Eternity Pillars of Eternity + The White March Expansion Thread

[GloomFrost]

Doesn't feel weird or out of place, unlike Twin Elms which has no business being that big.

Never said anything about it being out of place. Its the way naval exploration made it makes game even more bloated and monotones. Also all that endless trash mob combat gives way too much XP and gold completely destroying any hint of balance.

 

[almondblight]

Twin Elms probably would have worked better if it was just another Dyrwood city. The whole multiracial feudal Americans colonist stand-ins fighting multiracial American Indian stand-ins was a weird and unnecessary angle in general. Another area where the game tried too hard and felt worse because of it. The faux-celtic name for the American Indian stand-in didn't help, either.

 

[Axel_am]

Twin Elms needed more stuff related to the gods and maybe that to be the sole focus of the area.

 

[Lacrymas]

Twin Elms didn't need to exist because it obviously took too much effort and it feels unfinished anyway because it lacks content.

 

[ColonelMace]

Twin Elms didn't need to exist

It was close to a contractual obligation at this point.

 

[Lacrymas]

Yeah, I know, but the game was stretched thin as it is. The best scenario would be to not bloat your kickstarter goals, but if you've already done that the best praxis would be to start cutting.

 

[ColonelMace]

They learnt their lesson with the second kickstarter. Deadfire's shortcomings are not due to any stretch goal, or at least none that I can remember (they basically promised stuff they already intended to do, like add islands, which isn't exactly an issue when designing an archipelago, or sea monsters, which is infinitely easier to implement than a whole fucking city).
Any problem in pacing was entirely on them and on Josh this time. Although, I think Deadfire is much more consistent in its overall design & content, and I believe not grieving themselves with fabulously optimistic stretch goals certainly helped.

 

[almondblight]

One of the worst parts of the game is the writing, but if you just scan through it and skip over most of the stuff things are much more enjoyable.

 

[Axel_am]

https://www.twitch.tv/werglia/clip/TastyBetterDunlinShazBotstix--YyBTDnFnQg1WzqN
I couldn't agree more.

 

[almondblight]

Putting massive groups of enemies right next to each other is pretty rage inducing in this game. You're doing a tough fight, but you're doing pretty well, and then all of a sudden one of your characters ventures a step to far out of the way and a couple dozen new enemies come smashing into your back line. In general the game has far too many trash mobs, but them being packed right against each other is just idiotic.

 

[Modron]

Putting massive groups of enemies right next to each other is pretty rage inducing in this game. You're doing a tough fight, but you're doing pretty well, and then all of a sudden one of your characters ventures a step to far out of the way and a couple dozen new enemies come smashing into your back line. In general the game has far too many trash mobs, but them being packed right against each other is just idiotic.

Proud Icewind Dale design tradition.

 

[Jvegi]

IWD is good though.

almondblight should also git gud.

 

[almondblight]

Eh...scouting and managing zones of aggression between different groups of enemies while your characters make confusing pathfinding positions isn't particularly fun. It's actually similar to the issues with the dragon fights - you need precision, but the game's not particularly great at precision.

 

[ferratilis]

The only place where that happened to me was in front of Caed Nua, and that fight can be easily avoided. You're blowing it out of proportion, sounds like skill issue.

 

[almondblight]

The only place where that happened to me was in front of Caed Nua, and that fight can be easily avoided.

Longwatch Falls alone has several places where that happens. Just to give a few examples - at the top of the ramp of the main road, for example, there's an encounter that triggers if you go a bit to the left of the map, and a higher level bounty that triggers if you go a bit to the right (obviously won't be there if you don't have the bounty, though). If you follow the main map up the road and fight the encounter there, it's easy for the encounter on the cliffs to be triggered and hit you from behind. The thermal pools have about 20 fish people spread all over the place, though I don't know if the intent was to have you fight all 20 at once or not (the placement is too spread out for an intended mass encounter but too close for the intent of having them be separate encounters).

Another map I remember being particularly bad about that was the one with the adra arch.

You're blowing it out of proportion, sounds like skill issue.

As I said, I don't particularly like managing zones of enemy aggression so much. It's annoying to do in combat; autopause out of combat can stop wayward pathfinding from triggering things you don't want, but in combat you have to babysit all of your characters, particularly with the odd pathfinding.

 

[The Limper]

I always thought the maps were packed way too tight. Seems they could of made bigger maps or adjusted ‘something..’. I liked the graphics but….. seems like if all the characters/enemies were just a bit smaller in size it would of fit better. I’m not a game designer, merely a mindless rpg zombi with endless appetite, but even i could tell there was something out of sync on the maps. I still enjoyed the game but….but the maps felt off.

