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

[ilitarist]

You don't need to assign a goal and goad the player right to it on the first minute the game starts but it must not take too long for you to form a descent goal for your character to pursue and one that makes sense on your perspective. The caravan part and your past before that being irrelevant isn't what I'm talking about, I'm talking about when you get to Gilded Vale, it is when you talk with the dead dwarf that she says you are a watcher, this is when the quest for your character actually begins.

Is initial motivation that important?

I agree that PoE start was strange. It looked like it's done right: I'm allowed to state my own believable goals till the shit gets fucked and I'm sidetracked. I liked how it quickly gets me into the action while leaving a lot for me to decide. Then you survive the soulstorm and you feel bad and it indeed gets sidetracked. You play the game that on one hand insists on being narrative heavy personal story and on the other you're allowed to switch into the munchkin quest pursuing player. Because come on, try to get to that Watcher you're supposed to talk to and not get destroyed by all the spirits in that keep - what you really have to do is fight weaker spirits in nearby temple and bury some people there.

Still it's not that big of a problem because most RPG do it even worse. Even the best ones like Fallout New Vegas screw it up completely. Courier has Schroddinger's past and his personality assumes he's going to follow a mafia boss for vengeance and 500 caps. And most of the way he gets involved in local town business and the greater conflict between NCR and Legion, and probably space ghouls too. It's no less confusing; PoE gives you a more urgent goal even before you're told you will go mad from being a Watcher. Watcher condition and dead babies are quite obviously connected at least thematically unlike Courier's job and NCR-Legion conflict (of course they're connected but you learn about it much later). But later FNV got better, after you get familiar with the world you want to get a side or goal

But story of PoE got worse in a middle when you learn about assassins and god plot and stuff. By that time there's no more talk about healing a Watcher thing and you continue to pursue that very same guy. There FNV did a smart thing by allowing you to deal with the initial bad guy but in PoE said bad guy is final boss and he isn't even that bad; he didn't do anything bad to you personally.

Honestly, giant rampaging murdering god would be a better villain in that kind of storytelling. I suspect that few years after I finish PoE2 I will remember why exactly I fought giant rampaging murdering god, today I struggle to recall why exactly my character personally wanted to stop Thaos. Even expansions were much better.

 

[Blakemoreland Hybrid Boss]

None of the portraits looks like the people they are claimed to be modelled on. Just saying.

Exactly.

 

[Maculo]

So it's an essential part of the world as you enter it. Introducing it is in and of itself part of the game's world building.

Yes, it is an important part of the world but protagonist motivation should come first because if you don't give a single shit to the world, why would you care about any part of it? You need to setup the player point of view on this world first or the player will feel like I did, completely detached from everything that was happening. All good RPGs do this, on Fallout 1, you are a vault dweller that need to save your people on a harsh unknown world, on MotB, you are cursed and need to learn about this curse to not lose your soul, on PoE, you are a Watcher and the game just forgets about it as soon as you are named with the title being only a vague excuse to super power, this isn't interesting.

The story should be about the player, on the point of view of the player not about the world, the player should see the world through his character. I don't give a single shit about endless exposition or about the world or about lore, this is just fantasy made up stuff like the other thousands interchangeable fantasy stories around the globe, now if the writer manages to make me feel that the character I control actually has an stake on it, now that become much more interesting.

It was the same mistake NumaNuma did, while NumaNuma was a garbage game and PoE doesn't reach that level of bad, the story was about another character and not the player, the player character was reduced to the camera man role for the actions of the dude. The same way, you as the player is the camera man of Thaos. On PST, Avellone was wise enough to make the motivations of the practical incarnation murky because he knew what was important was the point of the view of the player while NumaNuma was made by writers that didn't understand so they made the story all about the practical incarnation, or on another words, another character that isn't the player with the plkayer reduced to camera man that sometimes makes choices that are really unrelated to him personally.

I agree on the lack of a clear motivation, but I honestly believe it was intentional. Intentional in the sense that Obsidian allowed the player to choose their primary motivation in the dialogue choices, whether that be the awakening, revenge against Thaos, the hollowborn crisis, animancy, or the gods. Similarly, one could choose the Inquisitor's background and motivations. Ultimately, I think the intent was that the player would not be forced to care about any one issue and instead choose their own adventure.

