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

[Rev]

Not really. I was mostly just looking to prove my earlier point that Obsidian weren't looking to make a short game (despite what Eric said in our interview with him back in 2016). The exact number of hours is probably bullshit. It'll certainly be bullshit for me.

Who thought that PoE2 was gonna be a short game? Every now and then they've been naming BG2 and how they want PoE2 to be to first PoE what BG2 was to BG1, and BG2 is literally filled with content.

 

[Quillon]

As many as 150 hours if you do all content, Katrina says. Possibly bigger than Skyrim. Told ya.

That's a lot of trash mobs.

Yeah, that's incredibly worrying statement if anything. The previous game was 60 hours and it already badly lacked focus and pacing. And new one will be at least twice as big? Give me a break.

She also says doing just the main path could be as short as 25 hours long, so maybe Eric Fenstermaker does get some of what he wanted

She was answering how long the first game was, she didn't estimate any number of hours for Deadfire nor for its main path other than saying Deadfire will be just as big or bigger.

 

[Infinitron]

Whoops! You're right. Still the result is the same, the first game is what I said and the second game is as least as long.

 

[Trashos]

There's no need to prove anything, Eric doesn't work there & he was giving his own opinion, not a look at the direction the studio was considering in the future.

Sure, you can claim that, but I really doubt it.

 

[Quillon]

If they structured their quests like NV as they say, it should be very flexible for how short/long it can be. Tho even if we can go straight to somewhere to find Eothas(Benny) without dealing with factions then leap to the end, I'd guess there'd be serious combat roadblocks in a game like this which would require properly leveled party as opposed to FNV.

 

[Lacrymas]

Seeing as you can level scale the entire thing, there wouldn't be combat roadblocks if you don't want there to be. The quest journal in the beta does tell you when you are underleveled for a quest, though, which is very MMOish, not gonna lie.

 

[Quillon]

Seeing as you can level scale the entire thing, there wouldn't be combat roadblocks if you don't want there to be. The quest journal in the beta does tell you when you are underleveled for a quest, though, which is very MMOish, not gonna lie.

Yeah but Josh said levels will scale in a narrow band so how low level can a scaled down end game combat encounter be? If it'll be lv10 then we'd need to reach near that level first which could take some time, unless we can avoid combat which I seriously doubt would be possible in this type of game. Guess I'm questioning "How speed-run-able Deadfire will be?"

 

[Sentinel]

There's no need to prove anything, Eric doesn't work there & he was giving his own opinion, not a look at the direction the studio was considering in the future.

Sure, you can claim that, but I really doubt it.

Doubt what? The fact that he doesn't work there? The fact that he was giving his own opinion, and thus, his words were not indicative of the direction the studio would be pursuing? Both of these are very easily verifiable facts.

 

[fantadomat]

Nothing is bigger than Skyrim,the game have around 400 hours if you want to do almost all the contend.

I'm sure it does.

I am,wasted 600 hours when it came. It is like energy drinks,all shit and will fuck your life but you can't stop drinking it .

 

[Trashos]

Doubt what? The fact that he doesn't work there? The fact that he was giving his own opinion, and thus, his words were not indicative of the direction the studio would be pursuing? Both of these are very easily verifiable facts.

I am doubting that Eric was just voicing his own opinion. You want to test the waters, you send someone out there to talk about your plans as if they were their own opinion. Politics 101.

 

[Infinitron]

Worth noting that our interview happened shortly before Tyranny was announced. I later speculated that Eric thought that what the Tyranny team was doing was cool (shorter game with more C&C) and he was alluding to that.

 

[Trashos]

Worth noting that our interview happened shortly before Tyranny was announced. I later speculated that Eric thought that what the Tyranny team was doing was cool (shorter game with more C&C) and he was alluding to that.

Right. So my best guess is that the reason we dodged the bullet in PoE2 is that Tyranny didn't do very well. The better Tyranny would do, the more PoE2 would emulate it in the things it did differently than PoE1.

