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

[Fever]

Also, I suspect his dementia to be an elaborate troll.

Yeah this is what I'm thinking as well. He's just mocking the "haters". I can't imagine the real FreeKaner actually posting that. But I have to commend him for keeping it up for more than a day.

I remember I once had a conversation with FreeKaner about an historical topic. Back then, he seemed like a collected and knowledgeable guy.
I wonder what happened to him in the meantime. He does need an urgent injection of BALANCE to cease this charade.

On topic: I, for one, am quite excited about Deadfire. Despite the incredibly dull ship battles (huge let down), I still believe that something interesting will come out of this game. And I'm not talking about aggressive, explicit, homoerotic shark sex. Even if that might push them out of the balanced confort zone.
I'm expecting a more DARING game this time around. Something engaging, sparkling and ALIVE. Enough with the clichéd and gloomy atmospheres, the fetch quests and the mind-numbing soliloquies. I want to feel like I'm living an ADVENTURE, not as if I'm reading an history book (a quite accurate and coherent one, I must say, mr Sawyer). Am I too old for this? Is that even possible anymore? Am I betting on the wrong horse?
Ah, this year is really going to be the deal breaker of my rpg life. After the fall of D:O2 (I couldn't bring myself to play more than few hours) and the undetermined delay of LoX2, if Deadfire and Kingmaker fail as well, it might be the final chapter of my gaming history. Not that you care, good sirs, but I believe you might be the only ones who can understand my frustration. Farewell!

 

[frajaq]

curious about the doomsayers, what exactly do we have to gain if this game is a failure like so many of you are saying?

A tonne of reviews.

I can accept that, I enjoyed a lot of the reviews around here

 

[santino27]

Also, I suspect his dementia to be an elaborate troll.

Yeah this is what I'm thinking as well. He's just mocking the "haters". I can't imagine the real FreeKaner actually posting that. But I have to commend him for keeping it up for more than a day.

I remember I once had a conversation with FreeKaner about an historical topic. Back then, he seemed like a collected and knowledgeable guy.
I wonder what happened to him in the meantime. He does need an urgent injection of BALANCE to cease this charade.

On topic: I, for one, am quite excited about Deadfire. Despite the incredibly dull ship battles (huge let down), I still believe that something interesting will come out of this game. And I'm not talking about aggressive, explicit, homoerotic shark sex. Even if that might push them out of the balanced confort zone.
I'm expecting a more DARING game this time around. Something engaging, sparkling and ALIVE. Enough with the clichéd and gloomy atmospheres, the fetch quests and the mind-numbing soliloquies. I want to feel like I'm living an ADVENTURE, not as if I'm reading an history book (a quite accurate and coherent one, I must say, mr Sawyer). Am I too old for this? Is that even possible anymore? Am I betting on the wrong horse?
Ah, this year is really going to be the deal breaker of my rpg life. After the fall of D:O2 (I couldn't bring myself to play more than few hours) and the undetermined delay of LoX2, if Deadfire and Kingmaker fail as well, it might be the final chapter of my gaming history. Not that you care, good sirs, but I believe you might be the only ones who can understand my frustration. Farewell!

I assumed this was some kind of coded message, but even after cleverly extracting only the all-caps words, I was unable to form a coherent sentence out of BALANCE DARING ALIVE ADVENTURE. If you are trapped and this is a call for help, please blink three times.

 

[fantadomat]

Lets be honest,there are not many people here that WANT for the game to be shit. To me it looks like it will be mediocre shit with a sparkle of sjw love. I don't want it to be that,i want it to be a 100 hour epically amazing experience that i will restart the moment i finish it,filled with hard optional battles,amazing mysteries,stories and writing worthy to be called a classic. But it doesn't look like it will be this,doesn't it? And that is why i bitch here,so i could tamper my expectations and manage to finish it when it comes out. Anyway,the codex drama is always a joyful adventure in the debts of human psyche.

 

[rusty_shackleford]

Lets be honest,there are not many people here that WANT for the game to be shit. To me it looks like it will be mediocre shit with a sparkle of sjw love. I don't want it to be that,i want it to be a 100 hour epically amazing experience that i will restart the moment i finish it,filled with hard optional battles,amazing mysteries,stories and writing worthy to be called a classic. But it doesn't look like it will be this,doesn't it? And that is why i bitch here,so i could tamper my expectations and manage to finish it when it comes out. Anyway,the codex drama is always a joyful adventure in the debts of human psyche.

without shit games I'd have nothing to complain about

 

[Sentinel]

It will be game of the year, you hear me? Don't you doubt it for a second.



