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Review RPG Codex Review: Darth Roxor on Disappointment, thy name is Pillars of Eternity

Grinning Reaper

Guest
It seems more that they're using Baldur's Gate and Icewind Dale here to signify the series rather than the first games in these series. Besides, is there seriously any sign that PS:T was more of an inspiration than BG2 or IWD2?

Why does it seem like that to you, because you want to read that into it? Go read the Kickstarter pitch, you'll see zero promises regarding anything to do with BG2. The "Game Details" of the Kickstarter pitch read "Project Eternity will take the central hero, memorable companions and the epic exploration of Baldur’s Gate, add in the fun, intense combat and dungeon diving of Icewind Dale, and tie it all together with the emotional writing and mature thematic exploration of Planescape: Torment."

If they wanted to say Baldur's Gate series or Icewind Dale series, then they easily could and would have done so. It's not their responsibility to deliver on expectations that people dreamed up. I don't see a good argument for how they didn't deliver on their limited promise of mashing bits these three games into a new RPG that was in some way reminiscent of them, except possibly for those who had a more rigid view of certain things, such as Sensuki's love for the specific combat mechanics of the IE games.
 

Sensuki

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Codex 2014 Serpent in the Staglands Shadorwun: Hong Kong A Beautifully Desolate Campaign
I like tactical RTwP combat actually I didn't request any specific mechanics.

The pitch included tactical RTwP combat

The game isn't very tactical. Goal failed miserably there as far as I'm concerned. But hey, maybe they too confuse strategy with tactics? Lots of people do.
 
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SA comes through again, providing both a summary of Darth Roxor's criticism and several well thought out critiques that the Codex couldn't manage in 68 pages of bickering:

I am apparently a glutton for punishment, but people responding to the RPGCodex review in the same breath that they say "but it was so long/the author was too crazy that I didn't read it" nettles me. Listed below are the actual critiques the author makes, stripped of their hyperbole as much as possible. If y'all are going to refute something, at least tilt at the actual windmill in question.

CONS

Character generation
Races
All of them are indistinguishable from their D&D counterparts, and feature analogues racial stats.

Classes
Many of them are indistiguishable from their D&D counterparts.

Attributes
- There are clear dump stats, despite the game's intentions.
- Might & Intellect seem more useful than the rest, while Constitution and Perception fare poorly.

Skills
Some skills (athletics, mechanics) are essential, while the rest (stealth, lore and survival) are far less useful. Skills also present few (if any) meaningful options during dialogue and other interactive sequences. When skills ARE used in dialogue, the outcomes are often underwhelming, like skipping a very minor fight.

Talents
Utility talents are mostly useless with a few exceptions. Defensive talents are not useful to party-members who aren't on the front line. And offensive talents contain certain talents that are head-and-shoulders better than the rest.

Abilities
- The abilites for each class are not properly balanced, leading to 1-2 abilties that get used heavily while the rest are rarely seen.
- Additionally, each character gets a per-encounter ability which they have no incentive NOT to use every fight, further encouraging them to hoard their per-rest abilities.

Attack/Defense
Beyond stat allocation during chargen, the player is not given many meaningful ways to improve his attack and defense stats. According to the author, a passive level gain will grant you more benefits than talents, items or buffs.

Health/Endurance
- Having characters "pass out" when they lose their endurance encourages careless fights, as there are no penalties for "dying" during combat, and because ill effects end after every fight.
- Having healing spells heal endurance (rather than health) just means characters will take more long-term (health) damage in the fight.

Spellcasting
- The magic system in the game closely resembles Vancian casting from D&D, spell slots per level and everything.
- According to the author, the druid overshadows both wizards and priests, who have their own issues. Druids can heal, cause damage, cast buff/debuffs, use crowd control, and use summons. A druid can also shapeshift in the middle of a fight.
- Priests have underwhelming damage spells, are not geared for frontline combat, and aren't even effective healers because healing endurance just means giving characters a chance to lose more health in combat.
- Wizards either have underwhelming spells, or 1-2 per level that are broken compared to the rest. As a result, you wind up casting the same 1-2 spells from every level.

Itemisation
- The armor system is underwhelming because it's a simple linear progression, affecting only damage reduction and recovery rate, which leads to tanks wearing the heaviest armor available, and all non-front line characters wearing the lightest possible.
- Magic items are underwhelming and do not feel unique. There are no unique effects to be had, à la Mace of Disruption from BG2, Axe of the Jester from PS:T or the Messenger of Sseth from IWD.
- Crafting is uninspired and underwhelming, offering only banal options like quality, elemental damage, or stat boosts. Compare that to BG2 where when you killed the red dragon, you could make a suit of armor out of its scales that both offered a unique form of protection (vs. fire) and that was competitive with other similar armors.

Combat
Engagement
The engagement mechanic is just a retooled form of opportunity attacks. It also causes its own set of problems:
- There is no margin of error for moving while engaged, meaning that repositioning or maneuvering your tank once battle commences is challenging, and punishing.
- Engagement promotes what the author calls "MMO tactics"--namely, party roles where one character pulls attentino and aggro, while DPS-characters stand back and nuke the target.
- Enemy AI is limited, and hamstrung by engagement. Enemies will almost never bypass your tank and beeline for your vulnerable ranged characters, shadows and fampyrs excepted. Otherwise, enemies will fruitless fling themselves against your tank while they're picked off by your backline casters.
- All of this leads to a repetitive combat system, where you almost always approach battles in the exact same way.

Party AI
According to the author, the NPCs have terrible pathfinding, and will easily become stuck. Due to how the game processes "enemies," friendly party-members will auto-attack charmed/confused party-members if witing range.

- Encounter design
- There are too many trash mobs in the game, and this is only increased as the difficulty increases. Many of these mobs feel copy/pasted, particularly in wilderness areas.

- Buffs
- According to the author, it is not effective to cast buffs during combat as they typically guard against the enemy's alpha strike.
- Also, the opportunity cost of casting them is frequently outweighed by the damage one could have been doing instead.
- Buffs also suffer from poor range, small AoEs, and barely-noticeable effects. Part of this is because even a buffed character must still succeed on an accuracy roll, which has a constant chance of a miss or graze.
- Wizard buffs in particular provide underwhelming benefits.

