Pillars of Eternity Hype/Review Thread GS=8 MC=90

God dammit Bugsidian

http://kotaku.com/pillars-of-eternity-characters-crippled-by-ridiculous-i-1694367618

Elaborate a bit please, I'm not following a Kotaku link

basically double clicking an item in your inventory screen removes all your character buffs, including the permanent ones like the racial abilities.

"happens when a player tries to swap out a piece of equipment on a character with an item in their inventory by double-clicking the inventory item—a relatively standard role-playing game practice. Doing so will remove a character's racial abilities, passive powers and permanent buffs."

"While players are reporting that dismissing NPC party members and then re-adding them to the party resets their passive and racial buffs, others claim that doing so triggers another bug that removes all items from the NPCs' inventories."

well there goes any hope of a good GS score

Apparently Obsidian is working on a fix. Hopefully it comes soon. Luckily I was never hit by it.

This game is a god send. So much fun!

I'm about 16 hours in now, and honestly, even that bug wouldn't hold me back from calling this one of the best RPGs of the past 15 years.

The setting is really great. There's a ton of lore - possibly moreso than something pike Dragon Age Origins - but unlike Dragon Age the setting here is actually really interesting.

The characters...the combat...the stronthold system...I could go on and on. Pretty much every system is superbly well designed, and the writing is miles ahead of other modern RPGs. It truly is a brilliant game.

So does this have a good story, story telling? I wasn't much of a fan of Divinity's nonsensical humor peeking it's way into nearly every facet of the game,

Much of the worlds story, present and past (with optional story-telling via books) so far is basically American settlers VS Native Americans. The game doesn't take either side, which is good. 90% of games would either make the Native Americans evil savages or the American Settlers exploitative dickheads with an evil English accent.

Pillars Of Eternity opens with babies being killed and half a dozen people hanged, if you hate joy in the world, this is a wonderful video game - IGN gave it a 9 out of 10.

That's high praise from a site nicknamed "9GN" :P

On a more relevant note, I've played a few hours thus far and am just not feeling it. Was replaying BG2 up until the 26th, and while PoE certainly has the IE look and trappings, something just feels off about the combat. Perhaps it's the sticky engagement system, and the fact that wizards seem to have an uninspired and small spell selection. Good to see druids are so powerful though. Went back to BG2 though, maybe I'll give another shot after the inventory bug is fixed.

That sounds right up my alley, I'll have to make time for this. lol.

Oh yeh this game has lots of spiders. Some dungeons are just spiders, all kinds of spiders.

@jhonMalcovich: Shades are what scares me. Especially with their habit of warping to your spellcasters while your tanks are up front.

I'm not certain that they warp, but they definitely summon enemies to surround your weaker party members.

You've got to interrupt them like crazy at the start of the battles, or else you quickly get overwhelmed.

There's a list of who hyped it what in the OP. Who are saying underhyped it?

Cmon Gamespot.

Love the dwarf character design of Sagani.

Hand painted avatars with text work much better than awkward puppet people in Dragon Age: Origins, with there thunder-birds hands and blow up doll romance.

I spend most of my time at work thinking about this game!

Durance is gotta be one of the best written, most conflicted characters in an RPG to date. Love and hate that guy in equal measure... well no, I like him more than I hate him. Or Od I hate him more than I like him? Regardless, I love him!

Durance the priest?

Yeh, shades are the worst. They have rogue-speed attack, plus teleportation plus debufs spells. I usually use tight formation against them - everybody around the mage. If they don't have space for warping they can't warp. And before engaging them, the rolling ball of fire does a lot of damage to them and doest require to be in combat to be launched. It's a good way to weaken them before the fight starts. But at level 5 the game becomes much and much easier - higher damage and better gear helps a lot. I have a dual wield rogue with an insane speed attack but low constitution, but it's as good as a tank - thanks to the gear his deflection and interrupting stats are insane. My 5-level band now goes through any mob like a hot knife through the butter.

But I really hate the mage elf Aloth. He's so useless. He has only 12 might and 16 Int, but 16 Perception ??? So he basically has low area effects and low spell damage, but he has enough perception to be a rogue. Lol, what the guys of Obsidian were thinking when they created this absurd build.

@ReadingRainbow4: The story is slightly better than Original Sin, but that's not saying much. The dialogue though is up there in terms of pretty damn good.

I love this game and generally the storytelling and dialogue is fantastic but the voice-overs... some of them really are just awful. They sound like the devs just got random family members to read the text into a microphone. I am actually close to turning off voice completely and actually that wouldn't be such a bad thing. It's so well written I am quite happy just reading the dialogue instead of hearing some dreadful 'actor' read it out.

Literally the only blemish in an otherwise fantastic game.

@jhonMalcovich: I've given Aloth a heavy crossbow. He's basically my rogue, plus the ocassional fireball. Seems to be working for me so far - every so often a battle just ends because he has hit something for 50 damage.

lol this game is so weird like that. Kana takes forever to aim his gun at something but when he finally does whatever he is picking on is just 'gone'. They seem to be making a real point that wizards are not damage dealers in Pillars (my current main char is a wizard) which is a bit odd. Though I have heard they get much better late in the game.

I found a serial killer yesterday. Random NPC.

I found a guy who was tied up in his own house, killed/captured everyone in the house, then forgot to untie the guy until a week later.

I'd like to think he learned the error of his ways.

This is the nature of this first round of kickstarting in general. When the budget is only 4-5 million, they can't really spend much hiring seasoned voice actors or they'll run out of money like Broken Age. The good news is that if the game sells, there's a good chance for sequels and successors to return to a Baldur's Gate 2 tier voice acting crew, and maybe also spice up some of the cruder story elements.

