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

[Jasede]

You're a fucking liar and I can't believe you can write lies like that without feeling bad. It's no different from saying Britney Spears made music as good as Bach did. You tasteless moron.

 

[Sabin Rene Figaro]

You're a fucking liar and I can't believe you can write lies like that without feeling bad. It's no different from saying Britney Spears made music as good as Bach did. You tasteless moron.

The game I like is just like Beethoven and the games you like are just like Justin Bieber. Behold my insurmountable wit in my striking analogies.

 

[Blaine]

Many Codex folks were and are all over PoE right here in 2015.

Those of us who were criticizing design philosophies and decisions well in advance of the game's release—and who began highlighting the predictable (as well as not-so-predictable) flawed results post-release—would have done the same in 2003.

I have a legitimate claim to several instances of told-you-so prophesying—including, but not limited to:

• flatness of the character creation system, for which Sawyer is directly to blame
  
• generic-ness of the setting, to play it safe financially
  
• Roguey changing his tune once it became clear the game is banal-shit-boring
• features such as camping supplies et al., which were shoehorned in to prevent scummy play, not actually preventing scummy play, instead just being stupid
  
• opting for RTwP was a mistake (this turned [heh heh] out to be truer than I thought, since, as many worthies have pointed out, it's obvious Obsidian desperately wanted to make a TB game)

The game actually fucked up in ways I didn't predict, such as with the shit-tier fan fiction everywhere, absolutely huge quantities of trash mobs, generic fetch quests, and the oft-mentioned Wikipedia-style boring lore implementation. I didn't expect so many of the companions to be shit, either.

 

[Jasede]

You're a fucking liar and I can't believe you can write lies like that without feeling bad. It's no different from saying Britney Spears made music as good as Bach did. You tasteless moron.

The game I like is just like Beethoven and the games you like are just like Justin Bieber. Behold my insurmountable wit in my striking analogies.

Nah seriously, fuck you you retarded newfag. I hope you are raped by a horde of niggers with spiked dicks and die of cancer. You're disgusting. Go pollute the Bethesda forums or something, shit eater.

 

[Rake]

If there's anything Pillars has, it's soul, both figuratively and literally
Pillars has so-so quests, good music, good atmosphere and boring combat. I can see the complains that the setting is a bit too generic, plus it executes bad on what it's going for. If it was released in 2003 by Troika everyone would be changing his tune about Troika.
Stay mad

Fixed

 

[Sabin Rene Figaro]

Nah seriously, fuck you you retarded newfag. I hope you are raped by a horde of niggers with spiked dicks and die of cancer. You're disgusting. Go pollute the Bethesda forums or something, shit eater.

Jesus. Did Pillars of Eternity kill your parents? Get a grip.
The only reason why I'd ever go to a Bethesda forum is to commit account kamikaze to call them all retards. If you were smarter you'd just call me an Obsidian drone or something, considering the game I'm defending right now is from them. Just a tip on your future meek, impotent and unreasonably angry babbling.

• flatness of the character creation system

Can you elaborate? I'm not sure what you mean by this, to be honest.

• generic-ness of the setting, to play it safe financially

Yeah. We all saw it coming from the pitch of the Kickstarter. Still think they executed well on the generic setting.

• features such as camping supplies et al., which were shoehorned in to prevent scummy play, not actually preventing scummy play, instead just being stupid

I personally find that I'd much rather try to be good and not abuse spells and abilities on trash encounters than to go all the way back to the latest inn to get new supplies every time I'm done in combat, so it worked for me. I wouldn't say it's trying to prevent scummy play, if you want that badly to cheese through the game then do whatever the fuck strikes your fancy. It's merely trying to incentivize non-scummy shit.

• opting for RTwP was a mistake (this turned [heh heh] out to be truer than I thought, since, as many worthies have pointed out, it's obvious Obsidian desperately wanted to make a TB game)

I also enjoy Turn Based Combat much more than Real Time with Pause stuff, but nearly every CRPG that comes out nowadays is TB. Pillars of Eternity did a good job at tickling my nostalgia bone and adding some variety. Plus I don't see what's particularly bad about the RTWP combat of this particular game, unless you want to get into an argument on how TB is always better.

such as with the shit-tier fan fiction everywhere

Aye, aye. Colossal waste of time and effort by the team to appease to backers of the game. The game is all the worse for it.
And while we're at it on the complaints, the way loot equipment works in this game is really bad as well. There is no reason whatsoever to give a shit about rare weapons and armor, unless you're like me and just want to read their lore. The starting equipment with some enchantments is about as strong as any piece of equipment you can find, no matter how hard the boss guarding it is.

