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

[Weirdstuffinspace]

In the end, I suspect the most accurate description of PoE will probably be "BG1 meets IWD2". Well, and with Tormenty companions I guess.

The most accurate description in the end will be that the game looks great, the story is very well done, and the game plays nothing like the IE resurrection it was promised to be.

Roguey has wisely dropped the obession once she realised sawyer is not going to succeed in the one place she had absolute faith in him: mechanics. Too bad he won't get a chance to make a sequel to correct his failure as they won't be able to gather even half of what PoE collected on kickstarter for it.

 

[Infinitron]

In the end, I suspect the most accurate description of PoE will probably be "BG1 meets IWD2". Well, and with Tormenty companions I guess.

The most accurate description in the end will be that the game looks great, the story is very well done, and the game plays nothing like the IE resurrection it was promised to be.

Roguey has wisely dropped the obession once she realised sawyer is not going to succeed in the one place she had absolute faith in him: mechanics. Too bad he won't get a chance to make a sequel to correct his failure as they won't be able to gather even half of what PoE collected on kickstarter for it.

Roguey, is this true?

 

[Sensuki]

The most accurate description in the end will be that the game looks great, the story is very well done, and the game plays nothing like the IE resurrection it was promised to be.

Roguey has wisely dropped the obession once she realised sawyer is not going to succeed in the one place she had absolute faith in him: mechanics. Too bad he won't get a chance to make a sequel to correct his failure as they won't be able to gather even half of what PoE collected on kickstarter for it.

I'm going to wait until final release to give an absolute on that but yeah it's trending like many of the systems may not gel together properly. For a game that is supposed to be 'balanced', PE combat is hugely swingy compared to the IE games, you can deal between 0.1 damage and like 80 damage with the same weapon. I'd rather have total immunities and better numbers across the board than what we currently have, because it's fucked.

 

[hemtae]

Shooting for Tuesday for the next patch.

http://forums.obsidian.net/topic/69201-update-on-the-update/?p=1537982

 

[Russia is over. The end.]

Too bad he won't get a chance to make a sequel to correct his failure as they won't be able to gather even half of what PoE collected on kickstarter for it.

An overstatement. As much as I'm going to be disappointed in poe, I'll probably chip in again, cause a mediocre rpg is better than no rpg at all. I think most people will do the same.

 

[Sensuki]

Reposting from other thread

 

[Athelas]

Holy shit.

I don't recognize the guy on the far left though.

 

[Infinitron]

Holy shit.

I don't recognize the guy on the far left though.

^Give this man a brofist, he doesn't read GD.

That's Cloaked Figure, the Codex's own Lebanese pimp daddy. I have no idea what he's doing there.

 

[Abu Antar]

 

[Goat Vomit]

 

[Roguey]

Roguey, is this true?

Of course not. As I've said before, I don't want to watch this sausage getting made anymore. I'm sure it'll turn out fine in the end, though like all other Kickstarter projects, it'll probably need months of patching to be solid.

 

[Western]

Holy shit.

I don't recognize the guy on the far left though.

Enjoy

http://www.rpgcodex.net/forums/index.php?threads/shoop-make-this-look-professional.94775/

 

[Weirdstuffinspace]

Sausage of Eternity, Pillars of Eternity

 

[Abu Antar]

More responses from Josh.
http://poedevtracker.net/

 

[Infinitron]

Copy paste, lazyhead:

I agree with this generally, but I think there are exceptions. I think it's important for your main character (in a game like BG/BG2 and PoE) to feel solid from beginning to end. The games are built around parties, but people pretty much always want their MC to feel strong. In BG1, magic users were extremely weak at low levels -- especially before adding party members -- and it was frustrating for a lot of people. Before kits, I'd say that pure thieves and bards felt pretty bad most of the time in in BG, especially with another thief (albeit multiclassed) in the party very early on.

