PILLARS OF ETERNITY 2 confirmed

[DreamWayfarer]

Is Whitemarch (in the north) just cold because of mountains then? It seems a bit odd for a seaside town near the equator to be frozen.

This. No way Dyrwood is in the Southern Hemisphere unless the map is upside down from our perspective, which means the Vailian Republics are still closer to the equator.

Edited May 17, 2016 by DreamWayfarer

[Infinitron]

 https://eternity.obsidian.net/news/update-50-so-project-eternity

 

The story takes place in a small nation in the world’s southern hemisphere called the Dyrwood (DEER-wood).

 

Edited May 17, 2016 by Infinitron

[NegativeEdge]

I can't really tell if NegativeEdge is trolling, but I'll bite.

 

I liked that it gently rebuked us all for refusing to let go. A sequel feels like it dilutes the point.

I never got the sense the fanbase was rebuked at all by Pillars - which I presume you mean it missed the mark of our collective expectations.

 

In some sense yes I would say the game did not live up to expectations, it never could of course, but that isn't to denigrate its quality but instead acknowledge its own message to us about the nature of expectations, especially those born out of nostalgia and memory.

 

The whole game is suffused with melancholy and many of the characters and quests involve people in some ways trapped in the past to their detriment. The soul reading mechanic seems to exist only to reinforce the idea of the cyclical nature of violence through cultural memory, the dozens misappropriate the collective memory of others to justify themselves, you literally enter GMs memory, Saganis vision quest involves her village memory and she frets about whether her own husband will remember her in her absence.

The game explicitly says 'hey you shouldn't live in the past because it's the past and it's not like you remember it anyway. Don't let your memory of the past dictate your future, things change and it's unhealthy to try and pervert that process'.

Is it a coincidence that a game that was made by strapping our memory of the infinity engine to a table and forcing 4 million dollars into its lifeless husk has so many Frankenstein references in it?

 

The whole world of Eora is on the cusp of change. The gods are dead, boomsticks obsolete the arcane, people are weary of religious conflict and so modernism is approaching fast. Our heroes solving problems with swords and chivalry are an anachronism. A bunch of people who can't adjust to the changing times, every one an exile in some way, six outsiders marching gamely in lockstep to the next area who can't accept that everything around them has changed. Therein lies the rebuke.

A sequel just begs the question: Is it desirable or right to brute force into existence a facsimile of something that expired not due to evil publisher machinations but simply because it's time had come and gone? to which PoE already answers a resounding no and again no.

 

As far as whether it makes financial sense because profitable ip or whatever I just find that kind of talk weridly mercenary. I'd expect Obsidians accountant to use that justification sure, but as a customer I can't get excited about the words 'profitable', 'intellectual property' (lol) or any of that nonsense.

 

[IndiraLightfoot]

Yay!! This is great news. Now, I just hope, there will be more build options, more classes, spells and variation in combat. Yup! I'm that greedy.

[Lychnidos]

Is Whitemarch (in the north) just cold because of mountains then?  It seems a bit odd for a seaside town near the equator to be frozen.

 

What seaside town are you talking about? If you mean Stalwart, the map makes it pretty clear that the water body is a lake.

[AndreaColombo]

NegativeEdge- interesting reading of the game, but I disagree with your conclusions. I enjoy isometric party-based cRPGs in ways I never could a shooter with swords (aka "action RPG")--and that is true of even the most well done aRPGs (I grew tired of Witcher III after less than 15 hours, but I've gone through several completionist runs of PoE.)

 

I can only rejoice if more old-school cRPGs are made; as far as I'm concerned the genre has not expired and it is very desirable to bring it back.

[Karkarov]

Well I like how he confirmed it because it mirrors what I have said in other threads.  There was no way Obsidian was not going to make Eternity 2, Eternity 1 was a huge success for them and a new IP was always the plan.  It was foregone conclusion.

@Negative Edge -

You are reading wayyyyyyy to much into the games story.  If you actually paid attention in the kickstarter they made it very clear the goal was to make something new that hearkened back to a similar style of the old games.  Keywords being "something new" and "similar style".  They never said "We are making Baldur's Gate 3" that's just what people wanted to hear, so they convinced themselves that's what Obsidian said.

I would like to think most backers backed for Pillars of Eternity, I know I did, and I got what I paid for.

Edited May 17, 2016 by Karkarov

[Jojobobo]

As others have mentioned NegativeEdge, I think you're seeing metaphors and subtext when really the devs thought the story was interesting to tell in the manner they did - particularly because they could explore a darker tone as the audience was more mature. If the whole game is meant to be a metaphor for real life letting go of the past - particularly with reference to old games - then that's more of a critique made at the audience's expense which I don't think any developer would ever want to do.

