Why the hype?

[NineCoronas]

Having just came off the heels of a full Baldur's Gate Trilogy playthrough, with mods included, right into PIllars of Eternity, I can say with certainty that Pillars of Eternity is superior as a whole. On the individual level, Baldur's Gate 2 has Viconia and PoE doesn't, but I can't fault it for that.

[Varana]

As TheisEjsing said, the way you present your argument matters.

 

You stated several things as fact, esp. that "PoE is worse than BG", where many people have very legitimate reasons to disagree with. By "it is, period", instead of "I think it is", you don't leave any room for people thinking otherwise. Add to that that the internet generally is a nasty place, and you get your response.

 

P.S. I got to Defiance Bay on hour 16. I'm currently at 35, and I haven't done any main quest stuff in DB. I still have the temple in Gilded Vale open, I'm currently mopping up what's left in Dyrford, and I'm only 3 levels into the Endless Paths.

No sidequests???

[sorrowofwind]

Most games lack replayability due to the fact you've to pass through the same prologue again and again. (toee is better at this regard since it at least has 9 different beginnings)

 

The first time you may still feel refreshed and empowered due to knowing how environment react to you, but the second time and onward it becomes a grind. You simply cannot replicate the "first time feel" especially when the game focus on adventure and story.

 

It's like in candlekeep when you realize no matter what you choose the assassin attacks you aka the choice of illusion or no matter what you do Iowen getts kidnapped once out of Irecnius dungeon, there is no point doing anything no more due to the fact they're railroaded (despite having "opinions"). 

 

POE also has the main quest blocking the adventure aspect like how the brigand blocks the bridge in Arcanum which makes the game feel more railroaded and restricted.  Personally I play poe as a linear adventure path and enjoy what it is. Doubt would restart a new game soon though.

Edited April 1, 2015 by sorrowofwind

[Blovski]

I`ve been enjoying playing PoE quite a bit. But for the life of me I can`t understand the hype over the game which seems almost hysterical to me. After having finished the game I felt pleased but at the same time slightly disappointed, perhaps because I had expected more. I do not think it is an improvement over Baldur`s Gate at all quite frankly. In some cases it`s just not as good period. When I wrote a Metacritic review to this effect, where the flood of 10s is just beyond belief, I was subjected to a comical campaign of enraged fans who not only downvoted this review - fair enough really - but made a campaign of downvoting all my other reviews also. I have never experienced anything like it on MC, not even when I trashed a WoW expansion. It is quite amazing. Anyway, just so I`ve said it, these are my three main reasons for not agreeing with the hype:

 

1: Lack of replayability. There are not enough companions for replays to have much to offer. Yes I know you can make your own party members. But I never liked to do that in the IE games. I prefer the immersion of recruiting NPCs and having party members with some sense of personality. And eight is just one playthrough and change as far as I can tell. The eight there are are good. That isn`t the problem. But the way I play these games I will never play a monk, rogue or barbarian at all because there aren`t any.

Secondly it`s not open enough compared to Baldur`s Gate. Apart from Defiance Bay there`s only really ever one place you can go at any time, unless you want to be instantly killed of course. By contrast Baldur`s Gate had like 20 areas to choose between at any time and you could deliberately spend ages doing something completely irrelevant to the main quest. And you just can not in PoE.

 

2: Obscene loading times. There are just too many loading screens and they last for ages. At least 25 seconds is my experience and it just makes exploration a pain in the butt when it should be the best part of the game.

 

3: It is not better than Baldur`s Gate. And it should be considering that Baldur`s Gate is 17 years old.

 

To me this takes the game from a 10 if these, in my opinion major, issues were not present to a 7, which was what I gave the game on metacritic when the campaign against me there started. A good game but very far from a classic. It is also not the best game in genre, which I think it should be to merit a 10. Other than that the game is fine and I said so in my review. I did enjoy my one playthrough quite a lot and do not regret buying the game. In fact I love the genre and will happily support any devs making games like this, even if the games are average, just so more might be produced in future. But it still has to be criticized fairly a and not be fawned over like some rediscovery of a species believed to be exitinct. "Look everyone it`s a dodo! Don`t raise your voices or say anything disparaging or it might die off again!"

