Eurhetemec
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Posts posted by Eurhetemec
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I really want to play Company of Heroes on my watch.
Oh, no. I don't actually. It would suck.
Did you read any of what I wrote, or is this just a discourteous hate-post on your part?
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There is a lot of balancing to be done. In about 1 year I think it will be better.
As it is now:
- barbarians are glass cannons. I know their high AoE DPS is intended, but no way they should drop as fast as my mage.
- Ciphers have some really OP abilities (more than some other classes anyway) and they refresh
- 6 Chanters can faceroll hard mode with expert and ToI. After every chant sequence your party multiplies. You start with skeletons, then phantoms (which hit like a truck and are hard to hit), and eventually drakes. So basically you have a multiplying Borg army
- Moon Godlike's are the best godlikes by far, Nature probably being the worst. Try 6 Moon Barbarians and go AFK during a fight
- haven't played other classes so I don't know about them
The way it is now, there is many gimmicks in PoE which really makes me think I'm playing a MMO..... you have a tank, a dps, a healer, etc etc.
Exactly the opposite was promised on Kickstarter - no standard RPG/MMO trinity , and also to be able to make a party free of restrictions.
EDIT: On the other hand however, I love that Intelligence is now possible for Barbarians (increases AoE/Duration), while Might makes sense on Wizards (more spell damage )
This was promised and is fulfilled , so it's good... but there is still much, much work to be done... (Exactly why I don't understand WHY they're indulging people on twitter about meaningless stuff instead of working on balancing which is so obviously needed )Bolded bits contradict each other directly.
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But I agree that it should be a good match for tablets as well, just make sure to aim for PC first
Oh definitely, but as we have that, and Mac, and Linux, and it's Unity... then
i dont know, maybe i am in the minority but playing a full blown rpg on a tablet doesnt sound like much fun. Tablets to me are things we use when we cant get to the "real" computer, like sending emails or watching a movie on the train. For me playing games like POE, require a familiar computer setup and environment, not a spontaneous, "oh i think i am going to load up an rpg while I wait for the bus to arrive, simply to burn time.
I feel the same way, but that's the thing - my friends don't, and indeed my best friend was going on about how great BG:EE was for long train journeys or the like!
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You can already play it on microsoft tablets.
Score one for MS, I guess!
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Party banter in Baldur's Gate 1: Montaron and Xzar. Enough said.
Story and writing and characters are not the beginning and end of a game but, to be honest, the game-play in PoE is clunky at best. I just don't feel the fun in the combat.
There is a lot they can do to improve it and I am hoping that, with a few patches, it will feel less boring. It is at least a decent game so making it less tedious will certainly make it more fun.
You can call me what you like - I rant because I care. I cared enough to buy the game because, like the rest of you, I want to see a resurgence in this genre. I had high hopes for Pillars of Eternity and they were not met.
I don't see it - how is the gameplay "clunky at best" compared to the deeply clunky BG1/2 and IWD? I mean, I've played them recently - the gameplay in them is hideous compared to Pillars unless you're playing BG2 and you really love nothing better than working out how best to dump your massive arsenal of ludicrous spells to insta-win a fight and then rest.
Can it be improved? Sure. But "clunky" doesn't tell us how.
As for party banter in BG1, man what? It was absolutely DIRE. It was basically "What if you took two really bad roleplayers who rely on cheap stereotypes and crude understandings of the alignment rules, and had them come up with insults or verbal brofists for each other?". BG2 was a bit better, still pretty awful. At least in Pillars they talk like, y'know people, not bad D&D players.
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Hehe yeah.
I'm finding these "IS POOP BECAUSE ISN'T AS GOOD AS THE GREATEST CRPG OF ALL TIEM!" posts rather amusing actually.
No, the writing isn't as good as PS:T's at its best.
No, the encounter design isn't as good as BG2's at its best.
No, the exploration isn't as rich as in BG1.
No, the dungeon crawls aren't as well-structured as in IWD.
But the writing is way better than IWD, BG1, or (IMO) BG2.
And the encounter design is way better than in BG1 or PS:T.
