It's telling that a person such as Tigranes, who is an Obsidian moderator and likes Pillars of Eternity but is generally pretty neutral and fair about things is calling you out for this review as well.
Tigranes asked this question:
Tigranes said:
I love POE but I have no idea what this review was meant to achieve at any level.
I have the answer to this. This review was written in defense of the game, simple as that. That's why all the review basically says is "I'm not hardcore, I liked the game, I had fun, therefore it's good" rather than being a typically Codexian review. People were butthurt by the original scathing review and thus felt obligated to defend Obsidian's & PE's honor.
If you don't like the Real-time-with-pause (RTWP) mechanic, you will not like this game. Or rather, it is more accurate to say that PoE won’t really do anything to change your mind on whether or not the mechanic is any good. The fundamental aspects of the RTWP setup are all here, and in fact they are even more numerous than they are in the original IE games. RTWP seeks to create a middle ground between turn based combat and real time combat and it has survived -- if not necessarily thrived -- in this chapter of computer gaming because, if you know what you're doing, it really is a neat mechanic from which you can squeeze a lot of fun.
This is untrue, because there were several measures taken to make Pillars of Eternity feel more at home for fans of turn-based and tabletop games. This game is made by a team of developers who have publicly stated that they prefer turn-based. The Engagement system, the verbose auto-pause options and the 'default settings' all favor this. The game also has a more disjointed flow of combat than any of the Infinity Engine games if you are manually doing everything. The amount of active per-encounter abilities (or at least, this particular implementation) invoke more of a tabletop feeling but in practice they feel a bit unwieldy in RTwP.
From all the comments I've seen, I would say this *IS* a game that people who don't necessarily enjoy real-time combat can enjoy more than other, similar games - like the Infinity Engine games, 7.62mm High Caliber, or Aarklash Legacy.
It takes big brass balls to make the obvious investment in this character and then kill her 30 minutes into the game but Obsidian isn't horsing around. I was momentarily upset, especially when I realized I would have to finish the dungeon with Heodan, but thankfully he also gets brutally murdered. Anyway, it is this kind of commitment that makes PoE stand out from a lot of other games: the willingness to go all George RR Martin on your ass and kill a character you actually like, in a pretty petty and meaningless way.
This is bullshit. There are heaps of games where characters get killed early. Many of the Origin stories in Dragon Age Origins showcase this. Pillars of Eternity only does one thing differently, and that is that it lets you control those characters that get killed. Fair enough that you liked how this was done, but it wasn't really original in any way.
I agree with many of the blanket statements made about character customization and attributes. Yes, class choice has the strongest impact on the style of play of a character. Yes, attributes take a back seat. Yes, itemization really sucks. Yes, the classes that do not largely rely on per-encounter/per-rest system stand out like a sore thumb from every other class. You called them unique, fun, and perhaps OP - they are unique to the vancian focused 4E style classes and they do not really suffer from the resource concerns of other classes and perhaps that's what makes them more 'fun' for you because of the lack of strategical resource management concern when choosing and using abilities.
The engagement mechanic, essentially Obsidian's take on aggro, adds a crowd-control device that was missing from most of the Infinity Engine games
"Most of the Infinity Engine games". Sounds like someone has a bad memory/hasn't played an Infinity Engine game from a while. This line indicates that you think that one or more of the Infinity Engine games (such as IWD2) had Attacks of Opportunity, but they did not. The Infinity Engine games also had plenty of crowd control devices, but they were spell/ability based - as they should be. Pillars of Eternity has them too, but they're more useful for their debuffs (e.g., -25 to Deflection / -100 to Reflexes) than they are for their crowd control. Hobbled actually matters a lot more with Engagement disabled.
For my first playthrough, I had two melee fighters: Eder and my paladin, Victor, three if you count Sagani's useless fox. The rest of my party were ranged, with Aloth and Durance packing wands or scepters, Sagani on the bow, and Kana with his mighty arquebus. This usually meant putting Eder and Victor up front, Aloth lobbing the occasional spell, Durance being his badass self, and Sagani and Kana loosing projectiles. This set up gave me very good control over the battlefield, and I rarely had melee characters rushing past my own to engage my mage or ranged attackers. When this did happen, sometimes I was prepared and sometimes I wasn't, and my back-rank guys were sufficiently squishy to warrant my concern. For example, teleporting enemies will phase in behind your melee guys and simply wreak havoc on your spell casters, and guys like Aloth simply cannot handle the pounding -- he goes down like a sack of potatoes. Or, there are some instances where the sheer number of melee enemies, combined with a wide open space, can overwhelm Eder's engagement limit, sprint past the line, and start wailing on your dudes.
