PoE: The White March - Content Overload

GameBanshee has published a whole pack of helpful The White March content, including a review, a full walkthrough, and guides to locations, companions, and more. Spoiler alert!

In addition to publishing a full review of Pillars of Eternity: The White March Part I, we've also expanded our already chock-full Pillars of Eternity subsite with a plethora of content from the first half of Obsidian's ambitious expansion pack. Included among the subsite updates are a full walkthrough, a set of locations, new companions, additional bestiary creatures, and more. Before you dive into the content, here's a snip from the review:

There are also over 20 new quests. Many of them give you options for how to solve them. They're also more complicated than simple fetch or assassination quests. For example, in Stalwart Village a layabout asks you to steal some wine from the local inn. If you accept this quest and retrieve the bottle (which only requires you to disarm some traps), then things go sideways when you hand it over, and that leads to a humorous second stage where you have to do something else.

Along with the quests, there are also numerous new environmental interactions, but they're much more complicated than the interactions from the main game. As an example, after defeating the ogres in Stalwart Village, you learn that a house is on fire and that two people are trapped inside. To rescue them, you have to go through a "choose your own adventure" sequence, filled with checks on your attributes, spells, and equipment. So if you have enough Perception, then you can detect a dangerous passageway; if you have a Prybar, then you can move a beam out of the way; if you have the spell Winter Wind, then you can put some flames out; and so forth. The only downside to the interactions is that they have minimal effect on the world. If you rescue the two people from the burning house, then they don't give you a reward, and they don't play much of a role during the rest of the DLC, so it doesn't really matter if you notice the house at all.

More information.

More information.

I should probably add beware of spoilers for those who haven't played the game.

Oops. >.>

Ack. Sorry. Thank you, Couch.

They have messed up this game so bad since its release the question has to be why?
Patch 1.XX patch 1.XX patch 1.8X patch 1.8XXX patch 2.XXX.

This person on the internet complained that this spell wasn't 100% correct, lets balance it. Person XXX complained that if use this sword with that shield when fighting upside down it wasn't right…more balancing.

I did start a replay and it is so bad now because the have balanced it out so much it is easy now. Before it was a pain in the butt but it was fun, game breaking bugs are not fun, but not being balanced to the point of boring are. If you have an IQ over a Gnat, you can figure out how to deal with some unbalancing. It is part of the fun finding out what shouldn't work.

Anyways…

no clue. still waiting on a playthrough once its released.

but nice perspective. probably the only valid one. and one of the few times its valid

More of the same old.

Originally Posted by CelticFrost
They have messed up this game so bad since its release the question has to be why?
Patch 1.XX patch 1.XX patch 1.8X patch 1.8XXX patch 2.XXX.

This person on the internet complained that this spell wasn't 100% correct, lets balance it. Person XXX complained that if use this sword with that shield when fighting upside down it wasn't right…more balancing.

I did start a replay and it is so bad now because the have balanced it out so much it is easy now. Before it was a pain in the butt but it was fun

Yup.

JES was the lead system designer, he tried too hard to reach balance between the roles, but in the end it didn't work out so well. Subsequent updates are the same. More numbers. It isn't fun anymore. Balance isn't necessary for a good RPG but some other things are. Like having sound core systems. And this was fucked from the start. They didn't want to go with 3.5 but opted for some cadaverous system JES loosely based off the worst edition, 4.

They're obsessed with balance because Obsidian is involved with some MMO. And in MMO you… Have to balance everything so ppl son't spam "OP, nerf plz" all the time.

Then again, JES forgot that the point of Fallout is the strange world back then and put starting trait to allow that instead of default world being weird in FO:NV. Because, Obsidian wasn't on a weird game.

Originally Posted by joxer
They're obsessed with balance because Obsidian is involved with some MMO. And in MMO you… Have to balance everything so ppl son't spam "OP, nerf plz" all the time.

I remember that in Guild Wars 1 PvP back in the day the "skilldeck" system was so big , it was a nightmare to maintain… New gimmicks never stopped emerging and the devs soon realized its more fun that way so they greatly reduced the frequency of balance patches.

Originally Posted by luj1
I remember that in Guild Wars 1 PvP back in the day the "skilldeck" system was so big , it was a nightmare to maintain… New gimmicks never stopped emerging and the devs soon realized its more fun that way so they greatly reduced the frequency of balance patches.

You mean, they just couldn't keep up, didn't stop them from overhauling entire classes every 2 years. That's also why they greatly reduced the number of skills in GW2.

Yeah, they couldn't keep up. But it was tons of fun. You didn't always have balance, but you had a counter to everything. Because there was around 1300 skills to build your deck from. So balance was something that was in player's hands. IMHO they should've kept a number of things from GW1, things that separated it from most MMOs. Like the dual class system and 1000s of skills.