Pillars of Eternity Director's Commentary Streams with Josh Sawyer

[santino27]

 

[Infinitron]

Why now? Upcoming PoE2 official announcement detected.

 

[Abu Antar]

I hope they don't announce it during a stream like this. i doubt they will have many viewers.

 

[Fry]

It's not like they're going to get a featured spot at E3 or something. For a game like this, a dev stream is where you'd do it in 2016.

It'll be followed by all the usual social media stuff, of course.

 

[Infinitron]

I hope they don't announce it during a stream like this. i doubt they will have many viewers.

Oh, I didn't mean they're going to announce it now in this stream, just that this seems like a buildup to a proper announcement.

 

[Infinitron]

http://eternity.obsidian.net/news/pillars-of-eternity-directors-commentary-streams

Pillars of Eternity Director's Commentary Streams!
Starting today (November 30th) at 4PM PST/1AM CET, our own Community Manager, Aarik Dorobiala, will be joined by Pillars of Eternity Game Director, Josh Sawyer, as they play through Pillars on our Twitch channel and provide a director's commentary for the game. This will be the first of four planned streams we'll be doing over the next couple of months. They'll look back on the game that is closing in on two years since it's release and answer questions direct from Twitch chat. The planned dates for these streams are as follows:

- Stream 1: November 30th

- Stream 2: December 14th

- Stream 3: January 4th

- Stream 4: January 18th

Stream dates are subject to change, but any updates will be posted on the Eternity site!

PoE2 announcement not before Jan 18?

 

[Excidium II]

But will Josh play the game on normal?

 

[Infinitron]

Whoops, forgot about this:

 

[Sentinel]

YOU'RE 30 MINUTES LATE INFINITRON WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU DOING WHERE HAVE YOU BEEN

 

[Excidium II]

Oh boy Sawyer wants to change interrupts to be more like Tranny's "only some special abilities interrupt" system.

 

[Infinitron]

Also says he might allow interrupts to cause spell loss if you interrupt a spellcaster while he's casting, like in D&D

 

[Excidium II]

That is cool but attacks not interrupting is gay. It's annoying as fuck in Tranny to have a guy going ham on a mage while he just stand there spamming every cooldown.

 

[Infinitron]

We'll see - I'm not sure if he has the exact same thing in mind as what Tyranny does.

 

[Excidium II]

Well whatever he does I'm sure it will at least be better than tranny's implementation.

 

[Sentinel]

I think it's okay as long as the guy banging the mage has abilities that can interrupt spell casting. But then you almost have to give every class an ability to cancel spell casting. So it's kind of like "why bother?" since that's the system that's already de facto in place.

 

[Ent]

I want the chance for a spell to go absolutely haywire if the cast is interrupted - alas I don't think something like that will be implemented into a game anytime soon.

 

[Rev]

Watching the video now, someone asked Josh his favourite companion and he said Durance (followed by Eder).

 

[Excidium II]

Josh has good taste. Funny not even him likes Pallegina much

 

[Rev]

Josh has good taste. Funny not even him likes Pallegina much

Well, he said he liked writing her and that he liked pretty much all the companions, tho.

 

[Fry]

Someone asked about load times...

 

[Kev Inkline]

Pillar's loading times are neither for the timid nor children, apparently.

 

[Prime Junta]

That is cool but attacks not interrupting is gay. It's annoying as fuck in Tranny to have a guy going ham on a mage while he just stand there spamming every cooldown.

Hmmm.

I would kind of like it if it was possible to intentionally use interrupts tactically. As in, when you see a caster starting to cast something nasty, do something to interrupt him relatively reliably. I would probably like this more than just making a build around interrupts, which just turns it into a substitute for Deflection (preventing melee attacks rather than deflecting them when made).

Mage duels would also get a lot more interesting if they could defend against interrupts and interrupt each other, i.e. the AI would use these abilities on your casters as well when you started casting.

So if this means that characters could pick a couple of per-encounter interrupt attacks (and some attack spells had interrupt baked in), and the interrupts were fairly reliable, then I'm cautiously in favour of this change.

 

[Excidium II]

Yeah but limiting interrupts to a few interrupt-specific spells and abilities would require buffing their effect to be comparable to other CC abilities. At which point it becomes just another CC (like a silence) instead of its own mechanic.

 

[Prime Junta]

Yeah but limiting interrupts to a few interrupt-specific spells and abilities would require buffing their effect to be comparable to other CC abilities. At which point it becomes just another CC (like a silence) instead of its own mechanic.

Yeah, that could happen. If the interrupt abilities were mostly single-target though...?

 

[Tigranes]

I'd like the ability to interrupt people actively, i.e. magic missile's other primary use in IE games, but for this to happen interrupts don't have to be sequestered into special interrupt abilities. When you ran out of magic missiles, you still looked for fast-casting spells/abilities with the highest chance to hit. I like the idea behind Lantry's ability to silence mages with his quill throw in that regard. Interrupts could still be a general property of attacks, but (1) actually work properly, which it rarely (never?) did across POE lifespan, and (2) have success rate actually have high variance, e.g. certain spells have very high interrupt % because they're Swarm of Flies or whatever.

Of course, the other thing they would need to fix is POE's awful visual clarity for animations/VFX (not to mention the lack of trademark casting sound alerts as in BG/2), because right now it's bloody hard to tell when to interrupt what.