- Experience
Even though you only gain experience through questing, the bulk of the game is spent fighting, which gives you diminishing returns. Because of this, it's very easy to become overleveled if you pursue sidequests.

- Dungeon design
- There is very little incentive to fully exploring maps, as there is often no compelling content (especially in the wildnerness areas), a lot of trash mobs, and lacklustre "secrets" like a chest with 150 gold coins.
- Od Nua is too formulaic. It is, as the author puts it, "a series of banal fights that stretch on for 15 floors." There is no variety in the form of a puzzle level, or an interesting underground ecosystem, and the enemies all feel copy/pasted in.

- The stronghold
It is underwhelming.

The Story
- The setting is still generic european high fantasy.
- The much-vaunted languages are either silly (ducs, erls, guls, and fampyrs instead of dukes, earls, ghouls, and vampires), while the rest of the apostrophed and accented terms all jumble together.
- The souls don't wind up feeling that unique of a focus. Souls are a catchall explanation for many things in the game.
- The quality of writing in general is underwhelming.

PROS
- The weapons fare well, and are decently varied.
- The encounter with the Adra dragon.
- Raedric's hold.

And two reponses:

Ok I'll take a stab at this!

Many of them are indistiguishable from their D&D counterparts.
I don't see a con here.

Attributes
- There are clear dump stats, despite the game's intentions.
- Might & Intellect seem more useful than the rest, while Constitution and Perception fare poorly.
There are clear dump stats if you want to munchkin your way through the game sure. For those of us who like to experiment with more adventurous characters, the attribute system is a blessing.

Skills
Some skills (athletics, mechanics) are essential, while the rest (stealth, lore and survival) are far less useful. Skills also present few (if any) meaningful options during dialogue and other interactive sequences. When skills ARE used in dialogue, the outcomes are often underwhelming, like skipping a very minor fight.

The stealth system is pretty dumb, yes, but I would argue that lore is one of the most useful skills in the game. Give your tank 2 lore and they'll be able to cast fan of flames and jolting touch amongst others. Give them 4 for even more flexibility and it still won't ruin your character. More than worth it. As far as dialogue choices, I don't know what that dude is expecting, one of each skill dialogue check per conversation?
Talents
Utility talents are mostly useless with a few exceptions.

Hence the label 'utility'. Take them if you feel they will benefit your character. Don't if you don't.

Defensive talents are not useful to party-members who aren't on the front line.
Hyperbole, but really, no shit.

And offensive talents contain certain talents that are head-and-shoulders better than the rest.

Not counting OSA, they all have their advantages and disadvantages.

Abilities
- The abilites for each class are not properly balanced, leading to 1-2 abilties that get used heavily while the rest are rarely seen.
- Additionally, each character gets a per-encounter ability which they have no incentive NOT to use every fight, further encouraging them to hoard their per-rest abilities.

This one I actually agree with to a point. The paladin is a mess, and a few of the rogue's 'per rest' abilities should probably be 'per encounter.'

Attack/Defense
Beyond stat allocation during chargen, the player is not given many meaningful ways to improve his attack and defense stats. According to the author, a passive level gain will grant you more benefits than talents, items or buffs.
I don't see a con here.

Health/Endurance
- Having characters "pass out" when they lose their endurance encourages careless fights, as there are no penalties for "dying" during combat, and because ill effects end after every fight.
- Having healing spells heal endurance (rather than health) just means characters will take more long-term (health) damage in the fight.

It encourages careless fights until you're out of campfires and your tanks are in the red and your priest is about to all out die and you're mid-dungeon and there's a big fight coming up. Bonus points if you're playing on one save mode.


Spellcasting
- The magic system in the game closely resembles Vancian casting from D&D, spell slots per level and everything.
- According to the author, the druid overshadows both wizards and priests, who have their own issues. Druids can heal, cause damage, cast buff/debuffs, use crowd control, and use summons. A druid can also shapeshift in the middle of a fight.
- Priests have underwhelming damage spells, are not geared for frontline combat, and aren't even effective healers because healing endurance just means giving characters a chance to lose more health in combat.
- Wizards either have underwhelming spells, or 1-2 per level that are broken compared to the rest. As a result, you wind up casting the same 1-2 spells from every level.

I don't know what Vancian casting is, but I don't see a problem with it. The second point: I don't see a con here. Priests having underwhelming damage spells is just plain wrong. The Seal and Pillar spells are fantastic. Of course they're not geared for frontline combat, and that last part about healing I have no idea what he's trying to get at. Isn't giving players the ability to lose more health, if necessary, the point of healing them? I think maybe he's a bit too hung up on the Health/Endurance system.

Itemisation
- The armor system is underwhelming because it's a simple linear progression, affecting only damage reduction and recovery rate, which leads to tanks wearing the heaviest armor available, and all non-front line characters wearing the lightest possible.
Some more hyperbole here, but again, I don't see a con.

- Magic items are underwhelming and do not feel unique. There are no unique effects to be had, à la Mace of Disruption from BG2, Axe of the Jester from PS:T or the Messenger of Sseth from IWD.

First of all the examples he gave must have been made through rose tinted glasses because they're really not all that crazy unique. Secondly: Cloudpiercer War Bow, Good Friend Crossbow, St. Guaram's Spark Pistol, Mosquito Rapier, Azurieth's Stiletto, Bleak Fang Stiletto, Blesca's Labor Club, Starcaller Flail, Ritezzi's Thorn Spear, Sheathed in Autumn Sword, Rimecutter Axe, The Flames of Fair Rian Sabre, The White Spire Estoc, Wend-Walker Quarterstaff, Mabec's Morning Star -- all of these are pretty unique and fun weapons. Also if they don't feel unique enough, you can add your own stats to them via crafting.

- Crafting is uninspired and underwhelming, offering only banal options like quality, elemental damage, or stat boosts. Compare that to BG2 where when you killed the red dragon, you could make a suit of armor out of its scales that both offered a unique form of protection (vs. fire) and that was competitive with other similar armors.

