Justinian

I think these Polygon impressions and first few comments really nail home that even as a beta, PoE is really really buggy. http://www.polygon.com/2014/8/25/6066433/pillars-of-eternity-gameplay-video-preview The (misinformed) writer of the article makes the assertion "even this early in the game's development". As sloppily researched as this is, the fact he made this association speaks volumes about the unacceptable bugginess of the game this close to release. A comment down the page also eloquently addresses the truth of the matter: Buggy games is a well worn Obsidian trope and I don't think they can afford this Kickstarted project to have a buggy release. There's no point defending Obsidian or pussyfooting around the glaring truth. Obsidian need to step up and prove themselves this time. Delay the game for 6 months if need be. Casting aside this awful reputation is worth that.

wrong thread...

Why? Nobody has yet explained why a reward is necessary. No one said it was necessary. Giving out XP for combat simply aligns with combat being one of the core (and most challenging) activities in the game. The good old "effort = reward" loop in our primitive brain isn't being stimulated by no XP for combat. Not rocket science.

Where are the Shamblers? I must have missed those. Anyway I think the reason why every map is so crammed with stuff is due to the resources required to create each map. They want maximum gameplay mileage out of each map, so it's crammed with encounters/dungeons etc. That still doesn't justify making every map so heavily constructed and tight. Maps in almost all the Infinity engine games have been "locations of interest" where they contain something of significance. I just hope they bring in a bit of the Baldur's Gate style of wilderness exploration at least.

Another example:

Does anyone else think the encounter/point of interest density is too high for the maps? There also seems to be very clear "zones" to maps, which can often make the maps feel artificial and constructed. For example in Dyrford Crossing: The map is practically divided into 4 quarters, each with it's own group of wildlife. There are also 3 points of interest/dungeons on the map. To top it all off, the map is quite small. It really makes it feel like you're stumbling over encounters at every step, and that the "ecosystem" is designed and artificial. The terrain is also artificial - there are rivers and cliffs perfectly placed to funnel the player and maximise every square inch of space and seperate "zones". It reminds me of one of those exploration missions in Starcraft where the map funnels the player down a maze to maximise the distance the player needed to travel within the confines of a square map. In Baldur's Gate I loved the feeling of exploring each of the vast maps and of not quite knowing where the encounters would be. IMO the spread of encounters and content in that game was fantastic. Which brings us to another point - I sincerely hope there are much larger maps in the full game. Within those I hope that there's more constraint in placing points of interest and encounters. Hopefully this is just a beta thing and map density has been increased for the purposes of giving players a lot to play. Thoughts?

This. Generally betas are for balancing, tweaks and bug squashing, but here they're scrambling to ensure the most basic of the basic core functionality is working. Saving and persistence, character movement and AI, inventory, combat - you would hope these are working by the beta stage. It's almost like they prioritised cramming all the content in to make beta status, but neglected to make sure the foundation was solid.

Maybe this is a side effect of the overlapping characters bug? When one character is overlapped with another when it dies? Anyway. it's happened to me a few times.

Would everyone be relieved if Obsidian announced a delay of a few months for release? Judging from the forums and my repeated attempts to play through the beta, the sheer volume of small bugs, big bugs, gamebreaking bugs, visual issues, UI issues, combat issues, balance issues, attribute issues, class issues and overall design issues with the game is quite disconcerting if they plan on releasing the game this year.

I've just dug up a great GDC presentation from the art director for Diablo 3. In it he mentions some really important points on character legibility. Scroll down the topics to "Anatomy of a Screenshot: Midground": http://www.gdcvault.com/play/1015306/The-Art-of-Diablo Basically he says to make their characters stand out and be legible they implemented: Full contrast ratings on characters - from the darkest darks to brightest highlights. Radiance mapping with a rim light to push character off the background and even away from the world lighting itself. Higher fidelity of detail on characters than on background. Background is softer than characters. Of course Diablo 3 is an action game where readability is of higher importance than a game like PoE, but I still think these techniques can be extended to it.

But this completely destroys the notion of uncovering dungeons or revealing the terrain. How do you know exactly how a dungeon is laid out before you've explored it?

I've noticed that when the beta bugs out and framerate drops occasionally, the screen scroll speed also takes a dive. Tying scrolling to framerate was a really poor decision and it's hard to believe it's happened in 2014. Since it's probably too late to change this fundamental engine functionality, is there at least going to be a 60fps frame cap? Otherwise it's going to scroll twice as fast on 120Hz monitors. At least the game timer itself didn't appear to be tied to frame rate. That's one part of the Infinity engine games you don't need to replicate.

Line of sight visibility shouldn't even be a question it's that critical.

When I first saw the selection circle on it's side I thought it must have been a cultist sleeping on a bed

I'm quite neutral towards the music - it's not spectacular but does the job well enough. I just hope they revise the battle music since it's a bit repetitive. The best battle tracks progress and intensify as the battle gets longer, giving a real sense of grandeur to the larger battles. It also alleviates repetition.

The minimap basically doesn't show any 3D animated features at all, so water never shows up on any of them actually.

Awesome work! The characters definately "pop" more off the background but they still lacking heft. Can you perhaps increase the saturation and contrast even more on the models themselves?

I agree it feels a bit MMO like. Walking around a map and seeing all the enemies waiting around with vision radii doesn't really feel like the Infinity engine games, where revealing the map and being attacked by monsters happened mostly in unison. I also find the density too high for the size of the areas (too small). That combined with being able to see enemies from afar before pulling them, works to negate any suspense or surprise in stumbling across enemies.

Nice work. Darker floor shadowing would help ground the models more, though the ambient occlusion effect following the character around may be a bit distracting. I think that more substantial shading of the character model itself would make the biggest difference - give the characters weight!

Also, the water here looks amazing: Why does the water in the first screenshot have that artificial blue colour?

This is a great example of faded character models with almost no shading/saturation on a background with high contrast/saturation. There is no weight to the characters and you can barely see them.

Did you level up your character?

Great example. The thing that jumps out for me is the depth of the shadows on characters and the ground. Way too subtle in PoE beta.

I just checked with RadeonPro and the framerate drops from smooth 60 down to 27ish. There might be some visual effect causing this I think.

I think the blending is fine since that is more colour grading the characters. I think the main issue is that characters are just by default less defined than the background in many areas. Indoors and nighttime seems a bit better, but outdoors in sunlight is generally poor - it's almost as if natural shading and detail is reduced through desaturation and lower contrast, when bright sunlight should have the opposite effect. It looks like global illumination on characters needs to be tweaked.