Codex Review RPG Codex Retrospective Review: Pillars of Eternity Revisited

[Sentinel]

Infinitron It's one of the earliest screenshots. I bet you, a dedicated Obsidian PR-wannabe, has it stashed somewhere.

 

[Azarkon]

Yeah, I think class systems are driven more by nostalgia than by actual gameplay requirements. Even so, if you have to have one, the point is to make the classes play differently and develop along different paths. Pillars succeeds in this much better than AD&D, where paladins, fighters, rangers, and barbarians are effectively interchangeable.*

...Are you talking about actual Advanced Dungeons and Dragons or Baldur's Gate 2?

"Barbarians" in Advanced Dungeons and Dragons underwent drastic changes every book update. They cannot be talked about as though they represent one class. Paladins and Rangers also had a variety of rules and kits depending on the book you bought. None of these can be talked about as though they are one well-defined class. This guy explains it in better detail:

Although the barbarian was introduced in Advanced Dungeons & Dragons (1st edition) in the Unearthed Arcana supplement, they were tribal wilderness warriors more akin to rangers, and didn't have anything resembling the rage ability. It wasn't until Dungeons & Dragons 3rd edition that barbarians appeared with an ability with the actual name "Rage." However, there were earlier versions of the Rage ability that just had different names.

In The Complete Barbarian's Handbook (AD&D 2nd edition) there is the Brute class kit which provides a barbarian with the "Wild Brawl" special ability, which is introduced with, "When fighting without weapons, the Brute can propel himself into a berserk frenzy." However, "Wild Brawl" is mechanically entirely unrelated to Rage.

In the same book, the Ravager class kit provided the barbarian with the "Become Enraged" special ability, with which the "Ravager may work himself into a fighting frenzy, increasing his effectiveness in combat." Mechanically, an enraged Ravager hits easier and does more damage, is hit easier, is harder to damage, and is harder to charm.

Also in AD&D 2nd edition there is a Warrior class kit exclusive to dwarves in The Complete Book of Dwarves called the Battlerager, which is "a fearless warrior, able to create an insane rage within himself which increases his fighting ability and distorts his physical features," and therefore a dwarven barbarian in all but name. A Battlerager in "the Killing Rage" receives bonus hit points, bonuses to attack and damage, and an AC bonus, as well as being immune to charm-like effects, but may not stop fighting until there are no more enemies standing.

Similar to the Battlerager is the is the Berserker class kit for fighters in The Complete Fighter's Handbook (AD&D 2nd edition). A Berserker takes a long time to "Go Berserk", but once Berserk gains similar benefits and also can't stop fighting until every enemy is down. Notably, a Berserker isn't allowed to know their own hit points while Berserk!

The Complete Book of Dwarves was published in 1991, four years before The Complete Barbarian's Handbook; but The Complete Fighter's Handbook was published two years earlier in 1989, making the Berserker the first barbarian-like† character with an ability that is recognisable as a "rage" ability.

†Bear in mind that before D&D3, the actual barbarian class was restricted to humans, so fighter class variants like the Berserker and Battlerager was the official way of playing a non-human character that fulfilled the same class role despite not bearing the name "barbarian."

So I'll have to assume you're talking about Baldur's Gate 2, in which case to just use the Barbarian example:

• Hit Dice: d12, rather than d10.
• They move at 2 points faster than the usual character.
• Immune to backstab.
• Can use Barbarian Rage once per day for every 4 levels (starts at 1st level with one use). Rage gives them +4 to constitution and strength for 5 rounds. Gives a -2 armor class penalty and +2 to saves vs. magic (but actually imposes a -2 penalty to saves vs. magic in the original game, despite the description). Rage also gives immunity to all charm, hold, fear, maze, confusion and level-drain spells. This ability is very similar to Enrage, which is used by Berserkers. Enrage has double duration, but different bonuses and it comes with penalties after the duration has run out.
• At 11th level, the barbarian gains 10% resistance to slashing, piercing, crushing and missile damage. This improves to 15% resistance at level 15 and up to 20% resistance at level 19.This ability stacks with the Hardiness high level ability.
• Cannot wear full plate or plate mail
• Cannot specialize past normal specialization.

