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

[Zed]

sawyer is answering tumblrlrlr questions now.

http://jesawyer.tumblr.com/

 

[Infinitron]

melnorme asked: Do you regret not offering a Wasteland 2-style beta for Pillars of Eternity, one that starts from the beginning of the game? Throwing people right into the deep end with a full party to manage and unfinished mechanics seems to have triggered mass hysteria.

Not at all. Starting from the beginning of the game would have given us a large amount of feedback about the first few hours of the game. That’s certainly valuable, but it’s also not indicative of how you will spend the majority of your time, i.e. managing a full party.

I think starting in a mid-level place like Dyrford has worked well for us because it allows players to test and play around with a lot of things pretty quickly. Instead of forcing people to repeatedly play through an opening area that is structured for introductions, they can drop in with a higher level character + generic companions and immediately go fight, swap out party members, etc.

Starting people at the beginning would have been more gentle and probably would have been more well-received, but I don’t think it would have been as useful. The purpose of the Backer Beta was not to make backers smile and give us a thumbs up, but to have backers really play it and give us feedback on how things felt.

theoreticalspace asked: On the same notes of the last question you answered. Do you think that the negative buzz that kickstarter beta can create can be harmful to a gam? It seems like despite having the disadvantage of actually having to hire people, internal QA allows you to not expose an unfinished version of your game to the media/general-public.

Harmful to the game itself, no, not unless you listen to people who you know are being unreasonable. People being mad or upset doesn’t make the game worse. It might affect the game’s press and marketing, but I’ll accept that if the game itself is better for going through the beta process.

melnorme asked: So, Pillars of Eternity. It seems like you reduced the durations of buffs and debuffs to make combat more tactical, instead of being all about casting a bunch of long-duration buffs and steamrolling the dungeon with long-duration debuffs. But it seems like some players have reacted to that by deeming those buffs and debuffs utterly non-worthwhile and defaulting to damage-based builds and tactics. Paradoxically, making combat seem a lot LESS tactical to those players. How do you deal with that?

I don’t know how widespread that is among players, but I know QA uses buffs and debuffs quite a lot. Ultimately, damage is the thing that wins fights, but buffs and debuffs can be instrumental to either dealing damage out or preventing your allies from receiving damage.

In any circumstance where something is being universally used or universally ignored, I try to determine what the outliers are and why they have fallen into that role. Is it damage-based attacks overall, is it damage-based spells, is it a smallset of spells? Are the effects of buffs weak, are the durations of buffs weak, or is the time spent applying a buff too long, making it unappealing compared to another action like directly dealing damage?

 

[Sensuki]

And my latest one

enverxis asked: I have a question regarding how total damage is calculated in Pillars of Eternity with the use of multiple damage multipliers (for the purposes of a possible bug report). If I have a Rogue with 18 Might (+24% damage), a Fine War Hammer (x1.15) and I use Blinding Strike (x1.25), qualify for Sneak Attack (x?) and score a critical hit (x1.5) - what is the formula for calculating the total damage, and what should the final result be for the lowest roll (11) and highest roll (16) ?

To the best of my understanding and my latest conversation with Tim on the subject, all bonuses are added together (well, assuming 1 is average, so their difference from 1 is added together) and then applied to the base value. In this example, it should be:

.24+.15+.25+.25 (Sneak Attack)+.5 = 1.39 + 1 (base) = 2.39

2.39 * 11 = 26.29

2.39 * 16 = 38.24

I am getting 70+ damage crits with this same test case in PE at the moment, so yeah ... I think I found a bug.

edit: actually my test weapon was spears, spears are doing 70 damage crits. Others are not.

 

[tuluse]

There's no doubt that the game is going to have gameplay problems like Wasteland 2 and Divinity: Original Sin did. Both of those studios have committed to fixing the issues with their games in patches. I wonder will Obsidian do the same? To be honest, I don't think they will, at least not to the same extent anyway.

Don't forget they're already committed to an expansion.

Edit: just saw the Q&A above. When I was spending time with the game, I used a lot of debuffs, but a lot of abilities would do damage and debuff, and I favored those.

 

[dukeofwhales]

Man, "1.15x" or "+25%" damage just ~*feels*~ so much worse than +N on a dice roll. I don't care if it works out to the same thing, it just feels so useless.

