[First impressions thread!]

Do you think the game should just flat out tell  you to use weapon X against enemy Y? Seriously, Stun?

That's kinda missing point. Josh promised us it wouldn't be Rock-paper-scissors. But that's exactly what it is.

[No experience from combat]

 

This is a dungeon crawler at its heart, after all.

 

Uhhh, no.

 

Sure felt like it

[No experience from combat]

I don't agree with the 'it makes combat less rewarding' thinking.

 

Loot. That's the reason I go into every nook and cranny in rpg's, the xp is just a necessary 'drop' because the game is stratified by levels.

 

I actually didn't even notice that the combat didn't give xp, I was too absorbed in the looting and killing.

So your stance is that the developers should discourage "kill grinding for XP", but promote "kill grinding for loot".

 

Ok. I disagree by the way. From what I've played of the beta, The loot drops did not inspire me.

[First impressions thread!]

But the weapon stats are visible in the descriptions. It shouldn't be all that hard to figure out. How is this different from figuring out which buff, debuff, or counter to use in various situations in BG2?

The weapon descriptions only tell you

 

1) the damage threshold

2) the damage type.

 

They don't tell you whether Crushing damage will be useless against Spiders. Or whether slashing is the best damage to do against beetles.

 

And BG2 is a sequel. Anyone who played Bg1 will not have much of a learning curve to overcome with BG2.

[No experience from combat]

The idea that every little thing you do in the game should give you exp, just because this is an RPG, is silly.

I don't think too many people here are advocating that we should get rewarded for every little thing we do. They're merely asking to be rewarded for engaging in combat, which in a combat centric RPG, cannot be considered a "little thing".

 

Do you get exp for saving the princess in Super Mario World? No

If PoE was being advertised as the spiritual successor to Super Mario World, that would be an impregnable argument. It's not though. This game was *created* to be all about the IE game Nostalgia. To quote Josh Sawyer, it's supposed to make you feel like you are "coming home again". Bottom line: The IE games rewarded XP for killing and questing. Quest XP and Kill XP was *fundamental* in those games. It should have been in PoE as well.

[First impressions thread!]

Uh... why not switch to some more suitable weapon for your barb then?

 

(Other than that there aren't any due to the disappearing item bug, but that'll be history soon, presumably.)

Well, you stole my answer. because there were no more weapons left in the Beta to switch to :D

 

But I'll give you a serious answer. Because I didn't *know* which weapon would be more suitable (other than another rifle), and Because Playing Rock-paper-Scissors isn't a more exciting alternative.

[First impressions thread!]

What has me wondering, though, is the incredible amount of obvious bugs in the basics of the game. Like wrong cursors, load issues, zoom issues, input issues, menu issues - this kind of stuff. 

Maybe the guys at Obsidian work differently than I do but as a developer these would be the first things to be working properly since they're required for testing (in-house, not the beta). Feels a bit like Obsidian is struggling to keep up with the schedule to be honest.

I agree. But I'm more worried about the intentional design stuff that has turned out to be remarkably disappointing.

 

Someone here mentioned the "inefficient weapon" thing. That's a good example of mis-implementation of an intentional design. Josh specifically told us about the different weapon damage types vs. the different armor types and told us that some weapons will be more useful against, say, chainmail than leather, and vice vera. But HE DID NOT say that this was going to be some crap Rock-paper-scissors mini-game where some weapons will do NOTHING against certain armor types, while some will do what seems to be double damage against other armor types

 

As it stands, my friggin Mage was doing massive damage with his Rifle against lions, while my Barbarian was slaving away on the front lines scoring decimal point grazes.

[Experience point system in the beta and onwards]

Speaking of resting in inn's, what did you think of the buffs they provided you? How long did they last? Were the buffs different for each class?

The buffs are universally applied to everyone in your party. The Dragon-level buff honeymoon suite costs 200cp and gives you +2 to might and +2 to a couple other things. The problem is that it's hard to know if they make any difference at all.

 

As for how long they last... well for me, not long lol. They last until you rest again.