And the honest truth for my part is that I don`t imagine I`ll be starting a new game of PoE anytime soon, because I just can`t find a compelling reason to do so. Maybe in a couple of years after a few patches and after some more companions have been added. But just how is this game a 10 when BG is better in these respects by far? What is BG then? An 11? 12? I am hard pressed to find any aspect where I think PoE is the better game. That doesn`t mean it`s bad. Just that some people seem to have lost all sense of proportion when it comes to PoE. The hype is just unbelievable. I would be curious to know just how many of the people who are now raging while downvoting my reviews on Metacritic, simply because I had the temerity to criticize obvious shortcomings with PoE, will even be playing it in a couple of weeks, once their first playthrough is done with. Frankly I doubt very much if any of them will. I know I`d rather start my 53rd playthrough of Baldur`s Gate right now.

1. Kinda agree on openness, though with BG 2 it's more the ingenious having Spellhold + Underdark as a cutaway that's made it so replayable for me. There are more companions than Planescape had and though that game's not *as* replayable as BG 2, I think it holds up.

 

2. Yeah, a bit, but not a game-ruiner for me.

 

3. I think it's better than the first Baldur's Gate was on release and I think it benefits from the accumulated ideas of a load of other RPGs (bits of interface and ideas from, say, KOTOR 1 & 2, Lionheart, Jade Empire, Planescape etc etc) since BG 2 to make it a strong game in its own right rather than just a BG 2 clone. For me personally BG 2 might be the most mechanically perfect game I have but I'm really delighted that this one is as good as it is. I'm interested to see what a modern approach to patching will do for it.

[Ohioastro]

People rate games that they enjoy highly.  You don't need conspiracy theories.  The professional reviews were also uniformly positive; so you now have a game enjoyed by both critics and players.  "Bad" games, or buggy ones, usually get hammered in user rating in forums like metacritic.

 

Basically, there is a minority who want an exact copy of Baldurs Gate and hate any deviations.  They are exactly that - a small minority - and there is nothing wrong with having tastes in games that differ from other people.  But people like  me, who enjoy this game a lot, are also entitled to our opinions.

 

Your complaints:  1) too few NPCs - disagree.  You can roll your own here, unlike BG, and you didn't have 25 companions *in Baldurs Gate 1".  You're comparing a series to the first entry; invalid.  2) Long loading screens - I'm not seeing this; how can I agree with a criticism that isn't true for me?  3) Vague claims that it isn't as good as BG.  Well, great: you liked another game better.

 

BG1, in particular, is the game that you should be comparing to: this game does not reach the same character levels that BG2 did, and it isn't a sequel.

 

Areas where this game is either comparable or a big step forward:

 

Shedding tedious micromanagement tasks that added no difficulty, only lots of mouse clicks, to the older games.  This is huge to me.  Pathing is better (if not perfect); I don't spend tons of time clicking on individual corpses, nor do I have to shuffle junk from A to B, nor do I have to move piles of arrows around.  I don't have to spam rest, and the tedious and mandatory pre-buffing dance (which my party magically knows to do before it opens Random Door, because I know what's behind it!) is gone.

 

Much more subtle and interlocked dialog options; many more chances to avoid battles or solve problems in other ways.  From a design point of view this is a big step forward.

 

Interesting lore and world-building; the soul aspect is, to me, far deeper and more interesting than the extremely by-the-numbers fantasy world and lore of Baldurs Gate.  Others may disagree, and that's fine.  I find the writing to be consistently strong and enjoyable (again, there are people with other tastes, and I know that.)

 

Good encounter design - you hit nice tactical puzzles and there is a good difficulty curve.  Both games are strong here, and this was not easy to replicate.

 

Interesting class and stat system - I started playing D&D in the first edition (3 little books), and know D&D well; but there are some genuinely creative classes here (chanter, cipher) and nice takes on classics like rogue, fighter, wizard, priest. 

