Msxyz

so, according to your reasoning, what makes questing so different to have it rewarded with XP while the other activities don't? 10 years ago these days, I rember installing the first Far Cry and since I was totally blown away by the graphics, I spent hours doing nothing but exploring the lush environments, avoiding fights whenever possible and I engaged in all of this just for the sake of it. So PoE doesn't offer anything that other games, not even RPG are offering to me already. On top of that, the gameplay mechanics seems rather broken, attributes are useless and all the fights can be easily won by giving to all the members some ranged weapons and by having a single tank in the front. as I said before Obsidian tried to reinvent the wheel with PoE but it could only design a square one! This is not the game I was promised in the Kickstarter pitch.

Those games aren't even close to old school RPGs. D:OS is a slow aRPG, and Blackguards is... something. D:OS contains many key elements of traditional CRPGs although it's certainly built with a modern approach. An RPG can be modern while maintaining the same core values that made great a certain generation of past games. In a sense, I think many people are expecting this also from PoE, having been pitched as a 'spiritual successor' of IE games. evolution while maintaining certain core values and the general feel. The opposite example would be games like TES IV or V which, while being technically sequels of the past Elder Scrolls games, feel quite distant from Daggerfall or even Morrowind despite the obvious similarities.

The problem is simple: you and your fellow whiners heard that they would be taking some very broad aspects of some old RPGs and in your heads decided that meant that Obsidian was making Baldur's Gate 3. If this imagined promise causes you to snap at Obsidian for Pillars of Eternity when it's finally released, you'll be savaging the only company willing to make old-style RPGs; you'll be complaining about the ten or twenty percent of peripheral content that's different when the core stuff – what they were selling the game on and what everyone got so excited – is all right there. not Baldur's gate but a game with the exploration of BG, the combat and dungeon crawling of IWD and a compelling story like PST. While we don't know yet if the story will deliver, what I've seen so far is a quite different game. As for 'olskool RPGs', with games like Blackguards and Divinity Original Sin published this year alone, I think Obsidian is not the only company catering to the genre. Both these games where big, pleasant surprises.

So what will powerplayers do? They will complete every possible sidequest, fed'exing stuff around the world and always being a good boyscout, no matter if it goes against their party ethics or such. That is just bad quest design which has nothing to do with xp system. it has, since you can't progress otherwise. People will always aim for the highest reward; gimping a game to force one way of playing doesn't solve the proble at the heart.

So what will powerplayers do? They will complete every possible sidequest, fed'exing stuff around the world and always being a good boyscout, no matter if it goes against their party ethics or such. If the scope was to reward questing instead of grinding or powerplaying, it won't prevent people to find ways to maximize the experience gained. Not to mention that combat will become only a mere annoyance. This, coupled with the 'no bad build approach' will make this game very, very tedious. Remember people attacking Bioware for the 'awesome button'? Here we have an entire gameplay designed for the 'something awesome always happens'. Oh, and wave after wave of filler combat too.

Combat is no longer a challenge per itself. Nor exploration. Enemies infesting the maps are only meant as annoyance. People who wish to grind will have to complete every possible sidequest, fed'exing stuff around the world and always being a good boyscout, no matter if their party is composed entirely of evil bastards that eat kittens for breakfast.

If they don't rework this system or find a solution to make the FORCED, random battles more rewarding or less pointless (right now, it seems they are just there to make the players spend more time on a map) I don't see me buying the expansion or supporting the sequels. TBH, the 'no battle Xp' is just the tip of the iceberg; after playing the beta, i don't feel PoE to be a 'spiritual successor to IE games' more than any other isonometric RPG out there. I don't think I'll be alone in this; in the end the whole community will suffer because if the game faile to raise enough interest, there will be no sequel at all.

