perfect for RTwP, to keep up the illusion of realtime play.

To me, it's a system that's really tailor-made to the PC, to the CRPG format. Even though it has roots in tabletop, it's gotten away from the kind of problem that Sven was complaining about re. BG3, and that the Solasta developers were wrestling with (i.e. "translating tabletop to the PC" - although don't get me wrong, I think that's posible too). It's really its own thing, that I hope developers iterate on it in the future.

 

[BING XI LAO]

I think the issue POE2 has with its real time system is that it is so heavy on the pause aspect because of the class design. Your powers come back every rest. Every class has a full array of active use powers. This makes it so that unlike most other RTwP games, you either lean on the AI (possible on the normal difficulties, less so on the harder POTD fights) or are constantly pausing to issue new orders and queue them up. You kind of lose the benefit of a real time system because of the other unrelated game design choices. By comparison, in the BG games even at high levels you are generally not chain casting, and even then you are only casting spells on 1-3 characters, and your fighters/rogues are just auto attacking since they have no abilities except for when they are level a million in TOB.

POE2 would have been better as a turn based game from the start, but it's tacked on TB mode is just not balanced for the attributes it has nor the class system.

You only have to pause regularly in the hardest fights. With the AI conditionals being as good as they are (especially with the added mod), even on PoTD your characters do pretty well for themselves a lot of the time, and you just have to keep a weather eye on things.

That's why, to me, it's beautifully done. Even in hard fights, there's a nice rhythm to the gameplay on account of the way the abilities are timed (e.g. how long buffs/debuffs last) vis a vis how often you have to pause proactively to keep an eye on things. I find it very satisfying anyway.

It really feels to me much more like having a party of characters with their own minds who you're giving orders to, rather than actually controlling in every little detail. And that's just perfect for RTwP, to keep up the illusion of realtime play.

To me, it's a system that's really tailor-made to the PC, to the CRPG format. Even though it has roots in tabletop, it's gotten away from the kind of problem that Sven was complaining about re. BG3, and that the Solasta developers were wrestling with (i.e. "translating tabletop to the PC" - although don't get me wrong, I think that's posible too). It's really its own thing, that I hope developers iterate on it in the future.

Your posts got me to try poe2 recently, but I didn't automate stuff, maybe that's why I got bored. On the other hand, automating sounds like it could also making things boring.

 

[Butter]

Deadfire's combat is incredibly boring because you just repeat the same shit every fight like clockwork. At least in the first game you had to think about managing per-rest resources, but now you just spam everything every time. It's really fucking terrible.

 

[Lacrymas]

Try Magran's challenge if you want to manage resources, I guess. It's not well balanced for that, but eh.

 

[gurugeorge]

Your posts got me to try poe2 recently, but I didn't automate stuff, maybe that's why I got bored. On the other hand, automating sounds like it could also making things boring.

It's a slight perspective shift, as I said: your mindset is more that you're your character in the game giving live orders to other characters who are pretty capable in themselves, rather than being the player controlling each character's every single move. You're the god controlling their minds though I'm exaggerating for effect, but it's a bit like that.

It's never going to sit well if you prefer minute control of everything (which I do in other games ofc) - but you have that option too.

Deadfire's combat is incredibly boring because you just repeat the same shit every fight like clockwork. At least in the first game you had to think about managing per-rest resources, but now you just spam everything every time. It's really fucking terrible.

Don't you change your party around regularly?

 

[Butter]

Don't you change your party around regularly?

I don't use companions, so there's no reason.