 

The battle system in BG was chaotic and I never did trust the scripting much, so in technical terms the two are on par for me in the battle.

 

I really like the dungeon crawl and the stronghold is a nice concept which could be extended into something very interesting (you could tie a lot of story lines into being a landholder...)

 

------------------------------

I also liked D:OS, and it's a different (not better) but fine game in my book.

 

Bottom line: people have reasons to disagree with you; it's not irrational; and it's just fine if you preferred the older games.

[Nanakamado]

Well

 

- loading times are horrible. SSD is not standard so it IS a problem.

- NPC's are a bit... Flat for me nothing near BG2 living alone P:T

- Main Story looks a bit uninterestin for now, but I just entered Defiance Bay, so there still is plenty of time for story to develop.

[PrimeJunta]

I'm pretty sure the loading time thing is a bug, as I'm not experiencing it.

[DocDoomII]

It's caused by some weird stuff that can bloat the save files excessively.

[Hoeya]

IE games were some of my favorite moments as a kid, and it's been a long time since anything similar has been made. While the game lacks some polish, it's a very solid experience. It has that same feel as when you booted up an IE game way back in the yonderyears, the atmosphere is wonderful, and the characters are actually quite enjoyable. I haven't found an NPC follower I just immediately want to kill, and the fact that they have such diverse backstories and they don't feel hastily tacked on makes it a refreshing change from many so-called RPGs that have come out recently. While I've yet to find anyone who comes quite close to matching the charm of this fellow, they're all quite refreshing in their own ways.

 

While there are some issues with gameplay that have been found, they are on the way to being fixed. There are features that are tacked on and could be a lot better (looking at you, Stronghold) but overall, it's a pretty solid game. Is it as good as Baldur's Gate or Baldur's Gate 2? Not really, but it comes close to capturing that spirit. 

[Jimmious]

Yeah I have no loading time issues at all.

[Tartantyco]

Because the hype IS REAL!

[RushAndAPush]

I'll give you a crazy answer. The game is great.  

[talharbash]

The "comical campaign" as you put it, is very much because KS campaigns tend to have at least a fraction of backers who are very emotionally attached to the product. I've seen articles trying to promote PoE only to have enraged fans flip out on any comment that is even slightly derogatory to PoE or Obsidian.

 

PoE actually doesn't have that bad of a community. I've seen official forums of some other KS games where people would receive death threats for posting a suggestion.

 

TLDR version: gaming communities tend to be toxic and you should probably engage in them lightly.

[Eurhetemec]

I'm enjoying it a great deal more than BG and much, much more than BG2 on my first playthroughs. I'd rate P:E a solid 9, BG1 a 6 or 7, and BG2 as a raging bipolar, about 1 on my first attempt to play through it, 9 or 10 on my umpteenth once I figured out how the damn thing works.

 

Your opinion is legit of course, and any hate campaign you've suffered for it is unacceptable.

 

Pretty much exactly how I feel on this - I too would call Pillars a solid 9 or "A" grade game (ignoring the bugs as they will inevitably be fixed). I didn't like Baldur's Gate much when it came out, because I'd played Fallout 2 before it, which was vastly cleverer, less cliche, and better-written in just about every regard (I even have a semi-literate review I wrote from then, giving BG 6/10 for this reason). BG2, I'd say was 9/10, in part because it was so astonishingly long (even before the expansion) and went to so many unexpected-to-me places. Very excited for how good a Pillars sequel could be, for sure.

 

 

Walk into the biker bar and proclaim how you hate the bikes, see how that will end for you.

Welcome to real life chum.

 

Er, in the UK or US, that'll result in you being laughed out of there or ruthlessly mocked until you flee. Not being churlishly insulted, physically hurt, or having vengeance sworn against you. Bikers are mostly nice chaps until you REALLY piss them off.

