Will Obsidian be doing anything about the absolutely retarded amount of stun/prone/etc spam?

[Wormerine]

 

 

 

"Project Eternity aims to bring back the magic from Baldur's Gate..."

 

and what exactly do you think that means?

It means that they deliberatly marketed the game based on nostalgia for Baldur's Gate. They knew *damn* well what they were doing. It was Bernaysian marketing--make the people *feel* like they'll get their old sense of fun back even if they logically know it's not the same game.

It's like a beer commercial where they show a guy drinking this brand of beer and then suddenly surround by sexy women taking off their clothes. They don't *say* that drinking their beer will make you get laid, but you, me, and they all know what they're saying.

This isn't secret ****. This is Marketing 101.

all of which makes the "spiritual successor" bit meaningless.  is not a promise o'... anything.   obsidian were guilty o' attempting to use nostalgia for bg to sell poe? *feigned shock* 

 

review: obsidian never said "spiritual successor" and 'ccording to you, the bg magic bit is akin to using hot chicks to sell beer?  

 

...

 

in parlance you might be familiar with, you is doing a terrible job o' selling us on the notion o' "spiritual successor" being more than shibboleth.

 

HA! Good Fun!

Ehh.... not the most distunguished and trustworthy source but it will do. Googling a term is more than you can be bothered to do apparently.

 

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spiritual_successor

[Katarack21]

Spiritual successor doesn't continue because people are fools; it continues because the ideas and concepts--the tropes--behind it are useful manipulative techniques.

 

Obsidian deliberately drew a connection between PoE and BG, and they also deliberately marketed a campaign based around the nostalgia tropes. Given both these things, they knew a certain portion of their consumer base would naturally associate PoE as the "spiritual successor of BG" without the having to explicitly make the statement themselves.

 

Doing it this way is more powerful than saying it directly because the end belief *feels* like something you came to yourself, when really it's deliberately engineered.

[PizzaSHARK]

 

Gromnir, you're just wrong about the spiritual successor thing, man.  Just give it up.  You might see it as a shibboleh or nonsense, but there's no way you can deny that Obsidian banked on nostalgia and explicitly played to perceived demand for a successor to the Infinity Engine games... much like inXile did with Wasteland 2, and then Torment: Tides of Numenera.

 

In regards to a squad based tactical game, none of the Infinity Engine games (or Pillars, or even inXile's Wasteland 2 really) have been any good at it, but that's never really been the focus.  Pillars definitely has more tactical complexity than BG1, but is about on par with BG2 (and BG2 honestly didn't have much outside of a byzantine spell system.)  Again, that's part of why I think PotD is so pointless and why it seems like Obsidian felt compelled to spam stuns and hard disables everywhere in the game (both from players and against players) to try and make combat more "exciting."  The lack of terrain features, any sort of cover or concealment mechanics etc, removes a huge swathe of tactical considerations and features from the playbook and results in most fights being straight up brawls.  This isn't really aided by Pillars, oddly, having virtually no way of talking your way out of a fight (unlike the games it was inspired by, though the Infinity Engine games were also rather combat-heavy and light on the non-combat stuff.)

kinda missing the point on shibboleth.  first, obsidian never said it, but more important, as we keep repeating, it means nothing to say "spiritual successor."  in the bit kat21 left out o' his quote, there were mention o' iwd and planescape as well.  so, if the "magic" bit is indeed akin to "spiritual successor," then poe were intended to be the spiritual successor o' three different games.  use Gromnir's quote from kickstarter and poe becomes spiritual successor o' all the old roleplay games obsidian developers liked to play? perhaps somebody has claimed the new mummy movie is the spiritual successor o' all the old-timey horror and monster films folks like.  uh, ok. what exact is the point o' being the spiritual successor o' multiple games.  oh, and bg already had a spiritual successor: bg2.  

