Review RPG Codex Review: Pillars of Eternity - By Vault Dweller and the Spirit of Grunker

[Irenaeus II]

To be fair, Durance and GM are cool too.

 

[jewboy]

They actually have a 50% extra numbers than a character of your level would get. no IE game needed to implement this retarded buff to be challenging in the first run.

Um...well...actually...as disappointed as I am in The Sawyer's shiny new Obsidian I am playing through IWD right now and it is more fun for me on 'insane'. It did seem a bit too easy to me without it. Although to be fair I 'rolled' total minmaxed munchkin characters. I do think IWD, despite all the ambushes and well designed encounters, is a bit too easy with the core rules setting. But again maybe if I had accepted average characters that would have been enough to make it easy to die. Although in the beginning it's actually super easy to die even with 6 minmaxed chars. To the point that I was actually starting to get annoyed with constant reloading. On my next playthrough I will try either fewer chars or 6 chars with genuinely first roll stats. Of course in IWD (pre-EE) you can actually just roll a new char if one dies I think. That also would be interesting to try. No reloading if your character dies. Just roll a new one.

OTOH BG2 even without a good AI scripting mod like SCS I found challenging enough to be fun. With SCS it was way more fun of course. I think it's important that it is fairly easy for your characters to die in combat. If it's so easy that your chars never even come close to dying it's just lame imo and that is how PoE was before I even had the slightest idea how to play it on any setting except PotD. PotD definitely made the game more fun, but I still got bored of the combat by the time I made it through the starter dungeon. I realized that PotD was the way to go before even the starting battle was over. No idea how you guys could stomach playing the game on anything less. It's boring enough on PotD ffs. Not even because it's too easy, but just because Sawyer succeeded in getting rid of all the fun. Any remnants he can hopefully extract with patches.

 

[Mastermind]

I think you mean 2 hit wonder (Torment and Mask of the Betrayer).

MotB was shit.

 

[Kem0sabe]

Best review so far, VD manages to touch on all the triggers that turned what could have been an unique setting and experience into an uterly Mediocre rpg.

Simply put, the various bits and elements of the game don't jive together.

Finally, this crap has probably spawned more written content on the codex than there is dialogue in PST.

 

[ROARRR]

I think you mean 2 hit wonder (Torment and Mask of the Betrayer).

MotB was shit.

you mean shit like s.hit like super hit? Well that is something I can agree with.
I see you have my taste lets be BF

 

[Grotesque]

I started to feel sorry for Torment Numenera

 

[Zorba the Hutt]

Yeah tank MMOs and board games could use better writing.

I'm pretty sure there was another project.

I had thought that the other KS they'd vaguely hinted at a while ago was possibly an 'MCA project', and that perhaps Obsidian had recently had to make a decision over where the non-MMO part of Obsidian would focus resources next - MCA's project could have been a casualty. But looking back at what they told mindx2 recently this is what they had going on:

mindx2: Apart from the card game with Piazo anything else in the foreseeable future?

Chris: We have Armored Warfare, helping out with the Skyforge MMO and there’s one other unannounced RPG… am I forgetting anything…?

[someone]: Expansion…

mindx2: [towards Chris] Is the unannounced RPG your baby?

Chris: No it’s not.

 

[Lockkaliber]

To be fair, Durance and GM are cool too.

Tbh, I thought Durance was the only part of the game that stood out as genuinely great. As mentioned in the review, the best exploration of the lore is done through him. That also makes me think that anyone who thinks Avellone is washed up is just butthurt.

 

[Irenaeus II]

Yeah, Durance is great. MCA was truly inspired when he wrote him. I liked the other companions too, and the writing in general. I never said Avellone is washed up, but I wonder if he's burned out by cRPGs? Or just Obsidian? The Arcanum LP was weird as fuck, like he hated the game before even playing (to be fair just watched first episode).

I guess the reason why didn't he write more shit for PoE will remain a mystary.

 

[VentilatorOfDoom]

....? What are you saying? I'm just saying, Dexers might find the game too easy, but other people are finding the game "impossible". My room mate took 9 straight hours of retries before he beat Radric. I didnt even know what to say when he told me that.

