Game News Pillars of Eternity Released

[Quatlo]

Wait till you get to feral druids and their retarded aoe damage

 

[~*´¨¯¨`*·~-.¸-AIN'T]

Too few unique encounters + most of the non-unique encounters being against trash mobs greatly decreases the enjoyment I'm getting out of combat, and when you add engagement onto it the whole thing feels like doing the exact same encounter over and over again, using the same tactics. I had enough of that in DA:O, thank you.

This is very worrisome. It's the reason I've grown to hate Dragon Age the more I played it (and because it had no other strengths to counterbalance the shittiness of its combat encounters).

How well, would you say, do the non-combat aspects of PoE compensate for this shit?

It's a little hard to say, since again, I'm only 5 hours in. I haven't had much time to get a feel for the story (hasn't really even begun yet) or things like quest design. Exploration feels solid, it would be better if the encounter design was better but I've had fun exploring areas. Maps are maybe a little small, but it's not too bad, and there's some fun little puzzles and traps to deal with in dungeons. Loot has been underwhelming so far, but I'm chalking that up to it being so low level at the moment. I expect that will get better.

The text adventures seem cool, though so far they've been mainly descriptive, rather than interactive. Once I get some more interactive ones I'll have a better feeling of how it works, but I think they'll be a lot of fun.

As far as the writing is concerned, it's no Torment, but it's solid. The companions have character and seem interesting enough. I'll admit I've had some TL;DR moments so far, mainly when exploring soul memories and reading lore books, but I've enjoyed the writing for the most part.

Like I said, I'm actually having a lot of fun with the game. They absolutely nailed the IE look and feel, and the world seems pretty interesting. While the combat has been just mediocre at best, I certainly haven't felt bored at any point. When I get home today I'll probably play it for another 5-6 hours, so it's definitely not bad overall. If the encounter design starts to improve I think I'll even find the combat to be pretty fun, despite my reservations with engagement and some of the other mechanics.

(of course I had a lot of fun with Dragon Age for the first 10 or so hours, too, so who knows)

 

[Tigranes]

Only a few hours in and

(1) I get a lot of PST vibes from the soul schtick, getting little stories of people's lives, and so on, and it seems like Obsidian's typical brand of 'twisted' fantasy comes out well. There's some very good lines as well, like Eder when you ask why he still believes in his God. (No, that doesn't mean writing is better than PST omgwtf etc etc)

(2) I haven't really seen any specially designed encounters yet, but the 'diversity' is proving tactically interesting enough so far, e.g. shadows forcing you to rethink the type of damage you deal and the high damage / high speed tradeoff, shadow teleport also fucking with your own management of engagement, and so on. I'll have to play more to see whether the lack of special encounters becomes a problem, and the same with engagement - I"ll be very disappointed though if there aren't more 'ability-using' enemies.

So far I haven't really felt like I can win every battle with the same tactic, which seems to be because of how the under the hood numbers have been tweaked. Eder can't go around knocking anything down and a room full of skuldr puts paid to any hope of engaging them all, the PC cipher can screw some enemy types with its shock wave etc but is fucked if surrounded, Alroth ranges from useless to game winner depending on circumstance (and I suspect spells I picked), so on. But again, this is still early.

(3) For me it's absolutely smooth, polished, zero bugs, though that's not true for everyone, and everything looks beautiful. It also does nail the IE look and feel, pending the differences in combat obviously - it's like a non-D&D IE game.

 

[Bulba]

my only complaint so far as combat goes is that when enemies take control of my characters all they do 90% of the time is stand around and do nothing... hope it get fixed soon as it would really ramp up difficulty in some fights

 

[Volrath]

Sorry, the encounters in BG1 where kinda lame too, most of the fights where killing trashmobs. It had may 7 or 8 realy interesting encounters in the whole game.

BG1 definitely had too many trash mobs, but it had plenty of good encounters too. Obviously BG2 was the game that really excelled at encounter design.

