Playing PoE1: impressions

[Zibniyat]

A setting reproduced from a concrete historical foundation
can offer a unique glimpse into the cultural code of another time period. Game of Thrones does this, and it's one of the reasons of its immense success. Martin has
studied history very thoroughly, and his world is truly medieval to the bone.

 

[MuffinBun]

good point. But theres a middle ground: make dialogue options meaningful, and generate cosmetics(text) based on predetermined character traits. Yes/No/Maybe but the lines are different for the eager, cynical, compassionate or honorable characters. Could be based on background: an educated person speaks differently, less directly maybe(sometimes a sign of bad kind of education). I dreamt of something like this in a game for a while, but when I actually got to coding the dialogue systems, it never really seemed necessary in those cases. But for a game where diametrically different character builds are possible, that would be really nice to have.

Agreed.

Ha! Very nice. I'll comment in that thread soon. You have the right idea, and you're sticking to it, despite people promoting some other adjacent stuff(AP's dialogue system does not capture that well).

I love all kinds of tinkering with character interaction in games. Another thing, that in practice is somewhat realized already, is this: let the player access both layers of the conversation system: the objective meaningful one, and the more 'cosmetic' one, but here it would be something subjective, referring to motivations rather than style/flavour. So lets say you're playing as a captain of a space ship, the crew picked up a distress signal from a nearby vessel. Your dialogue wheel looks like this:

Phase 1: the choice
1) [accept] - (investigate)
2) [decline] - (move on)
at this point the character says nothing, and you can return to this step

Phase 2: the reasoning
Case 1)
>"We need to abide by the laws of spacetravel"
>"There might be someone in need of our help"
>"We all were in a similar spot. Time to repay the kindness."
>"There might be plenty of scrap inside for the taking"
Case 2)
>"I'm responsible for the safety of this crew. We're not docking."
>"We cannot spare any minute for this nonsense"
>"We need to leave immediately. Whatever got them might still be here"
this is where the actual line is being locked, there is no coming back after this decision

Now obviously this is being done to some extent already, largely because the designer wants to set your alignment changes properly(this was my motivation as well). But it is usually just dumped into one wall of text, whereas I'd like to see some clear gradation on the gui side here.

 

[MuffinBun]

Bester first of all, I really enjoy those insights, keep them coming! I'm always up for a decent critique. Some questions/issues:

For instance, women in history generally weren't equal to men in rights, no matter what period you take. In Archaic Greece, women weren't considered citizens
and lived in separate "women's quarters", where men only went for one purpose - procreation. Women were forbidden to go into the "men's quarters". They lived
so much apart, that it is suspected women had their own version of the Greek language.

Does this really refer to common practices widespread in the greek world during the archaic period? It rather sounds like a typical(accurate, afaik) description of classical Athens. The language claim seems really odd, not only on its own, but in face of the general diversity of greek at the time. Did they have a separate language in every region, for major dialects? Or is it again about Athens specifically?

In Medieval Europe, on which Pillars is more often based, wives were considered their husbands' property. In the 1500s, a Marital Exemption for Rape was passed:
forced sexual intercourse was considered a husband making use of his property.

Could you provide source? Which part of the world Europe does that refer to? Please dont take that for whataboutism, I'm genuinely curious.

 

[Sarathiour]

I don't think I'll say anything new here, but I want to write it down anyway, as I want to document this for later use.

I was having a hard time with the two Skuldr Kings with my 4-men party beneath the Eothas temple:

I decided to try different tactics, but quickly understood that there were no different tactics.

The problem is that the Skuldr Kings hit like a train and are fat like a pig. My D&D intuition told me they needed to be distracted or controlled.
On top of that, the Kings have 4 ads.

I'd normally go into my mage's spell book and cook up a strategy.

In POE, Wizard 1 level spells are:
- 1 debuff: "dazed", which won't turn the tide of any battle
- 1 useless buff: +3 move speed +20 Disengage Defense of questionable utility. Usually if you're engaged, by the time you cast this spell to disengage, you'll be dead anyway.

- 3 target damage spells
- 4 AOE damage spells
The only difference between them is their flair and the minor additional effects like "hobbled for 4 seconds". FOUR SECONDS!

- 4 spells to make the wizard more of a melee character for an average of 20 seconds, where he's got no business going. And by the time he self-buffs with these (~ about 16 seconds), the battle will be over. This is a game with no pre-buffing.
- Slicken, which is a CC that lasts for 4 seconds again. Don't you go having too much fun, kids.
I could spam Slicken, but I don't have any ranged damage dealers beside the Wizard, so that doesn't work for me.

2 level spells are:
- Aoe daze
- Web that lasts for THREE SECONDS
- More damaging spells...
- Hold Person for 1.5 rounds...
- etc..


