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

etchazz_sl said:

What difficulty did you play through on? Cause I chose hard and I am getting my ass whooped. Can't imagine getting through this game as fast as you've stated, unless you did it on easy.

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I played on Hard. People have done it faster then me. I think I can get it down to about 20 hours on hard, If I rush everything, and play all handmade characters. Mistakes where made on my main(stat wise). I have learned a lot( (I don't read guides, I like to learn it myself.) Stats are weird... Tank don't need might... wizards/rangers/dps do. I used 3 story characters which hinder you but not that much. Like someone said before you can make an Orlans tank. They are the smallest race and "They are known for their mental intensity and quickness" which is really weird cause they make the best tanks. Con is not that important either an is probably the most useless stats.

On big fights you need to bottleneck the mobs. The AI is pretty dumb, has no regard for friendly fire, and they will kill each other sometimes. Also pull from far away. Send in a pet / tank first cause they will dump their load on the first target. Having a Ranger really helps with pulls.

Trollocaust_sl said:

I was so hyped for this game and yet I can't bring myself to get past Maerwald yet.

I think this game suffers from Obsidian trying to reinvent the wheel of cRPGs. Don't fix it if its not broken - BG and IWD had the formula down right. Obsidian kind of failed at it, unfortunately.

I usually enjoy playing rogues and wizards in these games. Rogues to unlock stuff, unlock/disarm traps, find secret doors and stab things in the back. Wizards because they make things blow up and they are OP at endgame.

Sadly this game's take on the rogues.. Can't find things without being in scouting mode, can't only have the rogue in scouting mode, it has to be the whole party. I totally dig running the entire game walking slow as fuck to find all the hidden stashes and traps. Yay! That and backstab is completely useless unless you have the invisibility talent and that is only twice per rest..

Wizards.. spells per rest. Limited resting. Enough said. That and spells seem generally lackluster.

Like Faris mentionned here earlier, fight diversity(or the lack thereof) is a big downer for playing a spellcaster. The way I(and I think most people) play their spellcasters in a dungeon with limited resting and limited spells per rest is to let them sit in the back autoattacking until you get to a boss fight(or something really challenging). Problem is, that shit never happens. My wizard never gets to rape a Lich, Beholder or Dragon. Just more of the same. Might as well trade the wizard for an extra melee/ranged dps.

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You're judging the entire game on the first 10% of it? You can't be more than level 3, maybe 4 tops. I don't know about you, but when I was playing Baldurs Gate 1, I wasn't fighting Liches and Dragons right outside of Candlekeep Inn.

I do get being disappointed in the rogue, if that has traditionally been your favorite class, but that doesn't meant there aren't fun classes in this game besides that. I personally like the fact that I can open locked doors and chests and disarm traps without having to have a rogue in my party. I never had the patience for micromanaging positioning for backstabs anyways, so a rogue was basically just an underpowered fighter in my BG/BG2 playthroughs

Soygen_sl said:

Is this game better than Wasteland 2?

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One is sci-fi the other is fantasy. PoE is more like BG - there are 8 voiced companions with their own story/quest/acting. Wasteland has party members - they have personality - but it is not as meaty as the fantasy component. Wasteland obviously doesn't have fireballs as it has many types of guns. If guns bore you - there aren't a bunch of AE's to drop minus explosives. Wasteland also has more total skills - as it has Lockpick/CompSci/Bruteforce/safecracking etc. So there are a lot more contextual requirements to do everything in wasteland. There is obviously no rogue in the sense of steath, but you can certainly break into places. They do a nice job with the mad max setting. You create 4 total rangers in wasteland and recruit 3 more npcs with backstory/personality for 7 total.

PoE is fantasy - there are loads more cones, lines, blasts, and strikes that aren't comparable to PoE. If you like magic you won't find it in wasteland. You create 1 character in PoE and fill out your party with either 5 of the 8 voiced npcs or you can create perfect stat/whatever you want adventurers to fill in any holes or play any class you want extra. PoE is an adjusted fantasy combat system - it has many many status ailments and other effects that are not present in wasteland (or fallout) It is not a copy paste of DnD - but the way it plays out in a PC video game feels very much like the games you'd expect it to feel like.

Anyone who tells you either game isn't worth playing didn't really want to play this type of game as badly as they thought. If you actually enjoy isometric old school pc rpgs - both of these games are 100% worth your time. Reading this forum about these types of games and you think they are almost unplayable. Both games had some initial bugs certainly - but wasteland recieved at least 6 large patches which fixed all kinds of obscure and not obscure issues - it is now an absolutely wonderful game. PoE has some bugs - none of them would prevent you from experiencing the game - and the likely hood is is that within 2 weeks the most egregious ones will be gone.

This isn't even a debate if you enjoy this kind of game - they have not been made like this for years. And both games do have improvements to either their ui, feedback, or design of many features that you might just like. Are they perfect? No, but the rage on rerolled is not genuine about either title.

[Unofficial Bugfix] Easy fix for attributes/defences stacking bug. : projecteternity

Fix your own shit. I had a bunch of minor bonuses(mostly from cloaks of protection) that I had to edit, and my wizard somehow had 25 int. Seems to fix most problems assuming you don't do the double click bug.

