Preview Pillars of Eternity Gameplay Video, Previews and Interviews

[roshan]

Combat looks fucking terrible, boring and easy, and not at all like the Infinity Engine. Looks more like a Diablo 2 clone. What made IE combat so good was it's abstraction of movement. Characters didn't run around. They moved slowly. This abstraction of movement gave the combat a tactical, chess-like feel, where instead of just running up to enemies and bashing them like in Diablo 2 or Pillars of Eternity, you would instead maneuver and position them, taking advantage of the relatively slow walking speeds. Even with boots of speed, due to the very basic animations, combat still retained it's tactical nature.

Obsidiot has totally screwed this up.

 

[Korron]

Combat looks fucking terrible, boring and easy, and not at all like the Infinity Engine. Looks more like a Diablo 2 clone. What made IE combat so good was it's abstraction of movement. Characters didn't run around. They moved slowly. This abstraction of movement gave the combat a tactical, chess-like feel, where instead of just running up to enemies and bashing them like in Diablo 2 or Pillars of Eternity, you would instead maneuver and position them, taking advantage of the relatively slow walking speeds. Even with boots of speed, due to the very basic animations, combat still retained it's tactical nature.

Obsidiot has totally screwed this up.

Fuck you. Play iwd and tell me the first 30 mins isn't an autocombat slog. I'm not defending that but the first few minutes does not a reliable representation of evolving higher level combat make.

 

[Markman]

Lul, looks exactly like IE. I'm probably gonna hate it.

 

[Jaesun]

Obsidian said they were making a game just like the old IE games. What were you expecting? Temple of Elemental Evil awesome turn based combat?

 

[Infinitron]

Running animation instead of walking animation == game is not tactical

 

[Maiandros]

though am unaware if it's age, way my life developed, or my (looong) list of complexes taking the better of me..
I falted previous games, watching this now however made me realise;
This Iso(tm) view of 5,4 or 6 meatbags that i gotta drag through everything, watch them fight, and scratch my balls while they do everything and i am Peeping-Tomming is way, way past me.

many thanks to Josh and team however, and i mean it. Pledge money well spent far as i am concerned.

a) it set a trend. For quality over quantity. Unlike most of you fuckers, i support quality even in types of RPGs i do -not- like. Shocking innit
b) that nostalgia induced smile on my face watching this vid..if only i could get back to that emotional/intellectual state once again..heh (slap the grin of my face)

This genre needs an alienation effect
/summoning Brecht

 

[roshan]

Obsidian said they were making a game just like the old IE games. What were you expecting? Temple of Elemental Evil awesome turn based combat?

This is not like the IE games. This is like Diablo 2.

 

[roshan]

Fuck you. Play iwd and tell me the first 30 mins isn't an autocombat slog. I'm not defending that but the first few minutes does not a reliable representation of evolving higher level combat make.

That's not relevant to my criticism - the pacing of the combat is totally off. Rather than making combat abstract (and therefore tactical) like in the IE, this game has opted for kewl animeshuns! To the point that it looks totally absurd - characters are posturing with their weapons like enraged beasts even when there seem to be no enemies around.

 

[Decado]

What the flying fuck does it mean to say combat "looks easy"? How can any sane person make a judgment about difficulty without actually playing the fucking game?

 

[Shaewaroz]

UI and color palette are very reminiscent of Icewind Dale 2. Looks really, really great. Makes me feel less guilty for throwing over 100$ to fund this.

 

[Krash]

Looks nice, but the characters definitely need to stand out more. Actually, everything seems kinda washed out.

 

[Tigranes]

This. is. ICEWIND DALE THREE



Fuck me, this is going to rock

 

[holla_cabezas_de_mierda]

This better not be the final version of the UI

What's wrong with it?

most the time when people complain about shit like the UI I have zero fucking clue what they are whining about and even when they point it out it usually is something I would never notice, I can't understand most the things people complain about, this game looks fucking amazing, much better than DOS to my eye..much prefer the atmosphere, weapon and itemization, monster types and graphics..

 

[holla_cabezas_de_mierda]

whoever was making that character at the start was annoying the shit out of me and seems to be a complete moron. He just randomly clicked on shit and could not be bothered to read anything or even look at most of the options so I could pause and read it if i wanted to..fucking idiots and their ADD these days, he made a noble highborn barbarian from the most dominate culture ( this combination makes little sense)....he then proceeded to give him high intellect which affects area of effect spells (not something I imagine is very useful to a barbarian).... its like he could not stop to actually think about what he was doing and just wanted to get on with clicking the buttons at random like a thoughtless dipshit.

The game itself looks fucking amazing though, super excited about this

 

[Nikaido]

The pathfinding at 22:27 on the ign video. RTWP + masterful pathfinding where your fighter can't even find his position against a mob facing him.. this is gonna be gud.

Sounds like they copied the infinity engine so well they had to replicate all the bad stuff too. Uninspired tripe.

 

[Shadenuat]

What the flying fuck does it mean to say combat "looks easy"? How can any sane person make a judgment about difficulty without actually playing the fucking game?

