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

[aweigh]

my most enjoyable playthrough of Poe1 was my 2nd one, a Trial of Iron one. I made it only as far as Defiance Bay but every single second of game play was enjoyable.

I would never argue that only iron-man style of game play should be standard, far from it, only that the time I most enjoyed playing Poe1 was when I knew each fight could be the last.

Normally iron-man mode is not required to achieve this kind of psychological tension, but in the case of Poe1 it was required because in its standard, regular game play modes (i.e. not trial of iron mode) resources were too plentiful and too easy to acquire, so much so that the majority of players never even bothered utilizing food items because the game was simply not demanding enough.

I repeat, I am not saying iron-man mode is the best way to achieve parity of tension and exploration. I am saying that in the case of Poe1, a game where its resting mechanic made little sense in its implementation (and a game where loading screens took so long and were so frequent they actually became part of the resource management aspect); in that game it was the only way to achieve the type of tension in exploration normally achieved in older RPGs (like Wizardry) with much simpler or primitive systems.

 

[jungl]

There is no risk in wizardry as you are never pressured as the monsters at the dungeon never attack your town. There is no real incentive either to delve deeper when low on resources as good loot doesn't have higher chance in dropping the longer you stay. Its all preparation shit rpg you can play as a 9 year old girl. 9 year olds would be more scared of a game like spelunky then wizardry.

 

[Delterius]

People who are opposed to such tension or think it doesn't exist clearly haven't played a game with truly restricted resources or any danger of losing progress.

Cool strawman there. I am not opposed and I have played many such games. This isn't one of them and nobody ever cared about that.

 

[IHaveHugeNick]

It doesn't matter if things go bad, I can always reload.

Except you can't. Unless you are willing to reload to the start of the dungeon.

I am willing. I suppose you just abandon the entire playthrough and uninstall a game, because reloading is too much of a hassle, right? Are you off your meds again?

What people who are opposed to such tension or think it doesn't exist clearly haven't played a game with truly restricted resources or any danger of losing progress.

Nobody here is opposed to tension. You're inventing imaginary arguments and disagreeing with them.

Also, why the are you lecturing us on benefits of psychological tension, while simultaneously claiming PoE has unlimited resting, in other words, you rest spammed because even that limited tension was too much for you.

 

[aweigh]

fantadomat

you are confusing resource management with simulation.

two different things, though in this case of the modern RPG they sometimes conflate one another.

vancian spell casting is the easiest, most basic example of traditional RPG resource management. A game where coins weigh you down is an easy, basic example of "simulation".

 

[Sizzle]

It would be cool if there were quests where you have to solve an entire dungeon in one go. Like if, for example, you were chasing some crime boss who would get alerted when you attacked his base of operations, and would simply escape if you rested/went to a tavern.

That would put some amount of psychological pressure on the player. Sadly, the odds of getting such scenarios are slim.

 

[Lacrymas]

Wow, so much defensiveness, I struck a nerve, I see?

PoE has unlimited resting because you can always backtrack to get more camping supplies, I don't think anyone will disagree with that. If nobody has ever cared about tension and resource management, then why have resting at all? I'm genuinely curious because I don't see a point otherwise.

 

[fantadomat]

fantadomat

you are confusing resource management with simulation.

two different things, though in this case of the modern RPG they sometimes conflate one another.

vancian spell casting is the easiest, most basic example of traditional RPG resource management. A game where coins weigh you down is an easy, basic example of "simulation".

Not confusing mate,just didn't word it right. I am pretty conservative with my spell usage,i more frequently run out of health than spells.

 

[Maculo]

Is this some covert attempt at underestimating or denying the effects of psychology? Tension is always a psychological response, it's not ...something else. The added benefit of difficulty through resource management is tension. Remove that tension and it's all for naught, just remove the resting entirely.

It is a game with a quick load key....How do you get tension from playing such a game? More like annoyance that you have to replay something or exhilaration that you have met your match.

Yeah, but do you remember PoE1 load times though? If not for easy camping, there would be a psychological tension.

If anything, PoE1's load times did a better job than the resting mechanic.

I never had any problems with the load times,have a pretty good processor. Also there were not many hard battles in it,two dragons and a undead lord. The rest were beatable. The dragon battles did manage to annoy me.

I do not know if it was processor driven or the way the game handled save files, which could become bloated. In my experience, the load times became increasingly longer, which was a reason to not want to backtrack or quickload. Hence, I did not think it was processor driven at the time.

