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

[Gangrelrumbler]

I said said they have minimal utility, as in not game changers.
Magic missile was good to finish off enemies before they healed, pfe had a very interesting use against outsiders, chromatic orb was only useful if you used other spells to lower the opponents chance of shrugging it off. Grease? why bother if you have web. etc.
Plus magic resistance and below 0 saving throws fucked over most of them in the first place. The real changers where the higher level spells that either made the low level ones actually matter, or the ones that provided hard counters, etc.

Some posts ago demons were supposed to laugh at low-level spells, now level-one spells are supposed to be game changers. If someone found a game-changer lvl-1 spell you'd demand to find a catnip that automatically wins the game. The thing is that in DnD magic missiles remained useful untill the late game because of level scaling, fireball became useful even when you had access to higher level spells because of scaling. Now you have to learn some new versions of spells for them to remain useful.

 

[Once more unto the Codex]

http://www.irontowerstudio.com/forum/index.php/topic,4432.0.html
^ my impressions

Sounds like you gave it as much of a spin as I did. That is, a very short one.
I agree with the impressions you share.

"I'm going to go with this fire dude. I wonder if anyone's going to notice that my face is on fire (hint: nobody did)."
I find it very weird that godlikes don't invoke a much more noticeable reaction from pretty much every NPC. Too bad the godlikes have all the good player portraits, because I think the game would be better without them.

Pretty much. In a world filled godlike beings my character's appearance would be totally normal, but the village seems as ordinary as it gets and can fit into any fantasy RPG. A demonic looking character with his face on fire strolls in and nobody bats an eye. It makes you feel that the godlike character is nothing but a modifier. It's not an actual character but a walking "+1 to Dex +1 to Int" that doesn't serve any other purpose.

IWD2's aasimar and drow didn't have much 'personality' either but at least you had to pay for the bonus stats with ECL penalty. Here it's a freebie. Might as well roll all races into one and give the player extra 2 stat points to distribute however he wants to.

Given the description given during character creation, it would appear that the birth of godlikes are not rare events but the fact that most of them are killed at birth would mean that relatively few of them would live to adulthood. This would mean that most people in the world of PoE would be familiar with godlikes (as a thing that exists) but there would not be godlikes manning every other store and tending every other bar. But, overall, I agree; there should either be more godlike NPCs or NPCs should have a stronger reactions toward godlike PCs.

 

[Lhynn]

I said said they have minimal utility, as in not game changers.
Magic missile was good to finish off enemies before they healed, pfe had a very interesting use against outsiders, chromatic orb was only useful if you used other spells to lower the opponents chance of shrugging it off. Grease? why bother if you have web. etc.
Plus magic resistance and below 0 saving throws fucked over most of them in the first place. The real changers where the higher level spells that either made the low level ones actually matter, or the ones that provided hard counters, etc.

Some posts ago demons were supposed to laugh at low-level spells, now level-one spells are supposed to be game changers. If someone found a game-changer lvl-1 spell you'd demand to find a catnip that automatically wins the game. The thing is that in DnD magic missiles remained useful untill the late game because of level scaling, fireball became useful even when you had access to higher level spells because of scaling. Now you have to learn some new versions of spells for them to remain useful.

Hm, that is true. but id like to make some corrections to your statement now that proved me wrong.
Magic missile didnt remain useful, it became useful, it is arguably the weakest lvl 1 spell when you start, but the most powerful by level 9. It increased its damage much faster than a warriors relatively speaking (x5 damage), had no to hit throw, no saving throw, no elemental resistance to overcome. Only weakness it had was against creatures with mid-high MR.
Sleep dominated a large part of BG1, but it was completely useless on BG2.
Chromatic Orb was only good when combined with higher level spells that allowed it to land.
Fireball kept being useful only in 2nd edition because its damage scaling stopped at 10, by that level most classes didnt win any more HD, so the damage would keep being significant. In 3.5 it was fairly less useful, so was magic missile.
Grease was completely out classed by web.
But yeah, i exaggerated.

Ah before i forget, protection from evil secondary use was actually pretty fucking cool, even if it didnt seem to work for me sometimes in BG2, but it doesnt matter, stuff like that is the reason i love RPGs with passion.

 

[Zed]

It's not an actual character but a walking "+1 to Dex +1 to Int" that doesn't serve any other purpose.

Which, in turn, barely affects the character because of the small incremental impact all the attributes have. So it's essentially just a cosmetic alternative... turning your character into a horned freak with smoke-bellowing hair.

In its current state, I would describe PoE's character creation as a potpourri of low-impact nostalgic diversions on top of an almost exclusively combat-oriented character system. You get to make a decent amount of choices, but they feel so meaningless. So biowareian.

 

[Once more unto the Codex]

http://www.irontowerstudio.com/forum/index.php/topic,4432.0.html
^ my impressions

Sounds like you gave it as much of a spin as I did. That is, a very short one.
I agree with the impressions you share.

"I'm going to go with this fire dude. I wonder if anyone's going to notice that my face is on fire (hint: nobody did)."
I find it very weird that godlikes don't invoke a much more noticeable reaction from pretty much every NPC. Too bad the godlikes have all the good player portraits, because I think the game would be much better without them.

