They're really superb that they have managed to get the new Beta version for Christmas. It's a very fine move!
It comes as a surprise after those words: " I wouldn't expect that a new backer beta build will come out until the week after Christmas" and really shows they try to their utmost for all their supporters.
So, as Cluas said on the PoE forum, "Yessssssssss !!"
I've heard end of march for release, also reaffirmed with a guidebook you can purchase i think was 24 march it said. i can't recall which forum i saw the link on.
I've heard end of march for release, also reaffirmed with a guidebook you can purchase i think was 24 march it said. i can't recall which forum i saw the link on.
One question – the most important single question I had about the game – needed an answer. An answer that would either shatter or galvanise my high hopes for Pillars of Eternity.
If you right click on a magical item in your inventory does the game display a little blurb about the item and a brief biography of its prior owners?
What?? I can't hear you over playing Elite: Dangerous!!
Okay, seriously though...yeah, I got that email too. Should give me enough time to finally get bored with Elite and look for a new game to play obsessively.
Then again, I can't see me getting bored with Elite any time soon! Also, I still haven't tried Dragon Age: Inquisition yet. Farewell, dear social life...
Anthony Davis, a video-game developer that was involved in programming Neverwinter Nights 2 and is credited as a member of the Programming team for Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic II: The Sith Lords, has recently published a solid and detailed review of PoE. This review can be better in quality than the majority of usual sites' and magazines' ones.
"My Background: I've played all of the IE games. I'm a fan of the IE games because of what they were in that time period, not because they were DnD. In other words, they were quality RPGs breaking new ground. I have good memories of playing these games, but I also recognize that they also had some flaws.
When I play DnD, I do not get consumed by the rules and mechanics, I do not purposefully seek out ways to 'game' the system or to min max my characters. I actually prefer flawed characters. On a related note, this is one of the biggest challenges with a CRPG versus a PnP RPG - the lack of a Human Gamemaster who can tune games. For example, my campaign I was running recently was centered around a party of con-artists who masqueraded as circus performers - so they weren't walking around with heavy platemail and two handed swords. Most of them work leather breastplates or chain shirts - or no armor. Try doing that in a CRPG and see how far you get. Anyway...
My Expectations: I was not an Obsidian employee when I backed the game, but I love Obsidian and I like to be honest. So to be honest, I probably would have backed anything Obsidian put up on the kickstarter. A RTwP game would not be my first choice if I was calling the shots - I prefer TB, but I backed it anyway because again, I love Obsidian."
"The Companions: I only found Edar the fighter, Aloth the wizard, Kana the chanter, Durance the skeevy healer, and Sigani the ranger. I liked them all, even though Durance is skeevy and creepy. I thought the voice acting was good to great, and the stories, what I found, were pretty interesting.
Character Creation: I liked the details and all the various things I could select for my character and how they affected their stats and starting equipment. This has already been improved since my first run through. I wish there were more and varied backgrounds, but the backgrounds do come up at minor conversation points. I also wish there were more portraits. One, Obsidian is working on getting more portraits, and 2, we support custom portraits. So while I wish there were more, it is a fixable problem.
Graphics: The game looks good to me. It's like a mash up of IE and ToEE. I like the capes, I like that there are several variant looks for the same armors - if you can find them. I loved that I could give my ranger a sweet shirt, a dueling cap, and an arquebus and he looked like a musketeer. The spell effects were nice.
Combat: This is a sticky point for some of the more vocal friends/haters/trolls/fanboys/etc. of the game. To me, and I understand this is my opinion, it felt like IE - which is not the same thing as saying it felt like DnD. I set my controls up so that WASD moved the camera, and Tab highlighted stuff. I set my pause options up so that the game paused when and enemy appeared and some other settings I don't remember specifically. When I found an enemy (or enemies) the game would pause, I would issue combat and move orders. I would then unpause and let things commence. I would pause and adjust the orders as the situation required. The engagement system seems to work, unless it's a surprise, or I make a mistake, and I can mostly keep my squishies protected. Ranged enemies seem to target my squishies about as much or more than they target melee, which can be a trick - but it's not too bad.