It would be cool if there were quests where you have to solve an entire dungeon in one go. Like if, for example, you were chasing some crime boss who would get alerted when you attacked his base of operations, and would simply escape if you rested/went to a tavern.

That would put some amount of psychological pressure on the player. Sadly, the odds of getting such scenarios are slim.

I do not dislike the idea, but I know the Obsidian forums would kick up a fit.

In my mind, it comes down to what mechanic is actually going to make someone stop and think. The only thoughts I can add to the matter is perhaps if Obsidian made wounds easier to accrue (through creature attacks), or to make each party member automatically consume food upon rest and heavily restrict food quantities via cost/scarcity. The current PoE2 system still does not prevent rest spam.

 

[Sizzle]

I believe Infinitron once explained this, but as I remember it, it's basically - as you progress through the game and more areas become unlocked, the game loads all of these with every map transition, so that's why the game takes longer to load the more you play it.

 

[Maculo]

so that's why the game takes longer to load the more you play it.

 

[Lacrymas]

Wasn't it the same with Oblivion, or was it Skyrim, on consoles? The game loads every little interaction with any item you've touched and it bogs the save file more and more until the console can't load it anymore.

 

[Maculo]

Wasn't it the same with Oblivion, or was it Skyrim, on consoles? The game loads every little interaction with any item you've touched and it bogs the save file more and more until the console can't load it any more.

I guess we did have early warning signs that Obsidian would bring PoE to consoles after all.

 

[Immortal]

Is this some covert attempt at underestimating or denying the effects of psychology? Tension is always a psychological response, it's not ...something else. The added benefit of difficulty through resource management is tension. Remove that tension and it's all for naught, just remove the resting entirely.

It is a game with a quick load key....How do you get tension from playing such a game? More like annoyance that you have to replay something or exhilaration that you have met your match.

Yeah, but do you remember PoE1 load times though? If not for easy camping, there would be a psychological tension.

If anything, PoE1's load times did a better job than the resting mechanic.

I never had any problems with the load times,have a pretty good processor. Also there were not many hard battles in it,two dragons and a undead lord. The rest were beatable. The dragon battles did manage to annoy me.

I do not know if it was processor driven or the way the game handled save files, which could become bloated. In my experience, the load times became increasingly longer, which was a reason not to want to backtrack or quickload. Hence, I did not think it was processor driven.

It was the way they saved files.
First there was a bug in their saving code which would add excessive bytes to the file, which they resolved early on after release, but that only fixed save filesize. Their entire philosophy on save files is still kinda fucked.

Most save files work off the concept that you record changes to the state of the world. Things like story progression / killed enemies / sold items to merchants / ect..

Obsidian dumps all this information into a single file last I checked. All at one time. All on one thread. Every single quest / item / enemy / variable is saved into a single file on a single thread at one time every time you quicksave.

Thought Experiment:
Everyone always shit talks GameBryo.. imagine if they saved every single watermelon you threw around a room across the entire world like that? This is amateur hour. If Skyrim used Obsidians method of saving it would take 2 years to quick save.
- - - - - - - - -

By the end of the game you've got serious bloat. Most games would do saves based on areas of the world you've touched, or perform some kind of change set analysis to lighten the load on time and most importantly, thread the save so I can keep playing while you do it.

I don't know empirically for sure but.. I would guess Skyrim works off their Cell system, and persists cells that you've actively touched or interacted with.


TL;DR
PoE is very light on state management. They have no physics system. Their backgrounds are static. The amount of stuff they need to persist is quite small. The biggest offenders are unlooted corpses and items sold to merchants. It's actually pretty insulting how shit it is.

Obsidian has no excuse for such a shoddy piece of work. They better of fixed it.

Wasn't it the same with Oblivion, or was it Skyrim, on consoles? The game loads every little interaction with any item you've touched and it bogs the save file more and more until the console can't load it any more.

As I sort of alluded to above, Skyrim actually handles it way better. On Consoles I have no idea. I don't buy them. But comparing the amount of data Skyrim needs to persist compared to PoE is like comparing a Hong Kong Expressway during Chinese new years and a country backroad in buttfuck nowhere.

Skyrim has to persist so much data, it's actually impressive how they manage it. The location / state of every single actor / object / script at any given time. Compared to.. the 30 spears you sold some merchant near raedrics hold.

It's a joke how bad Obsidian fucked it.

