Pillars of Eternity II - From the Director Part 2

Originally Posted by Moriendor
The game has three speed settings and I think anyone wanting to keep their sanity set the speed to fast when in scouting mode .
It was definitely pretty stupid though because simply being able to speed up the game kind of annihilated the speed penalty of scouting mode or the skills related to reducing the speed penalty.
Anyway, I played pretty much the entire game in fast mode + scouting mode and only switched to normal or slow mode in combat encounters (actually the game auto-switches back to normal speed when combat begins IIRC).

Yeah - and even in fast mode, scouting was too slow for me. Really, I think they should have dumped that mode and just had the game check based on skill regardless of speed.

Sure, it might not be very realistic - but we all know that we want to find those secrets - and we don't want to spend an eternity (pun intended) combing every inch of every map.

Just another example of half-assed game design.

If they wanted a more realistic search function - they could simply have the skill prompt "area of interest" so that the player wouldn't have to search the entire map, but just a limited area. Might have been the best of both worlds.

Of course, it's not a huge issue - but they all add up in terms of annoyance.

Definitely. Including the not overly intuitive fact that scouting was tied to the 'mechanics' skill. WTF? Any sensible person would have assumed it was based on the 'perception' stat, right?
That was certainly a prime example where they obviously tried to do things differently just for difference's sake but with not much brainpower involved in the design process .

Well, they copied D&D verbatim in the first stage of their design, then looked at ways to change it in a contrived fashion in the second stage. Might for spell damage? Yeah, that sounds like something we can do to avoid a WotC lawsuit.

Who cares if it didn't make sense - it was different!

Well, I can see what they were trying to do in most cases - I just don't think I agree with the results.

Then again, I never found the quirky balance issues in D&D to be anything but great fun.

Maybe there's something wrong with me?

Originally Posted by NewDArt
Maybe there's something wrong with me?

What's that maybe doing there.

Originally Posted by Drithius
Well, they copied D&D verbatim in the first stage of their design, then looked at ways to change it in a contrived fashion in the second stage. Might for spell damage? Yeah, that sounds like something we can do to avoid a WotC lawsuit.

Who cares if it didn't make sense - it was different!

I suspect they wanted a HERO/Champions approach to balance, but with the supposed simplicity of D&D. Personally I have no problem with it; PoE is just a new set of rules to adapt to with a slightly different philosophy. I've played enough different and unique PnP RPG systems that a new one wasn't a life-changing experience.