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

[TalesfromtheCrypt]

So to summarize, this is shaping up to be complete garbage even for the people who actually liked the first one?

 

[Cross]

Don't be so negative. Maybe fans of Tyranny will be able to enjoy the game.

 

[Infinitron]

So to summarize, this is shaping up to be complete garbage even for the people who actually liked the first one?

No, I don't think so. Other than the complaints about loredumping (which may subside somewhat after people read all the lore hyperlinks and no longer have to read them again), I don't see that there have been much complaints about the game's actual content - most importantly encounter design, enemy AI, difficulty, etc.

 

[TalesfromtheCrypt]

How‘s the quest design anyway, you guys can eloborate on that? I wish I could just try it out myself but the game won’t run on my crap laptop...

 

[2house2fly]

I don't much care about realistic dialogue and grounded situations, good options in quests and variety are all the story I need. I'm more concerned about the rigid-sounding character building, which I suppose is a natural consequence of having so many character types available . In the announcement they said the beta isn't feature complete so hopefully they'll be adding more

E: also hopefully they'll be optimising it more after hearing it doesn't run as smoothly as P1. Really shouldn't need a gaming rig to run a 2D indie RPG

 

[Sentinel]

the world is grey the mountains old
the forge's fire is ashen cold
no harp is rung no hammer falls
the darkness dwells in Pillar's halls

 

[Quillon]

the world is grey the mountains old
the forge's fire is ashen cold
no harp is rung no hammer falls
the darkness dwells in Pillar's halls

In love with pillows, writing poems for it?

 

[Fry]

Pasting a comment I made on the Obsidz beta forums:
Finally, a comment on the language -- certainly too late to change now, but anyway for what it's worth: I interact daily with people from literally all over the world, and nobody talks like that. The Russians don't go "Da, today is very nice day, harasho nyet?" and the French don't go "Oui mon ami, indeed the weather today is la belle." It's cool that you've got a conlang but there's way too much of "That kamahima has tipu my raumanuma, if I ever catch him he's going to be kaunahini!" It's grating, and the hypertext kind of underlines the "Look at how clever we are" aspect of it.

I dunno about Russians and Frenchies, but the Latin Americans I'm familiar with do that sort of code switching between English and Spanish routinely. The difference is, they do it when talking among themselves, not when talking to people who only speak English.

 

[TT1]

So, how is the npc reaction to the enviroment, weather and night-day cicles?

I watched a video with some rain, but people just continued to talk, as if there were no changes at all.

 

[ArchAngel]

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, 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 at Something Awful and elsewhere who viewed resting and the concept of per-rest abilities as a failed gesture to grognards that had no real gameplay justification.

Well this grognard will not give them his cash anymore.

 

[Infinitron]

You know...the game is supposed to be more moddable now. "Modders will fix it" might not be just a bitter joke now. Maybe you can even turn per-encounter abilities into per-rest. Has anybody checked out the game's directory for XMLs or whatever?

 

[Cross]

You know...the game is supposed to be more moddable now. "Modders will fix it" might not be just a bitter joke now. Maybe you can even turn per-encounter abilities into per-rest. Has anybody checked out the game's directory for XMLs or whatever?

Ah, the bargaining phase of the grief process.

 

[Prime Junta]

Man, the edge in this thread. :eyeroll:

 

[Grunker]

which may subside somewhat after people read all the lore hyperlinks and no longer have to read them again

I just... I... wow.

 

[Grunker]

I'm not going to read those hyperlinks. Ever. Ffs. They're full of boring lore! What I am gonna do is be miffed at all the retarded nonsensical word spam in my dialogue. You have completely misunderstood the issue, Infinitron.

 

[CptMace]

Pasting a comment I made on the Obsidz beta forums:
Finally, a comment on the language -- certainly too late to change now, but anyway for what it's worth: I interact daily with people from literally all over the world, and nobody talks like that. The Russians don't go "Da, today is very nice day, harasho nyet?" and the French don't go "Oui mon ami, indeed the weather today is la belle." It's cool that you've got a conlang but there's way too much of "That kamahima has tipu my raumanuma, if I ever catch him he's going to be kaunahini!" It's grating, and the hypertext kind of underlines the "Look at how clever we are" aspect of it.

I dunno about Russians and Frenchies, but the Latin Americans I'm familiar with do that sort of code switching between English and Spanish routinely. The difference is, they do it when talking among themselves, not when talking to people who only speak English.

