IHaveHugeNick
Arcane
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- Apr 5, 2015
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Did it occur to anyone that Aeldys supports freeing slaves only on this particular island to fuck with Furrante?
That's weird. That someone would appeal to people's sense of idealism and present themselves as heroic in order to achieve a pragmatic and for themselves. Can't imagine that happening in the real world.This would have been fine actually, if it was more of a recruiting strategy - after all, they can also ally with the lower castes in Neketaka. But instead of being presented as a pragmatic/naturally occurring thing it's presented as a weird 'muh freedum' ideal.By what I am reading here, apparently the status quo in the region is pro-slavery. On these grounds, maybe it makes sense that the pirates are against slavery. It could be their way of appealing to and attracting people by offering an idealistic alternative.
That's very interesting, and maybe ties in with the anti-status quo narrative. The article is not very well written though ("one historian notes" etc, WHICH historian?), and I 'd have to double check in order to take it seriously. Pirates were still gangs, and that's not how murderous thugs operate usually.
There is obviously a difference between appealing to Roparu and slaves, and how you present yourself to an aristocrat like the Watcher. And there's a further difference between that and how how it's presented to the player. In this case it was just hamfisted 'everyone can do what they want' rebellious teenager ideology portrayed at all levels.That's weird. That someone would appeal to people's sense of idealism and present themselves as heroic in order to achieve a pragmatic and for themselves. Can't imagine that happening in the real world.This would have been fine actually, if it was more of a recruiting strategy - after all, they can also ally with the lower castes in Neketaka. But instead of being presented as a pragmatic/naturally occurring thing it's presented as a weird 'muh freedum' ideal.By what I am reading here, apparently the status quo in the region is pro-slavery. On these grounds, maybe it makes sense that the pirates are against slavery. It could be their way of appealing to and attracting people by offering an idealistic alternative.
Really loking to getting back on the shoip
Yes. Apparently there's also an item that references Cleve/Grimoire, but nobody has found it/made the connection yet.I've been staying away to avoid spoilers and will probably continue to do so until all DLCs are released and I've done a few playthroughs with different factions. I haven't read the thread so forgive me if this has been asked and answered: Was there a in game Codex reward for the fundraiser in Deadfire? The only thing that stood out for me as possibly a Codex thing was the pet "Grog", was that for/from the Codex?
That's very interesting, and maybe ties in with the anti-status quo narrative. The article is not very well written though ("one historian notes" etc, WHICH historian?), and I 'd have to double check in order to take it seriously. Pirates were still gangs, and that's not how murderous thugs operate usually.
Most people just don't picture pirate ships having order, rules, discipline, and an egalitarian code. There's plenty of debate how much they were actually applied, but pirate codes were a real thing and they were generally democratic.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pirate_code
Building Pillars of Eternity IIwithout losing that Infinity Engine charm
There’s always a fine line to walk when you’re working to remake or expand upon a classic game or series.
You want to pay homage to the original and not veer off too much in another direction, but because of advancements in technology and how we play video games, sometimes it’s not possible to replicate a classic completely.
Josh Sawyer, the game director at Obsidian Entertainment, knows this conflict too well. He’s been working on some of the most traditional roleplaying games of the past decade: Pillars of Eternity, Tyranny, and Alpha Protocol, just to name a few. The studio has become known for its dedication to classic RPGs, specifically games made on the Infinity Engine such as Baldur’s Gate, while also updating them just enough that they can exist in the modern age.
Its latest release, Pillars of Eternity II: Deadfire, continues the trend, creating another RPG that fans of classic titles can sink their teeth into while also ensuring they’re getting something new. Deadfire probably strays the farthest from Infinity Engine out of all the games Sawyer has worked on, but he says it’s still in the same tradition. Otherwise, its audience wouldn’t bother playing it.
Infinity Engine games are specifically appealing for a number of reasons, but according to Sawyer, one big draw of Deadfire's design has to do with its openness.
