Eternity Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire Pre-DLC Thread [GO TO NEW THREAD]

[Lacrymas]

Can't you just rush the main story in Ironman mode and say that you've done it Ironman?

 

[Maculo]

Pacing/difficulty really seems to depend on your wanderings. Sometimes I run into some lich or someshit above my paygrade and the fights are delicious and require full use of resources; then I get back to MQ or something and roflstomp the whole map in 5 minutes.

I suspect that if you (accidentally?) beelined to Neketaka and cleaned the entire place out with non-combat quests, maybe robbed every single container and NPC possible (I don't know why, but we know people do this), and so on, then you might find the entire game a very quick and boring stomp.

Of course, the onus is on the game to pace you properly, so it's still true that the devs fucked up on POTD difficulty (and, I suspect, the pacing / balancing of XP rewards and so forth all over the place, just like POE1). But my suspicion is that if upcoming fixes are decent, then it's perfectly possible to have a nice fun long romp around the islands, as long as I don't deliberately look for ways to make the game easier. (Right now, it's more like you have to look for ways to not make it easy.)

I made a beeline to Neketaka and finished as many quests as I could. By the time I left, I had plenty of gold and was over-leveled for a decent chunk of the side-content.

Hey, I am currently on an Ironman POTD All Scaling only Upward Blind playthrough with an evil oriented main character (Eder has been sacrificed in POE1 for example), I have completed Fort Deadlight (killing everyone). Do you think I have any chance to succeed?

Yes, I am pretty sure you can ignore all the factions in the finale.

 

[fantadomat]

Can't you just rush the main story in Ironman mode and say that you've done it Ironman?

Yes you can,it is pretty much pointless achievement.

 

[Kaivokz]

Can't you just rush the main story in Ironman mode and say that you've done it Ironman?

Yes you can,it is pretty much pointless achievement.

That's disappointing. In PoE1, I enjoyed figuring out the best strategies for a solo wizard against the arch-mages, dragons, and bounties. Ways to get through dungeons, and difficult encounters, etc. For example, using elemental bulwark turns the fight against Maerwald from potentially game-ending to very easily winnable. I think PoE2's game systems are good enough to allow for a variety of interesting solo-character options, but I don't think the structure of the game will offer much of a challenge, even if the difficulty is tuned up.

They also removed "ironman solo" from steam achievements because some people can't handle not getting every achievement, even if they aren't good enough/don't have enough time to get them. I didn't get all the achievements in Pillars (no killing/beating it quickly/crafting potions/other crap that I don't care about and find no enjoyment in) but I DID get frozen crown solo, because it was an interesting challenge. Something to do with my psychology makes self-imposed challenges not as fun as system-imposed, or game design-imposed, challenges. Probably because I could just as easily challenge myself to something impossible (like beating the game without using any equipment, items, abilities or companions--... and MAYBE there is some way to do that with a Monk or something, but I'm not autistic enough to find out).

 

[frajaq]

Don't think it has anything to do with psychology

If you have to find out a way to "cripple" yourself in-game to make it more enjoyable/challenging that's a big sign of failure in design from the developers
I've seen people in the codex defend shitty games like IWD when their argument is something laughable like "well duh OF COURSE you have to restrain/cripple yourself otherwise you can't enjoy the game!!!!"

 

[Lacrymas]

Probably because I could just as easily challenge myself to something impossible (like beating the game without using any equipment, items, abilities or companions--... and MAYBE there is some way to do that with a Monk or something, but I'm not autistic enough to find out).

Yes, a no-item solo run can be done with a Monk. You can also finish the game with a level 1 solo Ranger. Both on PotD.

 

[IHaveHugeNick]

I suspect that if you (accidentally?) beelined to Neketaka and cleaned the entire place out with non-combat quests, maybe robbed every single container and NPC possible (I don't know why, but we know people do this), and so on, then you might find the entire game a very quick and boring stomp.

Yeah, my suspicion is that people who absolutely hate everything about this game are doing exactly that. Go straight to Neketaka after the prologue, spend next 30 hours picking it clean and when you finally come out, you are guaranteed to crush every encounter with all the extra levels and gear and money.

If you have to find out a way to "cripple" yourself in-game to make it more enjoyable/challenging that's a big sign of failure in design from the developers"

It's a bit more complicated than that.

If you have to cripple yourself on your first run, then yeah, developers have fucked up big time. And that's the case with Deadfire.

