Eternity Pillars of Eternity II Beta Thread [GAME RELEASED, GO TO NEW THREAD]

[Fry]

Go away for awhile and come back to three pages of "CONZOLEZ!??! WE'VE BEEN BETRAAAAAYED!!!"

Truly, the Infowars of gaming forums. Never change, Codex. Never change.

 

[Infinitron]

Some more previews I spotted while writing the newspost:

https://www.gamewatcher.com/previews/pillars-of-eternity-ii-deadfire-preview/12968
http://www.rpgfan.com/previews/Pillars_of_Eternity_II_Deadfire/
https://www.n3rdabl3.com/2018/02/pillars-of-eternity-2-deadfire-preview/

 

[Jezal_k23]

Suppose he didn't know about it.

 

[Infinitron]

Hey, I called it! The Living Lands is Icewind Dale.

 

[Falksi]

I started off playing proper RPG's by experiencing Countdown to Doomsday on the Megadrive, and that's what got me interested enough in PC's to make the transistion to Baldur's Gate a few yeras later.

Hope the port doesn't affect the game's quality of course, but personally I'm glad when these games make it to console as they'll no doubt help save the console tards which can be saved.

There'll be plenty of poor fuckers out there who love proper RPG's but don't know it yet coz of the shite they usually play. When games like these arrive it opens their eyes to what it's really all about.

 

[Sizzle]

The difference between food is p. steep. Also poor lad having fucking oil for dinner.

:D

 

[AwesomeButton]

Has there been any info specifically on whether the enemy AI scripting will be moddable? This would make SCS-like mods possible with a minimum of technical troubles.

 

[Urthor]

Has anyone actually legitimately played the console port? How on earth do they make it work

 

[Lacrymas]

it’s not properly off-tanky, but i can’t resist the sword and stiletto combo on pallegina

Actually, Josh, it's properly main tanky atm. The best tank being a dual-wielding Paladin/Berserker, insane defenses and insane DPS.

Anyway, consoles. It's not designed around consoles, the interface is terrible in general and the amount of clicking you have to do in each encounter speaks that much. I have no idea how people played P1 on consoles, it seems pointlessly masochistic.

 

[Cross]

JS: I will say that in Pillars 1, I handed Eric Fenstermaker a difficult problem for him to solve. We have an illness that is driving you crazy, and portraying madness from an isometric camera is really difficult to do, especially in a supernatural world. Is that a ghost? Sure, there are ghosts in the world, but is it a real ghost, or one that I just imagined? That’s a difficult thing to communicate. Regarding Thaos as a villain, which I think Eric developed a very cool villain, one of the problems is that Thaos is part of a secret organization that no one knows about and everything he does is very covert. When he pops up, no one has any idea what he is or what he’s doing, and if you contrast that with Jon Irenicus, he pops up and just starts popping people, and people know who he is and he’s a big deal as an antagonist. People can go “John Irenicus, that dude is psycho” and talk about him. For Pillars 2, one of the things I said right away is that Eothas is coming back, and he’s in this big statue. He’s as tall as skyscrapers in Chicago. We did the measurements. There’s not a big chance that people aren’t going to notice that he’s walking around, and he can leave physical marks in the environment. We wanted to make sure that it felt like he had a real presence in the world so that players didn’t feel like they were pursuing this thing alone and the world was not responding to it.

Taking narrative inspiration from Bioware now?

'People complained that Thaos lacked presence, so we made the antagonist of Deadfire a skyscraper-sized walking statue possessed by a god. Try ignoring that! He's going to be the new Irenicus!'

This is such a boneheaded, unimaginative way of addressing a narrative flaw. Some of the best antagonists, including those of several Black Isle games, don't show up until the final stretch of their games. Ever heard of things called pacing and buildup, Josh?

We also changed esoteric rules, like our stacking rules, which is a very D&D, noodley thing; we made those much clearer and simpler. We also looked at our status effect system. I think there were 30 afflictions in Pillars of Eternity and they were all unique and their relationship to each other was very unclear. You had to memorize which priest’s spells countered which afflictions and all this other nonsense. We brought that down into a set of afflictions that’s easier to understand based around the different attributes. For example, “weakened” is the first tier of strength affliction and there are multiple levels up from weakened that are basically all the effects below plus the effect above, and if you counter it with any strength inspiration, such as “strong,” that gets rid of them all automatically. It doesn’t matter if it’s a low-level or high-level affliction; it’ll get rid of any of them and make you immune to any subsequent applications of them. If you learn that for strength, you’ll also learn it for intellect and dexterity and others. They all follow a similar convention.

The problem with the afflictions in PoE wasn't that they were too complex, it's that they had minor effects that you could easily shrug off. In D&D the 'frightened' effect made you run away in panic, in PoE it's just a minor penalty to accuracy. From the way he describes Deadfire's 'solution', it sounds like they added even more pointles bloat rather than making afflictions have meaningful and distinctive effects.

 

[Fry]

Has anyone actually legitimately played the console port? How on earth do they make it work

A radial menu, of course. I've messed around with the Xbox version. It's as good as it can be without completely redesigning the game, but still damn near unplayable.

I also don't give a shit. It's obvious that neither PoE or Deadfire were designed for consoles. If some company wants to put in all that port work for a tiny slice of console sales and people want to torture themselves playing it, go for it.