In what way does their mere presence make the game "much" worse?

I edited the post before your reply and removed "much."

Sorry, I didn't see that. That said, I have enjoyed playing as godlikes in the demo so I would definitely not be happier if they were removed from the game. What I would prefer is if NPCs would acknowledge that I have huge horns growing out of my face occasionally.

 

[Jezal_k23]

I think it has been mentioned that they do throughout the game, either in a positive or negative manner. There might just not be any case in the beta village, perhaps there should be, but I do believe it won't go unnoticed throughout the game. Maybe it'll happen more often in the critical path areas.

 

[Sensuki]

Sensuki, I thought you stated several ways in which they would counteract these problems?

Yeah you only get an "AoO" against enemies you are engaging. Fighters can engage 3 people at once in Defender mode, othewise it's one per person unless you take that talent that gives you a second one.

If they fix the feedback, overlapping and pathfinding issues with combat should make it a bit easier to critique.

At the moment since heavy ranged weapons are OP, the melee engagement system feels like it hamstrings melee characters even further. Perhaps a more passive system like a damage bonus against moving targets would have been better, where some classes can avoid/suffer less damage from attacks when moving.

Might wait and see how it feels after they clean combat up.

 

[roshan]

The dialogue system looks terrible. You have immersion breaking dialogue tags on both the right side and left side of the text. It's almost unreadable with all those tags. Telling you what counters are added to by the dialogue or what stats are being used is just silly, it's not only terribly dumbed down but also encourages players to metagame and powergame the dialogue. So everything combat and character development related is boringly BALLANCEDD!!! and stripped of all difficulty, but the dialogue system is meant to be powergamed? Have the Obsidiots got their brains screwed on in the correct position?

Have these people even played Planescape Torment? I thought this was meant to be a return to those types of games? In that game if you lied to enough people about being "Adahn", the force of thought would actually cause an Adahn to materialize somewhere in the game. That was a cool, unexpected discovery. In Pillars of Shitternity, there would be a dialogue tag that said [Adahn Lie - minor].

 

[Sensuki]

The dialogue system looks terrible. You have immersion breaking dialogue tags on both the right side and left side of the text. It's almost unreadable with all those tags.

Turn them off in the options menu?

 

[roshan]

The dialogue system looks terrible. You have immersion breaking dialogue tags on both the right side and left side of the text. It's almost unreadable with all those tags.

Turn them off in the options menu?

Why is having tags even an option? What's the point?

 

[Once more unto the Codex]

The dialogue system looks terrible. You have immersion breaking dialogue tags on both the right side and left side of the text. It's almost unreadable with all those tags.

Turn them off in the options menu?

Why is having tags even an option? What's the point?

Because there exist people in the universe with different tastes from you.

I think the more reasonable question would be, 'why are the tags on by default?'

 

[roshan]

The dialogue system looks terrible. You have immersion breaking dialogue tags on both the right side and left side of the text. It's almost unreadable with all those tags.

Turn them off in the options menu?

Why is having tags even an option? What's the point?

Because there exist people in the universe with different tastes from you.

I think the more reasonable question would be, 'why are the tags on by default?'

No, "Why is having tags even an option?" is a perfectly reasonable question. Like I asked, what is the point? If a game is going to have a particular "feature", it should serve some sort of purpose. If other people like it that way, why do they like it?

 

[Blaine]

 

[Gangrelrumbler]

The dialogue system looks terrible. You have immersion breaking dialogue tags on both the right side and left side of the text. It's almost unreadable with all those tags.

Turn them off in the options menu?

Why is having tags even an option? What's the point?

Because there exist people in the universe with different tastes from you.

I think the more reasonable question would be, 'why are the tags on by default?'

No, "Why is having tags even an option?" is a perfectly reasonable question. Like I asked, what is the point? If a game is going to have a particular "feature", it should serve some sort of purpose. If other people like it that way, why do they like it?

Because people want control over character development, in this case over the development of their personality. Sure you might say that people should be intelligent enough to understand that saying "fuck you" is a mean response. It's similar to game telling you that your fireball does fire damage. Everyone who's not a moron knows that fireball does fire-damage, but some people would prefer to have it spelled-out in case there was some ambiguity.

 

[holla_cabezas_de_mierda]

IIRC according to the BG2 manual mages weren't supposed to be able to learn 9th level spells unless they have 18 INT.

I'm not saying BG attribute system is perfect but atleast it has a very solid impact on non-pure caster classes' performance in combat.

Except that you have to be a complete retard not to max your intelligence and min (most) everything else.

Call me when you actually have to spend time deciding how to spread your attributes in BG.

..

 

[roshan]

The dialogue system looks terrible. You have immersion breaking dialogue tags on both the right side and left side of the text. It's almost unreadable with all those tags.

Turn them off in the options menu?

Why is having tags even an option? What's the point?

Because there exist people in the universe with different tastes from you.

I think the more reasonable question would be, 'why are the tags on by default?'