He's being pretty contradictory here. It's banal and underwhelming to add a form of protection to your armor in PoE but it's unique to do so in BG. More rose tinted glasses.

Combat
Engagement
The engagement mechanic is just a retooled form of opportunity attacks. It also causes its own set of problems:
- There is no margin of error for moving while engaged, meaning that repositioning or maneuvering your tank once battle commences is challenging, and punishing.
- Engagement promotes what the author calls "MMO tactics"--namely, party roles where one character pulls attentino and aggro, while DPS-characters stand back and nuke the target.
- Enemy AI is limited, and hamstrung by engagement. Enemies will almost never bypass your tank and beeline for your vulnerable ranged characters, shadows and fampyrs excepted. Otherwise, enemies will fruitless fling themselves against your tank while they're picked off by your backline casters.
- All of this leads to a repetitive combat system, where you almost always approach battles in the exact same way.

I'm not the biggest fan of engagement either but it's not 'challenging.' 'Punishing' yes. And I don't know about that guy but when I played the old IE games I also put my fighters out front to catch the attention of the enemy frontline and let my rogues and wizards and priests hangout in mid and backfield.

Party AI
According to the author, the NPCs have terrible pathfinding, and will easily become stuck. Due to how the game processes "enemies," friendly party-members will auto-attack charmed/confused party-members if witing range

This is true and is absolutely enraging.

- Buffs
- According to the author, it is not effective to cast buffs during combat as they typically guard against the enemy's alpha strike.
- Also, the opportunity cost of casting them is frequently outweighed by the damage one could have been doing instead.
- Buffs also suffer from poor range, small AoEs, and barely-noticeable effects. Part of this is because even a buffed character must still succeed on an accuracy roll, which has a constant chance of a miss or graze.
- Wizard buffs in particular provide underwhelming benefits.

All of this is just nonsense.

- Experience
Even though you only gain experience through questing, the bulk of the game is spent fighting, which gives you diminishing returns. Because of this, it's very easy to become overleveled if you pursue sidequests.

True, but you could always skip the quests that you don't want to do your next time through the game to cut down on the overleveling.

- Dungeon design
- There is very little incentive to fully exploring maps, as there is often no compelling content (especially in the wildnerness areas), a lot of trash mobs, and lacklustre "secrets" like a chest with 150 gold coins.
- Od Nua is too formulaic. It is, as the author puts it, "a series of banal fights that stretch on for 15 floors." There is no variety in the form of a puzzle level, or an interesting underground ecosystem, and the enemies all feel copy/pasted in.

More hyperbole, but that's par for the course so far I guess. I guess I'm not sure what he is expecting here. There are plenty of instances where fully exploring will get you a nice reward. One off the top of my head is the wizardry ring you get off the side of the cliff that you go to for Sagani's questline.

- The stronghold
It is underwhelming.


True, but you do get some decent rewards as far as crafting materials and a nice 'base' for your delve into Od Nua. The quest system is a nice solution for characters that are not in your party but you want to keep on par as far as leveling goes. If the Stronghold wasn't so far away travel-wise I'd like it a lot more.

The Story
- The setting is still generic european high fantasy.
- The much-vaunted languages are either silly (ducs, erls, guls, and fampyrs instead of dukes, earls, ghouls, and vampires), while the rest of the apostrophed and accented terms all jumble together.
- The souls don't wind up feeling that unique of a focus. Souls are a catchall explanation for many things in the game.
- The quality of writing in general is underwhelming.

Again, what was he expecting the setting to be? And were the languages really 'much vaunted?' The focus on souls and how they work and what to do with them is the entire point of the game, so I don't know what he's getting at here. Also about the quality of writing, what was he expecting? The Chinese Room-level pretensiousness?

PROS
- The weapons fare well, and are decently varied.
- The encounter with the Adra dragon.
- Raedric's hold.

First point: But he just said magic items were underwhelming and did not feel unique! Second point: A spell-check encounter as a pro. Ok. Third point: I agree Raedric's Hold was a cool area/quest.[/quote][/quote]

CONS

Character generation
Races
All of them are indistinguishable from their D&D counterparts, and feature analogues racial stats.

Classes
Many of them are indistiguishable from their D&D counterparts.

. . .

Spellcasting
- The magic system in the game closely resembles Vancian casting from D&D, spell slots per level and everything.
- According to the author, the druid overshadows both wizards and priests, who have their own issues. Druids can heal, cause damage, cast buff/debuffs, use crowd control, and use summons. A druid can also shapeshift in the middle of a fight.
- Priests have underwhelming damage spells, are not geared for frontline combat, and aren't even effective healers because healing endurance just means giving characters a chance to lose more health in combat.
- Wizards either have underwhelming spells, or 1-2 per level that are broken compared to the rest. As a result, you wind up casting the same 1-2 spells from every level.



Not really true but true enough I guess. There are two levels of response here. The first is that feeling like D&D was an explicit design goal. The second is that thinking the character classes were closer to D&D than they actually are may have been some of this guy's problem.

Itemisation
- The armor system is underwhelming because it's a simple linear progression, affecting only damage reduction and recovery rate, which leads to tanks wearing the heaviest armor available, and all non-front line characters wearing the lightest possible.
- Magic items are underwhelming and do not feel unique. There are no unique effects to be had, à la Mace of Disruption from BG2, Axe of the Jester from PS:T or the Messenger of Sseth from IWD.
- Crafting is uninspired and underwhelming, offering only banal options like quality, elemental damage, or stat boosts. Compare that to BG2 where when you killed the red dragon, you could make a suit of armor out of its scales that both offered a unique form of protection (vs. fire) and that was competitive with other similar armors.

This complaint is where I really start to wonder if the guy was playing the same game I was. There are lots of unique-effect weapons and there's more complexity to the armor choices than the guy gives the game credit for, mostly because of AoE attacks and things like Shades that skip through engagement.


