Eternity Pillars of Eternity + The White March Expansion Thread

[Florian Gheorghe]

I tend to think that if Gamespot gave it a 5 then it's a must have

 

[Florian Gheorghe]

Seriously now that site should be taken down as with gametrailers. What's the point?

 

[ArchAngel]

Gamespot gives it a 5. And still no Underrail review from them.
http://www.gamespot.com/reviews/pillars-of-eternity-the-white-march-part-2-review/1900-6416370/

That review is strange. After reading it I don't understand why give it a 5.

 

[Blackguard]

I love all of these critics bitching about having to play an RPG when they just want to "explore a world". I haven't played Betheda's latest offerings, do you fight like 1 fucking enemy every 10 hours or something

This is something that really makes me hate mainstream RPG reviews. For years now not being completely "open world" has been seen as a flaw. Which is just fucking retarded.

 

[Somberlain]

Combat is miles better now than it was at release.

Is it?

I played PoE during the release week and it was a boring and buggy mess. I didn't touch the game at all after that, nor did I follow the updates and development. Since I heard that the expansions are much better and there's been loads of improvements, I bough White March 1 and 2 and started again yesterday. And I fail to see any huge improvements in combat, or in the game in general.

I haven't noticed any bugs and there are a few obvious improvement like ability to use stealth individually, but the game doesn't feel much different than at the time of release. Combat is still an annoying clusterfuck with horrible visual feedback. Seriously, an enemy can be blinded, frightened, dazed, sickened, flanked, distracted, hobbled and weakened at the same time and you couldn't even tell without individually checking its status

I'm still looking forward to White Marches because of their alleged improvements in itemization, combat and stuff but reaching them is a pain. The base game is so banal and bland that I'm falling asleep. This is like the first 15 hours of Boreland 2.

 

[AN4RCHID]

One saving grace is the new Story Mode difficulty setting.

/10

 

[AwesomeButton]

My guess is you have been playing up to the end of Act I at most, and you have been playing at a non-PotD difficulty.

I've been playing since the BB 238 (September 2014) where I have about 70 hours, then in my longest playthrough I started with the release version I made around 70-something hours (they added a realtime hours counter on savegames before they made naming savegames possible), I did some attempts at soloing with different classes on PotD, and I'm now doing a second big playthrough where I passed Act I with a 2.03 version, and I'm now running the 3.01 version. Just hit 40 hours of this yesterday. I've never progressed past Act II though. Back in 2015 I decided that in the game's current state, I'd just spoil it.

The major changes to combat that I can mention are the loosening of the penalties for breaking Engagement (at some point before August 2015) and the addition of enemy behavior scripting, which in effect added some rudimentary AI where there used to be just one targeting clause: "Attack the next nearest enemy character" that was never being reevaluated, so it was possible to kite an enemy indeifnetly as long as your character could run faster than the enemy character chasing him. Look up Sensuki's videos to see what I mean. It was that bad.

Combined with the rebalancing of abilities, of which there has been too mmuch for me to remember it in sequence, combat on PotD at least is challenging enough and provokes some creativity and looking for counters to enemy abilities on the player's part. Also enemies will now reaquire targets in mid-combat. The battle I had with the adventuring party on the second floor of the Goose and Fox was very nice in that regard.

I'm not one to advocate PoE but the combat is waay improved since the release. True, that's partly due to the release being a prematurely delivered beta, because the budget ran out, but the fact is that there was continuous work post release.

It would be wrong to make a judgement of the combat just based on Act I, where you can't reach more than 4th-5th level rigt now. It starts to get interesting at levels 6 and upwards, where you have. ore abilities and more options. Also more variety of party members if you're not using a custom party.

Another reason for needing to reach at least Defiance bay in order to judge combat is that before you reach level 6 you're mostly (with very few exceptions) fighting enemies who are themselves around lvl 5, and who have very few abilities/spells they can use. The biggest change to enemy behavior that came with TWMI was that enemies started using their abilities. So basically you need touger enemies in order to try out more complex combat. That was a fact in BG as well.

 

[Immortal]

Combat is miles better now than it was at release.

on Hard difficulty up to Defiance bay, I have noticed zero difference. How is combat changed at all?

 

[AwesomeButton]

Don't be lazy. Read my previous post, I've answered that.

