Dee-Jay

It took me 60 hours to complete my first and only playthrough on normal difficulty. I did all of the quests available to be and must have experienced at least 85% of the content. What are people doing who spend more than 80 hours on a playthrough?

The breath RNG really is a bit stupid. I was hoping for an epic, climactic encounter but instead got frustrated and ended up spaming her to death with Maelstrom scrolls.

As I have stated in other threads, I've never been a huge fan of the resting system in IE games and PoE. I find it breaks my immersion if I picture my party settling down for an 8h session of R&R, sometimes in some of the most hostile environments imaginable and with dragons and Vampires just yards away. I also don't like the "per rest" skill-limit because it doesn't make for interesting resource management. Instead you end up "conserving" them for the hard fights...that don't end up coming before your next rest. Ar you blow through all of them too quickly and end up having to rest despite the last rest just being an hour ago. And yet somehow my group is still willing to travel 3 days without resting at all. Yeah it just makes no sense in a video-game and is a relic of the old D&D ruleset which just sin't relevant anymore. So instead I wanted to propose a different, more appropriate system, based on the even-older Realms of Arcadia series from 1992 (similar to Wizardry). In it time would pass fairly slowly when in a city or zone. Characters generally wouldn't tire much based on exploration. You could still go to taverns and wait or rest if you needed to wait for a particular hour of the day but otherwise exhaustion wasn't really a factor. This changed when you traveled across the world map. Instead of being an instant teleport you could follow your group's progress across the map along the route. At the end of every day, the group would make camp and you could assign every group-member a specific task. - You could assign people to night-watch, reducing the chance of being attacked at night (random encounters will local wildlife or bandits mostly) - You could assign people to cook, which depending on what dish you cooked for the group, gave everyone a special bonus for the following day. - You could assign someone to hunt, which would get you various supplies. This was only really needed if you were running low on food because characters always had to eat. If they went hungry they wouldn't heal. - You could assign someone to look for water for if your group didn't drink, they wouldn't regain Stamina/Mana over night. - You could assign someone to treat wounds, which would increase the healing everyone received from resting and removed wounds. - You could assign someone to recover, which removed any wounds they might have received. - You could assign people to collect herbs which would give you an appropriate selection of regional herbs for brewing and healing wounds. - You could have a character brew new potions, which would allow you to use these potions the next day as you couldn't just brew them "on the fly". - You could also have a character enchant gear, which too wasn't possible "on the fly". I can't think of anything else at the moment that would make sense, but you get the idea. What I liked about this system is that it really helped characterize the different members of the group. You really noticed when Amoen, your Hunter, was heavily wounded and needed to recover and thus couldn't go hunting that night. You noticed when you replaced your primary herb gatherer with the Alchemist dude because while you now had access to much cooler potions, you now needed to buy most of the ingredients. It also enhanced the sense of "here's a group travelling through a hostile and barren land" as certain environments left you starved for resources. If you were looking to travel through a desert for three days, you better prepare for it by stocking up on water and supplies. For PoE such a system would also provide a good basis for expanding on the secondary skill system. Because currently, it feels a bit underwhelming. It would also provide a great opportunity for more "chose your own adventure" stories as "...while looking for water you come across a strange fountain unlike anything you'd seen before....". Or "while out hunting your prey you are surprised by a huge bear...". Of course, abandoning the current resting system would require reworking some of the current game-mechanics, first and foremost the "per day" skill limit. But that's a matter for another topic.

No, but why wouldn't there be? After taxes, publisher cuts, and other costs, I'm not sure if Obsidian earned enough money to fully finance their next game, but even if they did, Kickstarter is a great way to gain additional funding. With the stellar reviews Pillars is getting from players and journalists both, this new campaign certainly wouldn't suffer from lack of interest. While you are correct and crowd-funding has very little downsides, I do resent the idea of a well-established and financed studio resorting to crowd-funding. PoE did well enough to earn Obsidian healthy revenue throughout the coming year. They should be financially well-secured at this point and as long as they don't overreach, should remain afloat for a while to come. Since it was Obsidian that initiated the KS and Paradox only really came in as a publisher its safe to assume that Obsidian secured a lion's share of the profits. And even if they should need more money, with such a successful and highly-acclaimed title to show for it wouldn't be hard to secure funding from a 3rd party investor, one that doesn't care to influence games much. Imo crowd-funding should be reserved for studios and projects that cannot yet stand on their own two feet. KS can enable them to do that, that's what they're for. They're not meant to be preorders, 3 years in advance.