Edited April 1, 2015 by Eurhetemec

[kat7ra]

Most games lack replayability due to the fact you've to pass through the same prologue again and again. (toee is better at this regard since it at least has 9 different beginnings)

 

The first time you may still feel refreshed and empowered due to knowing how environment react to you, but the second time and onward it becomes a grind. You simply cannot replicate the "first time feel" especially when the game focus on adventure and story.

 

It's like in candlekeep when you realize no matter what you choose the assassin attacks you aka the choice of illusion or no matter what you do Iowen getts kidnapped once out of Irecnius dungeon, there is no point doing anything no more due to the fact they're railroaded (despite having "opinions"). 

 

POE also has the main quest blocking the adventure aspect like how the brigand blocks the bridge in Arcanum which makes the game feel more railroaded and restricted.  Personally I play poe as a linear adventure path and enjoy what it is. Doubt would restart a new game soon though.

Sorry, I just have to...

Heya, it's me IMOEN.

Don't misspell my sisters name please.

[sim-h]

 

I'm enjoying it a great deal more than BG and much, much more than BG2 on my first playthroughs. I'd rate P:E a solid 9, BG1 a 6 or 7, and BG2 as a raging bipolar, about 1 on my first attempt to play through it, 9 or 10 on my umpteenth once I figured out how the damn thing works.

 

Your opinion is legit of course, and any hate campaign you've suffered for it is unacceptable.

 

Pretty much exactly how I feel on this - I too would call Pillars a solid 9 or "A" grade game (ignoring the bugs as they will inevitably be fixed). I didn't like Baldur's Gate much when it came out, because I'd played Fallout 2 before it, which was vastly cleverer, less cliche, and better-written in just about every regard (I even have a semi-literate review I wrote from then, giving BG 6/10 for this reason). BG2, I'd say was 9/10, in part because it was so astonishingly long (even before the expansion) and went to so many unexpected-to-me places. Very excited for how good a Pillars sequel could be, for sure.

 

 

I'm enjoying it a lot, but more than BG1? Not so sure. The criticisms the OP raises regarding companion choice and choice of places to go are hugely legit. The two biggest things I miss are the memorable lines from BG1 characters (are there *any* in PoE?) and the more open nature of the BG1 maps, the fact you could just go and explore map sectors for no reason other than adventure.

 

We need the hype however, to generate sales and success for this game so that more get made that address those criticisms. If you do not hugely overhype these games, dumb financial people will not believe they can make money out of them, and will not commission such games in future. [edit I hate kickstarter - if you want to know why - kickstarted NPCs and memorials in PoE say it all]

 

So OP, I demand you immediately change your metacritic score to a 10 (like mine). Tactical voting.

Edited April 1, 2015 by sim-h

[Vaalac]

Well

 

- loading times are horrible. SSD is not standard so it IS a problem.

- NPC's are a bit... Flat for me nothing near BG2 living alone P:T

- Main Story looks a bit uninterestin for now, but I just entered Defiance Bay, so there still is plenty of time for story to develop.

I don't see what people don't like about POE NPC's ? Are we talking about companions or every NPC ?

 

Personaly, I like PoE companions until now (I only met 4 for the moment), I mean, beside a romance option I don't see what they lack. They speak to you, speak together, have their own opinion, have a nice story (I really like Eder's story, I'm really curious about it), the don't feel flat for me. Well of course they're not Minsc, but the game is darker than BG2 so that's a not a big surprise.

 

Same thing about the NPCs, I really liked a lot of them, Raedric for example is a nice character in my opinion, I haven't met a lot of big guys yet but for the moment they seems well done to me.

[Osvir]

Scores, ban them please, burn them in the hellfires of Magran please!

But I'll play:

1- Replayability. Companions. Dispositions. Roleplay. Adventurers. Stronghold. Quests. Endings (Multiple of them). Multiple outcomes. Multiple beginnings that will have multiple consequences. Whilst the sense of urgency in this game might be "fake", it affected me and it made me abandon a lot of side-quests and focus on finishing the critical path. This Obsidian design strategy might not have worked on everybody, but it worked on me and I'm on the fair belief that then it probably worked on (most likely) a minority of the Players. Meaning: I'm going to have to replay if I want to see more. There's also, supposedly, an early ending somewhere, or a "bad" ending.