- Buffs
- According to the author, it is not effective to cast buffs during combat as they typically guard against the enemy's alpha strike.
- Also, the opportunity cost of casting them is frequently outweighed by the damage one could have been doing instead.
- Buffs also suffer from poor range, small AoEs, and barely-noticeable effects. Part of this is because even a buffed character must still succeed on an accuracy roll, which has a constant chance of a miss or graze.
- Wizard buffs in particular provide underwhelming benefits.

This is probably his most interesting and legitimate critique and the one I probably agree with the most. Wizard buffs especially should give more bang for the buck than they do.

- Experience
Even though you only gain experience through questing, the bulk of the game is spent fighting, which gives you diminishing returns. Because of this, it's very easy to become overleveled if you pursue sidequests.
Yeah, I'd like to see a mod that re-normed the XP so you had to do a lot more of everything to get your party to level 12. I presume we'll see that with the expansions.

The Story
- The setting is still generic european high fantasy.
- The much-vaunted languages are either silly (ducs, erls, guls, and fampyrs instead of dukes, earls, ghouls, and vampires), while the rest of the apostrophed and accented terms all jumble together.
- The souls don't wind up feeling that unique of a focus. Souls are a catchall explanation for many things in the game.
- The quality of writing in general is underwhelming.

Yeah as per above he's missing the whole point of the "IE tradition" design goal here.

Overall he does have a few good points (yes, the stronghold needs a lot more work; encounter design could be more varied) but he's either not playing the same game I was or didn't read the same kickstarter I did. He's also, as I suspected, forgetting that this is not a AAA-budget title and doesn't have a previously created engine, setting, game system, etc., all of which take dev time.
 

Prime Junta

Guest
It seems more that they're using Baldur's Gate and Icewind Dale here to signify the series rather than the first games in these series. Besides, is there seriously any sign that PS:T was more of an inspiration than BG2 or IWD2?

Fuck if I know, I'm only going by what they said. Not what they may have been thinking or wanted to signify.

I think it's pretty obvious how they (attempted to) take various elements from these three games.

A lot of the environment art is IWD-ish in style, and the Endless Paths is a lot like the IWD dungeons, except not as good.

The game is structured like BG1: lots of interconnected maps you can travel to via the edge of the map, plot-gated at a couple of points (cf. Cloakwood, Baldur's Gate itself, return to Candlekeep).

The writing and companions are way more PS:T-esque than BG-esque or BG2-esque. Not as good, but clearly inspired by it.

Whereas I don't see jack shit of the unique features of BG2 -- crazy-powerful artefacts, crazy-complex encounters, crazy-weird monsters. There's mmmmaybe a little of BG2 in the quests -- as in, you do random stuff for random people involving relatively long sequences of things and lots of fighting, instead of just hunting down the breadcrumb trail of your past lives à la Torment or the relatively simple go-there-and-do-that quests of BG1.
 
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PC RPG Website of the Year, 2015 Divinity: Original Sin Torment: Tides of Numenera
SA comes through again, providing both a summary of Darth Roxor's criticism and several well thought out critiques that the Codex couldn't manage in 68 pages of bickering:

I am apparently a glutton for punishment, but people responding to the RPGCodex review in the same breath that they say "but it was so long/the author was too crazy that I didn't read it" nettles me. Listed below are the actual critiques the author makes, stripped of their hyperbole as much as possible. If y'all are going to refute something, at least tilt at the actual windmill in question.

CONS

Character generation
Races
All of them are indistinguishable from their D&D counterparts, and feature analogues racial stats.

Classes
Many of them are indistiguishable from their D&D counterparts.

Attributes
- There are clear dump stats, despite the game's intentions.
- Might & Intellect seem more useful than the rest, while Constitution and Perception fare poorly.

Skills
Some skills (athletics, mechanics) are essential, while the rest (stealth, lore and survival) are far less useful. Skills also present few (if any) meaningful options during dialogue and other interactive sequences. When skills ARE used in dialogue, the outcomes are often underwhelming, like skipping a very minor fight.

Talents
Utility talents are mostly useless with a few exceptions. Defensive talents are not useful to party-members who aren't on the front line. And offensive talents contain certain talents that are head-and-shoulders better than the rest.

Abilities
- The abilites for each class are not properly balanced, leading to 1-2 abilties that get used heavily while the rest are rarely seen.
- Additionally, each character gets a per-encounter ability which they have no incentive NOT to use every fight, further encouraging them to hoard their per-rest abilities.

Attack/Defense
Beyond stat allocation during chargen, the player is not given many meaningful ways to improve his attack and defense stats. According to the author, a passive level gain will grant you more benefits than talents, items or buffs.

Health/Endurance
- Having characters "pass out" when they lose their endurance encourages careless fights, as there are no penalties for "dying" during combat, and because ill effects end after every fight.
- Having healing spells heal endurance (rather than health) just means characters will take more long-term (health) damage in the fight.

Spellcasting
- The magic system in the game closely resembles Vancian casting from D&D, spell slots per level and everything.
- According to the author, the druid overshadows both wizards and priests, who have their own issues. Druids can heal, cause damage, cast buff/debuffs, use crowd control, and use summons. A druid can also shapeshift in the middle of a fight.
- Priests have underwhelming damage spells, are not geared for frontline combat, and aren't even effective healers because healing endurance just means giving characters a chance to lose more health in combat.
- Wizards either have underwhelming spells, or 1-2 per level that are broken compared to the rest. As a result, you wind up casting the same 1-2 spells from every level.

Itemisation
- The armor system is underwhelming because it's a simple linear progression, affecting only damage reduction and recovery rate, which leads to tanks wearing the heaviest armor available, and all non-front line characters wearing the lightest possible.
- Magic items are underwhelming and do not feel unique. There are no unique effects to be had, à la Mace of Disruption from BG2, Axe of the Jester from PS:T or the Messenger of Sseth from IWD.
- Crafting is uninspired and underwhelming, offering only banal options like quality, elemental damage, or stat boosts. Compare that to BG2 where when you killed the red dragon, you could make a suit of armor out of its scales that both offered a unique form of protection (vs. fire) and that was competitive with other similar armors.