But crippling yourself a bit on a 2nd or 3rd run is just common sense. We play RPGs for their complexity and open-ended design, but you can't have complexity and open-ended design without making the games inherently exploitable. Every RPG that isn't completely railroaded can be cheesed, and you need to learn to walk a fine line between playing the game well and just cheesing it.

Ie tanking mobs in a choke point is a legitimate strategy far as I'm concerned, and devs know it exists and they probably (hopefully?) plan for it. But robbing all shopkeepers clean in Neketaka, then reselling the items and robbing them again, that's cheese.

 

[Shadenuat]

Neketaka is low level content that gives out low level main and side quests, ofc you go there.

Trying going somewhere else from the beginning of the game will likely get you to level 10+ content.

For example playing second time I went to Deadlight and then pirate island. Took a quest to help actors.

Solved quest, got into scripted encounter with thugs, they have 100+ in all stats, I have like 40 accuracy

But again since some classes like wizord evoker can 1-shot whole encounters starting from level 5, it's not just Neketaka. And if they wanted to balance Neketaka, they should have created more layers of it, like Athkatla had - which had beginning, midgame and endgame content hidden in it.

 

[Tigranes]

If you have to find out a way to "cripple" yourself in-game to make it more enjoyable/challenging that's a big sign of failure in design from the developers

Of course, this was never about 'absolving' the devs. Ultimately it's their responsibility to provide enough encouragements/constraints to ensure good pacing for most players, and they failed to do that. POE1 and 2 both make unnecessary mistakes with its pacing.

At the same time, we live in a world where almost no CRPGs ever offer sufficient difficulty that an RPG veteran replaying the game with optimised characters will actually ever really be in danger. So I don't really care about who to blame - the blame is obviously with the devs - but what's the point of powergaming and cheesing and then spending hours being bored by the roflstomp? The rational thing to do is either (1) stop playing the game because it is not good enough, or (2) come up with ways that make the game fun for you, without becoming too ridiculously self-crippling. What I don't get is people who insist on roflstomping, spend 50 hours on the game, then complain.

---

From a RPG design perspective, though, I think some of Deadfire's problems are symptomatic of any CRPG trying to offer more open-ended stuff. Think about it - we love it when games open up after the first 30 mins and say the whole world is free to roam, right? We don't want to be strung along with each location opening up in a linear way? And we also like being able to go to a huge city like Neketaka straight off. But it's hard to see how you could achieve really good pacing when you have that format. (Deadfire still should have had better pacing, but I'm thinking about the broader point; e.g. we see similar kinds of issues in games like Expeditions or DOS2.)

I think this is also where BG2 lucked into a good mitigation strategy; the relatively flat progression of D&D means that you could do the De'Arnise keep at level 9 or level 12, have a lot of gear from other sidequests or not, but the difference wouldn't be as massive as it would be in many other RPG systems. POE1&2 suffers from having accuracy & defences depend so heavily on level, so that being even a couple of levels under or over can lead to a roflstomp where the player doesn't even realise why. (I just had a quick look, and my dude should not be getting over 50% of his Fortitude or Accuracy from level. It would be much better if most of the gains were dependent on gear and skills.)

Another thing is how generous you are with XP and loot. POE1/2 serves a certain RPG crowd that has come to expect and enjoy having 8 times more magical items, and therefore money, than they actually need - as well as a 'casual' crowd that wants to do only 30% of the quests and still be levelled enough for endgame, etc. I think instead of having 5 difficulty levels, all of which are half-arsed, we should really have had two or three, with bigger differences between them. POTD should not only have more challenging encounters but things like increased supplies consumption, some kind of decreased XP gain across the board, and higher merchant prices.

 

[IHaveHugeNick]

Neketaka is low level content that gives out low level main and side quests, ofc you go there.

Trying going somewhere else from the beginning of the game will likely get you to level 10+ content.

For example playing second time I went to Deadlight and then pirate island. Took a quest to help actors.

Solved quest, got into scripted encounter with thugs, they have 100+ in all stats, I have like 40 accuracy
.

See, on my first run I first explored around a bit, killing some mini-bosses around Port Maje. They were too easy, so I switched to PoTD , went to Fort Deadlight, had a blast there and even a full party wipe with the ship fight. Only after that I went to Neketaka, spend there maybe 10 hours and I left again to explore a bit.

 

[existential_vacuum]

Yes you can,it is pretty much pointless achievement.

Pillars of Eternity: Deadfire, ladies and gentlemen.

I don't even know if it's hilarious, sad or both.