Each "option" had its own flavor text, but it was just flavor. The story did not change if you focused on Thaos over the gods or the hollowborn crisis.

 

[IHaveHugeNick]

Myeaah, maybe that's what they *tried* to do, who the fuck knows.

But what they actually ended up doing, is a story where players don't really give a shit about anything at all. Revenge on Thanos? Why would I want that? I haven't even talked to the guy until act 2 finale. Hollowborn crisis? What do I care, I don't have a vagina. Gods? They haven't done anything to me. Animancy? Ban it, don't ban it, what the fuck do I care, I am here for the loot and the Salty Mast hookers.

Here are the moviations that were on offer at the start of the game:

I simply chose one of them.

 

[Riddler]

...what is Critical Role?

It is a streamed DnD 5e game run by VA Matthew Mercer for some of his VA friends/acquaintances. Each episodes runs for about about 3.5 hours and is mainly focused on narrative, character interactions and roleplay. It is far more gameplay focused than for instance The Adventure Zone though, which is mainly a radio drama at this point.

The main draw is really Mercers excellent DMing which is helped by having relatively famous and competent VAs as his players.

 

[Maculo]

Myeaah, maybe that's what they *tried* to do, who the fuck knows.

But what they actually ended up doing, is a story where players don't really give a shit about anything at all. Revenge on Thanos? Why would I want that? I haven't even talked to the guy until act 2 finale. Hollowborn crisis? What do I care, I don't have a vagina. Gods? They haven't done anything to me. Animancy? Ban it, don't ban it, what the fuck do I care, I am here for the loot and the Salty Mast hookers.

Here are the moviations that were on offer at the start of the game:

I simply chose one of them.

The execution certainly was poor, but I honestly believe the end goal was to create a CYOA up to a point. It is the only way I can make sense of all the disparate dialogue options that bounce between "kill Thaos," "stop the hollowborn crisis," and "dude, gods lmao."

 

[The Bishop]

Your character not having a concrete goal at the start of PoE feels very much intentional.

You don't need to assign a goal and goad the player right to it on the first minute the game starts but it must not take too long for you to form a descent goal for your character to pursue and one that makes sense on your perspective. The caravan part and your past before that being irrelevant isn't what I'm talking about, I'm talking about when you get to Gilded Vale, it is when you talk with the dead dwarf that she says you are a watcher, this is when the quest for your character actually begins.

There are two questions raised by the game at that point: one about Gilded Vale and its curse and another being about your position as a Watcher. The writer decided to make Gilded Vale, the starting town, be about the Hollowborn plague right on a moment the single most important question for the player and its most important mystery being "What is a watcher?" At that moment, I felt confused and I felt why should I care about all of this? I want to know who am I on this world, dead babies? Those peasants all could die for what I cared. Sure, the starting areas are the best designed areas of the game so that weak storytelling is offset by that but you are only going to get some clue much later on the fortress, and even there, not much of a clue at all.

Just compare this with the start of MotB where pretty much alot of shit that is happening on the town had some connection with your curse and all characters are connected to it on some clever ways. Don't answer questions the player doesn't care, make the player care first about your questions then you try to answer them, no amount of interchangeable whining fantasy peasants, they can cry, cry as they wish, this won't even awake me from my Mark Zuckerberg robot energy economy mode, maybe because of my dark hidden sociophatic tendencies but I think alot of players feel this way.

Yes, exactly. This is the biggest problem with story of PoE. You have a whole bunch of characters and situations develop around you, yet throughout the game you can't help to question why should you care at all about any of it. Why am I picking sides and changing diapers to every schmuck I come around? Gilded Vale is not particularly hospitable place, so why should I care about their rationing? Why the affordability of bodily pleasures in Defiance Bay are of any interest to me? Why the hell do I even care in the slightest whether that contract Valian Republics are making with Twin Elms is fair? Like literally, why, a single reason? And why are everybody are so desperate to tell their life stories to a random stranger and then put that random stranger in charge of the most important decisions? The only weak explanation I remember goes something like "you're stranger so you're impartial". Yeah, right. This is how people usually act when they have a dispute in their family or personal circle - walk out the door and make the first guy they meet make the decision. So believable.