Hopefully both of these glaring issues will be fixed on the expansion.

 

[Blaine]

It's merely trying to incentivize non-scummy shit.

What a mealy-mouthed asshole you are. A punishment isn't an incentive; it is a punishment. Players are allowed to abuse the resting mechanics as much as they like, as long as they don't mind enduring the punishment of wasting their time. An actual example of incentives in Pillars of Eternity is the variety of resting bonuses received when resting at certain locations. These bonuses cannot be obtained from camping supplies, thus further encouraging players to disregard camping supplies and trudge back to the inn that bestows +1 on five different stats or skills... even if they have maximum camping supplies.

This is the opposite of what should have been done, which would have been to reward the player in some way for fighting long periods without resting, while offering no resting bonuses at inns, or anywhere else for that matter.

The problem with Sawyerism is that Josh is an ultra-liberal, and, like all ultra-liberal people, he believes that the proper solution to any problem is the one that would be blatantly obvious to an average five-year-old. He refuses to properly contemplate which solution is most correct, instead applying all of his brain power to IMPLEMENTING his hastily- and arbitrarily-chosen solution, which often ends up being a shitty one.

As we've seen, he can do implementation very well, but implementing garbage very skilfully only results in well-implemented garbage.

Lots of shooting deaths in the USA? BAN GUNS! Players abuse rest mechanics in RPGs? RESTRICT RESTING!

 

[Sabin Rene Figaro]

Wow. This discussion got weird.

 

[Tacgnol]

Wow. This discussion got weird.

Welcome to the codex.

 

[Blaine]

Wow. This discussion got weird.

I shoehorned in the bit about Josh being an ultra-liberal to incentivize you to understand why PoE is banal-shit-boring.

Regardless of his worldview, I'm quite serious when I say that he seems to seize on the most obvious solution to any problem.

 

[felipepepe]

This is the opposite of what should have been done, which would have been to reward the player in some way for fighting long periods without resting

BTW, Lords of the Fallen does this by adding a 1% XP multiplier for every enemy you kill. Kill 30 enemies without resting and the next enemy you'll give +30% XP, and so on.

 

[Cowboy Moment]

good combat

All the other stuff is ultimately in the eye of the beholder, but you need to have some really low standards to consider PoE combat "good".

This is the opposite of what should have been done, which would have been to reward the player in some way for fighting long periods without resting

BTW, Lords of the Fallen does this by adding a 1% XP multiplier for every enemy you kill. Kill 30 enemies without resting and the next enemy you'll give +30% XP, and so on.

Sounds like a bad idea to reward someone for playing well by making the game easier for them, in action games at least.

 

[Arkeus]

This is the opposite of what should have been done, which would have been to reward the player in some way for fighting long periods without resting

BTW, Lords of the Fallen does this by adding a 1% XP multiplier for every enemy you kill. Kill 30 enemies without resting and the next enemy you'll give +30% XP, and so on.

The issue with those kind of games, though, is that it ends up punishing you by making the game too easy. So you begin by doing this for the challenge and are glad of the free XP, and then you realize that you ended up making 'hard' 'easy'. And given your complaint about hard, well.
Not that the bounties, before the patch, didn't do the same thing.

 

[Irenaeus II]

If there's anything Pillars has, it's soul, both figuratively and literally
Pillars has good quests, good music, good atmosphere and good combat. I can see the complains that the setting is a bit too generic, but it executes well on what it's going for. If it was released in 2003 by Troika everyone would be ignoring its flaws and looking fondly on its strengths, just like you do to the Troika games already.
Stay mad

+1

 

[T. Reich]

Sounds like a bad idea to reward someone for playing well by making the game easier for them, in action games at least.