These games aren't about voice acting. It's primarily narrative "descriptive writing". The idea is to form, not just purely images but other senses such as sound and touch into the readers mind. In that regard, you probably not find a game outside of Planescape Torment that even approaches Pillars Of Eternity.

so any news with GS review ...srsyl will it ever come out ??

PS : Yo guys check out my new avatar ... god it's so kewl !!!!!

Great review

Finally picked this up yesterday and I'm about 4 hours in. Wish I had more time to play. It's awesome so far and a very nice change of pace from the stuff I've been playing.

The writing is great, of course. The voice work could definitely be better, but I haven't come across anything cringe worthy yet.

Favorite part so far is when some elf dude basically called some drunk dude a sister fucker. Was unexpected and hilarious.

Some of the random characters you happen across are more interesting than the main characters/casts in most games.

Soooo... where is the GS review?

Installed this on my laptop, I forgot to send over my save games to google drive to download on this laptop. So I started a new game. Now that I altered the rules a bit (I no longer force myself to reload if someone gets K.O'ed). The game has become insultingly easy, on hard. I wonder if I should just use cheat codes to permanently lower my guys stats or set the difficulty to path of the damned or just revert to the old rules I played with.

So its like all the other IE games then. Also Hard doesn't change enemy stats, only numbers. Path of the Damned is the real difficulty.

@-God-: Yes, the IE games were piss easy too.

But with some people hyping up the difficulty for this game, I thought Hard would be perfect this time around. Turns out I shouldnt have believed the hype. Oh well, I will just use cheat codes then to alter the diffiulty.

Well, it doesn't have voice acting constantly so maybe just drop it completely then if they're mainly relying on text narrative? It is really jarring to hear people trying way, way too hard with a voice over as though they're trying to impress someone instead of just conveying the written text. Distinctly amateurish which is a shame as the rest of the game exudes class.

It looks like GS decided not to review this game at all.

@jhonMalcovich:

Nah. Kevin is still playing the game. Looks like he ran into another bug where scrolls lore are rolled against your main character not the character who has the scroll. Looking at the pictures he's posted on twitter, he is significantly deep into the game (Durance with lore of 12 for example). It will get here when it gets here. Not worried.

lol who uses scrolls and potions

so far, ~20hrs, 8\10.

depending on how far it goes that may increase.

always tell myself i'm going to when in the inventory but never end up when in battle

@jedikevin2: someone needs to tell Kevin to stop his nitpicking and give us an honest review

I really enjoyed it. Just finished last night at about 45 hours on normal. I probably did 80% or so of the side quests, because I'm sure I missed some things. I'll probably reload my Endgame save and go do a few more side-quests (had a few bounties I didn't do) to get to lvl12 since I didn't reach the cap by the end. I enjoyed the last 2 hours and the ending, lots of dialogue and story revelations, last boss fight was kinda trivial though with 2 mages since the monsters are not immune to CC. I'd give it a 9 at this point.

I wonder how they are going to handle the expansion packs since you can't continue after you beat the game. Specifically if you will continue on with your current character or have to start a new one. I'm guessing it probably does a hidden endgame save like ME1.

As a side note I'm already planning on a second playthrough, maybe nature godlike chanter or cypher. Haven't decided yet.

Kevin was in hospital (no idea why) and then recovering, he say's he's on with the reviewing the game now though.

Best rpg in years, as much as I liked Wasteland 2 and Divinity, this is even better.

I am 85 hours into the game and still havn't beat it yet. I am doing a good amount of the side quests and exploring alot. I also read all the dialogue (as its soo good), game has so much to do in it, just loving it. Not had any big bugs yet myself, the pathfinding needs some work though. Love the art design, love the combat, love the writing for the dialogue, story and characters.

I repeat, there is A TON of side quests!

Made a character and played a few minutes of it.

Reminds me of Baldur's Gate and DnD.

Can't wait to play now that i'm mostly finished with Bloodborne (will continue to dabble casually into pvp though) . I hear the voice acting isn't great or good even but i'm quite forgiving in that regard so as long as the dialogue is well written and not cliche-ridden which seems to thankfully be the case here.

Review coming soon. Kevin is playing the last bit of the game. And the way kevin bitched about the games mechanics I am anticipating a 7/10 now. GS should let someone else review the game.

@Gamerno6666:

Nah. Minimum 8 with the "bad" being the bugs he encountered (the now patched out inventory bug, and scroll lore to name a few he mentioned). Seems he has complained about the item sort with merchants as well. Glad he didn't rush thru it as the game has up too 60+ hours of content. We will see how the review goes. Glad its coming late since he could really criticize the day 1 bugs that the first major patch sorted out.

I would take Kevin over any freelance reviewers and lolface reviewers that have now. He is pretty much the last member of the good reviewers from years ago.

Has up to 200 hours of gameplay :)

I remember hearing Obsidian saying anywhere from 45 to 200 hours. For me I am now 89 hours and not finished yet (On Act 3 now). Looking more and more like my first playthrough will be 100+ hours. Then again I like to soak up all the dialogue/story stuff and I love to explore and do side quests!

No way is it close to 200, or even 100 under normal circumstances. That is not a knock on the game, it is great, but it probably tops out at 80 hours on max difficulty. That is unless you are repeating large sections or playing with all the difficulty settings enabled (even then 100 would be a stretch). I went back last night and leveled up my party to level 12 and then repeated the ending section and it still took me less than 60 hours on normal. I did ~90% of the side quests at that point, cleared all the caves/dungeons I could find and explored every map, but didn't touch the Endless Dungeon (not really my thing).