PotD solo, Bubbles (woodelf ranger) and her trusty bear companion Bwäwr (named appropriate to the lore)

Spoiler

 

[Irenaeus II]

Cheesy as fuck

 

[ZagorTeNej]

My point is precisely the opposite, that PotD is the only place where the encounters make a bit of sense and require some thought. Not because the stats are bloated there, but because they are nerfed to irrelevance on the other difficulties.

It's a symmetrical system, the enemies don't have nerfed stats (depending on their level) they just can't do anything to stop you from repeating the same winning strategy over and over again, they don't force you to adjust and dig into your toolbag. That could potentially be fixed in a number of ways, better AI (mainly in the target and spell/ability selection), better party composition, enemies having better gear where it makes sense (for example why is the enemy mage always wearing robes when that makes him a sitting duck given lackluster protection magic in PoE?), using terrain to their advantage etc. bloating enemy stats would be the last option I'd choose, it's just lazy.

There's a reason why SCSII is considered to be much better than Tactics.

All the other issues are still there, of course, and some new stuff is introduced like armor being borderline irrelevant, AoE being mandatory, etc... but there's a functional system buried in PoE, it just wasn't something Obsidian was interested in.

Maybe, would be interesting how the game would play if it got the SCSII treatment. Of course people have to care about the game to mod it.

Besides blatant comercialism, one reason why they weren't interested is that it would required them to remove some other dumb shit they added to the game. I.e., the more I think about the graze/hit/critical system, the more retarded it looks. Sure, for weapons it makes sense, but for spells and abilities it's plain stupid. It's very hard to fully miss (like ~5-10%, most of the times), so most of the times you are being hit by every ability, just for a reduced time. This makes every effect feel horribly short and ineffective. And they have to be ineffective, or you end up with things like Slicken, a level 1 spell that has like 90% chance to knockdown all targets in an area.

That's largely the consequence of the genius unified mechanics system, i.e. magic playing by the exact same rules as swinging a fucking axe.

So, if you can't prebuff against poison, there's no poison hard-counter like an anti-poison magic ring, and every poison attack has a ~90% chance of hitting you no matter what you do, then the only way people are surviving that is by making the poison itself be no more than a minor inconvenience. BRAVO!

You said it yourself, no hard-counters and prebuffing. You have no way of countering negative status effects and they trigger even on grazes, the only choice left is to make them have no real game-changing effect (just to add some flavour instead, "I'm getting poisoned and webbed by spiders in a cave, it's so old school").

A lot of the game flaws are just the consequence of trying to come up with a better implementation and making things even worse. Yes, drinking an antidote potion/casting slow poison when you're poisoned in BG by a spider/wyvern isn't really complex but it's something, atleast you have react to what the game throws at you.

 

[Shevek]

Besides blatant comercialism, one reason why they weren't interested is that it would required them to remove some other dumb shit they added to the game. I.e., the more I think about the graze/hit/critical system, the more retarded it looks. Sure, for weapons it makes sense, but for spells and abilities it's plain stupid. It's very hard to fully miss (like ~5-10%, most of the times), so most of the times you are being hit by every ability, just for a reduced time. This makes every effect feel horribly short and ineffective. And they have to be ineffective, or you end up with things like Slicken, a level 1 spell that has like 90% chance to knockdown all targets in an area.

The graze system works just fine for damage spells (similar to save for half in dnd). The debuffs/charm etc would have been better if a graze conferred a lesser effect rather than a lesser duraction. So, a graze on a paralyze could be root or a graze on a stun could be a daze, etc.

 

[Infinitron]

You have no way of countering negative status effects and they trigger even on grazes, the only choice left is to make them have no real game-changing effect

This doesn't follow at all.

AD&D already had an equivalent of "status effect grazes". They were called "periodic saving throws". If you had a character with good saving throws, even if a status effect-inflicting spell caught him, if that spell allowed the possibility of periodic saving throws, he had a good chance of escaping it shortly afterwards - before the full duration of the spell was complete. Sound familiar?

 

[StaticSpine]

it’s a combat heavy game with crappy combat but pretty backgrounds

just this

P.S. I actually was a backer, do not regret backing it, but most likely won't walk through the game cause it's not fun.

