Preview Pillars of Eternity Presentation at PAX East 2015

[Jedi Master Radek]

Heroes with fucking 800 hp? So inelegant

 

[Sensuki]

Combat is manageable by default, but there might be people who prefer slow-mo instead of pausing.

No offense, but you've never played it. I have, and even though it's completely fine for me - I wholeheartedly acknowledge the complaints about the speed. They are not actually due to the speed of actions, just the lethality of combat and length of encounters IMO.

 

[LeStryfe79]

What's the GotY emote again?

 

[Athelas]

Combat is manageable by default, but there might be people who prefer slow-mo instead of pausing.

No offense, but you've never played it. I have, and even though it's completely fine for me - I wholeheartedly acknowledge the complaints about the speed. They are not actually due to the speed of actions, just the lethality of combat and length of encounters IMO.

It's intentional to some extent. The idea seems to be that if you want combat to be less lethal on your characters, you have to sacrifice offense for increased deflection/DR.

I do think the speed of actions could be toned down a bit as well.

 

[Durante]

I think the speed is perfectly fine. It actually seems slower in the more recent versions than IE combat.

The whole point of RTwP is pausing when you need to perform complex actions.

 

[Sensuki]

You can only increase your DR so high, and it's not going to do much against hits for 90 damage. Deflection is the same. There might be one build where you can slow the damage down to a crawl against many enemies, but then one enemy comes along with much higher accuracy than the others and makes short work of you.

I made a fairly defensive chanter (not quite 100 Deflection, or maybe close to it) and deliberately positioned her so that she took most of the aggro and it did decrease the damage taken by the party in several encounters ... it didn't stop enemies from dying very quickly though.

It actually seems slower in the more recent versions than IE combat.

You're kidding right? Heaps of encounters in the IE games go for quite a long time.

 

[Athelas]

Well, I assume you're paying attention to damage types. If someone would attack enemies with damage types that they have high DR against, I imagine combat will take quite a bit longer.

Sword and Shield style fighters/paladins have great longevity, you don't really need to go the min-max extremes I went to.

I also brought up DR/deflection boosts because they typically slow your attack rate, making combat play out slower to some extent.

 

[Sensuki]

No, I wasn't paying any attention to damage types. I never swapped weapons over or deliberately used spells that I knew enemies were weak against. Just rolled with what I had. I would have taken less damage if the fucking auto-attack AI didn't make my characters run at enemies if they got hit by a ranged attack though.

The character I made wasn't super-duper bullshit high Deflection. It's a good idea to have one of those types of characters in the party because they soak up a fair bit of damage. Chanters are a good pick for them because well, they don't actually do anything except auto-attack and cast invocations ... of which the speed of their acquisition is not determined by action speed at all.

Probably going to have to play around with numbers post-release

 

[Durante]

You're kidding right? Heaps of encounters in the IE games go for quite a long time.

Not at all. I replayed Icewind Dale in 2014 and the majority of the encounters are over in a flash of (un-paused) game time. I probably spent more game time buffing than fighting most of them.

 

[Sensuki]

I suppose you spent half of the game rest spamming too, because spells are per-rest. Apparently there are many people out there that beat some of the IE games by abusing cloudkill/web and rest spam combos and then complained about the combat ... lol.

Here's my last playthrough of it: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLIRfCmyR7ijJU11xQVn2SXIwmeuajTkom

No rest spamming (and not much pre-buffing either, unnecessary).

 

[hiver]

Its not about the "speed" or lethality, damage or DR. Its about the fact that not a single character or creature moves and positions in combat in anything even resembling natural movement anyone can naturally rely to.
Failure to properly desing the Real Time component of RTwP system. Which ive said already several times.
Plus the engagement is available to every creature which has further negative influences on movement and positioning - which results in a combat system that needs slow-mo to be understandable.

-
JC ... ill take that one as a return for my recent comment in another topic so 1:1 by my count.

 

[Shadenuat]

"I always play a fighter"
MCA:

And then Paradox bribed people

I wish we could hear more about the game from not-Sawyer

 

[J_C]

Combat is manageable by default, but there might be people who prefer slow-mo instead of pausing.

No offense, but you've never played it. I have, and even though it's completely fine for me - I wholeheartedly acknowledge the complaints about the speed. They are not actually due to the speed of actions, just the lethality of combat and length of encounters IMO.

