Eternity Pillars of Eternity II: Deadfire Pre-Release Thread [BETA RELEASED, GO TO NEW THREAD]

[Deleted Member 16721]

I'm generally in favour of having fewer fights overall, but making them more interesting and meaningful. This doesn't have to entail getting rid of "trash mobs" altogether, but they still need to be spaced out and spiced up, so that combat doesn't feel repetetive - if you're fighting through the tenth room of bugbears, you're gonna commit suicide. Variety does help here, provided that different kinds of enemies throw different stuff at you, and aren't just varied in terms of statistics and models. I want my party-building and resource management skills to be tested, but I don't want it to feel like grinding (as in, doing the same thing over and over again, like in most MMOs), because by God, I hate grinding with a fiery passion. Which is why I can't help but disagree with this statement:



I'd like to limit grind as much as possible. Now, I don't want all "story-based encounters", as you term it, but a nice between them and more generic encounters. I think too much of either is bad, but still, I think having an overwhelming majority of trash encounters to be far, far worse.

Well, if everything is important and story-based, that can get old quick, too. The casual encounters P) are designed to break things up a bit. Fight a little, talk a little, do a little town stuff, etc. You don't want to go through 10 straight rooms of the same encounters, obviously, but it seems like "trash mobs" anymore is thrown around loosely to describe pretty much 90% of RPG combat content.

By "grinding" I mean the RPG-grind from level 1 (peasant with rags) to level 99 (God-like fighting universe-devouring dragons). There needs to be a strong sense of progression in there in a natural, emergent way, and combat helps provide that. So yes, there needs to be a balance, but that balance should not be removing every duplicate encounter and/or going as far to remove every duplicate-that-adds-something-subtle-but-new-to-change-things encounter as well. Just my 2 cents.

 

[TT1]

Will Codex raise funds to participate in any tier?

 

[Arulan]

We need to convince Sawyer that Vancian casting needs to stay. He can always further restrict where you can camp, or punish players in some other way who do go back to town mid-dungeon.

 

[Rivmusique]

One more change to wizards - grimoires' spell lists are static now:

This sounds good. Want to hear about the changes to priest and druid as well (I think he's said that they want to do something to drop the number of abilities they have available/unlock per spell level).

 

[Got bored and left]

Well, if everything is important and story-based, that can get old quick, too. The casual encounters P) are designed to break things up a bit. Fight a little, talk a little, do a little town stuff, etc. You don't want to go through 10 straight rooms of the same encounters, obviously, but it seems like "trash mobs" anymore is thrown around loosely to describe pretty much 90% of RPG combat content.

By "grinding" I mean the RPG-grind from level 1 (peasant with rags) to level 99 (God-like fighting universe-devouring dragons). There needs to be a strong sense of progression in there in a natural, emergent way, and combat helps provide that. So yes, there needs to be a balance, but that balance should not be removing every duplicate encounter and/or going as far to remove every duplicate-that-adds-something-subtle-but-new-to-change-things encounter as well. Just my 2 cents.

Can't disagree with that.

Will Codex raise funds to participate in any tier?

Shit, it would be fun to encounter the vessel Hopw Roewur Ne (I'm sure it means something in Aedyran), captained by the fearless, if slightly delusional Cel Erity, on a quest to conquer even the darkest of dungeons in the Deadfire Archipelago. But I dunno if there's enough goodwill towards Obsidian on the Dex to get the 5k.

 

[Deleted Member 16721]

Static grimoire spells is an excellent addition. Frankly, I thought the first PoE had that when I found my first grimoire. I expected rare grimoires, special ones, etc., but alas it was not to be. So this is definitely a good addition, IMO.

 

[Rev]

Because the other alternative is making the game very hard (very difficult combat in general, hard random encounters on-rest, points of no-return in dungeons etc.) and those people that are described in the Sawyer quote won't like it, and they are the majority playerbase.

Retards will find reasons to complain either way, there's no sense in appeasing them. And that's without even considering all the work spent on patching and balancing PoE that would be basically lost because of these changes.

