Pillars of Eternity, Obsidian's new CRPG in the vein of Baldur's Gate

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Kirun

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Without avallone I just didn't feel it.

Something was missing in poe 1. It almost gelled for me, but didn't. And I think it was office politics with avallone.

I also felt like they sniffed on landscape.

It's not that it was bad, it just wasn't quite as good as I felt it should have been. This is obsidian after all. Unfortunately I do have a raised expectation for their games. I would have said it was fair to good for anyone not named obsidian, but for these guys it felt mediocre. Maybe that's not fair, but damned by their own success and all that.

Pretty much my exact thoughts as well. I thought the gameplay was solid enough that I was able to sink a good 20ish or so hours into it, but the story just never gripped me whatsoever. I got busy with work for a week or two and just haven't ever been able to bring myself to finish it.

I used to be a firm believer in gameplay being the only thing that really mattered and made a game "fun"/worth playing, but after being bored to death by P1's story, I've changed my stance on that a lot.
 
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TJT

Mr. Poopybutthole
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While I did complete P1. I think it suffered in that the amount of shit you could explore just wasn't that cool.

The card carrier for them will always be Baldur's Gate II which has an alarming amount of content. Lots of it you can't even find unless you truly spend time looking for it and talking to people. Getting the right rumors to go investigate. Being meticulous enough to find things like Kangaxx's lair and how to trigger it. Entire extra-planar jaunts hidden in innocuous inn conversations. I mean, that's the kind of shit to live for in these games.

So I hope they do more of that with P2.
 

Malinatar

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For me, PoE 1 game play was 'OK', but overall it just didn't grab me like Baldur's Gate did, probably because of the setting. Also, there were just too many fucking words to read and after awhile I stopped giving a shit and tried to plow through to the end. I gave it a solid 6 out of 10.
 

khalid

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Part of my issue with getting into the story of PoE was how badly optimized the non-player created characters were. Creating your own custom characters were a whole magnitude of greater power and so I just couldn't motivate myself to play with the garbage NPC's. I think if I ever could have talked myself into doing that, I might have cared more about the non-combat parts of the game.

Trying to get into Tyranny right now but I feel like it takes me forever to get between battles. Way too much story and not enough fighting.
 

TJT

Mr. Poopybutthole
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Tyranny was good but didn't grab me too hard either. Torment really tickles my pickle however. I have a huge hardon for that setting.
 

Rime

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PoE also has the issue where there is a load screen for every single building. Even with an SSD and a new-ish computer, the load times get pretty silly when you are the sort of person who explores everything.

The only area that really 'did it' for me in the game was when you have to fight your way through the keep. I did it a few levels early and it was a load of fun.

Tyranny is okay, but like others have said, it is just missing something. Waiting for Divinity: Original Sin 2 as my next hope, will wait to see how Tides does before I pay out for it.
 

Valderen

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I enjoyed PoE, but didn't finish it. I was about 3/4 in when I stopped. There was a huge balance(nerf) at some point that kind of cripple my main character and group and progression became a bitch. Not impossible, but hard enough that I was not enjoying the game anymore.

I didn't like Tyranny at all.

I am looking forward to Tides of Numenera, Original Sin 2, and I guess PoE2 down the line.
 

reavor

I'm With HER ♀
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I like PoE, played through it a couple of times, but I think it still falls short of it's "spiritual predecessors" BG, Icewind dale etc. in part because it tries to be more edgy, dark and philosophical, which doesn't quite work out. It lacks the healthy dose of whimsical fantasy fun of the BG series. Also mechanically PoE is far more advanced, and really went a bit out of hand with it's complexity and balancing: stats affecting multiple things, far more weapon types, every class being very distinct in play style, and with foods, resting types, crafting, enchanting complicating things further. Still far better than any other RPG released the past 5-10 years.
 

sakkath

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Launch date for PoE II was announced as 3rd April 2018. Looking forward to it!
 
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sike

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Somehow I completely missed this game, despite loving the original Baldurs Gate games

Saw it was high up the list of twitch games - this streamer is playing it before the release of the sequel and there is a 30% off discount on GOG until tomorrow with his code:

GOG.com
 

Gavinmad

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I lost about 2/3rds of the way through, but I'll probably go back to it. Very rough game, could have used about a month of additional polish and yeah the pre-made NPCs are just absolutely terrible. They don't need to be fully munchkin level optimized death machines like my firebarian, but combat is brutal and unforgiving even on the lower difficulty levels. The stat system seems unnecessarily arcane as well. I can understand wanting to break out of the cookie cutter DnD stats a bit, but it seems so very weird that maxing intellect on my barb was optimal because it increases his aoe range.
 
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Drajakur

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I really loved Tyranny but not so much PoE. Then I heard about this release and thought "Awesome! A sequel to the game I really loved". And then I looked it up and remembered I got the games confused.

Such is the saga of my life.

I'm playing Bayonetta 2 on Switch and will be playing God of War anyway so what do I care.

