Eternity Pillars of Eternity + The White March Expansion Thread

[gurugeorge]

Tbh the only walls of text I found annoying were when Watcher looks into someone's soul (I don't mean the ones of golden named characters written by backers, but the ones you encounter in quests). We don't need 200 adjectives to describe someone's thoughts, especially when you encounter a character for the first time. But the writing about lore, history, gods etc. is pretty interesting. It was a new setting at the time, after all. It was probably hard to introduce it in any other way. And it IS an interesting setting. It's just that it is hard to get into it all in your first playthrough.

Also, companions are great. I constantly switch between Sagani, Kana, GM, Hiravias and Zahua because they are all interesting, both narratively and mechanically. All except Aloth and Pallegina, who are insufferable, but the only way to fix that would be to never let Sawyer and Carrie Patel write companions, ever again. We could've also done without the lesbian love story, but fuck, just having two Avellone's marvelous characters is enough to make up for others' shortcomings.

Yeah I never got the complaints about the lore, it's the least of the game's problems.

 

[Lacrymas]

The text is an unedited first pass by their own admission. The characters constantly tell you what you already know, it's overwritten to the point of parody, nothing goes anywhere, you are assaulted with text at every corner. It's far from well written in the technical sense of the phrase.

 

[almondblight]

Where are those infamous blocks of text/lore dump that everyone is talking about?

As the guy above said, beside soul reaching and some narrative pieces after dream sequences, the dialogues are rather short and to the point. TBH I haven't noticed much difference between the length of PoE dialogues and, say, BG2 ones.

They're pretty long. If I reload a segment and skip through the conversation I just read, it's not uncommon for me to be hitting the return key ~10 times. There's also a lot of extraneous non-dialogue in there that other games don't have. Stuff like: ***At this, her smile briefly fades and she subconsciously begins to pull at her tattered robes. 'That...that is an interesting question...' *** Thankfully, it's grayed out so it's easy to ignore.

It doesn't help that so many people you run into end up being walking lore dumps. The funniest to me is the guy you run into as soon as you enter Defiance Bay. He's leading an angry mob that he's in the middle of riling up,. You can interrupt him in the middle of his big speech and he stops what he's doing and suddenly becomes a tour guide, giving you details about every part of the city.

 

[Piotrovitz]

The text is an unedited first pass by their own admission. The characters constantly tell you what you already know, it's overwritten to the point of parody, nothing goes anywhere, you are assaulted with text at every corner. It's far from well written in the technical sense of the phrase.

There are some valid points to what you're saying, but I think you're exaggerating some things a bit.
Give me some example of characters constantly telling you what you already know, or being assaulted by text.

Like I've said earlier:

As the guy above said, beside soul reaching and some narrative pieces after dream sequences, the dialogues are rather short and to the point. TBH I haven't noticed much difference between the length of PoE dialogues and, say, BG2 ones.

Again, I haven't notice any text bombardment aside examples pointed above.

As for the writing quality - sure it's no Dostoevsky, but it's good enough to not stick out and there aren't many cringy moments. It's more than serviceable imo, plus it's pretty down to earth and doesn't try to be what it isn't.

I think people are confusing or deliberately mistaking the plot (which is not the greatest one and falls apart with each subsequent chapter) with writing or lore-dump.
Those are two separate things IMO - writing is fine for what it is and the lore is kinda interesting and you're not overloaded with it at any point. It's' the plot direction that's lacking, not the writing itself.

 

[Piotrovitz]

They're pretty long. If I reload a segment and skip through the conversation I just read, it's not uncommon for me to be hitting the return key ~10 times. There's also a lot of extraneous non-dialogue in there that other games don't have. Stuff like: ***At this, her smile briefly fades and she subconsciously begins to pull at her tattered robes. 'That...that is an interesting question...' *** Thankfully, it's grayed out so it's easy to ignore.

I think this goes mainly for dialogues with Grieving Mother - those are indeed overwritten to the point of parody. Was this example from her?

It doesn't help that so many people you run into end up being walking lore dumps. The funniest to me is the guy you run into as soon as you enter Defiance Bay. He's leading an angry mob that he's in the middle of riling up,. You can interrupt him in the middle of his big speech and he stops what he's doing and suddenly becomes a tour guide, giving you details about every part of the city.

Yeah, it may be absurd, but I'd say it's nitpicking.
If you would have to go through whole cutscene/long and non-interactable dialogue until the dude calms the mob down, then I bet some people would say you're assaulted with unavoidable text/lore-dump. Again, no win situation.

