Pillars of Eternity II - Released

rjshae said:

Yeah, catering to the lowest common denominator is rarely a good thing. How was combat in PoE too fast? It felt pretty much the same as Baldur's Gate. Ah well.

The game is looking really nice so far though. The addition of dynamic shadows adds a lot to the environment, and the voice acting bark strings by the locals is a nice touch. It's looking very decent even before the first patch release.

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Combat in PoE was faster then BG and very confusing and irritating.

Combat in Tyranny felt better but this system is not possible to fix and POE2 cannot fix it as well.
The two main reasons are:
1. There is no combat round. Every ability has its own cast time and recovery time that is also modified by player's stats. So each of the 5 members of party in POE2 starts and ends attack and abilities at different times making any kind of party wide planning impossible unless you plan to pause every 0.5s or so OR you let AI take over (making playing a "tactica" party cRPG pointless)
2. Too much VFX, makes combat and battlefield hard to read and follow. BG2 also somewhat had this problem but it wasn't as bad as in POE1 (or NWN2).

My edition is on steam still downloading stuff, due to my slow connection speed. I won't play it until everything is downloaded.

Compared to the first POE2 feels a lot more streamlined and I don't mean that as a bad thing.

I can't see how Tyranny is any better when it comes to fighting. Tyranny solved the problem by reducing the party to four characters which made every fight feel small.

In my opinion 5 party members in Deadfire is a fair compromise. That and the toning down of visual effects make the action much more manageable.

At times I had the impression of a terrible mess when playing POE1 and that's something I've never experienced with BG2 (even with modded BG2). Deadfire is clearly an improvement on that front.

I would say that it all depends on how you feel about the Deadfire setting. Personally I love it and l think Saemon Havarian would feel right at home there.

The problem I have with DOS2 is that you're encouraged to focus on either physical or magical damage so worst case scenario you end up with the impression that you're focusing on one particular trick instead of sampling all that the game has to offer.

POE2 still features muscled wizards (problem with Might being used for every damage type while being reduced to physical strength in story events) and genius barbarians (intellect is still a key attribute for these guys). I know every set of rules will come off as arbitrary and that DnD didn't necessarily made more sense at times but it doesn't mean it's not weird to have a direct correlation between physical strength and the damage done with both firearms and magical wands.

Not saying DOS2 or POE2 are bad games because of those things but that depending on how strongly you feel about the way they work your experience will vary.

A few mentioned difficulty - I'm playing on normal without any additional rubbish (no IIRC iron mode and no stupid levelscaling). The game does feel somewhat easy, but it's expected from beginning hours in Obsidian's game. Anyone finished it already to be sure it's easy all the way through?

Found two more bugs.
Dunno why but sometimes the game doesn't spawn quest critical NPCs. Okay, I know why - Eternity2 contains time cycles rubbish. The thing where NPCs are not at the same spot depending on "daylight" that IMO has no place in isometric type games. And then whatever script sometimes can't spawn them. And then you miss getting a quest or can't report quest success or quest fail.
Workaround? Quicksave/quickload. Quickload will spawn NPCs back. Bugfixing by savescumming. This is a new one…

If you find and free (IIRC the name is) Oswald before visiting tavern and getting a quest for that, upon talking to the questgiver girl her chatty will feel out of place and you'll get confused what's going on thus clicking random dialogue options only to learn wtf is that about. Then you'll reload previous save and… Well, do what you would do if you knew what was that about in the first place. Or you'll decide to ignore her completely.

There can not be any assessment about the difficulty of the product. Because players lack the basic skills to play RTwP.

The situation is that players can not even handle RTwP on storymode (a mode that allows a hands off approach as the IA can take charge), they need to spam pause to compensate their lack of skills.

It is pointless to ask people who can ride bikes only when using stabilizer wheels or an electric engine if that bike circuit is difficult. It introduces a huge bias.

Second thing, devs understood the power of the streaming scene to increase sales. Streamers are used to play hardest so showing them struggling wont be good for sales.

Third thing, first thing. In order to test their additions to help players RTwP, it is better to provide an easier version. A more difficult version would destroy any hope.
Already, players could not play RTwP on storymode.

JDR13 said:

It's adjustable though, right?

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The point about slowing down the combat pace was to give players room to adjust, make sense of a battlefield.
The option of making it faster is pointless.

Archangel said:

Combat in Tyranny felt better but this system is not possible to fix and POE2 cannot fix it as well.

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Both PoE and T were played RTwP.

The two main reasons are:
1. There is no combat round. Every ability has its own cast time and recovery time that is also modified by player's stats. So each of the 5 members of party in POE2 starts and ends attack and abilities at different times making any kind of party wide planning impossible unless you plan to pause every 0.5s or so OR you let AI take over (making playing a "tactica" party cRPG pointless)

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Faster characters are faster than slower characters. This shows how playing PwRT hides dimensions that belong to RTwP.
Cohesion in action is one side in party building, the goal is to get a party that works as a unit, so characters are made faster or slower relatively to the whole party.
It is fully possible to conceive sequences of play given the timings of each character.

2. Too much VFX, makes combat and battlefield hard to read and follow. BG2 also somewhat had this problem but it wasn't as bad as in POE1 (or NWN2).

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This took years to understand that stuff: the battlefield is a mess thing.

One imperative in RTwP is to organize the battlefield so it works to your benefit. That is tactics. Since players do not that stuff, they rush headlongs into a fight as if they were playing UgoIgo, they end with a mess.

When organizing the battlefield, players know where to look, they have an idea of what is going to give them an upper hand, they do not have to re assess the situation every single second. This approach is once again UgoIgo.

Noticeably, PoE 2 strongly solved that issue as the battlefield is already organized. Enemies are scattered, already ordered and most of the times rooted on the spot.
There is no manipulation to be made so to get a properly organized battlefied.

@Fluent;: I prefer POE2 easily even though just getting into it. But then I am not a huge fan of turn based combat and I liked DDOS2 in spite of that fact not because of it. I also disliked the heavy focus on constant upgrades to weapons/armor in DDOS2. But overall liked DDOS2.

I was just browsing through the oficial forums, and apparingly a few people have difficulties with imports form POE1.

Alrik Fassbauer said:

I was just browsing through the oficial forums, and apparingly a few people have difficulties with imports form POE1.

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It's a known issue. There is a patch coming next week with fixes.


My current experience with bugs in the game makes me suspect there is memory corruption happening which cause all sort of flags to misbehave. I toggled on the "hide selection circle" and after a while they came back up and I crashed on area transition not long after. The AI also randomly comes back up on my Monk where it is turned off. Outside of that I had no other issues (using custom made legacy, not save import).

azarhal said:

My current experience with bugs in the game makes me suspect there is memory corruption happening which cause all sort of flags to misbehave. .

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Its a known Unity Engine bug that every RPG released with that engine has. I have talked about this problem with memory leaks, and corruption on different threads.

Wasteland 2
Pillars of Eternity
Tyranny
BattleTech

They all had this problem.

The only bugs I've had is the mouseover popup descriptions not working for the first item on a list, as previously mentioned, and a text name missing error on an item. Both are inconsequential.

Thrasher said:

The only bugs I've had is the mouseover popup descriptions not working for the first item on a list, as previously mentioned, and a text name missing error on an item.

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I haven't noticed a single bug and the combat is so great.