Funkor_sl said:

Day late on this but if you want to edit story companion stats here are their baseline values:
Companions Builds, ouch. - Page 3 - Pillars of Eternity: Characters Builds, Strategies & the Unity Engine (Spoiler Warning!) - Obsidian Forum Community

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Those aren't base values though. Ed?r's might is really 15+1 and his resolve is 10+1+1, for instance. The easier way to do it is to open their character panel and click on each stat name. That opens another panel that gives the x+y+z breakdown as well as telling you what the sources of y and z are.

Well, I spent the last 30 minutes getting my ass kicked by a dragon (Cail the Silent), finally beat it with one character alive. So yeah, people 2 hours into the game complaining they aren't fighting tough shit can go eat a bag of dicks.

khalid_sl said:

Well, I spent the last 30 minutes getting my ass kicked by a dragon (Cail the Silent), finally beat it with one character alive. So yeah, people 2 hours into the game complaining they aren't fighting tough shit can go eat a bag of dicks.

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If you think Cail is hard The Master Below is going to make you rage quit. He can not be killed without the right group setup.

ili_sl said:

If you think Cail is hard The Master Below is going to make you rage quit.

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Yeah, I certainly feel like my party is pretty weak. For one, my melee (ranger/fighter/paladin) seem to do absolutely terrible damage. My druid and mage are carrying the fuck out of the rest of my team, which is probably not how it should be.

khalid_sl said:

Yeah, I certainly feel like my party is pretty weak. For one, my melee (ranger/fighter/paladin) seem to do absolutely terrible damage. My druid and mage are carrying the fuck out of the rest of my team, which is probably not how it should be.

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I don't know about that... I personally always felt that is the way it should be. Seemed odd to me in the later D&D rulesets that the tanks did almost as much damage as the classes that were designed for damage but offered little survive-ability. That said, once your melee have more DR reducing weapons, you will see them do a lot more damage. A lot of what you see early on is melee struggling with DR while the magic/poison etc pretty much pass right through. For me right now, I would say my melee (Warrior and Paladin) do better single target dps than my casters, but the casters overall do more because of AOE.

Chanter and Cipher still seem to be the most powerful classes over all though. Chanters AOE charms, unlimited and very survivable summons and solid ranged dps is hard to beat, and the Ciphers smart targeting AoEs and amazing CC -- both of which they can just dump every single fight, is crazy good.

khalid_sl said:

Well, I spent the last 30 minutes getting my ass kicked by a dragon (Cail the Silent), finally beat it with one character alive. So yeah, people 2 hours into the game complaining they aren't fighting tough shit can go eat a bag of dicks.

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Mmm, the dragon in the cave, right? I think I cheesed it by luring them to the narrow path leading into the main room. I got lucky and a drake came first. So I set all ranged on the dragon and just let the fighter, Edar, with a flail that leeches health or endurance (I forget) tank, while using the reduce accuracy modality that gives cover to the rest. Basically the drake blocks the drake, while I range the dragon. Pling-pling-pling, takes forever, but it works. Tried pulling the dragon first, can be done too, but takes more spell activity and regen from the priest, Durance, as well as the tanking modality on Edar. Party is lvl 5-6'ish, normal mode.

bytes_sl said:

If you're not starved for an rpg right now, you might as well wait. It's an average game, dragged down by bugs and odd choices on the devs part in terms of balancing and mechanics. By the time Obsidian has put out any actual patches, you can probably grab it in a steam sale.

Overall I just hope the absurd praise the game is getting on steam/metacritic isn't going to their heads and PoE2 can be what BG2 was for the original Baldurs Gate.

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100% this.

Chanter Rime and Frost traps get saved, causing mobileobjects.save to grow out of control - Pillars of Eternity: Technical Support (Spoiler Warning!) - Obsidian Forum Community

haha. wtf.

Pretty solid game but I was really disappointed to learn that the level cap is 12. I'm nearly level 10 and only halfway through the game.

I hope you're not basing "only halfway" on act progression. Act 2 has more content than the other 3 acts combined.

I'm taking into account all the side quests and exploration. One review said the game is about 70 hours long. No idea if that's true.

The pathing in this game is pissing me off. trying to get my party to go and do what I want them to is like watching the keystone cops.

I just snipped this from a user review over on Metacritic. It HAS to be a troll post... right?

What really annoys me is the "backers' shrines": plaques, monuments showing the names of Kickstarter VIP backers and their weird quotes. It really ruins the atmosphere to find a plaque saying "greetings from Hong Kong" while crawling in a dungeon. Of course you can just ignore them.

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Argarth_sl said:

I just snipped this from a user review over on Metacritic. It HAS to be a troll post... right?

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I dunno, I thought the plaque's were stupid, but they were no worse than some of the tombstone epitaphs in BG1/2, and as he said, you can just not click on them. They're mostly annoying because of how many of them there are.

Azrayne_sl said:

I dunno, I thought the plaque's were stupid, but they were no worse than some of the tombstone epitaphs in BG1/2, and as he said, you can just not click on them. They're mostly annoying because of how many of them there are.

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That is really disappointing to me. They could have plastered the loading screens with names (ads), or even baked a "compulsory viewing" video into the game code, listing all the big$$ backers and their dumb comments and high-fives. Plenty of time for me to go and make a nice cup of tea while ignoring it all.

It's a role-playing game, not a damn shooter ffs. So much for Kickstarter freeing you from the bean-counter marketing imperatives of Publishers.

Lame.