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

[Rake]

x that makes y completely useless. Like how Chaotic Commands makes confusion (and a bunch of other stuff) do absolutely nothing in IE games.

But that was one of the best parts of IE. What the hell is Sawyer doing?

Killing fun

 

[coffeetable]

But that was one of the best parts of IE. What the hell is Sawyer doing?

do you think Limbo is a good game too

 

[Frusciante]

x that makes y completely useless. Like how Chaotic Commands makes confusion (and a bunch of other stuff) do absolutely nothing in IE games.

I would say it slightly different: defense/enemy X that can only be defeated by ability/class Y

Seems more relevant in the context of Sawyer not wanting to have defenses that can only be taken down by one specific ability.

 

[Cazzeris]

x that makes y completely useless. Like how Chaotic Commands makes confusion (and a bunch of other stuff) do absolutely nothing in IE games.

But that was one of the best parts of IE. What the hell is Sawyer doing?

Balancing fun

Fixed.

 

[felipepepe]

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.

Going full authistic, Godlike is a dumb name that no one would use, especially people that don't respect you. Fallout did this well, with characters calling others "mutie", "smoth skin" and the likes, especialy how people from Vault City would just call ghouls "things". This is the kind of detail that makes the world feel alive.

I just don't buy a bunch of religious peasants calling creatures they usually kill at birth "GOD-likes".

 

[Infinitron]

Do the peasants in the game call you a Godlike? I assumed it was just an "academic" name used in chargen and lore manuals. Like illithid vs mind flayer.

(For a folksy name, "Godkin" or "Godspawn" would sound better)

 

[Zed]

I just don't buy a bunch of religious peasants calling creatures they usually kill at birth "GOD-likes".

yeah it needs a derogatory alternative. they should call them god-coons.

 

[SniperHF]

Going full authistic, Godlike is a dumb name that no one would use, especially people that don't respect you. Fallout did this well, with characters calling others "mutie", "smoth skin" and the likes, especialy how people from Vault City would just call ghouls "things". This is the kind of detail that makes the world feel alive.

I just don't buy a bunch of religious peasants calling creatures they usually kill at birth "GOD-likes".

They might kill many(Most?) Godlikes at birth but the various lore I've seen says they also fear them. So I don't think a peasant would call a full grown Godlike a derogatory nickname to his face like Harold with the VD. 2 humans chatting at the pub however...

 

[felipepepe]

Do the peasants in the game call you a Godlike?

They do, many NPCs address you by "racename". I'm on a bus, on a cellphone, 400km from home, so I'm not able to get a screenshot.

 

[Sensuki]

Maybe they should have made a fantasy name for them to make it easier (harder) to swallow?

 

[Infinitron]

I'd be surprised if such a thing didn't already exist.

 

[Jedi Master Radek]

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.

If godlikes are so scary that are killed at birth, then people should somehow react to a walking, alive, scary godlike strolling through their town. They had killed some of their friends babies because of this trait, so they ought to be at least suspicious of someone caring it. It may be difficult for them to look in the mirror, if they weren't.

 

[Hegel]

x that makes y completely useless. Like how Chaotic Commands makes confusion (and a bunch of other stuff) do absolutely nothing in IE games.

I would say it slightly different: defense/enemy X that can only be defeated by ability/class Y

Seems more relevant in the context of Sawyer not wanting to have defenses that can only be taken down by one specific ability.

Wrong example then. Plenty of alternatives to Mages and clerics. Paladins kits were immune too, warriors could use lilarcor or the helmet, Minsc could frenzy, chaotic command potions, scrolls, spell immunity, demons, polymorph, wish, trash summons etc.
Too bad itemization in POE sucks, I know right.
Obsidian designers are just lazy, as they didn't want to design a system as complex as BGII, the practical course of action was to dumb down everything by removing any decision the player might have envisioned.
There is no back entrance to our castle, you can rush through the main gate, though!
Combat-wise, this is the Mass Effect 2 of isometric games.

 

[Athelas]

I'm not surprised to hear about the lack of believable reaction to godlikes. The only way to make race matter in RPG's is to - paradoxically - not let the player pick anything other than a human to play as.

 

[MicoSelva]

My beta impressions after a few hours of playing (and a few more of over-analyzing stuff):

long version

Currently this thing is really, really, really buggy an unpolished. Most of these were already mentioned (disappearing items, etc.) and I do not want to repeat stuff, but some of them were just obvious and I have no idea how they could pass initial QA. For example, zooming in combat does not work - characters and other objects zoom as transparent 'ghosts', while the background stays as it was. Did nobody every try that? Some of the bugs are straight-up insulting, like when I spent 4000 of my hard-earned copper to hire a level 4 monk, only for the monk to only have enough XP for level 2. Come on!

