Eternity Pillars of Eternity + The White March Expansion Thread

[Great Deceiver]

Thanks, I've installed the whole thing and started a new game on Path of the Damned (my first playthrough was on Hard).

edit: they've managed to improve the loadtimes immensely since the first time I played - hopefully they can do the same for Tyranny.

 

[Ent]

Are guns any good?

 

[dukeofwhales]

I haven't done the maths but last I heard they're only really worth it for your first attack of a battle before switching to something with a shorter recovery time. Personally I couldn't be bothered with micromanaging like that so I didn't use them.

 

[Prime Junta]

Are guns any good?

Yes.

(Like anything else, you need to build around them and use them right to make the most of them.)

 

[Bonerbill]

Only real complaint is that the new companions are a bit bland.

A druggie monk is anything but bland

 

[Grunker]

Well, it's not the concepts so much as the execution.

Zahua is the most developed character and never becomes much besides his initial gimmick.

Devil-in-Caroc treads awesome territory in recruitment conversation and concept, but it all amounts to "do you kill a random guy to find VENGEANCE(tm) or PEACE(tm)", and on top of that she is easily the worst companion, being a rogue with a built-in terrible armor with -40% action speed.

Maneha is barely fleshed out at all and when the game claims she's a daring-do adventurer-type daredevil we'll have to take its word for it because there sure as hell isn't much in her dialogue that lets us know. She has an interesting choice built-in but that's about it.

But I mean, that's a PoE standard. Besides Durance none of the companions are great, and Grieving Mother is the only other one with surprises and interesting developments. Maybe Aloth too, but there's not much depth to the twists he offers.

 

[Prime Junta]

Eh, the companions are a bit of a mixed bag. I really liked Edér, Sagani, and Zahua, thought Aloth, Pallegina, Kana, and Hiravias were pretty cool, didn't care much for GM, Durance, Maneha, or the Devil of Caroc. I also dug the companion interactions a lot.

With the Devil and Maneha it wasn't that they were actively bad, just underdeveloped (Maneha) or a good concept poorly executed (Devil). GM and Durance felt out of place, like someone playing a church organ in a swing band, plus their quests weren't really -- it was just, rest and talk to them, rinse, repeat, like MCA wanted to write a novella but had to shoehorn it into some companion dialogues/monologues.

 

[Grunker]

Durance felt out of place because he was actually well-written. He tells you the whole story of setting without a single lore-dump, from different angles, discuss the various stakes in it and has a character arc beyond a mere quest-fork where the player decides between A and B.

Grieving is pretty poorly written, but at least her story is genuinely interesting, told without constant lore-spurts and deeply connected to the world.

 

[retamar]

Yeah companions are mediocre at best, Devil of Caroc is a great concept poorly developed. Only Durance and Grieving Mother have some depth and interesting backgrounds. It seems like PoE tried as much as possible to be a good game but fell short on most of what it tried. I looks to me like the underestimated the cost of making such a game.
Anyways, I liked the game, quite a lot, I am impressed they are still fixing bugs, that shows how attached they are to this game. I am looking forward to see what they got for us on the next one.

 

[Infinitron]

He tells you the whole story of setting without a single lore-dump, from different angles, discuss the various stakes in it and has a character arc beyond a mere quest-fork where the player decides between A and B.

Well, in Durance's case, there's not even a fork.

If you take the time to look beyond "gud writing", you'll see that there's a reason why Chris Avellone disavowed his work on Durance. He's an interesting, vibrant character, but his story is not well-designed.

Also, "stream of consciousness dumps" are no better than lore dumps in terms of their impact on pacing.

 

[HoboForEternity]

He tells you the whole story of setting without a single lore-dump, from different angles, discuss the various stakes in it and has a character arc beyond a mere quest-fork where the player decides between A and B.

Well, in Durance's case, there's not even a fork.

If you take the time to look beyond "gud writing", you'll see that there's a reason why Chris Avellone disavowed his work on Durance. He's an interesting, vibrant character, but his story is not well-designed.

Also, "stream of consciousness dumps" are no better than "lore dumps" in terms of their impact on pacing.

but we were supposed to explore a dungeon inside his mind and told with combination of environmental storytelling and dialogues. The mind dungeon was cut off and we get the great wall of text instead

 

[Prime Junta]

Durance felt out of place because he was actually well-written. He tells you the whole story of setting without a single lore-dump, from different angles, discuss the various stakes in it and has a character arc beyond a mere quest-fork where the player decides between A and B.

He was well-written, but the writing style was completely different from anything else in the game, right from the first dialog at Magran's Fork. It's like he waltzed in from a completely different game.

(Edit, addendum: would I have liked to play a game that was all like Durance and the GM? Hell yes.)

 

[jaydee2k]

Edér was a pretty cool companion actually. I liked his humour and yes there is some in PoE.
Aloth is my favourite though. By the way exists a list out there about who wrote which character?

 

[Bonerbill]

Funny how you dicks are getting into a pissing contest on something as subjective as companion preference. I pretty much enjoyed all the companions in PoE, especially Eder and Hiravias because I'm a fan of characters with humor (an there interactions with each other are hilarious). My only problem with them is they didn't have that much interaction with the main plot of the game like Tyranny's characters, which is something I hope they improved in PoE2.

 

[Starwars]

Edér and Zahua were written by Eric Fenstermaker (these are my favorite companions)
Grieving Mother and Durance were Avellone's (though I think Fenstermaker and Carrie Patel wrote for them also?)
Sagani, Aloth, Devil of Caroc and Maneha were written by Carrie Patel
Hiravias was written by Matt McLean
Pallegina was written by Josh Sawyer
Kana was written by... someone I don't recall

Think that's it?

