Yellow Rabbit

Hey, Volly, do you even verifiy what you're posting these days? ^That and this one are ridiculous even by your standards (unless the latter is sarcastic, in which case it's expressed poorly).

There are really a lot of negativity towards the game on these boards, and some of it is fully earned. But the sheer fact of threads like this one cropping up from time to time ever since release date roughly a month ago tells a great deal about actual worthiness of Pillars of Eternity despite all flaws it has. I hope devs notice such threads.

Uhm... nothing? I'm confused about it too. I guess it's all kinda backtracked praise to awesomeness of Baldur's Gate in general mixed with opinions from people sincerely considering FR novels a pinnacle of fantasy fiction.

Nope. I was just going by the first sentence of the pitch picking every word that can be interpreted as promise. Well... I won't argue about the quality of plot/writing since it's pretty uselsess (arguing, I mean), but overall, what can I say? My sincere condolences to you. Whole "You aren't a successor to IE games if you don't beat every last one of them in the aspects that made them classic" kinda shouts of unreasonobly high expectations, thanks to which you now stuck with impression that game sucks without any hope on improvement. This is really, really sad.

You know, I went to re-read their kickstarter pitch just to get what the heck you're talking about. Still didn't. Here's what I gathered:Central hero (delivered) Memorable companions (by general consensus in neighboring story forum proclaimed delivered, which I agree with. Twice. Because Durance and Eder. Though it's actually matter of taste.) Fun, intense combat and dungeon diving of Icewind Dale (generally failed with some hope to get it right in expansion/sequel, although there are some high moments as it is.) Emotional writing and mature thematic exploration of Planescape: Torment (thematic exploration - check, maturity - check, emotional writing - miss, PS:T level - miss. Not surprising, frankly, plank was too high, but it's quite visible that they did their best with resources they had. Also, subjective.) ...Dialogues that are deep, and offer many choices to determine the fate of you and your party. (delivered, subjective) ...Story that explores mature themes and presents you with complex, difficult choices to shape how your story plays out. (mostly delivered, going down towards the ending, subjective) That's what I gathered from the pitch without touching stretch goals, presence of which is pretty damn hard to deny since they're rather specific in description. All in all, devs did quite good work in deliverence department compared to some other kickstarted projects. So. What the heck are you talking about?

It seems to depend on date in game. I've checked it on the first hidden stash in Valewood, one under the wall you climb to get Fulvano's gloves, and there was necklace +2 Per on 15th every month, Stalker's Torc on 11th and various generic crap like rings and cloaks of minor protection on other days. Though I don't know if this loot-date dependance spreadsheet is fixed somewhere in game resources or generated explicitly for each playthrough. The latter would be more logical for randomizing things further.

Yep, my bad. Misremembered currency on their KS page, sorry. Default budget of theirs before Kickstarter should still be those 3kk in euros, though. More like to actually finish it as in "yeah, it should work now".

Larian counted their budget/expenses in euros. They had ~4 millions euro, 3 of their own, 1 from Kickstarter. I'm not sure how much that would be in dollars. I certainly hope PoE will do at least as good as D:OS, if only to see the sequel.

It's hardly fair to put cliches as a Forgotten Realms' fault, though. FR was always meant to be extremely generic fantasy setting for having fun adventuring, and that's kinda supposes clicheing (is it even a legit word?..) to no end. PoE's Eora, as far as I can tell after one full playthrough, is anything but generic fantasy, which is good, but writing and quest design in some places felt excessively dry to me. For that matter, I already can't remember any significant NPC aside from 8 companions and Thaos. It's as if devs concentrated on thematic exploration too much, making all significant NPCs samples of some certain idea, and forgot to add them a little personality aside from representative function. Dumped right in face in big chunks lore didn't help either. So, for me, overall PoE's writing is below usual Obsidian level, but still well above everything Bioware produced since... ever, actually. All in all, I'd blame time and resources. Too much to write in too little time. At least companions are really good.