Yeah I read that too. But it only seem to apply if you've triggered the "go to Canada" Quest. And even after running around for almost an hours, there's only two exists. Canada, which I cannot yet enter and the farm......but coming from the top I simply cannot fart the rats away. I've ended up having to restart the game. This seriously sucks.

Hi, I got really frustrated yesterday. I accidentally ran into the woods. I don't recall how exactly I ended up there, but I did. This is before the quest to go to Canada. Now I can't seem to leave. The only ways out are Canada, which I can't yet enter or the farm, which is blocked by a rat-pack which for the life of me I can't fart on. I'm stuck....I can't get out and had to effectively restart the game unless you can help me.

The unity engine is very accessible and makes content creation fairy easy. But he Baldur's Gate series has just had a remake and I have no idea why you'd want to do it again. The only gripe I have with the game in the AD&D ruleset , which is completely non-intuitive. But there's no chance of that ever changing. And frankly PoE doesn't look that much better than the BG series did back in 2000. And that ran on a 300 Mhz PC.

Really? Discussing the location of a potential item that has no plot-relevance is now worthy of spoiler tags? Aren't we getting a little excessive?

This is one of the reasons why the game-mechanics remain so opaque for casual players. Most buff and debuffs just affect the stats in some way or another. Very few actually have a tangible effect in game. That's disappointing.

I don't get this obsession with min./maxing. There are more ways to spec a character than maxing a few stats at the expense of others. And frankly, you don't even NEED that many stats above 16 for dialogue. Withe the right gear and buffs, you can easily get good enough stats for every dialogue option.

I'm eagerly awaiting the arrival of a 21:9, 34", 3440x1440 widescreen monitor with Freesync.

Random weapon malfunctions have NEVER been fun in any game I've played. And while gear degeneration has its uses it mainly serves to sustain demand in a player driven economy. In a single-player RPG I see no room for such a feature.

Well I did most of the quests on my playthrough and, including all 15 levels of Od Nua, and ended up being level 12 with the entire party by Act 3. I think that the XP curve is basically balanced without Od Nua in mind, which iirc, was added as a stretch goal.

My main reason for killing everything was to explore every nook and cranny. I hate the idea of missing something and stealth just wasn't reliable enough.

I agree that the stronghold feels a bit like an afterthought. It was a stretch-goal iirc, which explains why it feels that way. That's one of the reasons I don't like games adding content as stretch-goals because they always end up feeling "tacked on". To be honest, I think the game could easily do without the stronghold. Being a lord of a castle would really change the way people interact with you, but it doesn't. Generally the life of a lord is very different from your typical RPG protagonist. Even Dragon Age: Inquisition, where the castle was always a central concept, has you doing a lot of mundane stuff and travelling the world with a "rag-tag" band of followers. Yeah, it doesn't make sense. If they want to expand on it, there are some things they could do. Just look at some old Facebook or browser games for inspiration. Building soldiers, RTS battles, attacking other castles, consolidated vendors etc. could all be potential ideas. But really, if they're going to stick with the classic RPG formula of "Protagonist from humble origins bands together with rag-tag band of followers to defeat evil" then I'd rather they'd leave any "grand strategy" elements out of it. Even in Dragon Age, the "management" stuff was really boring.

I'm sure it also had to do with the rise of consoles, and cross-platform development. Isometric games don't play well on consoles and with the Xbox entering the arena and the PS2 being really, really popular I can see why publisher were pushing for those.

