Pillars of Eternity II - Reviews

Ignore joxer he hasn't played and that has made him bitter. He has been doing this on every poe2 thread...

Fluent said:

Thanks fellas. Sounds great, will have to pick it up sometime later (too many games I haven't played already piled up, sheesh.)

@joxer;, you disagree that that is the start of good exploration? Pretty sure you're a Piranha Bytes guy and IMO they nail exploration in all of their games (and most of my points come directly from their style of RPG design.) What is your definition of good exploration? Beyond that, good exploration in an isometric CRPG?

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Fluent said:

Thanks fellas. Sounds great, will have to pick it up sometime later (too many games I haven't played already piled up, sheesh.)

@joxer;, you disagree that that is the start of good exploration? Pretty sure you're a Piranha Bytes guy and IMO they nail exploration in all of their games (and most of my points come directly from their style of RPG design.) What is your definition of good exploration? Beyond that, good exploration in an isometric CRPG?

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Definition of good exploration is when higher risks lead to better rewards. But when you risk the neck and waste time only to get cheap stupid gem that's being sold in shops for pocketchange you ask yourself why didn't you just rush the main story and to hell with exploring/looting areas where trashmobs outlevel you. I'm still turning every stone in Eternity2, but how many times I got excited in 22 hours I've played the game? Once. Only once. When I found a talking sword.

It's pretty much impossible to keep risk/reward design ongoing for anyone in an openworld game as every person goes their own way. So at some places you'll, because of levelups, get rewards easier than on others. What gothiclike games did as bonus incentive however was "hiding" a permanent potion ingredient herb at random locations. And a few perma pots of course. Instead of wild goose chase, you are actually getting visible character improvement thanks to exploration in gothiclikes.

Isometric cRPG before anything else needs to remove temporarily impossible to find quest NPCs during day/night cycles. Because of it's static background, backtracing only because of time change is dull filler that makes it a design crime. Larian noticed it and left it out of DOS, I have no idea why exBioware thought it's a good idea. PST didn't have that idiocy.

you said:

Ignore joxer he hasn't played and that has made him bitter. He has been doing this on every poe2 thread…

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wat?

I stand corrected. Guess you love it.

joxer said:

Definition of good exploration is when higher risks lead to better rewards. But when you risk the neck and waste time only to get cheap stupid gem that's being sold in shops for pocketchange you ask yourself why didn't you just rush the main story and to hell with exploring/looting areas where trashmobs outlevel you.

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No. That is one way to improve lootwhorism. Or to make exploration a means to the end of looting.

Exploration suffices itself: exploration is a motion toward the unknow, it is a journey, not a destination.

When players are given an impulse to move around toward what they do not know, that is good exploration. Skyrim and Zelda did that well. It is nothing related to loot, risk etc. Actually, it is better when exploration does not end systematically on loot. It helps to focus on exploration.

ChienAboyeur said:

No. That is one way to improve lootwhorism. Or to make exploration a means to the end of looting.

Exploration suffices itself: exploration is a motion toward the unknow, it is a journey, not a destination.

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I absolutely disagree on this. You're not talking about exploration based videogames there but about TV shows on History and Discovery. Or National Geographic. Or videogames without "destination" like Tetris. Or phonegames without "destination" with microtransactions.

ChienAboyeur said:

When players are given an impulse to move around toward what they do not know, that is good exploration. Skyrim and Zelda did that well. It is nothing related to loot, risk etc. Actually, it is better when exploration does not end systematically on loot. It helps to focus on exploration.

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Skyrim and Zelda exploration are retarded. What are you exploring? Same old endless respawns? Impossible to get rid of dust and vacuum cleaner is a chore, not exploration.

I think loot rewards can be one potential impulse for players to explore. Others can be: finding interesting characters / side stories / landscape features / challenges / adventures / mating partners … you name it.

Exploration has to feel rewarding. Whether this is material reward (e.g., loot, experience) does not matter that much. Although, it is certainly easier for the developers to use material rewards.

And Chien has a point about "motion into the unkown". I think this was one issue about the exploration in TW3. Nearly everything was on the map. Reward is only one part of exploration, another part is probably something like novelty, or surprise.

Chien's motion to unknown is mostly passive and waiting to be spoonfed.
Videogames, escpecially those with choices&consequences like Eternity2, should be experienced under your own fingers. Exploration based or not.
IMO.