In PoE you have to actually care about party placement, and using chokepoints can often mean the difference between an easy win and a hard-fought slog. I rarely used consumables, but again this might be because I played the game on "Normal." By the end of things I had a trunkload of unused ingredients, mostly because I felt no great need to do anything with them.
This statement basically says to me that you found what others found - that you basically do the same thing every single encounter over and over again but were not bothered by this fact and perhaps even found the combat comfortable/enjoyable/relaxing because of it. You identified that you had to do something different when you made mistakes. From what I gather, you're more of a storyfag, so as long as the combat doesn't piss you off/frustrate you it's okay.
In the Infinity Engine games you have to care about party placement, it's just that Pillars of Eternity's Engagement mechanic punishes you for getting it "wrong", but it also strongly encourages you to play the same way every time. In BG1 if you had your Mage walking in the front against a bunch of archers, LOL CYA M8 - that's a dead Wizard and you have to reload, but you can dynamically correct positioning and there is no 'set' solution or 'set' position for every encounter that works against everything. How long has it been since you last played an Infinity Engine game my friend?
*cough* Normal difficulty *cough*. Even still, that's actually a bit of worrying statement that you didn't discover that the Ranger animal companion is extremely useful to the point of being broken, in some instances.
The endurance/stamina system that Obsidian introduced here is nicely done, and presents a break from the traditional high/low HP mechanic -- a nod to Darklands, one of JE Sawyer's favorite games. It is not very intuitive at first -- much like DA:O, the number you need to care about in combat (in this case endurance) rapidly fills itself after each encounter; this makes endurance a short term resource, and health a long term one. But I only ever worried about health with the more frail, cloth-wearing members of my party because, based on their class, your front line tank-ish types will have more health than you know what to do with.
This paragraph is also fair enough, you identified that strategical resource management didn't really matter, but you also don't seem to care about it anyway.
The resting mechanic is also a nice touch, but I have found this to be a contentious opinion among some who have played PoE, chiefly because they found that it didn't impact the difficulty of the game. As a resource management mechanic, it was serious enough to warrant my attention, but not something about which I had to constantly fret. I like this, other players may not. The biggest threat to running out of camping supplies is not some Betrayal at Krondor game-ending scenario where you are stuck in a dungeon with no way out, no way to rest, and no way to proceed through the level. If you run out of supplies, the worst thing that happens is that you have to backtrack to another location where you can buy them . . . but that's bad enough, for me. My supreme hatred of this kind of meta-gaming back-and-forth presents enough of an incentive for me to be judicious in my use of supplies.
The distinction between per-rest and per-encounter abilities mirrors the health/endurance mechanic in that you should be balancing your use of less-powerful per-encounter abilities against the more-powerful per-rest abilities. At least, this is how it supposed to work in theory but, aside from spells, I rarely wound up in a situation where I wanted to use a per-rest ability but couldn't. And in fact, it seems like per-encounter abilities are always going to be a better bet than per-rest ones, if you have to choose, because it all comes down to combat, and combat is won in the short term. A lot of this boils down to the game becoming too easy later on, but more on that in a moment.
If BGII suffered from any poor design choices, it was the one that allowed you to rest almost anywhere you wanted, whenever you wanted. This effectively neutered any kind of resource scarcity, since you didn't have to worry about your hit points or spells over the long term. The only thing you had to care about was making it through the current fight, after which you could rest for free and get all your spells back. PoE's attempt to fix this problem with camping supplies and per-rest/per-encounter abilities succeeds, most of the time, but it strikes me as something highly dependent upon difficulty level.