Not that I'm disagreeing, you're certainly making sense there, but this is exactly the reason why I feel so bad for Obsidz. Lots of loud namethrowing during Kickstarter to attract as much people as possible and gather funds to save studio from shutdown for a while, and then they SUDDENLY ended up with 2 years to homebrew complex ruleset which supposed to be competing with another one developed for ****ing 3 decades (AD&D 2Ed) and even after that having gaping issues. There was no way it could live up to expectations regarding combat, so it didn't. But at least with their experience and passion they managed to produce really good, if not great, game. Can't we at least be a little less harsh phrasing criticisms?

Since when full VO is the sign of "high standards"? It's needed in movie wannabes Bioware chose to make since KotOR, but completely redundant and overly expensive for games like PoE. You're supposed to read here. End of story. If it'd make your experience better and you'd like to mod it in, though, then go for it. *shrug*

As we all know, the best way to carry through some questionable statement is to start it with "obviously", "naturally" or "as we all know". ...Ooops. I did it, didn't I? This thread is hilarious. Hmm? That jab meant for me or the poster whom I was quoting? The poster you were quoting, sorry for bad phrasing. I stand with opinion that one need to be really looking for things to be offended by to find that limerick worthy more than a chuckle.

As we all know, the best way to carry through some questionable statement is to start it with "obviously", "naturally" or "as we all know". ...Ooops. I did it, didn't I? This thread is hilarious.

I agree that old Vancian magic system tied to resting is kind of an artifact and never fit well in a computer RPG immersion wise, but I don't think devs have or had any real choice with it. Spellcasting and its clauses were huge (I mean really HUGE) part of a combat and gameplay in general in IE games, and PoE, after all, obliged to feel like those games whether you or me like it or not. Devs tried to cut rest spamming limiting camping supplies and inventing per-encounter abilities. It didn't really solve all the problems, but still ended up being better than in IE games and preserved their "feel". Kinda win-win. *shrug* Regarding immersion-breaking resting in dungeons, I don't think there's need to restrict it entirely. Why not allow to rest in dungeon you already cleared out, for example? I just don't know why devs didn't go with "you cannot rest here, enemies are too close" stuff. It would solve at least some of immersion-breaking rest issues.

That's one really high mountain people made out of molehill. A pity it isn't made of rock but of other... substance.

Very much this. As a side note, I don't even want to compare PoE to BG as I feel it wouldn't be entirely fair. I mean, when I see cRPGs inspired by tabletop games, I divide it on three parts in my head: ruleset, setting and campaign. All three require enormous amount of work poured into them to be good. BG had first two already done and developed for decades before its development started, PoE is whole from scratch. Yes, ruleset has some nasty problems, regarding class design primarily; yes, dungeons in campaign are varying from ok to meh, stronghold's redundant, encounter design is mediocre at best and xp balance is plain not there. But it's still an astonishing job Obs did in 2,5 years with 4,5 million dollars, and the game is FUN to play. Now, that Obs have their base and can divert their attention more on campaign rather than anything else, I expect PoE 2 to be a complete mindblowing.

While I can perfectly understand where all these complaints about tediousness of micromanagement coming from, I don't miss AI scripts for companions in a bit. AI scripts from IE games worked terribly for spellcasters, and there's no reason to believe they would do otherwise in PoE if implemented. Even simple auto-attack option this game has I had to turn off after the fourth time my fragile cipher PC stupidly rushed into the fray to face her unconsciousness.

