Eternity Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire Pre-DLC Thread [GO TO NEW THREAD]

[Parabalus]

I've been considering two things: elevation giving an advantage when fighting on a staircase, a ramp or any kind of slope, and certain weapons getting bonuses or maluses, if the enemy is wielding a certain other weapon type - fight a pike with a dagger and you'll be at a certain disadvantage. I think both would have been interesting mechanics to have.

Why would you add an obscure and situational mechanics when the difficulty doesn't support them?

The game already has a bunch of systems it doesn't use well, adding another rock-paper-scissor element on top is pointless.

You'd also need to retouch most encounters by hand to ensure that there's a decent mix, seems like a huge undertaking for the mechanic to be relevant when choosing targets.

 

[AwesomeButton]

Use best ability 10 times is only natural for a system like this. Rogue & Ranger are best examples of this.

I have Maia in the party, and I don't have any rogue at all, but I imagine it's pretty much the same. For Maia I hardly use any of her active abilities.

Paradoxically, the majority of the moments where I have to make a tactical choice is when I am using a per-encounter ability that comes from an item. That's because then it's really a limited use per-encounter ability, instead of an ability I can spam throughout the whole encounter with little restriction. On Aloth I have some boots of evasion that let him teleport a short distance, and some gloves that give him Lay on Hands. The most interesting moments are when I have to decide when to use one of those abilities and how.

I'm coming to the conclusion that the martial classes will have to have their source points tuned down to 4 max which will greatly improve combat pacing, make casters more important, and turn aggro/engagement management into a major technique for winning combat and minimizing damage to party members. You know, like in the Infinity Engine games.

 

[AwesomeButton]

I've been considering two things: elevation giving an advantage when fighting on a staircase, a ramp or any kind of slope, and certain weapons getting bonuses or maluses, if the enemy is wielding a certain other weapon type - fight a pike with a dagger and you'll be at a certain disadvantage. I think both would have been interesting mechanics to have.

Why would you add an obscure and situational mechanics when the difficulty doesn't support them?

The game already has a bunch of systems it doesn't use well, adding another rock-paper-scissor element on top is pointless.

You'd also need to retouch most encounters by hand to ensure that there's a decent mix, seems like a huge undertaking for the mechanic to be relevant when choosing targets.

This isn't something anyone can add to the game apart from Obsidian. I meant to say that it would have been interesting to have those mechanics, if they were conceived and integrated into the rest of the game.

 

[The Avatar]

Pillars doesn't lend itself to tactical combat at least in part due to the environment and encounter design. They casually added those exploding barrels in Deadfire a few places but that's it. As has been said, elevation should play a part(higher ground gives you an advantage). There should also be cover, and cliffs to bull rush your enemies off of. Basically any reason to not use the same spell over and over again. This stuff is what made the combat in Divinity:Original Sin games so great(albeit crippled a bit in the mechanics). You usually see this stuff in turn-based games but there's no reason it couldn't be added to a real-time-with-pause game.

IE games weren't all that tactical either(Fighters had no abilities at all until epic levels). It was just harder because in the beginning your wizard could get 1-shot because he only had 1d4 hit points and 2 spells. And by the end game, most of the enemies had all kinds of protections up. But I guess casting breech and spending 5 minutes buffing yourself before every battle is considered tactical.

 

[aweigh]

Enviromental hazards aren't part of tactics... they're just environmental hazards. Also whether or not a unit has an ability that you need to manually click on and utilize isn't conducive to creating a tactical layer either. I've used more tactics playing Wizardry Empire or Elminage or Stranger of Sword City than I've ever done playing PoE.

EDIT: Or for argument's sake, because I know you haven't played any of those; playing Wizardry 8 too.

I do agree that a unit needs to have some type of active ability, but it doesn't need to be relegated to spend-a-point-on-it bullshit; a great example is the Elminage's Werebeast race which comes with the ability to poison via any attack, Wizardry's Draconian race which comes with a breath ability, or the Ninja Class's ability to Hide which both augments its attack potential and extends its attack range, and additionally boosts its Armor Class; so on and so forth.

Less is more, especially when the ability in question is Race or Class-defining; I don't think it's necessary to make every possible thing a point-buy dump. I think it's much better for a Wizardry Fighter to be expert in all Martial weaponry as part of its Class Kit than it is to make the player spend 1 point on Longsword every Level to achieve the same.

When the designers take pains to carefully map out in advance the power progression a Class by making its abilities adhere to the overall game systems, such as deciding beforehand that a Fighter will gain an additional attack every five Levels, instead of making the player "spend points" on say, things like Stances, that each give diminishing returns, then the system is better for it and more pleasurable to play.

 

[Shadenuat]

But I guess casting breech and spending 5 minutes buffing yourself before every battle is considered tactical

Fighters having no abilities is not tactical, wizards using abilities is not tactical, nothing is tacticool

 

[Roguey]

Dragon Age had elevation give ranged bonuses and very few people noticed or cared.

(additionally, it's also something that's more time-consuming to do with prerendered backgrounds, they'd have to set it all by hand)

 

[Dodo1610]

Dragon Age had elevation give ranged bonuses and very few people noticed or cared.

(additionally, it's also something that's more time-consuming to do with prerendered backgrounds, they'd have to set it all by hand)

Nope Inquisition had bonus damage when shooting targets that are below you but not Origins.

Honestly I do not understand why they limit themselves with those pre-rendered environments. The only reason Bioware used them was the fact that it back then it was not possible to render them in real time. Obsidian is apparently unable to decide whether they want to make an Baldurs Gate clone or actually try to make something truly unique and that in my opinion prevents them from being more successful.