[Experience point system in the beta and onwards]

What difficulty was it set on? I'm curious to know if the combat seems on par, more difficult, than it's predecessors.

If the demo suggests anything, it's that PoE doesn't have a predecessor. Or at least not an Infinity engine predecessor. PoE plays (and looks) more like a spiritual successor to ToEE but without ToEE's excellent combat.

 

I'm playing on Normal, but I suspect that 75% of the difficulty is both unintended and artificial. You're going to struggle in combat in this game when your mage takes the loonng way around the dungeon in order to cast a fireball at a group of spiders that are in front of him, thus triggering another group of spiders at the flank, causing your party to be surrounded. And it's kinda tough when your fighter has to take on the front line...without a weapon. Or when you're monitoring your barbarian's frenzy and look over to see that your priest and rogue are doing nothing at all despite the fact that you ordered them to attack the group of lions who are currently munching on their their faces with unnatural speed you can't even see.

 

But mostly, it's hard because I can't get myself to care. Bugged or not, combat in this game does not excite me. There's a dull, mechanical feel to it. It's not "boring" by any stretch. But it's not particularly compelling, either.

[First impressions thread!]

ps having to play our cipher sans armour is also annoying. every time we reload a game, his armour disappears... not that we can honestly tell you how much good armour is doing for our cipher anyway given lack o' a dynamic character record display

Yep. Our Fighter's a monk now, only without monk skills. Why? no more melee weapons available in the entire demo for him to equip then lose.

[Experience point system in the beta and onwards]

Maybe I shouldn't play the Beta.

Well, the good news about the beta is that 1) it starts you off with camping supplies and 2) You're never far away from the village inn.

 

Here was my playstyle for the first wilderness map:

 

1)Fight an encounter.

2) Rush back to the tavern to rest.

3) go back and fight another encounter

4) Rush back to the inn to rest.

 

and then in that map's dungeon:

 

1)fight one encounter

2) set camp

3) fight another oncounter

4) set camp

 

If Josh thought he could eliminate or even reduce rest-spamming with his crap design ideas, he was horribly mistaken. I think rested more in this 3-map-beta than I did in 7 chapters of IWD1.

[No experience from combat]

Stun, LARP stands for Live Action Role Playing. That's people who play a roleplaying game in person. It has absolutely no relevance to the discussion here, so just stop abusing terms you don't even understand.

In cRPG larping is pointless stuff you do for RP purposes that the game mechanics don't recognize. Like making sure your character eats 3 meals a day when you're playing skyrim. or dropping gold and weapons in front of a Talos shrine.

 

It's meaningless "pretend" crap.

[No experience from combat]

 

 

What?

 

A large part of this game is killing creatures.

 

Yes.  So?  I'm killing them because they're between me and where I need to go, because they attacked me first, etc.  Not because I get some reward for doing so in XP or items.  A roleplaying reward, if you will

 

That's a Larping reward, not a roleplaying reward. The game mechanics will not recognize that you killed those creatures. You may as well have just soloed the game and rushed past them.

 

Edit: besides, I didn't explore what's-it-called Gorge because I needed to go there for some quest. I explored it because it was there to be explored. Yet not even exploration in this game yields Xp.

 

But this misses the point. PoE looks like it will easily be just as combat heavy as the baldurs gate games. Which menas you're not going to be tangibly rewarded for something you have to do for 80% of the friggin game.

 

By definition, that makes gameplay mostly POINTLESS.

[No experience from combat]

 

It pigeon holes players into playing one specific way. What if players don't want to do many quests? The only way to play if you want to get anywhere is by questing now. There's no just going out and adventuring around killing things as a form of progression.

Well, no.  This isn't Diablo.  If you don't want to do quests, this is probably not the right game for you.

 

Apparently this isn't Baldurs Gate 1, Planescape Torment, Icewind Dale, Baldurs Gate 2, or Icewind Dale 2 either. It's not even their spiritual successor.

 

All those games had Combat XP and quest/objective XP. And they all gave players the opportunity to quest or not-quest for XP. And they were good enough to be name-dropped by Obsidian in order to attract backers for PoE's kickstarter funding.