I'll still end up buying this but I really hope the story isn't as boring as the last one and that the NPCs don't suck ass and infuriate the hell out of me.
 

Pyros

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I played this a couple weeks ago in preparation for the 2nd one. It was... average? It wasn't terrible but there were a lot of flaws, in many ways it showed that it was a kickstarter project and stuff. The expansion content felt more polished and more interesting overall.

If I had to list the big things, the writing was uneven and the main story very slow to start, the companion quests were way too short and didn't feel fulfilling at all so there wasn't much of a connection with them, it's hard to empathize with most of them when you barely spend any time learning about them.

The combat was a confusing mess pretty often, due to fairly poor engine(aoe overlapping and shit), small tooltips, tons of confusing effects and the real time aspect was barely relevant since you had to pause constantly due to having to do everything manually. Difficulty was pretty uneven, but mostly easy on hard difficulty(potd is the highest difficulty but I didn't want to bother) as long as you did all sidequests which made you outlvl all the content. Class and character customization was kinda meh for many classes, and you can't respec the companions(can't even mod them apparently cause their stats are hardcoded) which was pretty annoying too.

Oh and the loading times are fucking garbage tier shit. The game looks like it was made 10years ago but it takes over 10secs to load a single room house with no NPC in it on a SSD, like yeah fuck you, doing quests that involved entering buildings then going to another floor were fucking atrocious because of it. Shitty old Unity engine license from what I understand, the kickstarter showing point I mentionned earlier. It had no right to load this slow considering how it looked.


2nd game looks a lot better though. Both in terms of how it actually looks(dynamic lightning/shadows, much more detailed models with better animations etc) and many of the changes they've done to the combat system and things like that. So I'm actually pretty interested in the 2nd game. It feels like the same sort of improvement Larian did from Divinity OS1 to OS2.
 
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Rime

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The White March DLC was the best thing about this game. The storyline, once you get into it, is amazing compared to the base game.

Other than that, pretty much everything Pyros said is my take.
 
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Spark

Golden Knight of the Realm
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I actually stopped playing PoE because of the horrendous load times. The further I went into the game, the worse they got.
 
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Rime

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When I first played this game, I did so with an HDD. It was brutal. Particularly in the later acts of the game, where you get many, many fetch and investigation quests that require you to go three or four screens away, then back again. 10-12 second load times for each screen.

On my SSD, the times are down to 4-5 seconds, which is still obnoxious, given how small some of the areas being loaded, but it was slightly more tolerable.
 

reavor

I'm With HER ♀
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I think the game was pretty good, at least the best attempt to get back to the Baldur's Gate theme of old, that people were wanting. Pause-and-play is just far superior to round-based, and if you know how to use AI, and have a strong party, smaller fights go quickly and you don't need to micromanage that much at all, except boss fights. The story was supposed to be a darker, more edgy take on the Infinity Engine/Fantasy story of black-and-white good vs evil, with more gray-scale quests and resolutions to stories, making it more "realistic" I guess. It's far more challenging that Baldur's Gate, particularly on Path of the Damned, and very intricate with how all stats affect several important mechanics, making stat dumping less of an obvious choice.

That said, the game did suffer some mechanistic issues I think, like not being able to exit areas during a fight/seamless connection between areas, particularly houses/interiors and exteriors. The whole maximum of 2 camping supplies also seemed fairly arbitrary.
 
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TJT

Mr. Poopybutthole
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I think the game was pretty good, at least the best attempt to get back to the Baldur's Gate theme of old, that people were wanting. Pause-and-play is just far superior to round-based, and if you know how to use AI, and have a strong party, smaller fights go quickly and you don't need to micromanage that much at all, except boss fights. The story was supposed to be a darker, more edgy take on the Infinity Engine/Fantasy story of black-and-white good vs evil, with more gray-scale quests and resolutions to stories, making it more "realistic" I guess. It's far more challenging that Baldur's Gate, particularly on Path of the Damned, and very intricate with how all stats affect several important mechanics, making stat dumping less of an obvious choice.

That said, the game did suffer some mechanistic issues I think, like not being able to exit areas during a fight/seamless connection between areas, particularly houses/interiors and exteriors. The whole maximum of 2 camping supplies also seemed fairly arbitrary.

I finished the first game before they nerfed various things. But the ability to create characters via the Mercenary system seemed really odd to me. For various points I had my Aquabus Stealth Rape Squad if I needed to burn through a particularly annoying part. I mean I guess I didn't have to do that.

But 99% of the badassedry in Baldur's Gate II was trying to find out strong builds to work around mechanics to win fights you couldn't otherwise. BGII was an especially punishing god damn game if you didn't know how to play very carefully. But when you learn tricks like being able to use Cloudkill wands outside of the aggro range of the Red Dragon and silly shit like running away from Lavok and resting so all of his buffs dissipate. The game gets really awesome lol.

Here's to hoping this is a big improvement!
 
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