Cakebread666

No doubt. I had to butcher my party rogue at one point and replace him because he got glitched into a wall and I couldn't find a way to get him out or leave the area, or even kick him out of the party. If it were my main character that probably would have been the end there. No, the party wasn't rested. They walked to the fight straight from the compass. When you get back, the game is like, "oh no, people are dying, we have to get in their and help." It wouldn't feel like much of an RPG if I went and had a pint at the bar before the adventure. All that wouldn't be so bad if the game didn't hide monster statistics and disallow retreat from the map during a fight and disallow retreat when half a dozen monsters are standing on the body of a down but not out comrade. Even all that wouldn't be so bad if on top of it all the game didn't throw curve balls at you. That's my grip - that the game isn't set up for hardcore. Take a game that is for example, Path of Exile. When you are leveling your character up in that game and provided you are pursuing a standard and obvious design, you can FEEL your way through the game. If you are losing too much life, you can advance health. If you need damage, then damage. If the monsters start becoming too hard, you can check your gear, go back to a previous area, party up, and so on and on. It was designed with the hardcore experience in mind. Other than beating the game in regular mode and memorizing everything because it doesn't even change, what can you do in Pillars? The game goes out of its way to be dense. It's not so much a "have a pint" thing as a "Oh, no, we're not rested and we're gon' get killed if we don't rest up and think this through carefully before committing". Granted, I think that the dialogue in the game should allow you to really act that out way, way, way more often, but that's pretty much it. In Hardcore, you really need to stop and think before you do anything at all, considering your options. It wouldn't be hardcore, otherwise. That said, I specifically do not run hardcore myself because I don't trust games to not arbitrarily and suddenly screw me over due to bugs or crashes or just plain weird mechanics suddenly acting in a completely unintuitive manner. So, yeah.

Difficulty curve balls are fine if the game isn't an iron man game, or if the game has a way for you to escape. Not being able to escape fights or leave maps with downed party members makes curve balls too nutty.

Instead of complaining about Iron Man (I assume) when you haven't even beaten the game, how about turning it off so you can reload? If you want reloads, play without the option. This post just comes off as a standard rant and rage quit. I don't want to reload. I also don't want to play the game once in normal and then again in Iron Man with all the mystery gone. It claimed it was an iron man game, but it wasn't designed with it in mind, at all.

No, the party wasn't rested. They walked to the fight straight from the compass. When you get back, the game is like, "oh no, people are dying, we have to get in their and help." It wouldn't feel like much of an RPG if I went and had a pint at the bar before the adventure. All that wouldn't be so bad if the game didn't hide monster statistics and disallow retreat from the map during a fight and disallow retreat when half a dozen monsters are standing on the body of a down but not out comrade. Even all that wouldn't be so bad if on top of it all the game didn't throw curve balls at you. That's my grip - that the game isn't set up for hardcore. Take a game that is for example, Path of Exile. When you are leveling your character up in that game and provided you are pursuing a standard and obvious design, you can FEEL your way through the game. If you are losing too much life, you can advance health. If you need damage, then damage. If the monsters start becoming too hard, you can check your gear, go back to a previous area, party up, and so on and on. It was designed with the hardcore experience in mind. Other than beating the game in regular mode and memorizing everything because it doesn't even change, what can you do in Pillars? The game goes out of its way to be dense.

I got a solid 18 hours out of this game which is about 5 more than I got out of Bioshock Infinite (which was $60) so I'm satisfied. I made 2 or 3 characters to figure out how to play the game, then went with an elven ranger. When I died, at least half of my party was level 5, about 14-15 hours into the game. I was being pretty careful to sweep town centers for quests and thought I was handling what I was coming across pretty well, with one out of area exception I managed to run from (tons of drakes coming from the craters). After a short questline and a battle where I brought some research papers to the compass, I returned to town to find a bunch of clockwork golems of one kind or another had taken over the area. I thought I might be able to walk away from it, but doing so seemed too stupid and disingenuous to the spirit of the game, so I went in to the building and tried to clear it. My party had nothing that I could throw at them. Once I had a party member drop, I was stuck, because of course you know, no man gets left behind. I tried a number of different techniques to split up the enemy, but at the end, I was too low on spells and health and one isolated creature wiped my four remaining characters. So here are my problems with the game for hardcore: Can't retreat from areas during combat. Too many enemies have non-sense run speeds. Can't abandon a party member even when rescue is hopeless. Enemies can't be coaxed around the map AND NPCs won't move to help you. The combination is these silly, isolated battles within earshot of one another. All together, the play feels like I'm in a straight jacket. This game has about zero replay value because everything spawns the exact same way. That's all fine. I was having a ball. I just don't understand why you would bother with a hardcore setting at all when the game is clearly no set up for it without reading spoilers and running from urgent plot points. Like I said, I had a good time with the game. The 15 hours I played continuously with my character were good. I'm just not going to run at this thing again until I look up some mods or something to fix it. Have fun.