PrimeHydra

Typed Pillars of Eternity into Google News for the heck of it and found this great preview. These guys liked the beta, and they voice a lot of the same concerns we have. On the lack of combat XP (argue about it here, not in this thread): This debate already has a thread so I'm not going to touch the quote, just wanted to share their view. On pause-and-play vs. turn-based battles: This point deserves some serious debate--arguably more so than the XP thread. Granted, selection circles no longer overlap, but that hardly dilutes the argument. For my part, I agree that turn-based combat would solve the issue. I'd be fine with a well-implemented system, so don't count me among the "purist" backers; fun trumps purity any day. However, realtime-with-pause can work. The missing ingredient is AI scripts. Imagine playing an IE game without any basic scripts whatsoever, and clearing out a mob of baddies. Suddenly the micromanagement involved becomes more akin to the PoE beta. Realtime-witth-pause worked in the IE games because you could delegate no-brainer behavior, such as having your ranged character keep their distance or having a barbarian auto-engage their nearest enemy. Going up against a bunch of goblins requried a lot fewer clicks than tactically taking down a dragon. That's how it should be. Without any sort of scripting, I think I'll be spending more time in pause mode than out of it, and will miss the balanced flow of IE-era battles.

I too have a ranger protagonist, and have serious trouble getting the party to exit areas. I'll either be told the party is not gathered, or it won't even get to that point--my party won't even trigger the attempt to exit the area despite them all swarming around the exit (e.,g., cannot go upstairs in the inn when I have a bear companion). Edit: Attached savegame. Remove the .txt extension to use it. Note: Your admin should consider allowing us to upload files with extension .savegame Try going upstairs in the Dryford Inn in the attached savegame. No matter how much I fiddle with my formation, I can't get my group to go upstairs! Guess I'll start a new game with a non-Ranger... 15d5d28788e44556a622dfcea6e44023 DracogenInn 7627218.savegame.txt

I agree that the PC should be the one whose stats determine the conversation options. The problem is that the design doesn't make this clear; those of us who've played lots of IE games won't be aware that it's the main character, not the character who walked over and started the conversation, who's actually speaking.

When I initiate dialog with an NPC, whose stats determine the conversation options? The protagonist's? If so, why doesn't the protagonist always approach the NPC? In the IE games, the selected character would initiate conversation; if more than one character was selected, the "leader" (topmost portrait) would engage. The character who initiated dialog determined the context of conversation. It might be more intuitive if the protagonist always initiated dialog OR if you could pick a character to speak with and have their stats determine dialog options (not recommended, since this way you'd feel obligated to build a party with one maxed stat each to unlock all options).

Two of the three auto-pause option screen bugs that I reported in the previous build are still at large: The option to auto-pause on enemy sighted is disabled. This is true whether on the main screen before starting a game, or after starting a game. I can only get the option to select by clicking Set All. When I click Set All and then click an individual option to turn it off, ALL of the options get turned off.

Senuski, You win the Internet.

Good question, OP. I thought arrows added a nice dimension of depth in the IE games, due to all the different effects they could carry. And the more powerful ones (like acid arrows, or arrows of dispelling) were limited by their short supply/high cost. It felt good as one progressed to go from scrounging normal arrows off Kobolds, to buying multiple stacks of +2 Arrows from the smithy. With inventory space as limited as it is, though, I don't know where we'd put all of our ammo. Rangers will feel like they have an artificially smaller inventory due to having to carry arrows. But I'm not the only one who thinks we don't have enough carrying space as it is. What can I say, I want this game to live up to BG/IWD as closely as possible. So yea to arrows.

Obsidian: If you truly care about this debate, add a poll to this thread and pin it. Otherwise, me thinks this is just a heat sink to keep the arguments in one place.

Sorry about that!! Wasn't sure who you were responding to. And yes, the trolls...were these people bred in vats? Seriously, where do they come from?

Where did you hear this? See, that's what we're talking about in terms of their communication needing work.

I didn't think I was being particularly aggressive. This is a plea for communication. And I'm not the only one who's growing impatient. Your white-knighting is misplaced. Also, I've given this beta plenty of constructive criticism and bug reports, so please don't try to characterize me as some rabble-rouser. Edit: My bad, you weren't directing this at me.

Nailed it. I'd be happy for them to push back the release another year, if it meant getting an awesome successor that we've been waiting fifteen-odd years for. As PrimeJunta said, we won't know for sure whether the project is a train wreck till we see another patch. But the build isn't everything--as you point out, the lack of a good feedback/reporting system and a dearth of developer communication combined with a buggy build raises plenty of doubts.

