Eurhetemec
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Posts posted by Eurhetemec
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I'd probably cancel my pledge if they decided to incorporate Dragon Age or Mass Effect style "Romance". In my opinion that would be a terrible waste of resources.
Besides, I'm pretty sure the point of these games is to be as unlike Bioware "RPG's" as possible.
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):
Romances are huge magnet for female demographics. All those women who play, for example, Mass Effect do it mostly for romances, and not because they like SciFi and third person shooters.
So, if devs want to game be more popular and profitable, there should be a romances in POE2.
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I dont want Obsidian to blow dev time on a half assed turn based mode, and I REALLY dont want them blowing time and money on a fully functional turn based mode. It could be done well given enough time, but that much time for a feature that doesn't really fit the spirit of the POE franchise seems impractical, or a waste of resources.
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.
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Interesting... why does J.Sawyer post on somethingawful, but never appears on PoE official forums...
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.
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My guess would be that dual-classing invokes memories of DnD2, but what they called dualclassing works differently from multiclassing on a mechanical level. Afaik, in DnD2, dual classing meant:
- starting with class A
- at some level n, start dual classing into class B: lose everything from class A, start at lvl 1 in class B
- once your level in class B is n+1, get back everything that class A gave you
- proceed to level in class B for the rest of the game?
This is vastly different from multiclassing two classes from DnD 3.X, where you choose one of the classes at each level up, and how they will probably handle it here.
However, I might also be wrong, and they just used examples that they deemed sensible. Regardless, there will be some cap on the number of classes - NWN1 and NWN2 imposed 3 and 4 as a limit, although I can never recall which one had which limit.
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.
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I hope it's not too late for a change and they reconsider. Deleveling the protagonist puts an unnatural break into their progression, which is an integral part of every RPG. When you create an RPG sequel, this is a limitation you should keep in mind and work with, rather than try to cheat the system and reset everything, which sends a message to your players that their previous toils were less than meaningful.
Not to mention it disincentivizes replaying the saga as a whole, as the player will know from the start that their level progression from the first game will be lost when they start the second one, which makes it more difficult to care going into it.
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.
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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).
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Looking at the pace of pledges seems to go down tremendously. Grossly i think 16% of the number of backers compared to 77K. Hopefully at least 70% of the backers would come back? On a separate note, would it be better to do a +200K jump instead of a bigger gap? Just a suggestion.
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.
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I don't buy what devs said. It's just plain excuse. Do i need devs to restrict how the way i play the game? Folks can play with how many characters they want. 5? 4? Heck even 1 for those who want to go solo. The opposite isn't the same for people who want the default old school 6-party characters. Perhaps they wanted it 4 actually just like Tyranny and it flopped hard. So they just have to add 1 back in. With lesser.. it's actually easier and more simplified for devs in terms of tweaking and balancing combats due to new multiclassing/subclassing issues perhaps? So if DnD ruleset is doable but PoE ruleset cant? Too but it blandly, it's dumbed down.
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.
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If you imported your BG1/2 character into Neverwinter Nights, you got slapped back to Level 1.
Mass Effect, slapped back to Level 1.
Witcher 2/3, slapped back to Level 1.
Literally, the only game I can think of where you actually get to keep your character level between games is Baldur's Gate.
It's better to have a premise, however flimsy you find it, to be taken back to Level 1. With the sub-classes mechanic if you have a bunch of Level 16 characters you now have party members who don't take advantage of the sub-class mechanic unless you have a respec option which is even more lore-breaking.
I don't really understand what the hurry is to get up the levels faster aside from getting to play with the higher level abilities and spells. For newcomers to the game, you need the learning curve. For returning players, yes it might be a bit of nostalgia to tread over the level progression but you do get the chance to play that same character a completely different way.
If the sub-class system is taking a 5e approach to how you can develop a character I'm all for it. But you need to start at the beginning.
2 days into the crowdfunder and we're already having to go "This is not Baldur's F*cking Gate 3". Please, let's not turn this into the Disengage of PoE2.
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.
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In hindsight, it would be fairly easy to deal with, if one wanted to follow the same way Tome of Battle's martial adept did, whch multiclass extremely well. What one would do is say that each caster's caster level was equal to [Caster class]+1/2 other class caster levels, but extend that to (only!) the effective caster class level for number and level of spells, (E.g a cleric 6 wizard 6 would be cleric caster level 9 and have the same number of spells as a9th level cleric.) This would have obviated the need for mystic theurge-type "multiclass" PrCs.
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.
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Doesn't change the fact that pledges made with PayPal were supported back in 2012 during the Project Eternity kickstarter campaign.
So why not do the same but this time right from the start or at least from the moment on the funding goal has been reached?
Wasteland 3's figstarter campaign did it this way using a third party solution called crowdOX that, iirc, even fed its data (pledged amount, backer numbers) back into fig for real-time updates.
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.
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Same applies with 4 characters.. heck even 3 characters!. So by that theory.. we should go with 3 then?. It's not making us to think. It's more restrictive. There are couple of personal favorites and you dont want them out. But let's say for your 2nd or 3rd playthrough you can't simply because the boat isn't big enough. 6 is the magic number so that you can bring few that were your favorites and mix in say 1-2 new ones with the new party. With 6 party members.. if you so "feel' that you wished that you wanted 5 characters so that you can push yourself further about decisions the character in the party, you still CAN!. You can restrict yourself with 5.. we don't need devs to restrict us.
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.
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I always hated prestige classes because, rather than expanding choices as the advocates contended, they limit the player through entirely mechanical means.
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.
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Invest more time into making the animations look great! Gaming is a visual medium, and an RPG with lifelike animations really gives life to the characters that you grow attached to over the course of the game. If they're just moving pixels that swing a sword two different ways and run three different ways, it pulls you out of the immersion. Lots of developers seem to under-value animation, but it's so important and gives the game the appearance of high production values.
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.
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I will not use Fig. It seems a bit shady. I rarely give my CC out to anyone and use paypal or amazon pay.
Is there a way to back the game without using Fig?
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).
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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.
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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.
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D&D 3.x's multiclassing system was one of its best aspects (though to be fair, the old AD&D system had some merits as well). For tabletop at the vey least, I had absolutely no compunction in "class" becoming and entirely metagame construct.
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!
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I'm pro fully voiced except protagonist.
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.
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Pretty sure POE 2 will not have turned based combat.
However fear not for the Pathfinder RPG survey seemed to suggest that we will get a wonderful Turned Based CRPG set in the pathfinder sometime in the future.
I really hope that is the case and in the end results in Obsidian having two really great studio owned Ips with really different gameplay yet true to their crpg roots.
POE = Real time with pause
Pathfinder/Mystery game = Turned Based
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.
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They aren't, because well-wrapped poop doesn't keep selling.
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.
They aren't, because well-wrapped poop doesn't keep selling.
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.
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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.Skyrim sucks. Plain and simple. No doubt about it. PE has LOTS of issues but it DESTROYS Sky****.
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.
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Skyrim sucks. Plain and simple. No doubt about it. PE has LOTS of issues but it DESTROYS Sky****.
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.
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Well, you must have equipped Durance for somekind of tanking role before the encounter and thus forgo some of his caster capabilities, else he'd be a squishie himself. And that's a trade off. But I concede your point nonetheless, and agree that the AI is needs to be better equipped/programmed to put your squishies in danger. And that video is just screwy, but I imagine their behaviour is to reflect the lore that Drakes are close to primate intelligence. They are dumb.
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.
Poll on preferred party size
in Pillars of Eternity II: Deadfire General Discussion (NO SPOILERS)
Posted · Edited by Eurhetemec
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.