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

[Russia is over. The end.]

Impressions from the new version:
- Improved main menu music.
- More ear pleasing button sounds in the main menu and options.
- More UI sounds in game (and they're good).
- Gone is the horrible inventory sound that made my ears bleed - it's replaced with a soothing sound.
- Party characters voices have a nice little echo added to them.
- The volume for inventory items being picked up and dropped off was lowered down (good).

The game sounds much much better than before. It's like they changed their sounds guy or something.

 

[Roguey]

Didn't know 1999 was modern, hee.

Cue Sawyer quote about Fallout 1 fans?

I loved his responses to Sensuki on SA about this issue ("PoE doesn't allow you to loot during combat or equip items during combat, so this is a double mod-specific issue with metagaming sprinkled on top."
"I'm not going to make a core interface mechanic worse to support an extreme edge case that would be dominantly appreciated on a second, third, etc. playthrough.*

* With mods.")

 

[AN4RCHID]

Fuckton of new player portraits (some are "palette swapped", though)

 

[Athelas]

Fuckton of new player portraits (some are "palette swapped", though)

You mean race-swapped.

These are the best looking ones of the lot, I think.

 

[Infinitron]

Fuckton of new player portraits (some are "palette swapped", though)

These are the best looking ones of the lot, I think.

Hmmm...

 

[Grotesque]

autolooting in this game?
lol
it's a joke, tight?

 

[Athelas]

Why don't you actually read the previous posts and find out for yourself before flying into a panic?

 

[Trodat]

This portrait is very well done IMO.

Maybe I should try the beta again.

 

[veevoir]

Fuckton of new player portraits (some are "palette swapped", though)

Spoiler

These are the best looking ones of the lot, I think.

Spoiler

Hmmm...

That's nothing. This guy:

Looks exactly like Sid:

Awaiting other Galavant characters, especially Dicky.

And on that note - Protrait art looks really, really top notch.

 

[Bleed the Man]

Fuckton of new player portraits (some are "palette swapped", though)

They've also modified the portrait I use in this forum (don't know if others have also been tweaked)

 

[Zep Zepo]

Look at those sharp ears...0/10. Would not bang.

Zep--

 

[polo]

Those are fine lookin portratis. I approve.

 

[Roguey]

By the by, since they're only giving reviewers fewer than two weeks to write their day 1 reviews, that doesn't bode well for the quality of the reviews. Though that's nothing out of the ordinary. Their funeral.

 

[dukeofwhales]

Josh Sawyer ‏@jesawyer 38m38 minutes ago
@dragon_83_ when you click on a corpse, it groups that corpse with all others within 3m. that's the only way corpse looting works now.

So at least it's a small area.

I imagine (as someone with no experience with Unity) that means you'll be able to tweak the radius down to 0 with the mod. Though I think it is a Good Feature and am glad it's implemented.

By the by, since they're only giving reviewers fewer than two weeks to write their day 1 reviews, that doesn't bode well for the quality of the reviews. Though that's nothing out of the ordinary. Their funeral.

2 weeks is probably the sweet spot for buggy game/good review length, given the bugsidian rep. A reviewer playing the game full time for two weeks should be able to get through the vast majority of the game.

 

[Infinitron]

http://jesawyer.tumblr.com/

melnorme asked: THE DAMAGE IS TOO DAMN HIGH in Pillars of Eternity according to some people. Which is harming your goal of allowing a wider variety of builds than D&D does, since only parties consisting of builds hyper-optimized for either defense or offense can survive. Is this issue being addressed?

Some of the hardest-hitting creatures have had their upper-end damage reduced. I’ve also been playing on Hard for about 50 hours in the past few weeks and haven’t found it necessary to “hyper optimize”. I do have characters who toggle between being defensively oriented or offensively oriented (e.g. Eder alternating between pike or war hammer and shield, my monk toggling Cautious Attack when things get too thick). But more often than not, I’m using Kana’s chants & invocations, Aloth’s CC spells, or Durance’s buffs to emphasize an offensive or defensive angle.