 

I do think the decline of this kind of genre was in part due to publisher machinations, from most publishers' view-points it makes sense to push technology to its limit in order to make a more pretty game - these kind of IE games for years haven't needed to be on the cutting edge of technology and so I think they gradually became seen as more risky by publishers. That isn't to say there isn't a market for these kind of games, just that it was easy to overlook by publishers. PoE was a commercial success after its funding, which I think clearly demonstrates the viability of these games.

 

I guess you may think that talk of IP is a bit clinical, but to me I want developers I like to make the most money possible. Using their in house valuable assets to do that obviously makes sense, particularly when they can do that in way that is in line with the ideals of their brand and what their customers want from them. Game studios have a bottom line, like any of business.

[NegativeEdge]

As others have mentioned NegativeEdge, I think you're seeing metaphors and subtext when really the devs thought the story was interesting to tell in the manner they did - particularly because they could explore a darker tone as the audience was more mature. If the whole game is meant to be a metaphor for real life letting go of the past - particularly with reference to old games - then that's more of a critique made at the audience's expense which I don't think any developer would ever want to do.

 

 

Didn't you hear? the Author is dead

 

Either by conscious or subconscious design, the game has an unusual focus on history both personal and cultural and treats peoples very souls and identities as their accumulated and continuous memory. The game has some characters who are defined by their ability to either recall and witness history to which they shouldn't naturally be able (watchers) and others that have, through means always presented as insidious, preserved or attempted to prolong their grip on their soul/memory.

If the writers thought this was a boon and made such characters the caretakers of benign tradition and wisdom or the bearers of some other virtue then it would obviously have something different to say about it. But it doesn't.

The character most defined by his unwillingness or inability to forget and allow the passage of time its due harvest is Thaos, the leader of a malignant cult who sit around all day writing about how dope it's going to be when all the heretics who have forgotten get their comeuppance when the queen that was and still is returns.

[Jojobobo]

I think most of these ideas are somewhat (and this is entirely my wild conjecture) born from work on the Fallout franchise (pre-Obsidian for some members, and during Obsidian for many). Fallout is in its very essence a series about the better days gone by and the bittersweet feeling of remembering them and trying to emulate them, and to add to that I think J E Sawyer was very keen on The Lonesome Road storyline they introduced - the idea of ghosts coming back from the past to haunt a largely faceless player character, and the interactions at that interface (in FO:NV, people had up till then been playing characters in any which way they wanted and rightly so for a true open-ended RPG, then they were confronted with a past and a history which was an interesting idea). "Who are you, who does not know his history," and all that - I see Pillars as an expansion of some of those ideas and themes, but rather than full blown apocalypse it takes the slightly less tragic yet more volatile situation of a region on the brink of civil war.

 

Being a kind of weird postmodern critique on people's attachment to the past does really not ring true for the franchise, in my opinion. It's a bit of a stretch, and as I said vaguely insulting to the players. I really do think the subconscious element did just come from Fallout work, and not for some sort of weird snarky criticism of old school RPG players' attitudes they didn't realise they were working in.

Edited May 17, 2016 by Jojobobo

[InsaneCommander]

Awesome! I hope we have a bigger game (bigger maps, more quests, more companions, etc..)

[aluminiumtrioxid]

 

I can't really tell if NegativeEdge is trolling, but I'll bite.

 

I liked that it gently rebuked us all for refusing to let go. A sequel feels like it dilutes the point.

I never got the sense the fanbase was rebuked at all by Pillars - which I presume you mean it missed the mark of our collective expectations.

 

In some sense yes I would say the game did not live up to expectations, it never could of course, but that isn't to denigrate its quality but instead acknowledge its own message to us about the nature of expectations, especially those born out of nostalgia and memory.

 

The whole game is suffused with melancholy and many of the characters and quests involve people in some ways trapped in the past to their detriment. The soul reading mechanic seems to exist only to reinforce the idea of the cyclical nature of violence through cultural memory, the dozens misappropriate the collective memory of others to justify themselves, you literally enter GMs memory, Saganis vision quest involves her village memory and she frets about whether her own husband will remember her in her absence.

The game explicitly says 'hey you shouldn't live in the past because it's the past and it's not like you remember it anyway. Don't let your memory of the past dictate your future, things change and it's unhealthy to try and pervert that process'.

Is it a coincidence that a game that was made by strapping our memory of the infinity engine to a table and forcing 4 million dollars into its lifeless husk has so many Frankenstein references in it?

 

The whole world of Eora is on the cusp of change. The gods are dead, boomsticks obsolete the arcane, people are weary of religious conflict and so modernism is approaching fast. Our heroes solving problems with swords and chivalry are an anachronism. A bunch of people who can't adjust to the changing times, every one an exile in some way, six outsiders marching gamely in lockstep to the next area who can't accept that everything around them has changed. Therein lies the rebuke.