 

[Somberlain]

I guess I'll soldier on to see some higher level gameplay then. But oh god, it's so fucking boring so far

 

[Infinitron]

Seriously, an enemy can be blinded, frightened, dazed, sickened, flanked, distracted, hobbled and weakened at the same time

Pillars of Eternity causes cognitive dissonance to people who are very used to the high level AD&D experience of BG2 - the amount of active abilities available is reminiscent of high-level IE gameplay, but the actual stakes are low as you'd expect from a low-level RPG. Yes, you can blind, hobble, knock down and all these other things, but all those abilities and options are not critical actions in some HIGH STAKES DO-OR-DIE TACTICAL DUELING experience, they are just things that you can "do".

Basically the IE games train you to expect a stronger correlation between the number of abilities your party possesses and the "true difficulty" of combat, and PoE confounds that expectation. I believe this is an important reason for much of the dissatisfaction with the game. Even before looking at things like "encounter design" and "itemization", this fundamental premise of its core gameplay just rubs some people the wrong way

 

[AwesomeButton]

I guess I'll soldier on to see some higher level gameplay then. But oh god, it's so fucking boring so far

I played BG intensively in the months before PoE's release and I was immensly bored with combat with low-level BG characters There seemed to be nothing to do except wait for successful dice rolls and keep your fingers crossed that you successful rolls will arrive before the enemy's.

Honestly, I'd still prefer a PoE with a carbon copy of IE combat, not because that combat was perfect, but because I am more accustomed to it. And in some respects, yes, it is a lot better. But this was never on Josh's agenda, and I'm rarher cross that he never admitted to it during development.

 

[Trashos]

Guys, can you tell me more about the encounter design in the expansions? Is difficulty still heavily dependent on the number of enemies? Does it look like they have designers who can appreciate BG2 combat now?

 

[AwesomeButton]

Guys, can you tell me more about the encounter design in the expansions? Is difficulty still heavily dependent on the number of enemies? Does it look like they have designers who can appreciate BG2 combat now?

I thought it's better in TWMI and I've written about that here. Mostly due to the same factors - higher level enemies and higher level party provide more options during battle. Additionally, area and encounter design are improved, so that you can rarely get by with just blocking the doorways, like you can in the base game, and enemies now have good backline variants that cause damage while you're pinned down by their frontline variants.

People who have played TWM2 say it's actually better than TWM1 but I haven't reached it yet.

 

[Rev]

I guess I'll soldier on to see some higher level gameplay then. But oh god, it's so fucking boring so far

I know everything is subjective, but if you managed to endure or even enjoy previous Obsidian games, you shouldn't have too much problems with PoE. After all, despite all the flaws it may have, it still has a far better gameplay than all their other products, not that it means much since every other Obsidian games were so flawed to the point of being almost unplayable.
I mean, some of them had better stories and/or characters (MotB) or more reactivity, cooler factions and more quest approaches and solutions (New Vegas) and so many of us loved them (myself included), but really, they were just terrible to play.

Guys, can you tell me more about the encounter design in the expansions? Is difficulty still heavily dependent on the number of enemies? Does it look like they have designers who can appreciate BG2 combat now?

I thought it's better in TWMI and I've written about that here. Mostly due to the same factors - higher level enemies and higher level party provide more options during battle. Additionally, area and encounter design are improved, so that you can rarely get by with just blocking the doorways, like you can in the base game, and enemies now have good backline variants that cause damage while you're pinned down by their frontline variants.

People who have played TWM2 say it's actually better than TWM1 but I haven't reached it yet.

In TWM2 there's more variety in the encounter design, thanks to the inclusion of enemy monks and other classes that didn't appear in the base game or TWM1 (or were very rare). The eyeless are not too big of a deal, though.
Beyond that, however, the good thing is that the new dungeons are on Raedric's Hold level and not like the Skaen's Temple shit, and you can reach your objective through more than one way (not just by killing thousands of mobs) most of the time.

 

[Prime Junta]

FO:NV is not terrible to play. I wouldn't call it great, mind, but it's a far cry from terrible. It's head and shoulders above KOTOR 2, NWN 2, or Alpha Protocol anyway, and most of what's wrong with it, it inherited from FO3 which is not their fault.

With the Josh mod it's quite nice actually... with certain caveats, like sticking to real-time ranged combat. VATS sucks ofc.

 

[Rev]

FO:NV is not terrible to play. I wouldn't call it great, mind, but it's a far cry from terrible. It's head and shoulders above KOTOR 2, NWN 2, or Alpha Protocol anyway, and most of what's wrong with it, it inherited from FO3 which is not their fault.

