Obsidian's "Pillars of Eternity"

[Merusk]

Just ran into 3 druids and got my ass handed to me faster than the drakes I'd run into. Fuck my current party, I'm rerolling as all druids and trying that. Multi-target lightning spell with an affect area you can't walk out of, healing AND barkskin for DR & Interrupt prevention? Ok, sure.

Now I know it's a BG-legacy game. Melee classes are ass.    

[Lucas]

If everything goes well, patch should be out tomorrow:

http://forums.obsidian.net/topic/74701-obsidian-why-isnt-there-any-hotfix-yet/page-3#entry1625275

From other posts, it looks like they're already working on another one, possibly out next week.

[Miasma]

I'm going to disable automatic patching until I hear an all-clear that it doesn't corrupt or otherwise destroy current save files.

[Khaldun]

The adult drakes are pretty tough at level 6/7 where my guys are at. Beatable for sure but the kind of fight where I have to pay attention and watch that I don't pull more than I want.

[Lucas]

Preliminary notes for patch 1.03 (geeze, Obsidian, look at that list. You'll never learn) :

https://forums.obsidian.net/blog/7/entry-179-patch-notes-103/

Game is finally out of beta  

EDIT Main fixes:

- Bears and Cats can now be equipped with hats. This is most likely not a joke... but might be a joke.

- Double-clicking to equip items was causing passive abilities to get removed from the character. This has been fixed and we were able to retroactively fix the problem for people that have already run into the issue. If you open your saved game in the latest patch, your characters will be repaired.

- Fixed a problem where attributes on characters could permanently increase by equipping certain items. This will also retroactively fix the problem in saved games that have characters with this issue.

- The crash in Raedric's Hold has been fixed.

- Fixed the looping audio sounds that can occur if you play with minimized tooltips.

- Previously Wizard summoned items could persist after the spell's duration. This has been fixed and it will also retroactively fix the problem in saved games that have characters with this issue.

- The items Drinking Horn of Moderation and Talisman of the Unconquerable were causing Ciphers to permanently lower their amount of focus gain. We've included a fix to retroactively resolve the issue on Ciphers but the effect is still on the items. Unfortunately the fix will not fix the broken effect on those items, so you'll need to keep those items unequipped until the next patch. If you do equip them, perform a Save/Load to fix your Cipher.

[Sophismata]

Complete notes:

Now I know it's a BG-legacy game. Melee classes are ass.  

That's just its D&D heritage.

Edit: Druids especially are extremely strong in 3.0, 3.5 and pathfinder.

Also, the change to arbalests worry me. Clearly Obsidian are concerned about the very common equip everyone with arbalests to fire at the start of combat "issue" but that's a side effect of the lack of weapon proficiencies (which I actually like) tied with easy weapon switching. Making arbalests do less damage will make them more useless than they already are for their intended use case.

[Tannhauser]

Cool, I can finally go to Raderic's Hold.  My fighter's so tanky that any damage he does is just gravy to me.  Anyone else like the Chanter?  It's pretty cool how you can rearrange their songs.  Also, the phantom they summon is quite a taunter. 

[Miasma]

I'm going to disable automatic patching until I hear an all-clear that it doesn't corrupt or otherwise destroy current save files.

Holy crap there is no longer a way to just disable updates, the only choices are auto, really fast auto and update at launch.  Assholes.  I know these "retoractive" fixes are going to destroy some peoples games what with how terrible Obsidian QA is.

[Ard]

If you hate them that much, why do you continue to buy their games?  Are lessons really not learned?

[Merusk]

I'm going to disable automatic patching until I hear an all-clear that it doesn't corrupt or otherwise destroy current save files.

Holy crap there is no longer a way to just disable updates, the only choices are auto, really fast auto and update at launch.  Assholes.  I know these "retoractive" fixes are going to destroy some peoples games what with how terrible Obsidian QA is.

Yeah, your only option now is to enable offline mode.

[Lucas]

Yep, kiddos, patch is out ( Steam says 1GB):

http://forums.obsidian.net/topic/75170-patch-103-is-live-on-steam/

Notes: https://forums.obsidian.net/blog/7/entry-179-patch-notes-103/

Coming out in a couple of days on GOG.

[Senses]

This is my favorite patch note:
•Bears and Cats can now be equipped with hats.

[Tannhauser]

Just played about four hours straight with the new patch, no issues that I can see.  Raedric's Hold was fine as well.

[calapine]

Fuck you Obsidian.

Game stuck right on the first loading screen (after the fight at the Caravan, 15 minutes into the game).

I am not sure if twice in a row already counts as "reproducible", but I am not going to try again tonight.

Fucking fuckers.

[Lucas]

Verify integrity of game cache through Steam, see if that fixes the problem.

[calapine]

Thanks, but seems that wasn't it.



And I did try a 3rd time, same result. Loading screen comes up but never goes away. No crash, game responds to ALT+F4 closing, but never transitions to the new area.

grrrr....

[Lucas]

try to run the .exe as admin

[calapine]

That...worked

Thank you.  

Btw, Dreamfall: The Longest Journey is a jewel of a game. You should play it once.  