You didn't really think this through, did you?
From the times immemorial, the reward for playing well has always been making game easier, especially in action games, unless it was some kind of weirdo game.
Play well and don't die = retain all the power-ups and kill everything easier, or at least have more lives/health to deal with harder stages later on.
Play well and kill more enemies in a row = get bonus points (usually meant extra life at some point) or some other reward.
Play well and explore a hard-to-reach or secret area = get some bonus.
Play well and defeat an optional hard enemy = get some bonus.

EDIT: Come to think of it, that's one of the main reasons the old games are so enjoyable - they reward effort. Unlike modern games that foster mediocrity via "no player should lose" mentailty.

 

[Lurker King]

I think the lesson here is that kickstarter isn't charity and isn't hobby patronage just a different way to do preordering and as on AAA preordering you can be fucked pretty hard. Once the money is on the hands of the developers they have a freedom that they can misuse and the temptation to misuse can be big, especially on the case of Obsidian that cleary had and still has difficulty changing the AAA identity to a new indie identity that they are scared as shit to assume.

I would post like a gentleman, but I will just say this: FUCK THOSE PEOPLE.

On the bright side - I pirated W3 expecting it to be shit and just to try it out for its graphics and I ended up buying it because I thought it's worth it after having played for 20-30 hours. I still wouldn't count it as an RPG though. I bought Underrail's alpha 13 after I learned about Underrail from this forum and I've been very happy I did that. I bought SitS and haven't played much yet, still waiting for more patches, but the game is very solid. I also played the AoD demo and my impressions are so good that I've bought the game but won't touch it at least until its final release.

This. We need to support our home-grown talent for our own good. Do this in the best way you can, either buying more units or by word of mouth. Don’t waste your money with AAA games. They don’t need your money, even if you happen to enjoy one of them just to screw around. With the same amount of money you buy one unit of TW3 you can buy Age of Decadence, Underrail and Serpents in the Staglands, and still have some pocket change to invest in other cool projects, such as Icy - Legends of Eisenwald also sound really cool, but I didn’t play it yet. That way we can have real fun playing the games we like instead of having just the smaller pleasure of picking out their flaws and bitching about developers.

 

[Angthoron]

This. We need to support our home-grown talent for our own good. Do this in the best way you can, either buying more units or by word of mouth. Don’t waste your money with AAA games. They don’t need your money, even if you happen to enjoy one of them just to screw around. With the same amount of money you buy one unit of TW3 you can buy Age of Decadence, Underrail and Serpents in the Staglands, and still have some pocket change to invest in other cool projects, such as Icy - Legends of Eisenwald also sound really cool, but I didn’t play it yet. That way we can have real fun playing the games we like instead of having just the smaller pleasure of picking out their flaws and bitching about developers.

You didn't read his post, did you.

 

[Overboard]

If there's anything Pillars has, it's soul, both figuratively and literally
Pillars has good quests, good music, good atmosphere and good combat. I can see the complains that the setting is a bit too generic, but it executes well on what it's going for. If it was released in 2003 by Troika everyone would be ignoring its flaws and looking fondly on its strengths, just like you do to the Troika games already.

Per carità!

 

[Cowboy Moment]

Sounds like a bad idea to reward someone for playing well by making the game easier for them, in action games at least.

You didn't really think this through, did you?
From the times immemorial, the reward for playing well has always been making game easier, especially in action games, unless it was some kind of weirdo game.
Play well and don't die = retain all the power-ups and kill everything easier, or at least have more lives/health to deal with harder stages later on.
Play well and kill more enemies in a row = get bonus points (usually meant extra life at some point) or some other reward.
Play well and explore a hard-to-reach or secret area = get some bonus.
Play well and defeat an optional hard enemy = get some bonus.

EDIT: Come to think of it, that's one of the main reasons the old games are so enjoyable - they reward effort. Unlike modern games that foster mediocrity via "no player should lose" mentailty.

Nope, I meant exactly what I said, and I dislike the design of the older Castlevanias or shooters like Gradius for this very reason. For one, they effectively sabotage their own mechanics - it's pointless to have multuple extends in Gradius if you can't recover once you die in one of the final levels, for example. Secondly, this kind of difficulty scaling makes noone happy - a beginner will be frustrated because his mistakes are punished so harshly, while a veteran will find little challenge as they breeze through the game on the strength of their stacked powerups and resources.

