Eternity Pillars of Eternity + The White March Expansion Thread

[rusty_shackleford]

Have you ever tried making an argument that didn't include a strawman?

"This chicken literally has shit in it"

 

[Parabalus]

Now this is just nonsense to me. I wanted to play an RPG where I build my own kingdom and that's exactly what I got. The act of managing said kingdom was a joy, in and of itself. If I didn't want to do those things I would have replayed Baldur's Gate 2.

by this logic the system could never be bad. just the fact that it exists and is about managing a kingdom makes it good. insert koala-what reaction

What is wrong with the card and advisor UI?

You can also easily end up without an advisor for a role and getting out of that is tough. Each advisor character also has unique options for various rank-up events.

The building part isn't true, rushing teleporter circles is important, as is using the, e.g., lawful evil ones for the stat boosts.

 

[Grunker]

Have you ever tried making an argument that didn't include a strawman?

"This chicken literally has shit in it"

You're the native english speaker here, surely you know the difference between definete and indefinete conjugation

 

[Grunker]

Now this is just nonsense to me. I wanted to play an RPG where I build my own kingdom and that's exactly what I got. The act of managing said kingdom was a joy, in and of itself. If I didn't want to do those things I would have replayed Baldur's Gate 2.

by this logic the system could never be bad. just the fact that it exists and is about managing a kingdom makes it good. insert koala-what reaction

What is wrong with the card and advisor UI?

You can also easily end up without an advisor for a role and getting out of that is tough. Each advisor character also has unique options for various rank-up events.

UI..?

You asked for an argument for why the system for superficial, and I made it. You still haven't argued how the system is interesting to interact with. I played the game twice and was never without advisors, so I don't see how it is easy to end up without them - but even if it was, that is not strategic depths. Strategic depths come from making choices. There are almost no meaningful ones in PF's system - for the reasons I have already explained. Making random choices will suffice except for a few very obvious ones that need to be prioritized. The only thing you have to learn is saving non-immediate cards for when you've finished doing quests. Once that learned you know the only important mechanic of the system.

The building part isn't true, rushing teleporter circles is important, as is using the, e.g., lawful evil ones for the stat boosts.

QED: you're arguing against my point that buildings generally aren't useful by highlighting the fact that out of the games wealth of buildings, you only need the 2 that have a slight effect on gameplay (and even those are highly optional - I didn't have any of them in my first playthrough)

 

[FreeKaner]

It thought the part with advisors, dossiers and court events were the best part. While I couldn't care much about the facebook game management part. Same goes for Wrathfinder. I love HOMM3/HOMM5 but even with that I was feeling it hard to care about crusader combat because it has terrible design decisions like 3 unit limit per army and questionable at best distribution of unit stats (that tends towards extremes too much) meanwhile I felt that the military council and the dossiers part again was very fun. If anything it seems to be any party-based RPG has a lot to gain from that sort of court/council with dossiers & events type of gameplay because it is infinitely productive towards actual RPG mechanics (I.E including your party members, named NPCs and using stats to resolve written events.)

 

[Grunker]

court events

it's like that thing grunker was talking about: contextual events = good, systems (so far in RPGs at least): baed

 

[Sunri]

They are underused because people don't like them, I think the setting is a big reason why the game flopped compared to I with more traditional fantasy.

If we went with this mentality then we shouldn't do anything but Fallout 3 and Skyrim. If they made a better job it would have been better received. People just don't know what they like or don't like and tend to associate their generalized experience with most obvious outliers. The fact that POE2 is a maritime setting is very obvious, so people in their lack of in-depth analysis associate why they didn't like the game with that fact.

There is indeed a lack of imagination when it comes to creating maritime settings. I assume this is because the main inspirations for fantasy settings are medieval and focused on land but if anything maritime settings are more conductive to adventure party configuration. Moving between ports and cities, exploring islands and landing on uncharted lands basically writes itself. As well as the fact that port cities are more conductive to whole "people giving out odd jobs", "taverns full of characters" and "larger than life figures" that RPG gameplay fits best with.