 

am thinking you don't know what is shibboleth, but suggesting there is some kinda fundamental quality o' a "spiritual successor" is silly  and revealing something 'bout those who use the phrase as 'posed to having any meaningful use in game development discussions.  kat 21 accurate likens the use o' phrase to the inclusion o' hot girls in beer commercials.  he/she is correct.  the girls don't reveal anything 'bout the qualities o' the beer. even the dumbest purchasers is not gonna expect hot girls to sudden become attracted to a purchaser o' beer. so, you are the guy actual buying the beer for the hot girls? the shibboleth in question is, at best, nostalgia inducing puffery when it is utilized... not that obsidian did use. furthermore, what is the qualities o' a spiritual successor?  do you know?  is it possible for anybody hearing you says "spiritual successor" to know what essential qualities you is referencing?  no? then is not a particular useful descriptor.  

 

you, like others, has globbed onto a meaningless turn o' phrase that obsidian never even used.  congrats on dragging out and proving shibboleth.

 

as for the second half o' your post, you gotta recognize you is marginalizing self, yes?  Gromnir were in fact responding to your complaint 'bout surfeit o' tactical depth. fine.  you not see poe or or the ie games or wasteland 2 as particular good examples o' squad-based tactical combat in rpgs.  again, fine.  given such low opinion o' poe tactical combat, why are you so fixated on a graze mechanic in potd? makes no sense to us whatsoever.  the potd feature is an extreme cheap way for obsidian to give the hardcore player a bit o' a challenge.  is not 'posed to be balanced.  your complaint is becoming increasing nonsensical.

 

again, am in agreement that 'cause o' potd increased mobs and bloated foe accuracy, a handful o' encounters involving enemies which confer debilitating status effects become significant more difficult than other trash mobs. for reasons stated ad nauseum in previous posts, your solutions to an extreme limited problem strike us as impractical and excessive.  am doubting we are gonna reach agreement.

 

The point of why it's an indefensible mechanic design is not because it can't be beat but because the solution is narrow yet required.

 

if you ask ten different potd players how they deal with stuns, you are likely to get at least five different answers.  one o' the good things 'bout poe is the wide range o' player options. the game has many abilities and synergies.  assuming a solution is narrow is a mistake.

 

HA! Good Fun!

 

 

But only one or two of those answers will actually be seen as viable.  "I just let my one dude take half his health in damage while I spam spells to keep him alive" is certainly a viable way of dealing with stunlocking but it's not exactly the most efficient or effective.

 

Pillars' tactical options become increasingly narrow the harder you make the game.

[rjshae]

Having no stun abilities, or having them be too weak to ever be noticeable, would also be rather disappointing. To me the only question is whether they were so overpowering or ubiquitous to be a pain, and my opinion is they weren't, in general - but that it was not a great move to let grazes/crits linearly reduce/extend disabling effects, and some other system could be beneficial.

 

Agreed. I'd say grazes of disabling effects should merely be debilitating: strong enough to allow a sneak attack from a rogue, but not strong enough to prevent all actions.

[George_Truman]

gitgudgitgudgitgudgitgudgitgudgitgudgitgudgitgudgitgudgitgudgitgudgitgudgitgudgitgudgitgudgitgudgitgudgitgudgitgudgitgud

[Nail]

 

 

Playing through Pillars 1 again on PotD and I'd apparently forgotten about just how retarded the amount of stun or other hard control spam there is in this game.  Phantoms that stun on hit, every hit.  Returning Storm and Relentless Storm that stack with each other, do high damage in an AOE, and stun on every hit.  Wizards can paralyze for a long duration at low level with high accuracy, Chill Fog blinds and damages in a massive AOE at level 1.

 

It's kind of insane.  I don't know how anyone that plays tabletop games consistently could possibly have thought this was a good idea - "save or suck" is one of the most enduring problems in tabletop RPG design, and it's like they tried to maximize that problem in Pillars.  Maybe it's just a PotD thing, when monsters have enough HP and stats that they don't just fall over when the player farts in their general direction.