Your character is completely disconnected from the world it is in. At some points you feel that writers stop acknowledging the character and start talking to player directly, so they can just get done with pushing all that exposition on to you.

 

[DeepOcean]

Is initial motivation that important?

It was for me, I think linear games should naildown the player motivation even it is as simple as "you are the God of murder, kill your halfbrother!", it is a videogame, you dont need to write Shakespeare, but a decent motivation is key for the game to not bore me.

New Vegas follows more the model of a non linear sandbox, so it doesnt need this as much.

Besides, New Vegas makes the narrative all about the factions and it does a really good job about showing those factions to the player, imagine, if you knew nothing about the Legion and th NCR and instead of learning about them through dozens of sidequests, you just got a Wikipedia entry about both factions and had to decide?

The thing the writer decided to focus should be well exposed, PoE is way to schizophrenic with jumping focus all over the place and you end not connecting to anything.

 

[Infinitron]

Thaos ritual, YOU ARE A WATCHER NOW --> Okay, but now Hollowborn plague

is analogous to

Sarevok ambush, YOUR FATHER IS DEAD --> Okay, but now iron shortage

 

[ilitarist]

DeepOcean NV is not a sandbox for a big part of it. You are introduced to factions on your trip to Vegas. You probably only go out of the way if you're doing some sort of special playthrough. Till then you have to follow a line of people who just saw Benny and it becomes old fast. Later when you're familiar with the world it works better.

@Kit Walker Ignoring the main path in FNV doesn't work because it means your character is even less explained. Instead of trying to go home your character (who worked not as a soldier or bounty hunter or whatever but as a courier) decides to get involved into the biggest conflict in the Wasteland. If not for brain damage explanation it would be hard to explain the player character behavior because the game just expects you to behave like an RPG hero. Some NPCs even highlight it, Caesar talks about all what you did up to the point and concludes that you're mad terminator he wants on his side.

 

[fantadomat]

Legit proof that if you think Xoti looks like a man, then you're gay like IHaveHugeNick

Don't know how,not liking a tranny makes you faggot,but ok. It is pretty clear that you are overcompensating your faggotry by calling everyone else a faggot. If this helps you get better connected with your inner "she",then by all means keep on going. I hope you find true happiness behind the doors of your local "Faggy Daddy" club.

 

[Generic-Giant-Spider]

If these portraits are supposed to be based on their voice actors then I'd live with a deep and destructive insecurity if I was Marisha Ray.

 

[Infinitron]

Thaos ritual, YOU ARE A WATCHER NOW --> Okay, but now Hollowborn plague

is analogous to

Sarevok ambush, YOUR FATHER IS DEAD --> Okay, but now iron shortage

Of course, in execution the games are pretty different.

BG sets Sarevok aside immediately and makes the main quest a step-by-step tackling* of the iron crisis, with the Sarevok and Gorion plotline only reemerging near the end of the game.

PoE tries to have it both ways, putting the Hollowborn plague and animancy on display front and center while still making the main steps of the plot about tracking down Thaos.

The thing is, I think in theory that's the artistically better, more ambitious way to tell the story. Having a moustache-twirling Darth Vader kill your father, disappear for 80 hours while you kick random butt, and then bringing him back at the end as an OMG HE'S YOUR BROTHER final boss is sort of kid-tier storytelling. But clearly Obsidian failed to make things work for a lot of people.

*Underrated aspect of BG plot I think is the real progress you get to make over the course of the story in terms of solving the world's problems. Curing the Nashkel Mine, wiping out the bandits, drowning the Cloakwood mine. It's a cool motivator that's harder to execute in a story that's about a more inscrutable threat and more strictly about chasing down and stopping the final bad guy. Like imagine a PoE that was more focused on stopping the Leaden Key and allowed you to halt some of their schemes before they occurred instead of only showing up to clean up after the fact. That part where you infiltrate the Leaden Key chapter in the sewers sort of hints at that possibility but it doesn't go in that direction.

