anameforobsidian

Absolutely. However, to have a narrative without an antagonist requires a different plot structure than the one this game chose. This narrative was very adversarial in nature, and less like a pilgrimage. Brought back from the dead to track down the person that killed you is a classic revenge story.

Pillars II is the second best rpg I've played in the new CRPG Renaissance. The first was White March.

Bigger doesn't necessarily mean better, but it can create a different experience. The best large dungeons provide more space for plot and atmosphere, a small dungeon will usually tell a small story. A larger dungeon can normally tell several related stories that build up to a larger tale. The Endless Paths, which was by no means perfect, told several small stories that slowly added up to a bigger tale. A king's growing madness led to amoral research but also a peasant rebellion. Even after it was sealed, the power contained drew and trapped adventurers and creatures alike as the whole area decayed. The grief and arrogance of the king meant that the everything around him was always dying, but could not die. Oathbinder's Sanctum shows that a group of fanatics that chased justice, but were too fanatical and created injustice. The Hanging Sepulcher has good design, but it fails to communicate much of a story. It's not a bad dungeon, but it doesn't have the same scale as something like Durgan's Battery.

Beast of Winter was a pretty linear campaign, not really a dungeon. By dungeon I meant it in the classical style; big scary castle, lots of different rooms with different enemies that are thematically unified, usually going down, traps and puzzles, that tells some story of ruination, always with a boss at the end. The only part of Beast of Winter I would consider a dungeon would be the temple area. I enjoyed some of the other areas, but they weren't the same type of experience. Pillars I had tons of them, like the Endless Paths, White March, and Raedric's Keep. Pillars II doesn't really, even though Ukaizo and the Beast of Winter would have been perfect for it.

I want a big dungeon. It should be at least 4 levels, with puzzles and secrets and difficult fights. The game has yet to deliver a Durlag's Tower style dungeon. I could also use a town with as many quests as Dyrford or Stalwart. But really what I want is for this DLC to be more like an expansion than a DLC, and that's not going to happen. Finally, by the time the third game comes out, we should have a world map; doesn't matter if it's incomplete.

