Pillars of Eternity Beta Discussion [GAME RELEASED, GO TO NEW THREAD]

[Maculo]

I am hesitant to discuss balance, since it is a can of worms. At the moment, it seems that Sawyer's system revolves around marginal choices or increments. The stats, items, and perhaps even the talents seem to have a small effect. Hence, everything seems viable on normal difficulty, because every character is on a plateau. Such choices may become substantial towards the end of the game when players have built up their talents, abilities, and faction reputation, but for the beta everything feels insignificant (some exceptions) and at a glacial pace.

 

[DeepOcean]

I wish this guy would stop obsessing over BG2. BG2 this, BG2 that.

He seems to think there are millions of Baldur's Gate 2 fanboys out there that specifically want a game that's just like BG2, and will reject everything else, even if it's a perfectly good general Infinity Engine-style experience.

Show us these hoards of BG2 cultists that will make this game fail, mastroego

Wot? Baldur's Gate is the "Infinite Engine Experience." nigga. Outside it, there is only the Baldur's gate but crappier Icewind Dales and Storyfag heaven Planescape Torment. The first time I watched the pitch video, the very first tought it came from my mind was "Finally, Baldur's Gate 2 without a vomit inducing story and the mess of the RTwP system improved, at last."

 

[Darth Roxor]

Can't stop laughing at all you FEWLS that backed this

 

[Duraframe300]

Can't stop laughing at all you FEWLS that backed this

Eh, I'm pretty ok with how its turning out. (so far)

Ofc, thats imo.

 

[Semper]

I'm not the one who banked on BG2 nostalgia to finance my game. That was Sawyer.

what was really said in the kickstarter video by josh:

i think the appeal in the infinity engine games is really the story, the setting, and also the tactical combat. the classic locked camera view, top down looking at your whole party, looking at the battle field. i think there's a really great appeal to that, and i think it's a really fun style of game. that's the sorta thing that we wanna capture.

right now tactical can be replaced with clusterfuckery, but everything else seems on track. there's enough time left to polish the combat part.

 

[DeepOcean]

Can't stop laughing at all you FEWLS that backed this

You and Obsidian that is going to bank the bags full of money from storyfags while trash talking "grognards" that wanted more than 2D NWN 3.

 

[tuluse]

Can't stop laughing at all you FEWLS that backed this

You and Obsidian that is going to bank the bags full of money from storyfags while trash talking "grognards" that wanted more than 2D NWN 3.

NWN games had all the trash options and imbalance you could want.

 

[DeepOcean]

Can't stop laughing at all you FEWLS that backed this

You and Obsidian that is going to bank the bags full of money from storyfags while trash talking "grognards" that wanted more than 2D NWN 3.

NWN games had all the trash options and imbalance you could want.

But that was the only good part, after the character screen it became generic, repetitive and unoriginal with the combat a complete mess devoid of tactics like a certain RPG beta. At least, MotB is a good storyfag experience, something I'm sure Obsidian will provide.

 

[Grunker]

Can't stop laughing at all you FEWLS that backed this

Yeah man, we're idiots. Not like those super-edgycool non-IE-fans who drop by once in a while to tell us how they don't like PoE.

Those guys are rad.

Hey, you know who does exactly what you do, but with Divinity and Wasteland instead? Roguey.

But no, of course, what you're doing is completely different, right? 'cause you hate Roguey. You'd hate being compared to him, 'cause according to you he's a "lame-ass troll" who "derails threads" about games and developers he doesn't even like. So nah... it's nothing like that. Nothing like that at all. Better dispel those thoughts from your mind, quote my post and post a butthurt-emoticon.

 

[PhantasmaNL]

I am hesitant to discuss balance, since it is a can of worms. At the moment, it seems that Sawyer's system revolves around marginal choices or increments. The stats, items, and perhaps even the talents seem to have a small effect. Hence, everything seems viable on normal difficulty, because every character is on a plateau. Such choices may become substantial towards the end of the game when players have built up their talents, abilities, and faction reputation, but for the beta everything feels insignificant (some exceptions) and at a glacial pace.

"A good game is a series of interesting choices"

said Sid Meier

someone who once knew something about designing excellent games

 

[DeepOcean]

Hey, you know who does exactly what you do, but with Divinity and Wasteland instead? Roguey.