And the exploration is way better than IWD or PS:T.
And the dungeon crawls are way better than BG1 (possible exception for expansion dungeons aside).
And... it's a relatively low-budget Kickstarted game developed from scratch in two years. The fact that it's even worth comparing to these classics in the very areas which made them classics is a pretty damn huge deal. It's like reviewing somebody's debut novel and saying "Well, it's not quite as good as Dostoevsky at his best."
Well said, and I would agree completely with your assessments of it's relatively quality compared to those games. The writing thing can't be overstated, either, given that we're constantly interacting with the world and learning about through the written word in a way that's simply not true of a lot of CRPGs. It's a much, much bigger deal for an isometric party-based CRPG to have good writing than it is, for, say, a Skyrim-type. Also, it's not a little better than BG2/IWD writing-wise, it's massively better, and yes, I've played them recently, and was actually rather shocked and appalled at how terrible the writing was at times. Of course Fallout 1 & 2, both of which came out before BG1 even, had vastly better writing than BG2, so there's that.
(Of course what was amazing about BG2 wasn't the writing but rather it's epic scope and the fact that it took you to so many utterly fantastical and rather unexpected places! We can only hope that a Pillars 2 does the same - going from the relatively mundane world deeper and deeper into the bizarre and arcane one)
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Lots of my friends are huge Baldur's Gate/PS:T/IWD etc. fans from way back. It seems like half the people I know played them back in the day, even some you might not expect. Pretty much all of these people still play games, and indeed, many of them still play Baldur's Gate 1/2, but they don't do so on PC or Mac.
What they play on, is on tablet - most 10" iPads and Androids.
I've been letting them all know about Pillars, and how totally awesome it is, and the fairly universal response seems to be "I'll get it as soon as it hits tablet!". There's a lot of surprise that there isn't a tablet version already, in fact.
These are people with money (in many cases very large amounts of money), and they want to give it to Obsidian. But they won't do so for desktop versions, because that's just not how they game any more (for better or worse, but it's a reality). Given the fairly massive success of BG:EE etc., I think that there's a good case for getting Pillars on to these platforms.
Now, before we start hearing a lot of twaddle about how terribly difficult ports are, let's be clear, this is a game developed with Unity (if you don't know what that is, stop talking about how hard ports are and go look it up), already happily running on Windows, Linux and Mac, it will not be stunningly hard to port to tablets. If Obsidian want to concentrate on other things, like expansions and/or Pillars 2 or other projects, great, the port can probably be handed off to an out-of-house dev team. The only big concern I see is whether tablets could hack Pillars, technically (gameplay-wise, it would work great, no question), but I strongly suspect that, given that it can run on my literally 8-year-old (and not exactly top of the line then!) PC in 1920x1080 with no real framerate issues, that with a little downscaling, that wouldn't be a problem.
So anyway, big untapped market there, tap it!
TLDR: Big market for tablet versions. Unity makes it easy to port. Not suggesting main development team do this.
(EDIT - There's also probably a market for PS4/Xbone versions, BUT that, unlike these, would be actually a challenging port in some ways, because you'd have to come up with an entirely new control system)
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The only problem with rolling a barb is choosing between 19 con and 19 int, or 20 con and 18 int.
Barbarians need brains. Its totally apt that I roll a barbarian and he knows everything about engwithian ruins at the start of the game.
To be fair that's exactly what a Glenfathan barbarian WOULD know about.
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Here's the thing: AAA publishers need to remember that you can turn just as big a profit, if not bigger, off a series of well-made four million dollar games as you an off a single one hundred million dollar games, and without nearly as much risk.
Actually you can’t, because of the costs of advertising and opportunity costs. Sad.
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i dunno about unity 5, but 4 is a horrible engine, i have decent hardware, but in combat when using spells i get serious slowdown. that is present is most unity games i played like wasteland 2 and dreamfall chapters.
maybe it can use UE 4 since it is cheap now, and with the demo i have tried, it offer beautiful graphics with really awesome performance. the background will still use drawn 2D, but the characters and magical effect such as lightning, particles will look awesome using UE 4, or if unity 5 perform better than 4
They're using Unity because it's a full development package in a way the Unreal isn't. It's very suitable for a small team.