I started posting here again after having played the beta. Usually, I don't post on game specific forums or communities but since I invested in this Kickstarter and I'm part of the beta group, it's appropriate to contribute with feedback. As for the relevance of this poll, we have around 200 responses and quite a few backers particpating in the discussion. People willing to spend some time on these very forums care about the game more than most out there and are also probably Kickstarter backers, even if they didn't pledge 110$ or more to access the beta as some of us did. Everything considered, I think 200 posters out of 73000 (?) backers is a sizeable slice with enough statistical relevance to draw some conclusions. unfortunately, from what I've heard in these past few days, certain decisions were set in stone for a long time and no amount of discussion could move Obsidian or its lead designer from their vision. I DO hope, however, that Obsidian will finally consider the feedback of us betatesters because we speak after having seen and experienced their intended design firsthand. I gladfully pledged enough money to enter in the beta test not because I had hoped to play the whole game a few months before the others but to give my contribution in improving the game I was helping financing. The poll results and other threads in the beta forums speaks for themselves... this game mechanics and feel need to undergo some significant tweaking before being published. As it is now, bugs aside (which are totally excusable and understandeable), it leaves a sizeable part of the community dissatisfied.

When I pitched my Kickstarter pledge I believed they were going to deliver a game with the exploration fun of BG2, the combat and dungeon dweelling of IWD and a story rivalling PsT. Some comments from Obsidian staff reinforced this belief. Story aside, on which we don't have anything substantial to express a judgement, what I've seen doesn't look and feel like what I was expecting. Certainly this is no more a IE games 'spiritual successor' than any other isonometric RPG out there. To be honest, as a backer, I'd rather have this game pushed back by one year or more, rather than playing it in this unsatisfying and disppointing state, with these mechanics and approach to questing.

yes, unrewarding IS the right definition. Not only I've found the combat mechanics too confusing and labor intensive but on top of that, many times I'm forced to enter combat with a variety of generic, filler foes for no reason other than to artificially prolong the time spent on a map and for what? some crafting ingredients, little to no money, no XP, no purpose.

I would remove 3D characters as well. considering the few resources available, they are betterspent elsewhere.

removing XP makes the I'm not saying it's impossible, I'm saying it hampers your progress further on down the line if you skip XP rich areas where the goal is basically just to slaughter everything in sight. Yes, believe it or not ignoring a huge portion of the game's content does not yield as much xp. So what? Being an adventurer who is a pacifist should be harder since it's kind of a contradiction in concept. It certainly doesn't justify the outright removal of combat making you better at combat. As I have stated before: This is not a bold experiment in rpg game design; this game was pitched as a return to the familiar game-play of the IE games. Making xp exclusive to quests is not only a major detriment to role-play, it is a terrible departure from the tradition this game was meant to emulate. You just said yourself one post back that there's going to be plenty of mandatory killing through following the quest lines. That is hardly the same thing as pacifism. If it's what you want to do, it is perfectly possible to roleplay someone who goes out of their way to kill enemies when the game doesn't force them to without giving XP for it. It is not so simple to roleplay someone who tries for peaceful solutions but fights when required if your character progression requires you to go out of your way to find more things to kill. What is disincentivising killing as a solution is not the lack of XP for doing so; it's the rest mechanics that makes it costly. But it's hard to really evaluate the significance that cost without playing through much more of the game than we can right now. I would be in favour of something like, say, the option to toggle the resting supplies requirement to address this problem. I agree. just to be clear I think a lot of us don't want PoE to be turned into a Diablo clone or those action RPG where bashing things is the main scope of the game. I usually avoid trash mobs or random encounters whenever I can when I'm playing RPGs and yet I'm someone who likes to explore the environments. The fights I cannot really avoid at least provide me the consolation of rewarding me with some loot and XP. Take away that and they become only an annoyance. From what I've seen of the beta, the maps seems to be well populated of creatures and enemies attacking my party on sight. Short of assembling a party entirely composed of PCs with high sneak abilities, I don't have any other choice to endure one pointless fight after another without even the consolation of seeing my efforts rewarded somehow (loot from generic critters usually sucks). TBH I'm feeling really demotivated right now. If Obsidian doesn't address this somehow, I don't see myself going through this game more than once just for the story and then disinstall it for good.

There is a poll, in the Gameplay & mechanics forum, that clearly shows only a small minority of the people (9%) is satisfied by how XP is now rewarded. One of the reasons to hold a more or less open beta is to receive feedback about mechanics. I would be surprised -and disappointed- if Obsidian doesn't reconsider the way XP is handled.

