Created account to say: (a word or two about camping supplies)

[Gairnulf]

Well, they promised 15 levels, they had to do all 15 of them. I think they used pretty much every enemy type that wasn't wildlife.

[Electrogasms]

Reading this thread almost two years later is absolutely as entertaining as it was the first time; just like PoE!  

[scythesong]

I'm surprised no one pointed out that from a game perspective it's obviously a dev intent vs player compromise thing.

 

The devs obviously intended for camping supplies to be an important resource, but they didn't want people to waste time lugging massive amounts of loot into/out of dungeons ala the infinity engine backpack weight system. So you instead get a bag of holding by default, and it's up to you to roleplay how that factors into your game. You can simply rationalize that you're actually performing multiple merchant-runs when you finally sell all your loot, for example - the game is simply allowing you to skip all that mindless back-and-forth travel.

 

You people also have to understand that when Bioware abandoned the RPG strategy genre after DA:O we basically lost a decade's worth of progress in that direction. If you turn on the design commentary for the various areas of the game, it should be obvious that the people behind PoE are basically starting from scratch - from rediscovering the importance of negative space to the importance of points of interest/symmetrical balance in maps (this is especially obvious if you track their progress from the original areas maps to more recent maps like WM2's Whitestone Hollow, which is a much better designed wilderness area both visually and mechanically - it even has a unique interaction with Zahua's personal quest).

Caed Nua is basically a product of their "Baldur's Gate phase" and should be taken as such. PST and BG2 didn't exactly spring the minds of their developers fully formed - it took a lot of work/time/trial and error/player feedback to get there.

 

And so while Caed Nua may seem rather "meh" hopefully the devs are learning from that experience and will be able to give us a much better experience in the future (and given WM2 content, I'm pretty optimistic).

[Borissimo]

Let me preface this by saying that I absolutely adore Pillars of Eternity. Obsidian did an amazing job (among many other things) improving the player's quality of life, letting you focus on the fun of playing the game rather than fiddling with the inventory.

 

So that being said, I simply do not understand the rationale for the camping supply limit. It would make sense as a measure to prevent rest-spamming if and only if camping supplies were an unlimited resource. But they are not. There is a finite number of them in the world, and there is no merchant that sells an unlimited number. A player who tries to rest-spam will literally run the game out of camping gear.

 

Writing down where all of the camping gear is located so that you can come by later to pick it up after your pack isn't full is exactly the kind of tedious BS that Obsidian did away with in pretty much every other facet of PoE.

[Boeroer]

Well, you are wrong.

 

Nearly every merchant sells camping supplies. And the stock of every merchant gets refilled (when it comes to consumables, ingredients and camping supplies). So you have an unlimited number of camping supplies in the game. Their number is in no way finite. And I think that's pretty obvious.

 

So maybe one should double check before calling something tedious BS. Just sayin'...

[scythesong]

Writing stuff down is a nice way to use your journal, and as pointed out there are numerous camping supplies in the game. Ultimately a better system should just be created that rewards proper character ability/skills/endurance/HP/etc resource management (like the inn bonuses, which only stick around for a limited number of rests).

 

But this is one of those things the seem "pretty obvious" mostly n retrospect.

[Boeroer]

Sure one could get the impression that camping supplies are limited - if one played the game for a few hours only.

 

But I still think it is pretty obvious that this is not the case - especially if you double check if the thing you complain about really is a thing.

 

I mean it's not really hard to see that every merchant always sells camping supplies even though you bought all of them on a former visit.