There is room for improvement but most of the VO was actually pretty good when it was there. My only gripes were: a) VO is somewhat inconsistent. Some things an NPC says will be VO, then other parts won't be. It's a bit weird when you have to read something in your internal voice, only to have it jump back to VO. I can see why this happened, it's still a bit weird. b) the PC rarely speaks. In fact it was so uncommon I was actually so surprised when it did happen that I had to check the companions if it didn't come from them. c) More variety might have been nice. But it always is.

So, yesterday evening I finished my first and fairly extensive play-through of Pillars of Eternity. Throughout my play session I took notes of stuff that I wanted to provide feedback on, in the hopes of seeing an even-better PoE 2 sometime in the future. With that in mind, a lot of the points are going to sound critical. But bear in mind that the overall experience was still great and that PoE is an impressive product considering the humble roots. Just a little background on myself. I bought the game on Steam, about 1 week after launch, mainly due to the rave reviews that were coming out at the time. There were so many 9/10s that I really had to see for myself if the game was up to the hype. I did play the Baldur's Gate series 15 years ago and still consider them some of my most memorable games but otherwise wasn't hugely involved in PoE, neither as a fan or a backer. That's why my feedback might sound a bit „casual“ at times. I won't say a huge deal about the positives because the reviews already did that. And to be honest, saying positive things is always more general and unspecific that pointing out areas for improvement. This feedback is based on a single, extensive 60 hour play-through on medium difficulty with a main Rogue and all companions. General: The game is pretty enough considering its humble origins, or at least the maps are. However the actual 3D characters you see during creation and the inventory are pretty ugly. Other than that, some of the area maps were a little „bland“ and static. A little more motion and interactivity would go a long way. But I assume this is directly tied to the limited production quality available. Despite the “simple” graphics style I found the load-times to be fairly long, even on an SSD. Also, shouldn't it have been possible to have single houses not require a zone switch? I understand what Obsidian with going for, giving every NPC realistic loot. But I don't think it made the game better. Instead it floods you with loot, and subsequently money, which allows you to buy everything you could possibly want immediately. I was close to 100000 gold at some point. It also meant that the relevant loot was often drowned somewhere in your stash and I often wouldn't notice a quest reward I had received until a few hours later. I also had a hard time discerning what item was better, again because the entire stat-system isn't very intuitive or well explained unless you go out of your way to research it. Mechanics: I didn't think the secondary skills (Mechanics, Lore etc.) really facilitated many interesting choices. Instead I was always focusing on 1-2 skills on each character and ignoring almost everything else (except Athletics to 3, min). It wasn't bad, just a little dull. More secondary skills with more interesting choices might be cool. Cooking, Alchemy, maybe even Enchanting could be potential „camp skills“ for the future. I see what Obsidian was going for with the primary stats in making every stat useful for everyone. And I think it worked, to an extent. But Might in conversation always seemed to imply physical prowess which goes against the concept. I also think more could have been done to encourage balanced builds instead of focusing heavily on Might. Maybe Diminishing Returns or similar. Overall it's a good system but it could use some fine-tuning and some more intuitive interactions. This game has some many stats and doesn't do a very good job explaining them. It wasn't until the end of the game that I realized what exactly Reflex, Fortitude and Willpower did. Better loading screen tips would have gone a long way. This isn't helped by the fact that there are so many spells that influence them in some way. This is pet-peeve of mine, but I really do not like the “resting” system, neither here nor in previous IE games. The idea that my party would camp out in the middle of an infested dungeon to cure all ailments is immersion-breaking to me. That's why I only camped when absolutely necessary. Not only is it immersion-breaking, but it also encouraged weird game-play like camping before and after difficult fights or not camping at all on a three-day journey across the entire map. On that note I also didn't like the “per encounter” or “per rest” skill limit for the same aforementioned reasons. I just seem arbitrary, encouraged cheesy game-play and doesn't force interesting choices or resource management. I'll use my Warrior knockdowns in every fight, not matter how trivial or hard and because I don't know what