Eternity Pillars of Eternity + The White March Expansion Thread

[Iznaliu]

Time for a new Codex Pillars retrospective! Can i write this one Infinitron?

Submit it and it will probably be looked at.

 

[Icewater]

Thread is tl;dr so: am I the only one who thinks the resting mechanics and other mechanics based around it sort of don't combine in a way that makes sense? Resting is so necessary and powerful in how it heals you, removes traumas, and restores all spells and per-rest abilities, etc. and it all seems designed assuming there'd be some serious restriction around when and where you can rest—something to force you to put off resting for as long as you can—but there just isn't. Camping supplies rain from the sky, and yet they're cheap to buy even if you couldn't find any. Resting at Caed Nua is free and it's not like it's hard to leave the area, go back there, rest, and then return. Inns cost money but it's an amount that's trivial past the first quarter of the game. In Baldur's Gate, camping out somewhere dangerous could end with your weakened party being eaten by ghouls but there's nothing like that in Pillars.

Basically, if resting is going to be so easy to pull off, why not make everything per-encounter? You could just rest every time you break a nail and then all that shit would nearly be per-encounter anyway.

Also, mechanics of the Stronghold largely suck. You run out of things to build a third of the way through the game and most of the stuff you can build isn't terribly helpful. Taking prisoners is useless. Invasions are annoying instead of threatening. Why the fuck can't I just close the gates instead of letting all these assholes demanding money or escorts in? Hope they do better in Pillars 2. The megadungeon was really cool, though.

 

[Roguey]

In Baldur's Gate, camping out somewhere dangerous could end with your weakened party being eaten by ghouls but there's nothing like that in Pillars.

*reloads*
*backtracks*

 

[Inf0mercial]

Yeah i am always in two minds with this, you can backtrack so easily with no consequences that the resting limit seems to just be for either self imposed challenge or a time waster.

I can't think of a way to change that, that is not either infuriating like Re spawning enemies even if it would make sense or stuff that will trigger the majority of players when they realise they have to advance or fail the quest that would just lead to save scumming.

Maybe if more areas were deeper or bigger and had re spawns for enemies if you left and came back, otherwise there is not punishment besides time for backtracking and resting at an inn then buying supplies.

I mean unless we went back to resting areas only in safe spots which would be way more fun, but with the resting system as it is you can't do that.

 

[Icewater]

In Baldur's Gate, camping out somewhere dangerous could end with your weakened party being eaten by ghouls but there's nothing like that in Pillars.

*reloads*
*backtracks*

Baldur's Gate isn't a perfect game—duh—but at least there's some mechanic in place to discourage resting and incentivize trying to get as far as you can before setting up camp. In Pillars there's only an arbitrary and irrelevant limit on camping supplies.

Edit: Oh yeah, post above reminded me: in Infinity Engine games, stuff respawns when you rest. That doesn't happen in Pillars.

Edit 2: That also doesn't address what is really the point of my post: why have resting as such a central mechanic if there's no downside to doing it as much as you can? It feels as if it was just copied over from the IE games with little thought given to what purpose it could serve.

 

[Roguey]

Baldur's Gate isn't a perfect game—duh—but at least there's some mechanic in place to discourage resting and incentivize trying to get as far as you can before setting up camp.

It's as irrelevant as Pillars's (according to Josh, whether it's the IE games or PoE, most players fight a single battle and then rest/reload if they get an encounter/backtrack to a safe area to rest if the RNG is too high).

Oh yeah, post above reminded me: in Infinity Engine games, stuff respawns when you rest. That doesn't happen in Pillars.

Only in certain areas of BG, and everyone hated it so much that they didn't do it at all in BG2.

 

[Icewater]

You're responding to select snippets of my posts and ignoring the overall point.

That's terror.

 

[<3sRichardSimmons]

The absurdly long load times were more than enough incentive against backtracking in PoE. No way I'm waiting through 3 cumulative minutes across 5 loading screens just to make sure Aloth doesn't fucking die.

 

[Roguey]

You're responding to select snippets of my posts and ignoring the overall point.

That's terror.

All right, an answer to your question: Josh wanted to preserve BG's combat pacing (where in any given map you have quite a few fights that don't require much attention that are intended to slowly whittle down your resources [health, spells, and/or consumables] and one or more bigger fights that require noticeably more attention but not necessarily a full-strength party unless an area where you can safely rest is nearby) but without putting harsher restrictions on strategic gameplay that would completely halt the progress of the average bumbling player. Given what happened with PoE, he has decided that this goal will never be satisfactorily met, which is why the sequel no longer does things this way and has abandoned classic combat pacing in favor of "everything demands your attention, but there's less of it" like other RPGs that have abandoned the illusion of strategic gameplay.