With the Josh mod it's quite nice actually... with certain caveats, like sticking to real-time ranged combat. VATS sucks ofc.

I agree that it's better than KotOR, NWN2 or AP, and that most of its flaws comes from Bethesda's legacy. Also, Obsidian didn't have the time to fix everything (and probably Bethesda wouldn't have allowed them to change to much of their formula), but still the shooter mechanics are just bad imo. It gets even worse in the dlcs, where every trash mob has tons of HP and you have to use half of your ammo to kill some goddamn roboscorpions or lobotomites because of the godawful level scaling.
Thankfully, in most of the game you can avoid combat and the reactivity, faction system and quest design are excelent.

 

[Anthedon]

Seriously, an enemy can be blinded, frightened, dazed, sickened, flanked, distracted, hobbled and weakened at the same time

Pillars of Eternity causes cognitive dissonance to people who are very used to the high level AD&D experience of BG2 - the amount of active abilities available is reminiscent of a high-level experience, but the actual stakes are low as you'd expect from a low-level RPG. Yes, you can blind, hobble, knock down and all these other things, but all those abilities and options are not critical actions in some HIGH STAKES DO-OR-DIE TACTICAL DUELING experience, they are just things that you can "do".

A well placed confuse/petrify/stun can turn the tide of a fight, at least in TWM encounters. A number of the other debuffs are not really consequential though, yeah. It'd probably smart to get rid of them or make them matter more. Like Alp or Web in the IE games when it comes to low level stuff as good examples.

The buff UI is also pretty meh. The constant hovering over character portraits because it displays only a certain number of afflictions was solved long ago by the IE games. The portraits got cluttered pretty bad at higher levels but you could still see what was going on at a glance if you know what to look out for.

 

[Zetor]

In general I like TWM encounter design a lot more than vanilla POE (part 1 so far), especially the emphasis on enemy human/humanoid parties. That said, in many ways it's still possible to cheese them by chokepointing. E.g. my level 9 POTD party managed to take out the Old Dunryd Hunting Lodge without taking anything more serious than a scratch - and those dudes are extremely dangerous high-level spellcasters - just by having my tank pull them into a nearby clearing with only a winding road as an entrance. Most of them couldn't approach or get LOS on the party members as they slaughtered them with ranged AOE attacks... the only things they could hit were throwaway chanter summons.

edit:

I'm currently having some trouble, as in my party getting beaten three times in a row, when I get back to the temple in stallwart for that quest there (I don't want to spoil it).

My party composition is somewhat funny - I had to replace Aloth with something, so I got Grieving Mother, and I also took Maneha to try out a barbarian, a class I'm very skeptical of. I had to send aloth on a stronghold related mission. I don't know why but he was the only one that I had the option ("option") to send.

The reason I thought to tell you this is the discussion above. Unlike most encounters, this enemy group tries to go for GM and Durance immediately, with its front-liners, while the back line is casting crowd control spells.

So any advice for that encounter on PotD for a 8-lvl party composed of Human Paladin, Eder, Durance, Pallegina, Maneha, Grieving Mother, is welcome.

Hmm, I didn't have much trouble there, though my team was level 9. I set up like this (the two squishies are stealthed in the corner, though I think you get revealed in the conversation anyway):

Spoiler

The composition is not that dissimilar from yours (you can sub my monk's position for Maneha and Pallegina / your paladin's position for my chanter... the two squishies would be GM and Durance in your case). My backliners didn't really draw fire except for one melee enemy, but I could just charm him with my cipher. My druid's insanely OP Relentless Storm probably helped a lot, though.

 

[One-and-a-half-Ivan]

FO:NV is not terrible to play. I wouldn't call it great, mind, but it's a far cry from terrible. It's head and shoulders above KOTOR 2, NWN 2, or Alpha Protocol anyway, and most of what's wrong with it, it inherited from FO3 which is not their fault.

With the Josh mod it's quite nice actually... with certain caveats, like sticking to real-time ranged combat. VATS sucks ofc.

TBQH, I really enjoyed AP's gameplay. It felt very gamey and fun (to me at least).

 

[AwesomeButton]

I'm currently having some trouble, as in my party getting beaten three times in a row, when I get back to the temple in stallwart for that quest there (I don't want to spoil it).