Man, this is a thread full of edgyness, but I have to defend Darth Roxor here. He needs to be become a total obnoxious, asshole, son of a bitch and a cunt to become even a little like Roguey on Divinity thread. Roguey come to a point where she/he was happy with every single small misfortune that happened with inXile and Larian, now that is a dedicated level of edgyness, assholishness and trolling that no codexian reached yet.

 

[HiddenX]

A great game is a series of interesting (sometimes difficult) choices with sometimes surprising/entertaining/unexpected (good or bad) consequences that challenge your wits.

 

[tuluse]

"A good game is a series of interesting choices"

said Sid Meier

someone who once knew something about designing excellent games

I'm pretty sure JES would agree with that.

His thing is that he doesn't think trash choice vs not trash choice is interesting.

 

[felipepepe]

Crusader Kings 2 is the ultimate RPG. They should make a fantasy version of it, so that I can finally enslave nations through necromancy.

 

[agris]

So uhh when's that patch coming out?

 

[Jezal_k23]

Yes I'm also wondering. Hopefully it IS going to be tonight because I have the night off today.

 

[Duraframe300]

So uhh when's that patch coming out?

Soon (~2 hours at most)

 

[Zorba the Hutt]

I'm pretty sure JES would agree with that.

His thing is that he doesn't think trash choice vs not trash choice is interesting.

Without wishing to reignite the whole "Why does he hate trash options" debate, I have to say he seems to have quite a broad definition of what a "trash option" is. Sometimes it's builds that I would call unusual/suboptimal/potentially interesting.. in fact some of the fun I had replaying BG2 was using builds like this that I would never have chosen on a first playthrough.

What I find more surprising is I always thought it was perfectly understandable that you would have shit equipment as a level 1 peasant, and happily upgrade later. But his example of padded armour shows he really has a problem with that, he wants padded armour to be "viable" instead of something people upgrade from:

Padded armor suffers even worse in most RPGs: in many games, there are literally no worse options than padded. The suits are often aesthetically ugly and mechanically awful—the quintessence of a pure RPG trash option—and if players are forced to wear padded armor at the game's opening, they'll gladly ditch it as soon as anything else becomes available. In Pillars of Eternity, padded armor actually offers reasonably good protection. It can easily be argued that our padded armor is more protective than is realistic, but the first goal is not verisimilitude, but justifying the player's interest.

To me there is no problem with a game world having shit (cheap) options like this that you move on from when you can. Making it 'unrealistically' good just so it remains viable seems unnecessary. Perhaps that makes me simulationist scum.

 

[FeelTheRads]

The suits are often aesthetically ugly and mechanically awful—the quintessence of a pure RPG trash option—and if players are forced to wear padded armor at the game's opening, they'll gladly ditch it as soon as anything else becomes available.

Like I said, for balancefags anything that's not the best is trash.
Hurray for simplistic design which is good because.

Perhaps that makes me simulationist scum.

Makes you one hot muthafucka, imo.

 

[TalesfromtheCrypt]

I haven't been keeping up with the thread for the last 50 pages or so and I didn't have the chance to play the beta neither, but here's some facts that should help some of you get a proper perspective on things:

1. 90% of the people outside the Codex don't give a rat's ass about the stuff you're discussing here. PoE has "tactical" RtwP combat, an IE style interface and dialogues and pre-rendered 2D backgrounds - for most "hardcore" RPG fans out there this makes it pretty much the perfect IE successor. Your speculations about how the PoE backer base will turn away from Obsidian with a feeling of betrayal and disgust are fantastical delusions.

2. Seeing Baldur's Gate and D&D being hailed as the best thing since sliced bread in this thread is really funny. You know what I remember of the character creation/progression system in BG1/2/IWD? "Oh my fighter has leveled up again, lets just click OK, check how many new HPs he rolled and be done with it. Oh wait, it's been a few level ups, I have skill points to distribute. Let's put everything into longswords. Wait, no, that's already full. Alright, let's just put the points in some other weapons category, not that it matters anyhow, since by the end of the game, I'll have enough points to max every significant category. Ok, time to level up the rogue. I'll just pump all skillpoints into detect traps and open locks. Who uses stealth and pickpocketing anyway? It's absolutely useless, get caught once and the whole fucking town will turn hostile and attack you. Ok, I can select some new spells for my cleric and mage. Well, at least there's something interesting to do, I guess...."