to expect in the future, I won't use my powerful spells until later...and then never end up using them at all. This isn't a good system. The health system on the other hand was ok, although it too suffered from some of the same issues mentioned above. Endurance was effectively your “combat HP”, while Health was you actual life power. Health was grinded away slowly, effectively forcing you to camp eventually while Endurance needed more moment-to-moment attention. I'm still not sure it's actually better than a more conventional system but it's ok. Still, I would have liked to see more ways of replenishing health, because having everyone sitting at 90% health and one at 20% really wasn't much fun. Combat and Classes: There were times where I felt there was too much emphasis on combat. When every room in every dungeon has a potentially lethal mob-group it can get a bit grooling. I was also a bit disappointed in the lack of puzzles. Or maybe I missed them. AI pathing, while ok outside of combat, was generally terrible once in combat. Both enemies and companions would frequently get stuck, block each other or not do much at all. Annoying to say the least, especially given how quickly a fight can go south. I also felt that combat at times could feel rather random. I was a bit of a perfectionist and would often reload if I felt my party took too much unnecessary damage. I did this mainly to avoid camping, which I consider extremely immersion breaking, especially when used inside dungeons. Point being, I could do the same fight 5 times and while 4 times my party might lose 40% of it's HP, the 5th time it would barely lose 10% without any discernible reason why. The huge skill discrepancy between classes was a big letdown to me. Some classes like the Ranger, Rogue or Paladin only get a handful of active skills to use in combat. On the other hand Mages and Priests get an almost overwhelming number of skills that, in the case of the Priest, almost do the same thing. I mean Durance has at least 5 different versions of “Buff Might and Resolve” and 5 different versions of “buff various defensive stats”. Some variety is good but if some many spells do virtually the same, they seem redundant. It also meant I had to scroll through a lot of spells before finding the one I actually need. Because when all spell descriptions read so similar it's hard to remember which one actually increased your resilience to “Terrified”. In my opinion the Cipher and Chanter had a good amount of skills allowing both choice and diversity without being tedious. For the future I'd like to see other classes gain more skills and utility while reducing the redundancy of some of the Priest spells especially. Mage spells in contrast are at least fairly diverse. Companions: Overall the companions were decent. They had characters and got involved in conversations and the plot. My only complaint with them is that they feel a little „tacked on“. Most of them are literally standing around, waiting for you to pick them up with very little story involvement. Pallegrina was the only character that was at least tied to a quest directly. I assume this was a side-effect of the kickstarter, where more characters were added as stretch goals. That's ok. But for the future I would like to see them as essential parts of the story as well as their own personalities, just like in Baldur's Gate 2. World and Writing: A lot of the time I felt I was „bumbling“ through the plot, without much of a clue where I was and what to expect. Often times I would end up accidentally forwarding the plot or completing a quest. This often ended up feeling a little anti-climatic. I'm not sure exactly why or how to avoid it, but a little more setup and guidance might have helped. I also got frustrated at times looking for specific NPCs in specific locations. It would have been nice to have at least the option of turning on a navigational aid for turning in quests, especially if you've already talked to that specific NPC. Having to remember all the NPCs and their specific locations realy just made me alt+tab a lot. This was obviously reinforced by the previous point about „bumbling“ through the plot. Other than that, I did find the world slightly inaccessible at first. It doesn't take long for the game to introduce you to countless concepts like the different gods, souls, animancy, adra, the different races etc. While it does come together towards the end, it is all a little overwhelming at first. On a similar note....boy are some NPCs chatty. I knew I was up for some reading even before buying the game, but some of those 20-30 page exposition dumps some NPCs drop on you seem a little unnecessary and ruin a bit of the pacing. I voice-acted parts help alleviate this somewhat. Still I would have appreciated either more frequent, but less lengthy exposition or simply a little more „compact“ writing. I know opinions may vary on this and that's ok, but this is just my opinion. Well, that's all I have to say for now. Hope it wasn't too wordy and I'm looking forward to the next chapter in the Pillars of Eternity.