That leads to disregarding quests and running off to hunt monsters becoming the optimal way to play (if you do quests and gain levels, monsters become worth less xp, meaning there's literally less xp in the world for you to gain). I'm not a fan. You can still learn XP from quests... but also from hard encounters, while preventing at the same time, mindless grinding. You misunderstand. Let's assume we have a choice between doing a quest for 1000 xp, or just going out and killing goblins, of which there are 5, and they're all Lvl 3. Let's also assume that we gain a level for every 1000 xp we manage to gather, and that the XP coefficient is 100/goblin. First guy goes out to hunt goblins, and kills all of them. Because he's lvl 1, he gains 100*(3-1)=200 XP for each, meaning his rampage has gained him a level. Yay! He then goes back to the city and does the quest, and in doing so, gains another level. Good for him. Second guy decides he likes the story so far, and this quest thingie seems intriguing, so he starts with the quest. He completes it successfully, gaining 1000 XP which means he has also gained a level! Having his courage bolstered by a bloated HP pool, he goes goblin hunting, and brutally massacres them with his newfound lvl 2 abilities, gaining 100*(3-2)=100 XP for them apiece. His XP total is now sadly 1500, meaning he's a level behind Goblin Hunter Guy, as a punishment for daring to be engaged by the excellent storytelling and finely crafted quests of Obsidian, as opposed to be consumed with a burning desire to try out the likewise excellent combat system. This is bad design. Boo! Hiss! Point taken. The diminishing returns then must not be based on level alone but on experience against specific enemies. Let's say the first goblin your party kills nets you 400 xp, the second 200 xp, the third 100 xp and so on till you get only one meager point per kill. This system shoul be safe and sound enough. Of course the way you resolve your quests influences the outcome, I'm not expecting a situation where a quest can be resolved in X different manners each yielding exactly the same amount of XP. Part of the fun of replaying a RPG is seeing different parties progressing in different directions using different tactics and strategies. Powerplayers will always find a way to abuse a system: even this. Having XP tied to quests will also punish those players who don't complete all the sidequests within a single run because they feel some don't fit in their party ethics or because they want to place the enphasis on the mainquest.

That leads to disregarding quests and running off to hunt monsters becoming the optimal way to play (if you do quests and gain levels, monsters become worth less xp, meaning there's literally less xp in the world for you to gain). I'm not a fan. You can still learn XP from quests... but also from hard encounters, while preventing at the same time, mindless grinding. In Pillars you're pushed towards quests and combat becomes only a bothersome interruption that, sometimes cannot be avoided. In priciple I like the Elder Scrolls approach where you increase only the attributes you use. I wonder if Obsidian, at some time during development, considered implemting something similar.

The problem with removing trashmobs is that those maps start to feel empty. That is a problem when you want to make a game with exploration. That's why I suggested a diminishing return approach. Another solution is to base combat xp on the difference in level between player and enemy: XP gained = XP coeff * (LevelEnemy - LevelPC) only when LevelEnemy > LevelPC. XP coeff is an arbitrary value that depends on the opponent type.

I'm okay with removing entirely combat xp if only the maps are void of the so called trash mobs. there are other methods to avoid people grinding for the sake of it such as implementing a diminishing return mechanic where players get progressively less experience from fighting the same enemy again and again.

seconded. it would be a neat feature.

i had this bug too... in my case, the journal became empty after updating one quest. I tried to reproduce the bug but I couldn't...

will the final version include more portraits and personalization options? I thought I read so but I couldn't find the source...

I hope we can choose whom we can bring along and whom we can drop off the party. Nothing against middle aged men with a baldness problem, but I don't like Shaolin wannabes in my fantasy games.

maybe if the fund raising campaign could last a bit longer... No way in 4 days they're going to reach that goal, even if today screenshot will have a lasting effect on the amount of pledges.

The perspective looks a bit odd for an isonometric game. The camera angle is a bit too shallow. Ayway today I upped my pledge, I tripled it, actally. I guess I really need a fix of good old style RPG goodness!

I hate wookies. They're ugly, noisy and leave a lot of hairs around forcing me to sweep the Ebon Hawk every week. This one also has his wires crossed. What's worse than a giant fleabag who lost his mind ?

The real problem here is with the AI packages not doing right. I've tried various combinations and it always ended with my sidekicks making banzai charges against groups of enemies or being somewhere else when their help was needed.