TheUsernamelessOne

You find it fun. Some people find it fun. Some people don't. There's nothing wrong with enjoying it or not enjoying it. I love Dark Souls and Dragon Age 2 and lord knows there's plenty of people who can't stand those games. If people who don't like it want to complain about it, they're allowed to do that, especially when they might have legitimate grievances. I think it is fair to say, though, that Pillars of Eternity is far too harsh on new players, as it is right now. Of course, being a Kickstarted project, I guess they don't really care about newbies, since it's made with freaks like me in mind who are still playing Baldur's Gate now, a million years after it came out, so maybe that's not much of a priority. This is true, and while I may whine about Pillars of Eternity's problems I still think it's hands-down better than the original Baldur's Gate, gameplay-wise.

It worked for me. I recommand this guy's beginner's guide. It's a couple hours if you don't skip any of it but it does a good job of laying out what things you need to be thinking about and focusing on.

Okay, even if they could do the different strokes for different folks thing, because they can't, how is it a "brilliant" idea? And how is it a good roleplay option to say that Wizards can't possibly be strong and intimidating and therefore could never physically intimidate people? People aren't defined by their classes. They're supposed to be defined by their attributes and your roleplaying; your class is just an abstract set of rules that simulate your character's chosen adventuring career. It's like saying, "An accountant really shouldn't be intimidating people with the strength and size of his muscles." Not all Wizards are glass-boned elves with porcelain skin who dissolve into fairy dust in a stiff breeze. Not all Fighters are big hulking thugs in heavy armor swinging mattocks.

Isn't that pretty much the definition of meaningful roleplay, staying true to your character even if leads to a suboptimal outcome in the game?

Yeah, but it's an article written by Chris Avellone. I'm pretty sure Kotaku is just hosting it.

Are you saying that's what you do in Pillars of Eternity? Because that isn't what you do in Pillars of Eternity.

Your party just has severe anxiety issues, they have to do everything together. Alternatively: if they stray out of sight of the main character, they stop doing their jobs and just loaf around uselessly. I mean, the adventurers you hire are motivated only by the love of gold and the NPC companions are all out of their minds. It kind of makes sense, honestly.

Hey, I've got an excuse. I figured as long as I had to wait for the game to get patched into a playable state I might as well go on these forums and whine about all the stuff I don't like as if anyone cares. I would be playing Xenonauts but strangely that too is also currently broken and awaiting a patch.

The game is pretty up-front about the fact that you'll be spending a lot of time on each and every encounter, micromanaging your little minions and pausing every half-second, and Easy difficulty doesn't actually change that in the slightest. You might as well play on Hard because there's more enemies and that means more xp and loot, and once you get the hang of the combat system numbers don't matter anyway. If you don't enjoy the combat system, I suggest you just cheat. Or maybe wait for more balance patches, though I doubt they'll do anything to provide the kind of minimal combat mode you seem to be saying you'd prefer.

Oooh, I just realized D:OS is Divinity: Original Sin. I hate that game. I don't truly hate many things, but every moment I wasted playing that game was one of the worst moments I've ever spent playing a video game. Completely unintuitive garbage mechanics that have you spend most of your time mucking around with environmental hazards (DIVINITY: ORIGINAL SIN, Thinks Zapping Puddles in Bioshock Was a Solid Basis for the Entire Combat System of a Fantasy RPG), the bizarre character stats designed by aliens (DIVINITY: ORIGINAL SIN, Many Options, Few Correct Choices, Zero Logic), you're basically required to waste hours wandering around stealing everything in sight for cash (DIVINITY: ORIGINAL SIN, Medieval Petty Larceny Simulator) so you can buy your characters' skills (nothing makes me feel more special than knowing I am a hero who robbed an inn's cellar for the money to buy all my skills, because there is absolutely nothing special or unique about me as a hero and literally anyone could do my job as long as they can read), generic story, two character system was a waste of time... Man I couldn't stand anything about that game. And somehow I have the feeling that everything I hated about it is exactly what you love about it.

