Xharlie
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Posts posted by Xharlie
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Personally, I didn't even try playing a Wizard but I raised it as a common criticism because I have seen it in these forums many times. My point was that someone who isn't having fun is quite entitled to say so and they ARE entitled to ask for a fix in a patch.
This doesn't mean that the developers have to implement their every whim but this thread started with the premise that they were not allowed to post their demands - that's just arrogant.
Ultimately, making Wizards more useful, adding some party A.I., giving control over the controversial camping limit and fixing balance issues will make the game more fun for a lot of people - myself included.
(My now-abandoned character was a monk... a class that is just as useless as the mage.)
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Anybody who finds the game to be boring has every right to raise their issues. They paid for the fun that was promised and they're not getting it.
So, if you buy a book and don't like how the plot develops or how it is narrated to you, do you feel justified to go to the publisher or author website and make comments like "I didn't like this and that, will you change that in the second edition to satisfy my tastes"?
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Fun is not measurable, not a feature. People don't pay to have fun, they pay to have access to a product that maybe will give them fun, maybe not, and that's how they should think about it.
Books are not an interactive medium. Games are and "fun" is supposed to be their primary feature. Before all else, they must be fun to play.
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"The game is soooo booooring? Will that be fixed in the next patch?"
That behaviour in people is what I find too entitled.
Anybody who finds the game to be boring has every right to raise their issues. They paid for the fun that was promised and they're not getting it.
Let me put it another way: this is a ROLE PLAYING game so, naturally, you start off by rolling up a character that you want to play. Since it's relevant, let's say that's a mage... or Wizard in PoE speak. Turns out, Mages are pretty useless so you're finding the endless stream of junk-spiders very tedious. The tedium is further enhanced by the fact that, every half-dozen encounters, you have to run back to town to buy more camping supplies. For you, the game is boring.
You also can see easy ways to fix it: make mages more powerful so they're a viable option - they're a fair choice for a fantasy role-playing setting, whatever the lead developer might think; give players to option to remove the camping supply limit if they so choose; don't design dungeons full of cut-and-paste junk-mobs.
At least two of those can easily be implemented in a patch.
The forum, however, responds by saying "get gud" and "don't play a mage" - two very unhelpful suggestions.
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Party banter in Baldur's Gate 1: Montaron and Xzar. Enough said.
Story and writing and characters are not the beginning and end of a game but, to be honest, the game-play in PoE is clunky at best. I just don't feel the fun in the combat.
There is a lot they can do to improve it and I am hoping that, with a few patches, it will feel less boring. It is at least a decent game so making it less tedious will certainly make it more fun.
You can call me what you like - I rant because I care. I cared enough to buy the game because, like the rest of you, I want to see a resurgence in this genre. I had high hopes for Pillars of Eternity and they were not met.
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Party A.I.
A "custom difficulty" screen that allows me to remove the camping limit entirely while keeping the other difficulty settings.
A PROPER monolithic dungeon like Durlag's Tower or Watcher's Keep. (They can just scrap the Endless Paths and replace it entirely - it is so much filler.)
Party banter.
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Hmph. I disagree with just about every point you mentioned.
The music is decent but there is far too little of it. It seems to repeat a LOT, particularly the battle music. It isn't so good that I want to listen to the same parts more than once.
The NPCs are incredibly bland, without any interaction or conversation. The banter between NPCs in Baldur's Gate and other games was, for me, the whole point of having them. In PoE, they feel like muscle and quest-givers, nothing more. (Edit: except for the Chanter and the Priest, to be fair.)
They really did not think very much about the stronghold. It feels like a tick-in-a-box: "has home-base". You get it too early and for zero effort, it has timed events that you have to rush back for, it doesn't really reward you with anything and the dungeon underneath it is tedious and bland.
Finally, comparing any "traditional" elves-dwarves-swords-etc RPG to Planescape Torment is laughable. Sigil and the protagonist from that game were far more original and far more interesting.
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So, basically, you're saying that PoE is NOT for Infinity Engine fans who used to trust the party A.I. to reduce tedium in uninteresting battles, it's for the neurotic types who enjoy micro-managing their whole party all the time?
Funny, I thought PoE was specifically made for I.E. fans.
The glaring lack of Party A.I. is not the real problem, it's a symptom. The real problem is the vast over-population of trash-mobs that make the game incredibly boring to play. Micro-managing a party of characters to win an important battle is one thing, having to do it over and over for every other group of junk-spiders, for zero reward, is another.
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Meh. I turned at once to the manual to work out how combat was supposed to work. It is completely useless! The manual is not "short and neat", it is lacking of nearly all useful content.
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I turned off all the auto-pause options before I even started my first game but I can completely identify with the "staccato" feel of combat.
I, too, have had issues with my orders being ignored or delayed, characters standing about, etc. I think that's what causes it - you're always pausing to re-issue orders or to check the log because the visual an audio feedback isn't good or is sometimes just plain wrong.
My biggest issue is that it seems impossible to block enemy paths - they mobs just run through your big beefy front-line - meanwhile, you can't run past enemy mobs at all - they engage you and your character stops moving and abandons your move order.