I am not really concerned about things like a 20% power/efficiency difference between classes, more with players picking a class, getting 5 minutes in or 50 hours in and thinking, "This sucks." Perfect balance is not required to solve this problem, but we do have to pay attention to balance in broad strokes.

Really a lot of this comes down to whether you would like the Talents to reinforce what the styles already do or if you would like them to grant a different type of benefit. The style Talents are currently a mix, but could be collectively or individually shifted.

I think it's a bit superfluous really because there's a Talent called Superior Deflection, and I don't think they stack.

Passive Abilities and Talents are supposed to always stack, so Superior Deflection should stack with the benefit from Two-Handed Style.

However, I have noticed that the character sheet is not displaying the same data that you see in the combat log. Specifically, the bonus from Two-Handed Style appears in the log but does not update on the sheet when you equip a qualifying weapon.

To put this in perspective, we are are talking in the beta forum for a game that has yet to be released. The beta process involves finding both functional bugs and making balance adjustments. Making balance adjustments prior to bugs being fixed in a system is often counterproductive. It can obfuscate functional errors and, once the functional errors are fixed, requires revision to the adjustments that had already been made.

PoE's combat had a number of functional bugs connected to timing and recovery. There were problems with loops playing for incorrect time values, animation playback speed, inconsistent hit reactions, and a lot of errors with how Recovery time was being calculated, adjusted by armor and other factors, and depleted. Yes, three months ago I could have adjusted global Recovery. I would have been adjusting it in a system where Recovery wasn't calculated/played back properly to begin with. One of the small but significant benefits of leaving global Recovery at 1.0 was that it gave testers and programmers a very easy way to calculate the expected Recovery from an action with all appropriate modifiers. They could then use it directly with what they observed in game to see if things lined up.

All of the known major errors with animation playback speed and Recovery have been fixed (there are still problems with reloading crossbows, arbalests, and firearms, though), so making adjustments to things like global Recovery, casting loop lengths, and even the Recovery values on armor types and creatures can be done with a lot more confidence. It doesn't mean we're done tuning them, but it does mean that what we enter in the editor has a more consistent effect on what's happening in-game. If we need combat to slow down even more, we can adjust that. If we need to slow down or speed up individual actions or characters, we can also adjust that. We're still in beta and that's why this process is ongoing.

Every spell does not have a uniform casting time. Spells have one of three casting times: instant, short, and long. Instant and short are both used a lot. Long is currently used less frequently. We could subdivide casting times even more, but I think past a certain point, differentiating your choices becomes difficult.

Classes don't have the ability to do everything. Yes, any class has the ability to access any skill. A single character cannot excel at all skills. Any class can equip a great sword. If you want to rush a barbarian, a rogue, and a wizard into a mob swinging that sword, it's going to proceed differently for those three characters. PoE's fighters don't have class abilities to chuck fireballs. Rogues don't have class abilities to revive people. Paladins can't transform into animalistic forms.

If you do a comparison of class abilities, wizards have the most by a good margin (a little below 70). Druids and priests also have a lot of spells (about 45 each), but still fewer than wizards. Chanters and ciphers have the smallest list. I don't disagree that it would be cool to have more diverse options like polymorphs, spell doublers, sequencers, contingencies, time stop, etc. We designed a list of more diverse, complex, niche spells and most of them didn't wind up being implemented because of the enormous amount of time (and often specialized UI) that they demand. I would like to implement more of these in the future, but it wasn't realistic for core PoE because we were building all of the game systems from scratch.

No, the response is not surprising. Even so, I have always tried to be straightforward about why I make design decisions. None of these stated reasons have ever been because I have animosity toward caster classes (which would be pretty weird for any reason). Throughout the project I've tried to give casters the majority of the ability time, with wizards receiving the most even in that select group. I've tried to ensure that wizards have good access to personal protection magic, personal strengthening magic, and a mix of different offensive spells that do a variety of things: bounding from target to target, temporarily negating enemies' beneficial magic, sickening/terrifying anyone who comes near the wizard, swapping locations with an ally and hurting enemies caught between, temporarily stealing spells from enemy grimoires, etc. Is it enough? Clearly not for everyone, but this was honestly what we were able to do -- not because we decided to short-change spellcasters, but because even with 5 out of 11 classes (the casters) receiving about 3/4 of all abilities, we could only do so many special case scripts for them.