If these portraits are supposed to be based on their voice actors then I'd live with a deep and destructive insecurity if I was Marisha Ray.

They weren't as far as I know, hence the

 

[dragonul09]

Legit proof that if you think Xoti looks like a man, then you're gay like IHaveHugeNick

Don't know how,not liking a tranny makes you faggot,but ok. It is pretty clear that you are overcompensating your faggotry by calling everyone else a faggot. If this helps you get better connected with your inner "she",then by all means keep on going. I hope you find true happiness behind the doors of your local "Faggy Daddy" club.

Is your whole life revolving around trannies and faggs that you feel the need to make up shit that's clearly not there? I mean jesus christ you live in fucking Bulgaria, the only time you'll ever see a tranny or a fag there is if you become one, stop searching weird porn on the internet and go outside and meet reality.

 

[Generic-Giant-Spider]

Oh, disregard that last comment then.

 

[DeepOcean]

Thaos ritual, YOU ARE A WATCHER NOW --> Okay, but now Hollowborn plague

is analogous to

Sarevok ambush, YOUR FATHER IS DEAD --> Okay, but now iron shortage

And I would rewrite alot of Baldurs Gate 1,my point isnt that Baldurs Gate is the best written game of the world, MotB is a much better written game made by the same company that did PoE that I prefer much more.

My point is that even BG 1 does this better than PoE but I dont take BG 1 in high regard.

I just find a dude wanting to kill me personally more interesting than being a non entity the villain doesnt even get to know through half the game.

 

[Thonius]

Eh lets discuss alleged pixel penises of virtual waifus after release or something. It's just some weird fixation.
They just tried to make portraits "real"

 

[ilitarist]

PoE tries to have it both ways, putting the Hollowborn plague and animancy on display front and center while still making the main steps of the plot about tracking down Thaos.

The thing is, I think in theory that's the artistically better, more ambitious way to tell the story. Having a moustache-twirling Darth Vader kill your father, disappear for 80 hours while you kick random butt, and then bringing him back at the end as an OMG HE'S YOUR BROTHER final boss is sort of kid-tier storytelling. But clearly Obsidian failed to make things work for a lot of people.

I think PoE had secretly wanted to not be just a new BG but new Planescape as well. Hence the villain who is all philosophical, and also those memories of past lives, search for self-identification in the beginning and so on and so on. This may be a reason why they didn't reveal their villain till the midpoint of the game. Even then you're informed of his villainy and only near the end you remember enough of your past lives to clarify him as a villain. Before that he acts as well-intentioned extremist fighting against animancy and you see that animancy does a lot of sick shit. Fantasy Darth Vader would indeed work better.

Or at least those Eyeless dudes. They too have a complex backstory and reasons to do stuff but they establish themselves as villains by killing people without provocation. The worst you see of Thaos till the end is killing that duke dude, and before that he just launched some sort of machine.

 

[CptMace]

I would agree that Bg's plot is weirdly handled, in that it's pretty obvious from the get go that the iron crisis is linked to sarevok.
I think I remember the narrator, at beginning of chapter 1, clearly saying something along the lines of "how is your situation linked to the region's trouble, you do not know yet" which gives it away and is actually a pretty poor formulation.

What I would reproach to the watcher business however, is that it's actually secondary. The PC being a watcher is just there for "special one" purposes. The actual plot is that your soul is awakened, and the only way to put it to rest is tracking down Thaos, which is only revealed at the very end. It's still not clear if being a watcher has anything to do with the awakening threatening your life. That's what Maerwald's situation suspects, but then again there's this Aloth fellow who suffers the same problem, and fears for his life the same way.

Overall, I think BG handles this double plot better. Albeit, because it doesn't make a big deal out of it. Or maybe because the revelation of sarevok's plans is much more impactful than the one concerning Thaos. I mean, about the latter, it's really your soul's business but not yours. I don't like feeling like the passenger of my own story, and that's how poe felt.
Implementing a way to converse with your awakened past life would have been one way to make it feel more personal, and get the player more concerned imo. Needless to add, it would also give more relevance to being a watcher.