The above is very different from Fighters, except for the kit Berserker, which in essence is the model for the Barbarian in 3rd edition. But taken on its own terms, and without reference to that kit, the Barbarian class is very different from the Fighter class in Baldur's Gate 2 in that you're talking about a class with a +2 hp/level bonus, which moves much faster in combat, is immune to an ability that rogues use to one shot people, can naturally become immune to charm, hold, fear, maze, confusion, and level-drain, and which has natural physical damage resistance as opposed to armor, and which loses weapon specialization and the ability to wear plate as a consequence.

You built Barbarians - or more likely, Berserkers - in Baldur's Gate 2, as one man killing machines, and sent them in to take down enemies like illithids, vampires, beholders, assassins, and wizards, which would otherwise destroy your party due to the variety of devastating spell effects and instant kills they inflicted. You cannot do the same with a normal Fighter unless you gave him every high-level spell protection in the game. Barbarians - or again, Berserkers - provided parties without sufficient spell support a way to deal with such enemies. They cannot simply be replaced by another class in such a capacity.

 

[Infinitron]

Infinitron It's one of the earliest screenshots. I bet you, a dedicated Obsidian PR-wannabe, has it stashed somewhere.

All I remember is this one:

I don't know what symbol means.

Anyway, "Physique" is not an attribute. The difference between attribute and skill is important because skills can be improved on every level-up while attributes are fixed at chargen, and because there are more skills in the game than there are companions.

 

[Lacrymas]

It's probably athletics.

 

[Sentinel]

I don't remember it being that big (pretty sure there is another one where the same thing is showcased) but taht might be it.

 

[ga♥]

Uh oh, How could I call this interesting character.... let me open this Lord of the Rings... hmm Beregond, let's change it a bit noone will notice it he he he. Peregund. I am a genius.

- POE writer

 

[Azarkon]

=
Who's ignoring them? As I said, BG2 has a big menu and some of the dishes are very good, but when it comes to character creation and building, that's all there's to it. You make your pick from the menu at the start, and roll with it. Or for the trooly hard-kore, dual at level 9 to make another pick. After those initial choices, zip. Okay technically you have to put a proficiency pip on something from time to time, but if you don't build on what you chose at CC, you're just gimping yourself.

So what?

All of the examples of class build variety in Pillars of Eternity, either by you or Grunker or the build guys on the Obsidian forums, are planned builds. They are not ad hoc builds that you create during the game. A general property of skill build systems is that when you don't plan builds ahead, they suck; and when you do plan them ahead, and optimize the build, 99% of the times it's no different from picking a class because you end up with a relatively limited set of efficient builds and the rest are trash. It's called the cookie cutter syndrome. It's common in action CRPG and MMORPG systems and has led to many developers simply abandoning the whole skill focused approach.

I don't necessarily oppose skill based systems. I do think that, even though they end up with cookie cutter builds more often than not, they provide an extra level of interactivity not found in class based systems. But the reasons people provide for why they're better are often just inane, and in Pillars of Eternity's case, Sawyer doesn't appear to understand that you can't both prevent "degenerate" meta-gaming and reward people for planning and optimizing builds. They're mutually conflicting goals. A build that you naturally arrive at through picking the most obvious choices should not be an optimal build. Otherwise, there's no challenge involved and you might as well just pick for the player, as class systems do. This is why the classic Pillars of Eternity experience sucked - because so much work was put into trying to make every build work, that it defeats the whole motivation behind character planning.

 

[ore clover]

I'm sure it's only for skills. PoE2 will have like 20 of them including a bunch of dialogue-only skills, the balance is all different.

Sawyer posted a screenshot of the party's physique (? whatever it's called) score being added up to complete a skill check successfully in a dialogue scene.

The party... combines its total physique? Dafuq?

Spoiler

These modern rpgs get weirder every year, let me tell you.

