Pillars of Eternity

Definitely playing but I'd probably agree with Zillah regarding story. Had a 'vision' regarding the main antagonist and I was like... oh yeah, you. I'd completely forgotten about you.... I still love the game though.

I'm not going to spoiler tag this whole post so I'm just going to warn you now that this is all super SPOILERY stop reading now.



So...

I decided that the main story is terrible. Evil wizard is trying to steal everyone's souls to resurrect an evil God. Bleh. Very old hat, nothing original or distinctive about it. So in concept it's boring. It's even worse in execution. The entire main plot can be summarised as: you accidentally run into the main bad guy at the start. As a side-effect of something he was doing he kind of messed up your soul, he never even noticed you or knew who you were. You run around for a long time doing little of relevance. Eventually you find him and fight him. Bleh.

HOWEVER. Look at the backstory. There's a story about a world full of false Gods and the Engwithians create a pantheon of Gods to bring religious order to the world and stem the tide of barbarous religion. There is a whole conflict between those advocating the new pantheon and those that resist it. There's a civil war, a great schism, an inquisition. That's an awesome story, can we play the game set then instead of getting laborious and largely irrelevant psychic visions about it?

ALSO. There's another backstory. Apparently in recent history the God of benevolence possessed a living man and became a walking Saint-God and eventually led a war against a neighbouring kingdom only to be destroyed by what is essentially a magical nuclear bomb called the Godhammer. Can we please play through that story?! That's waaaaaay more interesting that the derivative crap we got for the actual story. That's a genuinely fantastic and original setting for a fantasy story.

They came up with two awesome storylines and one crappy one, decided the crappy one would be the one that we play through and the awesome storylines would serve as mere backstory.

Talk about losing sight of the forest for the trees.

(I am enjoying the gameplay, and overall it's not a bad game, but they screwed up on the storyline front. The fact that it's so wordy while being so dull just makes it sound pretentious)

mewso wrote: »

It's specifically designed so that you can't have a gimped build which I don't like but there it is. Josh Sawyer doesn't like dump stats so all attributes will be of some benefit to all classes. On character creation it will tell you what the most applicable attributes are to the class you have chosen (2 highly recommended and one recommended) but by design you can ignore that and still do fine. In terms of choosing a class you could pick one that isn't covered by the companions (e.g. I don't think there is a rogue companion) or have a read up on them as some of the mechanics are interesting and may appeal to you. Chanters having phrases (that you lay out in a song book) that build up to an incantation, Ciphers using a whip to build focus to cast spells, Monks using their wounds to build up focus etc. They do have some interesting takes on the classic classes.

I went with a rogue. Mostly using a bow but I switch to daggers when needed. I went with might and dex at around 18 or 19, Con at about 7, int at 3, with perception and resolve at 16 each.

I have a party of 4 at the moment including myself, the wizard guy, eder, and a merc I hired who I called Tankurth! :P I did the tomb in the first town.

One thing I don't like about it is the way the abilities/hotkeys work. It's so cumbersome. You have all this screen real estate and they hide the abilities away on a small bar. It's not ideal.

mewso wrote: »

I stopped playing early as I realised like many recent kickstarters it's not yet the game they intended and I'm going to wait until the next few patches come in. Like you I'm not that big a fan of the combat. It doesn't help that I would far prefer if it was turn based. I know this is a BG homage but a brave move like the torment guys to turn based could have been a godsend for this game and the deep rules system they have built. Oh well.

It's also a pity they have no XP for combat bar minor monster XP. I respect the idea to move enphasis away from combat from an XP point of view but you can't do that and then make a game that involves nothing but. For what it's worth I did find telling the game to switch to slow speed when combat starts was a big help.

Yes there are a good amount of options regarding the pausing in combat, which is nice. I too clicked the "slow mode when entering combat" button like you said. I also tried a variety of different options but it ultimately didn't help. The combat just isn't satisfying.

And I don't understand why abilities you are going to be using every encounter, are hidden away in submenu's in tiny Icons. Take Aloth your wizard companion for example. He has tier 1, 2 and 3 spells from his grimoire. I'm going to be using them nearly every turn. Why are they so small? The UI has an awesome scaling option but it doesn't effect the ability icon sizes. That's not "being classic or oldschool". That's bad design. It was bad design then and its bad design now.

Has anyone downloaded the The White March Part I expansion yet, it is out today?

Lone Stone wrote: »

is the new xpack free ? had a 2gb patch there, i loved game when i got it but trailed of about half way through and stopped playing might try get back into it.

It is 14.99 on Steam.

shame there is no new class would have loved a necromancer type. (no chanter doesnt count !!)

Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire is coming and will be a direct sequel, although it will be a equity crowdfunding effort through Fig and Obsidian are seeking at least $1.1 million, with $2.25 million open for equity.

Cheers for the heads up, don't know how I missed this. I'm now backer 39something something