am gonna wait and see how much progress is made with the first patch. keep in mind that many o' the issues you observe were known issues Before beta release, so is not as if obsidian only started working on fixes.

 

that being said, we is not optimistic about a december release, but we don't genuine care either. if it takes an extra month, or longer, to get game well and fully stable and to adjust based on player feedback (not the xp system, 'cause that ain't changing,) then so much the better. is no publisher that need be satisfied by getting game figuratively on the shelves by thanksgiving or some fiscal quarter target to satisfy quarter report expectations. let it cook a bit longer if it is needed.

I hope that if the game needs more time, they actually delay it. The thing is, will they have the money for that? Publisher or not, bills don't pay themselves and once money runs out...

 

Kickstarter: Pillars of Eternity: In the search for more money.

 

I wish that they made the beta the first areas of the game and not just an extract from it. I get the point of the current beta model but... er... spoilers or not, doing like Wasteland 2 could be better for them.

The reason the Backer Beta is now is because of Gamescom. Obsidian decided they were going to Gamescom ages ago and decided they were going to have a playtest at Gamescom. This meant the backer beta had to be soon after as to not make backers grumpy. This is why we are doing this now.

 

 

This is a great point, I had not connected those dots. I don't know how much it alters my assessment, but it helps explain why the beta hatched when it did. Thanks

 

 

Regardless, I'm confident they have their ducks in a row. They've entirely redone their pathfinding system in a very short amount of time(it's waiting for deployment, I believe), so that's a moot point.

Where did you hear this? See, that's what we're talking about in terms of their communication needing work.

QA has been very active in giving feedback on the bug report forums and have updated their known issues list.

First, to get this out of the way -- yeah it's buggier than I had expected, especially the combat.

 

Second, just to point out a few things that may give cause for cautious optimism:

 

It's relatively stable. At least on my rig, it barely ever crashes or freezes or exhibits other engine-level problems. That's a good sign.

 

It's feature- and content-complete, or close to anyway. All the quests are fully written and playable, the world and its inhabitants look polished and finished, all the classes are in, there's a pretty damn huge bestiary for a very small area, and so on.

 

I don't think Obs actually wants us for bughunting. It's got to be a major hassle to trawl through the forum looking for unreported bugs and then log them in their internal system. Certainly at this stage it's going to be light-years more effective to have a handful of professional in-house testers systematically scouring the thing and reporting bugs directly into their issue tracker, with their standard format.

 

And yeah, Gamescom. That kind of forced the schedule. All we know at this point is what the game looked like about a week before that. We don't know how fast it's progressing, what kinds of things are giving them trouble, and generally how well the ship is sailing. We need another build, probably two for that. If everything is going well, debugging can go extremely quickly.

 

I.e., I'm not writing off a 2014 release yet. If the next build isn't a lot better and doesn't arrive pretty soon now, then I'll start to worry.

 

Black Isle generally opted for smaller maps overall for their games whereas Bioware usually did pretty large exterior maps. It is disappointing that "Wilderness Areas" like the Dyrford Crossing are so tiny.

 

However I know that the Dyrford was THE first settlement area they made for the game, and the Dyrford Crossing was one of the first Wilderness Areas made for the game (during the Prototype). It will be a shame if the other outdoor areas are all so small though. I know there are some 8x8 maps but I'm not sure how many.

 

 

 

 

Yes! Bigger maps would be awesome, because these 3 outdoor maps are really too small. In wilderness areas you don't really have the feeling of exporing the wilderness, and it seems strange that a village only has 7 buldings (not counting the church). Where do the villagers live? In the inn? In the mill? There are only 3 houses that aren't shops or something else, seems weird...

I've been mostly silent on the beta forums. There's a lot of problems and Obsidian know they have problems with the game. One of things I find truly remarkable is the exploitable enemy A.I. I made a couple of posts when the video was released some time ago when the gameplay was released by gaming websites. Ooze and enemies exploitable A.I. by just watching the gameplay footage. I could see exploits already. Playing the beta, the enemy A.I. is even worse than I could possibly imagine.