 

[Prime Junta]

All of the examples of class build variety in Pillars of Eternity, either by you or Grunker or the build guys on the Obsidian forums, are planned builds. They are not ad hoc builds that you create during the game. A general property of skill build systems is that when you don't plan builds ahead, they suck; and when you do plan them ahead, and optimize the build, 99% of the times it's no different from picking a class because you end up with a relatively limited set of efficient builds and the rest are trash. It's called the cookie cutter syndrome. It's common in action CRPG and MMORPG systems and has led to many developers simply abandoning the whole skill focused approach.

In that case Pillars must be a real work of fucking genius, because those planned builds we've posted /aren't/ cookie-cutter. And hell yes they're more efficient than ad-hoc builds.

It's like you guys can't into scalars. It's either cookie-cutter, or all builds are the same. Fallacy of the excluded middle much?

 

[Azarkon]

All of the examples of class build variety in Pillars of Eternity, either by you or Grunker or the build guys on the Obsidian forums, are planned builds. They are not ad hoc builds that you create during the game. A general property of skill build systems is that when you don't plan builds ahead, they suck; and when you do plan them ahead, and optimize the build, 99% of the times it's no different from picking a class because you end up with a relatively limited set of efficient builds and the rest are trash. It's called the cookie cutter syndrome. It's common in action CRPG and MMORPG systems and has led to many developers simply abandoning the whole skill focused approach.

In that case Pillars must be a real work of fucking genius, because those planned builds we've posted /aren't/ cookie-cutter. And hell yes they're more efficient than ad-hoc builds.

It's like you guys can't into scalars. It's either cookie-cutter, or all builds are the same. Fallacy of the excluded middle much?

The cookie cutter syndrome refers to every class having a small set of optimal builds against which all other builds objectively under perform. Pillars of Eternity doesn't have enough players or analysts to evaluate whether the builds you guys posted are, in fact, cookie cutter; they probably are, I just can't be bothered to prove it because it doesn't matter to my argument, which is that your criticism of classes being selected at the start, makes no sense in this context.

 

[Prime Junta]

The cookie cutter syndrome refers to every class having a small set of optimal builds against which all other builds objectively under perform. Pillars of Eternity doesn't have enough players or analysts to evaluate whether the builds you guys posted are, in fact, cookie cutter; they probably are, I just can't be bothered to prove it because it doesn't matter to my argument, which is that your criticism of classes being selected at the start, makes no sense in this context.

So you're asserting that there's no difference between a system where the classes are defined and on-rails from the start, and a system where you have to actively explore the system in order to discover those optimal buils.

'k

 

[ilitarist]

You have to do some "exploration" in AD&D too. E.g. hearing about BG games having a grand plot and party relations you might think that Charisma or Intellect would be useful.

 

[Ulfhednar]

You have to do some "exploration" in AD&D too. E.g. hearing about BG games having a grand plot and party relations you might think that Charisma or Intellect would be useful.

I think that's why they put the ring of human influence 3 feet away from the exit to Irenicus' dungeon. They didn't want you to feel too bad about dumping your CHA to 3 on CHARNAME.

 

[Azarkon]

The cookie cutter syndrome refers to every class having a small set of optimal builds against which all other builds objectively under perform. Pillars of Eternity doesn't have enough players or analysts to evaluate whether the builds you guys posted are, in fact, cookie cutter; they probably are, I just can't be bothered to prove it because it doesn't matter to my argument, which is that your criticism of classes being selected at the start, makes no sense in this context.

So you're asserting that there's no difference between a system where the classes are defined and on-rails from the start, and a system where you have to actively explore the system in order to discover those optimal buils.

'k

Of course there's a difference, but what's important is not whether classes are locked in at the start. It's whether the game rewards strategic planning before the game begins. Contrary to the hyperbole, while there are few significant in-game choices for character progression in Baldur's Gate 2, there's a lot of planning involved - from the parties you build to the spells you take to the items you'll use to the races, classes, and kits you'll choose. Evaluating classes in a class-based game is like exploring builds in a talent-based game - in both cases you're applying the rules of the game to analyze whether a particular class or build has the potential to be powerful. This is also why excessive "balance" is such anathema - because in a world where all builds and classes are equally effective everywhere, the choice of build and therefore any effort spent analyzing the game system, is irrelevant.

