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Eurhetemec

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Everything posted by Eurhetemec

  1. This is a truly pointless poll. You can vote for six all your like, but all it does is remind the devs why they shouldn't bother to post here. Too many people aren't interested in hearing their opinions or reasoning, and think that they know better.
  2. If that is the goal of Pillars and Tyranny, they are utterly miserable failures. Truly awful, even, because the similarities between the two are far greater than the differences, apart from the visual perspective. But I'm pretty sure that's not the goal at all, as in fact just a strange thing a tiny minority of people on this forum believe (and that people make this sort of claim is why Obsidian designers almost never post here, whilst posting frequently elsewhere). As for romances, I think there's really one simple, good, sound argument against them in Pillars 2: Pillars 1 was designed to intentionally avoid them. Now, it was not in the "WE HATE ROMANCE!" way some fans here pretend, but because they wanted to put a different focus on character interactions. That said, fundamentally a lot of the relationships in Pillars 1 very mechanically similar to romances in other games, just not technically romantic. But now it's as much of a tradition for Pillars as having romances is for Bioware. Which is not to say it stands in "opposition" to that, it doesn't. I should also say that most of the arguments being deployed against romances here are complete and utter rubbish, which isn't even rational or true. But I agree that they shouldn't be in Pillars 2 (or full-on ones shouldn't) because that's not how Pillars 1 was (though it is how BG2 was, note). But sadly some of the pro-romance arguments are equally godawful, like this bit of extremely sexist nonsense (I mean good god, if you actually believe this, you might want to try talking to people instead of making wild assumptions about them):
  3. Yeah I think the biggest issue is that even if you got a fully-working turn-based mode for Pillars working, it'd be a lot of effort to create a mode that, for most turn of most character, you'd just be pressing "next turn" and letting them keep casting that multi-turn-cast-time spell or keep swinging away with auto-attacks.
  4. I can't say for sure, but my experience is that whilst people on the SA forums are even sassier than the ones here, they're generally less rude, take things less personally, and don't engage in "crusades" the way we've seen here (during the Pillars 1 development). So I can't really blame the devs for taking a more read-y and less interact-y approach. I don't doubt they are reading, though - Josh's GDC speech on ability scores certainly indicated very strong awareness of how players felt about various things.
  5. This summary of how dual-classing worked in AD&D 2E is correct, or very close to it. It was a very bizarre system that seemingly existed solely for the purpose of enabling players to emulate various literary fantasy human characters who clearly had multiple classes by AD&D standards. As these literary characters (largely from swords and sorcery stuff) pretty much all had a series of careers, rather than pursuing multiple careers at once, the designers created a system that resembled this. Mostly it was just a very unrealistic-feeling pain in the arse, which lead to a lot of "What do you mean you can't pick the lock, you have five levels in thief, don't you?!" "Well yes but I'm dual-classed to fighter now so I'm not allowed to pick locks until I'm a level six fighter..." "Man what?!" etc... I feel like it largely actually existed for the benefit of NPCs, who didn't have to go through the BS. Also I'd note that a not-insignificant number of dual-classed NPCs were actually illegal by the actual dual-classing rules but oh well... Like you'd have a Fighter 6/Thief 4/Mage 4, but his backstory would say he was a Fighter first, then a Thief, and by the MC'ing rules, he should basically only have low-level Wizard abilities - but of course his statblock assumed he had all three.
  6. This would be far more convincing if this wasn't something that most sequel/series-based CRPGs do, and if The Witcher series, probably the most broadly positively regard CRPG series out there right now, didn't do it. But because most CRPG series do do this, or more often entirely dump your character from one game to the next, it is a wholly unconvincing argument. I do agree mildly with the "disincentivizes", but literally all they need to do are give some very minor benefits to people transferring a character over and retain decisions. The Mass Effect series proves this. ME1 to ME2 involves going from a likely level 40-60 to level 1, but people are not "disincentivized" from playing them as a series because they care about the decisions they made, the impact they had, and the small-but-significant benefits they gain from importing a character.
  7. I'd agree with the OP that the desaturation really needs to go. It really detracts from the beauty of a lot of the locations. A soft glow at the edge of visual range or... nothing, would probably be fine. System-wise, I think it's pretty well-done - I'd extend vision range (for PCs and NPCs) by about 15-30% myself, longer for very large or flying monsters, because walking into a well-lit area and not seeing so giant bastard until you're quite close feels pretty silly (especially when they're not hiding).