 

Seeing four enemies in a room in the Dyrford ruins with your party at the door but they don't attack you because you're somehow out of their range. Even though they appear to be in direct line of sight to you and should see you. You throw a fireball and hit all four enemies but only two rush your party while the other two enemies just stand there half burnt. Presumably because those two are still 'just' out of range and can't see you. I don't know. That's just an assumption on my part. If it's true, then words fail me. You pull your party back so you fight those two rushing enemies, so you don't accidently trigger the other two who are standing there twiddling their thumbs. Kill those first two. Wait for your stamina to get back to full and edge close to the door again and fireball the other two guards. They'll probably have some health left but are no threat to your party at full stamina.

 

Or you see a couple of enemies and get your fighter to move a couple of steps at a time and get one of the enemies to rush your fighter while the other just stands there. You pull your fighter back and then ambush that one enemy. Then you send your party in to kill the second enemy. Perfectly valid tactic drawing an enemy in for an ambush, but you would think the enemy would tell his friend instead of rushing alone.

 

Enemies only attacking one party member and ignoring the rest of your party. So you make sure enemies attack your beefiest tank while the rest of your party go to town on that enemy. Fights usually last 5-10 seconds. Then you back away to make sure you reset your encounter powers and then rush in and kill that second enemy.

 

And then there's the set patrols of the guards that you can see and exploit. So you make sure the (usually one enemy) patrol goes by, then attack that lone guard when the patrol is gone. And then wait for the patrol guard to come back to kill him. Perfectly valid tactic.

 

The fog of war opens up and reveals too much and you can see enemies two rooms away and around corners. And you can exploit this by drawing one enemy out at a time.

 

You rush an enemy and some enemies don't seem to attack for some time (they seem to be busy doing something) and then start attacking you when they're half dead.

 

If a feral druid is at range and throws a spell at you, your party can run away and the druid stops chasing you. You can then wait out the effects of the spell. Druid now has wasted his spell and you can go in and kill him pretty easily.

 

I could go on. Hopefully the bugged AI with enemies getting hit by fireballs and not doing anything and enemies 'busy doing their thing' while get whacked by you will be fixed.

 

There needs to be a lot of work to get it up to the standard of a 15+ year old IE game. It does seem weird to say that a game from around 15 years ago does things better than a modern game today that it's based on. And this is just the A.I. There are many other things that I think is wrong with the game as well. Overall, I'm pretty disappointed.

You don't need hope, you just need patience, this thing is probably going to be the best thing that happened on computers since internet.

I agree that the enemy AI is frighteningly bad atm.

All the time spent on the bestiary could have been spent on making interesting items and sketches of said items(BG2 style). Instead we get this ****.

 

edit: Don't get me wrong, it's a cool feature and I like it, but item sketches should have been priority.

 

Well Torment had a beastiary and it was pretty cool honestly so I think most people will enjoy a beastiary here in PE.

 

Most people agree and miss not having Item sketches but Kaz said they are short on artists/time so the scope of the game wasn't big enough to include everything down to those details I guess. If PE had greater funding or more bodies on the project something like this would likely have happened.

 

They could have tried outsourcing the sketches and just kept the ones that are good and/or not even used them if in the end it didn't pan out. As for rewarding the artists most of them would have been fine with being officially credited in the game?(not sure on that)  In attempting this they would have had to put some parameters in place to make sure each artist who did a sketch would have similar looking artwork to fit the game. (Like reference material, examples, documentation)

 

Even more important than sketches is the classes...they need to have those down and spend more time making sure Fighters can actually do more than take it on the chin.

I agree that the enemy AI is frighteningly bad atm.

 

From my perspective buggy combat AI and general NPC behavioral control is expected in a beta, even this close to release as it's one of the most difficult design areas to implement in code and you need a large sample size/variation to really fine-tune it and get the coverage & balance desired.

 

While this is a downer when playing the beta, I more or less expect it. The big concern here is do they have the bandwidth to address this AND all of the other issues in time? With all the classes and mob combinations, this is one area where I can see them having bitten off more than they can chew, perhaps. /more_speculation

The AI has some instruction sets - enemies that are targeting the Wizard change targets if he puts his Arcane Veil up, and there's been a couple of instances where I've seen enemies determine which target to attack at the start of combat, but other than that I haven't really seen anything great.