Funny that you would mention the idea of scoring by killing enemies in a row - this is a characteristic feature of the Dodonpachi games, and those games do, generally speaking, give you more resources the more you die, and become more difficult as you score. Not to mention games with truly crazy rank like Battle Garegga, where it's often preferable to suicide, as playing with multiple lives in stock makes the game too difficult.

 

[Lurker King]

This. We need to support our home-grown talent for our own good. Do this in the best way you can, either buying more units or by word of mouth. Don’t waste your money with AAA games. They don’t need your money, even if you happen to enjoy one of them just to screw around. With the same amount of money you buy one unit of TW3 you can buy Age of Decadence, Underrail and Serpents in the Staglands, and still have some pocket change to invest in other cool projects, such as Icy - Legends of Eisenwald also sound really cool, but I didn’t play it yet. That way we can have real fun playing the games we like instead of having just the smaller pleasure of picking out their flaws and bitching about developers.

You didn't read his post, did you.

I did. I just argued that he shouldn't be buying AAA games because they don't need our money.

 

[Angthoron]

This. We need to support our home-grown talent for our own good. Do this in the best way you can, either buying more units or by word of mouth. Don’t waste your money with AAA games. They don’t need your money, even if you happen to enjoy one of them just to screw around. With the same amount of money you buy one unit of TW3 you can buy Age of Decadence, Underrail and Serpents in the Staglands, and still have some pocket change to invest in other cool projects, such as Icy - Legends of Eisenwald also sound really cool, but I didn’t play it yet. That way we can have real fun playing the games we like instead of having just the smaller pleasure of picking out their flaws and bitching about developers.

You didn't read his post, did you.

I did. I just argued that he shouldn't be buying AAA games because they don't need our money.

Oh hurr, yes, absolutely, they have no running expenses and no needs to show investors and suits that this is what the audience wants instead of Call of Duty. Flawless logic, friend.

 

[Lurker King]

They don’t need the money from a small community such as the Codex and people who buy games such as AoD, SitS and Underrail, because they will sell millions to consoletards anyway.

 

[T. Reich]

Sounds like a bad idea to reward someone for playing well by making the game easier for them, in action games at least.

You didn't really think this through, did you?
From the times immemorial, the reward for playing well has always been making game easier, especially in action games, unless it was some kind of weirdo game.
Play well and don't die = retain all the power-ups and kill everything easier, or at least have more lives/health to deal with harder stages later on.
Play well and kill more enemies in a row = get bonus points (usually meant extra life at some point) or some other reward.
Play well and explore a hard-to-reach or secret area = get some bonus.
Play well and defeat an optional hard enemy = get some bonus.

EDIT: Come to think of it, that's one of the main reasons the old games are so enjoyable - they reward effort. Unlike modern games that foster mediocrity via "no player should lose" mentailty.

Nope, I meant exactly what I said, and I dislike the design of the older Castlevanias or shooters like Gradius for this very reason. For one, they effectively sabotage their own mechanics - it's pointless to have multuple extends in Gradius if you can't recover once you die in one of the final levels, for example. Secondly, this kind of difficulty scaling makes noone happy - a beginner will be frustrated because his mistakes are punished so harshly, while a veteran will find little challenge as they breeze through the game on the strength of their stacked powerups and resources.

Funny that you would mention the idea of scoring by killing enemies in a row - this is a characteristic feature of the Dodonpachi games, and those games do, generally speaking, give you more resources the more you die, and become more difficult as you score. Not to mention games with truly crazy rank like Battle Garegga, where it's often preferable to suicide, as playing with multiple lives in stock makes the game too difficult.

You're making two mistakes here:
1. You're abstracting the difficulty-vs-power aspect from the other ways of managing difficulty a game could have. It is but a fragment of the overall game balance after all.
2. You're focusing purely on action games (in an RPG thread), and not only that - you're focusing on arcade action games, where one of the staples of design had always been a high difficulty and harsh punishments for mistakes to force players to play again from scratch (which required money). Not to mention that such games were really short, if you could beat them in one attempt. One had to get really good at those to even have a chance of seeing the end of the game. Compared to your average modern games, where it is assumed that almost everyone should be able to reach the endgame, should they be willing to invest some time and a token amount of effort.