 

[MajorMace]

What's sad/hilarious ?
You mean the fact there's no loop in first spot of dialogue options ? Who gives a fuck ?

 

[Sloul]

When I reached Neketaka for the first time I visited the whole thing and did most of its quests, because I was engaged by its quests and the politics going behind. I also found the place charming.
I never thought that by playing the game I would be ''cheesing'', which is really a new ground to me: playing the content of a game in the order that seems the most appropriate is now cheesing. Gotcha.

 

[Zboj Lamignat]

I was pretty far into the game, but just encountered a bug that simply makes everyone inside the ori o kaki-sraki-whatever sanctum hostile for no reason with 100% reproduction rate and my ocd completionist nature cannot stand that so that's that for the time being. Next stop - all dlc and patches in about a year I guess. My initial enthusiasm waned a fair bit, mostly due to the combat still having many of the exactly same problems that PoE1 had and the game being horribly bloated with all the absolutely pointless and boring seafaring stuff (that sea "combat" dialogue minigame, jesus fuck...). But still, I would call this game good-ish, huge incline over PoE1 and the best of all the new-old school crpgs that I've played by far. Not a huge achievement perhaps, but still. And it looks so gorgeous, goddamn.

 

[Trashos]

From a RPG design perspective, though, I think some of Deadfire's problems are symptomatic of any CRPG trying to offer more open-ended stuff. Think about it - we love it when games open up after the first 30 mins and say the whole world is free to roam, right? We don't want to be strung along with each location opening up in a linear way? And we also like being able to go to a huge city like Neketaka straight off. But it's hard to see how you could achieve really good pacing when you have that format. (Deadfire still should have had better pacing, but I'm thinking about the broader point; e.g. we see similar kinds of issues in games like Expeditions or DOS2.)

I think this is also where BG2 lucked into a good mitigation strategy; the relatively flat progression of D&D means that you could do the De'Arnise keep at level 9 or level 12, have a lot of gear from other sidequests or not, but the difference wouldn't be as massive as it would be in many other RPG systems. POE1&2 suffers from having accuracy & defences depend so heavily on level, so that being even a couple of levels under or over can lead to a roflstomp where the player doesn't even realise why. (I just had a quick look, and my dude should not be getting over 50% of his Fortitude or Accuracy from level. It would be much better if most of the gains were dependent on gear and skills.)

Well, that's the answer right there. What serious players are looking for has been done before in SoA (which was also level-capped before ToB came along, so that mages couldn't reach level 9 spells). In addition, Josh did something similar with his JSawyer mod for New Vegas, where he reworked level progression and the level cap, and made the game challenging.

So it has been done in a similar game, Josh has done it himself in another open-world game, and yet it wasn't done for Deadfire, and it is questionable (as you pointed out) whether the game systems can support such a thing at all. If it turns out that it's not possible (which is my best guess) to turn the game hardcore, it is a mystery all around why he designed the systems like that.

 

[Tigranes]

When I reached Neketaka for the first time I visited the whole thing and did most of its quests, because I was engaged by its quests and the politics going behind. I also found the place charming.
I never thought that by playing the game I would be ''cheesing'', which is really a new ground to me: playing the content of a game in the order that seems the most appropriate is now cheesing. Gotcha.

Literally nobody in the world said this, and I specifically said that the fault lies with the devs for failing to encourage/constrain players effectively to produce good pacing. Players are enticed into Neketaka and given the freedom to explore all of it if they wish, which is entirely different from cheesing or metagaming.

But I suppose there's something about the fact that you were engaged by Neketaka despite being unable to read

Trashos I agree, and it mystifies me. When POE1 fucked up its pacing, I attributed it to a low cost project struggling to fulfill all the stretch goals and pack in content. Here, they did up the ante with a more open-ended form, but there is still no excuse - and I thought if there's one thing Sawyer would get right it is this kind of number-fiddly systems management. I wonder if there was a lot of troubled development going on in terms of cut/repositioned content and such.

 

[Sloul]

Alright, might have missread, my bad.

 

[Tigranes]

Fair of you, I retract my spit-spewing rage.

I wonder what can be done to pace a game where you have a big city full of quests & lots of combat outside. Quests in the city do try to send you to remote locations, but I think many players like to vacuum up all content in an area before moving on, which is entirely fair.