Combat
Engagement
The engagement mechanic is just a retooled form of opportunity attacks. It also causes its own set of problems:
- There is no margin of error for moving while engaged, meaning that repositioning or maneuvering your tank once battle commences is challenging, and punishing.
- Engagement promotes what the author calls "MMO tactics"--namely, party roles where one character pulls attentino and aggro, while DPS-characters stand back and nuke the target.
- Enemy AI is limited, and hamstrung by engagement. Enemies will almost never bypass your tank and beeline for your vulnerable ranged characters, shadows and fampyrs excepted. Otherwise, enemies will fruitless fling themselves against your tank while they're picked off by your backline casters.
- All of this leads to a repetitive combat system, where you almost always approach battles in the exact same way.

Party AI
According to the author, the NPCs have terrible pathfinding, and will easily become stuck. Due to how the game processes "enemies," friendly party-members will auto-attack charmed/confused party-members if witing range.

- Encounter design
- There are too many trash mobs in the game, and this is only increased as the difficulty increases. Many of these mobs feel copy/pasted, particularly in wilderness areas.

- Buffs
- According to the author, it is not effective to cast buffs during combat as they typically guard against the enemy's alpha strike.
- Also, the opportunity cost of casting them is frequently outweighed by the damage one could have been doing instead.
- Buffs also suffer from poor range, small AoEs, and barely-noticeable effects. Part of this is because even a buffed character must still succeed on an accuracy roll, which has a constant chance of a miss or graze.
- Wizard buffs in particular provide underwhelming benefits.

- Experience
Even though you only gain experience through questing, the bulk of the game is spent fighting, which gives you diminishing returns. Because of this, it's very easy to become overleveled if you pursue sidequests.

- Dungeon design
- There is very little incentive to fully exploring maps, as there is often no compelling content (especially in the wildnerness areas), a lot of trash mobs, and lacklustre "secrets" like a chest with 150 gold coins.
- Od Nua is too formulaic. It is, as the author puts it, "a series of banal fights that stretch on for 15 floors." There is no variety in the form of a puzzle level, or an interesting underground ecosystem, and the enemies all feel copy/pasted in.

- The stronghold
It is underwhelming.

The Story
- The setting is still generic european high fantasy.
- The much-vaunted languages are either silly (ducs, erls, guls, and fampyrs instead of dukes, earls, ghouls, and vampires), while the rest of the apostrophed and accented terms all jumble together.
- The souls don't wind up feeling that unique of a focus. Souls are a catchall explanation for many things in the game.
- The quality of writing in general is underwhelming.

PROS
- The weapons fare well, and are decently varied.
- The encounter with the Adra dragon.
- Raedric's hold.

And two reponses:

Ok I'll take a stab at this!

Many of them are indistiguishable from their D&D counterparts.
I don't see a con here.

Attributes
- There are clear dump stats, despite the game's intentions.
- Might & Intellect seem more useful than the rest, while Constitution and Perception fare poorly.
There are clear dump stats if you want to munchkin your way through the game sure. For those of us who like to experiment with more adventurous characters, the attribute system is a blessing.

Skills
Some skills (athletics, mechanics) are essential, while the rest (stealth, lore and survival) are far less useful. Skills also present few (if any) meaningful options during dialogue and other interactive sequences. When skills ARE used in dialogue, the outcomes are often underwhelming, like skipping a very minor fight.

The stealth system is pretty dumb, yes, but I would argue that lore is one of the most useful skills in the game. Give your tank 2 lore and they'll be able to cast fan of flames and jolting touch amongst others. Give them 4 for even more flexibility and it still won't ruin your character. More than worth it. As far as dialogue choices, I don't know what that dude is expecting, one of each skill dialogue check per conversation?
Talents
Utility talents are mostly useless with a few exceptions.

Hence the label 'utility'. Take them if you feel they will benefit your character. Don't if you don't.

Defensive talents are not useful to party-members who aren't on the front line.
Hyperbole, but really, no shit.

And offensive talents contain certain talents that are head-and-shoulders better than the rest.

Not counting OSA, they all have their advantages and disadvantages.

Abilities
- The abilites for each class are not properly balanced, leading to 1-2 abilties that get used heavily while the rest are rarely seen.
- Additionally, each character gets a per-encounter ability which they have no incentive NOT to use every fight, further encouraging them to hoard their per-rest abilities.

This one I actually agree with to a point. The paladin is a mess, and a few of the rogue's 'per rest' abilities should probably be 'per encounter.'

Attack/Defense
Beyond stat allocation during chargen, the player is not given many meaningful ways to improve his attack and defense stats. According to the author, a passive level gain will grant you more benefits than talents, items or buffs.
I don't see a con here.

Health/Endurance
- Having characters "pass out" when they lose their endurance encourages careless fights, as there are no penalties for "dying" during combat, and because ill effects end after every fight.
- Having healing spells heal endurance (rather than health) just means characters will take more long-term (health) damage in the fight.

It encourages careless fights until you're out of campfires and your tanks are in the red and your priest is about to all out die and you're mid-dungeon and there's a big fight coming up. Bonus points if you're playing on one save mode.


Spellcasting
- The magic system in the game closely resembles Vancian casting from D&D, spell slots per level and everything.
- According to the author, the druid overshadows both wizards and priests, who have their own issues. Druids can heal, cause damage, cast buff/debuffs, use crowd control, and use summons. A druid can also shapeshift in the middle of a fight.
- Priests have underwhelming damage spells, are not geared for frontline combat, and aren't even effective healers because healing endurance just means giving characters a chance to lose more health in combat.
- Wizards either have underwhelming spells, or 1-2 per level that are broken compared to the rest. As a result, you wind up casting the same 1-2 spells from every level.

I don't know what Vancian casting is, but I don't see a problem with it. The second point: I don't see a con here. Priests having underwhelming damage spells is just plain wrong. The Seal and Pillar spells are fantastic. Of course they're not geared for frontline combat, and that last part about healing I have no idea what he's trying to get at. Isn't giving players the ability to lose more health, if necessary, the point of healing them? I think maybe he's a bit too hung up on the Health/Endurance system.