I don't think that edge case was really valid once they added wounds, or at least narrowed to insignificance. Wounds added such a strong malus that if you have one of the nastier ones, let alone two, it drastically lowered the combat effectiveness of a character to the point where rest was better anyways. Furthermore, healing just wasn't that effective to keep a wizard going through an extended beatdown session lasting four tiems their endurance? Furthermore, it wasn't too common for you to start loosing party members and not have a tpk / wipe. Wounds added a malus, but you could still play through them. They weren't designed to be super crippling. And the edge cases are *not* "you're in an easy fight after having just rested" but "you've been in a couple fights and now these edge cases are occuring." And yes, for e.g. wizards, it's in fact very very easy to keep healing and blow through x4 endurance. Even with monks and fighters you can (especially with fighters because they can be taking a lot of "invisible" damage e.g. plinking damage that gets healed by constant recovery so your endurance isn't changing much but you're losing health fight over fight). Again, this just isn't a fair or believable criticism. Pillars rarely had tank and spank endurance grudge matches. Those fights were not about outlasting the enemies, because realistically, you couldn't raise your defenses high enough to be immune to the enemies. The enemies themselves could heal through your damage if you got to the point where it was a grudge match, and then kill you after you burn out your resources. The system favors an offensively built party that uses alpha strikes and cascading defense failures to kill enemies, by the time health is an issue, you've already done something wrong. That's the whole point of health. It is a fair, and it is literally believable because it happens. It won't happen in "normal" gameplay, but it enables or disables solo encounters (and considering that PoE1 had like four separate achievements for beating the game solo, cheevo hunters would run into this in a way that you couldn't in e.g. Deadfire). It also enables cheese, because you can just range an enemy, kite, and if they disengage, range them again, etc. until even the toughest enemy keels over dead because they regenned through all their health. This is an artifact of the health/endurance system. In "saner" systems like Tyranny, Deadfire, Dragon Age, etc. where enemies are tied to a specific encounter, if you can't outdamage an enemy's heal potential or are just taking potshots and running away, the encounter is fundamentally unbeatable. IN fact, health is mostly just a hack for the player to feel some sort of multi-encounter resource constraint, because it's mostly irrelevant for enemies and the fact that it's mostly irrelevant for enemies except in these weird interactions where it enables you to do things that you really shouldn't demonstrates how much of a hack it is. Similarly, if you have strong regen and are tanking real hard (easily possible with a slightly metagamed build) health/endurance means you can still end up losing the fight even if in the long run you could've won. That's not quite true. With per rest, you can't balance all encounters knowing a set amount of player resources. PotD boss encounters assumed you would drain your abilities and probably crack some scrolls and potions too. That's what made them feel like bosses. In Deadfire, there's less variance because parties are using their best spells every single fight. Circle of death and Wall of Colors over and over and over again. And the variance is still there, just based on level instead of level and strategy. Finally, it's bad form to make up statistics. With the exact same amount of proof you have, I can say that 95% of players used rest supplies strategically and only a vocal 5% went back to town to rest spam. It's not bad form. It's called hyperbole. (The 1% number that is. I would've hoped it would have been painfully obvious that I was using a small number for exaggerated effect.) But objectively, JE Sawyer and co had plenty of feedback about people running back all the time to get more rest supplies and anecdotally the internet/forums were filled with these sort of complaints that it seems completely credible that JE Sawyer and co would think that this was a problem and that relatively few players saw this as a "fun" strategic constraint rather than an encounter-countdown-tedium that they had to fix somehow. There is literally some comment somewhere on the internet, either in the forums, a backer update, or an update video, or his own blog where JE Sawyer cites this as part of the reason to change the system in Deadfire. Also per-rest doesn't change anything about ability variance. E.G. IWD2, I knew several friends who converged on the same "web, then fireball" strategy. Per-rest simply meant that they had to click a rest button every now and then to keep doing it. edit: more specifically, the per-encounter resources numerically are set so that in effect it approximates a partial use of per-rest resources. It doesn't let you spam x3 or x4 top-level spells like you could in PoE1, but it also means that fundamentally there's not much of a distinction between per-rest and per-encounter in terms of whether or not you vary what abilities you use. What does narrow down variability is the ability tree system where priests and druids now have to make explicit spell selections instead of getting a lot of spells for free per spell level and wizards having a very different grimoire mechanic. I would in fact argue in some cases per-encounter system in Deadfire enables much greater variability where martial classes are concerned (e.g. in one fight pallegina can be a lay on hands heal monkey, in another she could mix it up with lots of sworn enemy and flames of devotion, in another she's just reviving and liberating everyone whereas in PoE1 you'd have a hard per-encounter limit on all of those abilities, or possibly even a per-rest limit). The malus on wounds is huge with the right one. If you get burned in a place with a lot of fire damage that's bad, but wrenched shoulder and swollen eye particularly lowered the effectiveness of characters. Barbarians especially struggle for every point of accuracy in Potd. And if you've been in a series of fights and the health is making you play differently, that's working as designed. The great part about the health system is when you have some party members half-way down; it creates a risk / reward decision, and a lot of times you have to dip into different skills. This can create a battered but not broken feeling which just isn't present in Pillars 2, except for the Trial of Endurance. If your wizard is taking a bunch of damage you're not handling the encounter or the build well, and health communicates that. The communication is far less granular with the dead not dead binary. Kiting through health on the type of enemies you have is unbelievable. I did plenty of kiting and cheese on my TCS run, and it would have taken a long, long time to cut through health. It took a long time to do it without letting the enemies regenerate endurance. You have to cut through a significant multiple of what it takes in the first place, and those fights are already long. So I guess if you're willing to stretch the system out into hour long trash mob fights and longer on bosses that can one shot you if you do a bad kite, then yes the health system becomes apparent. Otherwise it's just invisible in enemies. And that's fine; this was never supposed to be a very simulationist game. A bit helps, but eventually the focus needs to be on fun. If you have strong regen and are tanking really hard, you're building a pretty ****ty character. The system is designed for alpha strikes, cascading status effect defense failures, and focus fire. If health causes you to lose a fight, you're playing the game poorly and health is communicating that as designed. Either you're hoarding rest and abilities too much, or just using bad tactics. JE Sawyer had lots of feedback, including plenty that said health worked just fine. It was and remains contentious. He chose to side with criticism over his instincts. Of course per rest fights converge on repetitious strategies when there's unlimited resting; it's functionally the same thing as not including rests at all. The problem with the argument that in effect you see the same ability use is that in PE1 you see different ability use, not just Wall of Colors or Circle of Death every fight. Overall it may come out the same, but there's more variability in each fight. I don't see how less per encounter enhances fight variability for a class that already had per encounter abilities. Paladins had enough per encounter abilities that the real limit on their behavior was time constraints and disengagement.

