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

accismus

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The Gamereactor video is from PDX CON and hasn't been posted here before, so not old (Josh's name tag says PDX CON...). If you were talking about the video inside the pcgames.de article, that's just a big montage of tiny bits of gameplay footage.
 

Bleed the Man

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Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 A Beautifully Desolate Campaign Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire
game designers don't usually get to pick the setting of the game they work on.
Indeed. It's what they do with the setting that counts. Playing NWN2 OC I was bored to tears but not because it was generic fantasy. Mostly because it the story was a rehash of NWN OC only worse and writing was nauseatingly bad.
Well, he wasn't a writer on that game
Wasn't Josh, along with Ziets, responsible for the backstory of the King of Shadows? I think I remember this being the case, but I'm not sure.
 

Duraframe300

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The Gamereactor video is from PDX CON and hasn't been posted here before, so not old (Josh's name tag says PDX CON...). If you were talking about the video inside the pcgames.de article, that's just a big montage of tiny bits of gameplay footage.

Gamereactor

And thanks :)
 

Grotesque

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I told myself not to savescum while playing Wasteland 2 but I failed miserably.
I hope in Pillars of Eternity I will be able to uphold this promise.
Savescumming for perfect gear destroys the gameplay experience.
 

Copper

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Indeed. It's what they do with the setting that counts. Playing NWN2 OC I was bored to tears but not because it was generic fantasy. Mostly because it the story was a rehash of NWN OC only worse and the writing was nauseatingly bad.

And to reflect back on PoE: is the setting really different from FR? I haven't noticed; I look at it and I see generic fantasy with guns. But it's not necessarily a bad thing. :)
It actually makes sense, so it has that going for it over FR.

To a given value of sense, surely. Care to expand on what makes it seem sensible to you as a setting?
 

tuluse

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To a given value of sense, surely. Care to expand on what makes it seem sensible to you as a setting?
The highly detailed and inspired from history explanations of current situations compared to... whatever it is the FR writers did.
 

Copper

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To a given value of sense, surely. Care to expand on what makes it seem sensible to you as a setting?
The highly detailed and inspired from history explanations of current situations compared to... whatever it is the FR writers did.

Fair enough. I'd put it higher than Dragon Age as well, although I often find the historical stuff in Eternity a bit odd/inconsistent, especially when they intersect with the fantastic.
 

Sensuki

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Codex 2014 Serpent in the Staglands Shadorwun: Hong Kong A Beautifully Desolate Campaign
enverxis asked: Now that Pillars of Eternity is on the home stretch, what are your major balance and tuning focuses for the coming weeks ?
I’m looking at specific encounters on Hard and trying to tune or cull any remaining Abilities (Spells, Powers, etc.) or Talents that seem either superbad or excessively powerful. I just did a pass on crafting recipes based on ingredient distribution in the early game. This morning I’m revising some of the loot lists for consistency.
 

uaciaut

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I told myself not to savescum while playing Wasteland 2 but I failed miserably.
I hope in Pillars of Eternity I will be able to uphold this promise.
Savescumming for perfect gear destroys the gameplay experience.

Why do you need perfect gear to play/finish the game?
 

Infinitron

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Enjoy the Revolution! Another revolution around the sun that is. Serpent in the Staglands Dead State Divinity: Original Sin Project: Eternity Torment: Tides of Numenera Wasteland 2 Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 A Beautifully Desolate Campaign Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire Pathfinder: Kingmaker Pathfinder: Wrath I'm very into cock and ball torture I helped put crap in Monomyth
Josh clearing his Tumblr backlog:

theovf22stuff asked: Is PoE going to have cutscenes on rest like BG or is it going to work like IWD where the screen just goes black for a second?

Dimitri and Sean made a few rest cutscenes about a month ago. They were in the last Backer Beta build, but I think we have re-rendered them to be a bit longer due to backer feedback.

melnorme asked: So I hear disengagement attacks in PoE have been made less punitive or something. How smart is the enemy AI about running a cost-benefit analysis on whether to take a disengagement attack or not, when selecting new targets upon being engaged?

They follow relatively simple preferences. Each creature has an instruction set (INST) that contains all of its potential actions. The individual action contains its targeting preferences and whether those preferences allow any movement, movement if not Engaged, or movement even if Engaged.

If the action doesn’t allow any movement, they will always choose among targets that can be reached from their current position. If it allows movement while not Engaged, they will try to reach a preferred target, but if they become Engaged or are already Engaged, they will re-evaluate based on the targets that are immediately accessible. If an action specifies that they can break Engagement, they will just try to go for it.

Most creatures do not have the “break Engagement” allowance for their basic melee attacks but there are exceptions (e.g. trolls, who may try to stalk people to the ends of the earth). NPCs characters like rogues or barbarians, who may be built with Disengagement defense-oriented Talents, are more likely to have those built in to their more severe attacks.

melnorme asked: PoE is supposed to have systems that are more consistent, etc, than D&D. However, compared to the AD&D-based IE games, it's still a lot more complex, simply due to having to choose a bunch of feats, skills, etc, in character creation that those games didn't have. To a lot of people, that consistency isn't going to be worth much when they're faced with having to make a bunch of character development choices they were never expecting to have to face in an IE game. Aren't you afraid of a backlash?

You don’t have to pick feats or skills in character creation. You have to pick your sex, race, class, culture, background, and 1st level ability (a couple in the case of wizards, ciphers, and chanters). Abilities are gated by level and there are only five skills. The only aspect of advancement that people have expressed concern about is Talents, which is why I have been trying to cull less useful ones and gate many of them by level.