To the folks who don't want combat XP: Did you play Baldur's Gate and Icewind Dale? Did defeating monsters in tactical combat as a major--in the case of IWD, primary--means of progressing feel bad? I'm not trying to badger you. I really am curious where your expectations come from. See, a lot of us here want a successor to BG/IWD. We noticed the "Miss Baldur's Gate, Icewind Dale, and Planescape Torment?" on the home page, said to ourselves "Hell Yes", and clicked the "Back Now!" button. Then we booted up the beta, won our first few fights, and were left scratching our heads. No experience for ridding the town of the bandits, because I didn't complete the quest the "right way" but lying convincingly to the baddies at the inn. WTF? The reward was based not on winning a complex tactical battle, but not having enough of stat X. There's a reason we feel a little gypped. I load up Baldur's Gate, and I can tromp around the wilderness, kill some baddies, and have a few levels to show for it. The wilderness areas in this beta are disappointing because they don't offer rewards beyond monetary ones. It doesn't feel much like those old favorites. Yet the UI screams Baldur's Gate. It's as if they want to lure us 90s nostalgoids in, and then push their own gaming vision on us, a vision incompatible with the game that PoE obviously tries to be in every other category. My guess is you who like the current system either haven't played BG/IWD, or found them too combat-heavy. You're looking a dialog-heavy, Planescape-Torment-like experience. The thing is, you're already getting that. Why can't we have a combat-rich successor to our favorites, that rewards battle like those did? Were those classics really so fundamentally flawed just because PoE's designer thinks they were? I don't know, but I've been playing Baldur's Gate 1 lately--it's a lot more fun than anything in this beta. Had I known these things, I might not have backed Pillars. (I know, haha, owned by fine print.) They're going to have to deliver a very different experience if they want it to feel rewarding. The beta proved this--at least for me.

Kind of disappointing. We're paying for the privilege of giving free QA, and they can't even give us a weekly update.

PS I'll understand if you simply don't have the time/staff to make this happen. (Though it would be pretty easy to post updates to the main Pillars page if you don't want to create a separate Blog section). Just say as much, will ya?

It would help us know what to bother reporting/reviewing in-depth if we had more frequent updates. Maybe I'm just used to Path of Exile's nearly-daily news posts, but as a beta tester it's...been a little while since we heard from you guys. At the very least, the Known Issues post in the bug forum ought to see (nearly) daily updates. Copy and paste from reported bugs that you've logged. Easy-peasy. As for non-bugfiix, feedback, we have no idea which systems you're reworking if any. Thanks!

They might not have actually added all of them to the game yet. Maybe digitizing their art assets is not yet complete. We don't really know. It just seemed like such a ridiculously short list of portraits (plus duplicates of one guy with a different haircut) as to be obviously non-final.

Eegahs, it's beta! Do you really think the portraits we see are the final list? Probably not even close.

Damn, beat me to it! I thought it was Vita Mortis Carrio. But I didn't go to wizard school.

I think you get to skip the approval process once you've had a few posts approved. I noticed this delay upon first joining the forum, but now my posts appear instantly. The delay is most likely so they can filter out spam accounts.

George was right: Combat is this game's central activity, and not rewarding it with experience points makes players want to shy away from that activity. There may be a nice narrative surrounding it. There may be a decent number of dialog options. Some of those options may well allow you to feel clever by avoiding a fight. But at the end of the day, what are all those items and abilities for? Anyone who thinks this game is not primarily a tactical fantasy role-playing game is in the wrong forum. I love nonviolent point-and-click adventure games, too. This is not one of those games. Argue all you like about whether it's a "dungeon crawler" or not. The developer's point about combat XP being missing was spot-on.

PrimeHunta, let me just say from one Prime* developer to another: You nailed it! Based on what I've seen from responses to the more critical bugs, I think the game will fine. OE were already aware of most of the posted bugs, and I can vouch for a lot of them being trivial (probably). The one and only issue that concerns me at a design level is combat. As another guy put it, PoE feels more pause-with-realtime than realtime-with-pause. This is due mainly to the vast number of commands (i.e., abilities) you need to issue to succeed in combat--and the need to issue them in quick succession. A decent set of AI scripts (think Baldur's Gate where you could choose Ranged, Melee, and a dozen variants) would help. But how would they keep movement in battles quick enough to look natural, without making the player feel they have to frantically hit space lest they lose a tactical opportunity? Well, Diablo's developers did manage to turn a turn-based strategy game into a real-time action game. Maybe Obsidian will do the reverse and build a turn-based option on top of the existing system. I don't know; it will be really interesting to see how this system evolves.

We could use some more communication regarding the beta...see Path of Exile for a good example of frequent (more or less daily) news regarding current developments.

Awesome article--thanks for the link!

I must be missing something...where can I see my character's in-progress action?