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They ended for many reasons.
1) The emergence of 3D as the dominant medium in virtually all genres of gaming.
2) The general view of publishers that said emergence was the only way to make money.
3) They were considered niche games that were slow-paced and required too much thought for mainstream gamers, and publishers were not interested in niche products as the 2000s progressed.
4) Interplay, the publisher that was the most invested in 2D CRPGs all but went under in the early 2000s and closed Black Isle as a result.
5) Bioware moved on from their origins into more accessible 3D formats.
6) There was no indie scene at the time really, since all games had very expensive physical distribution costs necessitating large publishers.
You're missing some utterly gigantic ones here:
A) Relations between Bioware and WotC broke down for various reasons, to the point that Bioware felt that they had to develop their own IP, rather than continuing to work with WotC's IP. This is what lead directly to the development of Dragon Age etc.
B) CONSOLE CONSOLES CONSOLES! A big part of why CRPGs in this style were less popular is that they didn't work well on consoles, and consoles were and still are the largest part of the market (even with CRPGs like Skyrim - which is far better on PC, imho - you see far more sales on consoles). That's not bad behaviour or stupidity, that's just realism on the part of pubs and devs.
C) Really putting the final knife in, WotC messed around with the licensing for the D&D IP, continually changing it's mind about what could be done with it and by whom, until in 2007 (some say 2005) it signed a RIDICULOUS 10 or 15-year lock-in deal with Atari, who, as it turned out, had zero interest in making D&D-based games, rather they just wanted to lock the license up. (It took a lawsuit to fix this - in 2012 WotC succeeded in getting the IP back - but this is why there are no "real" 4E games, despite the ruleset being absolutely perfectly suited to tactical turn-based play, moreso than any other edition).
Also 3) Is only half right - ALL games which didn't have a mass audience were neglected in the early '00s. It had nothing to do with whether they "required too much thought" - if you were perceived as niche, you got ditched by the main publishers. And not being good on consoles meant you were niche.
To be fair, too, Pillars IS niche, but thankfully we now have funding models which support that kind of game.
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Actually, it's one of the best I've ever seen (rewards your actions, don't force you to kill everything just to level up, etc).
I've never played a game that forced me to kill everything just to level up.(which BTW is an action so...)
Killing everything is indeed an action, but it's not "actions" in the same sense as he is using the word, so zero points there.
If you've never played a game which rewarded XP primarily or exclusively for killing things, and not for quests or the like, you can't have played many older CRPGs, frankly. It was very common. You often had a situation as CRPGs advanced, where you could do something the smart way, and avoiding killing, and get either no XP from your success, or relatively little, or you could mindlessly butcher everything in sight and gets tons and tons of XP and loot and complete the quest, and it didn't take a genius to work out which the game promoted.
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Mowing down dozens of copy&paste cultists and getting nothing out of it but trash loot made me sad. Removing combat XP achieves nothing in this case, you'll still mow them down to the last man in hopes they hide something interesting (they don't).
On the other hand, you get huge piles of XP for progressing quests in the most trivial manner.
Lower quest XP, make up for it with combat XP. Not like you can grind mobs forever anyway because nothing respawns.
Lockpicking XP could be removed entirely far as I'm concerned, it leads to the very munchkin gameplay JES supposedly wanted to avoid (pick lock instead of using key to get XP).
Beastiary xp wouldn't make this ideal, once an entry is full you don't get combat xp. Also, humans never give combat xp.
But they should. At a reduced rate after the bestiary entry is complete, maybe 50% or whatever, but they definitely should give XP all the way so killing stuff doesn't feel as pointless as it does now. If it needs to be rationalized, I'm sure you can still learn something about fighting wolves even after you've killed a dozen of them.
This is an example of how some people profoundly do not understand why there isn't combat XP.