 

[Rev]

Eric would probably prefer to work in a 25 hours long rpg, it's just that PoE cannot be that game, being inspired by Baldur's Gate and all.
I don't know what's Sawyer's preference on the lenght of a game, though, but we may discover it if he actually gets to make his historical low-fantasy rpg, since it would probably be a smaller project and it would be completely acceptable for everyone involved (Feargus, producers, the fans) if it was a rather short experience, and he would also have far more freedom in designing it than he has with PoE (where he was able to make most of the decisions himself but he had to adhere to some impositions like RTwP, classes, high fantasy setting, and some other stuff).

 

[Sentinel]

Doubt what? The fact that he doesn't work there? The fact that he was giving his own opinion, and thus, his words were not indicative of the direction the studio would be pursuing? Both of these are very easily verifiable facts.

I am doubting that Eric was just voicing his own opinion. You want to test the waters, you send someone out there to talk about your plans as if they were their own opinion. Politics 101.

There's no need to go "test the waters" by sending one guy to say stupid shit, simply because of the fact that crowd reaction does not match their behaviour.

Assuming, however, that you are correct and they merely wanted to test the waters and actually sent Eric to say that shit about shorter games, then I very much doubt they'd do it in an interview given to a relatively small site like the Codex (especially since the Codex certainly isn't their target audience), that wasn't even republished in any other mainstream gaming media website.

Lastly, he started the sentence by saying "Personally". I don't assume people (in this case, companies) are stupid, so I'd lean more on the side that he was actually giving his own opinion on the subject, and not merely following orders by the obsidian triumvirate illuminati.

 

[Trashos]

...

The way I see it, they tested ideas by talking to us, and they also tested ideas with Tyranny. The number of companions follows the same logic. Eric was arguing that they could do better with less companions, Tyranny tried it, Tyranny didn't do very well. They still reduced the companion# in PoE2, as this was the original plan, but to 4 instead of 3 (Tyranny has 3, right?).

In base PoE, the best feedback they got was for Raedric's Hold. So it only makes sense that they would be thinking to make a shorter game that is Raedric's Hold-like.

Anyway, this is my theory. I was also discussing this in PoE's thread when Tyranny was announced.

 

[Kem0sabe]

I'm no longer a fan of rpgs that take a huge time commitment to finish. 20-30 hours is more than enough length for a rpg.

Those that boast huge gameplay lengths, tend to have shit content to fill all that up.

 

[Sentinel]

Eric was arguing that they could do better with less companions, Tyranny tried it, Tyranny didn't do very well.

Yeah, exactly. They released a game where they tried it, they didn't go "well a bunch of neckbeards on a forum don't like this idea, it's not viable, no one's gonna buy it" (even though that is what ended up happening). You don't test the waters by doing stuff, but by throwing the hook and seeing how many people bite it, regardless of what they're saying online. That's all I'm saying.

 

[IHaveHugeNick]

Yeah they always have to cut corners on something in these games that are really massive.

 

[Rev]

The way I see it, they tested ideas by talking to us, and they also tested ideas with Tyranny. The number of companions follows the same logic. Eric was arguing that they could do better with less companions, Tyranny tried it, Tyranny didn't do very well. They still reduced the companion# in PoE2, as this was the original plan, but to 4 instead of 3 (Tyranny has 3, right?).

In base PoE, the best feedback they got was for Raedric's Hold. So it only makes sense that they would be thinking to make a shorter game that is Raedric's Hold-like.

Anyway, this is my theory. I was also discussing this in PoE's thread when Tyranny was announced.

Tyranny was shorter because it was a B-project in which they put very low effort, ending up being a rather disappointing game.
That's why it didn't sold so well, not because it's short (and it's not that short either, since it takes 30 hours to reach the end, unless you rush it), and besides there are short rpgs that were commercially successful and/or loved by the fans.

Now, of course when you have to hype your game a sentence like "100 hours of content", "bigger than Skyrim", etc. works better than saying "it's shorter than most rpg tbh", but that is especially true in the AAA crowd. Tyranny is already a niche game, and a lot of people within that niche don't really have a "bigger is better" mentality like the mainstream crowd.

 

[Cross]

...

The way I see it, they tested ideas by talking to us, and they also tested ideas with Tyranny. The number of companions follows the same logic. Eric was arguing that they could do better with less companions, Tyranny tried it, Tyranny didn't do very well. They still reduced the companion# in PoE2, as this was the original plan, but to 4 instead of 3 (Tyranny has 3, right?).

