Eternity Pillars of Eternity + The White March Expansion Thread

[CptMace]

How does the combat feel in POTD ? I've stayed on the idea, since the release version, that it was nothing more than longer to go through fights but if it's legit stats buff (like, giving the means to the golems to actually deal some damage) instead of more hp-more defenses i'll give it a try.

I'm still butthurt about the normal modes lacking interest though.

 

[Darth Roxor]

The Pillars of Eternity world doesn't have culture/geographical area corresponding to Earth

yes which is exactly why everything in the game corresponds to cultural/geographical areas of earth

How does the combat feel in POTD ?

Bad, there's hardly any difference except for the fights getting prolonged.

 

[Gangrelrumbler]

My problem with "anti-fillerites" is that it's like they're banishing entire worldbuilding concepts from the genre. Why shouldn't a fantasy roleplaying world have dungeon levels infested with monsters? This a thing that exists in these worlds.

Infested with monsters: good
Infested with the same encounter repeated over and over again, or really similar encounters: bad
Forest full of monsters: good
Stumbling into a fight every five step when exploring the forest like I'm playing a bloody jRPG: bad
It doesn't really help that in PoE most encounters with non-human opponents exactly feel the same.
Besides filler combat for world building is only bearable when it doesn't take so fucking long. I liked PoE at first, but every combat taking long time combined with me doing pretty much the same things in every encounter made the combat really tedious for me.

 

[Delterius]

Like I said, that's not been my impression of those encounters and those abilities (playing on PotD, of course). The cean gŵla (I'm just calling them banshees, fuck it) can fuck you up with paralysis and I've found that use of Prayer against Paralysis is often a bare minimum to survive. If I didn't have Durance, I'd find some other way to get around them, I guess.

My impression from PotD is that the banshee's paralysis doesn't hurt your defenses as much as, say, the hold spells from old. Meaning that one easy way to take out the Cean Gwla is to bait them with your tankiest guy to far away from your party. Same thing with Forge Knights.

My problem with "anti-fillerites" is that it's like they're banishing entire worldbuilding concepts from the genre. Why shouldn't a fantasy roleplaying world have dungeon levels infested with monsters? This a thing that exists in these worlds.

I'm playing Icewind Dale right now and the Severed Hand is quite interesting. Most of it is filler, but the first few levels are composed of millions of filler encounters whereas the elven towers have fewer encounters with many more enemies at once. PoE only does the "5 monsters at a time, 15 times a map" thing.

 

[Infinitron]

How does the combat feel in POTD ? I've stayed on the idea, since the release version, that it was nothing more than longer to go through fights but if it's legit stats buff (like, giving the means to the golems to actually deal some damage) instead of more hp-more defenses i'll give it a try.

I'm still butthurt about the normal modes lacking interest though.

It's the one true difficulty level. Don't knock PoE until you've tried it. Not a panacea of course, things do eventually get cheesy at the highest levels. Although the expansion may have addressed that now.

 

[Ulrox]

My problem with "anti-fillerites" is that it's like they're banishing entire worldbuilding concepts from the genre. Why shouldn't a fantasy roleplaying world have dungeon levels infested with monsters? This a thing that exists in these worlds.

My problem with your statement is that it makes no sense whatsoever - anti-fillerites, aren't saying - there should be no monsters in the dungeon, they're saying - the dungeon should be full of interesting encounters, sure there can be some filler, other IE games had filler too, but just not to this extent.

I'm continually reminded of icewind dale 2 when playing pillars - which is a game that copy pasted creatures, monsters, whatever all over the place to create a bigger game. Black Isle studios were afraid that they couldn't make a big enough game, so this was the approach they took, and icewind dale 2 suffered tremendously for it.

Pillars of eternity is the exact same thing. They had to make a certain game length because they knew that that was what their playerbase expected, but at some point, after defeating the same enemies 20 times or more - it becomes quite dull. Sure there were times where I too could feel the 'potential' of pillars of eternity, but the entire thing still left me very disappointed.

Which leads me to the next point... WHY ohh WHY do you feel like copy pasting the same dull encounters, WHY do you feel this is OKEY? ... Seriously Infinitron, you're smarter than this.

 

[CyberWhale]

Infested with monsters: good
Infested with the same encounter repeated over and over again, or really similar encounters: bad
Forest full of monsters: good
Stumbling into a fight every five step when exploring the forest like I'm playing a bloody jRPG: bad
It doesn't really help that in PoE most encounters with non-human opponents exactly feel the same.
Besides filler combat for world building is only bearable when it doesn't take so fucking long. I liked PoE at first, but every combat taking long time combined with me doing pretty much the same things in every encounter made the combat really tedious for me.

 

[Infinitron]

My impression from PotD is that the banshee's paralysis doesn't hurt your defenses as much as, say, the hold spells from old. Meaning that one easy way to take out the Cean Gwla is to bait them with your tankiest guy to far away from your party. Same thing with Forge Knights.

I'm sure there are lots of things you can do in PoE if you run around a lot. Even before the Patch 2.0 tank nerf though, I have seen Eder get overwhelmed after getting hit by lots of status effects and being surrounded. It happens faster than you realize, one moment you think he's in typical invincible mode, then suddenly you notice a huge chunk of his endurance is gone (and lots of his health as well since he's constantly regenerating from it...)

So I generally try not to put him in situations like that.

 

[Darth Roxor]

Which leads me to the next point... WHY ohh WHY do you feel like copy pasting the same dull encounters, WHY do you feel this is OKEY? ... Seriously Infinitron, you're smarter than this.