 

[Infinitron]

Immortal It's really only the loading that's slow though, not the saving, no? Is it the world state processing that's the problem here, or the way it interacts with the asset load routines (which we know are slow in and of themselves)?

 

[Delterius]

PoE has unlimited resting because you can always backtrack to get more camping supplies, I don't think anyone will disagree with that. If nobody has ever cared about tension and resource management, then why have resting at all? I'm genuinely curious because I don't see a point otherwise.

I already said so. Because, ideally, people should try to rest as little as possible and the games are better for it. Its a soft incentive to use your resources well and not to spam your best spells.

The mythical 'I backtrack every 2 battles because I love rest spamming' only have themselves to blame and probably only exist in autism centrals -- aka RPG forum threads.

 

[IHaveHugeNick]

Wow, so much defensiveness, I struck a nerve, I see?

There might be something to it. The quality of your posts certainly implies that you struck your face against the keyboard and then struck your face against the "Post Reply" button. It's possible that you also struck a nerve while doing it, I wouldn't know, I'm not a physician.

PoE has unlimited resting because you can always backtrack to get more camping supplies, I don't think anyone will disagree with that.
If nobody has ever cared about tension and resource management, then why have resting at all? I'm genuinely curious because I don't see a point otherwise.

No, it doesn't have unlimited resting, unless, as we already established, you are playing like a retard. If a gameplay system works excellent, but then some retard shows up and plays like a retard, then the blame is on the retard. Otherwise you may as well argue that resource system in Starcraft doesn't work, because you spend all of your minerals on spamming hundreds of pylons on entire map. Would the blame be on the developers because they didn't stop you? No, it would be on you for playing like a retard.

QED.

 

[fantadomat]

Is this some covert attempt at underestimating or denying the effects of psychology? Tension is always a psychological response, it's not ...something else. The added benefit of difficulty through resource management is tension. Remove that tension and it's all for naught, just remove the resting entirely.

It is a game with a quick load key....How do you get tension from playing such a game? More like annoyance that you have to replay something or exhilaration that you have met your match.

Yeah, but do you remember PoE1 load times though? If not for easy camping, there would be a psychological tension.

If anything, PoE1's load times did a better job than the resting mechanic.

I never had any problems with the load times,have a pretty good processor. Also there were not many hard battles in it,two dragons and a undead lord. The rest were beatable. The dragon battles did manage to annoy me.

I do not know if it was processor driven or the way the game handled save files, which could become bloated. In my experience, the load times became increasingly longer, which was a reason to not want to backtrack or quickload. Hence, I did not think it was processor driven at the time.

It would be cool if there were quests where you have to solve an entire dungeon in one go. Like if, for example, you were chasing some crime boss who would get alerted when you attacked his base of operations, and would simply escape if you rested/went to a tavern.

That would put some amount of psychological pressure on the player. Sadly, the odds of getting such scenarios are slim.

I do not dislike the idea, but I know the Obsidian forums would kick up a fit.

In my mind, it comes down to what mechanic is actually going to make someone stop and think. The only thoughts I can add to the matter is perhaps if Obsidian made wounds easier to accrue (through creature attacks), or to make each party member automatically consume food upon rest and heavily restrict food quantities via cost/scarcity. The current PoE2 system still does not prevent rest spam.

Resting in any kind of dungeon is kind of hitting the "Suspense of disbelieve" hard,yt have zero logic. Can you imagine raiding a castle,killing 20 people on the second floor and making camp 20 meters from a group of soldiers and resting 8 hours without getting chopped to pieces?

 

[Haplo]

The only way these games can enforce attrition and rest limits is by A) inserting a disclaimer every time you enter a 'dungeon' or 'adventuring sequence' and B) create some separate auto-save in case the player needs to backtrack and prepare better. But that sort of heavy handed approach is something people hardly want.

Well, I suggested this before: limited safe rest "sanctuaries" at strategic positions, acting as sort of attrition "checkpoints", generally safe for one-time use only before dungeon clearance.

I felt this has worked exceptionally well for resource management in Dungeons & Dragons Online mission instances.


Of course if it's possible to include some "one chance only" locations, like Sizzle suggested - either time limited, or locked away forever after entry, then it's even more incline. But I guess that would be hard to digest for the millenial crowd.

 

[Haplo]

When i read Infinitron's post i kind begun thinking. Does anyone knows a game where you have truly decimating spells that take incredibly long time to cast,like 5-10 turns? I don't remember a game where you have those ritual kind of spells. It will be pretty fun to see such a thing.