And there is funny stuff, like the multiplying boars near the starting spot. That boar companion must have been a female in labor, because next time I passed through the same place, there were like 12 boars there. These boars were also the source of the most bizarre bug I have encountered in the beta.

Fell free to skip this

I am still not sure what exactly happened, but it must have been something like this:

During combat with this group I mind controlled the dwarf, to whom the boar companion apparently belonged to. Mind control is already pretty wonky as it is (mind controlled characters get blue circle, but you can still attack them as a default action, and you have to move away from them a little before they 'get' they should be on your side now), but here, the game had absolutely no idea how it should treat these boars. Were they still hostile? On my side? But whatever; red circles = hostile, so I attacked them with Sucky.

Due to the clusterfuck combat currently is I could not even tell if only the boars that I attacked were fighting back, or if they all went hostile? I am suspecting the former, but it is hard to say for sure. I am almost sure they did not fight back against the dwarf, who I also sent to slay them.

Anyway, we won in the end, killing the last hostile (incidentally, a boar) while the dwarf was still under mind control. This is when the game went truly weird. Since the dwarf was on our side, the boars immediately resurrected got up. Because they were not really dead, you see, just knocked out (out of stamina), and since the dwarf was friendly, and they were his companions, they were party members - which meant they were not supposed to stay knocked out! Obviously.

I do not remember if they got up as hostiles or not, I would need to check that.

The dwarf went hostile a moment later, and, thankfully, after defeating him, no boar got up again.

Bugs aside, my main problem with the current build is how chaotic combat feels. Note I use the word 'feels' not 'is', because I believe characters actually do what they are supposed to do, abilities work as they should, etc. But the visual/audio feedback is just awful. It is hard to control what everyone is doing, who is fighting whom, why does an ability not fire up (is it still recovery time, or did my click not get through?). The game is visually very rich and various ability effects - people glowing in various colors make following what is going on very hard. Diablo 3 had a similar problem (its 'Low FX' trigger helped a little). Also, technical issues like character circles overlapping, lack of responsiveness, etc.

My other problem is music. It is pretty bland and uninteresting. Does not hold a candle to Baldur's Gate and PS:T music. But it is possible that I need to spend 500 hours more with it to make a fair comparison.

Interface needs a lot of work too. Much room for improvement in almost every aspect of it. Too much to detail here, but here are a few examples:
- character screen shows base weapon damage, but inventory shows dmage modified by character's Might; if anything it should be the other way around, I think?
- inventory slots are too small overall, why cannot we have a full-screen inventory?
- mind controlled enemies can only use basic attacks, because the UI does not adjust based on who you have selected (like it did in every IE game) and you do not get a 'temporary portrait' to click on to display abilities
- for that matter, ability icons are to small either (maybe the UI can be rescaled and I missed it?)
- item descriptions are badly displayed, almost ToEE-level-bad at the moment
- much more, but no time to point them all out

But what is actually important, I was having a lot of fun when playing this. This is not all that I wanted from a BG successor, but it is close enough. My greatest worry was this would turn out to be another Icewind Dale - a pretty-looking dungeon crawler with linear progression. I can already see that this is not the case. This is gathering your party and venturing forth towards an adventure, like momma Bioware used to make. Good stuff.

Combat needs polishing (a lot of it), but I could play it as it is even now. I am a storyfag, it would not break the game for me. I have played worse. Although I would probably get tired of it after many hours, so I do hope they improve combat before release. The basics are all there. Creature variety seems pretty good and they do not feel like one type of enemy, reskinned to look like a beetle or lion. It just needs more work IMO.

I also do not mind that attributes do almost nothing. It is how it is. I will just dump CON and assign the rest equally, for maximum dialogue benefits, if this does not cripple my char in combat, all the better.

Do not get me wrong, I would not make a low-attribute character and spend hours with him to check the impact of main stats, if I did not care about that. I do care. And I do not agree with this particular design goal (I would prefer if these attributes defined my character the most, along with his/her class and race). This is the lazy solution, same as with no combat XP (it would be much better if they made the stats equally matter instead of equally not matter). But I do not mind that they did it this way. It will not break the game for me either.