Itemisation
- The armor system is underwhelming because it's a simple linear progression, affecting only damage reduction and recovery rate, which leads to tanks wearing the heaviest armor available, and all non-front line characters wearing the lightest possible.
Some more hyperbole here, but again, I don't see a con.

- Magic items are underwhelming and do not feel unique. There are no unique effects to be had, à la Mace of Disruption from BG2, Axe of the Jester from PS:T or the Messenger of Sseth from IWD.

First of all the examples he gave must have been made through rose tinted glasses because they're really not all that crazy unique. Secondly: Cloudpiercer War Bow, Good Friend Crossbow, St. Guaram's Spark Pistol, Mosquito Rapier, Azurieth's Stiletto, Bleak Fang Stiletto, Blesca's Labor Club, Starcaller Flail, Ritezzi's Thorn Spear, Sheathed in Autumn Sword, Rimecutter Axe, The Flames of Fair Rian Sabre, The White Spire Estoc, Wend-Walker Quarterstaff, Mabec's Morning Star -- all of these are pretty unique and fun weapons. Also if they don't feel unique enough, you can add your own stats to them via crafting.

- Crafting is uninspired and underwhelming, offering only banal options like quality, elemental damage, or stat boosts. Compare that to BG2 where when you killed the red dragon, you could make a suit of armor out of its scales that both offered a unique form of protection (vs. fire) and that was competitive with other similar armors.

He's being pretty contradictory here. It's banal and underwhelming to add a form of protection to your armor in PoE but it's unique to do so in BG. More rose tinted glasses.

Combat
Engagement
The engagement mechanic is just a retooled form of opportunity attacks. It also causes its own set of problems:
- There is no margin of error for moving while engaged, meaning that repositioning or maneuvering your tank once battle commences is challenging, and punishing.
- Engagement promotes what the author calls "MMO tactics"--namely, party roles where one character pulls attentino and aggro, while DPS-characters stand back and nuke the target.
- Enemy AI is limited, and hamstrung by engagement. Enemies will almost never bypass your tank and beeline for your vulnerable ranged characters, shadows and fampyrs excepted. Otherwise, enemies will fruitless fling themselves against your tank while they're picked off by your backline casters.
- All of this leads to a repetitive combat system, where you almost always approach battles in the exact same way.

I'm not the biggest fan of engagement either but it's not 'challenging.' 'Punishing' yes. And I don't know about that guy but when I played the old IE games I also put my fighters out front to catch the attention of the enemy frontline and let my rogues and wizards and priests hangout in mid and backfield.

Party AI
According to the author, the NPCs have terrible pathfinding, and will easily become stuck. Due to how the game processes "enemies," friendly party-members will auto-attack charmed/confused party-members if witing range

This is true and is absolutely enraging.

- Buffs
- According to the author, it is not effective to cast buffs during combat as they typically guard against the enemy's alpha strike.
- Also, the opportunity cost of casting them is frequently outweighed by the damage one could have been doing instead.
- Buffs also suffer from poor range, small AoEs, and barely-noticeable effects. Part of this is because even a buffed character must still succeed on an accuracy roll, which has a constant chance of a miss or graze.
- Wizard buffs in particular provide underwhelming benefits.

All of this is just nonsense.

- Experience
Even though you only gain experience through questing, the bulk of the game is spent fighting, which gives you diminishing returns. Because of this, it's very easy to become overleveled if you pursue sidequests.

True, but you could always skip the quests that you don't want to do your next time through the game to cut down on the overleveling.

- Dungeon design
- There is very little incentive to fully exploring maps, as there is often no compelling content (especially in the wildnerness areas), a lot of trash mobs, and lacklustre "secrets" like a chest with 150 gold coins.
- Od Nua is too formulaic. It is, as the author puts it, "a series of banal fights that stretch on for 15 floors." There is no variety in the form of a puzzle level, or an interesting underground ecosystem, and the enemies all feel copy/pasted in.

More hyperbole, but that's par for the course so far I guess. I guess I'm not sure what he is expecting here. There are plenty of instances where fully exploring will get you a nice reward. One off the top of my head is the wizardry ring you get off the side of the cliff that you go to for Sagani's questline.

- The stronghold
It is underwhelming.


True, but you do get some decent rewards as far as crafting materials and a nice 'base' for your delve into Od Nua. The quest system is a nice solution for characters that are not in your party but you want to keep on par as far as leveling goes. If the Stronghold wasn't so far away travel-wise I'd like it a lot more.

The Story
- The setting is still generic european high fantasy.
- The much-vaunted languages are either silly (ducs, erls, guls, and fampyrs instead of dukes, earls, ghouls, and vampires), while the rest of the apostrophed and accented terms all jumble together.
- The souls don't wind up feeling that unique of a focus. Souls are a catchall explanation for many things in the game.
- The quality of writing in general is underwhelming.

Again, what was he expecting the setting to be? And were the languages really 'much vaunted?' The focus on souls and how they work and what to do with them is the entire point of the game, so I don't know what he's getting at here. Also about the quality of writing, what was he expecting? The Chinese Room-level pretensiousness?

PROS
- The weapons fare well, and are decently varied.
- The encounter with the Adra dragon.
- Raedric's hold.

First point: But he just said magic items were underwhelming and did not feel unique! Second point: A spell-check encounter as a pro. Ok. Third point: I agree Raedric's Hold was a cool area/quest.
[/quote]

CONS

Character generation
Races
All of them are indistinguishable from their D&D counterparts, and feature analogues racial stats.

Classes
Many of them are indistiguishable from their D&D counterparts.

. . .

Spellcasting
- The magic system in the game closely resembles Vancian casting from D&D, spell slots per level and everything.
- According to the author, the druid overshadows both wizards and priests, who have their own issues. Druids can heal, cause damage, cast buff/debuffs, use crowd control, and use summons. A druid can also shapeshift in the middle of a fight.
- Priests have underwhelming damage spells, are not geared for frontline combat, and aren't even effective healers because healing endurance just means giving characters a chance to lose more health in combat.
- Wizards either have underwhelming spells, or 1-2 per level that are broken compared to the rest. As a result, you wind up casting the same 1-2 spells from every level.



