Eternity Pillars of Eternity + The White March Expansion Thread

[PorkyThePaladin]

I have a lot of issues with PoE (too much blabbering in dialogue/lore/exposition, Kickstarter NPCs, visual effects that obscure combat and turn it into a clusterfuck, some others), but all in all, it's a pretty good game. Way better than Shitfinders and Original Shits.

 

[scytheavatar]

PoE2 bombing all but guaranteed no PoE3 I think. Roguey will probably know

POE2's had a good afterlife though, so far as I can tell - it's a huge, highly polished CRPG that's just sitting there, and lots of people have gotten round to trying it and have found they like it. Every now and then one of the YT channels has a review saying, "Hey, this is actually very good."

That will count for something, I'm sure. It seems to me that it bombed because the people who'd invested their hopes in POE and made it a success had been disappointed by POE and so didn't buy into POE2. If the marketing had been different (not marketing to people who'd bought into POE, but rather to a wider audience) it could have been much more successful.

Case in point: I've played through it 2 and a bit times, and I've really enjoyed it, but I hadn't bought it at the time of release (I was barely even aware of its existence), but long after, on a bored whim.

POE2 bombed because Obsidian games are highly intellectual and appeal only to a limited audience. The exact opposite of Larian games which are dumb shit but appeal to the lowest common denominator. The masses want to have fun adventures in their RPGs, rather than read through a wall of lore dump.

The only way a POE3 could be a success would be if Josh Sawyer is not involved in the game.

 

[Lacrymas]

I wouldn't say highly intellectual, especially concerning the PoEs.

 

[Grunker]

I like PoE, but calling them “highly intellectual” is a bit of a stretch. Wikipedia isn’t intellectual, it just has a lot of text

 

[Reina]

The only way a POE3 could be a success

IMHO they just need to scale down, forget about the gods stuff, go back to the roots and deliver some classic european fantasy experience.

On paper there's nothing wrong with it, but I feel that pirate/tropical setting worked to the detriment of the PoE2. It's a bit too "foreign", and when coupled with terrible main story about big statue on the run, there's little to hook players in.

 

[Lacrymas]

The setting was one of PoE2's strong points.

 

[Nikanuur]

I find the topics of "We affirmed that souls are for real, let's see where it leads us from there." and "The gods have been manufactured by humans in secret." pretty imaginative and original.
Also, I find writing in PoE and PoE II of epic proportion.
I mean, I understand that not everyone wants to dig in the ocean of lore, be drowned by the amount of non-punchy text-lines comprised of the many worldly and historical affairs, etc.

 

[Lacrymas]

PoE utilized its lore in the worst possible way. The writers failed to realize that "souls are real" and "the gods are manufactured" have real world counterparts and aren't as fantasy as they seem at first glance. Christians have assumed souls are real for a very long time and quite a lot of their philosophy and actions are informed by that. The gods being manufactured thing isn't much different than ancient Egyptians assuming the pharaoh is literally Ra. Instead of doing something with that, they went with the most banal, literal and derpy interpretation possible. This is par for the course for PoE, though, they failed to do anything with the clash between the caste system and the proto-Capitalism of the Vailians in PoE2 either, although the implications were staring them right in the face.

 

[Fedora Master]

Banal boring shit written by midwits with a thesaurus.

 

[IHaveHugeNick]

Generic 'save the princess from the evil wizard' type of story would have been miles better than whatever PoE was trying to do.

 

[Reina]

Generic 'save the princess from the evil wizard' type of story would have been miles better than whatever PoE was trying to do.

Having finished (replay) the game yesterday, I think the story is decent up to the sudden revelation about the gods; just a low level adventure about chasing a villian using strange ancient machines. There's simply too much dumped on the player in the last act - both in terms of worldbuilding, as well as player's personal story. This is especially jarring if players moves to act 3 after long interlude in White March, where Thaos/Leaden Key play next to no role.

If gods stayed in the background, I think the story of PoE would be fine; a bit bland, but serviceable. Then they could dump the revelation at the end of PoE2, where after two games full of worldbuilding it would have a greater impact.