Ripper said:

I wouldn't necessarily rule out anything causing the reboots - a driver problem could potentially do it. Also, if something is very taxing, a heat issue could cause the bios to shutdown or reset.

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This whole thing is a sort of off topic. Recent win10 update causes frequent reboots if there is Intel's SSD inside of your PC. I'm not saying that's exactly the case here, but before blaming system reboots on games, one should first check the machine itself.

@joxer;, Thanks for clarifying. I wasn't saying PoE2 has good exploration (I wouldn't know, haven't played it yet.) I was saying the points I made in my post were, to me, some of what makes good exploration in an RPG. I agree that risk/reward is important, so is being able to stumble into non-level scaled, difficult areas, and in general keeping the level-scaling down and risk/reward higher is the best. And it's great when you're exploring and you see dangerous enemies interspersed with less dangerous ones, i.e. it's not just a static "high level zone", you get a bit of hard/medium/easy everywhere, which increases the immersion and feeling that the world is more hand-crafted, i.e. Gothiclikes, rather than a randomized world. Especially when loot is also hand-placed according to how hard it is to reach, what monster is "guarding" it and so on.

Playing Risen right now, so yeah.

So, what have I learned from this thread?

- Optional level scaling? - Ok, now I'll be an official fanboy of Obsidan forever, the only thing better than no scaling at all would be optional scaling (since then I can turn it off but don't have to hear people complaining about the lack of scaling...)
- Chiens take on exploration is the opposite of mine. I'll just agree with Joxer on that one.
- Full voice overs? I would have preferred partial, it's only annoying to hear the first two words of every sentence spoken while I read. Seems I have to disagree with Chien here too. Shocking.

I already own the game since I backed it, but I have to finish Battletech first. On the other hand, like many others in the thread mentions time to play seems to be decreasing for every year that passes, so it might nod be a bad thing to wait for the expansions for diving in.

Game sounds pretty good so far, minus a few things (seems it's very easy right now, even on the harder difficulty levels.) If I stumble into a key I'll probably play it when they fix Path of the Damned difficulty.

joxer said:

I absolutely disagree on this. You're not talking about exploration based videogames there but about TV shows on History and Discovery. Or National Geographic. Or videogames without "destination" like Tetris. Or phonegames without "destination" with microtransactions.

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Exploration is exploration. No matter the support it happens.
Useless to insulate video products.

Due to years of PCness, people who were plunderers, raiders etc were called explorers. It is the legacy of PCness.

As usual, when facing events, people drop out of their failed thinking. After a burglary, people usually do not call a burglar an explorer, a burglar moves through space looking for valuables. What is intriguing to him or her is the wealth that could be reached by moving. Not the space itself.

Now for players who prefer to stage themselves for what they are not, and would prefer not to tell they like plundering, raiding etc, there is the term for it: questing.

When a person moves around in hope of finding something good, she is questing.

The quest was a big topic in middle ages litterature, with stuff like the quest for the holy grail. By questing standards, everyone but one failed on that quest. By standard of exploration, that would be more difficult to state who failed and who di not.

In the end, people might prefer plundering over exploring. If they are uncomfortable to confess that leaning of theirs, they might paint it as questing.

Skyrim and Zelda exploration are retarded. What are you exploring? Same old endless respawns? Impossible to get rid of dust and vacuum cleaner is a chore, not exploration.

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What is explored is an environment worth being explored due to the work put in by devs focusing on exploration mechanics.

These environments might not be worth plundering though.

ChienAboyeur said:

middle ages litterature

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What are you talking about? At that time 99% of people were illiterate.

Maybe he was talking about cave man drawings, I don't know. When I think of the middle ages, people standing around waxing philosophy isn't one of the images that comes to my mind.

joxer said:

What are you talking about? At that time 99% of people were illiterate.

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Then the litterature written, read (and learned by heart to be delivered to the 99 %) by the one per cent and that served a huge inspiration for stuff like RPGs.

Yes, there was literature in the middle ages. Aristocrats, scholars, clerics and merchants were often able to read and write. It doesnt require a broadly literate society to produce literature. Nibelungen / Parzival just to mention two more famous cases from Germany.

And yes, I agree that some of these works are one basis for the stories in todays fantasy stories, which includes stories in fantasy RPGs.

Although, I don't see how this relates to exploration in any way. This all seems awfully vague.

The how is mentioned in the previous post.

You have to inhabit a unique part of the universe to understand.