 

[Roguey]

Nope Inquisition had bonus damage when shooting targets that are below you but not Origins.

I was fooled by this Bioware guy speaking as if they had https://forums.obsidian.net/topic/59989-do-not-make-the-game-isometric/page-6#entry1186510

 

[Fairfax]

I had a thought. Since POE is not bound by the simplicity of fast PnP rules, and the calculations are already complex enough that you'd need a calculator to do them- they could have added tactical simulation elements in the form of modifiers for things like elevation, weather, cover, ect.

This is the double standard that has irritated me all throughout PoE:

When Josh decides, certain things are completely haram, because "we are making a spiritual successor to the Infinity Engine gamez..."

Yet, when Josh decides, certain things are welcome, even when they are completely breaking off from the IE games' tradition, with explanations like "we are making a computer game", "we tried to imagine how the genre would have evolved", etc. I'll just mention one such instance, although in this particular case I agree with Josh - the reduction of the max party size to five.

It's because PoE wasn't a passion project by a huge IE fan. Sawyer never liked the IE games that much, and he doesn't seem to understand why others did. He saw the opportunity to save the company, keep his job, and further his career in the process. His approach was to keep enough to sustain the façade and/or make his job easier (like all spells being lifted from D&D), while also streamlining enough to reach more people and sell more copies. He couldn't tell (or didn't mind) how much these elements mattered to IE fans, which is why you see these inconsistencies.

 

[Grotesque]

Is 3.0 out yet?

 

[IHaveHugeNick]

Josh simply assumed people who actually enjoyed IE gameplay are far too autistic to communicate with the outside world. And 15 years ago it would have been a correct assumption, but he forgot that Ritalin, Adderall and other amphetamine-derivatives are a thing, and this is how Sensuki ended up scarred for life after spending 6 months beta-testing PoE1 while on speed.

 

[AwesomeButton]

It was just harder because in the beginning your wizard could get 1-shot because he only had 1d4 hit points and 2 spells.

My main conclusion from playing through the IE games is that the major part of the excitement of combat is to cheer when your character scores a hit or is missed by an attack, and to gasp when he is hit or himself misses an attack.

Having a quick succession of such events play out between a big number of characters, 6 of which are "yours", is much more fun and exciting, and much more evocative of the emotional rollercoaster of watching fantasy/adventure combat, than the routine of "Pause... fidget through halo UI... select an ability... click on target... unpause..."

The former (IE-like) kind of combat gameplay is also much better suited to realtime with pause, than anything that a theorist can come up with by going down the road of "We'll give them these resources, and then these abilities which cost them points, and these lock-into-combat mechanics, and it will be much more tactical".

This is my explanation at least, about why the IE games can have such "fun" combat, without much complexity, or with fake complexity. The complexity is always real until you learn the rules of the game and always "fake" once you have learned them.

The constant need to pause combat in PoE/Deadfire is actually detrimental to that IE experience, the rollercoaster. It breaks the flow of emotion. It's like watching a horse race with pause, where we can stop time and analyse why Ocean Breeze is losing the lead.

If you want to read all of the above as "IE games were only fun because they were popamole" or "He finds the IE games fun because they were popamole", be my guest.

But think of this - in all these years, how many people have you seen who say "I liked Baldur's Gate and Icewind Dale, but if only combat was more complex, and tactical, and if they had addressed that horrible rest mechanic abuse"? And then how many people have you seen who say "I tried playing those games for a bit, but I kept getting killed, they are too complex for me." What if PoE's biggest folly was that it didn't replicate the IE games' gameplay enough, and instead tried to be too "smart" for its own good, which under close inspection wasn't even that smart to begin with?

 

[BING XI LAO]

PoE definitely tries too hard to be clever. ''We need to give 5 tactikul abilities to the hitting-things-with-swords class''. Worst offenders by far are the Paladin and Ranger abilities that have no downsides, are spammable, are necessary and fundamental, and should so obviously have be passively applied.

Also does Expert mode not turn off AoE indicators or was my game bugged when I played on release? Seeing spell AoE is for casuals, roasting your own team with fireballs on accident is a core part of the experience.

 

[Malpercio]

Wait, they nerfed the summon items? ALL of them?

 

[prodigydancer]

Wait, they nerfed the summon items? ALL of them?

 

[FireKing]

Hold on a sec mate, did they nerf the nerf as well?

 

[Iskramor]

I still stand that the 1 game is better no VO no pirate theme no bipolar decisions on game mechanics and classes etc...

 

[Iskramor]

Beatiary bug still not fixed lol????/

 

[BING XI LAO]

I still stand that the 1 game is better no VO no pirate theme no bipolar decisions on game mechanics and classes etc...

Yeah I agree. Dogshitfire will probably turn out ok with mods and dlc, but the whole tone, setting and story is so much weaker than PoE1. And no Durance, how pathetic.

 

[IHaveHugeNick]

Modders already fixed the figurines back.

 

[Quillon]

Very special treat... hmn, more CR stuff?

 

[Malpercio]

I still stand that the 1 game is better no VO no pirate theme no bipolar decisions on game mechanics and classes etc...

Yeah I agree. Dogshitfire will probably turn out ok with mods and dlc, but the whole tone, setting and story is so much weaker than PoE1. And no Durance, how pathetic.

Story yes, setting no. PoE1 was boring as fuck, basically discount D&D. At least PoE2 is different.

 

[AwesomeButton]

I wanted to ask a bunch of technical questions, but Adam won't be there.

 

[TT1]

I just got promoted from Nexus Mods tweet