Pillars of Eternity II - RPG Codex Review

BoboTheMighty said:

Reading codexian review is like going through diary of autistic edgelord teenager: for every good observation, there's a mountain of infantile snarling and hyperbolic, one sided nonsense.

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Well yes, that's also true. But that's why it's often an entertaining read.

Silver Coin said:

As I said, their reviews are low quality crap. Not worth the spotlight.

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Not always. I have read some Codex reviews that were quite good. The reviewer set aside their need to prove their Codex (finger quotes) "cred" and just gave a solid and informative overview.

It looks like someone is butthurt because they didn't proclaim it's the best game of all time.

TomRon said:

And biased? Of course a review is biased, objective facts are always nice but in the end a review is a subjective sharing of opinions.

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That's not really what bias is about. If being biased was exactly the same as having subjective opinions - then the word would be meaningless.

Bias is about preconditioning and the inability to give games a fair chance without whatever unrelated baggage, perceived or real, getting in the way.

Now, it's true that the ideal of having absolutely no bias is a hard one to achieve, especially if you're knowledgeable about the industry and the people involved with whatever you're reviewing.

In a way, the more you know - the harder it gets to be objective. Which is why I really admire people who manage to get closer to it, that are also highly informed.

Certainly, I always strive to be fair - even when I dislike something.

But dismissing an obvious lack of objective intention with "oh, that's just subjective like everything else" - is like saying you don't really care about being fair.

For Codex reviews, I have to say I think they're particularly challenged when it comes to unbiased material.

They're very padded and full of both subtle and overt prejudice - and it's like a marathon of trying to justify the prejudice through supposed insight into the finer points of CRPGs. Sometimes it works, but it mostly doesn't. Not for me, anyway.

Of course, whether you enjoy such reviews or not - is likely to correlate with your own appreciation for the (perhaps unreachable) ideal of an objective review - and naturally your own opinions about the object of attention.

Codex is not really trying to write a review for the wider public like big gaming sites do, they write it for its members first and foremost. What you call bias is just another set of values that games are merited by.
Just like mainstream sites have a bias for QoL, good (AAA) graphics or MP features.

I like the Codex reviews. The biggest reason is that you are virtually guaranteed that the reviewer has played the game. Thats light years ahead of most "review" sites.

Regurgitated screenshots and cut/paste text from other sites doesn't exactly meet the baseline criteria as a review for me.

As for "bias" etc, I give great latitude because the reviewer is doing 100% of the work, its their review. If they personally spend 5 sentences on how they detest games with loot, then fine. Its their review.

On top of that, I prefer blunt reviews to bland, polished, "please everyone" reviews.

Regarding Codex reviews, I strongly disagree on their worth and quality. They do tend to have very critical reviews, and I appreciate that a lot. Those are the reviews where I can learn a lot about the game. In contrast, the "please everyone" type reviews, as Wisdom aptly phrased it, which take it easy on the games, for different reasons, often because they are scared of offending someone somewhere, those reviews I think are generally very boring and not very useful.

That is one of the (very few) weaknesses of this site, to be honest, in that the reviews are almost always positive, and often glowing, for most of the rpg games. Certainly the ones with a big name. I can't remember the last major rpg game that was given a bad review here at rpg watch, for example. (that said, I love rpg watch, don't take my small bit of criticism as anything other than that, this is my favorite rpg site, and everything else about this site is outstanding!)

Whereas rpg codex has a reviewer who I think has quite a talent - Darth Roxor - they are lucky to have him as a reviewer. He is not afraid of offending someone, because he is very critical. Because he has very high standards. I respect that.

For instance, when all the sites and all the mainstream gaming press were praising to the moon the games Pillars of Eternity and Divinity Original Sin 2, in his reviews at rpg codex, Darth Roxor was very critical, and saying that these games basically suck, and he backed up his words with good reasons.

The reviews were very good, in other words, and they explained his point of view, why exactly he was saying the games were lousy, being very specific as to his issues with the games, and they were reasons that I could relate to, and nod my head, and say "yea, I would hate that too."

Anyway, as usual , I tend to be wordy sometimes, but had to defend rpg codex on this one. I am not a fan of a lot of the juvenile stuff at rpg codex, but reviews are one of their biggest strengths, in my humble opinion.

Neutral reviews strive for neutrality. It's a particular tone of writing that is readily identifiable. The neutral reviewer leaves out the hyperbole, hate, angst, genre love, or extraneous opinions of the manufacturer, and just tries to review the game on its own merits. This review wasn't particularly neutral, or even close. Hence I found it disagreeable because I was too busy having to cut through the bullshit to get a useful review out of it.

rjshae said:

Neutral reviews strive for neutrality. It's a particular tone of writing that is readily identifiable. The neutral reviewer leaves out the hyperbole, hate, angst, genre love, or extraneous opinions of the manufacturer, and just tries to review the game on its own merits. This review wasn't particularly neutral, or even close. Hence I found it disagreeable because I was too busy having to cut through the bullshit to get a useful review out of it.

