game playabiity

[Waelkman]

This game can be bewildering.  At the beginning, control of the starting two characters switches between joint movement and individual movement for just one character, often and unpredictably.  This got me into the mindset that this game just does crazy things.  Over time I learned how to recover from these changes (it involves using the L1 and R1 buttons), but I still don't understand how/why these shifts occur.  Being able to move both characters at the same time is important for easily playing the game, but the game itself doesn't tell you how to make this work.  Or if it does I never found it.

 

Related to this is what happens when a party gets sick.  Instead of being able to use the ordinary directional modes, you now have to use the triangle button to specify a target location and then move to that target.  There is no explanation for this change.

 

In battle mode the abilities that the player can use are normally represented by an icon.  This becomes unwieldy at best, since you have to memorize what each icon represents (I wound up making sketches of each icon and writing a gloss of what it does).  Sometimes a description of what the ability does would appear above the icon, but that was unpredictable.  As it turns out, pressing the triangle key brings up the descriptions of the abilities, but the game doesn't tell you this.  Or if it does I never found it.

 

Within a city you can travel from one district to another.  After some time you find yourself deposited in some random building inside the district when you travel in.  I put up with this as another crazy game thing until I discovered that if a location in the district is underlined, that is where you will go when you enter the district.

 

Usually you can interact with something by getting close to it and pressing the X button.  Arbitrarily at times this doesn't work, and if you are new to the game you may not realize that you have to use the triangle button to interact.  I was stuck in one part of a city until someone pointed out this solution.

 

To get a chanter to use a chant you have to navigate a mysterious part of the combat bar.  A character who wants to talk to you has a little light patch in the upper right of their facial icon.  I didn't notice this until late in my first playthrough.  And to talk to a person you have to open the combat bar  (of all places) and go to the far left to find it.

 

I mention these examples because the developers could have done a better job explaining how to manage important elements of game play or done more to eliminate arbitrariness.  No doubt there are adventurous, perceptive players who mastered these elements easily and early, but for the rest of us ordinary folk, these oversights cause hardship and confusion.  Difficulties like this soured me on playing the first Pillars of Eternity.  When learning how to deal with basics of the game becomes a challenging quest in itself, something is wrong with the game.

[Dyxx]

Versus Evil did the console port, and they are doing their best to patch out all those little and gamebreaking nasty bugs.

But you are right, the controller setting on the PS4 can be quite confusing. I'm fine with that cause I like to try out stuff by myself. But you are definitely right that this might be too fuzzy for some/most other players. 

Maybe you post your critic at Versus Evil. No one of the developers or Versus Evil will read this here, ever.

[Boeroer]

I really hope it gets better for you console players. The game itself is too good to get trashed because all of those quirks on console.

[Dyxx]

@Boeroer PoE2 is actually really enjoyable on PS4. The last patch banned blue screens for me entirely !

There are still some bugs and old descriptions (brilliant buff from chanter !), but Versus Evil has the next big patch rolling. I assume it will go live in the next two weeks. 

The handling and overall gameplay is much better than PoE1. For me the controller setting is somewhat intuitive, but I can understand everyone who gets overwhelmed or confused by that. 

Much isn't explained and some descriptions I can't understand why VE did it this way. First example the spell/skill descriptions in combat don't show any numbers, just a really short description in words. 

I hope they change this.

Are there any sales numbers out ?

Maybe we can hope for PoE3 ?

Greetings 

[Boeroer]

I honestly have no idea about the sales numbers. I would love a PoE3 pretty much though.