I can already picture it: the party returns from 80 hours of adventure, everyone is bruised, Xoti is dead, shark woman is dead, Pallegina is dead, pale elf waifu is dead, baby orlan holding the PC's hand, Edér on one side, orlan pirate bro on the other, as the 4 walk back to the Steward, who surprises us with a hot meal. Reincarnated Thaos shows up, says he just needed a friend, we let him have dinner with us. Our characters wonder where Durance went off to as the game fades to credits.

 

[Prime Junta]

Since we're talking expectations, here's mine.

• Mechanically, some (grimoires, keywords and counters, non-combat abilities), some (more on-rails character development, no per-rest abilities, magic watered down even further), but a general trend towards as Josh is clearly catering to the goon squad here.
• Moment-to-moment gameplay that starts out as passable on release, and will make its way towards actually good over the next two or three years.
• Much better production values than P1.
• Much better designed and more polished areas than P1 OC (comparable to WM).
• Much bigger and more varied bestiary and better designed encounters than P1.
• Very good faction mechanics. My baseline expectation is 'almost as good as FONV.'
• Whole bunch of 'flavour' features that will work okay enough -- naval battles, waifus, cannibalism, what have you.
• Big. Say 100 hours for a completionist playthrough.
• A more interesting setting than anything we've seen in a major game in years.
• Writing that's heavy on exposition and has too much Hawa'i'i'a'a'an sprinkled in it for its own good, has some good moments, but is otherwise forgettable
• Technically reasonably competent. No gamebreaking bugs on release, runs well on the target systems, but lots of subtle bugs in mechanics and elsewhere.
• Commercially successful.

Overall I'm lukewarm about this. There's a lot I expect to like, but the core of a RPG for me is the mechanics, and I just don't like what Josh has done with them here. It's a general trend towards dumbing down, taking away player agency, and smoothing out everything into a paste designed first of all to not offend the goon squad.

In short, I expect this to be more or less what DOS2 was to DOS1, with the difference that DOS really is all about the mechanics which were ruined in DOS2, whereas Pillars has more substance in other areas to build on. So probably not a total loss, but unlikely to be the kind of classic BG2 is, or what a P1 successor could have been.

I don't expect to finish this quickly, nor do I expect it to get me excited enough to submit a review. Only game I'm genuinely hyped about RN is Disco Elysium. That's a labour of love with insane talent behind it; P2 is a potboiler by competent engineers who'd rather be making something else.

 

[axedice]

curious about the doomsayers, what exactly do we have to gain if this game is a failure like so many of you are saying?

The warm feeling that nothing is good on this earth and everything is shit just like our wretched lives.








Prime Junta what info they relased gave you the hope of 'almost as good as FONV.' faction dynamics? Did we get any exposition on that? Because that's the main thing that bothers me, not enough communication about the narrative aspects of the game.

This is silly. Obsidian has a long track record of making games with not-so-hot combat and very good everything else. The one has very little to do with the other. In fact, other than Sawyer, you often get the sense that combat is kind of an afterthought for these guys.

Even when the games they release are a buggy mess, the writing and narrative elements tend to be really good. In short, you cray.

Sawyer is not just some PR face, he's the lead director of the game and his obsession with making the combat right rather than tuning the factions/quests/NPCs is what bothers me. I mean this is a colonial themed game with warring factions, do we even have any moral dilemmas about that similar to F:NV? Because that's what I remember Obsidian communicating before release, the interfaction dynamics and grey choices in the wasteland. Nowadays it's proving how everyone is wrong and he's right about the combat system by implementing a mod to the beta.

 

[Urthor]

I sincerely doubt there won't be gamebreaking bugs on release. I am sure something will slip through, Cipher Focus items were game breakingly broken for PoE 1.0 and something along those lines will happen again.

 

[santino27]

This is silly. Obsidian has a long track record of making games with not-so-hot combat and very good everything else. The one has very little to do with the other. In fact, other than Sawyer, you often get the sense that combat is kind of an afterthought for these guys.

Even when the games they release are a buggy mess, the writing and narrative elements tend to be really good. In short, you cray.

Sawyer is not just some PR face, he's the lead director of the game and his obsession with making the combat right rather than tuning the factions/quests/NPCs is what bothers me. I mean this is a colonial themed game with warring factions, do we even have any moral dilemmas about that similar to F:NV? Because that's what I remember Obsidian communicating before release, the interfaction dynamics and grey choices in the wasteland. Nowadays it's proving how everyone is wrong and he's right about the combat system by implementing a mod to the beta.