  8. Pledging isn't typically at a steady rate in a crowdfunding campaign. The vast majority of pledges come at the beginning and near the end. As Obsidian's video on the making of Pillars 1 said, they got almost as much pledged in the last 24hrs as the first 24hrs. In-between, the pledging rate was much, much lower, and we're into that lower rate now. I wouldn't expect things to speed up much until the last week. Further assuming they let Paypal work eventually that'll lead to a jump there - but one that will only be unofficially recorded, I think.
  9. I don't think you're making much sense here, dude. You seem to be saying the devs are maliciously and needlessly reducing the number of characters. That isn't realistic or likely. They are not out to get you or ruin your fun. They're out to make a game that is popular and sells copies.
  10. I don't entirely disagree but I would make two points: 1) I am horrible pedant, and whilst in ME1 to ME2, you did get booted back to L1 (but, IIRC, you could get bonus XP from having been high level and start at like L5 - or was that NG+?), in ME2 to ME3, you kept your level - it's just that they re-jigged everything so there were 30 more levels. So BG2 isn't quite the only one. 2) The hurry to get up the levels faster is because, at least in Pillars 1, the gameplay was pretty much objectively better at higher levels. You had more options, the enemies could be allowed to have more options, you didn't need to rest quite as much (as you could ration abilities better with more of them), and so on. Now, they say they are re-working progression, and if L1 is more like L4 or L5, say, which wouldn't break anything or stress people too much, then this issue will be much reduced, and I don't think speed leveling will be needed. But if you don't have either more choices at L1, or speed leveling, you are going to effectively make the beginning of the game mechanically dull - and if you level as damn slowly as in Pillars 1, that's going to be a long, painful part of the game.
  11. This is pretty much similar to what 5E does with MC'ing, except 5E is more elegant and doesn't require specific classes. ToB tried out a lot of stuff that ended up working well in 4E and 5E. Mystic Theurge was, if you will forgive me, the purest indication of how totally broken both the MC and PrC systems were in 3E. They existed solely as an overpowered band-aid for the mechanics, but masqueraded as an actual PrC! And they weren't even the worst... The whole usage of PrCs as mechanics band-aids (which got heavier and heavier as 3.XE went on) was a total betrayal of the original PrC concept. So I'd say what 3E prototyped clumsily, 5E largely got right. 4E initially did MC in a really limited and kind of bad way, with the multiclass-feat business, which was just tedious and ineffective whilst allowing some serious cheese. The later "hybrid" multiclassing system did a vastly better job and resulted in less-broken characters than both single-class and feat-based multiclassing. It was more akin to a powered-down version of the Gestalt system from late 3.XE.
  12. They were not supported until very late in the original KS campaign for pretty much the exact same reasons discussed in this thread. This is a problem Paypal are essentially choosing to create, and not something solely on Fig or Obsidian. It's obviously better for pretty much everyone involved for people to not go via Paypal where possible, so I see no problem with them holding adding Paypal back until very late. I don't know enough about CrowdOx to comment on it, but it seems to have seen limited use so far, so I suspect it does have its downsides.
  13. It's actually not the same with every size, because the underlying class/role system limits how far you can shrink things at some point. And that's exactly what the Devs said - they feel five is the size where you are both more constrained so make choices more, and where you can still use all the class/roles properly. The problem I have is that I don't really like "all companions" parties, and the smaller you make the party, the less viable it is for you to not take the official companions. It's not a huge issue, but I feel like they're going to have to take more care with the out-of-party leveling and stuff than they did with Pillars 1, and also may want to look at letting us have "required" companions tag along as a non-controlled 6th character on their quests. It does allow them to make each class more mechanically complex, though.
  14. I think that's very true and I agree, but I think equating subclasses and PrCs is a bit assumptive. Josh Sawyer specifically compared them to Kits in AD&D 2E, which were far less problematic and limiting than PrCs in 3E. We'll see, of course. I'll be pretty surprised if people importing characters don't gain some kind of benefit, too.
  15. Yeah, this is a big one that people will likely ignore or scorn because of the whole nerd-macho "I don't need no steeekin' graphics!" attitude (when in fact Pillars is a goddamn beautiful game as were the Infinity Engine ones!). Better and more expressive animations, and more of them, could be wonderful. I'd consider upping my backing amount for that.