 

 

 

If this is trolling, it's the most artful example of such I've ever seen.

[Jojobobo]

He/she didn't elaborate overly much what they meant to begin with, but no they don't seem to be trolling at all.

[Yosharian]

 

I can't really tell if NegativeEdge is trolling, but I'll bite.

 

I liked that it gently rebuked us all for refusing to let go. A sequel feels like it dilutes the point.

I never got the sense the fanbase was rebuked at all by Pillars - which I presume you mean it missed the mark of our collective expectations.

 

In some sense yes I would say the game did not live up to expectations, it never could of course, but that isn't to denigrate its quality but instead acknowledge its own message to us about the nature of expectations, especially those born out of nostalgia and memory.

 

The whole game is suffused with melancholy and many of the characters and quests involve people in some ways trapped in the past to their detriment. The soul reading mechanic seems to exist only to reinforce the idea of the cyclical nature of violence through cultural memory, the dozens misappropriate the collective memory of others to justify themselves, you literally enter GMs memory, Saganis vision quest involves her village memory and she frets about whether her own husband will remember her in her absence.

The game explicitly says 'hey you shouldn't live in the past because it's the past and it's not like you remember it anyway. Don't let your memory of the past dictate your future, things change and it's unhealthy to try and pervert that process'.

Is it a coincidence that a game that was made by strapping our memory of the infinity engine to a table and forcing 4 million dollars into its lifeless husk has so many Frankenstein references in it?

 

The whole world of Eora is on the cusp of change. The gods are dead, boomsticks obsolete the arcane, people are weary of religious conflict and so modernism is approaching fast. Our heroes solving problems with swords and chivalry are an anachronism. A bunch of people who can't adjust to the changing times, every one an exile in some way, six outsiders marching gamely in lockstep to the next area who can't accept that everything around them has changed. Therein lies the rebuke.

A sequel just begs the question: Is it desirable or right to brute force into existence a facsimile of something that expired not due to evil publisher machinations but simply because it's time had come and gone? to which PoE already answers a resounding no and again no.

 

As far as whether it makes financial sense because profitable ip or whatever I just find that kind of talk weridly mercenary. I'd expect Obsidians accountant to use that justification sure, but as a customer I can't get excited about the words 'profitable', 'intellectual property' (lol) or any of that nonsense.

 

 

This is an interesting way of looking at it, but even if it's true that PoE is a rebuke, I'm more than willing to sign up for a fresh rebuking.

[Mallard]

I'd like to echo the excitement of others, and cast my vote to use crowdfunding again. Hopefully this time Obsidian won't make the mistake of TWO large cities.

 

 

(Twin Elms looked fantastic, but that didn't prevent it from hampering the pacing of the game -- the game needs to start linear, open up midway, and then *narrow* again towards the end.)

 

 

However, I do wish to make one plea to Obsidian:

 

Please, please, please do *not* spend time redesigning the engine, graphics, etc. from scratch!

 

One of the major benefits of the IE games was the ability of BG2 to reuse the assets and code from BG and TOTSC -- and, for that matter, PST and IWD. Orogs, Conugons, Myconids...

 

Contrast that with Bioware's approach to Dragon Age II.

 

Many of us would have been more than satisfied with DA:O's graphics and gameplay, with development gone to *added* creatures, maps, stories.

 

Instead, they rebuilt everything from the ground-up -- even the models of the basic Darkspawn were changed. And we all know how that affected the writing, quests, and maps (or single map, in the case of the dungeons).

 

And then, with Inquisition, they switched engines yet again!

 

 

[NegativeEdge]

He/she didn't elaborate overly much what they meant to begin with, but no they don't seem to be trolling at all.

 

I'm not a troll in that I say things to be provocative but I will admit it did occur to me yesterday that appearing to argue against a games sequel on that games own forum is a bit...odd. But I like this forum and generally much prefer reading the thoughts of others than espousing my own but I'll try and summarize better my thoughts and will always read any response in good faith.

 

 

I think most of these ideas are somewhat (and this is entirely my wild conjecture) born from work on the Fallout franchise

 

As you brought up Fallout I'll use it to illustrate my point and I agree PoE is much closer in tone than any of the IE games to Fallout 1 which was partly inspired by A Canticle for Leibowitz, a book about the how even nuclear holocaust won't put an end to human blundering.

In it the monks of surviving organised religion covet the remnants of historical knowledge and dogmatically misinterpret them and in doing so ensure a continued cycle of assured annihilation.

Basic message from the book and which Fallout 1 captured beautifully is that the real wisdom in pre-apocalypse knowledge is that it's from a world that destroyed itself, any attempt to re-create it is doomed to fail. New Vegas has a lot of this going on and are the best parts of it but are unnecessary because Fallout 1 doesn't need repeating.