This is not a binary problem, where skill-based or talent-based systems are superior by definition simply because they decompose character design into smaller components than selecting a class. I've been a member of MMORPG communities where people write thousands of pages of comments debating the merits of class X versus class Y in situation Z. Does it matter that the class they chose was locked in at the start? No, because THAT CHOICE is what's being analyzed. Class-based systems are simply talent/skill-based systems with less granularity. Just because you don't compose a character from a set of talents doesn't imply that the choice of character is trivial; and at the same time, just because you can compose a character from a set of talents doesn't imply the choice of talent combination is deep or satisfying. That's why it's fucking stupid that every skill-based vs. class-based debate ends up with the former camp shouting "but mye customization options!" as though that makes a system automatically superior.

More options CAN be better, but is not necessarily so. As a reductio ad absurdum, anyone can understand why a system with a million classes is not necessarily better than a system with just ten classes. So why is it we have such difficulty applying the same logic to skill-based and talent-based games, where every skill or talent combination can be thought of as a class? I'm reminded of those strategy game fans who argue that more units is always better, which is simply not the case.

That said, this debate over whether it's objectively better to have more options in the form of talents is little more than a red herring to distract from Sawyer's deeply flawed game design principles. It's brought up again and again as though it's a breakthrough in CRPG design, when in fact it is little more than following a decade old trend in mainstream game design. The argument is tiring, because it's been done a hundred times already across multiple game systems.

What annoys me about Pillars of Eternity is not that, like a hundred games before it, it implements talents for character customization. It's those OTHER game design ideas, in which it is eccentric. Ideas like not rewarding experience for combat, getting rid of hard counters, abandoning verisimilitude in favor of functionality, excessive emphasis on balance, over loading of abilities and status effects in a party-based game, etc. It's THOSE ideas that made it an inferior system.

 

[ilitarist]

https://jesawyer.tumblr.com/post/162835265756/hi-josh-i-had-a-question-about-skill-checks-in

one-and-a-half-ivan asked:

Hi Josh, I had a question about skill checks in PoE2. If I understood it correctly, all your party scores are added in order to see if you pass a check or not. Won't it make checks redundant, as it would be easy to max out all the important skills and just steamroll through all dialogues? Could you maybe tell us about this aspect in detail?

JSawyer:
Other party members can contribute to checks, but the contribution is not 1:1. Every other character in the party who has a value in the applicable skill has their skill value added to a pool. The pool grants an additional bonus on a (more or less) triangular progression.

E.g.: John Watcher is in dialogue and one of his replies has a Diplomacy requirement of 8. He has 4 Diplomacy. Pallegina has 6 Diplomacy, Aloth has 3, Eder has 1, Xoti has 0.

6 + 3 + 1 + 0 = 10, which corresponds to a bonus of +4. John Watcher’s effective Diplomacy is 8.

The assists can allow you to make much higher checks than you could by yourself, but that’s also a pretty big investment of skill points to make high checks in one specific skill. If you want to make the Diplomacy Monster Party that makes all of the Diplomacy checks because everyone has maxed out Diplomacy, you can. You don’t receive any special bonuses for being 2x or 3x over the check requirement and you won’t qualify for any of the checks in other skills.

Doesn't seem so bad. But probably screws up solo players.

 

[Grunker]

At this point PoE-detractors are so blinded by their weird, cultist partisan-ship they seem to mistake praise for the IE games for the reverse lol

Or maybe luj1 just really likes Od Nua huh

 

[FeelTheRads]

The cookie cutter syndrome refers to every class having a small set of optimal builds against which all other builds objectively under perform. Pillars of Eternity doesn't have enough players or analysts to evaluate whether the builds you guys posted are, in fact, cookie cutter; they probably are, I just can't be bothered to prove it because it doesn't matter to my argument, which is that your criticism of classes being selected at the start, makes no sense in this context.