Using per rest abilities (spells or otherwise) is both a tactical and a strategic choice. That's one of the things that makes the choice more interesting. However, I've found throughout my career that people who minimize resource consumption are not extreme and they're not small in overall number. It's a very common behavior exhibited by a lot of players, both RPG veterans and new players.*

I still think it's important to have those per rest (or simply limited overall, like potions/scrolls) resources to consume, but I also think it's important for players to feel that they have something core to their class that they can fall back on if all of their per rest resources have been exhausted.

* Not me, honestly. I use per rests/dailies/consumables all the time.

 

[Infinitron]

Earlier stuff that wasn't posted:

I don't have any hostility toward spellcasters/spellcasting. In A/D&D, I usually play clerics. For the past year and a half, I've been playing in one Ars Magica game and running another. Magic is a big part of most FRPGs. The difference between a game like Ars Magica, where magi are explicitly stated to be insanely powerful compared to mundanes, and a game like D&D or PoE, where wizards are ostensibly roughly on par with other classes, is the expectation of viability and relative difficulty. You should have fun playing a wizard, I should have fun playing a priest, Gfted should have fun playing paladin, Volourn should have fun playing a dwarf, etc. It's impossible to make everyone happy, but viability and relative balance are a big part of ensuring that the character you choose to play is going to feel good throughout the game, beginning to end.

I believe there is a healthy place between "balance is irrelevant" and "perfect balance is necessary". I don't want wizards to receive the exact same number of powers as a fighter -- or even the same number of powers as a priest -- because having access to a boatload of spells is part of the fantasy of playing a wizard. Obviously having a lot of options that feel weak is bad, so we need to find the right level of power per spell, speed of casting spells, number of spells available, casts available per rest/per encounter, etc. But it's also important that when someone plays a rogue, a druid, a cipher, a fighter, etc., they shouldn't feel like they dead-end with the character or run out of steam while other classes easily sail by every challenge in the game.

We want people to have different experiences when they play different classes, but we want all of those experiences to feature the same relative level of challenge and power growth (which are strongly connected). This is a difficult thing to do and it takes a lot of iteration, but that is the onoing goal.

On a related note, if you want to play Wizards Are Cool: The Game, I do recommend Ars Magica 5E. It has a lot of cool things going for it, most obviously the magic system but also the general downtime system. Also, Pendragon seems to be Knights Are Actually Cooler and Wizards are Terrible: The Game, so check that out if you want to be a glory hound, manage a manor, and brutally destroy Saxons from horseback.

I don't have anger toward anyone on these forums, but it does bother me that people think I'm trying to sabotage their favorite class, class feature, game feature, etc. It is not possible for us to make everyone's vision of this game come true. It's not even possible for us to make everyone's vision of an individual class, race, etc. come true. When I make decisions about how to balance parts of the game, it's based on the feedback that people give me and how I observe them playing the game (and previous games I've worked on). I don't place value judgments on how a person plays a game (at least I don't think I do!). If you want to play the game solo, or with all wizards, or murdering everyone, that's all fine. It's still my responsibility to make sure that all of these options maintain a good level of player engagement and enjoyment across the spectrum. Balancing and tuning is an ongoing process, but that's what I'm trying to do.

Hi Josh.

Just to point out; there is nothing wrong with overpowered spells. That is something which could be readily addressed with casting dependent on resource. Right now, that resource is rest. Which is comparatively easily available. How about spell components? Would that not be an easier solution to the problem of quadratic wizards than balancing out per day rate or something?