 

[jaydee2k]

Thanks !

 

[Infinitron]

Kana was written by... someone I don't recall

Olivia Veras.

 

[Grunker]

Durance felt out of place because he was actually well-written. He tells you the whole story of setting without a single lore-dump, from different angles, discuss the various stakes in it and has a character arc beyond a mere quest-fork where the player decides between A and B.

He was well-written, but the writing style was completely different from anything else in the game, right from the first dialog at Magran's Fork.

Exactly - that's precisely why I liked him. Unlike the rest of the game he was alive with personality and emotion, not a dry Wikipedia summary dispensing quests. I believe VD quoted my ghost for something to that effect in his review.

White March improved the main story considerably here with its mysteries and tales of doom, but strangely the companions remained poorly developed.

(Edit, addendum: would I have liked to play a game that was all like Durance and the GM? Hell yes.)

See - now we're talking

his story is not well-designed.

I don't care how "well designed" text is if it fails at the minimum requirement of being well-written.

Funny how you dicks are getting into a pissing contest

yeah i know i too hate discussion on a discussion board

 

[Starwars]

Durance is one of my favorites and certainly feels well-developed but he's also one of those characters, sorta like Ulysses, where he just spews out words at times where it could've been better to have it kept shorter and simpler. I mean, part of it is his character of course but there are many passages in his dialogue which I feel are very... over-written so to speak.

Think he's very important to the game overall though and it would've been a much weaker game without him, but yeah, for me there is quite a lot of fat to trim away in his dialogues, a lot of repetition as well. Again, Ulysses had a similar problem.

 

[Grunker]

If we're going with the button hell why don't we have one for "sort of agree"

 

[Starwars]

Not edgy enough.

 

[Prime Junta]

I don't care how "well designed" text is if it fails at the minimum requirement of being well-written.

I'm a huge sucker for well-written text (just watch me swoon over that furry game those Estonian comrades are making), but... in a game, if I have to choose only one, I'll take well-designed over well-written any day of the week. Games aren't books. If the design doesn't work, the best writing in the world won't save them, and if it does, I find it pretty easy to get past clunky writing.

(BTW I'd be very surprised if MCA disagreed, as I can't think of anyone who does narrative design for games as well as he does. With Durance and GM, it's clear that either he wasn't given enough room to do what he does, or what he did ended up on the cutting-room floor. Whatever the reasons, it's out of step with the rest of it -- and a lot of the companion content in Pillars was quite competently designed and implemented.)

 

[Grunker]

Man, I shouldn't have deleted that disclaimer. Labeling me a storyfag is a giant strawman. That's why I specifically wrote "I don't care how "well designed" text is if it fails at the minimum requirement of being well written." Text. Not the whole game.

Of course I agree games are mechanical beasts and so the most important thing for a game on a whole is mechanics. But if you introduce literary objects in your game - such as, oh, I dunno, a full-fledged character in the form of a companion - and you spend a lot text on that project, the writing is the bread and butter of it, just as mechanics are for combat. You can't excuse shitty writing by saying "hey, there's a token choice at the end of the character's arc where you get to weigh in on their character development mechanically!" Any given thing should be judged on what it tries to accomplish and how well it succeeds. You have a lot of text? Well, the quality of that text plays a significant role.

Durance's writing is top notch (well, it's wordy and has some stream-of-consciousness problems, but these are insignificant next to the problems that plague the other companions). That it doesn't have the "cherry" of more mechanical interaction in the dialogue is a price I'm quite willing to pay when you compare to the alternatives.

EDIT: And again, him being out of place is a problem of the entire rest of the game. He feels out of place because he is vibrant and alive, not just because the "tone" is different

 

[Fairfax]

Grieving Mother and Durance were Avellone's (though I think Fenstermaker and Carrie Patel wrote for them also?)

MCA came up with the concepts and the overall design, but 3/4 of what he wrote got cut and Fenstermaker and Patel were the ones who actually implemented the companions.

 

[Sentinel]

Grieving Mother and Durance were Avellone's (though I think Fenstermaker and Carrie Patel wrote for them also?)

MCA came up with the concepts and the overall design, but 3/4 of what he wrote got cut and Fenstermaker and Patel were the ones who actually implemented the companions.

What? Fenstermaker said he only wrote Durance's reactions to some environments and added the ability for the player to call him out on his hypocrisy.

"I can tell you the extent of my work on Durance. I wrote (if I'm remembering right) some of his environmental reactivity (like, for example, what does he say when he sees a dragon or the Grieving Mother drowning in a pool of blood), and then all of his banter with other companions, and his interjections into other conversations. I also gave the player an opportunity to call him out on his self-deception and hypocrisy, because it seemed to me that some players would want to, and that they might be more inclined to keep him in their party if they could, despite him being not the nicest guy. I had to make some minor edits to get everything to line up and make sense when his dialogue was pared down for length, but not a whole lot. Chris chose what to cut, and it was fairly clean - there was a layer that could be removed without losing the base of the character. Carrie's work on the Grieving Mother would've been similar, though I'm not sure the specifics.

The cuts came for length. The three limiting factors were time to implement, art resources for the dream sequences, and VO budget. There was a target length we had set upfront for all companions, and we had to stick to it. Otherwise we'd be, for example, voicing maybe one out of every six lines for Durance and the Grieving Mother, and it'd be conspicuously incongruent with the other companions, who had maybe 2/3 of their lines voiced. Unfortunately in this case it meant cutting down characters that had had a lot of research and creative energy invested in them, and there were some good ideas there that it would've been interesting to explore. It was a shitty thing to have to do, but we'd never have been able to implement the original versions in time to ship."

http://www.rpgcodex.net/content.php?id=10231