 

But lets cut the naivety. Obsidian (read: Josh Sawyer) did NOT decide to scrap Kill XP because he thought doing so would make the game more fun. He scrapped Kill XP because it takes FAR less work, and FAR less number-crunching to balance a game when you can simply hand-place and lump-sum all the XP rewards from act 1 to act 3 and create a rigid, tightly controlled level advancement from beginning for the sake of convenience.

[First impressions thread!]

Also, there are no more melee weapons in this beta. Believe it or not. Every time I reload the game, BB_Fighter's melee weapon sets disappear and I have to go back to to the blacksmith and purchase some more. But I've finally drained his stock. All he has now is a crossbow that I can't afford. drats. Looks like BB_Fighter's gonna have to Floyd Mayweather his way through the rest of the Beta!

[First impressions thread!]

In general terms, I'd like combat to feel less like a brief, hectic skirmish. The IE-style combat felt more drawn-out (in a good way), where characters would fight but not always be able to land a decisive hit every few seconds. So when the hits landed, they felt good, they felt decisive, and they altered the dynamic of the engagement. In other words, they felt meaningful. The combat felt like a sandbox environment: it would continue mostly without your input, but intelligent and timely use of abilities could alter the course of the battle, and you could experiment with different combinations without feeling rushed. That's the sort of feeling I hope Pillars of Eternity can capture.

Yes. This is a good executive summary of how things *should* be.

 

There are a lot of people here convinced that the Bugs are the only thing that's making the combat feel wrong in this beta. But I suspect that even when they slow things down and fix the bugs, it still won't feel right, because the *mechanics* are a bit too action-oriented to begin with.

 

You talked about the 'drawn out nature' of combat the IE games and how, by contrast, everything in PoE seems...brief. Well? That's not a bug. It's all about the DPS. That's Josh's stated design. They've replaced missing with grazes, rounds with seconds (and fractions of seconds) Of course you can graze for 00.00 damage in this beta, which is technically a miss, but that doesn't change the fact that as far as what you're seeing on the screen, you're still hitting, and it's still making a sound effect.

 

I don't know about this demonstration of PoE's combat. It sounded really good when it was described to us in the updates. But I'm seriously concerned now.

[Experience point system in the beta and onwards]

The problem still isn't the lack of kill xp, it's the lack of "everything that is not done as part of a quest" xp.

It's both.

 

You were active on the other thread, you heard the arguments from both sides. The most vocal supporters of the Sawyer-design (yes. that's what I'm calling it from now on) made it a point to remind us over and over again that anything except hand-placed, greater-goal-specific XP rewards (ie. exactly what we got in the Beta) would constitute a detriment to balance and gameplay and it simply wouldn't work well. Some went so far as to label certain types of unacceptable objective XP as "systemic" (stuff like Getting XP for successfully engaging in one of your class skills).

 

My side was shouted down whenever we dared argue that the game would get tedious if players were subjected to such an XP starvation diet for 60 friggin hours.

 

Well, the beta probably isn't any sort of "smoking gun" for either side (it's too small), but it does give us hints. And those hints are that this game had better NAIL its narrative, because if it doesn't it's probably not going to be very well received.

[Experience Point Mechanics - Fighting Enemies]

Having been more or less in the objective xp camp, I'm having second thoughts now, after five hours of beta.

 

I picked Easy, because I was in for some bug hunting as well. However, being a pretty seasoned CRPG:er, and I rarely pause too, I didn't even reload once. Without spoiling too much, I had my party of five (I added a six member right before I quit the game, and then wasting 4,000 cp on a lvl 4 adventurer that came out a lvl1 adventurer) doing the following tour: They did pick up a convo-hidden quest, but then decided to go into the Gorge six hours away and fight some pretty tough prides. I was proud after having survived those. Then I decided to do a little adventuring in Dyrwood Village again, and thereafter I went away to Dyrwood Crossing, and pretty much cleaned up there. Without return to the village, I pushed away a certain heavy stone feature, and found myself in some ruins with pesky cultists with some pretty rich loot to beat. I did everything there, and I only had a couple of doors to pick (Mechanic 7), when I went back to the village (all in all, five hours of playing), to rest for a second time at the inn.