I don't think that edge case was really valid once they added wounds, or at least narrowed to insignificance. Wounds added such a strong malus that if you have one of the nastier ones, let alone two, it drastically lowered the combat effectiveness of a character to the point where rest was better anyways. Furthermore, healing just wasn't that effective to keep a wizard going through an extended beatdown session lasting four tiems their endurance? Furthermore, it wasn't too common for you to start loosing party members and not have a tpk / wipe. Again, this just isn't a fair or believable criticism. Pillars rarely had tank and spank endurance grudge matches. Those fights were not about outlasting the enemies, because realistically, you couldn't raise your defenses high enough to be immune to the enemies. The enemies themselves could heal through your damage if you got to the point where it was a grudge match, and then kill you after you burn out your resources. The system favors an offensively built party that uses alpha strikes and cascading defense failures to kill enemies, by the time health is an issue, you've already done something wrong. That's the whole point of health. That's not quite true. With per rest, you can't balance all encounters knowing a set amount of player resources. PotD boss encounters assumed you would drain your abilities and probably crack some scrolls and potions too. That's what made them feel like bosses. In Deadfire, there's less variance because parties are using their best spells every single fight. Circle of death and Wall of Colors over and over and over again. And the variance is still there, just based on level instead of level and strategy. Finally, it's bad form to make up statistics. With the exact same amount of proof you have, I can say that 95% of players used rest supplies strategically and only a vocal 5% went back to town to rest spam.