Not really true but true enough I guess. There are two levels of response here. The first is that feeling like D&D was an explicit design goal. The second is that thinking the character classes were closer to D&D than they actually are may have been some of this guy's problem.

Itemisation
- The armor system is underwhelming because it's a simple linear progression, affecting only damage reduction and recovery rate, which leads to tanks wearing the heaviest armor available, and all non-front line characters wearing the lightest possible.
- Magic items are underwhelming and do not feel unique. There are no unique effects to be had, à la Mace of Disruption from BG2, Axe of the Jester from PS:T or the Messenger of Sseth from IWD.
- Crafting is uninspired and underwhelming, offering only banal options like quality, elemental damage, or stat boosts. Compare that to BG2 where when you killed the red dragon, you could make a suit of armor out of its scales that both offered a unique form of protection (vs. fire) and that was competitive with other similar armors.

This complaint is where I really start to wonder if the guy was playing the same game I was. There are lots of unique-effect weapons and there's more complexity to the armor choices than the guy gives the game credit for, mostly because of AoE attacks and things like Shades that skip through engagement.


- Buffs
- According to the author, it is not effective to cast buffs during combat as they typically guard against the enemy's alpha strike.
- Also, the opportunity cost of casting them is frequently outweighed by the damage one could have been doing instead.
- Buffs also suffer from poor range, small AoEs, and barely-noticeable effects. Part of this is because even a buffed character must still succeed on an accuracy roll, which has a constant chance of a miss or graze.
- Wizard buffs in particular provide underwhelming benefits.

This is probably his most interesting and legitimate critique and the one I probably agree with the most. Wizard buffs especially should give more bang for the buck than they do.

- Experience
Even though you only gain experience through questing, the bulk of the game is spent fighting, which gives you diminishing returns. Because of this, it's very easy to become overleveled if you pursue sidequests.
Yeah, I'd like to see a mod that re-normed the XP so you had to do a lot more of everything to get your party to level 12. I presume we'll see that with the expansions.

The Story
- The setting is still generic european high fantasy.
- The much-vaunted languages are either silly (ducs, erls, guls, and fampyrs instead of dukes, earls, ghouls, and vampires), while the rest of the apostrophed and accented terms all jumble together.
- The souls don't wind up feeling that unique of a focus. Souls are a catchall explanation for many things in the game.
- The quality of writing in general is underwhelming.

Yeah as per above he's missing the whole point of the "IE tradition" design goal here.

Overall he does have a few good points (yes, the stronghold needs a lot more work; encounter design could be more varied) but he's either not playing the same game I was or didn't read the same kickstarter I did. He's also, as I suspected, forgetting that this is not a AAA-budget title and doesn't have a previously created engine, setting, game system, etc., all of which take dev time.
[/QUOTE]

Fuck his review, who cares what he thinks?

I want to read a review by someone who liked the game, not a retarded hater.
 
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Bubbles
Please - most of these responses are just "it's not a problem" or "I don't feel that way". The discussion on RPG Codex and on the Obsidian Forum was much more interesting.
 

Grinning Reaper

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I like tactical RTwP combat actually I didn't request any specific mechanics.

The pitch included tactical RTwP combat

The game isn't very tactical. Goal failed miserably there as far as I'm concerned. But hey, maybe they too confuse strategy with tactics? Lots of people do.

What I said wasn't disparaging you in any way, in fact I was saying that only those with more rigid expectations could possibly have legitimate complaints. You went on for quite a while on the Obsidian forums at least about how PoE combat wasn't enough like IWD combat and IE combat specifically, so I have no idea why you're trying to divorce your desire for "tactical RTwP combat" from IE games combat now.

Also, the combat is tactical. Varied damage types and resistances mean that tactical responses are required to optimize efficiency. They're not as necessary in the sense that things don't have complete immunities, etc., but tactical responses are still required to play efficiently. So, the combat is tactical, just not as tactical as you'd like it to be, or "isn't very tactical" as you put it, which is extremely subjective.
 
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It seems more that they're using Baldur's Gate and Icewind Dale here to signify the series rather than the first games in these series. Besides, is there seriously any sign that PS:T was more of an inspiration than BG2 or IWD2?

Why does it seem like that to you, because you want to read that into it? Go read the Kickstarter pitch, you'll see zero promises regarding anything to do with BG2. The "Game Details" of the Kickstarter pitch read "Project Eternity will take the central hero, memorable companions and the epic exploration of Baldur’s Gate, add in the fun, intense combat and dungeon diving of Icewind Dale, and tie it all together with the emotional writing and mature thematic exploration of Planescape: Torment."

If they wanted to say Baldur's Gate series or Icewind Dale series, then they easily could and would have done so. It's not their responsibility to deliver on expectations that people dreamed up. I don't see a good argument for how they didn't deliver on their limited promise of mashing bits these three games into a new RPG that was in some way reminiscent of them, except possibly for those who had a more rigid view of certain things, such as Sensuki's love for the specific combat mechanics of the IE games.


You could be onto something here, by only deriving inspiration from IWD1's "intense combat and dungeon diving", as opposed to IWD2's, they were delivering a subtle jab to the system's designer of IWD2.

Fuck if I know, I'm only going by what they said. Not what they may have been thinking or wanted to signify.

How is reading BG1 into BG any less of a leap of interpretation than BG-series. Is there seriously nothing ambiguous in a dev saying "I took my inspiration from Fallout"?
 

tuluse

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It seems more that they're using Baldur's Gate and Icewind Dale here to signify the series rather than the first games in these series. Besides, is there seriously any sign that PS:T was more of an inspiration than BG2 or IWD2?
Even if they are signifying the series as a whole that means 1/5 BG2 and 1/5 BG1 and 1/5 IWD1.

Thus more BG1/IWD than BG2.
 

Sensuki

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It's not open world, it's a typical Obsidian style plot gated progression.