“I think that the feeling of exploration is really huge,” Sawyer said during a recent Gamasutra Twitch stream. “The party-based exploration adventure style is really appealing because you have this mob of colorful characters going around this big world with you and this freedom to take who you want, leave people if you don’t like them, explore things at your own pace, it's just a very unique feeling.”
How do you update tradition?
Infinity Engine games are specific. They’re RPGs where players build small but mighty parties to combat enemies, traverse a fantastical world, and improve their skills, but there’s something distinct about them.
There’s the aforementioned sense of exploration. Obsidian designed Deadfire to be an open-world exploration game from the beginning and it shows, specifically in one of its major new features: the inclusion of ships. It’s meant to be a replacement for the stronghold system, where players can spend in-game currency to upgrade and add features to their boats. Obsidian did this so that players couldn’t just ignore a whole system. Ships are essential to how you move around the game.
"it was a really really big challenge but the focus was to make the thing you're investing in and upgrading feel more central to the aspect of exploring the world. and then to try and tie in more quests and NPCs into that thing,” Sawyer explained.
The developers also ensured that players could do a lot of quests in a non-specific order. One of the hallmarks of quality open-world games is that freedom. A player runs into an obstacle preventing them from going where they want and the illusion is crushed.
“We try to do a lot of work to think about 'hey what if the player did these things out of order from these other things’ and we try to account for all of those in the conversations,” he continued. "Assume your players will do the worst, which is to say the best, which is what they want… I'd say resist the temptation to clamp down and say ‘no we're not gonna let the player go over there.’ Try to say yes.”
The appeal is also partially an aesthetic thing. Infinity Engine, and now some Obsidian, games have a distinct top-down, isometric, hand-painted feel that brings to mind Dungeons & Dragons manuals or fantasy book covers.
So when Obsidian creates those Infinity Engine-esque games, it tries to skew close to that style, with some subtle but important updates. Of course updates are necessary when the engine is different (Infinity vs. Unity 4 for the first Pillars of Eternity). For Deadfire, Sawyer says the team had to redo its entire art pipeline to update to Unity 5.
“We got a lot of flack on the first game for how static the environments looked. We also got a lot of flack for how the characters looked because their textures and resolution wasn't super great,” he explained. “We had high level goals to make dynamic lighting a really high priority.”
How to achieve that balance
Sawyer has been playing around with updating Baldur’s Gate since before Pillars, back when he was working on the first Icewind Dale in 2001 (he joked about how he began prototyping Pillars back then during the stream). He and his team try to consider two things when making a change to the formula: will it improve the game and what does the community want?
“In Deadfire, we changed a lot of mechanics based on feedback,” he explained. “The iteration process is mostly looking at the Infinity Engine games, trying to see if there were lessons that we could learn to improve on them, making some mistakes, trying to correct those mistakes and just iterating with the community."
Obsidian has already made some tweaks based on feedback. They made modding easier between the two Pillars, for example, and are also working on fixing the difficulty curve for players who want more of a challenge.
Sawyer knows well that a lot of his target audience, while wanting new experiences, will expect certain things out of Deadfire. The party will be of a certain size, for example, or there’ll be a large amount of dialogue and prose to flesh out the world. At a talk in Croatia, he got in a bit of trouble for insinuating that RPG fans could go to the extreme and become “unreasonable.”
“I understand that not all RPG fans are unreasonable... but especially with a game that is a throwback, it's supposed to appeal to more traditional tastes and styles,” he explained.
So how do you prevent yourself from going too far away from audience desires? Sawyer said you have to ask yourself a couple questions: what’s the point of the change and will it improve the experience?
“We don't try to change things just for the sake of changing things,” he said. “I try to think very carefully about what the advantages and disadvantages of staying the same way are versus changing it. Ultimately if I feel like the audience is going to have a more enjoyable game by making a change that's not like the original games, then I'm probably going to push to do that. That being said there's only so much you can change per game before it doesn't really start to feel like the things that inspired it.”
Deadfire changes quite a bit, even from its predecessor. There’s the aforementioned changes -- the ships, the updated graphics, the improved modding -- but there’s also small things that have a profound effect on old fans. The party size was reduced from six to five, which drew some ire from the community, but there’s an explanation.