When I’ve had to reload after a difficult fight, the issue has never been that my party wasn’t ultra-optimized for offense or defense in terms of attributes, abilities, or talents. It’s always been solved through different target prioritization, a different gear choice, a slight reshuffling of consumables/spells/chants, or some other combination of tactics.

melnorme asked: How do you respond to the claim that Pillars of Eternity strongly incentivizes specialization in terms of of offense or defense? That is, going either all out on deflection, or all out on damage and accuracy, with no viable middle road, at least on the harder difficulty levels. Since different classes have different base deflection scores, this becomes a class archetype viability problem - the game discourages defensive mages, etc.

The gulf between the class with the lowest Deflection and highest Deflection is 15 points, roughly equivalent to 3 points of AC in D&D terms. It’s not a trivially narrow window, but it’s relatively small. Deflection is also not the only means of providing/creating defense. Wizards have defensive spells that they can use to do things like provide DT (Ironskin), DT and Concentration (Spirit Shield), retaliatory damage (Flame Shield), and contingent AoE knockdown (Llengrath’s Safeguard).

enverxis asked: With the visitors to the Stronghold, which you can interact with in the Stronghold interface ... are they also visible and interactable in the game world as well? If not, is there a possibility that they can be added as content post-release? Also are there any quests similar to the BG2 style stronghold quests ?

Yes, you can go and see your visitors in the Great Hall, though they only have simple bark strings, not dialogues. The main quest associated with the stronghold involves progressively investigating the ruins beneath it (the Endless Paths).

Accidentally asked basically the same question twice, heh. Nice of him to respond to both.

 

[Sensuki]

When I’ve had to reload after a difficult fight, the issue has never been that my party wasn’t ultra-optimized for offense or defense in terms of attributes, abilities, or talents. It’s always been solved through different target prioritization, a different gear choice, a slight reshuffling of consumables/spells/chants, or some other combination of tactics.

What this basically means is "oh, I forgot to chain disables".

 

[Jedi Master Radek]

Spoiler

Fuckton of new player portraits (some are "palette swapped", though)

LOVE!
Especially:

 

[AwesomeButton]

Look at the bright side - most of the BB community will be able to try it out and vocally denounce it as a shit mechanic. I hope we convince them to cut it out from the final game.

No, just look at this thread, most people love this modern crap.

So, any guesses on what's the next step? I'm thinking about auto pickpocket radius. I mean why not, saves you the trouble of walking up to NPCs, right.

Heh, I guess they didn't tell you... poe has no pickpocketing lol, cause it goes against Sawyer's definition of fun.

By the way, I was looking at some related mechanics - such as methods called when you steal from somebody's chest, and it'd be possible to mod pickpocketing in based on those mechanics.

Yeah, you're right, I forgot pickpocketing isn't fun either.

Damn, I never expected such degree of stupidity. I couldn't have come up with something so dull if I tried. I'm too sleepy and too frustrated to play the new beta tonight. Good luck with the mod, I'm counting on it more and more lately.

P.S. A portrait where the character's face is not visible looks like fluff and trying to bump up the total artificially to me.

 

[Sothpaw]

Fuck yes.

 

[Ellef]

Good portraits, nice to see some portraits with grey in their hair.

I don't have anything add about the loot that hasn't been said, but it's clear that they don't like the way BG2 handles it (area looting, randomised save scumming magical items, infinite stash - yuck).

 

[Sensuki]

This one is also very similar to a Shadowrun portrait

 

[Crispy]

Still some weird bugs like the dialog box resize arrow "sticking" and so forth, but again the BB demo looks cleaner, plays smoothly, and is almost ready for release. I'm hoping lots of last-minute polish gets liberally applied.

Getting a little excited, now.

 

[Sensuki]

GOODJOB

 

[Ellef]

That took me by surprise. Engagement causing more problems than it solves, who would have thought!

 

[Maculo]

Despite the disengagement shenanigans, I think the game is much improved after the patch.

Edit: Also, I read that the reviewers have 2 weeks to the play the game. That sounds a little risky.