Negativity on forums is rather deceptive thing. People having nothing to complain about don't go to forums, they spend time actually playing the frigging game Anyway, I'll go by points from your OP trying to give my vision on them. - The story is weak Story lacks epicness, true, and people loving BG may find this to be a weakness. Writing is pretty decent, though. - The classes are either too balanced (from the chans) or not balanced enough (here) Some classes (howdy, wizard!) seem to have problems on concept level, balancing skills/stats around isn't going to help them. Others are fine, imo. - The game's too easy Depends on who you ask. It was basic complaint about BG and IWD as well - game either too easy or too hard. - The game's system sucks It's a little clunky, but considering that this is first working (presented to public, anyway) sample of ruleset hastily built up for the game - it's great! I'm sure it'll be improved in sequel. - The characters are lame They're neither really colorful nor loud, unlike their counterparts from BG series. Doesn't make them lame. Some of them are pretty interesting personalities, actually, feel like living people. - Too much voice acting Yep. Or, rather, it's mixing pretty badly with text descriptions and ends up distracting instead of mood setting. - Weak ending Nope. Too small world - Comparing to BG2 - absolutely. But it really isn't appropriate comparison. - Too few quests Quests are plenty, but majority of them are secondary, and that makes balancing xp on crit path a tough job to do. - Choices don't matter They do, but not as often as I'd prefer. - The music sucks The music is awesome! ...for the first 5... okay, 10 hours. After that you're gonna remember about sound sliders in menu. - The writing sucks Again, depends on who you ask. Some people seem to have hilariously opposing images of what is a good writing. - The keep sucks I liked the feeling of building it up and making thrive, so there's that. Mechanically and gameplay wise, yes, it sucks. A lot. - The "endless" dungeon sucks It's a dungeon crawler in miniature. It supposed to do exactly what it does. That said, I thought I'm past period when you play games through all night thinking "just 10 more minutes and enough for today", but Pillars of Eternity proved me wrong. Absolutely loving it!

There is certain logic to it, albeit simple one. 3D is better than 2D because 3 is greater than 2. Honestly, I can't imagine any other reasoning behind wish for PoE to move from render it has now.

Why do everyone poses a question as 2D vs. 3D? Both can look nice enough and give an artists suitable means to express artstyle. NWN 1&2 are probably not a very good examples because when they were developed hardware couldn't afford really fancy 3D. Aside from that, I'm strongly against "borrowing" someone else's engine for future PoEs at this point. Obsidian spent 2,5 years modifying Unity to fit their needs, building workflow, creating assets and now they should throw it all out of the window while the graphical part is awesome as it is? Why on Earth would they do that? I like the idea of them building specific engine for RPGs like PoE, though. In theory. It's helluva work and certainly beyond their scope right now, but it still would be nice.

Now let me chechk if I see the situation correctly: backer of a high enough tier provided a joke for the game which some people of not really healthy mental state found to be offensive and started a ****storm over it. Ain't no one likes ****storms, as well as meddling with said "offended" people is far less than pleasant in USA, so Obsidian asked the backer if it is okay to remove the subject of controversy and, upon his agreement, replaced it with memorial joke. And now we have other people of just as much questionable mental health ****storming over in a whole different way as if it's the end of the free world or something. Did I miss anything? Also, where do normal person fit in here? Nice bug squashing there, Obsidian! Thanks a lot. Now I can at last return to playing this awesome game. Was going to reroll anyway.

THIS is exact the lie I was talking about! Espezialy computer games do NOT have that many code lines compared to other software. http://www.informationisbeautiful.net/visualizations/million-lines-of-code/ Quake 3 engine (just the graphic) a bit over 300k lines. Cry Engine 2 or Age of Empire online a bit over 1 millions lines. Unreal 2 engine around 2 million lines. Compared to something simple like Google Chrome which has 5-7 million lines ... Facebook 60++ million lines (WTF??? what for??? *g*). Average modern car software 100++ million lines. Games are NOT that complicate and most of the code is invented 35+ years ago and can be downloaded! You really know nothing about software engineering, don't you?

Which will never happen and therefore we will never have games like PoE. Is that what you want? (not sure if it was a joke/sarcasm, though. Feel free to clarify). I don't know, maybe I've been made numb to this sort of things by playing Morrowind, Gothic 3 and the mess called DA:I on release, but I really don't feel like blaming Obsidian for the quality of their work. Modern games released when devs cannot afford to keep testing them anymore, not when they are truly ready, and there's nothing to be done about that. Bugs can be patched out, and Obsidian have worked pretty damn fast in this regard with PoE. So... yeah. Keep whining, that's fine enough way to spend time.

Just wait for the patch. I bet after its release everyone who yells about "game is a buggy mess!" now will forget about his/her own complaint in a day at most.

PrimeJunta said basically all my thoughts on the topic. I'm glad you found BG's story good, though. Hope you'll like PoE's as much or even more.