People know exactly what they like, that's why games with weird settings and gimmick don't sell if u want to create a pirate game do it but don't expect to go mainstream.

 

[Delterius]

Now this is just nonsense to me. I wanted to play an RPG where I build my own kingdom and that's exactly what I got. The act of managing said kingdom was a joy, in and of itself. If I didn't want to do those things I would have replayed Baldur's Gate 2.

by this logic the system could never be bad. just the fact that it exists and is about managing a kingdom makes it good. insert koala-what reaction

You found the experience of managing the kingdom to be boring. I simply did not. I liked building cities. I liked choosing advisors to solve crisis in the minigame. I enjoyed exploring the world to find loot that I could use to build more cities. I liked how certain things I learned about my kingdom during my campaigns would feed back into the building system. And I loved building up harnessing all of that towards the courtly events where I shaped the essence of the kingdom with each advisor's rank ups. I most of all enjoyed the sense of impending doom as the world didn't wait for me and I constantly had to solve the hillside curse / whatever crisis was happening at the moment. Sure, I didn't like how buildings felt superfluous after chapter 3. I also think that you should be able to see those towns you've built instead of a carbon copy version for all of them. But all in all it was a good way to present an unique D&D campaign and I much prefer that sort of thing to yet another incarnation of Baldur's Gate.

Now you can still take all of that and throw it in the garbage again and say: well no I had a bad time. Fair is fair. But then again you might as well say that of any game you didn't like. Or any genre you dislike. Or any mechanic that you dislike. Yes. Mechanics that I enjoy make a game better for me whenever they exist. You might call this circular reasoning. But you also once said that there's no point in discussing what RPGs are and discussing wether a mechanic is worthy of being inherently fun should be at least half as pointless as that.

 

[Parabalus]

Now this is just nonsense to me. I wanted to play an RPG where I build my own kingdom and that's exactly what I got. The act of managing said kingdom was a joy, in and of itself. If I didn't want to do those things I would have replayed Baldur's Gate 2.

by this logic the system could never be bad. just the fact that it exists and is about managing a kingdom makes it good. insert koala-what reaction

What is wrong with the card and advisor UI?

You can also easily end up without an advisor for a role and getting out of that is tough. Each advisor character also has unique options for various rank-up events.

UI..?

You asked for an argument for why the system for superficial, and I made it. You still haven't argued how the system is interesting to interact with. I played the game twice and was never without advisors, so I don't see how it is easy to end up without them - but even if it was, that is not strategic depths. Strategic depths come from making choices. There are almost no meaningful ones in PF's system - for the reasons I have already explained. Making random choices will suffice except for a few very obvious ones that need to be prioritized. The only thing you have to learn is saving non-immediate cards for when you've finished doing quests. Once that learned you know the only important mechanic of the system.

The building part isn't true, rushing teleporter circles is important, as is using the, e.g., lawful evil ones for the stat boosts.

QED: you're arguing against my point that buildings generally aren't useful by highlighting the fact that out of the games wealth of buildings, you only need the 2 that have a slight effect on gameplay (and even those are highly optional - I didn't have any of them in my first playthrough)

You're arguing the system is garbage because you found it too easy. Increase the difficulty and every choice is meaningful. If the in-game max difficulty isn't enough for you, congrats. I found, e.g., getting all artisan items in a timely manner challenging.

You might as well argue that XCOM base building is meaningless when playing on rookie.

You got the part about buildings wrong - to rush Arcane for circles you need to place the rest of the buildings efficiently.

 

[Delterius]

look at the bright side. every thread turn into poe so now the poe thread turned into a pathfinder thread.

its a metaphor for the death of 3rd edition

 

[FreeKaner]

People know exactly what they like, that's why games with weird settings and gimmick don't sell if u want to create a pirate game do it but don't expect to go mainstream.