 

[Lacrymas]

Remember: people were complaining that easy mode was way too hard, so they added story mode. This doesn't prevent them from going all out on PotD, with dungeons trapping you inside and you being unable to backtrack to get more supplies, but they seem way too conservative with PotD and I don't know why. They have 5 difficulties, why does each one have to cater to the lowest common denominator of its stated goal? I just don't get it. Have BIG, EASY TO READ LETTERS SAYING: THIS MODE IS EXTREMELY DIFFICULT, DON'T TRY IT IF YOU DON'T KNOW WHAT YOU ARE DOING. ARE YOU SURE YOU WANT TO CONTINUE? REMEMBER, EXTREME DIFFICULTY!

PotD is already for very few masochists, so I don't see the reason for them to hold back -

 

[Luckmann]

according to Josh

Josh is full of shit, tho. I refuse to believe that "most" players backtrack after every single battle if RNG is "too high" (whatever that even means).

 

[Infinitron]

Remember: people were complaining that easy mode was way too hard, so they added story mode. This doesn't prevent them from going all out on PotD, with dungeons trapping you inside and you being unable to backtrack to get more supplies, but they seem way too conservative with PotD and I don't know why. They have 5 difficulties, why does each one have to cater to the lowest common denominator of its stated goal? I just don't get it. Have BIG, EASY TO READ LETTERS SAYING: THIS MODE IS EXTREMELY DIFFICULT, DON'T TRY IT IF YOU DON'T KNOW WHAT YOU ARE DOING. ARE YOU SURE YOU WANT TO CONTINUE? REMEMBER, EXTREME DIFFICULTY!

That would be an insufficient warning. "Extremely difficult" makes people think "enemies hit harder", it doesn't make them think "I will be trapped in this dungeon forever and have to restart the game".

It's not impossible, but you have to play very carefully with anything that can cause a strategic game over in these sorts of games. What if somebody wants harder enemies without being locked in dungeons? It would best be implemented as a separate "roguelike mode" type of thing.

 

[FreeKaner]

Remember: people were complaining that easy mode was way too hard, so they added story mode. This doesn't prevent them from going all out on PotD, with dungeons trapping you inside and you being unable to backtrack to get more supplies, but they seem way too conservative with PotD and I don't know why. They have 5 difficulties, why does each one have to cater to the lowest common denominator of its stated goal? I just don't get it. Have BIG, EASY TO READ LETTERS SAYING: THIS MODE IS EXTREMELY DIFFICULT, DON'T TRY IT IF YOU DON'T KNOW WHAT YOU ARE DOING. ARE YOU SURE YOU WANT TO CONTINUE? REMEMBER, EXTREME DIFFICULTY!

That would be an insufficient warning. "Extremely difficult" makes people think "enemies hit harder", it doesn't make them think "I will be trapped in this dungeon forever and have to restart the game".

It's not impossible, but you have to play very carefully with anything that can cause a strategic game over in these sorts of games. What if somebody wants harder enemies without being locked in dungeons? It would best be implemented as a separate "roguelike mode" type of thing.

How about it says "You will be eternally trapped in this cursed domain should you perish, choose this at your own peril".

 

[Cross]

In Baldur's Gate, camping out somewhere dangerous could end with your weakened party being eaten by ghouls but there's nothing like that in Pillars.

Campfire ambushes in Baldur's Gate do almost nothing to discourage rest spamming:

• the monsters that ambush you are always scripted to be the weakest type of enemy present in that area and therefore rarely pose a serious threat even if you're low on health;
• you get rewarded with XP for being ambushed;
• it's a dice roll to determine if you get ambushed, so you can always reload until you get an uninterrupted rest.

The real issue with PoE's resource management is the endurance system. In Baldur's Gate characters have a relatively low amount of health which doesn't regenerate after combat, so it's quite possible for deaths to occur if you play carelessly, and early on you don't have easy access to resurrection spells. In PoE however, endurance instantly regenerates after every encounter, even for downed characters. Depending on their class, characters have 4, 5 or 6 times as much health as they do endurance, meaning they can get 'killed' up to 5 times without any real consequences. The endurance system acts like a safety net that makes combat less threatening since it makes it virtually impossible for characters to die, made even worse by the fact that PoE lacks mechanics that would discourage continuing on at low health, such as being chunked/gibbed in Baldur's Gate, which made it impossible to resurrect that character.