Remember the journo at the E3 (or was it somewhere else?) white march presentation who watched Sawyer get his dudes into a fight with another bunch of copypasta trolls we love so much and said 'WOW IF THAT WAS ME PLAYING I'D BE LIKE TOTALLY DEAD (AND I WAS ALSO LEVEL 15)'? It's for the same reason. I've always said PoE is only liked by people who suck at playing it, and considering how our friend infinitron constantly says how much great challenge he takes from getting whacked by copypasta darguls/animats/trolls, I think we can safely add him to that group of people.

 

[Gangrelrumbler]

Challenge doesn't really have anything to do with it. Fighting random encounters in Nocturne was for the most part piss easy, but having to fight differently in most of them because of different abilities plus most fights being over in a minute or two made them engaging.

 

[Infinitron]

So, what was that about this thread becoming an echo chamber? I'm still waiting for that.

 

[CyberWhale]

Gangrelrumbler & Ulrox - thank you for restoring my faith in humanity. I'm not alone and not everyone is either a grogtard or a fanboi.

 

[Immortal]

Remember the journo at the E3 (or was it somewhere else?) white march presentation who watched Sawyer get his dudes into a fight with another bunch of copypasta trolls we love so much and said 'WOW IF THAT WAS ME PLAYING I'D BE LIKE TOTALLY DEAD (AND I WAS ALSO LEVEL 15)'? It's for the same reason. I've always said PoE is only liked by people who suck at playing it, and considering how our friend infinitron constantly says how much great challenge he takes from getting whacked by copypasta darguls/animats/trolls, I think we can safely add him to that group of people.

Yea.. I'm noticing that too.. like when PoE first came out.. the people who were screaming from the mountain top how amazing it was were the people still in Act 1 after 2 weeks..

"Well I just finished this dungeon with fire pillars and my companion betrayed me when we went to sleep and stole our water.. This game is FILLED with CnC and the combats feel SPESHAL"

 

[Kem0sabe]

I was pretty impressed with the girls few areas up to the castle, after that it was pure disillusion to the finale... One of the few rpgs I really had to push myself to finish.

 

[CptMace]

There are some sweet items in durlag's tower.

 

[Shevek]

I always find it strange that when people find out I've torn through the game but can still quote and understand the story and lore they just assume I didn't play it.

I've 100%'d PoE 3 times, this is my fourth character and with the White March my Playtime is 100 hours, there's not a lot of game there. Fanboys.

Played thru the game 3 times and has 100 hours clocked in. So, you like love this game right?

 

[Athelas]

'Pillars of Eternity made me a cRPG fan' will make a good headline for the next PoE review.

You will be writing it, I assume?

 

[IHaveHugeNick]

I always find it strange that when people find out I've torn through the game but can still quote and understand the story and lore they just assume I didn't play it.

I've 100%'d PoE 3 times, this is my fourth character and with the White March my Playtime is 100 hours, there's not a lot of game there. Fanboys.

I'm not saying you didn't torn through the game. I'm saying its mathematically impossible for you to get that far in 3 hours, without skipping almost everything that can be skipped. It takes an hour just to clear one map and properly explore the enviroment, and that's assuming you don't enter any of the dungeons, many of which are size of full regular map, and some are multi-level. I couldn't care less if you prefer to blaze through the content, its your game, do whatever the fuck you want with it. But don't bullshit, I played the whole thing completionist style and clocked near 20 hours.

 

[Immortal]

Not so much love as it was literally the first game I ever played of this type. So I can confess that as "Baby's first RPG", it hits all the right notes.

Going back to it after BG is suffering/

Spoiler

 

[Florian Gheorghe]

i love the music in Durgan's Battery!

 

[Starwars]

I blazed through the game when it was released on Hard, had tons of fun. Did a replay on PotD, still loved the game. Now playing through a third time on Hard, still loving the game. So kindly go hang yourselves with all your "only people who are bad at the game like it" and so forth. And of course there is a big difference between Hard and PotD, I have no idea how anyone could miss that. That's not saying that I feel the game is hard, in fact I'd welcome a difficulty boost and better encounter design. But there is a big difference between Hard and PotD.

And above post is right, you don't get that far in 3 hours unless you literally skip most everything.

But who needs facts when you're ranting about games on the codex amirite?! That internet cred...

 

[Fairfax]

PoE as the first CRPG? Oo
Wish I could play the great ones again as if it was the first time, to be honest. Check the codex top 70 CRPGs list, you're going to have a blast for next couple of years (unless you have a shitload of free time).

 

[Florian Gheorghe]

I was pretty impressed with the girls few areas up to the castle, after that it was pure disillusion to the finale... One of the few rpgs I really had to push myself to finish.

The last RPG I struggled to finish was DA:I.

Sent from my Galaxy Nexus using Tapatalk

 

[santino27]

The last RPG I struggled to finish was DA:I.

Sent from my Galaxy Nexus using Tapatalk

I never managed to finish DA:I. Gave it to my wife, and she finished it twice. Different strokes, clearly.

I did have to push myself to finish POE... particularly, after Defiance Bay, the story just didn't grab me, and there's not much of a 'item hunt/advance your party' draw either. Maybe that changes in the expansion with soulbound weapoins/

 

[IHaveHugeNick]

Progression is the biggest fail with the expansion. The scaling of base stats gives you more advantages than any talents gained by two extra levels. Only my Priest got some decent spells, and the rest of my squad got absolutely nothing worth speaking about.