mindswayer

I'm wondering, what do you guys think of the game so far? I'm about 11 hours in and I'm really disappointed. They improved the shooting and FPS aspects, with the cover system and revamped first person animations being a welcoming change, but everything else feels to me a step down from Fallout 3 (which I also didn't really enjoy). The removal of Skills really hits me. I felt way more organized when I could pick certain skills and then go "alright, I can use these items from now on". I have so much stuff in my inventory that I have no idea what to use. I feel really overwhelmed. I also really dislike the Perk tree system. The writing hasn't impressed me one bit either. I haven't met a single interesting character and the story so far is just Fallout 3 inverted. Also that black dude you help set up in Sanctuary, he just trusts you to rebuild his whole group for whatever reason? "Oh hey, you helped my group get set up here, I trust you to rebuild my entire clan even though you have no previous knowledge of whatever the hell it's about", doesn't really seem like something someone would do. The dialogue wheel system is atrocious in my opinion. I have no idea what the character is going to say and there are no choices. Every conversation is "1 - Yes; 2 - No; 3 - Maybe/Not Sure/You're a mutt; 4 - Explanation". The protagonist's voice acting (male) is really bad imo. He tries to convey sadness but it almost comes across as emo half the time to me. When I pick nice choices he sounds way too nice. Not only that, but they also brought back the chance-based dialogue checks. As if the whole dialogue thing wasn't bad enough. I also haven't met any Faction so far (heard they completely removed them, hopefully it isn't true). What the hell? Also every single settlement is completely empty. There's the occasional ghoul/super mutant/bug with a terminal inside and a little story, but that's it. The quests, so far, are fetch quests. "Clear out this building, come back for a reward". It seems to me the whole build a settlement thing isn't all that useful or interesting, but I get the feeling that's just because I'm not too far in yet. Maybe I'm not a fan of it because I don't like minecraft. Pretty weak game so far. I get the feeling every single RPG aspect of Fallout got butchered. I had some hopes that Obsidian would get to do a proper sequel to New Vegas, but after Fallout 4 launched I highly doubt Bethesda would hand it over to Obsidian AND let them reintroduce skills or change the dialogue system.

Actually, Requiem has Malkavians (they're a bloodline). Also, Paradox has the rights to both old and new World of Darkness, so if a Vampire game were to be made, I'd wager it'd be more likely to use Masquerade's systems because brand recognition yadda yadda. Requiem's system is kinda retarded though. Reducing Malkavians to a bloodline instead of a clan... ew. Also Paradox probably wants to use videogames as a way to make the PnP game more popular, hence it'd make sense for them to use Requiem instead of Masquerade since that's the current version.

Amidst all the excitement I just realized that if a Vampire game were to be made, it'd use the Requiem clans/bloodlines system, which would mean no Malkavian clan. That's sad, but you can't get everything in life I guess.

I doubt that Obsidian can deliver production values expected of first person games.Unless Paradox is willing to invest in the project we will likely get another nostalgia cash-grab. Wot. New Vegas seemed to handle pretty well. Source 2 engine is free too, so they could use that if they wanted (although I doubt they would since Tim Cain is probably traumatized from the nightmare that was developing while S1 was still in dev). Hell, they could still use Source 2013. That engine still delivers on impressive facial animations.

That's why there aren't many projects, I reckon.

I assume there's as many "lead developers" (I assume you mean Project Leads/Lead Designers) as there are projects.

I would assume he's busy on Double Bear's next game, plus being in Seattle would make collaborating harder than the Obsidian/InXile collaborations. Eh, not sure. Also

It's probably because of the characters in VtMB. They all have this unique personality and character to them, it's quite extraordinary. I don't know if it's the voice acting or the writing itself, but VtMB is an achievement when it comes to how to make NPCs feel like actual characters and not just models that **** out quests. I think he was talking about the PnP game. I bought all the VtM sourcebooks because I was a huge fan of the lore behind Vampire. Only played one game of it though. Got the books shortly before graduation and everyone moved away. Ah, ****, being half asleep and excited has never wielded good results. By... having relative parity between character options? How terrible that would be, indeed. The problem with the constant combat balance in PoE was that Sawyer made everything equally awful, instead of everything equally OP and fun.