 

[Sentinel]

With this talk of Jon Irenicus, have Obsidian said anything about the possibility of bringing David Warner to voice a character?

 

[aweigh]

ok, i read entire inerview. summation:

1 tyranny rep and comp systems refined
2 combat clarity cues taken from tyranny incl. speed
3 tyranny way of magic (abilitty always per enc.) adopted


4 apparently tyranny = poe2 testing ground

 

[Sizzle]

Paging Lacrymas (and anyone else interested in how mandatory the ship combat will be). Excerpt from the interview:

Let’s devote our efforts toward making the ship something that’s really engaging and cool and something that there’s a reward for managing, but there’s also a scaling level of involvement. So, if you don’t want to be a super involved captain, you can stick with the Defiant and a relatively small crew with relatively low impact. Or, you can get the high-end ships, you can upgrade everything, you can hunt guys down all over the Deadfire and murder pirates everywhere. It can be a really big and engaging system.

Yup, looks like I was right - you can devote a lot of time to it, or just the bare minimum.

 

[Lacrymas]

The problem with the afflictions in PoE wasn't that they were too complex, it's that they had minor effects that you could easily shrug off. In D&D the 'frightened' effect made you run away in panic, in PoE it's just a minor penalty to accuracy. From the way he describes Deadfire's 'solution', it sounds like they added even more pointles bloat rather than making afflictions have meaningful and distinctive effects.

The afflictions and inspirations in the beta are actually pretty strong. The base inspirations give you +5 to an attribute and then build up on that with things like +Power Level or +Penetration. The afflictions in P1 were like that because at the beginning there were no hard counters, so frightened couldn't be like in D&D since you'll constantly run around like a headless chicken (which kinda happens in the IE games if you have no hard counters against fear). It's advantageous to have a party which can quickly stack up a bunch of afflictions in P1.

What this change does is giving access to hard counters to a bunch of classes, which kind of homogenizes them.

 

[Urthor]

Tyranny rep system is massive incline tbh

 

[frajaq]

ok, i read entire inerview. summation:

1 tyranny rep and comp systems refined
2 combat clarity cues taken from tyranny incl. speed
3 tyranny way of magic (abilitty always per enc.) adopted


4 apparently tyranny = poe2 testing ground

completely fine with this tbh, as much as I found Tyranny to be mediocre I liked the reputation system a LOT

 

[Sentinel]

What was the rep system in Tyranny?

 

[Lacrymas]

Tyranny's combat system was aggressively bad, though. It also didn't have per encounter spells, it had cooldowns. I'm fine with the combat speed slider, it would be great if it was easily accessible, too, so you can breeze through trash mobs faster, which there really aren't many in the beta tbh. The relative speeds are fine as it is, so there's no need to slow down everything even more.

 

[Sizzle]

What was the rep system in Tyranny?

You had factions and powerful individuals of said factions (as well as your own companions), and you could choose to either get on their good side and align with them or piss them off - through your actions and responses.

It isn't a perfect system by any means, but it did allow for a lot of branching.

The game itself is pretty bad, but that system worked as a sort of evolution of the one from Fallout: New Vegas. Let's hope they develop it even more for PoE2, it's potentially one of the best things about this game.

 

[Lacrymas]

It was directly stolen from DA2, though. One of the better ideas DA2 had and you could exert more varied influence on the companions like that. DA2's take on the companions and their shaping as individuals was pretty good in general. If PoE2's companions are like that, maybe if I can corrupt and change them with my Skaen Priest, I'll be soooo happy and I'll actually play with them, as opposed to automatically defaulting to the hired adventurers because they are less annoying.

 

[Anthony Davis]

With this talk of Jon Irenicus, have Obsidian said anything about the possibility of bringing David Warner to voice a character?

There have been quite a few people at Obsidian who would like to get David Warner to VO a main character, or heck, ANYTHING. This actually has nothing to do with PoE2 (as far as I know), just that there are a lot of people at Obsidian who are fans of David Warner.

 

[Sentinel]

With this talk of Jon Irenicus, have Obsidian said anything about the possibility of bringing David Warner to voice a character?

There have been quite a few people at Obsidian who would like to get David Warner to VO a main character, or heck, ANYTHING. This actually has nothing to do with PoE2 (as far as I know), just that there are a lot of people at Obsidian who are fans of David Warner.

Well, I hope they do it, 'cause that man isn't getting any younger.

 

[2house2fly]

With the reveal of a console release and the prospect of using a gamepad to play a mouse-driven RTwP RPG, suddenly the emphasis on sophisticated party AI scripts that lets the game play itself makes a lot more sense.

People have been complaining about the lack of AI customisation literally since before the first game was released. Now they add AI customisation and it's evidence of a nefarious plan

 

[2house2fly]

Taking narrative inspiration from Bioware now?

'People complained that Thaos lacked presence, so we made the antagonist of Deadfire a skyscraper-sized walking statue possessed by a god. Try ignoring that! He's going to be the new Irenicus!'

This is such a boneheaded, unimaginative way of addressing a narrative flaw. Some of the best antagonists, including those of several Black Isle games, don't show up until the final stretch of their games. Ever heard of things called pacing and buildup, Josh?

turns out they had to make the villain a giant green statue for the console port