Basically, they needed to follow Baldur's Gate formula: first game is for 60-70% low-stakes adventure with PC frolicking around and while Sarevok's plot ups the ante fast, it's hardly presented as a world-shattering event. It's only in BG2 when shit hits the fan, and the stuff about Bhaal becomes core of the story.

 

[Butter]

Generic 'save the princess from the evil wizard' type of story would have been miles better than whatever PoE was trying to do.

Ultima Underworld used this exact setup and created one of the best stories in any video game.

 

[Lacrymas]

Basically, they needed to follow Baldur's Gate formula

PoE1 is almost a 1 to 1 retread of BG1.

 

[Lacrymas]

Fedora Master

I proposed once that the flashbacks with Thaos should've been playable, to make them more personal. I think they tried to copy BG1's story structure -> You find yourself not knowing what you are (Bhaalspawn/Watcher) or where to go, a central conflict (Iron Crisis/Hollowborn Crisis) sweeps you up and introduces you to your antagonist (Sarevok/Thaos), you go around trying to get to a big city (Baldur's Gate/Defiance Bay), a political struggle (Iron Throne/Animancy) and coup makes itself apparent (Sarevok trying to kill the dukes/Thaos killing the duc), you go around trying to catch the antagonist (Thieves' Maze/Sun in Shadow). All the while unrelated adventures happen. The execution differs greatly, however, and PoE struggles with coming up with a plot and making the characters in it relevant. It tries to focus too much on each premise, but since it's simultaneously rushed and overwritten none of them can be given a spotlight, so the narrative jumps from one to the other without any precedents.

There is no problem with each of these premises or whether there's an antagonist or not. It would've turned out better had the story been focused on one thing, the game is already bursting at the seams by trying to do too much with a limited budget and time constraint. They could've interconnected everything better, but that would require either more time/money or cutting of different content, like Twin Elms. Which I wouldn't have been opposed to tbh, Twin Elms feels like and is an afterthought. There is an extra act which BG1 doesn't have and could've been cut without the game losing anything, and even gaining something. If one game could benefit enormously from an EE, it's PoE, I kinda hope they do do this at one point.

 

[Fedora Master]

The big difference being, of course, that POE presents the same basic story in the format of

 

[Roguey]

Josh Sawyer is a misanthrope and that bleeds into everything he directs.

 

[gurugeorge]

Generic 'save the princess from the evil wizard' type of story would have been miles better than whatever PoE was trying to do.

Having finished (replay) the game yesterday, I think the story is decent up to the sudden revelation about the gods; just a low level adventure about chasing a villian using strange ancient machines. There's simply too much dumped on the player in the last act - both in terms of worldbuilding, as well as player's personal story. This is especially jarring if players moves to act 3 after long interlude in White March, where Thaos/Leaden Key play next to no role.

If gods stayed in the background, I think the story of PoE would be fine; a bit bland, but serviceable. Then they could dump the revelation at the end of PoE2, where after two games full of worldbuilding it would have a greater impact.

Basically, they needed to follow Baldur's Gate formula: first game is for 60-70% low-stakes adventure with PC frolicking around and while Sarevok's plot ups the ante fast, it's hardly presented as a world-shattering event. It's only in BG2 when shit hits the fan, and the stuff about Bhaal becomes core of the story.

I actually kind of like the main story theme re. souls and the gods, it's a brave attempt at something different, with some depth, though it's not always pulled off very well, or very consistently.

In one way, it's a kind of lame, Gen-X-cynical materialist take on the topics, but in another way, the gods remind me of the kinds of cosmic superheroes/supervillians you used to get in those epic crossovers in the comics, especially by Grant Morrison and that kind of thing. They are like "science heroes" in the Alan Moore sense, and their bickering and scheming is very much like a cosmic-level superhero team's bickering/scheming - they're like old friends/rivals who have a love/hate relationship with each other.

 

[Reina]

I actually kind of like the main story theme re. souls and the gods

It could work if gods were in any way relevant in acts 1/2. Excluding last moments of WM2, we only see a bunch of cultists of Skaen/Woedica running around. If instead of grand revelation, "the gods are artificial" was a line thrown during a random lore dump, it would probably have the same impact. Instead, it's treated like a major plot twist that should leave players stunned, even Iovara's VA delivers the line with pomp.

