Eternity Josh Sawyer reflects on his failures with Pillars of Eternity

[Grunker]

Roguey reflects on his failure with Josh Sawyer

 

[Butter]

Queen's Wish kind of solved this issue. You have to complete a dungeon in one run and can't leave or else enemies respawn. You have to clear the dungeon in one go, utilizing resource management and making sure you are prepared and ready to go the first time you try it. I'm fine with a mechanic like that, you don't need to rest and you get rewarded for completing a dungeon in one go.

How big are dungeons in Queen's Wish? Anything like Durlag's Tower or Dragon's Eye?

 

[Deleted Member 16721]

How big are dungeons in Queen's Wish? Anything like Durlag's Tower or Dragon's Eye?

Not sure, I haven't played it. But if I know Jeff's work, they are probably decent sized with secrets, alternate routes, difficult one-off encounters and quite a bit of content to get through. I'm only guesstimating based on his previous work, though.

 

[Atchodas]

Queen's Wish kind of solved this issue. You have to complete a dungeon in one run and can't leave or else enemies respawn. You have to clear the dungeon in one go, utilizing resource management and making sure you are prepared and ready to go the first time you try it. I'm fine with a mechanic like that, you don't need to rest and you get rewarded for completing a dungeon in one go.

How big are dungeons in Queen's Wish? Anything like Durlag's Tower or Dragon's Eye?

Not sure, I haven't played it

 

[hexer]

I once joked Codexers spend more time talking about RPGs than playing them

 

[Kyl Von Kull]

It sounds game-y, though, especially if there's a timer running somewhere. It depends on how they go about doing it, the first thing that comes to my mind is someone could start a fire and parts of the dungeon are progressively engulfed in flames, i.e. you can't loot the things in there.

Are deadlines really that gamey? The diseased questgiver who sent you to the dungeon to find a healing relic pays you a larger bonus the faster you get the job done. Thieves are sneaking through and gradually looting another dungeon, if you take too long they’ll run off with the best loot.

You can even do the thing with a nemesis party that Black Isle wanted to include in their scrapped Fallout 3; if they get somewhere before you, expect to find less loot, more traps and maybe less XP because there will be fewer monsters left to kill. The nemesis party and the bonus for doing the job faster are both present in Kingmaker chapter one and it’s great.

 

[IHaveHugeNick]

I once joked Codexers spend more time talking about RPGs than playing them

There's not that much stuff to play if we're being honest.

 

[MajorMace]

If we're really being honest, there's not that much stuff to talk about either.
I think a few days ago we had another "what's an rpg" thread.

 

[Desolate Dancer]

There's not that much stuff to play if we're being honest.

This. I admit that I'd rather replay any IE game a thousand more times than to play any new 3D anime/furryesque MMORPG ripoff tripleAshit nu-rpg. I literally haven't played any other rpg in the past 15+ years, aside for Phillows Oph Ethwrnty that I set thru for about 8 hours then left without ever looking back... the neural damage that this "game" caused was enough for a lifetime. It is still astonishing to see how many people - even codexians - managed to touch Dumbsterfire after this abysmal failure. I admit it is, in some eerily masochistic way... admirable!

If we're really being honest, there's not that much stuff to talk about either.

Now that's the real sad part...

 

[Trashos]

We spend so much time discussing how to ease newbies into tough games without compromising overall difficulty too much, and now you are finding novel uninteresting ways to increase the gap between newbies and experienced players. Sigh.

When you reward speed (which I am 100% against in RTwP regardless), you further increase the gap between newbie difficulty and the difficulty that an experienced player (who knows what to do) faces. Then, since you increased that gap, you will casually start looking for ways to decrease entrance difficulty, bringing the overall difficulty down for the experienced player. You are supporters of decline.

Not to mention that exploration and rushing the player never mesh well together. But that's a different matter.