While learning the system on my first playthrough, there was quite a bit of quickloading or forced loading. For example, when you finish the starter dungeon, you are alone as you make for the Gilded Vale. If you think that your solo character can take on a giant brown bear, or 3 bandits, or three wovles with knockdown abilites, all by yourself you will be reloading - unless you play on the easiest setting - and even then... maybe you are going to die.
So what I am saying is that you can wander into areas and fights that you most likely will not win. Fleeing mechanics are difficult and in some cases, impossible, so a reload will be required. In one sense this is good and realistic, in another sense - RPGs, with few exceptions, have taught me that while party members are great, my lone hero can face roll level scaling armies. It was kind of refreshing. It is not as unforgiving as AoD, which is another RPG where your hero is not Superman, but it is similar and makes the attempt.
To wrap up combat, I would have preferred TB, but I didn't have any qualms. Combat also got a LOT more fun for me once I started to get better equipment and I gave my ranger an arquebus. Sure it takes 7 seconds to fire, and it's inaccurate, but I like the alpha damage and it looks cool."
"Bugs: Yeap, there were quite a few. To be fair, I encountered ZERO story breaking critical path bugs. I did encounter quite a few UI bugs, most of which have already been fixed. Actually, the review build I got yesterday already had fixed almost every issue I had reported over the Christmas break - and there are still months left to fix issues***."
***The review was published on Tuesday.
"The Dungeons.
I really enjoyed the dungeon crawls in the game. The Catacombs, the temple of Wodica, Od Nua, the sewers beneath Lord Rudric's castle. All good. Full of traps, monsters, and other good things.
There are more than than, those are just the ones I could remember the names for."
"How many hours of gameplay are there? I don't remember how big either BG1 or BG2 was. I do remember spending over 200 hours on BG2 - PoE is not as big as that.
After about 20 hours I was still in the beginning of Act 2. There was still a ton of stuff to do in Act 2.
Before the break, the PoE team did a week long playthrough. Only two people beat it in 5 days on playing. One just went as fast as he could to get to the BAD ending - and it took almost 30 hours. The other player knew the crit path like the back of his hand, and ONLY did the critical path and skipped through everything as fast as he could. He took about 25 hours.
I would GUESS that the average player would take 30 to 40 hours for their first playthrough if they do not skip the side content. It could take longer."
"Resting. On my first playthrough, things got type a couple of times because I was out of camping supplies (you can only carry 4) and I was in the middle of a dungeon. Sometimes you can find camping supplies as loot too. So far in my second playthrough I've been able to handle it a bit better. The mechanic feels good - it didn't aggravate me and it encouraged me to spend my resources wisely. Spell use is only reset after resting - it isn't an encounter power like most melee skills.
I only had to rest a couple of times due to fatigue. There are conversation/scripted events, the ones that are fullscreen and painted, where I didn't have the athletics to do something well and my party ended up fatigued as a result. Sometimes if you travel around a bunch on the map and the dive into a dungeon you might get into trouble. Minor fatigue isn't too bad. Major fatigue is dangerous. The system didn't bother me at all. I think it is easily manageable and the athletics skill also seem to improves your resistance (so to speak) to fatigue."
"Stealth. Stealth is DEFINITELY useful. You find hidden areas and traps in stealth mode. You can disarm traps and place traps in stealth mode. You can snipe and crit dudes from stealth mode.
Is it required? Probably not.
Is it useful? Very much so."
"Interesting combats. There are mushroom colonies that were a bit chaotic and fun. The little mushroom people are super fast and swarm the party while the larger stationary mushrooms inflict range damage and status effects. @lolien@OneAngryMushroom
The final boss fight versus a certain ruler in a throne room was challenging.
I had a fight versus 6 forest trolls. I didn't even had 6 party members for that fight! There was some scrambling for that fight - mostly from Durance who was trying to heal the melee guys while keeping his distance from a troll that the melee couldn't pick up.
Most fights are memorable though because it is the culmination of a quest or story line. I'm sure there are better and more memorable fights."