[Lucas]

Glad it worked! I did a quick search on google about a possible "stuck on load" and people threw around some ideas like the ones I wrote above :). Also, I read on the Dev Tracker that some of the bugs related to load/save and related crashing will be further investigated (and hopefully fixed) in 1.04 and 1.05

[Lucas]

Hotfix available on Steam (580MB....Unity  ) :
http://forums.obsidian.net/topic/75410-103-hotfix-for-problem-with-adventurer-hall-companions/#entry1632810

We have hotfixed the problem with adventurer hall-created companions not being able to unlock doors or chests. This should work correctly now. Without getting into too much detail, it looks like adding and removing a companion in the Stronghold can cause its voice set to be stripped. This was causing a null reference exception when they tried to unlock items.

[trias_e]

35 hours in and the game is really, really good. 

[Merusk]

Oh good. I was having that exact problem last night. 

I'm getting bored.  When I try to go any place to advance quests my team gets its ass kicked right now. Level 6 but can't take out the drakes for that quest and I can't figure out how to get to the 2nd town.  (Not the village with the ogre).

[tmp]

Hotfix available on Steam (580MB....Unity  ) :

Isn't that Steam rather than Unity? Seeing how GOG manages quite better to keep their patches small for Unity games like Wasteland.

[lamaros]

Oh good. I was having that exact problem last night. 

I'm getting bored.  When I try to go any place to advance quests my team gets its ass kicked right now. Level 6 but can't take out the drakes for that quest and I can't figure out how to get to the 2nd town.  (Not the village with the ogre).

The second half of the game is pretty weak. Story becomes lame, all the little issues become more big issues. I'm pretty disappointed.

Just reply the start and don't ruin it for yourself!

[MrHat]

Oh good. I was having that exact problem last night. 

I'm getting bored.  When I try to go any place to advance quests my team gets its ass kicked right now. Level 6 but can't take out the drakes for that quest and I can't figure out how to get to the 2nd town.  (Not the village with the ogre).

Drop the difficulty.  Or keep at it. I got my ass handed to me..three times so far, mostly from AoEs and confuses.

[Lucas]

Another bug that results in permanent stat increases?  :

http://forums.obsidian.net/topic/75484-bug-0526-health-still-perma-increasing/

I can 100% reproduce this bug in my current save which I think is to do with the sickened status effect from a gul's attack.
 
In my specific save, my party is around the dial with 3 remaining gul creatures.
 
1. I attack them with no spells, just plain regular attacks, win the fight obviously.
2. Let one of more of you party members get either sickened or poisoned status effect.
 
Either one or more of my party members will see an increase in max HP if they got the status effect, you can see it in combat, sometimes it works fine in battle by reducing max HP, but other times you can see the max HP skyrocket. At one point I got my Eder to 570+ HP.
 
I also noticed that my player created companion wasn't getting affected, more tests need to be done on that.
 
If the developers want, I can send my save file, I just need to know where to look.
 
Hope this help.

[Sophismata]

How the hell are they handling stats behind the scenes? This isn't rocket science; it's pretty easy to create a value + modifier system that is essentially immutable.

[lamaros]

This game will probably make me buy bg2:ee.

Ultimately really underwhelming. Sense of world is really lacking, npc's stories feel half incomplete. Half the voice acting is bad. Compat system lacks any depth, other game systems are shallow. Loot is underwhelming. Overall story fell off a cliff. The cities feel empty.

It feels half done in the end. And had such a promising start.

Maybe with a few expansions or poe2 it will hit the spot.

[Khaldun]

Feels like BG2, Icewind Dale, etc. to me, even Planescape somewhat. Meaning most of what you just said could be said of them too. None of those are really open-world in the conventional sense, and the cities in particular generally feel like a succession of quest hubs.

If you like those, I think you'd have to like this. If you don't, you won't. I do not understand someone liking BG2, Icewind Dale, maybe even Planescape and really not liking this. It's very much one more in that tradition.

[schild]

It feels half done in the end. And had such a promising start.

I'm still playing through it, but anyone who assumes Obsidian will deliver otherwise is misunderstanding what level of skill in design and story-writing exists at Obsidian.

[Lucas]

Tabletop adaptation and Card Game in the works:

http://www.pcgamer.com/pillars-of-eternity-tabletop-rpg-and-card-game-in-the-works/

Do you have any plans for an Eternity tabletop RPG or anything like that? I mean, you created this new world and all this new lore, do you see that expanding out to other media?

Absolutely. So, actually one of the things we're going to announce very soon, I don't even know if I talked about it. Not in the latest backer update but the next backer update, we're definitely going to talk about how we're going to be Kickstarting... not us, but another group is going to be Kickstarting a Pillars of Eternity card game. This isn't like a CCG or anything like that, but it's more just a fun, kind of, four people get around and play a single session card game. You have heros, and you have a village, and all that kind of stuff, and you can take your heroes into a dungeon, and you can also take your heroes and armies and attack your friends while they're playing, so it's kind a very fun card game and it's actually designed by Chris Taylor. Not... there's two Chris Taylors. [Laughs] It's Chris Taylor, a friend of mine for many many years who was the lead designer of Fallout.
So, that's the first thing we're really looking at, and also, absolutely on the tabletop roleplaying. We're not sure yet how we're going to do it, we were kind of going back and forth on, do we use the game's rules, do we use someone else's rules, do we come up with another set of rules? And it's something we're going to be talking [about] soon. But absolutely, we want to expand. New books, roleplaying, all that kind of stuff.

