Sensuki

There should be a combat update tomorrow, FYI.

I'm an internal tester for this one so I can shed some info. It's not like Underrail. It's a party-based RPG and the turn-based system is not a standard turn-based system. It has simultaneous real-time turn resolution and visually, it will look like RTwP with auto-pause. But it *is* turn-based because player (and enemy) input is limited and absolute. There are a few games out there with similar systems, such as Grandia however I don't think there is a game that has such a combat system in a non-abstract battlefield. The combat here will take place in the exploration world, whereas other games with a similar system (mostly jRPGs) take you to an abstracted Battlefield for combat. The User Interface and controls for Copper Dreams should be a lot more up to date than Serpent in the Staglands. Whalenought still want to keep a few of the interface features old school but usability and accessibility should be much better. Most of the testing I've done so far has been on the controls, UI and camera and most recently on the combat feel. The Z-axis movement is fun and will hopefully be a primary feature of gameplay and combat.

They're 'fun' videos I guess, they utilize humor to come off as appealing.

I don't recall anyone saying that you have to play like a murderhobo and kill everything in order to beat it.

No way am I giving Double Fine my money, lol.

That doesn't really apply to completing 5% of the content on easy and skipping every possible fight does it?

I'm about as diehard of an IE fan as it can get and I really don't want Obsidian to try and do BG2. There are so many things in Pillars 1 that are trying to be BG1, BG2 or PS:T and failing at it or are just there because one of those games did it. I'd rather Pillars 2 content-wise just be a natural evolution of what they come up with rather than trying to badly emulate things that were done in the Infinity Engine games. Obviously they put that pressure on themselves with their Kickstarter campaign, but now they don't have to and I think they'd be much better off not doing it. I'm not even sure if I'd buy what they come up with but I think they'd be much better just making a game that naturally suits the story that Eric & Carrie come up with rather than going "BG2 had this, so we must have it too".

The Louisiana tease could be the codename for PoE2. We (the codex) are not sure.

I like the size of torment sprites.

in Icewind Dale 2 Rogues could do that with a feat. The other IE games use 2E rules though.

Spells did not miss in the IE games. You either saved, had magic resistance or were immune.

Cool. Well, it's not necessarily about that - the lower camera angle does make structures look more impressive. No doubt about it. It's just that it's less practical for the actual gameplay. The question is whether you care about that or not. I do. Some don't.

I actually disagree that Pillars does "just fine" indoors. The shader used to visualize characters behind walls isn't good for visibility compared to that cool dithering(?) effect used in the IE engine where you could see the characters just fine and in Pillars, characters disappear behind the lower wall of most dungeon corridors that have a somewhat flat vertical axis. In rooms this doesn't happen, but characters are still obscured by other characters (and 3D FX). The Infinity Engine camera angle is just flat out better for visibility of units in combat. I agree that Pillars goes more for depth of the scene, and structures look more impressive - and that was the reason why the angle was chosen, for the environment art - not combat clarity, which in turn is the consequence of that change, and one I doubt they considered when doing it.

I'd also just like to say that BG2's camera angle is flat out better than either of Pillars camera angles. The only good thing about the low outside one is that you can see more of the faces of structures but it's annoying for gameplay with 3D characters where your characters disappear behind other units, and the inside one isn't high enough so characters are behind walls a lot as well.

You can with a mod - for both of those things.

The Infinity Engine games have a backstab too, and it's better than DA:O's one. In BG2 a Rogue can use any item once they hit level 17 and you can use heavy armor and a two-handed weapon (though, you only get proficiencies in certain ones). Proficiencies also don't have anything to do with the combat gameplay really. They don't affect the actions you perform in combat in these games.

No I'm definitely thinking of Dragon Age: Origins. I did not buy DA2 or DAI because I hated the first one. The things I liked about DA:O were the C&C, and some of the boss battles, but that's about it really.

Positioning doesn't really matter because Warriors have a broadcast aggro ability, so all they need to do is do that and enemies just attack them. You need to pause because you have four characters with active abilities and you have to manage their cooldowns, that doesn't make the game tactical. Just as in Pillars of Eternity you need to use lots of active attacks over and over again, that does not make combat tactical. Rogues automatically shuffle behind enemies, and their animations for special attacks actually made them worse at combat because the animations took so long to play, so you were actually better off just auto-attacking and you got a higher DPS. How many spell casts of Time Stop do you get per rest, and how many battles do you face per day? You can run in every game, but in DA:O you don't really need to run because there's no death, there's automatic health regeneration and well, the aggro system, so you can't run some of the time. But I see your point - it's all about those animations and sound effects, and button awesome. I get it.

When the camera was not on the highest zoom, you could only control one unit at a time and you were locked to their perspective - what kind of bullcrap is that? Unit movement is super clunky, and movement in combat is not tactical, you just run up to something and start clicking away. And lol animation and sound effects, what about the awesome button? Aggro switching, tactical retreating, dispelling, counter-spelling, movement and positioning somewhat matters, lots of other stuff. There are lots and lots of different ways to beat encounters in BG2 especially. If you're discounting the combat because you rest-spammed so you could use per-rest spells every fight then you only cheated yourself out of a fun time bud.

I played on the PC and on Insane difficulty. That's another reason why it sucks, it's a ****ty console port.

Try now

Lol no it didn't. The game camera is bad, the game controls bad, unit movement is bad, there is very little tactical variety, characters generally just spam the same abilities off cooldown over and over, the death system is lulzy like KotOR. It did have some fairly cool boss fights - much better than Pillars of Eternity but not as good as say BG2. Encounter design for the most part is horrific, mostly just the same trash mobs of Darkspawn over and over. There were only a few encounters in the game I actually enjoyed, like Ser Cauthrien although that was mostly just because she had inflated stats but at least it still required doing something different.

fast-forward to 31:08

https://twitter.com/ChrisAvellone/status/670647701277679617