 

-I didn't die once. No reloads. I used six camping rations in that time. Some encounters were hard, but I was happy to survive those. It was loads of fun.

-I by-passed heaps and heaps of what I though were counting as objectives. I was mightily surprised to see that my xp gain during 5 h of RL time, or 26 h of in-game time, amounted to zilch and nada!

 

I must say this: either what's counting as "objectives" need a big overhaul (it must be segmented into encounters and small segments - just quest xp is not enough for me to get that IE-inspired feel), or I'll join the xp-per-kill-camp with a vengeance.

^yeah, this.

 

And while it's possible that Bugs are a primary culprit here, I *doubt* it. The beta's pacing feels intentionally IWDish/ToEEish despite its heavy dose of exploration and wonderful dialogue. You cannot limit XP rewards to Objective-only in such an overbearingly combat-centric game and still honestly claim that it's hitting all the right notes. You. Just. Can't.

[Minor Bug: Justice.]

There's a unique greatsword for sale at the blacksmith shop called "Justice" (I think that's its name). I bought it and used it for a while until it disappeared, but that's beside the point.

 

I think it has 2 bugs associated with it.

 

1) Its stats. It has/does standard Great sword damage, but then it has a special listed Property: +1000% Crushing Damage. That can't be intended can it? Great swords don't do crushing damage. And even if they did, this one most certainly doesn't seem to be doing 1000% more damage than a standard fine Greatsword.

 

2) It is invisible when equipped. A Character walks around unarmed when wielding it, but it's still doing slashing damage in combat.

[Biggest bug so far: Combat throng]

Items and quests don't disappear for you?

Oh yes. Poor, unlucky BB_Fighter. He's had, not 1, not 2, but 3 sets of warhammer + shield just disappear into the void. And unfortunately as a beta tester, I cannot meaningfully report what seems to be causing it. It just seems to happen randomly. I'd be in combat an notice he's trying to Mike Tyson everyone with his fists. For what its worth though, Unarmed fighting in this game has pretty decent animations!

 

 

But back on topic, Yep. Memories of DA:O's warden shuffle are alive and well in this beta. But at least this is something Brandon is fully aware of, and apparently the team is working on fixing as we speak.

[First impressions thread!]

Lastly and sadly a Con - Attributes: They are...kinda frustrating as you kinda need them all. They ALL work towards combat in one way or the other...there's no focusing without hurting yourself. I made a Cipher with tons of Resolve and intelligence but then i remembered how a Cipher generates focus so i put 10 points into both Constitution and Might...but then i remembered that dexterity controls accuracy and i can't generate focus unless i'm hitting things...and then i realized my Cipher is going to be the one talking to everything in the game so i have to have some kind of Perception or ill get duped all game long           You may have woven the stats together too tightly. You gave us 50ish starting points which is unheard of in any RPG because there isn't a single stat that i can see being unimportant for any class. Its not BAD but its certainly not good. It makes it hard for Infinity engine veterans to understand and REALLY difficult for people new to the genre. Im still testing the risk and reward of attributes. Hopefully i'm wrong.

Yes. I suspect that the day me and my inner Power Gamer decide to do battle with this game's Chargen, we're going to get our asses kicked.

You can tell right a way that this game is NOT designed for min-maxers.

[Experience Point Mechanics - Fighting Enemies]

I still haven't seen anyone from the "kill XP" camp refute that this system allows one of the most awesome progressions in RPG's to date... actual difficulty settings.Not +health (hello there, healthbloat Dragon Age), +damage or similar stupidity, but a harder encounter.

 

Has any game done this before? No. Does this system *allows* PoE to do this? Yes.

Do you want it to be gone to get your precious Kill XP back? Do you really?

 

(Incase you can't deduct why this wouldn't work with kill XP there's a balance nightmare - easy will get easier enemies, less XP, harder game. Hard will get stronger enemies, more XP, easier game. In either case the difficulty is bogus again. And no, "boosting XP, nerfing XP" isn't a solution, just another hack.