Using anglicisms while speaking your mother tongue isn't the same though, if that's what you meant.
I say cool and fuck but you won't hear me talking to a brit and go "well diantre what a beautiful petit cul ".

 

[Grunker]

"Master! Master! They're complaining about the lore dumps! What do we do?"

"Just switch out the lore dumps with 3-syllable nonsense words and put the dumps in hyperlinks!"

"Should I also make sure the dialogue is perfectly readable and naturally flowing regardless of one's understanding of the nonsense words?"

"Of course not, they can just read the lore dumps"

"Brilliant, sir!"

 

[FreeKaner]

I don't exactly do that sort of language switching anymore, but when I was younger and didn't speak English as well I kind of occasionally mixed my own language in, often mistakenly but sometimes because I didn't know the right word. Although overuse of it would look very out of place indeed.

 

[Infinitron]

I'm not going to read those hyperlinks. Ever. Ffs. They're full of boring lore! What I am gonna do is be miffed at all the retarded nonsensical word spam in my dialogue. You have completely misunderstood the issue, Infinitron.

*shrug* If you look at it from a perspective of LOL HWRPA DWRP WHO WRITES THIS SHIT then we won't ever see eye-to-eye.

 

[Grunker]

I'm not going to read those hyperlinks. Ever. Ffs. They're full of boring lore! What I am gonna do is be miffed at all the retarded nonsensical word spam in my dialogue. You have completely misunderstood the issue, Infinitron.

*shrug* If you look at it from a perspective of LOL HWRPA DWRP WHO WRITES THIS SHIT then we won't ever see eye-to-eye.

I look at it from this perspective:

The main problem with the setting is that Pillars of Eternity is so concerned with delivering its heavy lore that most characters do not act like characters but rather deliver their lines much like walking Wikipedia articles. After playing Pillars of Eternity for a while, you start to dread clicking the 'Talk' icon hovering over random NPCs, because all too often, initiating dialogue is functionally identical to clicking hyperlinks on everyone's favorite, digital encyclopedia.


"Dump your descriptive text on me, please, mr. Random NPC." Real people do not talk like this. (Image blatantly stolen from RPG Codex user CptMace without permission.)

The odd part is that the lore of Pillars is deliberate genuinely different than that of most fantasy worlds and at times even fascinating. What makes it all fall apart is not the substance, but the delivery. Immersion in deep lore comes through context and meaning, not by a look-up in the in game character-equivalent of a campaign-setting book.


Our fault for asking Pallegina about her work. Apparantly it can't be explained without the use of some mystical language that seems to be a mix between English, Italian and gibberish. (Once again, the image was stolen from user CptMace in an act of intellectual theft most vile.)

A good contrast to the majority of the core game's writing is Durance. This gruff, sullen priest companion is an aggressive spin on Planescape: Torment's more reclined, crisis-of-faith character 'Dak’kon'. Durance exemplifies how to handle lore dumps in an engaging way. He is a passionate, engaged bullshitter whose story tells us everything about the Dyrwood without resorting to massive blocks of text with nothing but exposition. Instead of telling us literal facts about the setting like "Dyrwood is very independent and because of all the hardships its inhabitants are very driven and nationalist folk", we implicitly learn the lore of the region through Durance's teachings and the tall tales he tells. The stories Durance tells are themselves engaing; the lore we pick up on the way is merely incidental.

While we may be inclined to be lenient towards Pillars' task here – explaining such a vast body of lore through short bursts of text – consider how Planescape: Torment had a much more confusing, lore-heavy world, yet most of what we know of Sigil, we are told through its characters acting, behaving and being themselves. Our knowledge of the Mercykillers is not derived from Vhailor's 6-page rant about the structure of the order, but through debating its principles with him. We know of the Sensates not because we read the Codex entry in our journal, but because we go to the Sensorium and delve into the sensory stones. We come to understand the ideology of these factions because we experience their fundamentals for ourselves rather than having it explained to us through meager description. To prove this is not simply the famous rose-tinted glasses talking, there are actually exceptions. The Harmonium, a faction you may not even remember despite playing Torment, make up a rare example of Torment faltering, leaning on dry description to explain their place in sigil.