 

[Lacrymas]

Are deadlines really that gamey? The diseased questgiver who sent you to the dungeon to find a healing relic pays you a larger bonus the faster you get the job done. Thieves are sneaking through and gradually looting another dungeon, if you take too long they’ll run off with the best loot.

You can even do the thing with a nemesis party that Black Isle wanted to include in their scrapped Fallout 3; if they get somewhere before you, expect to find less loot, more traps and maybe less XP because there will be fewer monsters left to kill. The nemesis party and the bonus for doing the job faster are both present in Kingmaker chapter one and it’s great.

If it makes sense, it isn't game-y. They just have to avoid any countdowns or visible timers to make it not feel game-y.

Not to mention that exploration and rushing the player never mesh well together. But that's a different matter.

That's why only sections of a game should have some kind of deadline, not constantly all the time. PF:KM has an absolute deadline, but I don't know how it feels since I haven't played it at a lot yet. The Fallout 1 timer was more than generous.

 

[Kyl Von Kull]

When you reward speed (which I am 100% against in RTwP regardless), you further increase the gap between newbie difficulty and the difficulty that an experienced player (who knows what to do) faces. Then, since you increased that gap, you will casually start looking for ways to decrease entrance difficulty, bringing the overall difficulty down for the experienced player. You are supporters of decline.

Kingmaker rewarded speed and it sure as shit didn’t try to make things easier for newbies. Developers who simply accept the fact that this is a niche genre can make great stuff.

 

[IHaveHugeNick]

From RPGs this year I played Disco Elysium and TOW once to full and half a 2nd run of each. And now it's back to idling until either Cyberpunk or WL3 come out. I also tried replaying FNV for the 5th time and gave up after 3 days of modding as usual.

So yeah.

 

[Deleted Member 16721]

Maybe the game mechanics are fine but the game just sucked in the marketing department. It did seem to have terrible marketing leading up to the game. I highly doubt gamers didn't buy it because of any of the mechanics you guys are nitpicking here in the thread, that's for sure.

 

[Steamboat Willie]

Maybe the game mechanics are fine but the game just sucked in the marketing department. It did seem to have terrible marketing leading up to the game. I highly doubt gamers didn't buy it because of any of the mechanics you guys are nitpicking here in the thread, that's for sure.

Oh fuck off. It's always "muh bad marketing" as a last resort with you fanboys. PoE had plenty of marketing. Fucking everyone knew about the game when it launched. They even had the usual YouTube dipshits shilling for it.

 

[Trashos]

Kingmaker obviously needed time limits for the practical implementation of the kingdom management part. The various quests gain absolutely nothing by the enforced time limits. I have no idea why players who want to play RTwFUCKINGPAUSE want to feel rushed.

There is something to be said about time limits guiding the procession of important in-game events ("How do we make the player prioritize this quest at this point?"), but I 'd much rather have that linked to other events and not time.

Lacrymas , you should absolutely play Kingmaker, it is a very good game. You are even going to like the companions more than I do.

 

[Desiderius]

Maybe the game mechanics are fine but the game just sucked in the marketing department. It did seem to have terrible marketing leading up to the game. I highly doubt gamers didn't buy it because of any of the mechanics you guys are nitpicking here in the thread, that's for sure.

Dumbed down mechanics, lack of rewards, whatever. Too much going through the motions not enough phat loot and cool skillz to motivate people to play and enjoy then tell other people about it.

When my reward for exploring is 15 fruit and 11 pails of water I’m just not into it anymore than the devs were when they forgot to populate their own fucking game.

You can market that shit until you’re blue in the face and it won’t make a bit of difference.

 

[Deleted Member 16721]

Oh fuck off. It's always "muh bad marketing" as a last resort with you fanboys. PoE had plenty of marketing. Fucking everyone knew about the game when it launched. They even had the usual YouTube dipshits shilling for it.

Yeah, you're right. It's much more likely that the game failed because of its resting system.