Let me explain - the reason there isn't combat XP, per se, is so that people who avoid combat and try and find rational, safe, clever solutions to problems do not get penalized for not just murdering everything and everyone in sight. Pillars is a good game in that it rewards play that isn't a total mindless slaughter, unlike a lot of CRPGs, especially older ones. Changing it so combat always rewards XP would be completely missing the point, and would turn the game back into that sort of ridiculous "Even peasants are worth 15XP!" butchery. It promotes the sort of idiotic and immersion-breaking play where you're more rewarded for solving a quest the clever way (avoiding combat etc.) AND THEN going back and slaughtering everyone mindlessly for no reason (something common in older CRPGs), than for actually just being successful.
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I've been hearing people getting to the level cap way before the game is over. I'm starting to see why, when I'm level 7 already barely into Act II.
I think a patch needs to tone down the XP gains from quests, because there is nothing worse than playing an RPG and not getting rewarded for quests you complete later in the game.
There are lots of thing worse than that, frankly.
It's actually not at all unusual with CRPGs that have a level cap, for you to hit level cap if you do all the sidequests and so on. In fact, if Pillars had a situation where people mostly ignored the sidequests then got to endgame, and found that they were too low-level to really deal with it, that is something that would be much, much, much worse than not being rewarded with XP because you're at cap. I've played games where that happened, and it was, frankly, no fun at all, especially as in some cases you couldn't even properly go back by the time you found out you weren't leveled enough.
So no, absolutely not, a patch does not need to "tone down" XP gains. I'd be fine if there's an option to put in an XP penalty, because it's simple to program and would please some players, but it certainly isn't some kind of necessity. Especially as most players are not completionists.
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Oh come on. Any score from 7-10 would be fair for P:E. So much depends on your preferences, your tolerance for bugs, your willingness to learn systems, your experience with similar games and so on and so forth.
Below 7 I would question the fairness though as it's more likely the reviewer just fails to get what the game is supposed to be.
Yeah but again I relate his 9/10 scores for other same-genre games (DA:I and D:OS) to PoE and find it odd that he considers PoE a full 'point' on whatever his scale is, worse.
It isn't odd. You finding it "odd" to the point of invoking bias/conspiracies is what is genuinely strange.
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Divinity is a really good game, so it's not really going to be surprising if some reviewers think it's a better game than PoEt. I'm not sure which I prefer right now myself. But D:OS was probably my favourite game last year, along with Age of Wonders 3.
I haven't played Inquisition, but my feeling is that it's sufficiently far from either PoEt or D:OS that comparing their scores isn't very meaningful.
I've played Inquisition* and I agree. Despite being a party-based CRPG set in a fantasy world, it's very far from Pillars in design, and I'm not sure there's all that much audience overlap outside of hardcore broad-spectrum CRPG fans.
D:OS also seems like a very different game to Pillars. Whilst it's inspired by older games like the Ultima series, it doesn't really play like them, and it's core mechanic is very different to them, and it tries a number of new things, where Pillars generally tries to keep it old-skool.
So anyway I agree, and people whinging about 8/10 need to get some perspective.
* = I suspect most of the people bashing it haven't, given the types of comments made - there are tons of valid criticisms of it, but those are rarely made in favour of cheap shots. The most undeniably valid criticism is that a huge amount of the content outside of the actual story and missions, where you actually talk to people and stuff, is very grindy and dull. People compare it to MMORPGs, but that's very lazy. The crafting system is definitely comparable to MMOs (but I have yet to see a single CRPG or MMORPG which doesn't have a tedious-as-heck crafting system - Pillars is one of the less-awful ones, but is still a bit tooth-grinding), but the really tedious "FIND ALL THE THINGS!" or "GET A MILLION THINGS!" missions/quests aren't like MMORPGs at all, but rather like the tertiary content in open-world games like GTA (i.e. "Find all the packages").
That'd be fine but those quests aren't segregated from the "real" quests, and this means anyone who likes completing stuff risks being bogged down in a mire of tedium. You have to actively avoid this stuff to make the game more fun, which isn't good design, period.
Also, for god's sake, I have an entire army (literally) at my disposal, tons of castles/forts, tons of friendly peasants, and they can't go and mine/pick herbs stuff like, automatically? Gah. (I am aware of the missions to do this, but they're pretty crummy for anything but top-tier stuff).