And even if I agreed with you, the encounter design in PoE's first 5 hours is still worse than BG1's first 5 hours.

 

[felipepepe]

BTW, if you are about to wipe it's quite easy to escape from a battle with one character, hide for a bit and see all your other characters casually get up as soon as the game decides combat is over.

 

[pakoito]

BTW, if you are about to wipe it's quite easy to escape from a battle with one character, hide for a bit and see all your other characters casually get up as soon as the game decides combat is over.

Dupli-Kate anyone?

 

[Visbhume]

Hi guys I have a doubt about the manual.

When explaining the six attributes:

Intellect • A character’s logic and reasoning capabilities as well as their tactical instincts. Affects the size of all Area of Effects and the Will and Deflection defenses.

when explaining combat:

Defl ection is used to resist most weapons and the natural attacks of monsters. It is defi ned primarily by the character’s class and level. No attributes affect Deflection.

Is there a mistake or maybe I cannot into reading?

 

[Tigranes]

BTW, if you are about to wipe it's quite easy to escape from a battle with one character, hide for a bit and see all your other characters casually get up as soon as the game decides combat is over.

Yep, that was a common exploit in KOTOR, NWN, and to an extent DA:O. It's kind of cheaty to do it in many cases, though.

Hi guys I have a doubt about the manual.

When explaining the six attributes:

Intellect • A character’s logic and reasoning capabilities as well as their tactical instincts. Affects the size of all Area of Effects and the Will and Deflection defenses.

when explaining combat:

Defl ection is used to resist most weapons and the natural attacks of monsters. It is defi ned primarily by the character’s class and level. No attributes affect Deflection.

Is there a mistake or maybe I cannot into reading?

Unsure which one is more correct, but the manual is meant to have some errata having been written before the very final round of Balance (TM).

 

[gromit]

Playing blind, on Hard/Expert, not very far in yet... but I'm liking how engagement has played out so far.

I rolled a semi-squishy monk, so positioning and engagement have been critical. I have to pick up wounds without dying, and then (ideally) maneuver for the cone-damage attack... also without dying. It wouldn't feel right to do that easily.

My go-to so far has been to throw the monk in, push my luck as far as it will go, then use the NPC knockdown/blind abilities to remove (or reduce) engagement... and KIIIIIYAHHHHHH, flying kick from the side. The tension comes from not blowing so much endurance that I can't effectively use my wounds. I was aware from the start it was going to be a more physical game than BG/IWD, so I'm happy with that little quagmire of on-the-spot risk / reward with a dash of sunken cost.

That one method is starting to feel a little rote, but I just started. We'll see what happens when more options open up. Hopefully they push me out of the comfort zone more, too... I liked how in the intro, what I had planned as a flanky glass-cannon counter-puncher suddenly had to step in as the front-liner.

We'll see. I find the system less insulting than managing transparent aggro. The potential annoyances are no better or worse, on paper, than "Red Rover, Quadriplegic League." They're both things you have to accept and plan around... there's no more sense in complaining in how much damage you take for constantly peeling off characters in PoE, than doing the same about a mob pushing past your fighter toward your mage in BG/IWD.

It's what happens, so weigh the costs and plan accordingly. Play it on its terms, and then hate it all you want.

 

[Ramireza]

Gamestar, DE

92/100

http://www.gamestar.de/spiele/pillars-of-eternity/test/pillars_of_eternity,48834,3084353.html

 

[Morkar Left]

Gamestar, DE

92/100

http://www.gamestar.de/spiele/pillars-of-eternity/test/pillars_of_eternity,48834,3084353.html

You forgot to mention: Balance 10/10

 

[Shannow]