This block tells me a few things. A) You're not very good at the game, because you found the resting system @ 4 camping supplies serious enough to warrant your attention, which means you must take a shit load of damage during encounters and not play very optimally. I'm not having a go at you for it but it does tie into the fact that I think this game is more interesting to people who are not very good at it. I don't really make too many mistakes in combat, therefore I don't have to change what I'm doing. I don't take that much damage during encounters because I play the encounter pretty optimally. Therefore, camping supply limit of 2 was never a concern. You're also complaining that you could rest pretty often in BG2 therefore resources were never a concern, which indicates that you indeed rest spammed that game, and thus ruined a lot of the gameplay for yourself. But that's not surprising given several statements from the review - you don't seem to really enjoy strategical resource management. Pillars of Eternity takes this away from your concern for the most part, so you're enjoying not having to worry about it.
Josh Sawyer has stated openly that this game is designed with the fact that he thinks that most people in the IE games rest spammed, and thus designed the game
for rest spammers. I didn't rest spam, I am good at managing resources and taking less damage - therefore I am bored out of my brains.
I disagree that Pillars of Eternity 'fixed' the resting problem, it's a bandaid over a bullethole. But as you've said, you're lazy and don't like Area Transitions/backtracking, so it worked for you.
Your statement about per-encounters and per-rest is on the money though. Per encounters are pretty much always a better choice than a per rest ability, they got the balance and frequency of per encounter vs per rest completely wrong ... but a lot of people seem to enjoy the 'ease' of the lack of strategical resource management.
Encounter design is another area in which there seems to be some profound . . . agitation. I do not agree with some of the Codex complaints that encounter design in PoE was uniformly terrible, though I will say that my above formula with Eder up front made most encounters start -- and end -- the same way. It also doesn’t help that the guy is nigh unkillable. Anyway, sometimes you will stumble into a horde of enemies completely unprepared, but there are also some instances where a careful reading of the terrain will announce an upcoming fight (say, the sewers under Raedric's Hold), and you are rewarded for positioning your party and dropping down (the limited selection of) pre-fight buffs. The two fights against Raedric, and the two dragons in the Paths of Od Nua, are examples of tough encounters that will really test your mettle; on the other hand, fights against the game's main antagonist organization are frequently underwhelming, if not completely cheesy. And sometimes the game is guilty of simply throwing enemies at you in a way that feels lazy. But overall, encounters rarely left me me bored, and they were frequently exciting and challenging, which is the best I can declare about any video game combat, really. I have to say, I don't get all the disgruntled grumbling about the game's encounter design.
Stumbling into stuff unprepared just means that you made a mistake. It just seems to re-iterate that the game is more interesting if you muck up/play suboptimally. You may have found that same encounter boring if you set up on it with Stealth (or "you are rewarded for positioning your party"). What does this say about replayability? Let's say you play the game again and you have a half decent memory and because you remembered those encounters and set up on them properly, they are now banal like the others?
You've stated that you enjoyed the combat and encounters didn't leave you bored but have identified the same problems that other people have - you do the same thing over and over and there are problems with encounter flavor. One thing I'm surprised you didn't mention though is the lack of unique/named enemies, although I suppose if you can stomach finishing Dragon Age Inquisition then you may not care (note: have not played that game, but from what I've heard it has endless trash combat).
Encounter design might be fine if you don't care that much about combat or encounter design, but for most of the people that
do care - it sucks. The major thing that the game lacks that the Infinity Engine games did well was setpiece encounters and unique/named enemies. It did feel more in line with the Icewind Dale games in this regard but with another large step towards the popamole. I would even go as far to say that most of the designers for the game don't care very much about encounter design, which is a real shame.
I don't think the combat or encounter design lends itself very well to replayability unless you don't really care about it
.
They really nailed the old-school feel of the IE combat systems
I really disagree with this. Nothing about the systems feel old-school, and they certainly don't feel very Infinity Engine either.
The part of the review I was most disappointed about is the Story and Writing section. I was expecting a bit more analysis from you here, but all we got is a short four paragraph section and it just seems like by now, you're rushing to finish the review or something because more important than the review being good is that it's out there to defend the game. And thus, the story/writing section is virtually devoid of discussion. Your review of Dragon Age Inquisition had a huge section on the story and characters ... yet here apart from mentioning that the the main story is a bit flat (but don't say why) you're basically giving Obsidian a free pass here and possibly deliberately leaving stuff out just so the criticism doesn't make the review.