"Game balance. I *think* Josh's goal is for every class to feel viable but different. His goal is *not* for every class to do the same thing.
Is the game too balanced? Hard for me to say... what would a game that is too balanced look like? Can you give me an example of a game or a mechanic that is too balanced?
So far, I've only played the ranger and the rogue. The rogue is primarily a damage dealer. My rogue seems to do that very well. He also can handle the sneakier job requirements.
My first playthrough with the ranger, I had my struggles with the damage side(till I got him an arquebus), but my bear could tank quite well usually. Rangers have been overhauled though since I last played them - so I'm not sure where they're at.
Some classes can do several things decently, for example Fighters can be heavy alpha damage hitters, tanks, or dps machines - or some combination. For example, in my party Edir carriers a polearm in one weapon set and a sword and board in the other for when things get rough. Kana on the other hand, is big and beefy and has my best armor and trinkets - he also wields "Justice", a magic 2-hander and he has no second weapon set that I use. While Kana gets hurt more easily than Edir, the two of them can hold off a ton of dudes.
Hard counters are one of the things I agree with Josh about, I wasn't a fan of hard counters either. There were some hard-ish counters I enjoyed, like Turn Undead, and it is in the game."
"Voice-acting. I don't know if *ALL* the voice work was in, but it seemed like a decent amount. I focused mainly on listening to the companions and I thought they were great."
"Wilderness areas. I liked the wilderness areas. I think some of them look really, really impressive. Especially when you remind yourself that, "Wow, that's actually 2d." Encounters for sure were mostly hostile, but I know I've run into some that were not.
I mean it is The Wilderness after all, that's where monsters lurk."
"Enchanting. I didn't use crafting much at all, I did however use Enchanting. You get reagents all over the place. Animals drop them, monsters drop them, you find them growing, etc. You Stronghold eventually can produce them. I liked enchanting." Remember M&M, @BelgarathMTH : )
"Writing and flaws. I found the vast majority of the writing interesting. From novels about the world and gods, to the bloody notes from some unfortunate soul that met his sticky end.
Largest flaw in the game?
THERE ARE NO FLAWS - THE GAME IS PERFECT!
Let's see - the UI had some jank in it when I played it over Christmas break. Almost all of that has been fixed.
I guess right now, for me, the biggest flaw that can be corrected at this point, is not enough portraits. Thankfully there are solutions and I believe the team is going to add some more portraits.
If I had to pick a happy-happy dreamland thing to change, or "flaw" to correct, it would be to make it TB. That's not going to happen - and personally for me, the game is still fun and interesting enough even with RtwP - just like IE games and Darklands."
"Melee fighters. They have different abilities, for example:
Rogues, for example, seem to be really good at adding status effects and the capitalizing on those status effects. Fighters are good at tanking and taking hits. Barbarians are good at AoE melee."
If I haven't been sold 100 times already, I would definitely be now.
That doesn't look anything like BG...the characters don't change weapon hands every time they change their orientation!!
I have to say, much as I liked BG, I hated the avatars you were stuck with. I think they were meant to look bronze age/Roman, but the setting was far more renaissance. I'm glad that these characters' outfits look a bit more true to the late-medieval setting.
Actually, that's one of the things that's bugged me about RPGs for ages, and in a way, I wish I had never gotten into re-enactment, because it's made me look at these things far more critically. I can no longer look at an illustration and think "Wow, cool armour!". Now, I think "Come on, how is that staying on? Why has he got a random bit of leather there? What is the purpose of this thing? Who made this armour, and why??"
Luckily for me, I think Obsidian have made an effort to be more historically accurate with stuff - both naming and in appearance. From what I've seen, the weapons and armour look quite good, and true to life.
This is an answer I probably find to be the most significant:
"And the weakness of hard counter design is that it forces players to build their parties and even individual characters around encounter limitations that they often can only appreciate in retrospect. Not only does it require prescience/metagaming, but it limits the players’ ability to build the parties that they want to build. I have talked about this before, but I think it’s important to talk about again.