So nothing you can debuff the two Kings with that would turn the tide.
Nothing you can buff your tank with to withstand the assault.
No Summon Monster to distract them.
No Charm Person to charm ONE OF THE TWO KINGS.
No Sleep to disable the ads, if not also one of the Kings.
No Grease to, ugh, kite around somehow...
No Darkness + Infravision or any other fantasy combo to give you some breathing room.
No FUNCTIONAL Web.
No potions that do any of the above.
Most of the things above I'd be able to do in D&D.

Okay, maybe the non-wizards can do something?
I can't use my rogue to set up a bunch of traps either (only one). The only traps I have are damaging, no "Sleeping gas" etc.
There's no "Last Stand" ability that Eder can use to survive for a while.
A monk can "knock back", but that's not enough.

So what CAN I do?

Run into a tight space and kill them one by one. Deep...

Sawyer says his favorite system is Arse Magicka. Sounds magical, yet in here the magic is dead. Is this something he picked up in this Arse Magicka system? Anyone knows how it works?

I hope PoE's system gets at least some depth later on, though I'm not optimistic.

Looking at the spell choice for the first 2 levels, it felt like Sawyer was ordered to put in the spells he detests:
- Slicken, Web or Hold Person, but sabotaged them by reducing their duration to 3-4 seconds
- "Make my mage into a fighter" buffs, but knew they'd be inefficient due to no-prebuff policy
Didn't put in any other typical D&D spells. As a result, mages are damage dealers and nothing else. For a "BG spiritual sequel" this feels criminal.

Maybe this'll change at higher levels, I don't know yet.

To get back on the magic system it's obvious that sawyer hate mage.
I played PoE a few years ago, and I can't remember single unique spell, it just melt as "boucing magic missile level 2/3/4" and "some random crowd control".

The way debuff like dazed, paralysis and petrification work is entirely fucked, notably because it's subject to the graze/hit/crit system.
Base duration of spell is indeed short, but it can be buffed by some stat. The thing is, most debuff come with heavy stat penalty, and the graze/crit sytem influence they duration.
So the winning move is to chain cast those like a retard. Sure, you onl gonna graze them at firt, but they are still taking the penalty for the next spell, until he get so low that you are going to score a crit either way. That's also why he had to change the priest spell to absolute status immunity later on, because the mob of monster does this shit to you and inevitably ended up stunlocking your party.


This also end up causing some narrative issue, because every other caster is more interesting than a mage, who were supposed to be big deal until the creation of gunpowder.

 

[Hobo Elf]

Hitting with debuffs is not as hard as you make it sound, even against bosses with souped up stats on Path of the Damned difficulty level. You just need a good amount of Accuracy.

 

[Harthwain]

what does that mean in terms of dialogue?

This means you won't be hand-crafting everything, including the dialogue, therefore there is less need for cosmetic dialogue over functional one. However, this also means you'd require a dedicated system to guide action-reaction interactions (something to govern the AI's behaviour).

A Song of Ice and Fire is by definition high fantasy. It takes place in a secondary world rather than our own. It also contains magic and dragons, hallmarks of what people misunderstand high fantasy to mean.

Isn't high fantasy a place where magic is common whereas low fantasy is a place where magic is uncommon? Another difference I can think of is that high fantasy is epic, low fantasy is much more down-to-earth in terms of how characters act. Compare The Game of Thrones to Lord of the Rings, for example.

 

[Zed Duke of Banville]

Isn't high fantasy a place where magic is common whereas low fantasy is a place where magic is uncommon?

No, but many people today do misapply the terms high- and low-fantasy to refer to high- and low-magic settings.

 

[Haplo]

Hitting with debuffs is not as hard as you make it sound, even against bosses with souped up stats on Path of the Damned difficulty level. You just need a good amount of Accuracy.

Yeah, particularly if you have a Priest.
There was an upgrade to his per encounter power that made him hit Fortitude hard.
And of course, Devotions of the Faithful is almost mandatory.

 

[Sarathiour]

Hitting with debuffs is not as hard as you make it sound, even against bosses with souped up stats on Path of the Damned difficulty level. You just need a good amount of Accuracy.

I badly explain, my complain is that it's actually way too easy, you don't even really need accuracy, you just have to throw enough shit for it to stick.

 

[Haplo]

...if you insist to waste time and spell slots, I guess that's one way to play the game.

 

[Sarathiour]

Waste ? If the ennemy save is low enough to beat straight on, you don't need to do this. Otherwise, you just pile on, inflicting status effect is the only thing mage spell do, what are you saving your spell slots for ?

 

[Haplo]

You made it sound like you're throwing random debuffs at enemies hoping they'd stick eventually.

While it should be a coordinated effort to first buff your own Accuracy, lower the enemy defenses with debuff effects and finally land the nasty CC.

 

[Sarathiour]

Sure, the actual order was to throw buff and any shit that cause hobbled/blinded/frightened, and then throw a petrify or a paralysis, and just stunlock them.