 

[almondblight]

I always thought the maps were packed way too tight. Seems they could of made bigger maps or adjusted ‘something..’. I liked the graphics but….. seems like if all the characters/enemies were just a bit smaller in size it would of fit better. I’m not a game designer, merely a mindless rpg zombi with endless appetite, but even i could tell there was something out of sync on the maps. I still enjoyed the game but….but the maps felt off.

Yeah, it doesn't just make the game frustrating to play at times, but the world building ends up being really weird when you have a ton of different enemies almost back to back. There was some mission north of Twin Elms where some people ask you to kill a big group of stelgaer, and you do and they run off to the north. And then you walk 5 feet north of that group you just killed, and there's another huge group of stelgaer.

Some maps are better than others though. There are some where you have very few/no encounters if you stick to the road and don't do any exploring, which is something in an RPG that always helps makes the world feel a bit more real.

The difficulty in this game also swings pretty wildly. I have maiming on, and the first fight on the Durgan's Battery mine level with the two battery sirens mauled me, to the point where Aloth and Sagani were out of the the rest of the fights. But all the other non-spirit encounters on the level were pretty easy to finish without a rest, even though I didn't have those two members and had already lost a ton of health.

 

[mediocrepoet]

I always thought the maps were packed way too tight. Seems they could of made bigger maps or adjusted ‘something..’. I liked the graphics but….. seems like if all the characters/enemies were just a bit smaller in size it would of fit better. I’m not a game designer, merely a mindless rpg zombi with endless appetite, but even i could tell there was something out of sync on the maps. I still enjoyed the game but….but the maps felt off.

Yeah, it doesn't just make the game frustrating to play at times, but the world building ends up being really weird when you have a ton of different enemies almost back to back. There was some mission north of Twin Elms where some people ask you to kill a big group of stelgaer, and you do and they run off to the north. And then you walk 5 feet north of that group you just killed, and there's another huge group of stelgaer.

Some maps are better than others though. There are some where you have very few/no encounters if you stick to the road and don't do any exploring, which is something in an RPG that always helps makes the world feel a bit more real.

The difficulty in this game also swings pretty wildly. I have maiming on, and the first fight on the Durgan's Battery mine level with the two battery sirens mauled me, to the point where Aloth and Sagani were out of the the rest of the fights. But all the other non-spirit encounters on the level were pretty easy to finish without a rest, even though I didn't have those two members and had already lost a ton of health.

1) Play on Path of the Damned
2) Take on all bounty quests as soon as they come up
3) Do not clear the areas the bounty spawns in beforehand
4) Have fun in the ogre druid cave

 

[Nano]

It's sad how the stellar atmosphere and art design is wasted on this game. Fortunately both took a nosedive in the sequel so nothing would be wasted at all (except for everyone's time and money). Based Obsidian.

 

[almondblight]

1) Play on Path of the Damned
2) Take on all bounty quests as soon as they come up
3) Do not clear the areas the bounty spawns in beforehand
4) Have fun in the ogre druid cave

"This doesn't happen, git gud"

"You should have known that this happens and you shouldn't accept a bounty quest before clearing an area because their placement is screwed up."



Go ahead and argue with the people above who were claiming this doesn't happen in the game.

As for PotD, as I said, it felt like the right difficulty when I started the game, and it's impossible to change later (same with level scaling). Even now, it doesn't feel wrong most of the time - like I said, 2/3's of my party were enough to clean out the mines without much trouble, and I have 5 campfires around I haven't used yet (2 in my inventory, 3 in boxes inside the battery). The weird thing about the difficulty is how much it swings. One gets the impression that a bunch of modifiers were thrown on without much play testing.

 

[mediocrepoet]

1) Play on Path of the Damned
2) Take on all bounty quests as soon as they come up
3) Do not clear the areas the bounty spawns in beforehand
4) Have fun in the ogre druid cave

"This doesn't happen, git gud"

"You should have known that this happens and you shouldn't accept a bounty quest before clearing an area because their placement is screwed up."



Go ahead and argue with the people above who were claiming this doesn't happen in the game.

Why come to the Codex if you don't want to argue with retards?

Seriously though, that particular issue can cause some of the most retarded, hard af difficulty spikes in the game.

As for PotD, as I said, it felt like the right difficulty when I started the game, and it's impossible to change later (same with level scaling). Even now, it doesn't feel wrong most of the time - like I said, 2/3's of my party were enough to clean out the mines without much trouble, and I have 5 campfires around I haven't used yet (2 in my inventory, 3 in boxes inside the battery). The weird thing about the difficulty is how much it swings. One gets the impression that a bunch of modifiers were thrown on without much play testing.