Dragon's Dogma. Of course it's an action crpg. Even cooler that it's possible to sync the incantation of big nukes by two or more sorcerors to accelerate the process.

 

[Immortal]

Immortal It's really only the loading that's slow though, not the saving, no? Is it the world state processing that's the problem here, or the way it interacts with the asset load routines (which we know are slow in and of themselves)?

Maybe I misread the debate going on, but my gripe is with the saving / persisting of data mainly. I still have an annoying twitch from qucksaving in PoE in Act 4 and seeing the game hang for 2 - 4 seconds as it does the save.

If they threaded the operation, I probably wouldn't care. There's no reason that I need to sit around and wait for 3 seconds while you write to a file. It's an Asynchronous task.

AFAIK Saving has nothing to do with Asset Loading (Unless they are like serializing every object in the game or something.. ugh). It's just doing a poor job of processing the new state of the world. Doing it all at once even if you took 3 steps forward and touched nothing else.

Full Disclosure:
I know Skyrim isn't perfect. It has a ton of bugs around Quicksaving / Quickloading because of the way they handle saves. AKA creatures around you can get double perks and certain papyrus scripts can be loaded from your last save instead.

But again, the amount of data they push is unreal. Those bugs were all fixed in Fallout 4 and SSE.

 

[Delterius]

Well, I suggested this before: limited safe rest "sanctuaries" at strategic positions, acting as sort of attrition "checkpoints", generally safe for one-time use only before dungeon clearance.

I wouldn't necessarily mind a checkpoint system, but the freedom to save wherever and whenever is a major sticking point in PC communities.

 

[IHaveHugeNick]

In terms of why supply system was conjured in a first place, I doubt it had anything to do with creating tension. Josh has set out to improve some of the archaic faults of classic games, and one thing about classic RPGs that is incredibly dated, is the whole playstyle of playing with your hand never leaving the F5 button. Constant save scumming has always been absurdly non-immersive, abstract and awkward. Back in a day that's just how you rolled, but for a modern gamuer it's probably a completely alien concept. So what camping supplies and the whole HP system really does, is it makes the gameplay flow a lot better, without making it too consolized Dragon Age style.

 

[Lacrymas]

I already said so. Because, ideally, people should try to rest as little as possible and the games are better for it. Its a soft incentive to use your resources well and not to spam your best spells.

The mythical 'I backtrack every 2 battles because I love rest spamming' only have themselves to blame and probably only exist in autism centrals -- aka RPG forum threads.

And since that myth exists only on RPG forum threads, Obsidian decided to remove the semi-Vancian system entirely. I also don't know why you think people should try to rest as little as possible. What do you gain out of that? You can win the game by playing either way, soooo. Humans, and even life in general, are drawn to the Path of Least Resistance and will rest spam regardless, so whatever catechesis you personally wish to place upon a game doesn't do anything and isn't in favor of the game's design.

Otherwise you may as well argue that resource system in Starcraft doesn't work, because you spend all of your minerals on spamming hundreds of pylons on entire map. Would the blame be on the developers because they didn't stop you? No, it would be on you for playing like a retard.

QED.

The difference is that you won't win at Starcraft if you spam only pylons, but you will win at PoE if you rest spam or backtrack for more resources. "Playing like a retard" is not an argument that will persuade Obsidian, or any dev, to whatever point of view. And it didn't, like I said to Delterius, they already removed the semi-Vancian system due to people "playing like retards", so there's that.

It doesn't matter what limited resources in games were created to do, at the end of the day what they DO do is increase the difficulty and create tension. When the resources aren't limited both of those things stop to exist and the whole concept is pointless and may as well be removed entirely, it isn't doing anything anymore.

 

[Immortal]

Well, I suggested this before: limited safe rest "sanctuaries" at strategic positions, acting as sort of attrition "checkpoints", generally safe for one-time use only before dungeon clearance.

I wouldn't necessarily mind a checkpoint system, but the freedom to save wherever and whenever is a major sticking point in PC communities.

I wouldn't mind it in a special difficulty setting or something.

Getting away from the obvious cheese factor of saving anywhere. Sometimes normies need to leave or exit the game mid-dungeon to go to work or take care of their kids, that can be incredibly annoying to have to spend 10 minutes getting back to a checkpoint just so you can do IRL shit. So It often comes down to "busy" work.. pointless back tracking through dungeons you already cleaned up because you need to catch the bus ect..

But yea it could be fun for a Hardcore mode or something..