There are a lot of stuff to explore and figure out too. Finding hidden gems warrant a second or even a third playthrough. Granted that you enjoyed the story/plot/game on your first playthrough and want to see what else you can do in the game. "What is possible and what isn't?". Though, then we're talking about game research~ which might not be the same thing as "game replay", perhaps.

2- Semi-agree. They did a backwards step here, and I keep wondering "Why does this not work like Baldur's Gate?" (In cities, going into houses and such, you could send 1 character into a house, and the rest would stay outside. Hardly any loading times too). This is worst in Brighthollow, where I have explained before that there is too many loading screens for just going inside to Rest and then turn around (So I made a little game out of it to actually feel like I was doing something "valuable" with my time. Which was dropping and sorting items of different types in the various chests in the other rooms on the upper floor). Otherwise it is 50-60 seconds of loading time for just a 5-10 seconds "Resting" loading screen. This can easily be fixed though.

3- Don't agree. Pillars of Eternity is far better than Baldur's Gate in most areas, in my opinion. The only thing that is lacking, which you said too, is there aren't as many areas to explore (in terms of "overworld wilderness"). The Endless Paths is fun and all, and is a great foundation to have in the world of Eora (Lore-wise). It was also an awesome Kickstarter stretch-goal idea that Obsidian tinkered together. Though, if this would've been an "ordinary" development project (hypothetically speaking at this point), there would've been a benefit in perhaps cutting 5 levels of the Endless Paths and put in more wilderness areas. Then again, what they have is a great foundation, as I said, and expansions can do what they do best: Expand.

Edited April 1, 2015 by Osvir

[CynicalP]

Your entitled to your opinion and I will respect that, but to me, this is by far the best of the kickstarter games that I have played to date. Baldur's gate 2 is my all time favorite game and I feel that Pillars not only captures the spirit better than any other game I have played it has added many improvements to the formula. Sure the game isn't perfect however nothing a couple of patches or an expansion cannot fix.  Why the Hype ? Well for many folks ,such as myself, believed that IE type games were gone and buried. A footnote in gaming history.  Along comes kickstarter and Obsidian with the chance to resurrect an IE type game. It was a no-brainer  for me. I had my doubts that Obsidian could even pull it off especially on a mere 4 million dollar budget.  Pillars reeled me in and hooked  me immediately with the opening narrative game sequence. The narrative, the dialog, the artwork, the music, the ui,  and thought provoking combat all lovingly crafted and delivered in a high quality package. Obsidian created a game that has far exceeded my expectations. It is as close to recapturing the look and feel of a Baldur's gate or Icewind dale game more  than any other modern game has delivered and that is enough to excite me.

[Lord Weh]

But just how is this game a 10 when BG is better in these respects by far? What is BG then? An 11? 12? I am hard pressed to find any aspect where I think PoE is the better game. That doesn`t mean it`s bad. Just that some people seem to have lost all sense of proportion when it comes to PoE.

Part of the problem here is expecting all games to hold together by their review scores in comparison to other games. Should we be retroactively degrading games score as newer games come out (it was a 10 in 1998" which is a 5 in 2015?), or when new (better) games come out should we be upping the score limit? Games marked out of 12 this year, then up to 14 next year, etc, etc?

 

A good game that is enjoyed and feels worthwhile should be an 8 - 10, regardless of what score other games got now, in the past, or potential games in the future. You don't mark games by saying X got 7 so this gets more, etc.