It would be a much more difficult solution, IMO. People are already reticent to use per rest resources and consumables. Combining them, plus linking components to spells and disseminating them throughout the game would be extremely time consuming and, again IMO, would likely cause people to be even more conservative about using them.

that is true. but still, you could consider us and our opinions a bit more. a bit more satisfaction and interaction go a long way. if people are left to speculate, it is inevitable someone gets the blame.

and if you don't implement the things in-game, at least consider keeping that part of the engine unlocked in case we want to change it.

I do consider your opinions, but we are also trying to final the game. In addition to the general balance/feel considerations, we have a lot of regular functionality bugs to fix. That's the main reason we haven't been as present on the boards lately.

Shrek gonna Shrek.

 

[Russia is over. The end.]

So he says the horribly generic wizard spells are the result of Obsidian not having enough time to script stuff.

And yet it's a nonsense. They've outsourced things before, it'd cost them a few thousand bucks to get a programmer from Europe to code stuff for a whole month, and with their solid framework he'd be able to do all the missing spells in less time than that. So Obsidian doesn't have a 3-4k bucks? Right.

 

[Infinitron]

Yes, let's outsource our core mechanics programming tasks to Craiglist, what could possibly go wrong

 

[Russia is over. The end.]

Yes, let's outsource our core mechanics programming tasks to Craiglist, what could possibly go wrong

Suck up more.

 

[Hormalakh]

This could all have been avoided if they had hired Cleve Blakemore instead of Tim Cain, Anthony Davis, Adam Brennecke, or Steve Weatherly.

 

[Ninjerk]

and fired themselves afterwards

 

[Hormalakh]

always bet on thal. 4 bugs remaining....

it would truly be a joke on the pillars of eternity team if grimoire releases before POE.

what an upside down world we live in.

 

[Jaesun]

grimoire releases

 

[Athelas]

Have these Sawyer quotes been posted yet?

One of our programmers dumped a bunch of money into his stronghold to up the Prestige but neglected all of the hirelings and other things that increased Security. Almost immediately, huge amounts of his tax income were being swiped by bandits and he suffered brutal attacks. Meanwhile, one of our producers upper her Security but hired scumbags that lowered the stronghold's Prestige to negative numbers, so it's secure, but all she gets are scumbag visitors. Good times.

It's not central to the plot like Crossroad Keep is in NWN2. If you don't invest in it, it pretty much chills out in the background and is unobtrusive. If you start investing in it, it becomes much more involved and requires more management. The UI has a dedicated stronghold interface that can be accessed from anywhere in the game. Only events like attacks require your presence, and even in those circumstances you can just tell your hirelings to handle it for you if you're willing to accept some losses (kind of like Mount & Blade: Warband).

Between this and the nifty stealth system, it's a good thing they're offering so many gameplay alternatives for the shitty combat.

 

[Hormalakh]

grimoire releases

I thought it's funny too.

Don't get me wrong - I am of the faithless.

Have these Sawyer quotes been posted yet?

One of our programmers dumped a bunch of money into his stronghold to up the Prestige but neglected all of the hirelings and other things that increased Security. Almost immediately, huge amounts of his tax income were being swiped by bandits and he suffered brutal attacks. Meanwhile, one of our producers upper her Security but hired scumbags that lowered the stronghold's Prestige to negative numbers, so it's secure, but all she gets are scumbag visitors. Good times.

It's not central to the plot like Crossroad Keep is in NWN2. If you don't invest in it, it pretty much chills out in the background and is unobtrusive. If you start investing in it, it becomes much more involved and requires more management. The UI has a dedicated stronghold interface that can be accessed from anywhere in the game. Only events like attacks require your presence, and even in those circumstances you can just tell your hirelings to handle it for you if you're willing to accept some losses (kind of like Mount & Blade: Warband).

Between this and the nifty stealth system, it's a good thing they're offering so many gameplay alternatives for the shitty combat.

Don't be so sure - I get the impression that the devs are easily impressed with their own work.