No, not at all. People don't know what they like at all. It's the opposite, people develop an interest in the setting when they like the game. For example a whole trend of "retrofuturistic post-apocalyptic setting", which is very niche, spawned out of Fallout. According to this somehow the very specific setting of post-nuclear retrofuturistic game is not a "gimmick" while the "medieval exploration" game is a gimmick?

People do know when they didn't like what they did, but they tend to not know why they don't like it. As I said, the association will immediately be with the most obvious outliers. If one dislikes PoE2, the immediate main difference they can tell is because its setting is different which they'll point fingers to. Similarly, if someone likes New Vegas, they immediately imprint on the "post-apocalyptic retrofuturistic wild west".

Really considering popularity of games, people are more likely to like "gimmick" settings than non-gimmic. Although that's not because of setting being gimmick or not but because the game being good or not.

 

[Grunker]

Now this is just nonsense to me. I wanted to play an RPG where I build my own kingdom and that's exactly what I got. The act of managing said kingdom was a joy, in and of itself. If I didn't want to do those things I would have replayed Baldur's Gate 2.

by this logic the system could never be bad. just the fact that it exists and is about managing a kingdom makes it good. insert koala-what reaction

What is wrong with the card and advisor UI?

You can also easily end up without an advisor for a role and getting out of that is tough. Each advisor character also has unique options for various rank-up events.

UI..?

You asked for an argument for why the system for superficial, and I made it. You still haven't argued how the system is interesting to interact with. I played the game twice and was never without advisors, so I don't see how it is easy to end up without them - but even if it was, that is not strategic depths. Strategic depths come from making choices. There are almost no meaningful ones in PF's system - for the reasons I have already explained. Making random choices will suffice except for a few very obvious ones that need to be prioritized. The only thing you have to learn is saving non-immediate cards for when you've finished doing quests. Once that learned you know the only important mechanic of the system.

The building part isn't true, rushing teleporter circles is important, as is using the, e.g., lawful evil ones for the stat boosts.

QED: you're arguing against my point that buildings generally aren't useful by highlighting the fact that out of the games wealth of buildings, you only need the 2 that have a slight effect on gameplay (and even those are highly optional - I didn't have any of them in my first playthrough)

You're arguing the system is garbage because you found it too easy. Increase the difficulty and every choice is meaningful.

You might as well argue that XCOM base building is meaningless when playing on rookie.

You seem to not be reading my posts, which goes along way to explain why you're not responding to my points:

I literally just picked stuff at random on the hardest setting

Difficulty isn't the problem. Let's say they made the rolls significantly harder so you would fail more often. That still wouldn't solve the main problem: that you make no interesting strategic decisions, because the core stat values of the system are so simple to interact with.

I have thouroughly explained why this is. You have yet to make one single concrete point about how the game has interesting decisions.

I found, e.g., getting all artisan items in a timely manner challenging.

I have way too much faith in your abilities to even remotely believe that this is the case, but even if it was, that doesn't answer my point: the main Kingdom system is a) stats, b) card selection and checks and that those systems are exceedingly simple and don't allow for any strategic variety whatsoever. Let's say we assume the system is difficult for the sake of argument. It would still be a binary system of a) getting stats to hit target numbers by b) selecting cards that increase or prevent reduction of those stats. You're not faced with any ponderous decisions here that make you go "huh, I wonder what I should do," because the system is simply too superficial to allow for that. It is so simple it nearly always comes down to two parameters: do I have the stat for this and does this increase a stat I need?

There are no interactions, buildings are superflous and any event outcome is decided by a simple dice roll influenced by one stat.

No one in their right mind would *ever* play a game that consisted of Kingmaker's Kingdom Management. The only reason this strange breed of creature that defends it exists is because you can larp that the minigame is you directing the kingdom which kind of contextualizes a poor system in a fun way.

But that can't be used to defend the systems own merits, which are non-existent.