P.P.S. rtwp is total shit.

 

[FrankHamilton]

I played on normal and thought it was pretty hard, tbh.

 

[Bubbles]

I played on normal and thought it was pretty hard, tbh.

It's hard as balls, some people just like to pretend they're better than others by claiming they find it easy. Steam statistics will tell you that virtually nobody finished the game on Hard or PotD.

 

[ZagorTeNej]

This doesn't follow at all.

AD&D already had an equivalent of "status effect grazes". They were called "periodic saving throws". If you had a character with good saving throws, even if a status effect-inflicting spell caught him, if that spell allowed the possibility of periodic saving throws, he had a good chance of escaping it shortly afterwards - before the full duration of the spell was complete. Sound familiar?

Like with web and entangle? Yeah, I get your point. Still would prefer if they allowed prebuffing (doesn't have to be completely metagamey, I could just scout ahead), scrapped combat vs non-combat state and made afflictions nastier.

 

[Clockwork Knight]

Maybe the games aren't finished because they're shit?

 

[Mastermind]

I played on normal and thought it was pretty hard, tbh.

It's hard as balls, some people just like to pretend they're better than others by claiming they find it easy. Steam statistics will tell you that virtually nobody finished the game on Hard or PotD.

I finished it on hard with it crawling at 5-10 FPS on my shitty laptop. There's just no excuse.

 

[tyrannosaurus rex]

I would point out the 4 million dollars was an opportunity to get ahead and save something for the future, provided they have other work going on at the same time.

I believe it was nothing but a bridge to last until the next publishers' payment/contract.

That doesn't make sense even from the perspective of a greedy capitalist, though. Everybody will tell you, developing your own IP is key to survival, independence and growth. IP, IP, IP.

I wouldn't know, but here are the facts as I see them:

- Obsidian is on the verge of layoffs; they start a KS (the effort isn't there at first) and get 4 mil
- Feargus stated in the past that Obsidian's burn rate was a mil a month, so the money they got was good for 4-8 months not 2.5 years.
- Instead of pouring all their effort into this new IP as we all hoped, they work on something else. If there is one thing Obsidian always did well it's the dialogues and unique settings/twists of familiar settings. I'm truly surprised that they fucked it up so badly. The only logical explanation is that this game was never their priority.
- I don't know what Obsidian's average contract is these days but if it's 15-25 mil, for argument's sake, it's easy to see why a 4 mil game wouldn't be at the top of their list. InXile is smaller and faster and can take advantage of KS and live off it for the next 20 years. Obsidian is too heavy and too publisher-oriented.
- Avellon left Obsidian for a reason.

-ok
-ok
-4 Million, one lead and no publisher. The end. Stop spewing stupid shit like you actually know something about their company we don't know.

-You cum guzzling IneXile fanboy, Bard Tale isn't even reaching a third of Wasteland's 2 funds. Speaking of Wasteland 2 you have yet to objectively explain how this RPG is even worth being qualified more than mediocre. Not just list vague conceptual arguments about what you liked. How did that focus work out for them? The only difference between their game and fallout 3 is the perspective.

-Yes but are you saying they moved some of those 4 millions to other project? Are you saying they didn't move 3 of their main men on the project?

-Avellone was a parasite at Obsidian it's quite obvious to tell from his lack of input in any of their games and his trophy position. General ''creative director''. He's leaving for reasons, like you know it more than us. You think this is a fucking book movie. This can be as stupid as a reason and not some grand imaginary noble drama dispute you made up in your head

 

[stony3k]

I dunno, with a 15-level megadungeon it seems to me that one could be pleasantly surprised by the fact that it's not straight-up Diablo

A procedurally generated megadungeon would have been awesome, sort of a roguelike minigame. Of course, that would be too much to expect.

 

[Jagged Appliance]

People wondering why D:OS outsold PoE should also consider the jewtubers.

 

[Vault Dweller]

-Yes but are you saying they moved some of those 4 millions to other project? Are you saying they didn't move 3 of their main men on the project?

Reading is teh hard?

He's leaving for reasons, like you know it more than us.

What if I do?

 

[Flacracker]

I clearly remember VD was ejaculating all over this game a few months ago. Something changed?