  16. It seems a bit strange to call Fig shady and then want to use Paypal, which is the method of transaction of choice for virtually everything that's a bit shady (at least in my experience).
  17. I've got a distinctly worse machine than that and have a solid-60 framerate in all locations, specifically including Copperlane. I mean, I literally keep the FPS up on screen with Steam (for all games) and it doesn't drop in Pillars. So I suspect it might not be as widespread as you think. I do feel loading times are excessive (haven't tried moving it to my SSD though...) but they did already mention that they have a new way of doing that, one that should make them basically a non-issue.
  18. I was very skeptical about the L1 start, but after reading through people's thoughts, I think it's probably a necessary evil, and the setting allows for it, given souls are specifically and repeatedly tied to both memories/skills and magic in the first game - so being damaged/drained in that area could indeed make you vastly weaker. Given the subclassing, multi-classing and so on, and probably other system changes, likely changing and/or adding/removing a bunch of spells, talents and so on, we would at the very least have needed to rebuild our character from the ground up, and getting us to start at L11-16 as a baseline would have meant the game was very unfriendly to anyone coming to it new, and hell, rebuilding your character would probably have been off-putting to even some veterans. Personally I do hope they do one of two things though (or both): 1) Make L1 to L6 or so more interesting mechanically - your options are very limited at these levels in Pillars and the game is significantly less engaging, mechanically, than in the mid and late game, and the encounter design is necessarily more boring too (as you have fewer counters/strategies available). A lot of different ways to potentially do this. And/or 2) Start at L1 but give XP very rapidly until you're around L6 or L8, which could be lore justified by having use somehow recovering fragments of our soul (each one could grant a very large glob of XP). The change from 6 to 5 characters is interesting - the only reason I can see for this is if they are making each character more mechanically complex - i.e. having more abilities to manage - which could be the result of beefing up the number of options you have at lower levels. They only thing I have against it is that I like mixed parties with both companions and player-created hired NPCs, and the smaller the party, the trickier that is to make work.
  19. That's a bit of a simplification! 3.XE's multiclassing was both great and totally rubbish, depending on what you were doing with it. For doing "Gish"-type characters, it was totally horrible. You ended up being utterly terrible at fighting AND utterly terrible at casting spells, unlike 2E, did a pretty good job of making you okay at both without being OP. Similarly mixing caster classes was a recipe for having a moderate number of low-level spells and generally poor capabilities. But for mixing purely non-caster classes it worked extremely well. Then later on we got all the band-aid classes and PrCs which finally completely unbalanced 3.XE. There were easy-to-obtain PrCs which "fixed" caster multiclassing by simply making you objectively better than a single-classed caster. There were Gish-y new base classes which were open to wild abuse. All in all, it was a mess. It started elegantly simple but really punitive on a lot of traditional AD&D multiclass setups, and ended entirely broken and silly (unless you were a DM who just banned half the stuff out there!) Personally I think 4E and 5E did better jobs with multiclassing, but fewer people are familiar with their setups, and they're less immediately understandable. Re: Pillars multiclassing, I agree with those suggesting that there should be some kind of restrictions. In 2E AD&D, one of the main initial restrictions with MCing, which worked pretty well, was you couldn't have Kits. Unfortunately later splat books (I blame elves... it's always the elves fault!) came with MC-specific Kits (many of which were OP on top of taking away a limitation!*). Still, if you made it so MC characters couldn't have subclasses in Pillars 2, that'd probably limit their power a bit, and encourage people to play single-class characters. I don't know how popular it would be though. I suspect, given Pillars' mechanical design, we'll see something similar to 3E or 5E D&D's multiclassing. 5E basically does the same stuff as 3E but is much, much smarter at avoiding stupid stacking of abilities whilst also having a much nicer way of treating spellcasting classes that makes them weaker than pure casters but doesn't make them worthless. * - The biggest entirely-official-rules-backed BS I ever saw when running 2E D&D was a Dwarven Fighter/Cleric. Sounds inoffensive right? By the original 2E PHB rules he can't have kits, can't have weapon specialisation, limits on multiple attacks, can't be a speciality priest, etc. But then there's the Complete Book of Dwarves, which offers up a kit for Dwarven F/Cs - a kit that explicitly re-allows their weapon specialisation. Well, still limits on multiple attacks and no speciality priest-ing, right? Uh-oh, here comes Speciality Priest of Clangeddin from one of the FR god books (Demihuman Dieties I suspect), and what does he explicitly allow? That's right, he allows you to be a speciality priest even if you're an F/C multiclass, to take any kit a Cleric or F/C could take, and de-limits the multiple attacks. So we have a Fighter/SP of Clangeddin with full weapon spec, full attacks, the bonuses from being an SP (including more spells - and some nasty Clangeddin-specific spells!), and who is only like 1-2 levels behind a single-class fighter... Well, at least the guy RPing him was really fun!