I actualy wanted to wait with impressions till I'm much farther in, but I also wanted to wait at least two weeks before starting to play.
It's a beautiful game.
I've only had one obvious bug (the tutorial-sound one), but that was almost gamebreaking. Had to turn off the tutorial tips, which leads me to the first criticism.
The game fucking hides lots of information. What does the character-sheet look like? Well, you gotta wait till after character creation to have a look. Notice something you want to change? Well, have fun starting a new game.
So, lets plan your character. Ok, I choose the class... and what feats and stuff can he choose? When does he get those choices? Hmm, no ingame info on the higher-level stuff. Lets try the manual.
"Knock Down – A forceful, melee-only shove that knocks an enemy
Prone but does little damage. 2/encounter." How long is the enemy prone? How is damage modified?
"Defender – The Defender ability decreases the fighter’s attack rate, but
increases his or her number of Engagement targets to 3 (default is 1).
When disabled, the fighter has a bonus to his or her Deflection." Not only is that all wrong (No. of Engagement Targets is upped to 2 and deflection is increased while it's active) but the information about by how much att is decreased and def increased is again not given.
So you might say "But you can see that in the game." Yeah, but the higher level stuff is just as vague.
When can I get Armored Grace? By how much does it reduce the Recovery Penalty?

"Each available class comes with a repository of unique abilities that
become accessible to the player over time. Crafting a well-balanced
party often means engaging with the strengths and skills of characters
on a granular level, and opens up opportunities to experiment with
different combat strategies." Now that just feels like OE is mocking me. How am I supposed to experiment when I can neither plan nor respec?
I've played 5 chars till Eder just to get a feel for them and see what kind of stuff they get on level up. And I played the beginning with another 3 chars just to get a look at their char-sheet.
I've now started looking stuff up here http://pillarsofeternity.gamepedia.com/Class instead. But that's also incomplete and lots of information is outdated.
EG. the monk ups his unarmed dmg twice, but I have no idea how high the base damage will be then. So how is one supposed to compare that to other weapon dmges?

Unfortunately even when I do get info ingame, it's not always clear, eg.: Eder's scale gives "Second Chance", but I have yet to find out what that does...

The fighter class turned out as bad as I'd feared. He can tank. And that's it. I tried a two-handed weapon fighter with feats focussed on damage and he was hilariously squishy. Not viable at all. I'd engage with Eder and then send my fighter in. The enemies' simply switch focus to him and he'd go down in seconds. If at least all two-handed weapons had a longer reach and re-focussing on him generated a disengagement attack.
In my experience (limited as it is) pretty much everything is squishy if it doesn't use a shield and the weapon and shield feat. With those and the fighter regeneration the fighter's tanky. A tank also seems to be required in the party, because outside of a Sensuki gimmick-build I see no possibility to evade or bring down enemies fast enough to survive their punishment. (And healing seems to be a joke. Level one attack spells deal 50 fire dmg but healing spells give 13...)
Only with the tank setup the fighter deals no damage...
Attributes are another issue. All this balance. I simply can't find a setup that "feels good". Do I invest in Resolve? Deflection and will saves seem good. But how often will enemies attack my will? Will equipment and/or feats completely outshine any attribute investment here? And what are the strengths I'm supposed to play to? Being a tankier tank? That sounds like fun...not. As I said, I tried a few different setups (and classes) and I wasn't really happy with any of them.
Since I'm unwilling to start yet again I've decided to go with early defensive feats but a relatively offensive attribute distribution. I hope I'll eventually reach a balance where I have survivability but feel like more than a doorpost. This verdict is far too early to be final but so far I'm not having fun with my char.


I have no general issue with the engagement system, but teleporting enemies are a pain. Mainly because my back-liners (especially Aloth) do not have shield-feats and thus die in two-hits. And there is nothing I can do about it. If I'm lucky I get off one touch spell and then he's down. He can't run away, my fighters are usually too far away, and even if they weren't, what could they do? Knock-down only works ~1/4 of the time against shadows. If they still have KDs left to use. Even when Aloth does disengage without dying... it's only 3 seconds before the next shadow teleports to him.
My toughest fight so far was against shadows. It started with 2 shadows, but over the course of the fight more seemed to teleport in until I was fighting 4 although I'd already killed 2. At that point the only one left standing, half-dead, was my tank. And he was not hitting or dmging anything because of shadow's huge defense against physical and several debuffs. Since that was already my 3rd try and I didn't see anything I could do significantly differently I decided to re-load and go somewhere else. And of course the combat log gave me no idea where all the shadows were coming from. It was a small closed room. Could be a simple bug with teleporting (duplication). :/


All this ranting aside I'm having fun with the overall game (if not with my char).

