Eternity Pillars of Eternity II: Deadfire Pre-Release Thread [BETA RELEASED, GO TO NEW THREAD]

[Chris Avelltwo]

Wasn't his example that you could enter some house through the toilet or something? A similar thing was in PoE1 as well.

You can get into Raedric's hold through either the sewer, or a grappling hook over the wall, or you can storm the main entrance like a manly man. Stealth could be used in either of the two non-manly approaches.

 

[Sentinel]

Wasn't his example that you could enter some house through the toilet or something? A similar thing was in PoE1 as well.

You can get into Raedric's hold through either the sewer, or a grappling hook over the wall, or you can storm the main entrance like a manly man. Stealth could be used in either of the two non-manly approaches.

I actually wasn't thinking about that situation, even though you are correct. I was thinking of the quest in Defiance Bay (same district as Lady Webb's house) where you're tasked with stealing something from a noble's house. You can sneak through a window as opposed to the main door. Although now that I think of it I don't even remember if you can do that quest stealthily; I'm pretty sure I remember the house being loaded with guards.

 

[santino27]

Wasn't his example that you could enter some house through the toilet or something? A similar thing was in PoE1 as well.

You can get into Raedric's hold through either the sewer, or a grappling hook over the wall, or you can storm the main entrance like a manly man. Stealth could be used in either of the two non-manly approaches.

I actually wasn't thinking about that situation, even though you are correct. I was thinking of the quest in Defiance Bay (same district as Lady Webb's house) where you're tasked with stealing something from a noble's house. You can sneak through a window as opposed to the main door. Although now that I think of it I don't even remember if you can do that quest stealthily; I'm pretty sure I remember the house being loaded with guards.

Yeah, you can stealth it. There are two guards upstairs, I believe, but they have fairly predictable patterns and don't enter the room where the window is, so you can stealth someone down the hall and into the room where the object is.

 

[Chris Avelltwo]

I actually wasn't thinking about that situation, even though you are correct. I was thinking of the quest in Defiance Bay (same district as Lady Webb's house) where you're tasked with stealing something from a noble's house. You can sneak through a window as opposed to the main door. Although now that I think of it I don't even remember if you can do that quest stealthily; I'm pretty sure I remember the house being loaded with guards.

I know with the over the wall approach into Raedric's Hold you can find some robes in a crate and if you put them on you can pass yourself off as a member of the cult there and no one will attack you; stealth or not. The Sewer is full of traps and zombies, but I think it is technically possible to sneak through it without a fight. If you can get to that animancer woman down there, she can be talked into betraying Raedric and show you a secret passage that leads directly to his throne room. So there's a lot of different ways of dealing with that quest, and hell you can even side with Raedric and not fight him at all if you want.

A lot of work went into fleshing that quest out and giving so many options for it. Its a shame that level of quality dips a bit in the late game when you have to deal with similar situations, like the Skane cultists. A lot of games have this unfortunate problem where early stuff is very polished and fleshed out, but mid-late game stuff feels more rushed and incomplete. Hopefully Deadfire can avoid this problem.

 

[tdphys]

In white march I solved the redcearan fort by stealthing through the back door. It was pretty neat that you could hear soldiers talking about their families back home... thought that was well done. Plus there was some scripted conversation you got to hear...

 

[IHaveHugeNick]

Like I already said, I predict it's going to be half-assed mechanic, front loaded into an odd quest or two to make it look like they've done something.

 

[Sherry]

Hi.

gosh what a good weekend but really cold too but that is okay because I did not put away my winter clothing even though there was a warm streak a week ago but I just wanted to touch base with everyone on stealth okay?

So in Pillars stealth was possible already if you played the later patches and there already is a good number of examples in this thread where one individual could stealth but there was always a problem with it in Pillars when it came to a triggered conversation right? Like I used my favorite party member Sagani to stealth a lot but if she got too close to a triggered conversation you know what it did? It grabbed Itumaak too and that ruined so much because Sagani was still in stealth and not seen yet even if the conversation started but with Itumaak there combat started and boom bang crash it was over just like that. I did not go sneaking around with Itumaak okay so stop jumping Itumaak halfway across the map goshffs!

Real problem with stealth right now is aligning its system with the questing system to allow for backward compatibility on quest completion.

Let me use an example from WM2 okay? So you could totally stealth your way to an cave entrance outside of Cragholdt Bluffs just along its ridge. You kinda had to fight a few mobs to move forward but it is possible without having to engage every single mob in the region to get to the cave. So you enter the cave right and there is a little encounter then when it is done you go down the rocky corridor and hit a wall. The only way to open this wall is to go through every single mob outside of Cragholdt Bluffs, enter Cragholdt via front door, move the quest inside forward and find a button within to open the wall.

It is so dumb right? You work so hard to stealth into the cave and can't get into the interior of Cragholdt through the cave even though if you did, you could still do everything inside of Cragholdt and complete the quest without having to fight all those mobs outside that you find winding your way to the front door! But you are forced to go the long way around! You are not rewarded because you used stealth.

The mechanics of stealth can be fiddled with all they want right but if the end result of using it have not been properly thought out for quest variables and story advancement by avoiding certain bottlenecks, then it is as useless as it is in Cragholdt Bluffs right?

Thanks,
Sherry

 

[Iznaliu]

Obviously the game should be balanced around 7 or 8 companions, you fucking retard. It's amazing that the thought of designing a game to take the number of companions into account never once entered your empty fucking skull.