  20. Same here. I'm not too stressed if minor NPCs also aren't voiced, but random non-voiced bits in the companion and important NPCs are jarring and anti-immersive. I would literally rather have no voices at all than companion NPCs sometimes being voiced and sometimes not.
  21. I think one might want to be wary of assuming that there will be a Pathfinder PC CRPG from Obsidian, especially any time soon. Given there have been no announcements, just people reading into survey questions and a hell of a lot of wishful thinking, you might want to not be hyping people about something that may not exist outside your mind. It's a great way to cause disappointment and unnecessary, unfair bitterness towards Obsidian if it doesn't happen. That said, given Pathfinder's design, it'd be very hard to make it not basically turn-based (at least in the underlying system - and at that point you might as well put a turn-based option in). Of course the sad thing is, the main problem with a Pathfinder CRPG would be that system, because it takes the worst traits of 3.XE and amplifies them severely (ironically its attempts to fix various problems with 3.XE just lead to them being worse problems down the line). The difference between a min-maxed PF character of a strong class and a merely vaguely optimised one of a weak class is the largest of any non-intentionally-imbalanced p&p RPG I can think of. Having a party only multiplies the problem. They'll need a top difficulty mode that makes Path of the Damned look like Story mode. At least Sawyer seems aware of this issue (given his discussion of stats at GDC, where he mentions it in passing - particularly re: how amazingly people managed to optimize characters in 3E/PF like the famous LOL-R-SK8), so I suspect most of their system designers are. That said if you just banned a bunch of the worst Feats, spells, and PrCs and really limited resting opportunities you could reduce the problem to manageable levels, at least below about L15.
  22. Sorry man, Call of Duty and Battlefield totally disprove that theory. Actually most "AAA" games disprove that theory. Though Skyrim is vastly better than most schlock that sells millions of copies while offering no substance. It's just a really, really, really flawed game, like everything Bethesda makes. They don't, you just don't like what they offer. That's what I'm talking about. Sales drop when worse ones come out. The entire economic structure of the Western world since 1950 or so begs to differ. Funny, but obviously untrue, or American exports would dominate the car market massively.
  23. Skyrim ist a nice Hiking Simulator with a nice build Gameworld. Sadly the RPG Part is terrible : Nohting what you do have consequences, the story is terrible, the writing uterly dull and the quests are totaly boring. Bethesda does two things very well. 1. They make games that look really good graphics wise. 2. They have great marketing. Other than that I don't think they could make a good game if their lives depended on it. Their games are basically poop wrapped up beautifully. They aren't, because well-wrapped poop doesn't keep selling. I don't get what sort of utterly neckbeared and fanboyish "My game beats your game!" nonsense achieves.
  24. They're completely different things united only by a hugely broad genre. Might as well claim The Sword in the Stone "DESTROYS" A Game of Thrones.
  25. Nope. I wonder if anyone is seeing the same enemy A.I I'm seeing with enemies not going around objects. Here's a video I just did of enemies not going around coffins to my back line and seem to have 'blinkers' on with trying to go after my tank. Could be a pathfinding issue for the enemies as well, especially when they get stuck behind each other after Sagani's fox goes down. Playing on hard. Enemies waiting in line to take turns at Eder after Sagani's fox goes down around 36 sec mark. I did kill the Fampyr earlier as it couldn't get past the darguls and wouldn't go around the objects. Durance is to the right of Eder just standing there doing nothing and being ignored by the enemy and eventually move him away near the end. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qe6ZtNVDNcU&feature=youtu.be PCs have the same pathfinding problem - saw it recently at a fight at some standing stones. They wouldn't go around until I manually told them to.
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