 

[Delterius]

this strange breed of creature that defends it

you can larp that minigame is you directing the kingdom which kind of contextualies a poor system in a fun way.

i just like playing games come on man

 

[rusty_shackleford]

For example a whole trend of "retrofuturistic post-apocalyptic setting", which is very niche, spawned out of Fallout.

ehm... yes?
Baldur's Gate was way more popular than Fallout. Fallout is only as popular as it is because of Bethesda completely ripping it apart and putting it back together for optimal mass appeal... and it's still completely overshadowed by TES.

I don't think the subgenre would be anywhere near as full of games without Bethesda. We'd probably still see games like e.g., Underrail and ATOM that are actually based on older Fallouts... but there'd be way less overall.

 

[Grunker]

this strange breed of creature that defends it

you can larp that minigame is you directing the kingdom which kind of contextualies a poor system in a fun way.

i just like playing games come on man

me too

i like to play good games even more

 

[FreeKaner]

For example a whole trend of "retrofuturistic post-apocalyptic setting", which is very niche, spawned out of Fallout.

ehm... yes?
Baldur's Gate was way more popular than Fallout. Fallout is only as popular as it is because of Bethesda completely ripping it apart and putting it back together for optimal mass appeal... and it's still completely overshadowed by TES.

Borderlands also exists. Also Fallout 3 & New Vegas sold 10m+, the popularity is not at all "completely overshadowed." Even with Skyrim existing as like one of the most sold RPGs ever. Both are very popular mainstream hits, even if one is more popular and not some small cult following.

 

[Sunri]

People know exactly what they like, that's why games with weird settings and gimmick don't sell if u want to create a pirate game do it but don't expect to go mainstream.

No, not at all. People don't know what they like at all. It's the opposite, people develop an interest in the setting when they like the game. For example a whole trend of "retrofuturistic post-apocalyptic setting", which is very niche, spawned out of Fallout. According to this somehow the very specific setting of post-nuclear retrofuturistic game is not a "gimmick" while the "medieval exploration" game is a gimmick?

People do know when they didn't like what they did, but they tend to not know why they don't like it. As I said, the association will immediately be with the most obvious outliers. If one dislikes PoE2, the immediate main difference they can tell is because its setting is different which they'll point fingers to. Similarly, if someone likes New Vegas, they immediately imprint on the "post-apocalyptic retrofuturistic wild west".

Really considering popularity of games, people are more likely to like "gimmick" settings than non-gimmic. Although that's not because of setting being gimmick or not but because the game being good or not.

I can't agree people want more of the same that why even if they game is just worse copy of something popular Skryim/Dark Souls/Baldurs Gate it gets some decent sales I believe that peps just don't want to try new things and rather play it safe with standard settings and gameplay just look at Black Geyser: Couriers of Darkness game is just imitation of another BG imitation, and it will sell anyway because there is demand for that type of game.

 

[Parabalus]

You seem to not be reading my posts, which probably explains why you're not making counterpoints:

I literally just picked stuff at random on the hardest setting

Difficulty isn't the problem. Let's say they made the rolls significantly harder so you would fail more often. That still wouldn't solve the main problem: that you make no interesting strategic decisions, because the core stat values of the system are so simple to interact with.

If the in-game max difficulty isn't enough for you, congrats.

I have way too much faith in your abilities to even remotely believe that this is the case, but even if it wasn't, that doesn't answer my point: the main Kingdom system is a) stats, b) card selection and checks. Let's say we assume the system is difficult for the sake of argument. It would still be a binary system of a) getting stats to hit target numbers by b) selecting cards that increase or prevent reduction of those stats.

On my first run I got maybe half the artisans, and seen half of each's items. Think maybe just one masterpiece before the house. Far cry from getting everything.

You undersell it a lot, you have to juggle the advisors, since events pop up during the month, but they all end on the 1st of the next month. If you lose even a few of the early events your kingdom easily dies.

The artisan quality stat has more requirements than just kingdom stats, so it's not as simple.

No one in their right mind would *ever* play a game that consisted of Kingmaker's Kingdom Management. The only reason this strange breed of creature that defends it exists is because you can larp that minigame is you directing the kingdom which kind of contextualies a poor system in a fun way.

Does anyone even disagree with this?