If you don’t want to have a priest in your party, I don’t want you to be forced to take a priest in your party. If you don’t want a rogue in your party, I don’t want you to be forced to do that either. We have made a game with 11 classes that, through Abilities and Talents, can be built in several different ways. Every time we say, “No, you HAVE to use this class ability/spell here” we are narrowing your options for how you build your parties and the characters within them.
In Icewind Dale II, we did not have hard counter spell battle puzzles. We also generally didn’t rely on that many save-or-die effects (there is a “Tactics” mod that changes this). This approach (and a quasi-3E rulest) allowed people to build a relatively wide range of parties and character types within those parties. Because the scenarios typically did not require prior knowledge of what was going to unfold, players could usually react and adapt in the middle of a battle with the tools they had brought.
If we had required hard counters, it would have resulted in fights that could not be overcome without a reload and metagame re-arrangement of spells/abilities or, worse yet, a reconstruction of the party.
Pillars of Eternity is a game that strongly features tactical combat, but it’s first and foremost a role-playing game that encourages you to build a character of your choosing and play through the story as you see fit. After the introduction of the game, you are never required to take companions, much less specific companions or specific classes.
If you hate Pallegina, I don’t want you to feel like it’s necessary to for you to take her because some paladin ability is vital to winning important fights. If you want to make a party of wizards, I want you to be able to do that. If you want to make a party with NO wizards, I want you to be able to do that. If you want to solo the game (which will probably be pretty hard regardless of class), I don’t want you to hit a roadblock where we say “Sorry, you’re never going to get by here unless there’s a wizard in the party with Move Earth memorized.”
" I wrote the first iterations of two companions (Durance and the Grieving Mother, who have been scaled down to about ¼ of what they were originally, and the Grieving Mother’s mental dungeon was excised as well, which was essentially a stealth adventure game inside her memories)."
I like him so much! All his ideas seem brilliant! I hope we'll see something similar in Torment. "The Mental dungeon sounds very PST-ey.
If we had required hard counters, it would have resulted in fights that could not be overcome without a reload and metagame re-arrangement of spells/abilities or, worse yet, a reconstruction of the party.
This was actually one of the few criticisms I have of the Baldur's Gate games...the fact that you had to have certain spells in your repertoire to win certain fights, that you couldn't reasonably expect to know were coming unless you'd played through it before (or read about it on a forum).
Case in point: the infamous Kangaxx (how do you kill him by the way? (for those who don't know, this was one of the most asked questions on PBG, to the point where it became a joke to ask how to kill him) ). Of all the protection from magic spells, you had to just know that you needed a specific one, and when you knew you needed it, there was no way to get it if you didn't already have it, other than to reload and somehow know that you need a spell that you've never needed before. I'm sure some hardcore gamer will disagree with me here (somebody on the Obsidian forum tried to make the case that the game was preparing you for certain eventualities by throwing wizards with those kinds of spells at you but, really, with so many spells that are only useful in one situation, and so few spell slots...), but I think it was virtually impossible for normal people to do that fight first time around without any prior knowledge of the encounter.
The only potential problem with making it so universally do-able, however, is that it might end up being too easy. Compare liches from NWN with those from BG...the ones in Neverwinter were pathetic by comparison.
What? hackNslash? No way! Did you try the beta? If not, then I'll share my experience.
There's a party of 4 or 5 wild druids on the area next to the starting one in the beta version. And I tell you: there's absolutely no chance you can win this battle without constant pausing the game and changing orders.
Another example. In the dungeon on the first beta location there're two ordinary human enemies. Even your party of 5 characters will lose to them if you don't micro-manage.
The amount of abilities and spells of your characters in this game is immense. Every literally second you should check if there's some new command you can give to your characters.
The battle in PoE is as far from hackNslash as possible. Without thinking you won't win easily even against a pack of lions. And all this is relevant even to the easy difficulty.
So, @ameliaboggins , I advice you not to think the way you did. As soon as you begin playing this game, it feels like a great RPG. The number of information, dialogues, lore is immense. I needed 3 hours only to talk to everyone and to read everything in the starting beta location, and this even without starting any fights at all.