Yeah, usually it's not bad, but there are a few things. The only ones that come to mind though are basically:

1. During low levels: Teleporting spirits fucking up your backline - at a low level, you might not be able to do a lot other than cheese it to avoid your squishies getting killed.
2. Ogre druids and their insane dots.
3. Some of the bounties that double up the spawns if you don't kill the original group first. Especially when it involves ogre druids and their insane dots.
4. Arguably that final battle at Raedric's Hold with all the fampyrs, though I think they may have re-worked this to be less of a gong show with a few nerfs and some AI tweaks. As I recall, the last time I played the game, this one wasn't as bad.

Once you get going though, you still steamroll pretty much everything for the entire game.

 

[Axel_am]

4) Have fun in the ogre druid cave

 

[Axel_am]

Ogre druids aren't that hard to handle. In general Druid spells target the ground so when you see one casting just move your party back.
almondblight if it makes you feel any better most of your criticism is valid. You should still get good tho.

 

[almondblight]

Why come to the Codex if you don't want to argue with retards?

Seriously though, that particular issue can cause some of the most retarded, hard af difficulty spikes in the game.

Fair enough, I was just amused seeing your post after being told by multiple people here that this doesn't happen.

Yeah, usually it's not bad, but there are a few things. The only ones that come to mind though are basically:

1. During low levels: Teleporting spirits fucking up your backline - at a low level, you might not be able to do a lot other than cheese it to avoid your squishies getting killed.
2. Ogre druids and their insane dots.
3. Some of the bounties that double up the spawns if you don't kill the original group first. Especially when it involves ogre druids and their insane dots.
4. Arguably that final battle at Raedric's Hold with all the fampyrs, though I think they may have re-worked this to be less of a gong show with a few nerfs and some AI tweaks. As I recall, the last time I played the game, this one wasn't as bad.

Once you get going though, you still steamroll pretty much everything for the entire game.

Upscaled PotD has given me some of the toughest fights so far.

Battery sirens, for example, are interesting. Their normal attack shoots pretty quickly, causing (from what I can tell) both stuck and fear, plus they seem to have paralyze and stun attacks. From what I can tell, they can regenerate pretty fast (one appeared to go from "injured" to fine in a matter of seconds). On upscaled their defensive stats appear to be close to that of dragons. For instance, it shows 99? as their will defense, but if I attack it, it shows it as 116. Same for deflection - shows 63?, but if attacked, it shows 103 (this are the correct numbers, they're what show up when you check out the combat rolls). I have to assume the "?" numbers are what they would be if they weren't upscaled. They're the numbers in the encyclopedia as well, which makes the encyclopedia somewhat worthless.

They're not impossible or anything, but it is somewhat tiring to have to do encounter after encounter of 2-3 battery sirens behind a meat wall. One encounter like that followed by a bunch of normal encounters is fine (Durgan's battery mines), but having encounter after encounter like that (Durgan's Battery foundry) gets a bit tedious.

The funniest encounter in Durgan's Battery so far was the one in the foundry after you grab the disc from the bottom of the pool. It activates a dozen spirits and three Battery sirens against you, but they don't appear until after you come out, and they appear both in front of you and behind you. Then the game does an extra screw you, because it also activates three new traps right in the middle of the area where they attack you (an area you already checked for traps and didn't find), and those traps instakill with hundreds of points of damage.



I got lucky and didn't trigger them during the fight, nor did I trigger them with any of my maimed characters. It feels like something that would have been rage inducing to happen in the middle of a tough fight, especially a tough fight where the game is already ambushing you.

almondblight if it makes you feel any better most of your criticism is valid. You should still get good tho.

Yeah, I don't mind the challenge for the most part (which is why I'm playing on PotD). Some of the design decisions make me raise an eyebrow, though.

 

[Piotrovitz]

As for PotD, as I said, it felt like the right difficulty when I started the game, and it's impossible to change later (same with level scaling). Even now, it doesn't feel wrong most of the time - like I said, 2/3's of my party were enough to clean out the mines without much trouble, and I have 5 campfires around I haven't used yet (2 in my inventory, 3 in boxes inside the battery). The weird thing about the difficulty is how much it swings. One gets the impression that a bunch of modifiers were thrown on without much play testing.

Eh, I wouldn't say that POTD diff swings that much - there is some spike at the beginning, but around lvl 7-9 it flattens out and goes downhill from there, mostly due to spells you get around that time (confusion, devotions, some cipher ones etc etc). E.g. confusion and call to slumber trivializes all of the fights with ogre druid packs.

Beside WM dragon I can't recall any really tough/unfair fight tbh.