Pillars 2 is weird, because in some parts it's a step forward, but in just as many it's a step back. They were really responsive to fan criticism, and it helped and hurt. The Good Combat SystemMulticlassing works really well. Itemization is much more solid, and the enchanting changes worked for the better. Combat is significantly more legible, the focus on penetration is useful, engagement works a little more naturally. Terrain types work pretty well, as do totems. The no trash mobs design works pretty well. Few encounters were repeats. WritingFactions work much better here. They have a legitimate reason for fighting, and fit into the plot better. The storybook mode skill check system works fantastically well. Seeker, Slayer, Survivor really pushes the limits in interesting ways. The lore is more focused on this one region. Pillars I had many interesting bits of lore, but they were too segmented. One area was all about Hollowborn, another about factions, a third about colonial aggression, a forth about dealing with gods. This story is all about luminous ardra, and everything else stems from its use and abuse. The major city is great, almost as busy and content filled as Amn and one of the best I have ever been to. The random ocean events are cool. Everything ElseThe way they changed stealth is a big improvement, and adds a bit of needed simulationism. Graphics are beautiful. Independent area design is much better and more diverse. The gunpowder caves and corrupted swamp stand out. Monster design works pretty well. The economy is much better designed. You're rich by the end rather than by the middle. The Neutral Combat SystemExploding hazards like barrels are rarely much of a hazard. The five man party cuts down some on party variety, but multiclassing more than makes up for this. The really cool items from the DLC come really late in the game. Giving pets stats is fine, but a lot of the descriptions don't describe the pet aura very well. WritingTying companions into factions work well for some (Pallegina and Maia), but worse for others (Serafen is hardly an ardent partisan; Takehu needs to care more about his faction in the beginning, and then make up for it with a crisis of faith in the lower city.) The islands are very modular. This means that there's a lot more diversity from island to island, but they never seem to interact with each other. The Ugly Combat systemThe decision to neuter long term strategic concerns was a poor one that compromises other decisions they made which improve the combat system.Decreased importance on resting and removal of supplies means that players aren't drawn towards inns nearly as much, which changes the flow of metaplay. You go wandering for massive periods of time instead of making expeditions that turn back when wounds pile up and supplies run low. It leads to a decreased sense of danger. The removal of a long term health bar creates a binary success in its place. Either your characters got knocked out or they didn't; this removes a significant incentive to improve tactics. Regenerating abilities means that you use the same abilities for every almost battle. Empower doesn't work as an implicit strategic factor. Limiting the characters to one empower per fight and having empower refresh abilities means that it rarely makes sense to use empowers as anything other than powerpool refreshers, especially at later levels. There's a far smaller range between boss fights and normal fights. Normally this is filled up with HP bloat, or scripted periods where new enemies come out of nowhere or the bosses go unhittable. This isn't very fun gameplay. There are no really expansive dungeons. The Fort Deadlight and Lower City are probably the best two in the game. Besides them one I'm having a hard time thinking of a dungeon with more than two areas. The original Pillars had the megadungeon, Raedric's Keep, the undead part of the city, Sun in Shadow, and more I'm forgetting, and then two in the expansion. Ship to ship combat blows. Maybe making it realtime would have helped. WritingImporting had numerous errors last time I tried it. The central plot is short and weak. Most character quests are pointless. There's not a single one as well designed as Sagani's, or even Eder's. The new companions don't really grow or develop, which comes from most of them being ambivalent about the organization they belong to. Maia isn't just terse, she doesn't really show why she believes in Rauatai. She cares more about her bird than the country. Serafen has a quest with a resolution, but the resolution has almost no consequences. Serafen giving you a quest to wipe out slavery would be far more interesting. He could even take over their base post credits! Xoti's quest is by far the best designed; it's a shame the character is really, really, really annoying. Takehu is probably the worst written of the bunch, he's an unrepentant shiftless hedonist who joins you on your great quest for reasons and then at the end leaves to become an unrepentant shiftless hedonist (my art vs. my culture that supports my art is not a very convincing conflict). The returning companion quests are superfluous; Aloth's is the best by far, but it isn't important. Romances have weird triggers, and don't turn off when they should.

It could just be that what was a ravenous market is now feeling pretty sated. Pillars was part of the first wave of RPGs. Now there's 12 separate iso rpgs in the old mold: Wasteland 2, Torment, Shadowrun: original / DF/ HK, Pillars / 2, Siege at Dragonspear, Tyranny, Divinity OS / 2, and Pathfinder KM. That's just the AA games, with indies we have Underrail, Age of Decadence, and several Spiderweb games. This is all in six years, when Pillars was kickstarted there were three party based isorpgs in six years; D:AO, NWN 2 MotB / SZ. This is my favorite genre and I haven't bought and played 4 of the flagship games. I think it's just simple economics. How many of these games had great sales, despite generally being decent?

So Alex Scokel did a bang-up job. I don't like either of Paul's main characters; Maia is leaden and Takehu is gross (seriously, it seems like sex is the only way he relates to people). Eder is great as always, Aloth's arc is far more unified this time around, Pallegina is quite good as an ardent nationalist. That said, all of the writers seriously need to break away from the young, aimless late mid 20 to mid 30 year old characters, and they need to work more on narrative arcs for said characters. They're supposed to be heroes, not that cool guy you talked to at the barcade.

I would consider the source heavily. The fact that he's hanging out at place like the codex says volumes by itself.