If you can't try the beta, you can watch the videos of this game once more.
Comments
It comes as a surprise after those words: " I wouldn't expect that a new backer beta build will come out until the week after Christmas" and really shows they try to their utmost for all their supporters.
So, as Cluas said on the PoE forum, "Yessssssssss !!"
Here's a pretty good video of how the game currently works in beta v392:
And I must say, with this new patch, they have gotten much closer, than I thought they ever would...
A very nice preview:)
One question – the most important single question I had about the game – needed an answer. An answer that would either shatter or galvanise my high hopes for Pillars of Eternity.
If you right click on a magical item in your inventory does the game display a little blurb about the item and a brief biography of its prior owners?
The answer is “yes”.
Oh yes. So much yes.
Looks like we have a release date!
March 26th, 2015!
Okay, seriously though...yeah, I got that email too. Should give me enough time to finally get bored with Elite and look for a new game to play obsessively.
Then again, I can't see me getting bored with Elite any time soon! Also, I still haven't tried Dragon Age: Inquisition yet. Farewell, dear social life...
I actually can't believe we've heard the final date. It's hard to believe it's finally happening, after all these months...
I just look at these screenshots and see BG in them, so much BG...
Guys and ladies! Am I dreaming?
2 months should be plenty of time to decide what class to play first right?
Right...?
Thanks @bengoshi those pictures are stunning.
mega spoilers (and crickets)
http://www.twitch.tv/paradoxinteractive/b/611493909
He's not on the PoE project, but he has a vested interest in it as a gamer, a backer, and an Obsidian employee. So... (I'll try to leave the spoilers out, the whole review with unmarked spoilers can be found on http://www.rpgcodex.net/forums/index.php?threads/anthony-davis-pillars-of-eternity-full-game-impressions-unmarked-spoilers.96472/ )
"My Background:
I've played all of the IE games. I'm a fan of the IE games because of what they were in that time period, not because they were DnD. In other words, they were quality RPGs breaking new ground. I have good memories of playing these games, but I also recognize that they also had some flaws.
When I play DnD, I do not get consumed by the rules and mechanics, I do not purposefully seek out ways to 'game' the system or to min max my characters. I actually prefer flawed characters. On a related note, this is one of the biggest challenges with a CRPG versus a PnP RPG - the lack of a Human Gamemaster who can tune games. For example, my campaign I was running recently was centered around a party of con-artists who masqueraded as circus performers - so they weren't walking around with heavy platemail and two handed swords. Most of them work leather breastplates or chain shirts - or no armor. Try doing that in a CRPG and see how far you get. Anyway...
My Expectations:
I was not an Obsidian employee when I backed the game, but I love Obsidian and I like to be honest. So to be honest, I probably would have backed anything Obsidian put up on the kickstarter. A RTwP game would not be my first choice if I was calling the shots - I prefer TB, but I backed it anyway because again, I love Obsidian."
"The Companions: I only found Edar the fighter, Aloth the wizard, Kana the chanter, Durance the skeevy healer, and Sigani the ranger. I liked them all, even though Durance is skeevy and creepy. I thought the voice acting was good to great, and the stories, what I found, were pretty interesting.
Character Creation: I liked the details and all the various things I could select for my character and how they affected their stats and starting equipment. This has already been improved since my first run through. I wish there were more and varied backgrounds, but the backgrounds do come up at minor conversation points. I also wish there were more portraits. One, Obsidian is working on getting more portraits, and 2, we support custom portraits. So while I wish there were more, it is a fixable problem.
Graphics: The game looks good to me. It's like a mash up of IE and ToEE. I like the capes, I like that there are several variant looks for the same armors - if you can find them. I loved that I could give my ranger a sweet shirt, a dueling cap, and an arquebus and he looked like a musketeer. The spell effects were nice.
Combat: This is a sticky point for some of the more vocal friends/haters/trolls/fanboys/etc. of the game. To me, and I understand this is my opinion, it felt like IE - which is not the same thing as saying it felt like DnD.