[Fredward]

In act 3 now and so far the game, for me, has been... tepid. The writing has a 'tell don't show' quality to it that I'm not terribly fond of, I sometimes find me eyes glazing over and I have to go back and scan what I just read because it's just so... bland? Flat? I don't think one kind of writing can be objectively better than another but this is just not doing it for me. I have absolutely no idea why the stronghold exists it just seems like massive waste of time for what you get out of it. The combat has been a mix of really boring (hordes of meaningless mooks) and a ****ing nightmare of micromanagement when it comes to boss fights where I usually get creamed anyway, this is on easy/normal btw. Seriously do the companions have no combat AI at all? Quests have been okay but nothing (as of yet) that made me sit up and take notice. Choices? What choices? What consequences? The ones I've made so far have been either functionally equivalent or largely meaningless. Also the lore/tone isn't always consistent and that vexes me.

 

BUT. My biggest complaint would have to be that the game is totally failing at making me feel connected to the story. I don't care about my PC, I don't care about the characters, I don't care about the world and I don't care about the big bad. I salivated when I read about the backgrounds and the culture and the multiple races but they don't seem to matter much at all. The companions are bland and almost uniformly forgettable (except for Durance but he literally feels like someone went 'oh my GOD I am SO OVER political correctness I am going to write the most offensive character ever conceived!' which isn't meant to discard him mind you, I actually think he's one of the more nuanced companions but still) and I think that plays a major part in my disconnectedness. No one seems to make much of an attempt to get to know you better. Or share what they think about this all except for voicing their very specific and static biases. They're just there. Like the PC. S/he's just there. You can pick all these nice background options for him or her but they don't really matter because you have no chance to really express them, you don't get the opportunity to express the why's of your actions or thoughts or how they tie into who you were or are or are hoping to be. You're just a lengthy biography of done deeds.

 

All that being said I'll finish this run (probably) and start another one or two so it must be doing something right.

Edited April 1, 2015 by Fredward

[Eurhetemec]

 

 

The two biggest things I miss are the memorable lines from BG1 characters (are there *any* in PoE?) 

 

 

Depends on how you define "memorable". Pillars characters talk like real-ish people, generally. BG1 characters talked like badly/over-the-top roleplayed characters from a particularly cheesy D&D game (good god the awful "I like/loathe character X!" stuff, it's cringeworthy). But because BG1 was a lot sillier, there was all the "Go for the eyes, Boo!" and so on.

[PrimeJunta]

FWIW I didn't think much of the BG1 companions. Minsc's humor got old really, really fast, and everybody else was basically a cardboard cutout. BG2 had Jan, Korgan, and Keldorn which count for something, but everybody else is either a waifu, annoying (there's a reason that one guy is named Annoy-Men), or forgettable. P:E's are much, much more to my taste.

 

One thing that I slightly miss is the "assembling my party" phase of a BG2 playthrough. With only eight companions and all of them easy to find there's not much there, there, even if you don't want to spring for the Adventurers' Hall to grab some mercs. I had fun figuring out how to get Mazzy and murder the black dragon before Mazzy spent all her proficiency pips on short swords.

[sim-h]

 

 

 

The two biggest things I miss are the memorable lines from BG1 characters (are there *any* in PoE?) 

 

 

Depends on how you define "memorable". Pillars characters talk like real-ish people, generally. BG1 characters talked like badly/over-the-top roleplayed characters from a particularly cheesy D&D game (good god the awful "I like/loathe character X!" stuff, it's cringeworthy). But because BG1 was a lot sillier, there was all the "Go for the eyes, Boo!" and so on.

 

 

It's true. They are different. But you won't remember any PoE character lines in 15 years, I'll tell you that much.

 

I do also appreciate the more 'realistic' nature of the PoE style. However when a game gives you lines you remember...well, for the rest of your life, you can't deny it's got a certain appeal.

 

My favourite is Montaron - "What part of 'I'm a loner' do ye NOT UNDERSTAND!!"

But I recently took on Shar-teel in BG1 for the first time EVER (hundreds of hours played). I think I'm in love. Now that's replayability!

[osea101]

Yeah I'm not terribly impressed by PoE either compared to the classics. I mean it's BG 1.5 essentially. Improved enough to make it better than BG but not enough to reach the soaring hights of BG2. 

 

Can we just have BG3 already? Shame Hasbro is so incredibly greedy with the D&D license.