The shame is, I enjoyed my TCS run.

Isn't the new ultimate achievement going to include all the God Challenges? If so, I bet we'll get less than a hundred people who do it, and only a handful who do it without savescumming.

I'm sort of thinking with my keyboard and revising my earlier post, but I'm really struck by some of the weird tensions when comparing the two. Pillars 2 has much better level design, but little to no expansive dungeons to show it off in. Pillars 2 has much better build design, but no new races or classes. Pillars 2 has much better factions, but the world is so modular that the factions barely interact with each other. Pillars 2 has much better encounter design, but usually you'll end up using the same build specific spells or abilities in every fight. Pillars 2 has a better reputation system for party reactions, but fewer companions to take advantage of it. This has led me to be deeply ambivalent about the game. I feel like it is more competent but less ambitious. I feel like combat has a lot more things you can do, but less things you will do once you're playing. The DLCs deepen my ambivalence. The White March rectified the weaknesses of the base game. The two DLCs are ambitious and provide worthwhile experiences, but do nothing to fix the weaknesses of the game (ship to ship combat, more faction interaction). The base game is too modular/ siloed, with the various pieces of good level design bound by a weak narrative. Beast of Winter adds a very modular dungeon with one piece of great level design (the bridge) and a relatively weak unifying narrative. Seeker adds some really good fights, fantastic text scenes, and some weakly interacting factions to a game that already has that. Both add some great high end items when the game needs more lower mid tier items. They don't do the unsexy work of fixing the stronghold or providing more faction specific interactions.

I'm at level 9 now, and apart from the four or five tools available (crowbar, grappling hook, etc., the absolutely essential stuff you don't want to be without in a scripted encounter), I have not bought anything. There has been no need. Actually, come to think of it: I have bought one thing that gives +2 might. I'm not saying that you're wrong, but so far it seems to me that Deadfire is identical to PoE in the sense that there is almost nothing to be bought in the game. Like in PoE, I also have not used potions at all, except for the two occasions I tried potions of moderate healing. There's quite a lot worth spending money on. Enchantments first and foremost. Or building weapons. The slaver's fort has one of the best estocs in the game for sale. Etc.

I would say it's improved in many areas over the base: Build variety - It keeps the many varied items, and then adds dual-classing with kits. This is a game where it's fun to make new characters. Content Density - The maps in general are better designed. Neketaka is the city Defiance Bay should have been. Many factions, lots of quests and areas. Many cool places to explore and people to meet. Encounter Design - There are some really cool fights in this one. Level design - The game just has more varied gameplay on the maps. The bog with the tainted dryads plays very differently than Deadlight Fortress, and both involve less combat. The economy is much, much better designed. The visuals are improved, and they were already pretty great. Same with the text adventures. There are some cool boss designs, especially in Seeker. However, there are areas where it's worse: The combat system itself isn't quite as good. Empower is great, but the removal of sleep means that there's less dynamic range between boss fights and mob fights. HP bloat is present, if not too bad. The ship to ship combat text window is pretty boring. The DLCs are enjoyable, but markedly less good or expansive than White March I & II. The difference between a DLC and Expansion is huge, and the expansion is just plain better in this case. Both Seeker and Beasts are experimental, and have interesting points, but unfortunately nothing is fully developed. The narrative isn't as good as the focused narrative of the White March, and might be a little worse than Pillars I. The chattiest of the new companions aren't great, and the old companions are fun but don't bring as much to the table. My wife hates Xoti, and she's only heard the game on my speakers. This game has yet to contain a great dungeon. The Undercity is pretty good, as is Fort Deadlight, but they still fall short of Raedric's Keep, The Endless Paths, the Abbey of the Fallen Moon, Durgan's Battery, or the Seige at Cragholdt. The game is pretty allergic to long dungeons in general. Most are one or two levels. This is a shame for a game with such good combat (even if I don't enjoy it quite as much as Pillars I, it's still solid).