 

It's a cruel irony that Fallout itself was delivered into the careless hands of people who did not understand it and grossly and with great ignorance took all the wrong lessons from it. Seeing Vaults, Plasma rifles and ultra violence as the important things in Fallout has lead us from something that was original, intelligent and hermetically sealed to what is now simply a juggernaut commercial franchise. An empty power armor shell hoisted into an upright position and held aloft by the shackles of financial expediency.

 

Bethesda are perhaps better (or worse) than their counterparts from Canticle because they appear to know exactly what they are doing.

 

So unnecessary sequels make me cautious and the least persuasive arguments for them are that it's commercially compelling to do them.

Overall I think PoE advances a beautiful and subtle argument that to everything should come an ending and not because Josh Sawyer says it or the developers even intended it. The game just makes that argument to me in a thousand ways large and small that belong in another thread entitled 'NegativeEdges sophomoric reading of PoE" and not here. This quote from Julian Barnes:

 

“History is that certainty produced at the point where the imperfections of memory meet the inadequacies of documentation”

 

For me sums up the games sub text if you like as a passion project for 70,000 people who could stand to be reminded of that, myself included of course.

 

What does a crowd funded sequel, another appeal to nostalgia wait to tell us? the same? anything?

[Karkarov]

What does a crowd funded sequel, another appeal to nostalgia wait to tell us? the same? anything?

Well I have no idea, because I think a Eternity 2 kickstarter would be less an appeal to nostalgia and more an appeal to fans of Eternity 1.  Considering that game came out like a year ago I can't see appealing to it's fans as being "nostalgia" driven.  That would be like saying Madden 2017 is running a "nostalgia" campaign in it's commercials for fans of Madden 2016.

 

Your analysis is interesting and a great read.  I think it is flawed, but that doesn't change the fact that they are interesting observations.  That said if you want to see a game that is REALLY about nostalgia and driven exclusively by that.... you need to look at something like Beamdog's new Baldur's Gate 1/2 bridging game Siege of Dragonspear.  That is what a game meant purely to appeal to fans of an old gaming series or style looks like.  Eternity wanted to pay respects to old infinity engine games but it was also trying to do a lot of new things as well.

[aluminiumtrioxid]

 

another thread entitled 'NegativeEdges sophomoric reading of PoE" 

 

 

Do want.

[verminus]

Hi guys, 

We don’t want to be too intrusive with self-promotion, so I don’t want to create a new thread. As we've promised in the news about Pillars of Eternity II, here is our full interview with Feargus. Enjoy!

http://www.gamepressure.com/e.asp?ID=720

[Kingsman]

Hi guys, 

We don’t want to be too intrusive with self-promotion, so I don’t want to create a new thread. As we've promised in the news about Pillars of Eternity II, here is our full interview with Feargus. Enjoy!

http://www.gamepressure.com/e.asp?ID=720

Thank god you didn't create a new thread because there was about 10 words relevant to POE 2 in that interview.

[Jarmo]

Hope they are not banking on anything near the success of PoE1 kickstarter.

I'll treat it as a regular preorder, with a caveat that the game will be -50% when I get around to play it.

[Kingsman]

How long do you think before it will be released?

 

Since they are using the same engine as pillars 1 I'm hoping not long.

[TheisEjsing]

I honestly don't care the slightest how and why OE chooses to run a kickstarter for PoE 2. They delivered on PoE, so extra crowdfunding for a better game is fine by me. I'll throw in a buck o'five for sure. 

[Yosharian]

I'd like to echo the excitement of others, and cast my vote to use crowdfunding again. Hopefully this time Obsidian won't make the mistake of TWO large cities.

 

 

(Twin Elms looked fantastic, but that didn't prevent it from hampering the pacing of the game -- the game needs to start linear, open up midway, and then *narrow* again towards the end.)

 

 

However, I do wish to make one plea to Obsidian:

 

Please, please, please do *not* spend time redesigning the engine, graphics, etc. from scratch!

 

One of the major benefits of the IE games was the ability of BG2 to reuse the assets and code from BG and TOTSC -- and, for that matter, PST and IWD. Orogs, Conugons, Myconids...

 

Contrast that with Bioware's approach to Dragon Age II.

 

Many of us would have been more than satisfied with DA:O's graphics and gameplay, with development gone to *added* creatures, maps, stories.

 

Instead, they rebuilt everything from the ground-up -- even the models of the basic Darkspawn were changed. And we all know how that affected the writing, quests, and maps (or single map, in the case of the dungeons).

 

And then, with Inquisition, they switched engines yet again!

Couldn't agree more with this statement. Absolutely love the current art style, the graphics don't need much improvement at all.

[Gender Nihilist]

 

 

another thread entitled 'NegativeEdges sophomoric reading of PoE" 

 

 

Do want.

 

Ditto tbqh