 

[Lacrymas]

It's not only about how long individual texts are (there are those too), but how the dialogue is structured. 99% of the time, you speak to an NPC and are given like 8-10 questions to ask them about everything the writers could think of. Companions suffer from that as well. It's just exhausting having to go through all the myriad of questions you have with every single NPC you encounter. One crucial example of the text being obviously unedited is how the main quest is called "the Hallowing of the Dyrwood", but you never deal with that at all and it's not about that. Yeah, sure, you randomly stumble on the solution to that whole mess at the end, but that is a byproduct of what you are actually doing (following Thaos). I can't really think of any examples of characters telling you what you already know because I haven't played the game in years, but I'm sure someone who is playing it right now can do that for me.

 

[Piotrovitz]

It's not only about how long individual texts are (there are those too), but how the dialogue is structured. 99% of the time, you speak to an NPC and are given like 8-10 questions to ask them about everything the writers could think of. Companions suffer from that as well. It's just exhausting having to go through all the myriad of questions you have with every single NPC you encounter

True, but the NPC dialogues boiling down to exhausting all possible questions is the pain of majority of cRPGs. Extensive and mutually exclusive branches that lead to something interesting, like hidden quest, are very rare - I cannot think of any cRPGs right now that have such system implemented all the way (not just in a single cases).

Plus,, in PoE no one is forcing you to exhaust all dialogue options - usually you can go directly from 'give me the goddamn quest' to 'see ya later'.

There are many dialogues that lead to nowhere, but just add flavour and gives you opportunity to roleplay. First example that comes to my mind is the lady selling potions in Dyrwood - you can ask her where did she get the scar on her face from, and then comment in a nice/cruel/mocking/etc manner. Or you can just skip that question and just get the dragon egg quest.

 

[Butter]

You can open your game with several minutes of exposition and have it be interesting, e.g. Icewind Dale. You can drop the player into an intriguing non-generic setting without having to explain every detail of it, e.g. Dragonfall. Pillars of Eternity didn't do either.

 

[the mole]

You can open your game with several minutes of exposition and have it be interesting, e.g. Icewind Dale. You can drop the player into an intriguing non-generic setting without having to explain every detail of it, e.g. Dragonfall. Pillars of Eternity didn't do either.

can't you just skip dialogue if you don't like it

 

[Lacrymas]

Plus,, in PoE no one is forcing you to exhaust all dialogue options - usually you can go directly from 'give me the goddamn quest' to 'see ya later'.

That's like saying "the book is well written if you don't count/read the bad parts of it". Even then, it's not exactly clear 100% of the time what gives you a quest and which dialogue options have to be exhausted to get to that quest. Since I'm not the only person to notice it's pretty shoddily written, it's safe to say it has issues. We actually talked about this a lot.

 

[the mole]

muh I don't want to read

 

[the mole]

no one forces you to read the lore

I know this because I didn't read most of it

 

[Butter]

Optional content can't be bad because no one forces you to do it. The game can't be bad because nobody forces you to play it.

 

[the mole]

Optional content can't be bad because no one forces you to do it. The game can't be bad because nobody forces you to play it.

I don't think it was that bad honestly

you don't have to read all of the lore, you can easily avoid it

thus not a problem

 

[Roguey]

Fenstermaker's writing philosophy is "I have to explain everything immediately, players can never feel lost of confused" As he said in the Codex interview

You had to know what a bîaŵac was before it struck. You had to know what adra was. You had to know what a Watcher was very shortly after becoming one. You had to know who Glanfathans were and why they would be mad at you for being in their ruins. You had to learn about animancers and the Saint's War and a slew of other things that led to the world being in the state it was in.

(you don't really "need" to know any of these things )

 

[Lyric Suite]

Warrior being a tank is MMO shit.

Who is it that wears the heaviest armor that has the greatest chance of deflecting hits?

The point i'm making is that there's no specific role as damage soaker.

Even actual tanks are offensive oriented, with their giant cannon or mounted machine guns.

D&D did it right by having firghters be true to their archetype, while MMO introduced this dumbfuck idea about walking punching bags taking hits on behalf of the whole group.

Notice how there's no tanks in PvP because human players aren't that fucking stupid to waste time on the big armored guy that does no damage. The only way the MMO tank mechanic works is to program the AI to be retarded in a way nobody would actually be in real life.

The only logical reason to engage the guy with the big armor in real life would be the fear of getting shorn in half by his big sword.

 

[Roguey]

The point i'm making is that there's no specific role as damage soaker.

Even actual tanks are offensive oriented, with their giant cannon or mounted machine guns.

D&D did it right by having firghters be true to their archetype, while MMO introduced this dumbfuck idea about walking punching bags taking hits on behalf of the whole group.