In a broader sense, rewards for skilled players don't have to be big, and a properly-balanced game would have a proper difficulty curve that accounts for both the probability of an average player gaining said bonuses, and for the cumulative impact of such acquired bonuses on the long-term balance. Similarly, the game doesn't have to punish players for bad skills too harshly, but neither should it be lenient towards sloppy gameplay (unless it is some sort of banal shit boring time-killer popamole crap, of course).

I can't believe I have to explain such simple things.

 

[AwesomeButton]

I hope you are raped by a horde of niggers with spiked dicks and die of cancer.

Jesus. Did Pillars of Eternity kill your parents? Get a grip.
The only reason why I'd ever go to a Bethesda forum is to commit account kamikaze to call them all retards.

Lol. Such exchanges are one of the main reasons I stick around in this forum

Funny, from where I'm at it looks more like the exact opposite. Pillars would've been a better game had they not had to go in so many directions at once, trying to honor the stretch goal and backer reward promises they made in the KS. Drop Caed Nua and Od Nua, lose the dumbass backer NPC's and their hundreds of interchangeable "unique" items, drop two or three classes, and they could've used the resources they wasted on that getting stealth and crafting right, and getting the numbers working without having to nerf the fuck out of everything. With a publisher, they could easily have cut them as soon as they realized they were overstretched. With the Kickstarter, they were fucked from the start.

I see your point, but I can't agree with the version that Obsidian had their hands tied by the KS goals which Obsidian themselves proposed in the first place. A few points:
1. When you are setting out to make a game which will invoke "IE feels" (I prefer this term because Sawyer himself uses it, unlike "spiritual successor", etc.), then it's "the spirit of the law", not "the word of the law" you should be keeping up with. The trick with PoE was that it was Obsidian that would define where does the border pass between these two, and they chose to define it in such a way that benefited them (with more sales) more, than in a way that would benefit the (admittedly hypothetical) backer wooed with the idea of "IE feels".

2. Did the quality of certain game aspects suffer from overpromising on KS? Obviously it did, it's enough to look at the megadungeon, and fortress mechanics. But like Sensuki has repeated many times over - even if they had another whole year of development, the things that made the IE games good would still not be present in PoE. And that would be because the project leads decided so, not because of budget constraints. I agree with him on that. PoE can't feel like an IE game without the IE games' combat.

Combatfag, storyfag, whatever other fag - combat is an integral activity in both PoE and the IE games (save for one of them), so when the devs try to get away with bullshit combat mechanics no one can convince me with arguments "it's all right, it's still like the IE games, look it's isometric and you have a party of six". That feels like the devs are taking me for an idiot. Tied to combat are systems like xp, loot, rest mechanics, itemization, everything hinges on it. I claim that to honestly say that PoE feels like an IE game is only possible for a person who has only seen the IE games on screenshots and letsplays, like some hipstery self-proclaimed 'hardcore gamer' would have seen them. Which I guess is good enough for Obsidian's purposes.

3. Overpromising trapped Obsidian and they had no choice but to produce a game that's subpar by their own standards? Then let's imagine the same situation but with the game being financed by a publisher -- Obsidian have a tight budget, a long list of features, and they have to demo their progress each 3 months to the publisher. One of the game's bullet points is "IE-feels kind of combat". What happens when they show up to their publisher with "Sawyer-feels-this-is-fun kind of combat"? See, that's what I mean when I say they had more freedom over what they had to deliver. They could have delivered a half-baked game with the same features list they ended up with from the KS, with publisher too, we've seen it happen many times. But they wouldn't have been able to deliver something that far off the initial arrangement, which arrangement in our case was "IE feels".

 

[Ninjerk]

Wow. This discussion got weird.

I shoehorned in the bit about Josh being an ultra-liberal to incentivize you to understand why PoE is banal-shit-boring.

Regardless of his worldview, I'm quite serious when I say that he seems to seize on the most obvious solution to any problem.

You're arguing with someone who named themself after a Final Fantasy character.