My ideas for ridiculous new classes (that will be ignored, but it's fun to give them anyways): Fampyr as a new template with it's own subclasses.Fampyr Blooded Barbarian - A Barbarian subclass that focuses on causing bleed effects and uses them to gain buffs. The more severe the bleed & the more bleed debuffs nearby, the more powerful the bonuses. Fampyr Mesmerist - A cipher subclass that focuses on quick, cheap charms. Fampyr Bloodknight - A Paladin subclass. A single tank that uses fire abilities Animancer - Focuses on animancy with possible paths for necromancers, golems, and buffs. Grappler - A monk subclass that focuses on grabbing and throwing enemies. Alchemist - Class that focuses on poisons and quick consumables; buffs, debuffs, general controller stuff. Cultist - A skaen inspired glass-cannon barbarian kit that uses wounds to debuff enemies. Trapper - A ranger subclass that focuses on battlefield control through the use of temporary traps.

I liked the DLC, I liked Vatnir, and I loved Rymrgand's Realm. It definitely helps fill out the late game. I would eventually like a large level with an involved story though; the game is missing one of those now.

I think lots of people don't like the plot because it's a goes against genre expectations. If they played up the guardian of Ukaizo more and Eothas killing people less it might be more liked. I think it will wind up as a Far Cry 2 style situation, where in ten years it will be useful as a discussion piece about the genre. As for the exploring aspect, the islands were too siloed/isolated/modular. As an example, I think they mechanically exceeded Raedric's Keep with the piano bomb quest, but like most of the quests it had a really weak lead-in. There was no Gilded Vale to make crushing Captain Benwick seem necessary. There weren't many times that one quest led to another quest, and extremely few quests that took players to multiple islands. That meant that a lot of times you didn't see minor consequences for minor actions. There was also no reason to go back to a place once you cleared the quests you got that took you there.

I'd love to play an Abydon or Wael godlike. An interesting question for Josh would be "Do the Vithrack give birth to Godlike." If they did my bet is they would be killed.

I've had very few. Deadfire is one of the more polished rpgs I've played. Like a previous poster said, the genre is prone to bugs.

While I think the text is pretty clear on Ydwin, it's important to note that living beings can eat souls to extend their lives. In Twin Elms there were two factions that did that. I just thought it was implied that Ydwin died in the ritual or separating the soul had the same effects as biological death.

One problem PE II suffers from right now is that the new affliction system was supposed to provide a really fun interplay of affliction and counter affliction, but I rarely see enemies use afflictions except as an aura. Combat gets really interesting when it happens (like the vampire hoard fight). Auras on the other hand are really, really good in this game, because I don't think there are any protection from affliction spells and abilities. Right now the system has the ability to have a counterspell game better than BG II, but only if one of the DLC teams steps up. Given that my current impression is that this round of DLC is Obsidian trying out different people in different roles to see who will take the series helm next, I don't know if that will happen.

Isn't that kind of how the rest of the base game is, though? I actually thought the use of a longer-form, focused, and more linear narrative was a nice change of pace, especially given the lack of large dungeon adventures in the OC. The rest of the game has a lot of exploration on a meta-level; specifically on the world map. But most of that leads you to a linear vignette. Outside of Neketaka and Port Maje, you don't see the same sort of large map with exploration. Some maps like Dyrford Crossing, Northweald, Russetwood, or Whitestone Hollow would be nice, because in those maps there's a lot to discover in the map your in. Fallout had random encounters, and random little dungeons you would find, but it also had the occasional sprawling map with everything from a special person trying to protect their cows to a robot giving Lost in Space references.

I thought Beast of Winter was pretty good, but it was also pretty linear. I'd really like one of the DLCs to allow for player exploration. The really nice thing about the White March is you had a new village with tons of sidequests / events, and some very large areas with quite a lot of content. In one White March area there's a god's curse, a pack of vampires, an archmage killing his apprentice, and a den of Ogres. The new island has great atmosphere, but there are only two sidequests. I'd like some more wide open spaces.