What, you can't see difference between BG1 (walk out of the city, engage wolf, get crit for 10 hp, your fighter has 10 hp, rekked lol), and this - get out of caravan, left click 2 wolves (that are more of a size of a horse), kill 2 bandits (including an archer who just shot arrow after arrow into the backside of 1st level char - "glance! 0.5 hp damage"), kill more bandits, kill whole enemy party 3 on 3, kill oozes, more oozes, kill giant spiders...
All with suboptimal party of 2, then 3 characters - hurrah for regenerating hpstamina.
In IE trying to kill a bunch of enemies like that straight on with just 2-3 characters is death sentence, you had to use entangle/sleep/heal/bows/pots/oil of speed... use something.
Here NPC fighter just tanked everything that's all. "yeah you can get knocked down (fighter loses 5% hp), you can get badly beaten (fighter loses 10% hp)".

 

[holla_cabezas_de_mierda]

well I hopefully playing it on hard or whatever will change this dynamic

 

[tuluse]

What, you can't see difference between BG1 (walk out of the city, engage wolf, get crit for 10 hp, your fighter has 10 hp, rekked lol), and this - get out of caravan, left click 2 wolves (that are more of a size of a horse), kill 2 bandits (including an archer who just shot arrow after arrow into the backside of 1st level char - "glance! 0.5 hp damage"), kill more bandits, kill whole enemy party 3 on 3, kill oozes, more oozes, kill giant spiders...
All with suboptimal party of 2, then 3 characters - hurrah for regenerating hpstamina.
In IE trying to kill a bunch of enemies like that straight on with just 2-3 characters is death sentence, you had to use entangle/sleep/heal/bows/pots/oil of speed... use something.
Here NPC fighter just tanked everything that's all. "yeah you can get knocked down (fighter loses 5% hp), you can get badly beaten (fighter loses 10% hp)".

In IE games you would just chug potions between each fight or rest.

Wow such hard. So strategy.

 

[Tigranes]

After IWD2 & FNV sawyermod I think we can be sure that Hard will be reasonably but not amazingly difficult. I'm OK with that, real difficulty has to come with mods in most games.

 

[Shadenuat]

In IE games you would just chug potions between each fight or rest.

Wow such hard. So strategy.

In IE you would chug potions and rotate characters even during single encounter from the beginning of the game, not just facetank everything.

After IWD2 & FNV sawyermod I think we can be sure that Hard will be reasonably but not amazingly difficult. I'm OK with that, real difficulty has to come with mods in most games.

Sure. It's just a demo. Can't have the guy die in first encounter and reload all the time like in IWD2. But they could have done it a bit differently. Liek, the thief could have been the guy who escaped and they could allow healing him. Then maybe in 3 vs 3 guy could have rushed one enemy with barbarian, while opening on another one with thief using hide in shadows. That would at least demonstrate viewers that positioning and using abilities is important. That they don't just "randomly sometimes happen" like knockdown/enrage.

 

[Volourn]

"How can any sane person make a judgment about difficulty without actually playing the fucking game?"

I bet you judge games ALL THE TIME before playing them. And, don't lie.

 

[Decado]

What, you can't see difference between BG1 (walk out of the city, engage wolf, get crit for 10 hp, your fighter has 10 hp, rekked lol), and this - get out of caravan, left click 2 wolves (that are more of a size of a horse), kill 2 bandits (including an archer who just shot arrow after arrow into the backside of 1st level char - "glance! 0.5 hp damage"), kill more bandits, kill whole enemy party 3 on 3, kill oozes, more oozes, kill giant spiders...
All with suboptimal party of 2, then 3 characters - hurrah for regenerating hpstamina.
In IE trying to kill a bunch of enemies like that straight on with just 2-3 characters is death sentence, you had to use entangle/sleep/heal/bows/pots/oil of speed... use something.
Here NPC fighter just tanked everything that's all. "yeah you can get knocked down (fighter loses 5% hp), you can get badly beaten (fighter loses 10% hp)".

In IE games you would just chug potions between each fight or rest.

Wow such hard. So strategy.

Not to mention it is a fucking demo meant to show off the game. How do we know the game isn't set to SUPER HARD MODE but he's played it so many times it looks easy? That could very well be the case, making the complaint "That looks easy!" completely fucking dumb. I guess benching pressing 300 pounds also "looks easy!" if you are a dumb fuck watching some guy who regularly benches 300 pounds do it. But if Mr. Easy tried to do it, I can only hope the bar would fall on his weakling manlet chest and kill him, thus improving the gene pool.

tl;dr it is the dumbest fucking thing in the world to claim something looks easy when you have literally never fucking done it before.

 

[Decado]

"How can any sane person make a judgment about difficulty without actually playing the fucking game?"

I bet you judge games ALL THE TIME before playing them. And, don't lie.

Great post!

 

[Tigranes]

Sure, it was a stupid as ass idea to show off the combat by going Select All + Spam Left Click on enemy most of the time. Sadly, it's something most people seem to do in these things. But hey, game journalism. If I ran the business the first thing I would do was fire all these 'interviewers' and let the dev talk.

 

[Sensuki]

Potions in combat in the IE games were fine because they took an entire turn to consume. There'll be stamina potions in this too, but you can't recover Health.

Btw I think the reason he's left click / auto attack to begin with is because level 1 characters only have a couple per-encounter & per rest abilities.

He used his knockdown, wild sprint and shit when he needed to.