23 pages. I just waded through 23 goddamn pages of reactions, looking for someone to engage with Roxor on his substantive points and it's just nothing but whining, 3 line posts of "I don't agree" and
Irenaeus's increasingly desperate cries for attention. It's a sad, sad day when the discussion on reddit of all places has more substance than 23 pages of the goddamned RPG Codex - at least over there you can see a couple folks making some sort of attempt to respond to the substance of the review:
For one, he seems to think that Might is better for dps than Dex, which is wrong wrong wrong if you have even the slightest idea how the damage modifiers work. Might is additive, whereas Dex is multiplicative ....
So if you have 20 Might (+30%), score a graze (-50%), and are wielding an exceptional (+30%) 2H weapon (14-20), your damage range for that hit is (14-20)*(1+0.3-0.5+0.3) = 15.4-22.
Speed boni are additive in the sense that if you have +30% speed from Dex and +20% from a talent, it ends up being +50% speed... but they're multiplicative with damage modifiers, which is where it really counts. Yes they increase damage lost to DR as well, but there's a tradeoff point where you've stacked up so many damage modifiers that Dex just becomes better than Might for damage, period. Which is a design flaw IMO - but that's neither here nor there. The point is that the reviewer's understanding of the (admittedly somewhat obtuse at times) game mechanics is woefully lacking, which makes his criticisms hold less water.
and:
Now, are these rebuttals
right? I honestly have no idea, but the reason I'm willing to wade through all this shitposting is because I learn more and become a better, more discerning consumer of gaming when I can watch informed people go head to head, point by point. The exchanges between Felipepepe, Grunker and VD in
this thread is still the best discussion I've ever seen on PoE because people who knew what they were talking about were taking the discussion seriously and exchanging perspectives. The Codex prides itself on high standards standards, but I don't see how 23 pages without a serious rebuttal meets any standards but the absolute lowest.
The only enlightening exchange I came across centered on the rather peripheral issue of Descartes, and at the risk of extending that already tangential issue I can at least that this fairly minor criticism in the review wasn't terribly on point. FWIW, modern philosophy doesn't take the Cogito very seriously, so no, the question presented in the game is very, very far from "null and void" (although it's arguable that the game didn't really intend the question in the same way that Descartes did). Very, very briefly (
you can check this Stanford page if you're dying to jump down this particular rabbit hole), philosophers object that (1) Descartes begs the question by assuming that an action must have an agent, which isn't entirely necessary (in other words, there's an unexplained leap between "thinking is occurring" and "there is a self which thinks") (2) Descartes assumes the validity of certain forms of inference, which hasn't been established if we're presuming radical doubt, (3) the Cogito can only be held, at best, to establish a self at a single point in time but fails to establish an enduring, permanent self that extends over time.
I don't want to be guilty of the same problem in not engaging with the substance of the review, but the fact of the matter is that I was out getting my degrees in philosophy when the lot of you were evidently getting your Ph.Ds in saving rolls and bitching, so I generally want to restrict my points to areas where I'm qualified to comment. Unfortunately I just don't know enough about the DnD universe to comment on how derivative PoE is or isn't (but at least I know enough to know when I don't know something, which may be the only useful thing I got out of my philosophy courses) - I can, however, say that
this part of the review is just pants-on-head wrong:
Another part of the setting that’s supposed to be ‘unique’ is its focus on souls. The result, however, is not exactly compelling, as whoever wrote it probably based it on some kind of ‘Plato for Dummies’ quick reference book, making it very highly derivative to say the least.
Mssr Roxor may be well qualified to speak on loot, greatswords and RPG engagement systems but I'm afraid he doesn't know the first thing about Plato - which is rather ironic, considering he accuses the Obsidian writers of cribbing from a 'Plato for Dummies' book he evidently hasn't troubled to read himself. Plato makes his longest arguments concerning the immortality of the soul in the Phaedo and, to a lesser extent, in the Meno, in which he ties his argument regarding immortal souls to his metaphysical argument regarding the unchanging
eidos (yes, the same
Eidos that make Tomb Raider and Deus Ex), as well as his (in my opinion, completely bonkers) argument that the soul possesses all knowledge but the traumatic experience of birth causes that knowledge to be lost - meaning that
learning is actually a process of
remembering. Was that confusing? It doesn't matter, because all you have to notice is that none of this has even the slightest thing to do with with Pillars of Eternity.
I suppose if you were trying to accuse PoE of being unoriginal regarding souls and reincarnation it'd make way, way more sense to reference Buddhism or maybe the Vedas, but even then you'd have an
awfully long climb ahead of you.
The reference to Hegel is even more bizarre:
Avellone is a talented writer, and while obviously he’s not a second Hegel, he does have the penchant for creating compelling setups and questions.
The only person who could possibly have written this sentence is one who has never, ever bothered to read a single word of Hegel. Hegel is a
notoriously bad writer, perhaps second only to Kant and the postwar deconstructionists in terms of employing a needlessly obfuscatory style. I remember one professor of mine theorizing that, since Hegel's style grew ever more obtuse as he aged, Hegel was likely doing it on purpose out of either fashion or sheer sadism. And that doddering old fart
liked Hegel.
I can't comment on all the points regarding the stats and the encounter system, but I can say that Mssr Roxor's name-dropping of various philosophical figures smacks of the shallow pseudo-intellectualism of one hoping to dress up a weak argument with a few fancy names. The arguments involve such a remarkable stretch that they give the impression of one who formed the opinions far before they had reasons to support them. There's no way that any reasonable person would play
Pillars of Eternity and say "wow, this souls stuff is such a rip off of Plato" unless they failed to understand the plot, failed to understand Plato, or simply disliked what they saw and set off in search of a reason.
As the reddit posters indicate, it's possible that Mssr. Roxor failed to understand the stats system and so therefore his criticisms might not hold water - I don't know, I'm no expert and so I should refrain from chiming in on matters that I don't really understand.
I can, however, say that on these (arguably) narrow issues his criticisms are remarkably weak, and that makes me doubt the strength and objectivity of his points on the whole.