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Before anyone jumps right in my face. This is not an issue at all I don't mind monks being in the game. It is just an opinion and I wondered if anyone shares it.
First of all they so don't fit into the world. I know they are part of dungeons and dragons but I always pretended they are not. Cool wizards and knights and all this stuff and then you have a shirtless dudes out of karate kid. What is this?
They are also so not fun to play. Main reason - attacking with bare hands. In the world of magic weapons and cool armours and all this stuff. Meh.
Two separate issues - they fit in fine, because they're not "Karate Kid" any more than a wizard is "Harry Potter". So disagree there.
But they are no fun to play - but not for the reason you suggest. Rather because they don't work very well, nothing to do with gear.
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Just - wow. I can't believe the score Kevin van Ord gives PoE. 8/10, when he gave Dragon Age : Inquisition 9/10. AND Divinity Original Sin?!! Is he for real?
PoE is not perfect, but 8/10?
Something is definitely up here. Did the devs p*ss Van Ord off??
How can he say D:OS is a 'glimpse of the future' but PoE is treading the fine line between clone and homage? I lost interest in D:OS pretty quickly, the world is just too fairytale and garish, and everything is covered in either slime, fire or ice!!
I'm shocked by this review. Genuinely shocked.
Whilst I disagree with him, personally, on the quality of Pillars (9+ for me), his opinion is absolutely not unreasonable.
D:OS is much more daring and tries actually-new ideas in CRPGs much more than Pillars, which is more reliant on being extremely high quality and amazingly written.
There's nothing "up", and conspiracy theory nonsense about devs pissing people off on an 8/10 is just that. Tinfoil hat time!
So, it's his opinion, it's a reasonable opinion, and it's a reasonable score. Please learn that because you disagree with something does not mean it is wrong, nor that there is a conspiracy. This will make the internet a better place!
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Planar Sphere. Klunk, you're locked in. If you're under-leveled, getting through those mage fights and especially the demons is not trivial. It's also the one that's pushed on you from the first time you exit Waukeen's Promenade if you're a wizard.
(If you're not a wizard though it's fine as you'll have to actively hunt for it; it's not something you'd likely accidentally stumble into.)
On the other hand, at the appropriate level it is also one of the coolest quest lines in the entire game.
That's the thing - in an ideal world, level-locked stuff that's highly customized tends to be more interesting/engaging/memorable than generated/leveled stuff (though Skyrim proves that if you introduce enough craziness and physics into proceedings there can be exceptions!), so I am glad it's there. It just needs to be placed/signposted in such a way that you don't rush into it headlong too much, and designed such that there's a way to back out without losing hours of saves (if you even can do that!).
I think Pillars does a good job with this, myself - unlike, say, D:OS, which seemed happy to place basically undefeatable (at the level you found them) encounters less than a screen-length away from bog-standard (at the level you found them) ones, and to put them actually inside towns/cities and so on, so you could easily wander into them. It's one thing to have a dragon cave or a dank dungeon containing instant death, it's quite another when walking down the apparent path to your destination involves your annihilation, and going the opposite way does the same, and only finding the relatively slim path between offers actual gameplay. Bah!
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Oh, so when asking the NPC by the bridge about the surrounding area and him saying his friend might be still alive in a cave, you're not going to check it out and try to save his friend? You're going to ignore this, take some time to go and find some companions and then go back to this area to take on this unknown threat? Funny how sucker punches in PoE are okay but in the IE games, they're not.
I get what you're saying, but you're not comparing like-with-like.
The only potential "sucker punch" I've found in Pillars, so far, is the bear, and it's kind of an obvious one, and even if you "fall for" it repeatedly, you've wasted like, what, a few minutes? Just reload the autosave from when you enter the bear den.
Whereas in Baldur's Gate 2, some of that stuff was absolutely horrible - you could basically dig yourself into a massive hole, and be fighting enemies who you essentially had no chance of defeating, because you hadn't leveled up enough, and it was the story of the game that had tried to shove you into it. Further, as I recall, and it has been a few years, you could get into a situation where you couldn't even just back out of it - where the only way out was through - but you were incapable of going through, because you weren't high enough level.