No, "Why is having tags even an option?" is a perfectly reasonable question. Like I asked, what is the point? If a game is going to have a particular "feature", it should serve some sort of purpose. If other people like it that way, why do they like it?

Because people want control over character development, in this case over the development of their personality. Sure you might say that people should be intelligent enough to understand that saying "fuck you" is a mean response. It's similar to game telling you that your fireball does fire damage. Everyone who's not a moron knows that fireball does fire-damage, but some people would prefer to have it spelled-out in case there was some ambiguity.

Basically, you are saying that character development and dialogue are no longer about roleplaying, but some sort of brainless minigame in which you click a particular option in order to get +1 to your favorite counter?

 

[Chaotic_Heretic]

On Grunker on scope of DivOS vs scope of P:E

The environment interactivity and elemental effects have way more systemic complexity than P:E's linear combat dungeon crawl

 

[holla_cabezas_de_mierda]

It's not because of the lore, it's so they didn't have to create loads of different spells for any classes except the Wizard. The lore simply validates the design choice in the game world.

This is also why classes have set ability progression, because a pool with extras would be too much work and harder to banalce.

I think if you start designing a roleplaying game and keep finding you are making choices based on 'too much work' 'too hard to balance', 'don't feel like writing so much stuff', that you might be making something pretty boring. I mean if you can't even be bothered to put much effort into it...... Many times 'Balance' seems like an excuse to be a lazy and uncreative. Probably its not possible to make a deep, fully fleshed out system and world to compete with one that has existed for almost 40 years and also a computer game version of the same in 2 years.

(and I don't mean to target YOU in particular when I use the word you in the above post; this post is not really directed at YOU, only what you said made me think of the above since it keeps coming up....)

 

[imweasel]

Because people want control over character development, in this case over the development of their personality. Sure you might say that people should be intelligent enough to understand that saying "fuck you" is a mean response. It's similar to game telling you that your fireball does fire damage. Everyone who's not a moron knows that fireball does fire-damage, but some people would prefer to have it spelled-out in case there was some ambiguity.

I don't like it either, it breaks my immersion while roleplaying.

It isn't required unless you want to powergame or can't comprehend what is written. Dragon Age 2 had the same thing, just with icons instead of text. It made sense in that game because of the shitty paraphrasing.

 

[Sensuki]

I wish people would learn to quote properly. These trains are annoying.

 

[Gangrelrumbler]

The dialogue system looks terrible. You have immersion breaking dialogue tags on both the right side and left side of the text. It's almost unreadable with all those tags.

Turn them off in the options menu?

Why is having tags even an option? What's the point?

Because there exist people in the universe with different tastes from you.

I think the more reasonable question would be, 'why are the tags on by default?'

No, "Why is having tags even an option?" is a perfectly reasonable question. Like I asked, what is the point? If a game is going to have a particular "feature", it should serve some sort of purpose. If other people like it that way, why do they like it?

Because people want control over character development, in this case over the development of their personality. Sure you might say that people should be intelligent enough to understand that saying "fuck you" is a mean response. It's similar to game telling you that your fireball does fire damage. Everyone who's not a moron knows that fireball does fire-damage, but some people would prefer to have it spelled-out in case there was some ambiguity.

Basically, you are saying that character development and dialogue are no longer about roleplaying, but some sort of brainless minigame in which you click a particular option in order to get +1 to your favorite counter?

Yes, for some people. Not everyone when playing the game thinks "what would I/my character do if that situation was real", some people aproach RPGs as any other form of games and want to get specific goals, in that case a character who gets certain reputation (if only to see if their playthrough will be different than the one where they acted naturally), it would be frustrating for some people to just guess what they have to do to get the reputation they want. Besides let's get it straight the game is not as oldschool as codex wanted it to be and is created also with modern gamers (retards) in mind. Some of them will roll Paladins, Paladins get bonuses from acting in certain ways and I suppose they loose them if they start acting in a different way and these gamers will get mad after losing their bonuses, so it's there to warn them about what they are doing. Same as in NVN where there was a big alignment counter that saved retards from accidentally falling as a Paladin.

 

[Volourn]

"No, "Why is having tags even an option?" is a perfectly reasonable question. Like I asked, what is the point? If a game is going to have a particular "feature", it should serve some sort of purpose. If other people like it that way, why do they like it?"

NONE OF YOUR FUCKIN' BUSINESS. IF I LOVE YOUR FUKKIN' MUM IT WOULD STILL BE NONE OF YOUR BUSINESS, YOU LITTLE SHIT STAIN!

 

[imweasel]

I see that Volourn is roleplaying Josh Sawyer.

 

[roshan]

"No, "Why is having tags even an option?" is a perfectly reasonable question. Like I asked, what is the point? If a game is going to have a particular "feature", it should serve some sort of purpose. If other people like it that way, why do they like it?"

NONE OF YOUR FUCKIN' BUSINESS. IF I LOVE YOUR FUKKIN' MUM IT WOULD STILL BE NONE OF YOUR BUSINESS, YOU LITTLE SHIT STAIN!

Is this sarcasm?

EDIT: Ah nvm, imweasel explained it.

 

[DefJam101]

This thread is erecting a pillar of eternity in my pants