No offense taken. I base my opinion on what I saw obviously. And from looking at Josh playing it, the speed and lenght of encounters look fine to me. Maybe it needs some tweeking, but having a little shorter than optimal encounters doesn't seem to be too big of a problem to me. And what is optimal? You might want to have longer ones, maybe somebody wants shorter.

 

[Durante]

I suppose you spent half of the game rest spamming too, because spells are per-rest. Apparently there are many people out there that beat some of the IE games by abusing cloudkill/web and rest spam combos and then complained about the combat ... lol.

You get a lot of useful low-level spells at higher levels. I don't know what you consider "rest-spamming", but obviously I did use the resting mechanic that the game provides. I never complained about its combat because honestly it's great -- outside of interface shortcomings such as the already mentioned lack of area indicators when targeting spells, and technical issues such as pathfinding.

Anyway, those are just digressions. I quite simply fundamentally disagree with the idea that the battles we see here are too fast. Personally, I see the real-time part of RTwP games as something where you observe how actions play out and not the part of the game where you directly give complicated orders, so having it run at a good pace is desirable.

 

[tuluse]

I think the majority of the audience (including some Codexers) will interpret them as quite Biowarey although of course it's not really that different from anything Morte, Annah and Grace might have said to each other in PS:T

:mcadiditfirst:

Of course Bioware has been copying PS:T for the past 15 years

 

[Jedi Exile]

Party banter was present in Baldur's Gate too.

 

[tyrannosaurus rex]

Associating with Paradox is the worst possible thing they could do.

But then that tells a lot about them. And their future business model.

 

[Deleted member 7219]

Associating with Paradox is the worst possible thing they could do.

But then that tells a lot about them. And their future business model.

Why? They can walk away from Paradox whenever they want. They're not hooked up to them in any way other than to use them as the distributor for PoE. The IP and all design decisions rest with Obsidian.

It isn't like Lando Calrissian's deal with the Empire. Paradox can't force Obsidian to do anything they don't want to. If Obsidian want to go with someone else for PoE 2, they can.

I call that a fucking good deal. If Obsidian teamed up with EA, Bethesda or Atari they would not have gotten anything like that.

 

[Infinitron]

I had assumed that Paradox provided the additional funding for the project after it was delayed, but apparently they didn't. Strictly a distribution deal.

 

[tyrannosaurus rex]

But I didn't say anything of the sort, yet you think I did even thought it's not written, which means your head imagined it all.

Letting Paradox handle Q/A when all their products come out even more broken and featureless than Obsidian's is worthy.

And when the business model they're the most used to market is 2 lines script DLC whoring every 2 month, that becomes even more .


Nice save UI. I love wooden low reliefs. Too bad the game UI is a Microsoft office stock wood texture.

 

[Deleted member 7219]

But I didn't say anything of the sort, yet you think I did even thought it's not written, which means your head imagined it all.

Not sure what this means, but ok...

Letting Paradox handle Q/A when all their products come out even more broken and featureless than Obsidian's is worthy.

I'd like to see a citation for your claim that Paradox are handling QA.

And when the business model they're the most used to market is 2 lines script DLC whoring every 2 month, that becomes even more .

Would somebody care to translate? I don't speak dumbfuck.

 

[Sensuki]

Obsidian have 8 internal QA, Paradox have like 12 external testers. I think Paradox focus on localization testing, among other things. It's important for sales that the translations be good.

 

[tyrannosaurus rex]

It was explicitly stated that Paradox handled the QA a few month ago. But then maybe the deal changed, hopefully, after proven incompetence.


Paradox releases blank state games, nearly full price, then sells a boatload of DLCs with barely any content in them, all absurdly expansive. They're the worst offenders. That's the games they actually care about. They also publish a whole bunch of shovelwares too.


But then I thought that the slaphead representative in the video should have been enough to give you a clue.

 

[Sensuki]

No, they said Paradox would be providing some QA.

The actual testing of the game is mostly on Obsidian's internal QA ... and the beta backers I guess.

 

[SausageInYourFace]

I am not really in the loop for this game so this might be a silly question but .. the "You must gather your party.." thingy that got a bunch of laughs, was that just a joke for the presentation or will that actually be in the final game?