As for itemization problems, some peope here have (especialy felipepepe). I do not see what is the problem, honestly. Yeah, compared to Baldur's Gate 2, every game has lousy itemization (news at 11!), but in the first BG, most stuff had maybe one more ability other than its +X bonus. Examples? The unique +2 battle axe has a backstory, but other than being a +2 it does not do anything special. Varscona is a truly unique longsword, because it adds +1 cold damage on top of its +2 bonus, Spider's Bane gives you free action. There were a few exception of course (Balduran's items, Claw of Kazgaroth, etc.), but they were the most powerful end-game stuff. I am not surprised to not see anything like this in the beta.

Seriously, bros. There is no reason to be worried about itemization. Remember that this is a low-level adventure. Comparing the unique items from the PoE beta to Black Razor or Celestial Fury, high-end items with tons of abilities, is more than a little unfair.

I do not have much of a problem with classes, other than their names being kind of misleading. For example, Rogue is not very Roguey if you catch my drift - it does not do what I would expect from a rogue. I believe this is a failure in the accessibility department, as non-intuitive names can lead players to make wrong choices ('wrong' as in 'different than they wanted to make'). The uniform design where everyone can be a lockpicker is fine for me, sincet it allows for a more flexible party composition (in every BG2 playthrough I either played as a multi-classed thief myself or had Jan Jansen in the party, because he was the only thief in the game able to level up - straight up bad design).

Overall, I like it a lot, but there are a lot of problems. The game needs bug fixing, polishing and balancing (ironically) and could use a few deeper changes (like reworking of inventory and UI). hopefully Obsidian can fix all this before release.

tl;dr version

Barely playable - wait for updates. Potential is good, shapes up to be a worthy BG successor, but still needs a lot of work.

 

[Hegel]

I'm not surprised to hear about the lack of believable reaction to godlikes. The only way to make race matter in RPG's is to - paradoxically - not let the player pick anything other than a human to play as.

Da: O did it fairly well.

 

[Frusciante]

stuff

Completely agree with your impressions. This is basically how I feel about the game.

 

[Athelas]

I'm not surprised to hear about the lack of believable reaction to godlikes. The only way to make race matter in RPG's is to - paradoxically - not let the player pick anything other than a human to play as.

Da: O did it fairly well.

Well, I never actually finished DA:O, but what does it affect aside from the origin stories (which are less 'races' and more 'backgrounds')? Of course, the lack of reactivity isn't really much of an issue when all your races are mundane (PoE's are too, with the exception of the godlikes). Though you could argue that fantasy races being just superficial variations of humans is an issue by itself...

My greatest worry was this would turn out to be another Icewind Dale - a pretty-looking dungeon crawler with linear progression.

I don't get how anyone could have ever believed Obsidian would make a game without a strong story focus. It's about the only thing that remains consistent throughout their games.

 

[Hegel]

I'm not surprised to hear about the lack of believable reaction to godlikes. The only way to make race matter in RPG's is to - paradoxically - not let the player pick anything other than a human to play as.

Da: O did it fairly well.

Well, I never actually finished DA:O, but what does it affect aside from the origin stories (which are less 'races' and more 'backgrounds')? Of course, the lack of reactivity isn't really much of an issue when all your races are mundane (PoE's are too, with the exception of the godlikes).

My greatest worry was this would turn out to be another Icewind Dale - a pretty-looking dungeon crawler with linear progression.

I don't get how anyone could have ever believed Obsidian would make a game without a strong story focus. It's about the only thing that remains consistent throughout their games.

Besides the starting equipment, bonus stats/talents and class restrictions, Dwarves (arguably dwarven nobility was the best origin of all) didn't have access to magic and gained MRES. There were plenty of interactions and references to your background (all the racism against dalish elves), some minor plot points and the ending.

 

[Spockrock]

godlike are just a throwback to planetouched. was there any reaction to such characters in MotB?

 

[Athelas]

There wasn't. Of course, there was also no reaction to a fallen half-angel and a spirit god bear walking in the middle of town. That's Forgotten Realms for you.

 

[Hegel]

In IWD2 picking up an Aasimar or a Drow was a big deal (I mean gameplay-wise)

 

[Once more unto the Codex]

Between a game where race is (potentially) under-acknowledged, as in PoE currently, and the insufferable racism morality play that was DA:O, I'll take under-acknowledgment any day.

 

[Hegel]

In fact I think Morrowind was much better.

 

[coffeetable]

I have no idea how they could pass initial QA.

got news for you there bud

its a beta