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There is no such thing as neutral review, every reviewer filters it through its own preferences.

@Darth Tagnan;, Point taken.

At least I know what the bias on the Codex is though.

Our reviewers don’t really play games they don’t like. When they happen to play a game and find out they don’t like it, I would expect them to give up on the game and don’t bother with the review. As a result we end up with reviews that are mostly rated as good or better (although Monster’s Den got a fair rating). Why would anyone bother with playing a game they don’t like?

Myrthos said:

Our reviewers don’t really play games they don’t like. When they happen to play a game and find out they don’t like it, I expect them to give up on the game and don’t bother with the review. As a result we end up with reviews that are mostly rated as good or better. Why would anyone bother with playing a game they don’t like?

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This is what I find puzzling - why play through a game you don't like, and then write an 8000 word dissertation on how much it sucked? Perhaps they take the concept of a codex seriously, and think that every RPG should be properly studied and critiqued, and filed in their library.

Ripper said:

This is what I find puzzling - why play through a game you don't like, and then write an 8000 word dissertation on how much it sucked? Perhaps they take the concept of a codex seriously, and think that every RPG should be properly studied and critiqued, and filed in their library.

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That question has been answered since the early 2000's: writing it is fun by itself, and people want to read it.

Playing through a game you think is crap isn't much fun, though. Is it?

Meh, I recall a blog that went through a buncha DOS games regardless of its quality, and kept going anyway. I mean, the pretense of "it's for documentation" doesn't really make it that fundamentally different. It's not like there is only one user writing these anyways. You can make the argument of them not getting money like the YouTubers, but many of those enjoy the review process, script, and editing, which makes up for the... bumps.

Don't get me wrong, I've got no problem with it, I just don't really get it. Playing through a bunch of shit DOS games to the bitter end, just to blog about them, doesn't make much sense to me either.

I get the the fun of sitting through a horrendously bad movie, just so you could write an absolutely brutal piss-take of a review, and be entertaining. But I don't really get investing that much time and effort in something you deem of little value, unless it were some type of service.

This is actually one of the best and most accurate reviews of PoE2 I've read. I agree with almost everything the reviewer said.

This is an alright game. But like the reviewer said, once I finish it, I can't see myself ever playing it again.

But the game's greatest saving grace is the fact it can be modded. If I'd been forced to play the game in its vanilla state, I'd have given up on it long ago.

But with mods, it's much more enjoyable.

Pillars of Eternity Interview with Brandon Adler on Expansive.

(In regards to) the franchise itself, there’s a lot of different things we want to do with the IP. And it’s not even just isometric games. We really want to support the IP long term in a lot of different ways.

I know Josh was talking about pitching a Final Fantasy tactics type game using the Pillars universe. I know there’s (also) a lot of people at the studio who want to do something in the vein of an Elder Scrolls. So there’s a lot of things we’re kind of exploring for that.

For the third game, we’re still talking about that and seeing what makes sense right now.

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Thanks for that article! A lot of good info in there about the final DLC

And then with The Forgotten Sanctum we’re going to build and provide the best dungeon experience. So it will be very dungeon dive-like and will really appeal to players who love Fort Deadlight, it’s going to have the same kind of feel. A big, cohesive dungeon.

What I can really get into is that it is spellcaster focused, so for those who’ve rolled a spellcaster they’re going to have a lot of new things to dig around in, like new spells and things like that. Lots of new equipment for them. As mentioned, we have a big focus on the dungeon-diving aspect and delving overall. That will be a big part of it and how we explore those different spaces.

There are also Arch Mages in the world and they’re all trying to figure out what do we do with Eothas. There’s this big, gigantic God, tromping around, smashing up everything. They all had different ideas on how to deal with him and so you’re going to be dealing with them in some respects. Like, do you back certain Arch Mages, do you betray certain ones? Do you say ‘screw it’ and do your own thing? So that’s some of the choices going to be in there as well, and dealing with that.

We are planning to have some additional reactivity with the game, even more so than we had with Beast of Winter and planning for Seeker, Slayer, Survivor. We will have more of a direct impact on some of things that deal with Eothas. I can’t get into exactly what that is but that will be there.

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Thank you for your constructive feedback, friendly friends

Except for Silver Coin, that guy's a big fat phoney and a plant.