I set my controls up so that WASD moved the camera, and Tab highlighted stuff. I set my pause options up so that the game paused when and enemy appeared and some other settings I don't remember specifically.
When I found an enemy (or enemies) the game would pause, I would issue combat and move orders. I would then unpause and let things commence. I would pause and adjust the orders as the situation required. The engagement system seems to work, unless it's a surprise, or I make a mistake, and I can mostly keep my squishies protected. Ranged enemies seem to target my squishies about as much or more than they target melee, which can be a trick - but it's not too bad.
While learning the system on my first playthrough, there was quite a bit of quickloading or forced loading. For example, when you finish the starter dungeon, you are alone as you make for the Gilded Vale. If you think that your solo character can take on a giant brown bear, or 3 bandits, or three wovles with knockdown abilites, all by yourself you will be reloading - unless you play on the easiest setting - and even then... maybe you are going to die.
So what I am saying is that you can wander into areas and fights that you most likely will not win. Fleeing mechanics are difficult and in some cases, impossible, so a reload will be required. In one sense this is good and realistic, in another sense - RPGs, with few exceptions, have taught me that while party members are great, my lone hero can face roll level scaling armies. It was kind of refreshing. It is not as unforgiving as AoD, which is another RPG where your hero is not Superman, but it is similar and makes the attempt.
To wrap up combat, I would have preferred TB, but I didn't have any qualms. Combat also got a LOT more fun for me once I started to get better equipment and I gave my ranger an arquebus. Sure it takes 7 seconds to fire, and it's inaccurate, but I like the alpha damage and it looks cool."
"Bugs: Yeap, there were quite a few. To be fair, I encountered ZERO story breaking critical path bugs. I did encounter quite a few UI bugs, most of which have already been fixed. Actually, the review build I got yesterday already had fixed almost every issue I had reported over the Christmas break - and there are still months left to fix issues***."
***The review was published on Tuesday.
"The Dungeons.
I really enjoyed the dungeon crawls in the game. The Catacombs, the temple of Wodica, Od Nua, the sewers beneath Lord Rudric's castle. All good. Full of traps, monsters, and other good things.
There are more than than, those are just the ones I could remember the names for."
"How many hours of gameplay are there? I don't remember how big either BG1 or BG2 was. I do remember spending over 200 hours on BG2 - PoE is not as big as that.
After about 20 hours I was still in the beginning of Act 2. There was still a ton of stuff to do in Act 2.
Before the break, the PoE team did a week long playthrough. Only two people beat it in 5 days on playing. One just went as fast as he could to get to the BAD ending - and it took almost 30 hours. The other player knew the crit path like the back of his hand, and ONLY did the critical path and skipped through everything as fast as he could. He took about 25 hours.
I would GUESS that the average player would take 30 to 40 hours for their first playthrough if they do not skip the side content. It could take longer."
"Resting. On my first playthrough, things got type a couple of times because I was out of camping supplies (you can only carry 4) and I was in the middle of a dungeon. Sometimes you can find camping supplies as loot too. So far in my second playthrough I've been able to handle it a bit better. The mechanic feels good - it didn't aggravate me and it encouraged me to spend my resources wisely. Spell use is only reset after resting - it isn't an encounter power like most melee skills.
I only had to rest a couple of times due to fatigue. There are conversation/scripted events, the ones that are fullscreen and painted, where I didn't have the athletics to do something well and my party ended up fatigued as a result. Sometimes if you travel around a bunch on the map and the dive into a dungeon you might get into trouble. Minor fatigue isn't too bad. Major fatigue is dangerous. The system didn't bother me at all. I think it is easily manageable and the athletics skill also seem to improves your resistance (so to speak) to fatigue."
"Stealth. Stealth is DEFINITELY useful. You find hidden areas and traps in stealth mode. You can disarm traps and place traps in stealth mode. You can snipe and crit dudes from stealth mode.
Is it required? Probably not.
Is it useful? Very much so."