Very helpfully, if you hover over the terms you're wondering about in the spell descriptions, it will provide a breakdown of what those status effects do.

Don't sweat it, you're really not missing out on much. If you're really desperate to see all the conversation options just cheat all your stats to 20 or whatever. I'm sure you will quickly realize it's not worth it. You're never going to get something impressive like 1. I am stupid. Please take all of money, spend it on drugs, and then report me to the police. 2. [Wisdom 20] The secrets of the universe are blooming behind my eyes, I shall now gain many levels and a magic earring. 3. [Attack] You innocent orphans have stood in my way long enough! Were I wiser I would not now attempt to murder you! If you don't want to cheat you can stack bonuses from resting at various inns, enchanted equipment, and prostitutes' blessings to boost your stats, so you can qualify for whatever you're aiming for in a given conversation. There's an inn that gives +4 Intellect for resting there, for example.

"Cheap fan boys" looking for thrills would probably be pretty disappointed by the romance subplots in mainstream RPGs. Most of them are made with the intention of giving the player a scenario where the primary reward they earn is warm fuzzy feelings--which is good, because the characters in Bioware games, at least, sink way deep into the Uncanny Valley when they're trying to be sexy. The fact that you criticize Bioware romances for not being very complex or nuanced and then hold up The Last of Us of all things as a contrast baffles me. Last of Us is a pretentious movie, not a video game. Even romance conversations in Bioware games give you choices of things to say, including things that will break off the relationship, if you want. Last of Us is a bunch of cutscenes broken up by linear gameplay sections. It doesn't exactly make much use of being an interactive medium. Compared to that, choosing to flirt with someone, doing a quest with them, having a soulful conversation about your pasts, and then making out in bed with your underwear on is a triumph of player choice and agency.

I think Durance was training in the Hyperbolic Time Chamber to unlock his magical saiyan super girl transformation sequence. Or something.

I don't know what was discussed during the beta period, but I do know that playing at launch I felt like the game was lying to me about what stats I needed (not literally but still). It also doesn't rely on your attributes enough for roleplaying purposes; most of the time the special options unlocked by high stats don't do anything particularly useful, even for roleplay purposes. It's not like you get any big reward from combat anyway, why not include more ways to shortcut encounters through optional dialogue or those nifty, criminally underutilized scripted encounters? Sort of like how Wisdom and Charisma were the most important stats in Planescape: Torment even though they contributed practically nothing to combat. I guess that's getting away from a simple rebalancing patch. Still, though. You're telling me Ciphers rely on Might and not Perception? The class who are stereotyped as scientists and detectives? Tanks get more out of spending points on Resolve and Perception than they do on Constitution? It's absurd. It's not even balanced.

What are you talking about? Alpha striking every encounter with all your encounter powers is the only reasonable strategy in this game, and all the best abilities are replenished between encounters, not by resting.

I personally think they do if they're important to the plot. So brutal violence up to and including humanoid beings exploding into red clouds of gibs and blood sausage, grotesque and cruel experimentation on humanoids and animals, mass murder, ethnic cleansing, racism, rape leading to unwanted pregnancy, humanoid sacrifice, implied mass infanticide; all good. They don't even need to be "important to the plot." But sexual relations between two consenting adults, well, that's where we as a society draw the line, huh? My Cipher can, with impunity, use a psychic ability that violates a sentient being's mind by forcing them to relive their most traumatic memories (a literal mind rape) for the purposes of gaining an advantage over them in combat, but they can't show them having sex with a hooker? My Wizard can set a living creature on fire to incinerate them because, hey, I'll be resting soon and I've got spells to burn (get it?) and hearing their last shrill screams brings a twisted smile of victory to my face, but GOD FORBID that same Wizard be depicted having a moment of intimacy and vulnerability with a loved one. Have you guys played this Pillars of Eternity game? The one where they ended a war by detonating a fantasy nuke in order to incinerate a god? Where physicians try to solve the problem of soulless babies by implanting animal souls inside humanoid shells? Where your party slaughters their way through every single tile on the world map for no reason except to fill out the bestiary pages and collect random crafting ingredients? Where you can't even step outside without being mauled and eaten by rampaging hordes of evil wood nymphs, trolls, lions, kobolds, and bandits? This game is profoundly and thoroughly screwed up. I fail to see why sex scenes, tasteful or otherwise (it's not like anything else is handled tastefully), would be some kind of problem.