Actually, I vaguely remember Feargus mentioning that possibility during the KS campaign; I definitely expected it when I saw the attention given to the Collector's guide and world building in general.

Plus: expansion is going to be split in two parts:

Speaking of expansions, can you give us any details on what might be coming in the future?

Sure. So, with the Kickstarter we announced that we were going to do an expansion, and so how we're approaching that is to actually do the expansion in two parts, and have one part out sooner than the other part. The idea being that people are really enjoying Pillars right now and they're going to get finished their first or second playthrough within in the next two weeks, a month, something like that. And so, we definitely want there to be content for them to enjoy and I think we're going to be talking about that pretty soon. I don't think we've released anything specifically, but it really ends up being this concept of this story that expands parts of what you would see in those sort of old school expansions we made for Icewind Dale and Baldur's Gate. So not just these three, four hour downloadable DLCs, but definitely big chunks of a story and a new hub to go to and things like that.
So that's kind of how we're really approaching it, like we've done with Eternity throughout is this idea of, these games kind of went away but not for a reason they should have. The industry shifted to so much console with this idea that PC wasn't so much of a gaming platform, which I know no one thinks that anymore. So, back then when you got an expansion you got this meaty thing with hours and hours of gameplay. And that's really what we're trying to do. So, while we're splitting it in two, it is like one continual story that people get to play.[/b]

They definitely want to ride the wave of the positive reception as soon as possible, can't blame them.

[rk47]

It feels half done in the end. And had such a promising start.

I'm still playing through it, but anyone who assumes Obsidian will deliver otherwise is misunderstanding what level of skill in design and story-writing exists at Obsidian.

[Zane0]

This game will probably make me buy bg2:ee.

Ultimately really underwhelming. Sense of world is really lacking, npc's stories feel half incomplete. Half the voice acting is bad. Compat system lacks any depth, other game systems are shallow. Loot is underwhelming. Overall story fell off a cliff. The cities feel empty.

It feels half done in the end. And had such a promising start.

Maybe with a few expansions or poe2 it will hit the spot.

I agree that the constraints of their kickstarter funding/time window are readily apparent somewhere towards the halfway mark - although I have a more complicated sense of where POE stands in relation to BG/IWD/PST. It is pretty clear in retrospect that a lot of their dollars went into recreating the infinity engine in unity, working out a replacement for D&D4e or w/e this ruleset most resembles, and making sure the basic nuts and bolts were solid. The game tries very hard to not take any risks from top to bottom. If nothing else I am really satisfied with their engine though, esp. the fidelity of their 2.5d backgrounds/environment maps, and think it could be a great platform going forward.

You might want to play POTD (level after hard) to gain an appreciation for the robustness of the combat mechanics (which I found.. as weighty as any sprg from the last 10 years?). I found hard too easy for large stretches of the game but my second POTD playthrough is reminding me a lot of IWD.

[lamaros]

This game will probably make me buy bg2:ee.

Ultimately really underwhelming. Sense of world is really lacking, npc's stories feel half incomplete. Half the voice acting is bad. Compat system lacks any depth, other game systems are shallow. Loot is underwhelming. Overall story fell off a cliff. The cities feel empty.

It feels half done in the end. And had such a promising start.

Maybe with a few expansions or poe2 it will hit the spot.

I agree that the constraints of their kickstarter funding/time window are readily apparent somewhere towards the halfway mark - although I have a more complicated sense of where POE stands in relation to BG/IWD/PST. It is pretty clear in retrospect that a lot of their dollars went into recreating the infinity engine in unity, working out a replacement for D&D4e or w/e this ruleset most resembles, and making sure the basic nuts and bolts were solid. The game tries very hard to not take any risks from top to bottom. If nothing else I am really satisfied with their engine though, esp. the fidelity of their 2.5d backgrounds/environment maps, and think it could be a great platform going forward.

You might want to play POTD (level after hard) to gain an appreciation for the robustness of the combat mechanics (which I found.. as weighty as any sprg from the last 10 years?). I found hard too easy for large stretches of the game but my second POTD playthrough is reminding me a lot of IWD.

There's no doubt, and in many ways it is better than bg1, and bg2 is a very great game. I don't mean that this isn't a good game, it just fell back towards ok in the end, rather than pushing through.

The combat is ok, the way stats and skills work outside combat is a work in progress though I think. If you take all those skills from the game not much is lost.

The narrative coordination of the game is also much worse than bg2. Bg2 nails down the "here is when you shit around, here is when you follow the path" bit much more.

[Sophismata]

Armour needs work - flat DR has not been handled very well. Skill system is weighted too heavily towards Mechanics. Other than that though it's pretty good, although I personally dislike the scaling attributes with level (accuracy and defence).