"Interesting combats. There are mushroom colonies that were a bit chaotic and fun. The little mushroom people are super fast and swarm the party while the larger stationary mushrooms inflict range damage and status effects. @lolien @OneAngryMushroom
The final boss fight versus a certain ruler in a throne room was challenging.
I had a fight versus 6 forest trolls. I didn't even had 6 party members for that fight! There was some scrambling for that fight - mostly from Durance who was trying to heal the melee guys while keeping his distance from a troll that the melee couldn't pick up.
Most fights are memorable though because it is the culmination of a quest or story line. I'm sure there are better and more memorable fights."
"Game balance. I *think* Josh's goal is for every class to feel viable but different. His goal is *not* for every class to do the same thing.
Is the game too balanced? Hard for me to say... what would a game that is too balanced look like? Can you give me an example of a game or a mechanic that is too balanced?
So far, I've only played the ranger and the rogue. The rogue is primarily a damage dealer. My rogue seems to do that very well. He also can handle the sneakier job requirements.
My first playthrough with the ranger, I had my struggles with the damage side(till I got him an arquebus), but my bear could tank quite well usually. Rangers have been overhauled though since I last played them - so I'm not sure where they're at.
Some classes can do several things decently, for example Fighters can be heavy alpha damage hitters, tanks, or dps machines - or some combination. For example, in my party Edir carriers a polearm in one weapon set and a sword and board in the other for when things get rough. Kana on the other hand, is big and beefy and has my best armor and trinkets - he also wields "Justice", a magic 2-hander and he has no second weapon set that I use. While Kana gets hurt more easily than Edir, the two of them can hold off a ton of dudes.
Hard counters are one of the things I agree with Josh about, I wasn't a fan of hard counters either. There were some hard-ish counters I enjoyed, like Turn Undead, and it is in the game."
"Voice-acting. I don't know if *ALL* the voice work was in, but it seemed like a decent amount. I focused mainly on listening to the companions and I thought they were great."
"Wilderness areas. I liked the wilderness areas. I think some of them look really, really impressive. Especially when you remind yourself that, "Wow, that's actually 2d." Encounters for sure were mostly hostile, but I know I've run into some that were not.
I mean it is The Wilderness after all, that's where monsters lurk."
"Enchanting. I didn't use crafting much at all, I did however use Enchanting. You get reagents all over the place. Animals drop them, monsters drop them, you find them growing, etc. You Stronghold eventually can produce them. I liked enchanting." Remember M&M, @BelgarathMTH : )
"Writing and flaws. I found the vast majority of the writing interesting. From novels about the world and gods, to the bloody notes from some unfortunate soul that met his sticky end.
Largest flaw in the game?
THERE ARE NO FLAWS - THE GAME IS PERFECT!
Let's see - the UI had some jank in it when I played it over Christmas break. Almost all of that has been fixed.
I guess right now, for me, the biggest flaw that can be corrected at this point, is not enough portraits. Thankfully there are solutions and I believe the team is going to add some more portraits.
If I had to pick a happy-happy dreamland thing to change, or "flaw" to correct, it would be to make it TB. That's not going to happen - and personally for me, the game is still fun and interesting enough even with RtwP - just like IE games and Darklands."
"Melee fighters. They have different abilities, for example:
Rogues, for example, seem to be really good at adding status effects and the capitalizing on those status effects.
Fighters are good at tanking and taking hits.
Barbarians are good at AoE melee."
If I haven't been sold 100 times already, I would definitely be now.
I have to say, much as I liked BG, I hated the avatars you were stuck with. I think they were meant to look bronze age/Roman, but the setting was far more renaissance. I'm glad that these characters' outfits look a bit more true to the late-medieval setting.
Actually, that's one of the things that's bugged me about RPGs for ages, and in a way, I wish I had never gotten into re-enactment, because it's made me look at these things far more critically. I can no longer look at an illustration and think "Wow, cool armour!". Now, I think "Come on, how is that staying on? Why has he got a random bit of leather there? What is the purpose of this thing? Who made this armour, and why??"