 

In BG1, non-caster enemies often go for the party member with the highest AC (easiest to hit).

 

In my RPGCodex interview, Josh said that it's going to be a while before they develop advanced AI, as they've built the system from the ground up.

 

http://www.rpgcodex.net/content.php?id=9547

 

Honestly, I think it will take us a while to exceed the complexity of IWD2 fights. IWD2 and BG2 were built with a lot of tried-and-true scripting functions that programmers and designers developed over previous titles and expansions. Like any other feature, AI in PoE is being built from the ground up, so we have to add layers of complexity over time.​

Edited August 28, 201411 yr by Sensuki

What does that mean "over time"? In the next game or just over development time in PoE?

Consecutive Titles I assume?

Edited August 28, 201411 yr by Sensuki

That was said just a month ago?

/shogun's brow furrows

 

 

Without coming right out and saying it, I read that as developer speak for "It won't be what we want when we release".

I'm making a leap here, sure, and it's fair to caution against comparing to mature systems, but it's tantamount to 'softening the blow' when we recognize at 1.0 that the combat system doesn't achieve the high expectations this team put forward. They sold us on their impressive resumes, but this tells me they are bailing water to hit those benchmarks.

 

If I'm right they're going to make concessions to simplify the mechanics so it is some measure of predictably playable in order to hatch 1.0, and keep refining the system while people are trying to enjoy their first run through the world, with a combat system that doesn't reach or exceed any gold standards.

 

I will try to stay optimistic.

They can't make run speed any slower, it would be ridiculously slow at that point.

Oh and I'd rather this game come out next year if it means the Fighter will be able to actually fight and they have time to implement most of Sensuki's ideas/requests.

 

 

They can't make run speed any slower, it would be ridiculously slow at that point.

 

 

Edited August 28, 201411 yr by GreyFox

Consecutive Titles I assume?

 

That's too bad, AI is pretty crucial in a combat game.

Totally serious. Maybe we're playing different games but it seems like my characters are running through molasses unless they get haste from the chanter.

Totally serious. Maybe we're playing different games but it seems like my characters are running through molasses unless they get haste from the chanter.

 

Or maybe you pressed slo mo without realizing it as you are literally the only person who has said the characters move too slow.

Nope didn't hit slow motion lol. They run at the speed of walking imo.

Nope didn't hit slow motion lol. They run at the speed of walking imo.

 

Maybe you power walk everywhere you go so whatever floats yer boat...some people work that way.

 

That isn't the case for most people though *shrug* not sure what to tell ya hipsters gonna hipster I guess   (I'm kidding!)

It will all boil down to how easily (and how fast) bugs and balancing problems can be fixed.

Still, I wonder how a small and unknown developer like "Larian Studios" could create an outstanding crpg (Divinity:Original Sin) with a kickstarter funding of 940k, yet a giant with veterans of the industry, such as Obsidian, struggles coming up with a superb product even though they had 4 times the budget.

The 2D artwork is truely amazing in PoE (except for the skill icons and symbols), the writing and dialogues (for what I have seen) are really good as well, but in almost all other areas problems are looming large.

Yes, yes, it's a beta. Let's see how 1.0 will look like on release day.

Divinity was only partially crowd funded. Their overall budget is similar to Eternity's.

No it was more.

It will all boil down to how easily (and how fast) bugs and balancing problems can be fixed.

 

Still, I wonder how a small and unknown developer like "Larian Studios" could create an outstanding crpg (Divinity:Original Sin) with a kickstarter funding of 940k, yet a giant with veterans of the industry, such as Obsidian, struggles coming up with a superb product even though they had 4 times the budget.

 

The 2D artwork is truely amazing in PoE (except for the skill icons and symbols), the writing and dialogues (for what I have seen) are really good as well, but in almost all other areas problems are looming large.

 

Yes, yes, it's a beta. Let's see how 1.0 will look like on release day.

You are so wrong..... divinity original sin had a funding of 4 millions (1 million trough kickstarter and 3 trough additionals loans) so it had the same budget as PoE.

Also Larian studio is also a veteran company (96).