NikoBolas

This issue is clouded by many factors. If I and 77,000 other people paid a team of writers to write a book and we weren't happy with it, I think we'd be justified telling them what we didn't like about it. That's the main problem with developing anything to appeal to 77,000 people: there are a lot of different expectations. In the regular industry what people want and what is made is determined mostly behind the scenes. Game developers have to convince the people with money that their game is worth the investment and investors keep them on a short leash to ensure their money isn't being wasted. This process can lead to some poor and even backwards game design as you must have milestones and demos and screenshots at various stages of development when they are not even fully developed yet. Furthermore as game development gets longer and more expensive it becomes harder to develop anything "cutting edge" as by the time you finish designing, developing, testing, iterating, bug-fixing technology has leaped ahead making your game look sub-par. That's why I like Obsidian. Because what they are really really good at is writing. Even if the technology gets dated or the systems aren't designed to be easily absorbed/understood, the writing and the story and the world makes sense and draws you in. That's why I think they didn't bother with making you spend extra time learning how to enchant weapons and armor (or gating where you can) or limiting how much stuff you can pick up (and where you can sell it). Because that isn't what they want you to remember about the game or really experience while playing it. And if that part of the game breaks the immersion, its worth breaking it to spare the hundreds and thousands of hours people would have spent playing their game moving items around, selling things at various merchants to get the best prices, and reading guides about how to it all optimally. Instead there are hand-drawn little choose-your-own adventures, gray questlines where there is no obvious good guy to back or evil guy to vanquish, and a rich world built upon themes most games wouldn't consider like reincarnation, soul science, and a colonial instead of medieval setting. At the end of the day I'm confident Obsidian is working hard to get their vision of combat, experience, spells, encounter design, AI, and such refined. And that stuff may be slightly lacking (I emphasize slightly because frankly it seems at least as good as other major companies' efforts, if not better). But I backed this project because I knew this was the group that would get all the other stuff right. And I look forward to playing PoE 2, 3, and more /PoE fanboy

This is exactly the kind of game they promised and I'm happy to say that they delivered. Above all what has consistently impressed me the most is the music (Great Job Justin Bell and co.!). I also love getting caught up in the quest lines and the companions are very well done. The main villain seems incredibly cool and I can't wait to discover more (just finished the Sanitarium part of Defiance Bay). The combat is fun but sometimes too drastic. I hate shades, shadows, and spectres, but most other enemies have seemed fair to me. Tactics are definitely what determines a fight that you have to reload vs a fight that you win using some spells. There are some trash fights too, but that's OK. I feel like I've been leveling at a good pace, if anything I wish there was a mode so you leveled more slowly. I'm about to hit level 7 with most of my party. That's a minor quibble though. Overall, I can't wait to play more, beat the game, try again with different options, get patches to fix what few things aren't perfect, and then start drooling over the expansion (and inevitable sequel!).

I'm considering trying my first run on Hard as I consider myself a bit of an expert at these types of games. My hesitation is that I never played the older games on Hard. That said, I've been devouring any scraps I can get for the last few months (years?), and think I could handle the challenge. Ironman doesn't seem fun though, at least not until I've beaten the game. What if you played through and got beaten by a cheesy tactic in a boss fight? Starting your tale from the beginning doesn't sound appealing to me unless it's on my terms.

My favorite character from Game of Thrones is Oberyn Martell. Sensuki, do you have experience playing a 2-h long weapon fighter with light armor? I don't have the beta but I'm picturing a fighter with skills more focused on active abilities and damage rather than passive abilities and defense. Any advice would be great

Very well done, the best of your videos in my opinion though I also really liked your story video. Looking forward to part 2!

Just want to give compliment Wespenfresser! Nice job, those look amazing I probably won't use them, but I like seeing really well-done art for one of my most-anticipated games.

Thank you for your passion, diligence, and your time spent improving Pillars of Eternity. I loved the IE games and felt terrible after those types of games stopped getting produced. I couldn't understand why, since I didn't buy many other types of games. Anyway nostalgia is a powerful force and it's difficult to divorce oneself from your earliest feelings and how you would feel today if you experienced the same thing. That said, I hope this game lives up to your and many of our high standards (and we all know you'll mod it if it doesn't! ). Seriously, you are the ultimate fan.