It's probably because of the characters in VtMB. They all have this unique personality and character to them, it's quite extraordinary. I don't know if it's the voice acting or the writing itself, but VtMB is an achievement when it comes to how to make NPCs feel like actual characters and not just models that **** out quests.

Obisidan has hinted that they're working on something on their twitter... Hopefully they bring back Mitsoda and hire Avellone for the job and actually use them for story/character writing. The characters in VtMB are so incredibly lively that they're all memorable. Also get Tim Cain on that game design, and bring back the soundtrack dude. #Hype

Not having read the thread, my biggest issue with the Adra Dragon and the Sky Dragon was how little character/personality development they had. I think I've said before that one of my absolute favourite dragon encounters in videogames is Grigori from Dragon's Dogma, and in large part that's due to his well developed character and ****ing bad ass lines. Pillars of Eternity dragons are just one more monster that barely says anything relevant and are just there for the sake of having a tough fight in the game. I wish they'd write some sort of bad ass dragon for Pillars of Eternity II that wasn't a braindead retard that just wanted to destroy stuff because that's his nature (not saying Adra and Sky are these types of dragons, but ultimately they come off as extremely dull enemies and feel like wasted opportunities). Doesn't even need to be an enemy.

Have they talked about the whole splitting it up thing? I haven't been keeping up to date. Why are they splitting it into 2 parts? Is the story for part 1 just going to end in a cliff hanger? Is there even any story? I really don't get the whole part 1 & 2 thing, and I'm really not sure if I'll buy it if it's 20$ a part.

They should have just done it the way Valve implemented it in Half-Life 2 and its episodes: there's some sort of trigger that you can manually activate to play the developer commentary.

Random encounters wouldn't fix wilderness areas being bland. Everytime I got a random encounter in IWD/BG I'd just ****ing quickload and rest again. I ****ing hate random encounters, they're annoying as ****. Merchants/somewhat randomly generated events would be cool though.

Are they fixing itemization and the drop system? Soulbound weapons with unique (truly unique) attributes seem a step in the right direction but if every other weapon is just (+10 acc) that's still kinda boring, especially if the soulbound weapons have 100% fixed spawn locations. Hope they diversify itemization on weapons lower than soulbound quality.

Pretty hyped. Don't know why they decided to split it in two though (gotta get them dollas holla holla $$$). Seriously hope they don't charge 20$ for each part. Also looks like soulbound items will FINALLY have pen and ink drawings!

The reason the Witcher games are "limited roleplay wise" isn't because they lack writers capable of writing roleplay experiences, it's because they work with a pre-defined character that has an already established personality in the 7 books and short stories that predate the game. Even though CDPR **** on the books with Witcher 3, they have always kept Geralt faithful to his personality and the choices you get are what would seem Geralt could do if he were presented with those situations in the books.

Probably inXile where he'll work on Van Buren with Fargo again.

Now that is something i can get behind. CDPR and Chris Avellone? Yes please! Dude CDPR is a polish studio, and the writers are polish as well. The game was written in poilsh and what we get is merely a translation. I know a polish guy on Steam who claims the english translation is "competent" at best, and fails to convey a lot of stuff. I highly doubt CDPR would even contact Avellone. There'd be massive communication problems if Avellone was writing in English and the rest of the people in Polish. Really sad to see Avellone go. He's easily my favourite writer when it comes to videogames. I wonder what lies ahead for Obsidian without one of its key people (and to me, the most important person there).