Again, I think the solution is systemic. E.g. if combat capacity progression wasn't so level-dependent, it would be totally OK to get a lot of XP in towns, and most of the reward could be gold or ship-oriented, while you'd still have to journey to dangerous dungeons to get the cool combat gear (which, by the way, is one thing Deadfire has very well - have cool and thematic items discovered in remote dungeons). Or even a game where you have combat & non-combat points given separately, and you earn the latter through noncombat quests, etc.

 

[Lacrymas]

Every development at Obs is troubled.

Fair of you, I retract my spit-spewing rage.

I wonder what can be done to pace a game where you have a big city full of quests & lots of combat outside. Quests in the city do try to send you to remote locations, but I think many players like to vacuum up all content in an area before moving on, which is entirely fair.

BG1 does it well, the big city it at the end.

 

[ScrotumBroth]

BG1 does it well, the big city it at the end.

It fits the story there. It does not here.

I agree with Shadenuat : Nekataka should have been multilayered like Athkatla. Gaping missed opportunity.

 

[FreeKaner]

Fair of you, I retract my spit-spewing rage.

I wonder what can be done to pace a game where you have a big city full of quests & lots of combat outside. Quests in the city do try to send you to remote locations, but I think many players like to vacuum up all content in an area before moving on, which is entirely fair.

Again, I think the solution is systemic. E.g. if combat capacity progression wasn't so level-dependent, it would be totally OK to get a lot of XP in towns, and most of the reward could be gold or ship-oriented, while you'd still have to journey to dangerous dungeons to get the cool combat gear (which, by the way, is one thing Deadfire has very well - have cool and thematic items discovered in remote dungeons). Or even a game where you have combat & non-combat points given separately, and you earn the latter through noncombat quests, etc.

You make it so you reach max level in the city, and the challenges outside are not gated by level but encounter difficulty.

 

[Trashos]

BG1 does it well, the big city it at the end.

Maybe I am biased because I am a much bigger fan of BG2 where the big city is at the beginning, but you shouldn't have to put the big city at the end. The problem is solved if you design PoTD based on the assumption that players will do the game's easier quests before the harder quests.

 

[IHaveHugeNick]

There's always a heavy price to pay for having an open, non-linear game.

Deadfire does a lot to try and encourage you to explore, both by giving you quests in Neketaka that can only be done if you leave the city, and by tying a lot of triggers to advancing main quest, which again, requires you to leave the main city.

But if some people have a playstyle where they just methodically clear area after area, they will always just go back and continue cleaning, unless you force them not to. And that requires putting the game on rails. You can do it AoD style where the game is non-linear only within each act, but remaining content is blocked by plot-gates, or you can do it Wasteland 2 style with radiation zones, or you can do some various other shit.

But I think that with a seafaring game, it really had to be a no-compromise completely open, with no plot-gating, otherwise whatever the fuck is even a point of having a seafaring setting.

You make it so you reach max level in the city, and the challenges outside are not gated by level but encounter difficulty.

That will only fuck up the people who explore a lot from the start. There's no pleasing everybody.

 

[Trashos]

Deadfire does a lot to try and encourage you to explore, both by giving you quests in Neketaka that can only be done if you leave the city, and by tying a lot of triggers to advancing main quest, which again, requires you to leave the main city.

But if some people have a playstyle where they just methodically clear area after area, they will always just go back and continue cleaning, unless you force them not to. And that requires putting the game on rails. You can do it AoD style where the game is non-linear only within each act, but remaining content is blocked by plot-gates, or you can do it Wasteland 2 style with radiation zones, or you can do some various other shit.

But I think that with a seafaring game, it really had to be a no-compromise completely open, with no plot-gating, otherwise whatever the fuck is even a point of having a seafaring setting.

You make it so you reach max level in the city, and the challenges outside are not gated by level but encounter difficulty.

I really don't see why such things are needed on PotD, unless we are under the assumption that PotD is not for thick-skinned veteran players of the game. And if we are under that assumption, there is really no serious discussion to be had on the matter.

 

[Tigranes]

I mean, I think from a gameplay perspective most open-world CRPGs would have been better off toning down the open-world (e.g. TW3, though for different reasons). Maybe they could have done something like natural hazards gating areas of the isles requiring ship upgrades and crew members?

I wonder what would have happened if POTD, from the very start of POE1, was billed as a "completely impossible" difficulty in the media, and then it was balanced far more punishingly not only in terms of enemy strength but elsewhere - money, XP gain, skill checks, everything. Would it have scared casuals off, who would just play Hard? Or would you have had tons of people whine that it's too hard and they can't get the ACHIEVEMENTS?!?!?! Because fuck me playing for achievos is a widespread cancer