 

[Infinitron]

I sent Josh a three-part message last night explaining why some players might be mad at him. He responded to the second part: http://jesawyer.tumblr.com/post/107876149331/continuation-the-strength-of-hard-counter-based

melnorme asked: Continuation: The strength of "hard counter"-based design is that FORCES the irrational players to use certain abilities they wouldn't have used otherwise. Does that debuff that doesn't do any damage seem useless to you? Well, in this particular encounter, you HAVE to use it, or you can't win. That kind of thing can really blow people's minds. And after that, they associate hard counters with "tactical" because they can't ever imagine using those abilities if they weren't hard counters.

And the weakness of hard counter design is that it forces players to build their parties and even individual characters around encounter limitations that they often can only appreciate in retrospect. Not only does it require prescience/metagaming, but it limits the players’ ability to build the parties that they want to build. I have talked about this before, but I think it’s important to talk about again.

If you don’t want to have a priest in your party, I don’t want you to be forced to take a priest in your party. If you don’t want a rogue in your party, I don’t want you to be forced to do that either. We have made a game with 11 classes that, through Abilities and Talents, can be built in several different ways. Every time we say, “No, you HAVE to use this class ability/spell here” we are narrowing your options for how you build your parties and the characters within them.

In Icewind Dale II, we did not have hard counter spell battle puzzles. We also generally didn’t rely on that many save-or-die effects (there is a “Tactics” mod that changes this). This approach (and a quasi-3E rulest) allowed people to build a relatively wide range of parties and character types within those parties. Because the scenarios typically did not require prior knowledge of what was going to unfold, players could usually react and adapt in the middle of a battle with the tools they had brought.

If we had required hard counters, it would have resulted in fights that could not be overcome without a reload and metagame re-arrangement of spells/abilities or, worse yet, a reconstruction of the party.

Pillars of Eternity is a game that strongly features tactical combat, but it’s first and foremost a role-playing game that encourages you to build a character of your choosing and play through the story as you see fit. After the introduction of the game, you are never required to take companions, much less specific companions or specific classes.

If you hate Pallegina, I don’t want you to feel like it’s necessary to for you to take her because some paladin ability is vital to winning important fights. If you want to make a party of wizards, I want you to be able to do that. If you want to make a party with NO wizards, I want you to be able to do that. If you want to solo the game (which will probably be pretty hard regardless of class), I don’t want you to hit a roadblock where we say “Sorry, you’re never going to get by here unless there’s a wizard in the party with Move Earth memorized.”

 

[Infinitron]

In the first part of my message, I defined "irrational player" as a player who avoids using certain abilities - in particular, non-damaging buffs and debuffs - unless they're overpowered well beyond what they actually need to be to make them useful.

My thesis is that many RPG players have an irrational bias against such abilities because they're perceived as not contributing towards the resolution of the battle. Therefore it might be necessary to make those abilities overpowered by design to get those players to even consider using them.

 

[Sensuki]

See I can understand that point of view, but counterspelling =/= hard counters, and even Icewind Dale vanilla has more reactionary fights than the Pillars of Eternity backer beta - you can complete them multiple ways, but they require you to react to enemy actions and changes in the combat scenario

PE combat is over pretty quick and is usually decided on openers and strategical elements more than anything.

 

[J_C]

What I hate about this argument is that Josh thinks that the hard counters of BG2 forced the players to make the same party and pick the same abilites every time. When it was not the case. You could beat the game with a lof different party composition. For example: many players did the puzzle like mage battles with counterspells, figuring out the hard counters and so on. Me? Being a DnD noob back in the day, I just fighted myself through them, with steel, blood and sweat. But I did it.

 

[Sensuki]

Yeah I'm not sure how many times Josh has played BG2, but there are actually many ways to deal with everything. I think PrimeJunta is doing a BG2 play at the moment and he was super frustrated for a while and resorting to Josh-speak, but he seems to have found his own way by now with the help of some of the Obs forum members.

 

[tuluse]

One could design a system in which the hard counters were spread over enough classes the player was sure to have one of them (unless the player was intentionally doing some gimmick).

 

[SniperHF]

but it’s first and foremost a role-playing game that encourages you to build a character of your choosing and play through the story as you see fit.

All goes back to the character creation is not gameplay principle. The rest of the design simply follows as a consequence.

 

[Metal Hurlant]

Can someone confirm if the Level 5 Sleep spell in PoE (level 1 in the IE games) still has a duration of 10 seconds? http://pillarsofeternity.gamepedia.com/Call_to_Slumber

Note: You would have to be around level 9 or 10 and near the end of the game to have access to this spell in PoE. Whereas in the IE games, you could get it straight away by selecting it at character creation if you had a mage as your player character. And in the IE games, Sleep lasted 5 rounds per level of the caster. So at level 1, Sleep lasted for 30 seconds. And this is at the start of the game, not the end of the game in PoE.

