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

[Ulfhednar]

What I'd really love to see is a review of the crowd control, that was Pillar's weakest element the first time around, and if they can fix the tank and spank combat, even the half decent tank and spank of 3.x patches, it'll go a long way to making combat meaningfully tactical.

Kudos to the enemy AI - the Engwithan titan pushed my characters aside to get out of a flanking position and they gave a gargoyle-like thing a limited teleport to accomplish the same goal. The engagement mechanics are restricted to fighters - not sure if I like this or not yet, because it took me a long time to get used to engagement in pillars 1. Overall, I'd say the improvements to individual combats are one of the things I've liked best about the beta so far.

 

[Urthor]

What I'd really love to see is a review of the crowd control, that was Pillar's weakest element the first time around, and if they can fix the tank and spank combat, even the half decent tank and spank of 3.x patches, it'll go a long way to making combat meaningfully tactical.

Kudos to the enemy AI - the Engwithan titan pushed my characters aside to get out of a flanking position and they gave a gargoyle-like thing a limited teleport to accomplish the same goal. The engagement mechanics are restricted to fighters - not sure if I like this or not yet, because it took me a long time to get used to engagement in pillars 1. Overall, I'd say the improvements to individual combats are one of the things I've liked best about the beta so far.

Enemy variety, tick I guess.

What about player driven crowd control? It's one thing to remove the idiot sticky attacks of opportunity, but they sort of need to be replaced with something akin to BG2's mage wars. Right click fire off your burst damage MMO combat would be even worse than what they had before

 

[Lacrymas]

Kudos to the enemy AI - the Engwithan titan pushed my characters aside to get out of a flanking position and they gave a gargoyle-like thing a limited teleport to accomplish the same goal. The engagement mechanics are restricted to fighters - not sure if I like this or not yet, because it took me a long time to get used to engagement in pillars 1. Overall, I'd say the improvements to individual combats are one of the things I've liked best about the beta so far.

Engagement was a non-issue after level 3 anyway. At first I was wondering how I could make a decent Paladin tank with so few engagement slots, turns out it doesn't matter at all and she was a walking fortress nobody could get past. Since only Fighters get engagement in 2 I hope it has more weight to it.

 

[Maculo]

I will not get to the game until tonight, but I plan to mess around with Priest and Cipher. From what I read, it seems that single class characters are far more narrow and streamlined relative to multiclass characters.

Would the return of general feats fix it, or is this a symptom of another problem all together (simplified design overall, etc)?

 

[Beggar]

Oh god, even more mediocrity. Why they even keep making these games? They have no ideas whatsoever

 

[Prime Junta]

Would the return of general feats fix it, or is this a symptom of another problem all together (simplified design overall, etc)?

Return of general feats (and bigger lists of feats to choose from in general) would fix it.

 

[ArchAngel]

Oh god, even more mediocrity. Why they even keep making these games? They have no ideas whatsoever

Good thing the Pathfinder is coming. It will have both proper spellcasting and proper resting.
Again developers outside USA have to show how it is done.

 

[CptMace]

Updated my signature with some more quality rpg content.

I second the criticism regarding the writing. It's even more frustrating now that these awkward lore-dumping dialogs and npc behaviours plague the sequel. The player is now supposed to be filled in with how souls and adra interact, how advanced technology is etc. The only unknown factor should be the new setting. Problem is, they turned something that should have been a factor of legitimate curiosity and excitement into some annoying gimmicks that feel unnatural.
It was annoying in the first game, especially when you make a thread on Obs forums before beta release to say - literally - please don't give in to lore dumps, players don't need to be told everything about this new setting of yours. Now it's straight out ridiculous. Slapping these Look how much work we've tackled on their customs and languages in the player's face once again.

Regarding Health/Endurance, it really depends on the encounter design. It's not inherently bad if, say, encounters are now less frequent and more difficult/demanding than before. The idea being that, with a supply system - you have to tune encounters in an area so the player doesn't have to backtrack everytime. This has been achieved in the first game. I've read here and there that less encounters was the goal for this sequel, so for me it's quite natural that they would get rid of supplies and tune combat so most if not all fights require everything the party has in terms of abilities etc.

 

[Infinitron]

It seems folks who donated $99 or more to our Codex fundraiser were supposed to get beta keys: http://www.rpgcodex.net/campaigns.php?id=19

I don't think that's happened, right? badler Can you take care of it or should I pester Katrina?

 

[Mazisky]

So, anyone who s playing beta is having performance issue like me?

 

[Sentinel]

I am sick and tired of the "you can be anything you want (and it won't really matter what you chose, unless you make yourself believe it matters)" school of building characters.

this. I hope they don't re add all those filler talents. They were fucking worthless garbage that only served to (further) dilute class identity. Fuck Sawyer for trying to shove his classless system ideas into what should be a class driven RPG.

The per-encounter abilities meaning combat turns into a spam shitfest isn't really a surprise. Plenty of people here warned against it, including myself. Looks like the encounter designers couldn't live up to the demands the mechanical changes made required.

 

[Sentinel]

So, anyone who s playing beta is having performance issue like me?