So you're asserting that there's no difference between a system where the classes are defined and on-rails from the start, and a system where you have to actively explore the system in order to discover those optimal buils.

'k

Actually no.
First, saying the classes in D&D are on-rails is just retarded and a lie.
Second, PoE also has classes.. how is that not on-rails, then? In which case your "explored" builds are technically nothing more than kits, that are just much more uninteresting than what D&D has to offer. Wow, one ranger hits from the distance one from melee! AMAZING EXPLORATION!
And fuck off with "more efficient" and "optimal". Everything is efficient. Just how much difference is between those builds and an ad-hoc one?

 

[Prime Junta]

First, saying the classes in D&D are on-rails is just retarded and a lie.

Be more specific. It would be a lie about base D&D3 without prestige classes.

It is entirely true about OD&D, AD&D1 and 2, and D&D3 with prestige classes.

(I don't know how true it is about D&D4 and 5, since I'm not familiar with these systems.)

Second, PoE also has classes.. how is that not on-rails, then?

Because you can skew classes different ways by picking different stat distributions, abilities, talents, and items.

In which case your "explored" builds are technically nothing more than kits, that are just much more uninteresting than what D&D has to offer.

The difference is that with AD&D kits, all you have to do is open your mouth and lick the spoon the game designer is sticking into your mouth like a good little boy, whereas with Pillars /you're/ the one doing the exploration and coming up with the build.

Wow, one ranger hits from the distance one from melee! AMAZING EXPLORATION!

If that was all there was to it, then yeah it wouldn't be all that much. It's not though -- one ranger does the damage himself, another supports the pet doing it, etc. etc., which you're conveniently ignoring.

And fuck off with "more efficient" and "optimal". Everything is efficient. Just how much difference is between those builds and an ad-hoc one?

Enough that it'll make you suffer at PotD (if you're good at the game) or Hard (if you're only reasonably good).

 

[ilitarist]

The difference is that with AD&D kits, all you have to do is open your mouth and lick the spoon the game designer is sticking into your mouth like a good little boy, whereas with Pillars /you're/ the one doing the exploration and coming up with the build.

Don't forget that if you aren't familiar with the system this spoon can go not into your mouth but somewhere else. And it's not the same as looking for a good build in PoE because there's right answer and there's wrong answer.

 

[Stompa]

It would be a lie about base D&D3 without prestige classes.

It is entirely true about OD&D, AD&D1 and 2, and D&D3 with prestige classes.

What the fuck are you on? Prestige classes are what makes D&D3's character building so freeform, it's not on rails in any sense of the word. The comment about PRC-less D&D3 being somehow less restrained than the one with PRC shows you have fuck all experience playing with that system outside of corebooks.

 

[Roguey]

Prestige classes are what makes D&D3's character building so freeform

Prestige classes: Build your character in this specific way to meet the requirements.

 

[Grunker]

Prestige classes are what makes D&D3's character building so freeform

Prestige classes: Build your character in this specific way to meet the requirements.

Manipulation at best. The requirements are rarely steep enough to railroad your character, and good D&D builds can have four or five classes.

 

[Stompa]

Prestige classes: Build your character in this specific way to meet the requirements.

That doesn't contradict what I've said. Plenty of freeform systems have requirements for things that you gotta fulfill with your character build. All Fallouts had that, for example.

 

[Prime Junta]

Manipulation at best. The requirements are rarely steep enough to railroad your character, and good D&D builds can have four or five classes.

Once you get into epic levels, sure. Most prestige classes can only taken around level 7-10 or so. It takes about 15 levels to get and develop your prestige class, and up to that point it's 100% on-rails. If you want to take two, you have to target that outcome from level 1 with no deviations.

(Most of the time anyway. There are a few prestige classes with relatively lenient requirements, but most of them just aren't.)

 

[Lurker King]

Azarkon owning schooling the unwashed Obsidiantards.

LMAO