If becoming the PoE world's equivalent to Tywin Lannister counts as a gamebreaking problem, I submit that perhaps it is the world that is broken. You should name one of Kana's Chants the Rains of Raedric's Hold, and have it be nothing but the syllable that scares people.

I actually ended up using a more or less similar strategy, with similar results. They eventually killed my Cipher and Wizard with the ranged icicles of course, but spamming mind crush, burning hands, and fireball did the trick. The rest of the party sort of stood around mostly eating hits to the face and missing, then they managed to finish off the last few hit points on the ones that survived the inferno. Then I got the Horn of Moderation and it broke my Cipher so I have to wait for a patch to see if I can even continue my playthrough or if I have to start all over again.

I agree 100%, and I also make no pretense to being in my right mind. Still, Strength = how strong your character is makes a lot more sense to me than Might = how strong your character is and all forms of damage and healing and also "soul power" I guess?. And you know, GURPS uses the d%, just like Pillars of Eternity.

One of my favorite romances in any story is the one between the female Courier and Christine in Dead Money. It's maybe ten optional lines of dialogue, none of them voiced, that only show up if you take Cherchez La Femme. There's a connection. You hold hands for like two seconds. It doesn't go anywhere once you've survived your ordeal. Christine stays at the Sierra Madre, the Courier treks back to the Mojave (apparently too drunk on those Sierra Madre Martinis to remember the way back afterwards). The End. That said, I think Dragon Age 2 did romance about as well as a video game can do it. It also did companions in general better than any other video game I've seen, even Planescape: Torment, which I consider runner-up in that category, mainly because you can build a relationship of mutual contempt with your companions and that's a totally legitimate way of doing things. In every other RPG you either suck up to your teammates or else you miss out on content, either because the people you alienate leave the team or because you miss out on unlocking dialogue, companion upgrades, or even quests. In DA2, hey, you don't think Merril can be trusted with an evil blood magic artifact? Tell her no. In fact, tell her exactly what you think of her and her beliefs, and then she'll tell you exactly what she thinks about you. You're still stuck together by your circumstances when all is said and done. Leading a team of awkward, bitter rivals is something DA2 offers that no other RPG I'm aware of has ever done. Even in KotOR 2 the party members all worship the Exile even if they despise each other. When Obsidian feels like doing it I think they do romance very well, though it's not often the standard sappy love story and they don't do unambigiously happy endings. Remember how the romance options for a female Exile in KotOR 2 were, respectively, an ex-assassin who specialized in murdering Jedi by training himself to be a sociopath, a sniveling Jedi apologist and stalker who had a huge creepy mother complex for the Exile, and the Sith Lord of Pain whose boss fight could be won by exploiting his crush on the Exile to convince him to kill himself in order to get out of her way? Good times. I think there should have been a romance in Pillars of Eternity. You should have been able to hit on one of your party members and then get turned down. If you have a lot of Charisma, maybe you can talk them into a one-night stand that means something to you and nothing to them. Then your party member starts dating someone else. The party member your character is crushing on is happy and content in their relationship. Meanwhile, you remain single and lonely, trying to satisfy yourself with your empty, meaningless life of managing a stronghold screen and having waxy, mercantile, emotionless sex with hookers in order to gain minor stat bonuses while you fight skirmishes throughout the land and plunder dungeons. All the while you know deep in your aging bones that you will never make a difference because no matter how many bandits and tyrants and monsters you kill there will always, always be more (in fact in most RPGs the villains vastly outnumber the population of the rest of the world combined). Every so often your crush drops by to pay you a visit because they're your friend and they feel sorry for you. Your options are to unfairly freeze them out or else put on a sick fake smile and pretend to be happy for them as if you aren't dying inside because your life sucks (because every RPG protagonist's life sucks until the game finally ends and the player lets them go home, if they even have a home to go back to, if they even survive the ending cutscene). Then, close to the end of the game, your crush comes to you in the middle of a brutal storm after a terrible battle that leaves everything you've built in ruin. The villain has murdered their significant other, and your crush is broken-hearted, full of vengeance--and newly available. What do you do then? That would be pretty good, in my opinion.