Durance is an awesome character, and he represents the epitome of what Obsidian and company are good at when they can get out of their own way. He is by turns funny, nasty, rotten, mean, generous, spirited, violent, and helpful. He is fascinating precisely because I don't think there is another character I've played in a game (ever) that he feels similar too. They managed to write him so that he does not feel schizophrenic, and his background is presented in a way that is -- despite all of the character's entrenched nastiness -- oddly sympathetic. His voice acting is the best in the game (supposedly provided by Patrick Seitz, but I can't confirm that), perhaps one of the best I've ever heard in a game, period.
I agree that Durance is a good character, he was my favourite in the game as well. I also agree that he was well voiced.
A lot of people have been going on about Durance and Grieving Mother, precisely because they are great examples of terrific character writing combined with sensible pacing, a sense of awareness, and a great voice acting. Like most non-AAA developers, Obsidian can't afford to get a Patrick Stewart or a Gary Oldman to voice a character, but that's actually a good thing. Nothing against P-Stew or Dracula, but they aren't really professional voice actors, at least not like the guy who makes a living reading terribly shitty translated anime dialog . . . and these are exactly the type of people who can get into the head of a wide-eyed religious fanatic without overselling the whole thing. And while Durance sounds great, it bears noting that all of the voice acting is excellent.
I also liked the Grieving Mother but I think her 'dialogue' is an example of where Obsidian went too far with 'tell don't show', particularly how many times it was mentioned that she has clinky bracelets. I mean ... there's even a VO sound of it. Darth Roxor did a fair job at pointing stuff like that out. I have to disagree about the voice acting though. I thought it was for the most part on the average side and noticeably worse than the Infinity Engine games. I also can't believe you didn't mention the horrible sibilance of Grieving Mother's voice. Personally I thought they not only cast the wrong voice actress for her, but the recording of her VO files was absolutely horrible. Her acting was fine, but yeah the rest of it made it a not so great experience. I think maybe you're fanboyism comes out a bit too much here.
Okay so, Durance is a good character and you also liked Grieving Mother ... what about the other companions? What about the NPCs? You don't mention anything about any other character, other than a brief mention of how Thaos was lackluster in a previous paragraph.
RPG veterans will likely find the main story a bit flavorless. I was disappointed here because while there are tinges of "Chosen One" nonsense in the beginning of the game that go in a slightly different direction than you might expect, it ends up being a rather banal climax. It is interesting that you are not the only Watcher, that being a Watcher is a phenomenon that exists in the world apart from you, but it is still a bit too "special" to shake off the trope entirely. Obsidian does some really interesting stuff with regards to souls, memories of previous lives, and the blurring of different personalities over time. The Hollowborn plot itself is also pretty damned good, and dark to boot -- babies born without souls, and the panic that follows? Great stuff, appropriate to the setting and utilized to give other characters (like Durance, who sees no problem with killing Hollowborn babies) some added dramatic heft. Side quests are cool and engaging, and your companion’s quests -- Kana, Durance and Eder specifically -- are well-written, spaced out, and important enough to matter. Except for some blandness in the main narrative, and the occasional over-reliance on adjectives and info dumps, this is solid writing and certainly better than what you get in most modern games.
I do agree that some of the soul narrative mechanics were interesting. I did like the Hollowborn plot (best one in the game) and some of the side quests were cool from a story perspective and they all had choices, but were boring from a gameplay and quest mechanics perspective. I did not complete any of the companion missions because I quit during Act 3.
If you ignore the backer NPCs/plaques, they can't bother you. I do agree that they handled that very poorly and it shouldn't be done again.
I agree for the most part about the art and the music. The music was better than I thought it was going to be but it was NOT in the IE style for the most part, save for the combat music. I agree about the icon art, but the IWDs didn't have great icon art either.
I definitely think you're letting Obsidian off the hook, and this review probably exists just to defend them and the game. From reading the review I also think you fit into the 'played the IE games once or twice, a while ago' crowd - at least that's what I garnered from the review.
But yeah man, your
DA:I review was a thousand times better. This one sucked balls in comparison, it just felt cheap and lazy, and it's pretty obvious as to why.