So this post is about the difference between a game allowing you to customize elements of your characters and a game allowing you to optimize those things. Most games do both. Take league of legends (or any MOBA) you can choose 1 of over 100 characters and then tailor them to your own sense of style or competition. You can make an attack focused character and shore up their defenses with talents and runes. Or you can choose to focus on making them even better at offense or give them some utility abilities. Since LoL is a competitive game there are a lot of "trap builds" that you should not do because they are strictly worse than other things you can do or just poor advantages to gain. That said, the game is played at a more casual level in much higher volumes than the competitive level, some people play it like other people watch TV, just for fun win or lose and winning with your own take on a character can be more satisfying even if you have to lose a few games along the way. The fact that casual people love the game and the competitive scene is big enough to support a large roster of pro players and lots of people struggling to get into that tier is fantastic game design. That said there is no competitive multiplayer in PoE. So the game is inherently about customizing not optimizing right? Well, no. There are difficulty levels that are there for people who wish to optimize the "Best Party" to beat the game when the game is the most difficult. These people start on harder difficulties and expect the game to force them to optimize in order to win. I'd wager the vast majority of backers and future buyers do not fall in this category. I do not. That said if the game can be balanced that my customized party of whatever I want to play is not so bad that I lose and feel like I must optimize to continue the game and that someone else's party of fully optimized characters can tackle higher difficulties while still being challenged and flexible, that's sounds like fantastic game design again. But if the game is just great for me at normal difficulty, I may never even get around to harder difficulties. After all replayability is one of the selling points. I am excited because one of Josh Sawyer's core tenets of game balance seems to be building a game with no trap builds, where whatever combination of statistics you actually want to play (ie- you aren't trying to make a terrible character for the sake of it) are decent and work the way you expect them to work. The biggest problems would be if the game was too easy or too hard. Too easy and I feel like my customizations are meaningless and my choices don't matter. Too hard and I feel forced to optimize just to proceed through the game. If we look backwards to Baldur's Gate it has a good mix. Without level scaling the game gets "too easy" as you advance in level, but it starts out pretty brutal. Level 1 characters die to almost any critical hit, armor mitigates this, but you are always worried about resting or running out of hp until you gain some levels. This style of play is great because as you get a better grasp of the game mechanics you also get stronger characters and you stop dying and reloading so much. It's poor because you might get turned off to the game entirely by having a string of bad luck scenarios early in the game, or if you aren't willing to figure out how some of the game mechanics work. The game gets very hard towards the end, and in fact I have a good friend who played through the game twice and could not beat the last boss. He is a more casual gamer but loves BG. He's played mostly through 4 times, spent hundreds of hours in it, but still hasn't mastered the very unwieldy rules (he also played a ton of 2nd edition with about the same level of mastery). Hopefully PoE strikes a good balance between difficult and rewarding and "impossible" for some people. He's also not the kind of person that would post on the forums, so I'm making this for him in part. Anyway, how do you feel about Customizing vs Optimizing? Do you tend to use the strongest things you can even if you don't want to (you feel like you "must") or do you like the challenge of playing through the way you want, even if you know it is not the strongest way to play?

I agree it would be more interesting if each deity granted a specific spell at each level, that was only available to its followers. That way picking a deity felt more important (I'm picking this deity and getting this spell) and getting new spell levels would also be slightly more exciting (what spell does my deity give me now that I have 2nd level spells?). I really like the idea of making this class shift more based on the deity choice while still sticking with an overall class mold. Having access to slightly different spells and different talents seems to be fitting with the legacy of IE games. Even different weapon proficiencies would be neat (and a god of war should allow a priest to take weapon focus and more martial talents).

Nice videos and suggestions. Also more concise than your previous one One question though, since you did now show actual combat from the bg video, what difference would it make? I think in BG I remember characters standing around if they had just killed an enemy they were commanded to attack, instead of going after another enemy. Though this could be changed with AI behaviors set to aggressive, then they would just go after the next red circle. This is an option I liked having for fighters/melee characters without many active abilities but did not use on mage/healer characters since I wouldnt want them rushing into melee. Instead the idle animation would show they needed to be issued another command? Is that what you're getting at? I think it is but isn't entirely clear WHY you want this change. Since I've read many of your posts I doubt it is for aesthetic reasons, so it probably has to do with gameplay.

I like your videos but I think they might be more useful if they were more concise? You spend a lot of time talking but your major points could be summed up much quicker. I like your viewpoints but sometimes you belabor the point a bit much. Also they aren't really "videos" if you don't show clips or gameplay, at that point its just an audio clip. As far as the topic, I like exploration XP. I think maybe having it in all areas is fine, but having a bigger bonus for finding hard-to-find areas would gently encourage people to seek out those places. Like 100 xp for just going to a new area, but 500 xp for finding a hidden cave, just fake numbers.

I'm of course torn on hearing of a delay. I'm very glad that the game will have the level of quality it needs to be a true successor to some of my favorite games ever made. I'm also very sad that the wait will be that much longer. However, I have other things I need to do and have already waited quite a long time. Most people that kickstart projects must have a good sense of time and a strong well of patience to draw on. Looking forward to more progress, polish, and pillars of eternity!

So one of the best parts of DnD and freeform PnP games is that when you've invested a good amount of time into a concept you can work with the DM to create some unique game elements for them. If your character is a blacksmith you can forge your own weapons and armor, if you are a wizard you can pen your own spells, if you are a rogue perhaps you come up with your own feat or combat maneuver, etc. In PoE you can craft items and enchant them, which is awesome and scratches this itch to an extent. But given how flexible many of the systems seem, it would be awesome to be able to create your own spell (name it, give it parameters, damage ranges, damage types). I know that this won't make it in the base game, but it would be an awesome thing to add to an expansion (or sequel)! Alternately designing your own talent (within reason, the game can probably only handle a narrow band of choices) sounds awesome. If you had a cool backstory about being the grandson of a famous duelist and wanted your talent to reflect that by naming it "Lineage of Duelists" with something like Deflection +1 and Attack Rolls +1 with 1-handed blades. It wouldn't have to be those values necessarily, I honestly haven't looked at talents at all and just threw those numbers out there. The point is even just being able to name your Talent if it was just a pick 2 skills type thing would be cool to me. Personally I would prefer to make a talent at character creation, but would prefer to make spells at later levels (more realistic, heh).

I'd rather shell out for an expansion pack then shell a little for nickel and dime DLC. To me, DLC always feels like things that could have (should have?) been including in the main game experience but someone decided they could make some extra money by charging extra. On the other hand, expansions typically feel like a moderate amount of work that is done to refine game systems and further the experience, usually with ideas that could not have been included in the main game (D3:RoS is a notable exception as they intentionally held back the Jeweler artisan for expansions despite coming up with and iterating on the idea in the beta).

Thanks for posting this! Lots of good info.