What makes the larp possible is that pmuch everything you do with a party influences kingdom stats.

Is it a proper nu-COM?

No, but it's damn fun. At some points in the game clicking on the cards and building up the kingdom is even better than the adventuring.

 

[rusty_shackleford]

For example a whole trend of "retrofuturistic post-apocalyptic setting", which is very niche, spawned out of Fallout.

ehm... yes?
Baldur's Gate was way more popular than Fallout. Fallout is only as popular as it is because of Bethesda completely ripping it apart and putting it back together for optimal mass appeal... and it's still completely overshadowed by TES.

Borderlands also exists. Also Fallout 3 & New Vegas sold 10m+, the popularity is not at all "completely overshadowed." Even with Skyrim existing as like one of the most sold RPGs ever.

Borderlands has a setting that just exists though, it's not something the player actually interacts with. Nobody thinks "wow dystopic futurism!" when they think of borderlands, they think "wow loot pinata garbage and terrible writing!" "wow shooty looty rooty tooty!"

How many critically successful(in terms of sales) RPGs with a Fallout-like setting are there that aren't a Fallout game? It's most likely the second most popular genre for RPGs, and I can't think of one that I'd consider to be a commercial hit.

If I were a publisher with a publisher mindset, I'd probably consider non-fantasy RPGs to be poison.

 

[FreeKaner]

I can't agree people want more of the same that why even if they game is just worse copy of something popular Skryim/Dark Souls/Baldurs Gate it gets some decent sales I believe that peps just don't want to try new things and rather play it safe with standard settings and gameplay just look at Black Geyser: Couriers of Darkness game is just imitation of another BG imitation, and it will sale anyway because there is demand for that type of game.

If you don't think you can pull of a new setting, which is definitely hard, doing a familiar and well-known setting is safe yes. There will always be people who want to play something that's familiar. That doesn't mean that "gimmick settings" won't sell well nor be unpopular as you said, again see games like fallout, it became so popular that whole "retrofuturistic post-apocalyptic" setting became a safe setting.

Also again, this is not some special snowflake unique gimmick setting, it is a maritime/colonial one. It's only one step ahead of "medieval fantasy kingdom." Such a setting regarding colonial exploration & conquest would be immediately familiar to most US & Western audiences. It also naturally just immediately overlaps with the RPG gameplay flow of taking odd jobs and doing exploration.

PoE2's commercial failures.

These include:
1. Direct sequel
2. Game's main story managing to be both intrusive and not even there
3. Generally convoluted lore and dialogue
4. Drag of an opening sequence with three intros and multiple info dumps because devs REALLY want you to not miss out on the story (this one in particular should be taught as what not to do for people to care about your setting).

Out of these I would put being direct sequel and being convoluted as main reasons. Direct sequel is really one of the most bizarre decisions ever and I am not sure who came up with it. The whole "the game flopped because it is not set in meadow and fields medieval kingdom" explanation in fact seems to be something that is repeated as a truism. I have seen some some criticisms of fantasy doesn't mesh with pirate setting but that seems to be rarer to just people not liking the story, companions, being lost in "lore" and ship combat. Even DND has its "ships and swashbuckling pirates and daredevils" parts for fucks sake.

 

[Grunker]

Now this is just nonsense to me. I wanted to play an RPG where I build my own kingdom and that's exactly what I got. The act of managing said kingdom was a joy, in and of itself. If I didn't want to do those things I would have replayed Baldur's Gate 2.

by this logic the system could never be bad. just the fact that it exists and is about managing a kingdom makes it good. insert koala-what reaction

You found the experience of managing the kingdom to be boring. I simply did not.

There's no reason to debate the merits of something if we boil it down to useless statements like "I liked this" and "I didn't like this." A billion people like Transformers, it's still a shit movie.

This is a more constructive approach in my opinion because it's a good example:

I most of all enjoyed the sense of impending doom as the world didn't wait for me and I constantly had to solve the hillside curse / whatever crisis was happening at the moment

Let's look at what you're describing actually consists of in the game: you pick the card (since it obviously takes priority over the regular stat-ups) and you... click on it. There's no choice between different tactical decisions, there's no excluding options, there's nothing to decide, there's... nothing to manage.