Josh being the director means he has final say on things... it doesn't mean he is responsible for implementing everything. When it comes to factions and quests, I'd expect most of that work to come from Bobby Null (the lead designer) and his team, in conjunction with the writers.

The fact that JES is the only person (othern than now-departed Katrina, via Fig updates) releasing much in the way of info obviously slants that info more towards the things he has personally involved himself in.

 

[Prime Junta]

what info they relased gave you the hope of 'almost as good as FONV.' faction dynamics?

It's been their goal from the start, and they have the people who made FONV. My assumption is that doing something again that they already did successfully once is going to be pretty easy.

I could be disappointed of course.

 

[Urthor]

Also there is no guarantee at all this game will be successful commercially. It's probably guaranteed to ship 300k-400k units in the first few months because of hype train and the Obsidian marketing machine, but that's about it. Nobody knows how well the market is going to receive this title given the fact the universe is absolutely saturated with games, the appetite for RTWP might have declined significantly, and whatever other random reasons might come through.

 

[Mazisky]

Are codexians just women?

They like to complain

They waste hours talking and shitting on things

They prefere things to be shit so they can drama because normal things bore them

They keep being attracted in delusional relationships

 

[Prime Junta]

I sincerely doubt there won't be gamebreaking bugs on release. I am sure something will slip through, Cipher Focus items were game breakingly broken for PoE 1.0 and something along those lines will happen again.

Your definition of 'gamebreaking' is different from mine. I meant gamebreaking as in something that stops you from playing or finishing the game, not a mechanical bug or oversight that makes something stupidly OP. There will certainly be a few of those, there's no way to catch them all in QA with something as complex as Pillars.

Also there is no guarantee at all this game will be successful commercially.

Only thing guaranteed in life is sickness, old age, and death. I still expect it to succeed commercially.

 

[Daedalos]

If it will be anything like White March, it will be a big success. White March was such a big improvement compared to the vanilla game, that it almost felt like a different game (better).

From what I can tell playing the beta and gathering feedback, combat IS improved also from poe1, but it's still kind of shitty overall. At least I hope they try real hard this time to make it better. Encounter design seems much improved also.

So let's hope Josh and his team has learned the lessons from Poe1 and really applied themselves this time around. We'll see in 3 weeks time, won't we?

I hope the story will be engaging, and the writing serviceable at the least. I'd hate for another loredump and side quests that goes nowhere or just drags on.

 

[Jimmious]

White March improvements were important for the "hardcore" players that had issues with some meta-gaming aspects of PoE.
The game was successful before the expansions and PoE 2 will also be because it's pretty and still carries the "revival of old school" aura for the general gaming audience.
I also believe that in total it will be a better game too, but most probably not in the ways the Codex would want

 

[Urthor]

I sincerely doubt there won't be gamebreaking bugs on release. I am sure something will slip through, Cipher Focus items were game breakingly broken for PoE 1.0 and something along those lines will happen again.

Your definition of 'gamebreaking' is different from mine. I meant gamebreaking as in something that stops you from playing or finishing the game, not a mechanical bug or oversight that makes something stupidly OP. There will certainly be a few of those, there's no way to catch them all in QA with something as complex as Pillars.

Also there is no guarantee at all this game will be successful commercially.

Only thing guaranteed in life is sickness, old age, and death. I still expect it to succeed commercially.

I think you're confusing the focus item issues. On 1.02 they were the best items in the game when they were fixed and mandatory for Cipher characters, on 1.0 basically equipping them as a Cipher crippled your total focus and forced you to play with a fraction of the total focus pool you had before because of some awful bug, it was a game breaking bug because you couldn't proceed unless you were happy to eject your cipher character.

It fully expect it to happen again and for there to be some pretty hilarious bug there's no workaround for that'll seriously impact players until 1.02 comes out to fix it.

 

[Bonerbill]

Also there is no guarantee at all this game will be successful commercially. It's probably guaranteed to ship 300k-400k units in the first few months because of hype train and the Obsidian marketing machine, but that's about it.

That's about how much they need to sell to break even (I'm assuming the budget is around 8-10 mil). Anything after that is pure profit.

 

[Trashos]

what info they relased gave you the hope of 'almost as good as FONV.' faction dynamics?

It's been their goal from the start, and they have the people who made FONV. My assumption is that doing something again that they already did successfully once is going to be pretty easy.

I could be disappointed of course.