 

[Deleted member 7219]

Only criticism so far is that I fucked up my chanter build. I left Might at 10 because I thought chanters just sat back and, well, chanted. I didn't know they were melee focused. So I put most of my points in the other attributes and I'm regretting it now. My main PC does bugger all damage.

Respecs are a symbol of the decline so I'm not asking for them, but a "Hey, you've been playing for a few hours, want to change a few things?" would have been nice.

 

[Fryjar]

So did anyone already find any Codex references yet? I'd be curious what made it in.

 

[Drowed]

Apparently, the base-building "minigame" breakes the game, making it too easy (or, "even easier than what it already is"), at least that's what I've read on the net. Can anyone confirm this?

 

[Quatlo]

Apparently, the base-building "minigame" breakes the game, making it too easy (or, "even easier than what it already is"), at least that's what I've read on the net. Can anyone confirm this?

Breaks it how?
I'm literally swimming in gold and I'm at level 5, the keep didnt really contribute to that

 

[Drowed]

Apparently, the base-building "minigame" breakes the game, making it too easy (or, "even easier than what it already is"), at least that's what I've read on the net. Can anyone confirm this?

Breaks it how?
I'm literally swimming in gold and I'm at level 5, the keep didnt really contribute to that

Precisely this. I read that you will end up making even more money than what you usually can, breaking the economy of the game. But apparently, anyone can do this without much effort, it seems.

So much for "balance" in the economy. Well, it's not like t's rare thing to become a millionaire in most RPGs.

 

[Szioul]

So did anyone already find any Codex references yet? I'd be curious what made it in.

 

[Athelas]

Everyone will just assume it's a Star Wars reference.

 

[Roguey]

Good thing I finished BG literally earlier this week.

Then you have your high-level mage assassin at the Friendly Arm Inn. He's only one guy, but he has spells you haven't ever seen before which makes you use different tactics against him than you would against the groups of weaker enemies.

I killed him with two arrows before he fired off a single spell.

Then the ogre in the wilderness is again different. Like the mage, he's a high-level single enemy, but the way you deal with him is completely different than how you deal with the mage.

Well that's partially true. I used entangle to hold him in place, then used ranged weapons to kill him.

As for cleric guy, I picked the Right dialogue options to destroy all those undead, then pelted him with ranged weapons. Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz

Early-game BG is not a good example of good combat at all. I disliked practically every moment.

 

[deranged]

 

[stony3k]

All this BG discussion is making me want to restart a BGT playthrough again (for like the 20th time). M.U.S.T R.E.S.I.S.Tttttt..

 

[~*´¨¯¨`*·~-.¸-AIN'T]

Good thing I finished BG literally earlier this week.

Then you have your high-level mage assassin at the Friendly Arm Inn. He's only one guy, but he has spells you haven't ever seen before which makes you use different tactics against him than you would against the groups of weaker enemies.

I killed him with two arrows before he fired off a single spell.

Then the ogre in the wilderness is again different. Like the mage, he's a high-level single enemy, but the way you deal with him is completely different than how you deal with the mage.

Well that's partially true. I used entangle to hold him in place, then used ranged weapons to kill him.

As for cleric guy, I picked the Right dialogue options to destroy all those undead, then pelted him with ranged weapons. Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz

Early-game BG is not a good example of good combat at all. I disliked practically every moment.

3 different encounters handled 3 different ways. Sounds like you just made my point for me.

 

[Roguey]

Interesting definition of "different." To me, it's "I destroyed all those guys with select all autoattack, except for one I cast a spell first because I think kiting is lame."