“We did that because the number of characters in the combat, or rather the amount of stuff that each individual character can do actively in combat is much larger than it was in the Infinity Engine games. So there's a lot more advantage per character.”
Sawyer said that there’s still a bit of anger, even after he gave an explanation, but Obsidian’s mission has never been just about recreating the games of old. It’s been about paying tribute to them while also improving them based on newer technologies and for other audiences. If you want to go back to a six-player party, there are other games to choose from. Generally speaking though, even Deadfire still evokes those same feelings that Infinity Engine games once did.
“Even if we change individual mechanics here and there... we try to keep the overall feeling and atmosphere really true to the spirit of the original games,” he added. “Pillars 2 feels like a biggers step away from the Infinity Engine games than Pillars 1 did but I think that people seem to enjoy Deadfire more than Pillars 1.”
Yes. Apparently there's also an item that references Cleve/Grimoire, but nobody has found it/made the connection yet.I've been staying away to avoid spoilers and will probably continue to do so until all DLCs are released and I've done a few playthroughs with different factions. I haven't read the thread so forgive me if this has been asked and answered: Was there a in game Codex reward for the fundraiser in Deadfire? The only thing that stood out for me as possibly a Codex thing was the pet "Grog", was that for/from the Codex?
Would that make Serafen the collective Codex avatar? But, who is Malnaj?Having fun imagining Remaro as a personification of Avellone's departure from Obsidian :
https://pillarsofeternity.gamepedia.com/Remaro
So you take a niche use of a single item as a precedent that the system is good? Makes no sense. Though with WHs you might as well mention CF in the OH for stats or MH for golem slaying.
In the Dumpsterfire system you are even encouraged to switch to situational weapons because there are no penalties.
It means all that content was specially scripted. They were able to modify Caed Nua's systems for the ship in Deadfire.
Would that make Serafen the collective Codex avatar? But, who is Malnaj?Having fun imagining Remaro as a personification of Avellone's departure from Obsidian :
https://pillarsofeternity.gamepedia.com/Remaro
Storm of Zehir would be the better example to use since a stronghold wouldn't make sense for MotB's story. Anyway, Josh's exact words http://www.rpgcodex.net/forums/inde...read-pre-expansion.98003/page-99#post-3833880One would have to ask the scripters of MotB per se but script code is valuable in and of itself. I reuse Powershell scripting code (particularly functions) *all* the time in my job - my most re-used functions are an excel document import function and a compare two multidimensional arrays function. Just because the content itself wasn't chosen to be re-used in MotB, doesn't mean that the code couldn't or wasn't reused.
there are other advantages to actually having a dedicated data-driven UI for those upgrades, principally that you can access and check it from anywhere. from the player's perspective, that's not much, but a data-driven system also makes implementing and debugging the content for the stronghold much easier. crossroad keep was great, but also entirely scripted and incredibly fragile. if we wanted to make another crossroad keep within the context of the NWN2 engine, we would have had to script the whole thing again; there was little to no existing data structure there to take advantage of.
i think it's also important to say that if we hadn't implemented the systemic aspects, that would have saved programmer and UI artist time, but it wouldn't have saved very much area designer time. our area design resources were the least impacted by the stronghold mechanics implementation. we still would have had difficulty making a good content for the stronghold because all of the area designers had plenty of crit-path and side quests to develop.
Don't have any saves from first poe, so I used story constructor from menu. However, constructor lack of some choices, for example Maneha's "Help Maneha come to terms with her past" doesn't exist in constructor or decisions about Forge Knights project, or should Dozen's take Knights in regard or not. Anyone with save from previous game noticed influence such decisions in Deadfire?
Don't have any saves from first poe, so I used story constructor from menu. However, constructor lack of some choices, for example Maneha's "Help Maneha come to terms with her past" doesn't exist in constructor or decisions about Forge Knights project, or should Dozen's take Knights in regard or not. Anyone with save from previous game noticed influence such decisions in Deadfire?
Ok and with Maneha's ending where she comes in terms with her past, she still staying and drink ale in "King's Coffin"?Zero influence