 

[vortex]

When they start working on Poe3 I hope they switch to Unreal 5. Loading screens in Deadfire are probably the worst technical aspect of the game.

 

[Bester]

Does this really refer to common practices widespread in the greek world during the archaic period?

Yes.

It rather sounds like a typical(accurate, afaik) description of classical Athens.

Archaic Greece is 8-6 centuries BC, followed by Classical period 6-5 centuries BC. How much do you expect to change in such a short period of time?

The language claim seems really odd, not only on its own, but in face of the general diversity of greek at the time. Did they have a separate language in every region, for major dialects? Or is it again about Athens specifically?

Greeks understood each other very well and the differences in dialects were often minor.
As for women, they seem to have had their own variant of the language, but it wasn't written, so we can't read it now to compare.

Could you provide source? Which part of the world Europe does that refer to? Please dont take that for whataboutism, I'm genuinely curious.

That example is from the English common law. Marriage gave conjugal rights, and one party could not unilaterally withdraw said right, therefore there simply could not be rape between spouses.

 

[ERYFKRAD]

such a short period of time

Huh? You're talking centuries aren't you?

 

[Bester]

such a short period of time

Huh? You're talking centuries aren't you?

You think they had drastic changes every 20 years like we're currently having with the SJWs?
There is an exponential acceleration in technological progress, and it causes acceleration in the cultural changes.
In the middle ages, people didn't even think of time in terms of linearity, but in terms of circularity. "What happened before will happen again" is the very crux of a medieval mindset. This is very typical of an agrarian society that relies on cycles for survival (sowing, harvesting, etc). For centuries, they didn't think there was any progress going on at all. There was, but it was so slow, that they couldn't see the forest for the trees. Thinking of time in linear terms is a very modern thing, unthinkable for them.

 

[agris]

Bester you're a crazy, autistic, neurotic spaz who is highly educated and a very clear communicator.

you're one of the threads in the tapestry that makes this place so special

 

[Nifft Batuff]

such a short period of time

Huh? You're talking centuries aren't you?

You think they had drastic changes every 20 years like we're currently having with the SJWs?
There is an exponential acceleration in technological progress, and it causes acceleration in the cultural changes.
In the middle ages, people didn't even think of time in terms of linearity, but in terms of circularity. "What happened before will happen again" is the very crux of a medieval mindset. This is very typical of an agrarian society that relies on cycles for survival (sowing, harvesting, etc). For centuries, they didn't think there was any progress going on at all. There was, but it was so slow, that they couldn't see the forest for the trees. Thinking of time in linear terms is a very modern thing, unthinkable for them.

Post-modern times think in term of circularity again: they are fixated with remakes and reboots.

 

[Trashos]

While it should be a coordinated effort to first buff your own Accuracy, lower the enemy defenses with debuff effects and finally land the nasty CC.

In how many fights do you NEED to do that, though, like 2 in the whole base game? (I haven't played the expansion)
It has been a while and I don't recall everything, but I remember that I ironmanned the game (almost, I think I was still working on the dragon fight) in my 2nd playthrough, and I didn't do much of that.

 

[likash]

Why are you noobs shitting on POE1? It's a decent game much better than the games Larian is making.


PS: loading screens advice for noobs: buy a fucking SSD and you won;t complain about them. They are not expensive. You can buy one from 50-100$. Use HDD only for storing movies,music and other shit.
One small SSD for the SO, a medium-large SSD for gaming and huge HDD for multimedia(torrents because i know that most of you are degenerates who pirate everything).

 

[Stoned Ape]

Why are you noobs shitting on POE1? It's a decent game much better than the games Larian is making.

That's true, but getting a case of gastroenteritis is more enjoyable than playing a D:OS game, so the bar you're setting is pretty low.

 

[luj1]

Why are you noobs shitting on POE1? It's a decent game much better than the games Larian is making.

They belong in the same basket

PoE 1-2, Numenera, Tyranny, DOS 1-2

It was a wave of really shitty RPGs

 

[Humbaba]

Why are you noobs shitting on POE1? It's a decent game much better than the games Larian is making.

They belong in the same basket

PoE 1-2, Numenera, Tyranny, DOS 1-2

It was a wave of really shitty RPGs

Tyranny's first act was very good I think and the conquest system was pretty cool. I wouldn't lump it together with those other disasters.

 

[gurugeorge]

Why are you noobs shitting on POE1? It's a decent game much better than the games Larian is making.

They belong in the same basket

PoE 1-2, Numenera, Tyranny, DOS 1-2

It was a wave of really shitty RPGs

PoE 1 and 2 and DOS 1 are not "really shitty", they're okay and can be enjoyable, in different ways; and Tyranny and DOS 2 are only somewhat shitty. The only really shitty game in that list is Numenera.