We need to convince Sawyer that Vancian casting needs to stay. He can always further restrict where you can camp, or punish players in some other way who do go back to town mid-dungeon.

Post your comment in the Obsidian forum, in the campaign section or to Obsidian/Sawyer's twitter then. If more people criticize these changes, it's more likely that they change their mind about them.

 

[Sentinel]

Wait is that actually confirmed? That's actually a deal breaker for me. If they confirm everything is per encounter now I'm actually losing all interest.

Just transcribed it:

"Are abilities and spells still on per encounter/per rest?"

"So what we're trying to do right now is we are using a new system where abilities by default are... whether they're per encounter or per resource based, they're not inherently per rest based... um but everyone has a resource which is called an empower. And an empower is a per-rest resource that can be used to make the application of an individual ability much stronger... it actually raises your effective damage or the duration of a thing or its accuracy by quite a bit. So the idea is most of your abilities are per encounter based, and if you're like "I really need this fireball to hit hard and do a lot of damage" or "I really want this knockdown to just smack the crap out of this dude" then you use empower which is a character based, per rest resource. You apply it to it, it decrements the number of empowers you have to use, and then um, you know that's gone down. And the only way you get those empowers back is by resting. Between the injury system, and empowers, that's kind of how we encourage you to rest more."

Seems like it is actually that way. That change doesn't bother me but I never liked vancian to begin with.

Well if most abilities are per-encounter, there go my intentions of backing it once paypal goes up.
Fuck this retarded shit. Not even gonna buy it.

 

[Arulan]

Post your comment in the Obsidian forum, in the campaign section or to Obsidian/Sawyer's twitter then. If more people criticize these changes, it's more likely that they change their mind about them.

Already did both.

 

[Kem0sabe]

Sawyer tells more info while on SA than he does the people actually making it possible he has a job, the backers.

This kind of attitude pisses me off so much, especially damming because it's behind a pay wall.

 

[Seaking4]

I wish they would be more consistent. Lots of the described changes sound good but some of them also sound outright terrible. Either make it all good or all bad. Don't confuse me with this shit.

 

[Jezal_k23]

Well... what the fuck... if the average person really does play PoE like this, then this is definitely depressing. Throws resource management out the window and makes the game shitty to play. I can see wanting to try to make it a better experience for them, but I think PoE ended up in a really good place systems wise, and I don't think it needed fixing.

This surprises you how? This is how most people played the IE games which were the primary inspiration for PoE and the reason it was funded.

And by the by, this is also how PoE plays at lower difficulties due to the number of available camping supplies. I've finished the game on hard and I didn't really have to conserve any resources beyond the very first levels. I sincerely doubt that any significant number of players actually played and finished the game on potd where serious resource management actually might be an issue (although I don't know this since I've only played the game on hard).

As for if the changes affect gameplay in a positive or negative way (or not at all) is hard to know since it depends on many other systems which haven't been explained how they change to accommodate for this.

Surprised me because I thought limiting camping supplies in PoE would get people in a resource management mindset, but apparently it doesn't. I enjoyed PoE because I had to think about resource management since I couldn't rest after every fight. This is something that was not really necessary to think about in the IE games, and I feel it was an interesting idea to limit it in PoE

A solution to this could be to remove the camping supply limits on easy and normal (the people who don't want to deal with resource management are more likely to be playing on these difficulties) while maintaining the limit of 2 on hard and PotD, and keeping the systems from PoE 3.0. It does upset me that after spending so long to get the game is in such a good place, they'd mess with it all over again in such a dramatic manner as if none of that evolutive process mattered.

 

[Sentinel]

Agreed. Presumably, spells will be weaker on a per-use basis to adjust for both the presence of the empowered ability and their per-encounter basis.

Definitely according to Sawyer:

Imagine if wizards, druids, and priests had weaker spells that were all per-encounter by spell level and that's pretty much what you have.