 

[Parabalus]

Remember: people were complaining that easy mode was way too hard, so they added story mode. This doesn't prevent them from going all out on PotD, with dungeons trapping you inside and you being unable to backtrack to get more supplies, but they seem way too conservative with PotD and I don't know why. They have 5 difficulties, why does each one have to cater to the lowest common denominator of its stated goal? I just don't get it. Have BIG, EASY TO READ LETTERS SAYING: THIS MODE IS EXTREMELY DIFFICULT, DON'T TRY IT IF YOU DON'T KNOW WHAT YOU ARE DOING. ARE YOU SURE YOU WANT TO CONTINUE? REMEMBER, EXTREME DIFFICULTY!

That would be an insufficient warning. "Extremely difficult" makes people think "enemies hit harder", it doesn't make them think "I will be trapped in this dungeon forever and have to restart the game".

It's not impossible, but you have to play very carefully with anything that can cause a strategic game over in these sorts of games. What if somebody wants harder enemies without being locked in dungeons? It would best be implemented as a separate "roguelike mode" type of thing.

How about it says "You will be eternally trapped in this cursed domain should you perish, choose this at your own peril".

Don't really know why Josh feels so much empathy for mouthbreathers who backtrack for supplies after every fight, or why the 'Dex cares so much about teaching them the proper way of playing. Those are the same people who copy ironman saves and similar, who gives a damn?

A few more instances of stuff blocking your passage would be welcome, like the blood pit jump in Caed Nua, but anything systematical seems unneeded. To increase difficulty PoE needs a SCS-like mod which makes the AI use abilities better.

 

[Prime Junta]

Don't really know why Josh feels so much empathy for mouthbreathers who backtrack for supplies after every fight

They buy his games, and there are a lot more of them than people who actually know how to play them.

 

[Cross]

Don't really know why Josh feels so much empathy for mouthbreathers who backtrack for supplies after every fight

Probably because those mouthbreathers are his friends.

 

[Icewater]

All right, an answer to your question: Josh wanted to preserve BG's combat pacing (where in any given map you have quite a few fights that don't require much attention that are intended to slowly whittle down your resources [health, spells, and/or consumables] and one or more bigger fights that require noticeably more attention but not necessarily a full-strength party unless an area where you can safely rest is nearby) but without putting harsher restrictions on strategic gameplay that would completely halt the progress of the average bumbling player. Given what happened with PoE, he has decided that this goal will never be satisfactorily met, which is why the sequel no longer does things this way and has abandoned classic combat pacing in favor of "everything demands your attention, but there's less of it" like other RPGs that have abandoned the illusion of strategic gameplay.

Huh, well, good to hear they're tackling that in the sequel then.

 

[Lacrymas]

What if somebody wants harder enemies without being locked in dungeons? It would best be implemented as a separate "roguelike mode" type of thing.

They have 5 difficulties, it's their job to figure out each one to cover as many people's wishes as possible. At the end of the day, you can't please everyone, so that's not on the table at all. It doesn't matter if "someone wants harder enemies without being locked in dungeons", that's a very degenerate mindset because it leads to all kinds of "what ifs". I propose the game to autosave before you enter the dungeon, there's your compromise for the droolies. PotD is purposefully designed to be as challenging as possible, not "a bit more challenging than hard", so it should at least try to reach its goal. At one point, harder hitting enemies aren't what can push the difficulty up, it's either very tight strategic difficulty or brutal AI.

Also, if that big sign isn't warning enough, then people can simply restart the game at the first dungeon when they find out they can't go back if they "didn't sign up for that".

 

[AwesomeButton]

am I the only one who thinks the resting mechanics and other mechanics based around it sort of don't combine in a way that makes sense?

No, you are not. There are other intelligent human beings in this thread, but we are the minority. Read pages 239-241 of the deadfire thread to see an illustration of what we are faced with.

 

[Roguey]

Fairfax

If everything is epic, nothing is epic. If each battle is of more-or-less equal in terms of resource applicability, everything proceeds at at a similar pace. Additionally, I've never played in a D&D adventure where the tempo of resource consumption was paced to taper perfectly from the beginning to the end. There are almost invariably two or three (sometimes four) bigger moments within an adventure that encourage an up-tick in resource consumption followed by a strategic rest -- either by retreat or by fortification within the adventure area.

When talking about designing combat system you make a distinction between strategy and tactics. What is the difference?

The definitions are not used concretely, but strategies focus on planning or preparation and tactics focus on reactive elements "in the moment". A simplified way of looking at it might be to consider good tactics necessary to win battles, but good strategy is required to win wars.

In a D&D campaign, how you build your character is strategic. You're making choices for the future based on some amount of speculation. A wizard selecting magic missile for his or her spellbook is not necessarily a bold choice because its applicability is broad. A ranger selecting abominations as his or her favored enemy either knows something really specific about the setting and campaign or is making a wild gamble.