So in PoE, you cast Call to Slumber and if you Wizard is wearing armour, the enemy might wake up before you cast another spell? Depending on your Resolve and duration of the spell of course. But 10 seconds as the default sounds really short. And the default is 6 seconds before you can cast again plus additional armour penalties which might bring it up to 9 seconds before you can respond?

 

[Kem0sabe]

During the 2 playthroughs i did of the beta, the first one i used a cypher and was careful to use is debuffs, damage abilities and manage the range of the encounters. On my second playthrough i focused on a passive build fighter and it ended up being a much more enjoyable experience without having to micromanage every little thing in RtwP.

The combat system is just not fun to manage for the average player.

 

[aeonsim]

It goes a bit beyond that, but combat in general is a lot less tactical, and there's still semi-severe problems with things like pathfinding and AI that are worse than what BioWare were able to achieve back in 1998.

Yeah the sad thing is that no one seems to be able to pull off anything better than back then even Bioware fuck it up now especially on the AI front. Good AI isn't easy and hopefully they will continue to improve it or some one will have a go at moding it.

 

[Infinitron]

During the 2 playthroughs i did of the beta, the first one i used a cypher and was careful to use is debuffs, damage abilities and manage the range of the encounters. On my second playthrough i focused on a passive build fighter and it ended up being a much more enjoyable experience without having to micromanage every little thing in RtwP.

The combat system is just not fun to manage for the average player.

Well, it did let you build a viable passive fighter.

 

[Kem0sabe]

Well, it did let you build that passive fighter.

Agreed, the system is flexible to allow multiple approaches, but it would have been funner to play with all the abilities at hand with equal amount of ease if use.

 

[Sensuki]

Good AI isn't easy and hopefully they will continue to improve it or some one will have a go at moding it.

While certainly not making it 'easier' to implement, I have a theory that people just don't think about how the AI should be acting in every situation. I am going to do a thread in the PE bug forums about auto-attack and exactly when I think it should work and when it shouldn't.

 

[Athelas]

In the first part of my message, I defined "irrational player" as a player who avoids using certain abilities - in particular, non-damaging buffs and debuffs - unless they're overpowered well beyond what they actually need to be to make them useful.

My thesis is that many RPG players may have an irrational bias against such abilities because they're perceived as not contributing towards the resolution of the battle. Therefore it might be necessary to make those abilities overpowered by design to get those players to even consider using them.

That isn't irrational. Most RPG's (MMORPG's, jRPG's, aRPG's and even many cRPG's) do favor dealing damage over buffs and debuffs - I assume people playing them simply developed the mindset that (de)buffs are never worth it in RPG's. Even with D&D, the iconic spells are offensive ones - Magic Missile and Fireball.

PoE doesn't really do anything to change that impression.

 

[Sensuki]

Hey, they were useful when you could pre-buff

 

[Infinitron]

That isn't irrational. Most RPG's (MMORPG's, jRPG's, aRPG's and even many cRPG's) do favor dealing damage over buffs and debuffs - I assume people playing them simply developed the mindset that (de)buffs are never worth it in RPG's. Even with D&D, the iconic spells are offensive ones - Magic Missile and Fireball.

PoE doesn't really do anything to change that impression.

Sure, if you look at the wider context you can find some justification. I'm using the terms "rational" and "irrational" in sort of a classical economics sense. I told Sawyer to think of it as behavioral economics as applied to game design, haha.

 

[Kem0sabe]

Really wish they had implemented party npc AI scripts, would have made the game that much funner to play. I know they said they were considering it for an expansion or post launch patch, but does anyone know if it was down to technical limitations of the engine or simply lack of time?

 

[Sensuki]

Too "expensive" for their budget, I believe is what they said.

 

[Hormalakh]

Uhhh just for those uninformed. Counterspelling by definition means you need to have a wizard in the party. Not having to have a wizard in the party is one of Josh's goals. Same with priests, paladins, fighters, and all the other classes. You should be able to defeat any opponent with any class make-up. That's his point. This is probably why wizards feel so useless, and all the other classes feel really different.

 

[bminorkey]

Where can I find the post where Sawyer says he doesn't have passion about the project, or whatever? Haven't been to this thread in forever.