Only reason I was excited for PoE2 wizard combat was the prospect of more powerful spells. The news that we'll be starting over from Lv 1, this fucking piece of shit empower gay mechanic + removal of per-rest abilities because casual retards were too fucking stupid to progress through the game completely kills any interest I had in this game.
Fuck Sawyer. I thought Bobby Null would be the lead designer, but it seems like Sawyer can't stop meddling and ruining everything.

 

[Raziel]

What's the point of empower again? JS school of game design: Make on-rest stuff spammable, add an on-rest ability that's supposedly going to require one to manage it as a resource. Genius!



At least there's still injuries in the game..hopefully they'll be more impactful than in PoE1. If you manage to get one of your dudes killed with all spells available you should be punished.

 

[Hyperion]

To me, it sounds like there is no change to how wizard spells work at all.

Well no, your spell choices on level-up matter more, as they're the only permanent ones you have. You can no longer equip any spell to any grimoire. Good idea in theory, but it will be functionally the same once those of us who like to power game find the Deadfire-equivalent to Ninagauth's Black Pages and learn the spells that doesn't have, and eliminate any extra micromanagement by using it all the time.

 

[Sannom]

Cue the Deadfire-equivalent to Ninagauth's Black Pages having such negative effects that you will want to use it only sparingly.

 

[prodigydancer]

$2m already - impressive pace. I was skeptical about Fig at first but it seems to work quite well for such a niche crowdfunding platform.

The Deadfire Archipelago sounds like a very promising setting. If they can really deliver on the "living world" and "enhanced reactivity", it's going to be great. I still dislike restarting at level 1 and reduced party size but I'll get over it if the rest of the game will be as good as they promise.

The ongoing dispute about the magic system seems a bit silly because Vancian doesn't work well outside of D&D. It was never meant to compete with any other magic system - in D&D you have per-rest magic and nothing else. Personally I have nothing against Vancian per se, but I don't want to see Obsidian yet again awkwardly gluing it to their own per-encounter/resource-based system. Let them experiment freely, and let's see how it turns out.

[Edit] I wonder if they're ready to add a more daring stretch goal. They're nearly at 2x their original goal after all - this should be a good enough spot to offer something major.

[Edit2] Also Vancian is hard to balance in a CRPG. If encounters are hard and demanding, you'll empty your spell pool very fast. What's the difference between per rest and per encounter if you have to rest after a couple of fights every time? If encounters are relatively easy, you'll either rely on less limited resources or you'll use Vancian spells "for lulz", which isn't very interesting in the long run.

SA ... pisses me off ... because it's behind a pay wall.

 

[AwesomeButton]

They crossed $2mln

 

[tripedal]

I think the eventual compromise they'll reach will be to have some spells that require "empower" to cast at all, emulating per-rest.

 

[jungl]

With how resting supplies work in pillars playing a caster was really annoying compared to infinity engine games. Per encounter with empower is a huge improvement and will make casters now fun to use. It was retarded how powerful and dominating melee classes are for spell casters to have resting annoyances.

 

[Quillon]

Feargus
DEVELOPER

We'll have a new update with a new stretch goal soon. We'll also have another update later (but not too much later) with Josh talking about romances.

Feb 2, 2017 | 09:04 PM

 

[Sentinel]

oh god romance stretch goal fucking incoming i can already feel it

the decline continues

Edit: I got fucking baited. He says "Josh talking about design", not romances. Fuck you Quillon.

 

[2house2fly]

One more change to wizards - grimoires' spell lists are static now:

This sounds good to me. I hope it means you can't remove spells from them (or learn them to put in other grimoires) but that there's room in found grimoires to put some of your spells in.

Sawyer tells more info while on SA than he does the people actually making it possible he has a job, the backers.

This kind of attitude pisses me off so much, especially damming because it's behind a pay wall.

The posting standard is higher there than the official Obsidian forums, at least, though he probably wouldn't admit to that being why he posts on SA and not the Obs forums. He's too dry and unapologetic for the fig comments anyway, probably best that Fergus posts on there and doesn't say any PR nightmares.

 

[One-and-a-half-Ivan]

Josh on controversial changes:

 

[Jezal_k23]

Romances? what the fuck

EDIT: oops, got baited as well