Away with the hacking, down to a proper system I say. And yes, I wonder why some people object to that.

We don't need to refute such a presumptuous, misguided claim. The Backer beta does a fine job of that for us.

 

You're wrong in 10 different ways, and the very first pieces of tangible evidence we've gotten confirm that in such a demonstrative fashion that it almost hurts.

[Experience Point Mechanics - Fighting Enemies]

And yes, combat is complicated, I just meant that combat lacks that addicting factor without exp, if that makes sense.

Aah. that's what you meant. yeah it makes sense. I utterly agree.

 

I'll also add that although I've probably only done about 1/3rd of this beta, I can say that even enemy loot drops aren't coming across as a proper motivator to engage in combat. The loot I've gotten so far has been very.... uninspired.

[First impressions thread!]

Gonna use a 10 point scale for this because there's so. Much. to. comment. on.

 

Scored: 10

 

--Atmosphere/Art/the visuals: Nailed it! Best part of the entire thing. For a game advertised as a 'spiritual successor' for another set of games, it sure does a good job beating its predecessors outright. At least in this part of its design.

 

--Dialogue/Writing/game world lore: Nailed that too. But I expected no less from an Obsidian product. I'm seeing a few people on this forum say that they haven't bothered reading the lore books and such. Big mistake! When you've got some time in these next few months while you're waiting for the full game to come out, I'd highly recommend immersing yourself in the flavor stuff. It's quite good so far.

 

 

Scored: 8

 

---The Chargen - You can very much customize a character in this game. the number of classes, races, backgrounds, attribute points is Breathtaking! (this scores an 8 instead of a 9 or 10 simply because it's hard to tell in just this demo how much all this customizable stuff matters, if anything, to gameplay.)

 

--The UI - feels remarkably familiar. and *right*. I had no trouble whatsoever figuring out the controls. Also, little discovery: Pressing the "alt" button shows the threat ranges of your characters and enemies (or at least I think that's what those circles are)

 

--Music/audio - Probably should have just lumped this in with Atmosphere, but it's good enough to be focused on by itself. I'm impressed.

 

 

Scored: 5

 

--The inventory - I said this 2 years ago, and it still rings true even as I play this beta. It is needlessly complex. You, Josh Sawyer, were the Lead Designer of Icewind Dale 2... the last of the infinity engine games. The ONE infinity engine game that cured the inventory headache once and for all. So Why did you feel the need to overhaul perfect? Poe's Inventory suffers from all sorts of pointless over-design. The individual character inventories are too small; I have found no use for the quick item slots; the deep stash feels ironically constrictive and rules-driven even though it's bottomless. One can't even pick up money from the bodies of looted enemies without having to decide who's inventory it goes into. And we'll discuss the interaction between merchants and your inventory below.

 

 

Scored: 3

 

-Merchant interaction - Did an entire thread on this already so I won't spend much time on it here. It's wrong. It copies Skyrim's "every merchant is almost broke when you meet them" design philosophy, and then adds an addition/subtraction trading mini-game on top of it. FAIL.

 

 

Scored: 1

 

--Combat. I'm going to be reasonable and assume the entire system is still in Alpha. It's a mess. Combat in this beta can be summed up in 6 words: What the hell is happening here? It's way way too fast. It's chaotic, and whatever tactical/planning you have usually goes right out the window because the game does not give you time to carry out any tactics. Pathfinding is fatal. the total party wipes that occur are NOT because players suck, but because combat sucks; Unless there's only 1 enemy (which is rare in this beta) it's almost impossible to tell who's attacking whom and with what. (and no, the auto pause settings don't help. They just cause combat to pause every 2 seconds making things feel even less fluid.)

 

 

This is of course just a Beta, so all of the above should be interpreted as stoic observations, rather than angry proclamation. I'm positive that a couple more months of polish will make things so much better. Good luck guys.

[The Official Romance Thread]

^It's the gun that the guy in your avatar is holding.