 

[Infinitron]

What I would reproach to the watcher business however, is that it's actually secondary. The PC being a watcher is just there for "special one" purposes. The actual plot is that your soul is awakened, and the only way to put it to rest is tracking down Thaos, which is only revealed at the very end. It's still not clear if being a watcher has anything to do with the awakening threatening your life. That's what Maerwald's situation suspects, but then again there's this Aloth fellow who suffers the same problem, and fears for his life the same way.

Yeah, by YOU ARE A WATCHER NOW I didn't mean just that but really the entire business with your soul. YOU ARE AWAKENED NOW would have been a better formulation.

 

[Blakemoreland Hybrid Boss]

New Vegas follows more the model of a non linear sandbox, so it doesnt need this as much.

Besides, New Vegas makes the narrative all about the factions and it does a really good job about showing those factions to the player, imagine, if you knew nothing about the Legion and th NCR and instead of learning about them through dozens of sidequests, you just got a Wikipedia entry about both factions and had to decide?

It is still important with a bigger world, and they presented an excellent narrative hook with the "You are the courier that almost got himself killed, you need to know why".

 

[axedice]

Underrated aspect of BG plot I think is the real progress you get to make over the course of the story in terms of solving the world's problems. Curing the Nashkel Mine, wiping out the bandits, drowning the Cloakwood mine. It's a cool motivator that's harder to execute in a story that's about a more inscrutable threat and more strictly about chasing down and stopping the final bad guy. Like imagine a PoE that was more focused on stopping the Leaden Key and allowed you to halt some of their schemes before they occurred instead of only showing up to clean up after the fact. That part where you infiltrate the Leaden Key chapter in the sewers sort of hints at that possibility but it doesn't go in that direction.

That comment is really spot on. A bit more focus on Leaden Key presence in Defiance Bay and some related quests instead of samey trash combat in the sewers would've worked wonders. Following that, the game should've taken the player's actions up to that point into consideration and resolved the animancy trials accordingly, instead of passively watching the assassination of the Duke. I guess the focus on the second city and trying fill it up took too much of their time to properly introduce C&C for the mid game, which is where PoE fails miserably.

 

[Pizzashoes]

You don't need to know shit. Normal people would thank God for his miracles, pack up their stuff, and then get the hell out of the Mojave. Who cares why you almost got killed doing your shit job. It is time to find another job. In fact, not once did I find the opening to mesh well with any character I created.

 

[agentorange]

Why are the portraits in these dialogues so much better than the party member portraits? Why aren't they just using this style for everything.

 

[Cross]

Your character is completely disconnected from the world it is in.

This perfectly sums up the problem not just with PoE, but with the nu-Obsidian style of RPG protagonists in general, Tyranny included. It becomes particularly clear when you look at how the protagonists are referred to in PoE and Tyranny:

• The Watcher
• The Fatebinder

Now compare that to the protagonists of some other story-driven RPGs:

• The Vault Dweller
• The Bhaalspawn
• The Exile
  
• The Nameless One

Notice a difference? The first group describes what a character does: someone who watches, someone who binds fates.

The second group describes a character's background and identity: someone who grew up in a vault and enters the outside world for the first time, a Bhaalspawn child who was taken in by Gorion, an exiled Jedi general and I don't think I need to explain why the Nameless One is a protagonist with a lot of baggage. Unlike the nu-Obsidian protagonists, these protagonists have clear ties to the game world they inhabit, characters that know them from before the game begins, even homes such as Candlekeep and Vault 13. Because of this foundation, they have a logical context for pursuing the quests of their respective games.

It's like Obsidian wants to have it both ways: telling stories that revolve around the protagonist personally (the Watcher's curse, the Fatebinder's budding Archon nature), while refusing to give those protagonists even a sliver of context. The protagonist's identity (or rather, the lack thereof) is at odds with the kind of the story the game is trying to tell, which is why the story development in PoE and Tyranny feels so unsatisfying.

It's quite baffling that even Tyranny, a game about playing as a high-ranking army officer, left it entirely to the player to define the protagonist's backstory.