But mostly, Torment is more elegant than this. We know that Dak'kon doubts himself not because he tells us "Oh by the way, protagonist, I currently have a crisis of faith" but because we slowly come to that realization ourselves by talking to him and experiencing the increasing fragility with which he describes the teachings of Zerthimon, until he finally reveals to us that we have surpassed his own understanding.

Even Edér, who so frequently receives praise for being well-written in comparison to other companions in Pillars of Eternity, often downrights tells us about his core emotions outright, rather than just letting that show through his stories about his brother.


Hold up Dak'kon, I don't get it. Are you saying you have a crisis of faith? Why not just tell us "I have a crisis of faith," then?


Paint With All the Colors of the Ashtray

Pillars of Eternity also champions the new wave of RPG dialogue writing that uses desaturated, descriptive text in between a character's sentences to describe the scene, the mood or the appearance of the character. You know the kind:

"So-and-so", the massive man said with a stern countenance, his breath smelling like the crotch of a Glanfathan crone. "But also this-and-this", he added with a playful gleam in his eye, making you dread his erotic intentions.

Paradoxically, the fact that the developers have chosen to desaturate the colors of this descriptive text show that somewhere, deep down, they realise its extraneousness. As much as it must pain writers who had their initial inspiration and experience from the world of books, we are reading dialogue in a video game here, not a novel. What the characters say is meant to convey the emotion and poignancy of the scene. Simply describing facial expressions and emotional states is akin to a movie using voice-over to explain the innermost thoughts of its characters. Even when David Lynch does it, it rarely, if ever, works.

There is a place for this kind of stage-setting, but only if it used for a specific purpose - to characterize an important trait of a character or draw the player's attention to a specific circumstance. All too often, however, Pillars of Eternity and other, modern RPGs use the gimmick merely for fluff, filling the dialogue with a needless abundance of wordiness that players quickly learn to gloss over. In the end, the desaturation of the descriptive text becomes a convenient measure for players to quickly skip over reading it and, more often than not, nothing is lost as a result.

Planescape: Torment had a lot of descriptive text because everyone you met was a weird demon/angel hybrid with hollow space-eyes that held the cosmic horrors of the endless planes. It also did not color the text differently, because when it was used, it was just as important as the dialogue. Do I really need an essay to describe how a Dyrwoodan hobo chews his food before he spouts what might be a relevant line of dialogue?

 

[CptMace]

I'm not going to read those hyperlinks. Ever. Ffs. They're full of boring lore! What I am gonna do is be miffed at all the retarded nonsensical word spam in my dialogue. You have completely misunderstood the issue, Infinitron.

*shrug* If you look at it from a perspective of LOL HWRPA DWRP WHO WRITES THIS SHIT then we won't ever see eye-to-eye.

Mwpugrwa is a weird word.
Someone who says "there's a mwpwgra in my backyard is a normal person using a weird word.
Someone who says "there's a mwpwgra in my wupalubdub since this shreklomani" is batshit insane.

 

[The Bishop]

Using anglicisms while speaking your mother tongue isn't the same though, if that's what you meant.
I say cool and fuck but you won't hear me talking to a brit and go "well diantre what a beautiful petit cul ".

It's not just borrowing words. It's more like

 

[TalesfromtheCrypt]

Exactly, he is right, bilingual people keep mixing stuff, but as he correctly said, only when talking among themselves.

I would use a lot of German words when talking with my brother or my parents in Polish and switch languages in phrases, but obviously I wasn’t doing that when talking with someone who spoke only German or Polish.

 

[Infinitron]

I'm not going to read those hyperlinks. Ever. Ffs. They're full of boring lore! What I am gonna do is be miffed at all the retarded nonsensical word spam in my dialogue. You have completely misunderstood the issue, Infinitron.

*shrug* If you look at it from a perspective of LOL HWRPA DWRP WHO WRITES THIS SHIT then we won't ever see eye-to-eye.

I look at it from this perspective:

Yes, and I've said before that I never saw the big problem with how PoE was written. All I care about is pacing, and Durance was a much bigger offender in that category, no matter how "show, don't tell" he was. "Show, don't tell" isn't that great if the "show" is still a huge wall of text that's far more awkward to read than any other companion.

 

[Grunker]

If you didn't see the problem with PoE was written, you could just have outruled agreement from the beginning. Essentially, why debat this particular issue stand-alone if you don't even accept the general consensus that the lore dumps were a problem?