BEST SYSTEM EVER WOW SUCH FUN MUCH COMPLEX - OBSHITIAN HOW DARE YOU CHANGE THIS PERFECT FORMULA
Seriously, based from what I've been reading here it's quite likely that Sawyer designed a shitty system, but it's hardly gonna be worse than what we had in the IE games. Also, see point 1.

3. Judging from videos, combat indeed looks like a clusterfuck right now, but it's nothing that can't be fixed. Obsidian will patch it up to "not great, but fun", a decent story, decent to good writing, lot's of C&C, beautiful graphics and neat little additions like the text adventure parts will do the rest to make this a fun and worthy IE successor.

 

[Zorba the Hutt]

1. 90% of the people outside the Codex don't give a rat's ass about the stuff you're discussing here. PoE has "tactical" RtwP combat, an IE style interface and dialogues and pre-rendered 2D backgrounds - for most "hardcore" RPG fans out there this makes it pretty much the perfect IE successor. Your speculations about how the PoE backer base will turn away from Obsidian with a feeling of betrayal and disgust are fantastical delusions.

Perhaps. Although looking at the backer beta section of the Obsidian forums the biggest threads are all about the lack of combat xp, apart from the "More like BG2 please" and "Pretty disappointed, this launches in December?" ones. So it's not just Codexers debating this stuff, although it obviously doesn't mean the silent majority won't love the game when it's released.

Can't argue with your point on the story, text adventures and graphics though. I think even those who have doubts about Sawyer's design look forward to those.

 

[TalesfromtheCrypt]

1. 90% of the people outside the Codex don't give a rat's ass about the stuff you're discussing here. PoE has "tactical" RtwP combat, an IE style interface and dialogues and pre-rendered 2D backgrounds - for most "hardcore" RPG fans out there this makes it pretty much the perfect IE successor. Your speculations about how the PoE backer base will turn away from Obsidian with a feeling of betrayal and disgust are fantastical delusions.

Perhaps. Although looking at the backer beta section of the Obsidian forums the biggest threads are all about the lack of combat xp, apart from the "More like BG2 please" and "Pretty disappointed, this launches in December?" ones. So it's not just Codexers debating this stuff, although it obviously doesn't mean the silent majority won't love the game when it's released.

Can't argue with your point on the story, text adventures and graphics though. I think even those who have doubts about Sawyer's design look forward to those.

Yeah, I forgot to mention it, I think that "no xp for combat" is one of the few issues which might prove to be a major turn-off for many IE fans, people notice obvious details like these and tend to form very strong opinions about them. But I don't think most of them are likely to dive deeper into the system design issues related to character creation/progression.

 

[tuluse]

I'm pretty sure JES would agree with that.

His thing is that he doesn't think trash choice vs not trash choice is interesting.

Without wishing to reignite the whole "Why does he hate trash options" debate, I have to say he seems to have quite a broad definition of what a "trash option" is. Sometimes it's builds that I would call unusual/suboptimal/potentially interesting.. in fact some of the fun I had replaying BG2 was using builds like this that I would never have chosen on a first playthrough.

What I find more surprising is I always thought it was perfectly understandable that you would have shit equipment as a level 1 peasant, and happily upgrade later. But his example of padded armour shows he really has a problem with that, he wants padded armour to be "viable" instead of something people upgrade from:

Padded armor suffers even worse in most RPGs: in many games, there are literally no worse options than padded. The suits are often aesthetically ugly and mechanically awful—the quintessence of a pure RPG trash option—and if players are forced to wear padded armor at the game's opening, they'll gladly ditch it as soon as anything else becomes available. In Pillars of Eternity, padded armor actually offers reasonably good protection. It can easily be argued that our padded armor is more protective than is realistic, but the first goal is not verisimilitude, but justifying the player's interest.

To me there is no problem with a game world having shit (cheap) options like this that you move on from when you can. Making it 'unrealistically' good just so it remains viable seems unnecessary. Perhaps that makes me simulationist scum.

I'm not making a value judgement one way or the other, but immediately replacing starting armor with whatever you find next is pretty much the opposite of an interesting decision, no?

 

[Duraframe300]

Steamdb got updated 20 minutes ago

 

[imweasel]

Seeing Baldur's Gate and D&D being hailed as the best thing since sliced bread in this thread is really funny.

People who loved Baldur's Gate and Icewind Dale backed PoE. It is pretty damn pretentious to claim that the subjective opinion of the Kickstarter's target audience is not relevant anymore.

Judging from videos [...] a fun and worthy IE successor.

You have an awfully strong opinion about something you haven't played.