Aweigh said yesterday that having "NPC Circles" Always On is a huge framerate hit. Try turning that off.

 

[Ulfhednar]

So, anyone who s playing beta is having performance issue like me?

Mine's an older rig, and while it kept with PoE in most places (The vithraak city being the exception), it's definitely struggling with the backer beta. Turning off the circles helped.

 

[Dux]

PoE and I might not be BFFs but does the cat, happy labrador, miniature blue guy and docile spider carry over by any chance?

Any news on this?

 

[Mazisky]

So, anyone who s playing beta is having performance issue like me?

Aweigh said yesterday that having "NPC Circles" Always On is a huge framerate hit. Try turning that off.

I'll try with circles off.

How simple circles can affect performance so badly, in 2017, is beyond my knowledge tho.

 

[Ulfhednar]

PoE and I might not be BFFs but does the cat, happy labrador, miniature blue guy and docile spider carry over by any chance?

Any news on this?

From the first game? They aren't letting us import save files from PoE1 yet.

 

[Cross]

Obsidian sure seems to have a problem with interpreting and addressing feedback.

People complained that combat was too micromanagement-heavy due to so many per-encounter abilities...so they made EVERYTHING per-encounter and (supposedly) implemented robust AI scripts to automate the process of using all those per-encounter abilities.

People complained about too much loredumping during dialogue...so they made the loredumps something that's technically not dialogue, but still impossible to ignore due to all the color-coded hyperlinks in the middle of conversations.

In both instances they came up with a half-hearted solution that doesn't address the root of the problem.

 

[santino27]

Listening ≠ hearing. Listening implies they actually do something about it. Filling conversations with made-up words and big lore pop-ups is the reverse. They're not reducing lore-dumping by putting it in a hyperlink. Stuff that shit in a Codex if you absolutely have to. It means they're not making a chance to the core principals of writing but are trying to the exact same thing in a different way.

Putting the loredumps in a hyperlink means you can choose not to read them.

But yeah, I see what you mean - any hardcore RPGer worth his salt will read everything he's presented with (backer NPCs say hi), so the loredumping experience remains.

There still is an advantage, though. Writers will often be compelled to repeat a certain piece of lore several times. It's not guaranteed that the player met that one NPC explaining elf lore early in the game, so if later he meets another elf, the lore might need to be repeated. Putting it in a hyperlink ensures you only read it once.

I don't mind the hyperlinks in general, but I don't like the way they're implemented so far in POE2... as translations, basically. If there are central concepts you don't want to unload to me organically, then fine, hyperlink that fucker, and make me mouse over it to see what it is. But use of foreign idioms should be primarily for color... if it reaches the point where I can't understand the text without mousing over individual words, you've pretty much failed as a dialogue writer.

 

[CptMace]

inb4 an toggle option to turn hyperlinks on and off.
Unfortunately it won't fix the issue PrimeJunta reported about dialogs filled with foreign words and expressions.

 

[Cross]

Remember how Planescape: Torment had githzerai NPC's who spoke in metaphors that required you to ask Dak'kon about their meaning? And how Dak'kon's pariah status among others of his kind was conveyed not through made up words, but through slang and colloquialisms that the player could intuit?

 

[Sentinel]

I member

 

[santino27]

What I'd really love to see is a review of the crowd control, that was Pillar's weakest element the first time around, and if they can fix the tank and spank combat, even the half decent tank and spank of 3.x patches, it'll go a long way to making combat meaningfully tactical.

Kudos to the enemy AI - the Engwithan titan pushed my characters aside to get out of a flanking position and they gave a gargoyle-like thing a limited teleport to accomplish the same goal. The engagement mechanics are restricted to fighters - not sure if I like this or not yet, because it took me a long time to get used to engagement in pillars 1. Overall, I'd say the improvements to individual combats are one of the things I've liked best about the beta so far.

Huh. For me, I escaped a rogue past the titan to flank him, met him on the stairs with my fighter, and he never moved during the entirety of combat. Maybe he failed his enemy AI intelligence check.

 

[Grunker]

inb4 an toggle option to turn hyperlinks on and off.

That would be very lulzy. "Oh, SO THE HYPERLINKS ARE THE PROBLEM. We totally get you guys now, don't worry." Would be like if they simply added an option to turn off the grey "highlighting" due to the criticism of the descriptive text

 

[Infinitron]

People complained that combat was too micromanagement-heavy due to so many per-encounter abilities...so they made EVERYTHING per-encounter

Obviously making everything per-encounter was not a response to complaints about per-encounter abilities.

My impression is that Josh Sawyer views the people who have problems with excessive micromanagement in PoE as casuals who need to be assisted with crutches like AI scripts, not as the core audience that the game needs to be oriented towards.

Making everything per-encounter was done to satisfy a different audience. The folks on the Something Awful forums and elsewhere who viewed resting and the concept of per-rest abilities as a failed gesture to grognards that had no real gameplay justification.

 

[Neanderthal]

So are there any strategic elements or good uses of attrition? Something I really enjoy (along with preperation) that i'm finding less and less of.