 

[Desiderius]

Kingmaker obviously needed time limits for the practical implementation of the kingdom management part. The various quests gain absolutely nothing by the enforced time limits. I have no idea why players who want to play RTwFUCKINGPAUSE want to feel rushed.

There is something to be said about time limits guiding the procession of important in-game events ("How do we make the player prioritize this quest at this point?"), but I 'd much rather have that linked to other events and not time.

Lacrymas , you should absolutely play Kingmaker, it is a very good game. You are even going to like the companions more than I do.

The limits are utterly nominal once you get an idea what is going on. 90% of what P:K is doing restwise is carrot side, not stick.

 

[Trashos]

The limits are utterly nominal once you get an idea what is going on. 90% of what P:K is doing restwise is carrot side, not stick.

This is exactly my point! It is making the 1st playthrough more difficult, but it has no major effect on subsequent playthroughs. Consequently, it just increases entrance difficulty without increasing overall difficulty, which is exactly the opposite of what we should be doing!

 

[Desolate Dancer]

Maybe the game mechanics are fine but the game just sucked in the marketing department. It did seem to have terrible marketing leading up to the game. I highly doubt gamers didn't buy it because of any of the mechanics you guys are nitpicking here in the thread, that's for sure.

I don't know and don't care about the sales and marketing data, in fact it baffles me that people even argue about such numbers as it would matter at all to one's personal opinion about a game.

What I do know is that it was a game that I was expecting for half a dozen years, a game that I expected to be a real successor of the great IE era, a game that, for the very least, to be playable as a 70% copycat of BG/BG2. What I got instead was an utterly cancerous soulless shit (despite the incessant rambling about souls), with no fun, no memorable encounters, no working spell system, no consistency, no itemization, no enjoyable party members, no plot, and no villain, it was literally an inflated unsalvageable shit. The disappointment was similar in feels like if you're expecting the saviour of Jedis and all you got is the new lord of Siths. Like if you want to extinguish your face cause it's on fire but all you manage to do is burn your eyes out with the acidic component in the foam. Like if you want to save the planet by using metallic straws but you tumble and suddenly drive it thru your brains and skull. So the whole experience and the culmination of the journey was akin to these...

So when it looks like it's shit, when it plays like it's shit, when it feels like it's shit... it's probably just shit. You don't need to run a quarterly board meeting "on the numbers" to arrive to that one simple conclusion.

 

[Trashos]

Kyl Von Kull , "easy to get into, hard to master" should be the goal for even the most hardcore of RPGs, afaic.

 

[Desiderius]

The limits are utterly nominal once you get an idea what is going on. 90% of what P:K is doing restwise is carrot side, not stick.

This is exactly my point! It is making the 1st playthrough more difficult, but it has no major effect on subsequent playthroughs. Consequently, it just increases entrance difficulty without increasing overall difficulty, which is exactly the opposite of what we should be doing!

Meh. Infinite time destroys immersion. The entrance difficulty on the time dimension is non-existent. You’re literally tilting at windmills.

The first Curse that hoses people has nothing to do with penalizing rest. It’s a poorly documented game mechanic that you fiddle around with until you figure it out if you’re already motivated enough to continue the game or go on Steam to bitch about the awful kingdom management/time constraints if you’re not.

 

[Desiderius]

it baffles me that people even argue about such numbers as it would matter at all to one's personal opinion about a game.

No man is an island. I've enjoyed every big seller in this and similar genres that have been produced. My peers have good taste.

It also matters in that it effects how many, if any, games of this genre are produced

 

[Kyl Von Kull]

Kingmaker obviously needed time limits for the practical implementation of the kingdom management part. The various quests gain absolutely nothing by the enforced time limits. I have no idea why players who want to play RTwFUCKINGPAUSE want to feel rushed.

well over 90% of the time you burn in Kingmaker is traveling or resting, not combat or exploration. the time limits should really only impact your travel and rest decisions. there's not much to be gained by rushing through a dungeon to shave off an hour.