PoE's combat is some of the most micro-intensive combat in non-tactical RPGs in history.

 

[AwesomeButton]

Wasn't his example that you could enter some house through the toilet or something? A similar thing was in PoE1 as well.

Yeah, the quests I remember in PoE where stealth is intended to be used is the Doemenel's quest for stealing a gem from some neighbor's house, and Raedric's hold. TWM added a quest where there was a stealth option for passing through most of the abbey.

 

[Prime Junta]

Yeah, the quests I remember in PoE where stealth is intended to be used is the Doemenel's quest for stealing a gem from some neighbor's house, and Raedric's hold. TWM added a quest where there was a stealth option for passing through most of the abbey.

You don't need stealth for Raedric's Hold even for a relatively sneaky infiltration though.

Spoiler

In through the dungeon. Whack the undead. Release Giacco. Through the cellar, up the stairs to Berath's sanctuary. Put on robes. Infiltrate. Talk to the old priest to get key. Through the locked door and down the stairs. Change into armour. Confront Raedric.

 

[AwesomeButton]

I think you do. Explanation in the spoiler:

Spoiler

Even if you get the robes, there is this character who stops you and engages in conversation whenever he sees you. She has a patrol route in the area. The second or third time you cross paths, if you don't avoid her, your cover will be blown.

 

[Prime Junta]

I think you do. Explanation in the spoiler:

Spoiler

Even if you get the robes, there is this character who stops you and engages in conversation whenever he sees you. She has a patrol route in the area. The second or third time you cross paths, if you don't avoid her, your cover will be blown.

Spoiler

Never happened to me. Talked her down once or twice, but guess I didn't derp around long enough to trigger it. I.e., no stealth required. (Normally I just slaughter everyone though.)

 

[AwesomeButton]

I think you do. Explanation in the spoiler:

Spoiler

Even if you get the robes, there is this character who stops you and engages in conversation whenever he sees you. She has a patrol route in the area. The second or third time you cross paths, if you don't avoid her, your cover will be blown.

Spoiler

Never happened to me. Talked her down once or twice, but guess I didn't derp around long enough to trigger it. I.e., no stealth required. (Normally I just slaughter everyone though.)

I never said "required", because it's a design principle for them that as few things as possible are required in general.

 

[Lacrymas]

I suppose they can put some environmental interactions near "fight scenes" you can only get to with stealth, making the fight easier, giving more loot or more flavor text down the line if you do it. Otherwise I don't know how you can maneuver 5 people around with varying amounts of stealth. And I don't see them making all content beatable with stealth. If the game was like AoD, sure, but it's not and I don't think they are going for that kind of freedom. In this context I see the new stealth mechanic being more involved than simply bee-lining to your target without thinking. Some missions in Commandos 1 were very difficult and all of the missions in the expansion were very difficult, so there's potential for incline.

 

[FreeKaner]

Didn't white march have few of those? Siege of the wizard place as well.

 

[Sannom]

One should mention that whenever they mention Commandos in the stream, they're thinking of Commandos 2 specifically, as Natasha and the 90° rotations were introduced in that game.

The siege of the "wizard place" could certainly have used vision cones. It may have been a bug, but some enemies were kind of blind to my characters, and they were often performing some other tasks, like drilling their bow skills, so I kind of chalked it up as them being too focused on the task at hand to really pay attention to me.

 

[HollyhockGod]

I think the "will it be utilized well?" question would have been more relevant if the base game didn't already feature plenty of stealth segments. This system sounds good to me mostly because I felt like it was needed in the first game. Stealthing around the Iron-Flail camp in TWM was awesome, but confusing as hell because you had to guess if a guard could see in a new position. This is more of a straight forward improvement than a new feature we have to guess the implementation of.

 

[AwesomeButton]

Sure, I doubt anyone is expecting them to make major parts of the content passable with stealth as an alternative to combat. Stealth is useful for scouting and sneak attacks, and certain missions may have it as a possible way to go about things, with or without a bonus reward for stealth.

 

[oldmanpaco]

I don't think I could care any less about stealth.

 

[Lacrymas]

Yeah, it's weird we are even talking about it so much ;d

 

[lili]

If only it actually made avoiding the trash combat possible...

 

[Lacrymas]

Didn't they reduce the trash fights as the patches went on?

 

[santino27]

Didn't they reduce the trash fights as the patches went on?

They did, although there's still a lot of fluff.

 

[Rostere]

You must really suck ass at the game if you had trouble with trash fights in PoE.

 

[DeepOcean]

Commandos style stealth would be huge incline if they manage to pull it off, it would mean a massive improvement on level design of dungeons as well as you would need to design things to take stealth in consideration. It would be great too to break the monotony of combat, combat, combat and pulling those X-COM ambushes off would be great, pulling a deadly flintlock barrage over some unsuspecting fools would be great.

Problem is that commandos is a mission based game where you waste ALOT of time on a mission, imagine the amount of work that would require to consistently implement on a RPG game? You would easily more than double the work hour on an area as you would need to bother with offering combat encounters for players that only care about combat and design the areas for all this stealth... In the end, this will be the first thing to go on the chopping block when the time to make cuts come.

The original PoE Raedric Hold seemed to me to be the template they were thinking for the rest of the game, when it became obvious they would run out of budget if they wasted so much time on an area like they did, they used the trash mob filler combat romp model for the areas. I'm skeptical but hope they succeed, I think they won't and this will be gimmicky.