 

[AdamReith]

Man, Pillars is such a great tragedy.

It's like somebody put in the foundations for a fortress and it was used to support an outside toilet.

 

[Nikanuur]

PoE utilized its lore in the worst possible way. The writers failed to realize that "souls are real" and "the gods are manufactured" have real world counterparts and aren't as fantasy as they seem at first glance. Christians have assumed souls are real for a very long time and quite a lot of their philosophy and actions are informed by that. The gods being manufactured thing isn't much different than ancient Egyptians assuming the pharaoh is literally Ra. Instead of doing something with that, they went with the most banal, literal and derpy interpretation possible. This is par for the course for PoE, though, they failed to do anything with the clash between the caste system and the proto-Capitalism of the Vailians in PoE2 either, although the implications were staring them right in the face.

Asumed does not equal are - for real. Also, your opinion is just not good

 

[The Limper]

PoE 1 needed an Epic ending. The Thaos fight was a joke. Take the same game and actually implement an endgame fight that was challenging (aka harder than anything in the expansions) and overall attitudes may change about the game. I beat the game prior to DLC release and thought several fights were a tougher battle than the non-epic final fight. It was a huge disappointment/let down. So much potential wasted……

 

[Roguey]

The Thaos fight was a joke.

They tuned it up in one of the patches, and I couldn't even beat it without turning it down to story-time on what would have been a critical-path-only playthrough (I had to do bounties to get additional levels to make it through Burial Isle and still got demolished at level 10 despite clearing everything in Sun-in-Shadow with no problem). Balancing that fight with the expectation that you should go through all the dlc first and be level 16 would be terrible.

 

[behold_a_man]

This is one of the least fun games I've ever played. It feels like developers did not even try to do anything remarkable with this game. Even mediocre games I've played had something interesting about it:
-> Risen 2 (and probably anything made by Piranha) had great exploration and was thematically quite original.
-> Oblivion had some great questlines (like the one for Thieves Guild) and You played it from the hero's sidekick perspective.
-> Dragon Age II had comics-like graphics and was played from a perspective of a random schmuck.
-> Twitcher 3 and Neverwinter Nights 2 had spectacular expansions (Blood & Wine and Mask of the Betrayer).
And in this game:
-> The exploration is trashy (just like in their stroke-ridden muse, Baldur's Gate). Small maps with many filler encounters and but a few points of interest (in White March it felt better, as the areas were more condensed).
-> The combat functions like Dragon Age: Origins after undergoing fun-removal procedure (they even ripped off its injury system - which kind of makes sense). It wasn't challenging on hard, and I was unable to powergame in order to dispose of enemies quickly (which apparently was a target for this developer).
-> Spells don't have any identity. And they could have changed it, after all, it was their setting.
-> Loading screens are terrifying.
-> Almost all the interesting equipment is found in expansions, which makes the exploration even less rewarding.
-> The world is presented as if it was some kind of Detroit neighbourhood, yet - if I remember correctly - no one made a single joke, so probably they couldn't have had it that bad.
-> The usual consequences of not passing the skill check? Less lore dumps (thankfully).
-> Journal was normal. It's not a problem, but some games made it good enough for me to remember it (Kingmaker showed it from a perspective of a companion; in Divine Divinity, it was witty and showed every conversation; same holds for Deus Ex; in Morrowind the development of a journal showed all player's progress, and it read like a book at the end of the game). It's a nice touch to the game, which was impossible for them to make, obviously.

 

[Agesilaus]

I'm level 7 right now, the game just alerted me that the White March is beckoning. Considering going there. I haven't played the game in years and I never got very far anyway, so it's all new to me.

It feels like a soulless version of PoE 2 without the pirate theme, with a simpler character system, etc. I wouldn't say it's BAD, I do like some parts of the theme and writing and story, and I haven't gotten burnt out yet. I'm also a big fan of the world because of PoE 2. But the gameplay and story progression is strongly reminding me of Black Geyser. I'm going to push through, though, because PoE2 is a direct sequel that has a common player character and references the original story a lot. I also want to know more about Rymrgand.

I'm really hoping Winter March has a lot of high quality Rymrgand content.

 

[PorkyThePaladin]

Ugh, Adra Dragon on PotD is pure fucking death.