 

Regardless, has Obsidian said anything about this?  I recall reading that they admitted that Phantoms were a mistake, or at least that they appeared too early in the game... but the stun-happy Phantoms are just a symptom of a larger problem.  Do we know if they'll be focusing on addressing that problem for Pillars 2, or can we expect it to also be a game with awful gameplay balance like Pillars 1 and Tyranny?

Dude. If it's too hard just give up.

 

 

Or just turn down the difficulty. I really don't get acheivement hunters

 

[Nail]

The lenguath were frickin easy to beat and so where the phantoms in the starting town and caed nua.

 

As soon as I came across encounters on POTD that where to difficult I just adventured elsewhere and came back when I was a higher level.

 

Having harder encounters is an important part of theses games and this thread should be deleted if you ask me. Stupid post.

Idk why you've put Llengrath to easy ones, for me it was the hardest (solo)

Phantoms in Caed Nua - only few of classes can beat them solo, better to stealth out.

[algroth]

 

The lenguath were frickin easy to beat and so where the phantoms in the starting town and caed nua.

 

As soon as I came across encounters on POTD that where to difficult I just adventured elsewhere and came back when I was a higher level.

 

Having harder encounters is an important part of theses games and this thread should be deleted if you ask me. Stupid post.

Idk why you've put Llengrath to easy ones, for me it was the hardest (solo)

Phantoms in Caed Nua - only few of classes can beat them solo, better to stealth out.

 

I think he meant lagufaeth, that being the Pillars equivalent to the sahuagin, instead of Llengrath. I think those were pretty easy to beat myself.

[rjshae]

 

 

The lenguath were frickin easy to beat and so where the phantoms in the starting town and caed nua.

 

As soon as I came across encounters on POTD that where to difficult I just adventured elsewhere and came back when I was a higher level.

 

Having harder encounters is an important part of theses games and this thread should be deleted if you ask me. Stupid post.

Idk why you've put Llengrath to easy ones, for me it was the hardest (solo)

Phantoms in Caed Nua - only few of classes can beat them solo, better to stealth out.

 

I think he meant lagufaeth, that being the Pillars equivalent to the sahuagin, instead of Llengrath. I think those were pretty easy to beat myself.

 

It depended a lot on your level. For me they started out being quite a challenge, and by the time I'd leveled up a bunch they were trivially easy.

[Nail]

 

 

The lenguath were frickin easy to beat and so where the phantoms in the starting town and caed nua.

 

As soon as I came across encounters on POTD that where to difficult I just adventured elsewhere and came back when I was a higher level.

 

Having harder encounters is an important part of theses games and this thread should be deleted if you ask me. Stupid post.

Idk why you've put Llengrath to easy ones, for me it was the hardest (solo)

Phantoms in Caed Nua - only few of classes can beat them solo, better to stealth out.

 

I think he meant lagufaeth, that being the Pillars equivalent to the sahuagin, instead of Llengrath. I think those were pretty easy to beat myself.

 

Oh, lagufaeth with the paralysis  misunderstood.

Fenwalkers + Wayfarer's Hide all the way!

 

At Llengrath "Form of the Helpless Beast" is much more deadly...

Edited April 17, 2017 by Nail

[PizzaSHARK]

Lagufaeth are pretty tough if you hit WM as soon as you can, when they're equivalent level or sometimes higher level.  They're basically xaurips that aren't complete pushovers.  The sidewinders can pretty easily get 60-70 damage crits on medium armor, and their front liners are generally tanky enough to keep your front liners tied up for a while.  I think I saw Aloth eat a triple digit crit on PotD once.  Poor Aloth.

 

You can basically let the AI handle things against most xaurip groups and even the ogres as you enter town, the lagus are when **** gets real and the player needs to start paying attention again.  It can come as a bit of a surprise.  I wouldn't really call them problematic, though, because even if you hit WM right away, you have enough levels and equipment (slicken, scroll of paralysis, etc) that you have a decent size toolbox to work with.

 

At the time you're facing phantoms, you have very little to work with (maybe just 2-4 elemental protection potions that wear off as soon as combat ends.)

Edited April 18, 2017 by PizzaSHARK