At some point I will have to accept that certain things in life are insanely hard to replicate/repeat, for example the good parts of BG2 or FONV. I like the optimism, though.

 

[Thonius]

jesus fuck you edgelords

P2 may/will have a bunch of d or otherwise flawed mechanical revisions, and the writing might be a bit kipi on the tekehupu, but it's bloody unlikely the maps, encounters, or what have you are going to feel like a padded rush job. They've had tons of time to work on them, they're thoroughly familiar with the toolset and production pipeline, and they've been underpromising what we appear to be getting. Early on Josh was talking about 30 hours or thereabouts, now he's at 80 going on 100.

Whatever its flaws may be, P2 isn't going to be a T:ToN.

NOBODY IS ALLOWED TO COMPLAIN REEEEE

Looking forward to that fair and balanced review - you're already shilling and it's not even out yet.

I wonder what will happen if Poe2 turns out to be good.

It's win - win for me.

Game is Shit - Hours of RPGCodex Entertainment.
Game is Amazing - I'll be too busy playing the game to even read the thread.

There is always the 3rd option - be busy playing the game. Then go to codex and realize that the game in fact shit... never touch it again.

 

[Lacrymas]

At some point I will have to accept that certain things in life are insanely hard to replicate/repeat, for example the good parts of BG2 or FONV. I like the optimism, though.

The problem is the "trying to replicate" part. The lightning rarely strikes twice in these things, so I'd be very careful about trying to live up to something like that. Yeah, there's room for improvement in both BG2 and FNV, but that would require grognard levels of meticulous understanding of the issues and the methods, as well as artistic mastery in general. All of these things Obsidian should already have, though, but somehow they keep getting worse. The beta combat doesn't look like a person with 20+ years of game system development is behind it, for example.

 

[Haplo]

Overall I'm lukewarm about this. There's a lot I expect to like, but the core of a RPG for me is the mechanics, and I just don't like what Josh has done with them here. It's a general trend towards dumbing down, taking away player agency, and smoothing out everything into a paste designed first of all to not offend the goon squad.

In short, I expect this to be more or less what DOS2 was to DOS1, with the difference that DOS really is all about the mechanics which were ruined in DOS2, whereas Pillars has more substance in other areas to build on. So probably not a total loss, but unlikely to be the kind of classic BG2 is, or what a P1 successor could have been.

I hope you are mistaken - or rather that this parallel is faaar off.
I'm a bit salty about the mechanical changes myself. Mainly the streamlining: removal of health and removal of class/spell/skill system differentiation trough the per rest/per resource/per encounter split.

Still I would not compare these 2 games.

DOS1 was a system with quite many faults, that was quite brilliant despite them - for a short time, at least. Admittedly it got old pretty fast. DOS2 made some of the glaring problems (like itemization, character development and number bloat) worse, plus added new mechanics, which are frankly beyond retarded (armors, initiative).

I definitely don't expect this level of incompetence from Obsidian.

 

[fantadomat]

Are codexians just women?

They like to complain

They waste hours talking and shitting on things

They prefere things to be shit so they can drama because normal things bore them

They keep being attracted in delusional relationships

RPGCodex - The biggest lesbian forum about rpgs! I am still sad about how we became genderless .

 

[Prime Junta]

I think you're confusing the focus item issues. On 1.02 they were the best items in the game when they were fixed and mandatory for Cipher characters, on 1.0 basically equipping them as a Cipher crippled your total focus and forced you to play with a fraction of the total focus pool you had before because of some awful bug, it was a game breaking bug because you couldn't proceed unless you were happy to eject your cipher character.

That's still nowhere near game-breaking, as you could simply not equip the items to not be affected by the bug, or just play as a crippled cipher.

 

[fantadomat]

At some point I will have to accept that certain things in life are insanely hard to replicate/repeat, for example the good parts of BG2 or FONV. I like the optimism, though.

The problem is the "trying to replicate" part. The lightning rarely strikes twice in these things, so I'd be very careful about trying to live up to something like that. Yeah, there's room for improvement in both BG2 and FNV, but that would require grognard levels of meticulous understanding of the issues and the methods, as well as artistic mastery in general. All of these things Obsidian should already have, though, but somehow they keep getting worse. The beta combat doesn't look like a person with 20+ years of game system development is behind it, for example.

The most important thing is the writing and the vision. The game is build around the core vision and the writer with it. Obsidian do have capable writer,but they have burned out their imagination. You can't have a good story when you copy parts from bunch of successful stories. Their writing is solid,yet bland and lacks the pazzaz. If only they had kept the codexian nazi writer .