Luckily for me, I think Obsidian have made an effort to be more historically accurate with stuff - both naming and in appearance. From what I've seen, the weapons and armour look quite good, and true to life.
Stunning. Huge pull of nostalgia. And then if the game is easy to mod, oh man..
This is an answer I probably find to be the most significant:
"And the weakness of hard counter design is that it forces players to build their parties and even individual characters around encounter limitations that they often can only appreciate in retrospect. Not only does it require prescience/metagaming, but it limits the players’ ability to build the parties that they want to build. I have talked about this before, but I think it’s important to talk about again.
If you don’t want to have a priest in your party, I don’t want you to be forced to take a priest in your party. If you don’t want a rogue in your party, I don’t want you to be forced to do that either. We have made a game with 11 classes that, through Abilities and Talents, can be built in several different ways. Every time we say, “No, you HAVE to use this class ability/spell here” we are narrowing your options for how you build your parties and the characters within them.
In Icewind Dale II, we did not have hard counter spell battle puzzles. We also generally didn’t rely on that many save-or-die effects (there is a “Tactics” mod that changes this). This approach (and a quasi-3E rulest) allowed people to build a relatively wide range of parties and character types within those parties. Because the scenarios typically did not require prior knowledge of what was going to unfold, players could usually react and adapt in the middle of a battle with the tools they had brought.
If we had required hard counters, it would have resulted in fights that could not be overcome without a reload and metagame re-arrangement of spells/abilities or, worse yet, a reconstruction of the party.
Pillars of Eternity is a game that strongly features tactical combat, but it’s first and foremost a role-playing game that encourages you to build a character of your choosing and play through the story as you see fit. After the introduction of the game, you are never required to take companions, much less specific companions or specific classes.
If you hate Pallegina, I don’t want you to feel like it’s necessary to for you to take her because some paladin ability is vital to winning important fights. If you want to make a party of wizards, I want you to be able to do that. If you want to make a party with NO wizards, I want you to be able to do that. If you want to solo the game (which will probably be pretty hard regardless of class), I don’t want you to hit a roadblock where we say “Sorry, you’re never going to get by here unless there’s a wizard in the party with Move Earth memorized.”
Yay! Exactly what is needed!
In the same time, Chris Avellone has done a Q&A with the RPG Codex: http://www.rpgcodex.net/forums/index.php?threads/chris-avellone-tells-the-codex-about-his-current-work-on-pillars-of-eternity.96561/
" I wrote the first iterations of two companions (Durance and the Grieving Mother, who have been scaled down to about ¼ of what they were originally, and the Grieving Mother’s mental dungeon was excised as well, which was essentially a stealth adventure game inside her memories)."
I like him so much! All his ideas seem brilliant! I hope we'll see something similar in Torment. "The Mental dungeon sounds very PST-ey.
Case in point: the infamous Kangaxx (how do you kill him by the way?
The only potential problem with making it so universally do-able, however, is that it might end up being too easy. Compare liches from NWN with those from BG...the ones in Neverwinter were pathetic by comparison.
too much of an arcade game look.
lacks any real atmosphere imo. Seems like one giant hackNslash fest.
where is the roleplay ? looks like streetfighter set in a fantasy universe.
WOnt be buying it.
There's a party of 4 or 5 wild druids on the area next to the starting one in the beta version. And I tell you: there's absolutely no chance you can win this battle without constant pausing the game and changing orders.
Another example. In the dungeon on the first beta location there're two ordinary human enemies. Even your party of 5 characters will lose to them if you don't micro-manage.
The amount of abilities and spells of your characters in this game is immense. Every literally second you should check if there's some new command you can give to your characters.
The battle in PoE is as far from hackNslash as possible. Without thinking you won't win easily even against a pack of lions. And all this is relevant even to the easy difficulty.
So, @ameliaboggins , I advice you not to think the way you did. As soon as you begin playing this game, it feels like a great RPG. The number of information, dialogues, lore is immense. I needed 3 hours only to talk to everyone and to read everything in the starting beta location, and this even without starting any fights at all.
If you can't try the beta, you can watch the videos of this game once more.