They really ought to just remove resting entirely. That way everyone loses. Once a character becomes maimed, their adventuring career is over unless they have a death wish. They must retire to the stronghold to nurse their hideous wounds for the rest of their short, miserable lives while you shell out coin to hire some fresh new blood to take their place. That's realistic. Maybe you could read their souls to read about the agonizing memory of their inevitable final defeat and shame. I really don't understand why they added the camping supplies mechanic but whatever. You never actually need to camp. Once you clear an encounter you're never in a position where you can't just trot back to town and sleep at the nearest inn. Here is the truth: if you are playing the game correctly, you won't need to rest in the middle of a dungeon. I am not trying to be condescending or insulting. It's just factual. The way the game is designed, if anyone in your party is taking significant amounts of damage in a fight, any fight, something has gone wrong and it is probably your fault. Unless you're a Monk, I guess. A lot of the classes don't even have any abilities that need to be recovered through rest. The point is that the tools are all there for you to absolutely control pretty much every encounter you can get into at any given point in the game. You don't even have to have gear specific to the encounter (or camping supplies), you just have to build your characters correctly and use correct tactics. When I first played I regularly got wiped in pretty much every encounter (and camping gear isn't much use then). I got frustrated so I went and studied what you're supposed to do on-line; all the stuff the game does not bother to teach you except through frustrating trial-and-error but that is vital to your success. I can't play the game the way I want to play it, but I can play it well enough to win. If I can do it then anyone can, because all I did was sit through that Beginner's Guide guy's videos (well, I skipped the parts where he talked about the UI for 30 minutes). Anyway, don't worry about camping supplies. It's a non-issue. Just get good at the game and it won't matter whether you can rest in the middle of a dungeon or not. You don't need to mod anything out or cheat. Despite what people say, it's not actually difficult and it doesn't require much thought, just a lot of fiddly pausing and micromanagement. It's actually easier than the Baldur's Gate series because all your abilities work on everything and you don't have to worry about ever using any kind of special equipment because there isn't any.

If it's bland, it's because the most viable strategy is to position your party where your tanks are up front, drop all your encounter powers right off the bat to cripple the opposition, then mop them up with guns or damage spells. Rinse. Rest if you need it. Repeat. You never really have to deviate from that strategy. If you do you're usually punished for it, in my experience and according to what I've read. Maybe toss in a daily or two from the wizard (grease and burning hands) and priest (whatever, might as well toss out buffs sometimes but it's pretty inconsequential compared to the barrage of save-or-suck spells the other classes can drop), if the situation calls for it. My Cipher has used Mind Crush so often that I refuse to even type the actual name of the spell anymore.

Am I crazy or did they used to inflict stun with every attack at launch (which made the Chanter summon phantom totally busted, by the by)? Either I'm insane or they snuck in a patch and downgraded it to daze. They're still right bastards and they definitely feel overpowered, considering how they show up pretty much everywhere in large numbers and they all have a wide array of powerful abilities that can't be easily countered (well, except by using the exact same strategy as you do against everything else in the game, positioning yourself so they have to funnel through a chokepoint to get to you and then dropping all your encounter abilities on them).

Soul power iirc. Hey, sure, why not.