What is there to manage then? Two things:

1) Which stats you increase when (there is no difference here, it's just a stylistic choice and only in terms of order - the stats are all identical except for the fluff texts on their events).
2) Which buildings you build - but out of the umpteen buildings, none of them make any difference except 2 which are QoL-upgrades).

If you enjoy the system, fine. I have what I'd describe as guilty pleasures as well i.e. things that I enjoy to do but which I accept has little or no objective merit. It's not very interesting to discuss though. What is interesting to discuss is how we get good kingdom management in RPGs. So far, systems seem to have yielded very little, because every single one of them so far has been poorly constructed as a game. You might enjoy larping that it's more interesting than it is - I can sympathize. Personally, I would rather enjoy the games I play because they include fun, strategic and challenging gameplay.

 

[Grunker]

Does anyone even disagree with this?

If you don't, why are you challenging the statement that it is a poor system?

At some points in the game clicking on the cards and building up the kingdom is even better than the adventuring.

Y-i-k-e-s

 

[rusty_shackleford]

I can't agree people want more of the same that why even if they game is just worse copy of something popular Skryim/Dark Souls/Baldurs Gate it gets some decent sales I believe that peps just don't want to try new things and rather play it safe with standard settings and gameplay just look at Black Geyser: Couriers of Darkness game is just imitation of another BG imitation, and it will sale anyway because there is demand for that type of game.

If you don't think you can pull of a new setting, which is definitely hard, doing a familiar and well-known setting is safe yes. There will always be people who want to play something that's familiar. That doesn't mean that "gimmick settings" won't sell well nor be unpopular as you said, again see games like fallout, it became so popular that whole "retrofuturistic post-apocalyptic" setting became a safe setting.

Also again, this is not some special snowflake unique gimmick setting, it is a maritime/colonial one. It's only one step ahead of "medieval fantasy kingdom." Such a setting regarding colonial exploration & conquest would be immediately familiar to most US & Western audiences. It also naturally just immediately overlaps with the RPG gameplay flow of taking odd jobs and doing exploration.

PoE2's commercial failures.

These include:
1. Direct sequel
2. Game's main story managing to be both intrusive and not even there
3. Generally convoluted lore and dialogue
4. Drag of an opening sequence with three intros and multiple info dumps because devs REALLY want you to not miss out on the story (this one in particular should be taught as what not to do for people to care about your setting).

Out of these I would put being direct sequel and being convoluted as main reasons. Direct sequel is really one of the most bizarre decisions ever and I am not sure who came up with it. The whole "the game flopped because it is not set in meadow and fields medieval kingdom" explanation in fact seems to be something that is repeated as a truism. I have seen some some criticisms of fantasy doesn't mesh with pirate setting but that seems to be rarer to just people not liking the story, companions, being lost in "lore" and ship combat. Even DND has its "ships and swashbuckling pirates and daredevils" parts for fucks sake.

DOS2 went all in on darker fantasy over their previous fairytale fantasy and was greatly rewarded for it in terms of sales.
I'm really not sure how many other games we can compare it to, but DOS2 is an easy one because of its similar release frame. The only thing it lacks is "direct sequel", but it's still titled as a direct sequel.

Yes, I strongly think a pillows game with a setting closer to act 1 of pillows(the grimderpness, the dread, hopelessness, etc.,) would have sold much better than deadfiya.

 

[pomenitul]

Thread keeps delivering nearly seven years after its creation. 11/10 game, would recommend.

 

[Orud]

You want to know how to sell a sequel to game meant for an audience that like to play Sword & Sorcery games? You make it clear in marketing that you're selling them a pirate game.

It's the impression that both I and many people that I know of had about PoE2. I backed PoE1, I didn't back PoE2 (or buy it until it was a steep discount) because I thought it was too far a shift away from medieval fantasy.