Notice how there's no tanks in PvP because human players aren't that fucking stupid to waste time on the big armored guy that does no damage. The only way the MMO tank mechanic works is to program the AI to be retarded in a way nobody would actually be in real life.

The only logical reason to engage the guy with the big armor in real life would be the fear of getting shorn in half by his big sword.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypaspists

 

[almondblight]

I think this goes mainly for dialogues with Grieving Mother - those are indeed overwritten to the point of parody. Was this example from her?

It was something I made up, but you can find a lot of examples if you play the game. For example, I just encountered this back and forth at the end of the quest where you get Pallegina. It keeps describing what Pallegina and the other guy are doing - Verzano tugs at his beard, wrings his hands, falls to his knees and clasps his hands, bites a trembling lip, while Pallegina snorts, her golden eyes narrow, and "the nictitating membrane of her eyes slide out and back." The whole interaction (even if you remove the descriptions of what's happening) really stretches out something that's no more than Pallegina telling a guy to screw off. It's not even a conversation you're part of, you're just watching her and Verzano talk.

Yeah, it may be absurd, but I'd say it's nitpicking.
If you would have to go through whole cutscene/long and non-interactable dialogue until the dude calms the mob down, then I bet some people would say you're assaulted with unavoidable text/lore-dump. Again, no win situation.

No, you can just have the guy as he is and cut out the tour guide dialogue. You lose nothing. Especially because you don't need someone to tell you Ondra's Gift is the poor dock area of town 5 minutes before you go there and see it for yourself.

But as for long and non-interactable dialogue, PoE has plenty of those (like the Pallegina conversation I listed above).

 

[the mole]

I've never played a barbarian phalanx spear guy so I think I'll do that

is barbarian still good

I don't even remember the last time I beat this game

 

[ERYFKRAD]

is barbarian still good

Always has been

 

[Neki]

at the end of the quest where you get Pallegina. It keeps describing what Pallegina and the other guy are doing - Verzano tugs at his beard, wrings his hands, falls to his knees and clasps his hands, bites a trembling lip, while Pallegina snorts, her golden eyes narrow, and "the nictitating membrane of her eyes slide out and back." The whole interaction (even if you remove the descriptions of what's happening) really stretches out something that's no more than Pallegina telling a guy to screw off. It's not even a conversation you're part of, you're just watching her and Verzano talk.

yea maybe this has something to do with it

I read somewhere that the first 6 hours of PoE its more words than bg and iwd combined

Its too much in a small amount of time( for a videogame not a book, in which case i could just read a book instead) and also a lot of tell but not show.

I thought wael temple was perfect and did everything right.

Dont get me wrong i like the game so far but there is something about the dialogs that just rubs me the wrong way.

 

[Haplo]

I've never played a barbarian phalanx spear guy so I think I'll do that

is barbarian still good

I don't even remember the last time I beat this game

Barbs are good.
Spears less so. But okay as a support/tank weapon, I guess.

Still, personally I'd rather go for the Tall Grass pike

 

[ferratilis]

Death Godlike barb with all points in Might and Intellect, with firebrand gloves from Crucible Keep is a great build. I played this build on my first playthrough, but as aumaua, but Death's Usher seems like a great passive ability for barb, so I'd go with Godlike instead. Honestly, any class other than rogue is quite easy to build on difficulties below PotD, so just have fun and experiment. You'll have so much money by midgame that you can respec as much as you like. But, as long as you put points into Might and Int in the beginning, you're set. Some people dump Resolve on barb, but I left it at 10.

Currently, I'm playing a Nature Godlike paladin and he hardly gets hurt. Almost all defenses are above 100 thanks to Deep Faith, and Wellspring of Life gives might and con in difficult fights. Together with Pallegina and buffs from Durance, the front line wrecks everything. The only micromanagement I have to do is with Aloth and Durance. Kana is chanting and summoning in the background, as well. In most fights, his summons come too late, but he's invaluable in those long boss fights where his summons can turn the tide. After playing a paladin, I would never go back to barb. It's a bit more boring to play compared to other classes, but so strong.

 

[Lacrymas]

Bleakwalker Paladin is actually quite fun to play. You can build it around Corrode damage and copy the saber which deals that kind of damage. A tanky Paladin is a bit bland, though.

 

[Technomancer]

Spears less so. But okay as a support/tank weapon, I guess.

You can do a chanter build with interrupt values so obscene you can pretty much permanently stunlock any single opponent in the game, including dragons. Maybe even works on PotD stats. Certain spear is needed for most broken results.