BG1 doesn't have copy pasted encounters, it has a random encounter system.
 

tuluse

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It's not open world, it's a typical Obsidian style plot gated progression.
Open world is not a boolean in this case, it's a continuum. Baldur's Gate also featured plot gated progression but was partially open... just like PoE.

BG1 doesn't have copy pasted encounters, it has a random encounter system.
Tell that to the Nashkel Mines, and various (every?) other dungeons.

Edit: people seem to be confusing quality with structure and inspiration. PoE is structured similarly to BG1. It's smaller and maybe not done as well, but you clearly see it's the same basic shape.
 

Sensuki

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No. Pillars of Eternity blocks off discrete sections of the game world much like modern games do. Just because it uses an IE style world map doesn't make it like Baldur's Gate.

Nashkell mines still had more variety than the Skaen Temple :smug:, as did other BG1 dungeons.

Also the fact that the game makes boring/annoying dungeons that are worse than IWD, IWD2 and BG2 is pretty bad. Some of them are better than most BG1 vanilla ones, but that's not exactly difficult to achieve.
 

Grunker

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Nashkell mines still had more variety than the Skaen Temple

I see you're still under the delusion that the difference between a skeleton and a kobold is bigger than the one between two completely differently built cultists. The opposite remains true.
 

tuluse

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No. Pillars of Eternity blocks off discrete sections of the game world much like modern games do. Just because it uses an IE style world map doesn't make it like Baldur's Gate.
Like the Cloakwood.

Some of them are better than most BG1 vanilla ones, but that's not exactly difficult to achieve.
Sadly the last 10-15 years of commercial RPGs points to "yes this is difficult to achieve". I'm not sure exactly why, it doesn't seem hard to beat, yet here we are.
 
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Except exploring wildness in Baldur's Gate was fun because it was full of monsters that gave significant XP and powerful magical items. In Baldur's Gate you can find one of the most powerful priest weapons in the game (+2) hammer by walking around in the wilds, in PoE if you try walking around the wilds without having any quests to do there you will most likely waste your time.
Seriously - proper combat XP makes would make the game so much more enjoyable. People here (and on other boards) might believe that they just fight for fighting sake but in reality becoming more powerful is a big appeal in RPG games. First two Gothics were all around walking the world and seeking challenges in order to gather more XP and become powerful enough to take on other challenges. In PoE I just scout around the wilds and avoid any combat if I am able to help it.
The only part of Searing Parts I've explored is the road to the cave because I've decided that going through all these drakes is not worth my time, even though the combat was interesting.
No xp for combat is good for mission based games like Alpha Protocol and Bloodlines, where every time you meet an enemy is when you are trying to achieve some objective - they are on the way to your reward. In game like PoE where there are hordes of mobs guarding nothing interesting and giving no rewards it just encourages avoiding exploration and leaving locations once the main quest is done. There is no point to explore non-critical locations of Temple of Eothas and Skaen's Cult.
 

Sensuki

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No. Pillars of Eternity blocks off discrete sections of the game world much like modern games do. Just because it uses an IE style world map doesn't make it like Baldur's Gate.
Like the Cloakwood.

Yeah and Baldur's Gate - two plot related areas.

PE blocks off whole sections of the world based on 'a roadblock' and 'a flood' that serve as plot gates. Much like modern games.
 

Sensuki

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Nashkell mines still had more variety than the Skaen Temple

I see you're still under the delusion that the difference between a skeleton and a kobold is bigger than the one between two completely differently built cultists. The opposite remains true.

Nashkell Mines has less content over it's five areas than the Skaen Temple has in it's one area.

It includes non-combat encounters, a mini quest, a quest item, a recruitable npc, kobolds, kobold commandos, ghouls, spiders, skeletons and oozes.

The content is very basic and easy, but yes I do think that it has more variety than the Skaen Temple which uses the same units copy pasted over and over again, down to their attributes.

Another thing is I don't find myself thinking "gee the Nashkell Mines was tedious/pointless" as it takes 10-30 minutes to complete tops and has never bothered me. Skaen Temple is so fucking pointless/monotonous that it should just be the room with the Sacrificial Pit and the room with Wymund and that's it. The rest of it fucking sucked dong.

It was also made by people with years of RPG experience, Nashkell mines was made by some guy who'd never worked on a game before most likely.

Seriously - proper combat XP makes would make the game so much more enjoyable.

Boring combat is boring combat, I don't know how giving it XP makes it more enjoyable. But then again I'm not an RP'er.
 
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Grinning Reaper

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No. Strategy is required to play efficiently, I think you're getting confused.

Or maybe you're the one who's confused about them.

Nope.

So, switching to a different weapon that does a different type of damage to which your enemy is more vulnerable, based on the composition of a group of enemies, isn't tactical response? Deciding which spells to use based on your enemies varying resistances isn't tactical response? Deciding between damage and cc spells during combat depending on how the battle is going, or choosing to break engagement when it's worth it to do so, aren't tactical responses as per your definition of tactical? When mobs overwhelm or ignore my front-liners, which they sometimes do, I sometimes choose to disengage a squishy spellcaster and engage that enemy with a more hearty unit while my squishy retreats to a safe distance, because the damage from the disengagement attack is acceptable if it allows the unit to survive and continue contributing to the fight. Are none of those things tactical responses, or are you just determined to be a broken record who refuses to admit to the tactical component of combat in this game?
 

Jasede

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I don't do any of those things. I arm everyone with ranged weapons and right click everything to death. (On Hard.)
 

set

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Played on the hardest difficulty. I was never motivated enough to change my equipment. You just need a meat shield wall and a couple of musketeers and spell casters. You'll spend most of the battle just casting spells as opposed to trying to perform any kind of tactic. None of the encounters are designed to wipe you if you play ineffeciently (as it is, most 'professional' reviewers found PoE "way too hard" even on fucking easy, so I'm not surprised). The hardest encounters that's not endgame is the Ogre in the cave on hardest difficulty, because he has a bunch of bear buddies. But that fight is optional anyway.

Despite having infinite inventory space, I was just too lazy to swap armor/weapons out against enemies. Too much effort compared to just fighting them and it taking a little longer.
 

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