Similarly, gear selection and spell preparation is strategic -- how strategic depends on how limited the availability of options is in the field. If you can carry eight weapons at a time, per character, you don't need to be that careful. If it's like XCOM:EU, where most characters go into the field with one main weapon and one sidearm, it's a big deal.

Sometimes, a decision made in battle can be tactical and strategic. For example, using a limited resource ability (e.g. a high level spell). The most tactically efficient thing to do may be to spend the limited resource ability, but if you think you have more difficult enemies coming up prior to regaining that resource, you may want to hold off.

I like RPGs to have both tactical and strategic elements, which is more in line with the AD&D-based RPGs of the late 80s-early 2000s. I'm trying to ensure PE will have both layers for players to consider.

This doesn't prevent them from going all out on PotD, with dungeons trapping you inside and you being unable to backtrack to get more supplies, but they seem way too conservative with PotD and I don't know why. They have 5 difficulties, why does each one have to cater to the lowest common denominator of its stated goal?

I can personally test things on Hard, as can Bobby and a few other folks, but most of the other devs cannot. Or rather, they wouldn't really get anywhere. If I listened to them for tuning advice, Hard wouldn't be hard at all.

Near the very beginning, back when it was still Project Eternity, Josh was considering using Knights of the Chalice-style rest areas.

We've talked about it, but for now we're going to see how the rest areas work on their own. Some people on the team believe that if we limit the use of the rest locations it will be excessively punitive.

Knights of the Chalice generally allows players to re-use rest sites, but there's at least one area I remember that doesn't and I saw a lot of negative response to it.

Personally, I do worry about the potential for player dissatisfaction either if resting removes all challenge or if restricted resting makes things too frustrating. In any case, it's something we're going to be looking at and thinking about more as we continue development.

 

[Lacrymas]

If everything is epic, nothing is epic. If each battle is of more-or-less equal in terms of resource applicability, everything proceeds at at a similar pace. Additionally, I've never played in a D&D adventure where the tempo of resource consumption was paced to taper perfectly from the beginning to the end. There are almost invariably two or three (sometimes four) bigger moments within an adventure that encourage an up-tick in resource consumption followed by a strategic rest -- either by retreat or by fortification within the adventure area.

This is very true, which raises the question of how this is going to be put into practice in P2, where you have all your resources for every fight ever. I'm afraid this is going to lead to a "one tactic to rule them all" situation where you use the exact same abilities every fight because they work equally well for everything. Not that this wasn't the case in P1, too, though, so eh.

I can personally test things on Hard, as can Bobby and a few other folks, but most of the other devs cannot. Or rather, they wouldn't really get anywhere. If I listened to them for tuning advice, Hard wouldn't be hard at all.

Ah, this explains a lot of things. Devs not having mastery over their own systems is not a thing I had considered, but it's interesting. Maybe they should start playing more challenging and varied games.

Personally, I do worry about the potential for player dissatisfaction either if resting removes all challenge or if restricted resting makes things too frustrating. In any case, it's something we're going to be looking at and thinking about more as we continue development.

The end result is frustration however you slice it, though, due to the ridiculous loading times. In this context, the only not-frustrating way to play the game is playing it well. Which is ironic if you think about it. If Unity wasn't a piece of shit, and the game didn't force loading screens every two minutes on you, resting would've been a non-issue at all, making it virtually pointless as a system. Kinda like the IE games, I guess. I dunno, when they announced PoE1 and I was reading about how they were going to revolutionize resting and finally making it mean something I was pretty excited, but Josh didn't go far enough with it, he had the right ideas but backed out at the last moment and didn't make them really shine due to hypothetical (and maybe not so hypothetical) frustration on the player's side. But we've been over this countless times. Bring on the PoE2 beta.

 

[Roguey]

This is very true, which raises the question of how this is going to be put into practice in P2, where you have all your resources for every fight ever. I'm afraid this is going to lead to a "one tactic to rule them all" situation where you use the exact same abilities every fight because they work equally well for everything.

I imagine the goal is to make the encounters demanding enough to encourage the use of empowered spells (lest you get a character knock-out and the injuries that go with it, eventually requiring a rest to remove)

 

[Sannom]

PotD is already for very few masochists, so I don't see the reason for them to hold back -

Well, there is the fact that your proposed solutions feel much heavier in terms of programming and testing rather than just increasing numbers on all creatures.

 

[Lacrymas]

Well, duh. I thought that we want quality and that's what Obsidian are aiming for, being easy and high quality is almost an oxymoron, so "let's make it easier on the devs" isn't on the table at all.