Character creation in PoE is only more complex than BG because of the culture and background selection. It’s less complex than BG2 (start at higher level), less complex than IWD (full party), and far less complex than IWD2 (full party with 3rd Ed. rules including skills and feats at 1st level).
 

Sensuki

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Codex 2014 Serpent in the Staglands Shadorwun: Hong Kong A Beautifully Desolate Campaign
I'm not sure what your question about character building question related to lots of choice is for. IMO learning how the systems work is going to be the challenge for most people as a lot of the rules are different from the norm or don't exactly follow "common sense", that's probably going to be much more of a hill to climb than more choice during character creation IMO. Then there's learning how to play - which is a lot different than the Infinity Engine games, there's a steep initial learning curve, and then it's fine.
 

J_C

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It will depend on the tutorial, which is not present in the backer beta AFAIK. If the first hour will contain a good tutorial, there won't be a problem.
 

Sensuki

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Codex 2014 Serpent in the Staglands Shadorwun: Hong Kong A Beautifully Desolate Campaign

Athelas

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NPCs characters like rogues or barbarians, who may be built with Disengagement defense-oriented Talents, are more likely to have those built in to their more severe attacks.
:hahano:

Most creatures do not have the “break Engagement” allowance for their basic melee attacks
This is not a good thing. It means you can just park a high-deflection fighter in front of a mob of enemies while the rest of the party can fire/shoot/blast away from afar with impunity.
 

J_C

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I'm not sure what your question about character building question related to lots of choice is for.

I asked that back during this: http://www.rpgcodex.net/forums/inde...ta-release-thread.93694/page-325#post-3734424

Right, yep.

We've seen the tutorial J_C - however that neckbeard loud guy nearly died 3 times and Obsidian had to give him an always crit cheat for the rest of the stream lol
Really? Jesus modern gamers are stupid.
 

Apexeon

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Savescumming is like playing a MMORPG where you do multiple runs to collect **** instead of playing the game for what it is.
Savescumming around a random box for random gear makes me feel unclean like the great unwashed.
The Blame for this rubbish lies at the feet of the "Designers" who are under there slave master to raid the wallets of the great unwashed $$.

Loot if it has to be randomize should be locked at the start of the game after it has been randomly generated "one time". The random loot sheet that's generated can be based on the class selection the player creates at the start of the game. So if you have more spell casters you can then expect more potential gear in the boxes for casters. Also if the designers want to try and put some effort in they would have this gear in "logical locations" and on "logical creatures". So random gear can be in, its locked so reloading a save game will not change it and the gear is in logical locations like a locked chest in the "kings chamber" (not in a wolfs ass).

Nah **** it lets have random rats in a sewer have a 1% drop rate for the "Sword of Lazy uncreative wanbe Casino operators +152 strength with a 50% chance to create cask wine on a hit".

Designing your game to encourage "gambling" is a great way to top the sales chart.
Looks at Diablo 3 :(.
 
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Infinitron

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Enjoy the Revolution! Another revolution around the sun that is. Serpent in the Staglands Dead State Divinity: Original Sin Project: Eternity Torment: Tides of Numenera Wasteland 2 Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 A Beautifully Desolate Campaign Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire Pathfinder: Kingmaker Pathfinder: Wrath I'm very into cock and ball torture I helped put crap in Monomyth
melnorme asked: Re: complex character systems, I was really talking about character development (including level ups) in general, not specifically character creation. The AD&D IE games had very simple leveling up - literally just two clicks with no choices to make for many character classes. The archetypes were a lot more "built in" and some people will be expecting that.

We didn’t get much of a backlash for it on IWD2 and you had six characters from the start of the game, so no, I’m not concerned about a backlash because you have more advancement options.
 

AwesomeButton

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PC RPG Website of the Year, 2015 Make the Codex Great Again! Grab the Codex by the pussy Insert Title Here RPG Wokedex Divinity: Original Sin 2 A Beautifully Desolate Campaign Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag. Pathfinder: Wrath
New interview from March 4th. Contains about 16 mins interview with Josh:
http://www.gamereactor.eu/news/293644/Pillars of Eternity: critical path only "a third or quarter" of game/

Just the video:
http://www.gamereactor.eu/grtv/?id=215404

Discussed:
  • Crit Path - nothing new
  • Area design - Trying to offer various content as reward for exploration of side content. "We do try to cater to everyone's taste in small amounts."
  • The Megadungeon - How the idea about the great statue came up. History of the megadungeon's development. They returned to it multiple times during development (I at least didn't know that).
  • Difficulty levels, non-scaling described as "very interesting approach" by interviewer (isn't he cute?) - Not much new info here it seems.
  • Setting/lore overarching vision - Souls, Great Wheel (reincarnation). Described again. How it affects character abilities (in lore sense). Animancy. Apparently animancy and its varied reception in the game world is JES' message to the players, as in author's message. Moral/ethical dilemmas represented with animancy and animancers.
  • C&C allows the player to make his own decisions on the main conflict in the world.
  • What has it been like to revisit the past with working on an Inifinity Engine-style game - Very fun, a chance to return to writing as a main channel of presenting the story. Nice to be able to concentrate on the PC platform exclusively. Cool to be able to spend this amount of time creating their own IP.
  • "A few people are doing planning for the expansion"
 
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Roguey

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Wait a minute. Do you mean to say that FR in BG is archetypal and dull but RF is IWD is suddenly original and exciting?
Early game Icewind Dale has more interesting writing/situations/content than early game BG.

These sidequests might as well be "collect 10 ooze samples."
 

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