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Throughout my pen-and-paper experience, resting was what you did at the end of the session, when all the players went home. They party didn't rest otherwise - certainly not to simply refill the mage's spell slots.
There were no trash-mob encounters in my pen-and-paper campaigns, though.
The PoE dungeons feel far too over-populated with meaningless encounter groups. The endless paths are a great example.
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I feel like the PoE community has many things in common with the Dark Souls community. Go onto any Dark Souls forum and explain that you want the option to "pause" the game because, occasionally, you have to stand up from your PC to stop your four-year-old from boiling over or prevent the pot on the stove from leaping off the balcony and they'll tell you to "get gud" and that you're playing the game incorrectly if you need to "pause"
I know how these RPG mechanics work. If I wanted to, I could build a munchkin with all the right dump-stats and min-maxed to the max, sculpt my party into the perfect fighting machine and "pwn" the game on the hardest difficulty without resting all the time. I don't choose to play games like that, any more. This is a ROLE PLAYING game and I choose to play a character that I fancy.
Because of that, my character feels painfully weak and that means that I need to rest, often. The limit on camping supplies means only one thing: busy-work, running back to town to buy more. The result is a lot of boring commuting and no chance to become immersed.
To all of you who think there is some magic strategy that I (and some others on this thread) clearly do not understand: what is it? For a start, how do you prevent all the junk-mobs from rushing a single support character, stun locking them and maiming them? There's no way to get out of a cluster-... because they all get disengagement attacks and, more often than not, your move-orders are ignored anyway.
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Yes, I knew that the yellow NPCs were backers, hence the term "fan fiction"... but I can't seem to find any that AREN'T backers. Seriously, not just in the inn, in the whole starting hub!
I wish there was an option to hide them but I wonder if it wouldn't turn the place into a ghost town...
(The Friendly Arm Inn is a bit of an own-goal. First, you have to fight for your very life simply to reach the door, and safety, and then you discover two friends inside who help you for the rest of the game. Also, it isn't the first Inn in BG1, there's one in Candlekeep too. Upstairs, you can get more quests, and it is a venue to which I often returned throughout the game on my way to and from places nearby.)
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The O.P. also raised the issue of "too many monsters" and I strongly agree with that. The encounter-groups are so closely packed that it feels like an M.M.O.: very carefully draw exactly one encounter-group, kill it, repeat until you're out of camping supplies, return to town. The fact that you don't gain experience from these encounters [after the first few for the type] and you don't really get any useful loot either is a huge flaw in my opinion.
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Pillars of Eternity strongly resembles a fan-fiction browser.
The very first tavern you encounter in Gilded Vale is a perfect example of this - apart from the shop keeper and one other character who appears after you complete a quest, both of whom have little to say, it contains only two fan-fiction vending-machines. There is not a single character of interest in the place!
The problem is that I don't care about the "spirit memories" or whatever they're actually called. They have absolutely nothing to do with the story, they're only loosely related to the setting, they don't involve my character in any way and they're dispensed for the mere cost of a single click so they're not even rewarding.
Please tell me that later areas in the game are better. Please tell me that there are interesting characters in later towns and taverns - ones that are actually worth speaking to.
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It's a very poor show! The GoG version is entirely DRM free and installs just like any other DRM free product ever made: as a bunch of files in a folder. There is absolutely no reason at all why Obsidian couldn't have made the patch available as a separate download. They have web servers, they could host it.
Pathetic!
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Alrighty, then, there IS a flanking mechanism. It wasn't just the brown ale.
I hope someone can explain how it works.
I really expected the manual to explain stuff like this but, to be honest, the manual is rubbish.
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I can't seem to find any information about Flanking but I am sure I saw something, at one point, saying that my character was flanked. How does flanking work?
Is there even a flanking mechanic or am I imagining it?
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I noticed, last night, that the bonus to accuracy that I should get against primordials and wilders is not being applied correctly, even though the passive ability that grants it does show on my character sheet.
My character is a Boreal Dwarf from the White that Wends with the Explorer background (I think, can't remember the background and it isn't listed.)
The ability (can't remember the name) states that I should receive +15 accuracy against primordials and wilders (of which Xaurip is one of the listed types). I looked at a combat calculation against a Xaurip and it showed my regular accuracy (49, the same as the inventory screen shows) minus the target's defense, plus my roll. There was no bonus.
Am I misunderstanding how the maths works? Is this the passive-stripping bug? (The passive does show on my character sheet.) Is this ability broken?
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Simple question: where should I pre-order the game?
I really actually want it on Steam for convenience (and updates) but I don't see why I should give up a DRM free Linux version because of that. GOG seems OK but I've had issues with GOG stuff that hasn't been kept as up-to-date as the Steam versions of the same.
What about the other stores and portals? I don't know what they're offering. There is WAY too much choice and confusion.
So... where should I pre-order it and why?
Too much whining about gameplay?
in Pillars of Eternity: General Discussion (NO SPOILERS)
Posted
I guess I'll accept that PoE simply isn't for me, then. Either way, I've stated my points and have nothing further to add.