1 month after I played it I can look back and see what it really is. I loved it for my first playthrough, but playing it again for a second time and I just notice a lot of **** that bothers me like the complete lack of interesting unique items, I started noticing that the writing is good at best and its "Torment" moment doesn't actually have that much impact; I noticed that choices are literally irrelevant with no long-term consequences and a lot of times you're given options to say the exact same thing just in a different manner, instead of actually saying different things; I noticed that there is little relevancy when it comes to building different characters because you won't get any new dialogue options unless you're some kind of priest or a monk (and even then, it's maybe twice in the entire game), there are very few occasions where this actually matters at all; I hated how **** and boring spell-wise wizards are compared to the hilariously overpowered druids; I dislike the lack of pre-fight buffing and lack of powerful hard-disable magic (like halt). I dislike how souls are constantly used as a cop-out ("hey, how can that be possible? lol idunno, fukken magic guv"). I liked the music, voice acting (probably the best part in the entire game), and the companions (especially Edér, GM, Durance and Hiravas). I don't feel like I have been cheated and I got my money's worth, but I am left with mixed feelings. I am happy to support Obsidian and fund a sequel, and I can only hope that the sequel is on par with bg2. Maybe by then Avellone will actually have some time to write for Pillars of Eternity 2, unlike PoE1, and Ziets will actually do something instead of being used as a marketing tool.

Pretty sure they said companion AI will only be a thing they'll be looking to add in the expansion. You're gonna have to make due with the basic AI they have right now.

To me the game was really amazing, got 76 hours out of one playthrough. However, I feel like the Stronghold could be much more than it is. Also one of my major complaints about the game is that the unique items are just **** for the most part and feel really bland. Their icons aren't even different (maybe this changed in 1.03, not sure) and they're just boring stat-wise. It's always "+ x damage against y", "+ x DR". There's no cool stuff like in BG2. Also their models seem to be resizes and recolours, which is also meh. Another thing I disliked was how enchanting cost gold and there was no visual effect on the weapon when you enchanted it with fire/ice/lightning. I'm looking forward to what the future might hold and I hope some of these things get addressed in a sequel.

It's incredible how arrogant you are. You don't need to be able to write code to observe how **** an engine performs, especially when you have other engines to compare it to. Now, if you want to understand WHY it performs like ****, then yes you'll be able to understand the code the engine is written in. Explain to me why all the Crysis games run perfectly stable (except the first one, but that one is famous for bad optimization), why Dark Souls 2 (dx11) runs at perfect 60fps without even one dip with a lot of particles and models on screen, why Dota 2 (a ****ing RTS-style game) also runs perfectly stable while having A LOT more going on than Pillars of Eternity. Even Arma 3 runs at constant 40+, and the arma engine is famous for being absolutely awful when it comes to performance. No, you don't ****ing need to understand code to realize that the Unity engine is complete ass at efficient resource usage.

Stop kidding. Divinity: Original Sin is in 3D and its characters have more polygons than PoE. D: OS is running wonderful on high details on my box. PoE slows down from time to time in some locations. i7 3770k 3.5GHz, Geforce 660 GTX Titanium 2GB, 16GB RAM. PoE looks worse than Temple of Elemental Evil (and ToEE had beautiful trees in 3D), but runs much worse. It's messed up Unity engine which is terribly slow. It's also the case in Wasteland 2. He's talking about Unity engine in specific. It handles 3d models horribly. Divinity: Original Sin has nothing to do with it, since Larian used their own in-house engine.

You just summed up every Unity 4 game. You need to learn a thing or two about Unity and development before making such ignorant statements. There's 3 choices really: - Either Unity is **** and that's why every game developed on it is either some mobile game or an unoptimized pc title; - Or the devs just don't know what the **** they're doing but they just keep using unity because hey it's free lol Unity IS a steaming pile of **** when it comes to using resources efficiently. it is no coincidence that almost every game released on Unity seems to have the same problems. I understand why Obsidian chose Unity, and I'm not even mad. They said they have no experience with Unity, they're still learning, which is ok by me. I'm not gonna die because my game drops to 30 fps. It's just annoying and I'd be glad to see it fixed. I just hope they move to Unity 5 in a sequel. You are once again completely wrong. The developer has full control over how resources are managed and there have been MANY successful games made with it, including games that run on limited embedded systems such as iOS and Droid. In addition, Unity is only free if you make less than $100k. Don't try to blame the engine until you have written code for it and released a commercial title. I get a feeling your machine just sucks. You must be one of those guys who thinks buying a bunch of parts from NewEgg (or wherever) makes you an expert at building a good machine. ROFLMAO I actually originally built this machine around the end of 2011 and have been upgrading it ever since. I also recently decided to OC my CPU to around 4.0GHz to see if it helped. But whatever floats your boat, I guess.