The first ever game made by Obsidian was produced with a smaller development team and using an engine and toolset unfamiliar to them and in half the time it took to develop Tyranny, and had twice as many companions (12 vs Tyranny's 6), yet those companions were much better written and designed and richer in content than Tyranny's.

I think the key lesson to take from Tyranny would be to take no lessons from it at all. It's a disaster of a game in every respect.

 

[Lacrymas]

Finished the beta, even did the extra island they added later. Hard mode didn't provide any challenge whatsoever outside of the very first fight where you are just plopped into a very disadvantaged position; and a very few damage spikes that literally one-shot one of the party. I didn't rest once throughout the whole thing and it's my first time playing through it. I also used Empower exactly once on the Priest. Make of that what you will, I ended with only 3 people having a single wound each and that's due to the aforementioned one-shotting. Writing is WM level, as in short and concise, which is fine. The combat, however :X I decided that, while it's not too fast and I won't mind if they don't slow it down, I won't mind if they do slow it down either. Spellcasting is not too slow, but I do think casting damage spells is not a good idea in big fights, it's better to cast other things. It's a combination of having enough damage already, them doing not-that-great damage and being more beneficial to cast CCs and such.

Outside of specific class design, which I don't think is good, it wasn't good in 1 either and I think it's worse here, the combat's main problem is the unreadability of what is going on. I don't know if that's because it's too fast or the UI is shit, or the models kind of clump together and it's hard to see what is going on, or a combination of these, but it's simply undecipherable when a battle is big enough. And this is only on 5th-6th level, imagine what will happen when more things start vying for your attention. Multi-classing is the way to go, I don't see a single benefit to going single-class, you just choose to gimp yourself if you go single-class. My Shifter would've been half as good as he is now without the Rogue levels and abilities. ESPECIALLY as a Shifter since you spend 95% of combat in forms and you can't cast anything, so going single-class Shifter is literally useless because you can't cast spells in the forms and having more of them is equally as useless. A lot of class combinations aren't very viable as a Shifter, though, because a) you can't cast spells in the forms, so no spellcasting multis and b) a lot of melee bonuses from other classes don't work in the forms, like the Monk unarmed bonus or any Fighter bonuses to weapons. You can use melee abilities in the forms, however, so the Rogue maneuverability is open to you. Viable Shifter/X are probably limited to Shifter/Paladin, /Rogue and /Barbarian. I don't think your own spells work in the forms, like Firebrand and Taste for the Hunt, where your default weapons are replaced, if they are cast before the transformation that is.

I just realized I didn't want to go into specific class design, but ranted about it either way, lol. Anyway, they have a loooooooot of work to get this shit together, which probably won't happen for release.

 

[Sentinel]

So, basically, easily predictable problems that stemmed from shifting to a per-encounter system weren't solved, and the shift does nothing to alleviate 3.0's issues because the encounter design team is not up to the task of providing encounters that are just challenging enough to strain your resources on a per encounter basis.

UI/combat log being shit and useless, nothing new there.

What was the questline about in the beta?

 

[Infinitron]

The first ever game made by Obsidian was produced with a smaller development team and using an engine and toolset unfamiliar to them and in half the time it took to develop Tyranny,

Is this true? We happen to have a KOTOR2 programmer posting here. Anthony Davis, how long did KOTOR2's development take and if it was really that fast, how did you guys learn to use the engine/toolset?

Did it help that Spitzley had experience with the Infinity Engine from back at Black Isle (and maybe even the NWN1 code from back when they were publishing it)?

 

[IHaveHugeNick]

Empower always seemed like absolutely pointless gimmick tbh.

 

[Trashos]

Eric was arguing that they could do better with less companions, Tyranny tried it, Tyranny didn't do very well.

Yeah, exactly. They released a game where they tried it, they didn't go "well a bunch of neckbeards on a forum don't like this idea, it's not viable, no one's gonna buy it" (even though that is what ended up happening). You don't test the waters by doing stuff, but by throwing the hook and seeing how many people bite it, regardless of what they're saying online. That's all I'm saying.

I am not claiming that they would do what the Codex would tell them to do. But the Codex is not necessarily a bad place to get some feedback on ideas (er... if one is thick-skinned enough), because a lot of people here really care, and they won't hold their thoughts back.