I certainly remember at one point in mid-BG2 I had to reload a save game that was like, six or eight hours back, because there was just no way I could continue, and that was the last save I had before I'd committed to that mission.
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The biggest joke - might affects your bullets' damage
Perhaps might in this instance, signifies a gangsta background ? You know, gold jewelry and a propensity to hold your musket at a jaunty sideways angle.
Before popping a cap.
"Through a variety of techniques (e.g. martial training, meditation, ritualistic evocation, mortification of the flesh), some individuals are able to draw upon the energy of their soul to accomplish extraordinary feats. These abilities range from the mundanely superhuman to the explosively magical. Having a strong soul seems to make this easier, but sometimes even people with fragmented souls are able to accomplish the extraordinary. The individual's body seems to act as a conduit and battery for this power, drawing in replenishment from seemingly omnipresent "fields" of unbound spiritual energy in the world around them."
Every single human being in this setting has supernatural magical powers, or at the very least the potential for such. Whether you are shooting a bow or punching a person or casting a spell, specialized training allows you to access the energy of your soul to accomplish superhuman feats. Might increasing damage of ranged weapons makes perfect sense in this setting.
Pillars of Eternity should have had an option box that came up automatically on a first play-through saying:
"Do you think the Baldur's Gate games were the apex of CRPGs?" with a YES/NO selector
If you selected yes, the game had special tutorial/explainer stuff which explained, in detail and unskippably, how Might is not Strength (and similarly with other stats), gave an elaborate RP explanation for the stash, told you how Engagement worked (and why), and generally went through the differences from the IE games and really carefully explained them to people.
Because I think if that'd happened, there'd be about 1/3rd as many complaint threads, if that, and certainly about 1/3rd as many posters basically bursting through the door to tell us how terribly shocked and appalled they are that not everything is exactly the same as a game made in 1998, which was based on a system from 1988.
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Well I just didn't think anyone was stupid enough to run into a cave to do optional content while playing with one character, in a game designed to be played with 6 party members not one.
Apparently this is not so
"Me and my wizard self, so badass. Spells and ****. I'm gonna go kill this bear! I don't care if I've got no armor and about 10 hitpoints, I'm the PC and I'm a badass!"
*mauls* *screams* *dies*
"This game is to hard! It sucks!"
I remember a 1st level AD&D party once nearly destroyed a badger... you'd think people would learn!
(I saw the bear and ran a mile, as I may have said!)
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So why not allow racism? Or nastiness in general?
Both exist to a great extent in the world as well. There's a difference between personal insensitivity and institutional insensitivity. The former should be ignored. The latter should be met with public outrage.
I largely concur (challenge or ignore depending on the situation with the first) but you seem to be avoiding the question, could you answer it please? Also note that the author of the limerick is happy to have it changed, so now it's in Obsidian's hands.
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bad jokes are bad jokes. This particular joke is bad and tasteless. I don't believe it's worthy of bringing out the censorship gavel.
Try replacing the "because they were male" with "because they were black" (or white, or whatever). Then maybe you'll get it.
What I get is that you are trying to sanitize a joke on the basis that someone is getting offended. Using that same argument "sanitizing" becomes a tool, a tool that removes discussion or enlightenment in favor of mass produced clean templates of what you should, think, say or joke about.
I thought that the movement you seem to uphold had the opposite intention.
So you think changing this limerick to be racially-based would be okay, right?
Also, what "movement"?! That's a new one on me.
This was promised and is fulfilled , so it's good... but there is still much, much work to be done... (Exactly why I don't understand WHY they're indulging people on twitter about meaningless stuff instead of working on balancing which is so obviously needed )
What Pillars of Eternity needs for mass sales - tablet versions
in Pillars of Eternity: General Discussion (NO SPOILERS)
Posted
That's cool, but you're self-identifying as "not the target audience". You already play it on PC - I'm talking about people who do not, and suggesting BG doesn't work well enough for many on tablet is clearly wrong, given I know so many people who do it and are happy!