My party composition is somewhat funny - I had to replace Aloth with something, so I got Grieving Mother, and I also took Maneha to try out a barbarian, a class I'm very skeptical of. I had to send aloth on a stronghold related mission. I don't know why but he was the only one that I had the option ("option") to send.

The reason I thought to tell you this is the discussion above. Unlike most encounters, this enemy group tries to go for GM and Durance immediately, with its front-liners, while the back line is casting crowd control spells.

So any advice for that encounter on PotD for a 8-lvl party composed of Human Paladin, Eder, Durance, Pallegina, Maneha, Grieving Mother, is welcome.

Hmm, I didn't have much trouble there, though my team was level 9. I set up like this (the two squishies are stealthed in the corner, though I think you get revealed in the conversation anyway):

The composition is not that dissimilar from yours (you can sub my monk's position for Maneha and Pallegina / your paladin's position for my chanter... the two squishies would be GM and Durance in your case). My backliners didn't really draw fire except for one melee enemy, but I could just charm him with my cipher. My druid's insanely OP Relentless Storm probably helped a lot, though.

Thanks. I beat them a few minutes ago. Actually there's a way to have a battle inevitably, just as soon as you enter the temple, so I couldn't position the party in advance. How this can happen:

Spoiler

Tell the dwarf that his sister's amulet is in the possession of the priests, and that they are actually thieves. He then goes directly to the temple and you can't avoid battle, but at least he fights at your side. He is quite a good fighter.

This time I formed a line to intercept their Hand-to-hand characters and dealt with them one by one. I used GM to dominate the toughest one for a while, and took advantage of him hitting his own guys. I managed to preserve both GM and Durance, GM almost until the end of the battle. The two toughest fighters remained in the end. One of them finally got killed by a summoned wood beetle that struck him with poison, which was doing raw damage. The other one was regenerating faster than I could cause damage with 3 of my characters (my paladin, Pallegina and Eder) + a summoned Adra Animat + the dwarf questgiver. If it wasn't for Durance's casting two Divine Marks which took down some of his Deflection while causing damage, he would have just regenerated to full health and picked my characters off.

 

[Maculo]

In general I like TWM encounter design a lot more than vanilla POE (part 1 so far), especially the emphasis on enemy human/humanoid parties. That said, in many ways it's still possible to cheese them by chokepointing. E.g. my level 9 POTD party managed to take out the Old Dunryd Hunting Lodge without taking anything more serious than a scratch - and those dudes are extremely dangerous high-level spellcasters - just by having my tank pull them into a nearby clearing with only a winding road as an entrance. Most of them couldn't approach or get LOS on the party members as they slaughtered them with ranged AOE attacks... the only things they could hit were throwaway chanter summons.

Unless changed, there is a funny way to coast through most outdoors fights with the following:

• put your party on the other side of the map;
• pull the enemies with a Chanter (movement talent helps); and
  
• have the Chanter cast the Frost Trail spell, while running back to the main party.

From my experience, this feeds the enemies into a meat grinder one-by-one. Even if they do pack in again, the damage mostly is done already.

 

[AwesomeButton]

Unless changed, there is a funny way to coast through most outdoors fights with the following:

• put your party on the other side of the map;
• pull the enemies with a Chanter (movement talent helps); and
  
• have the Chanter cast the Frost Trail spell, while running back to the main party.

From my experience, this feeds the enemies into a meat grinder one-by-one. Even if they do pack in again, the damage mostly is done already.

Since the addition of enemy AI the enemies have a certain radius within which they will chase you before they return to their original positions.

 

[Maculo]

Figures, it was too funny to find the main Bounty completely separated from its group.

 

[Trashos]

Thanks for the replies. So, it sounds like the situation with the encounter design is considerably improved, but not to great heights. At least that's what I got from what you guys wrote.

I was kind of hoping to see dangerous LONE enemies, but I guess the current system does not support those. (well, we have the dragons, but I am talking about more regular enemies)

I thought it's better in TWMI and I've written about that here. Mostly due to the same factors - higher level enemies and higher level party provide more options during battle. Additionally, area and encounter design are improved, so that you can rarely get by with just blocking the doorways, like you can in the base game, and enemies now have good backline variants that cause damage while you're pinned down by their frontline variants.

People who have played TWM2 say it's actually better than TWM1 but I haven't reached it yet.

Bloody hell, that link is well thought out, exceptionally written, and mostly relateable. Great job, Button!