I finally have time to play this game after a 10 day hiatus due to working 17 hour days.

And since I'm finally on Act III,

Spoiler

I can't help but feel like a complete asshole by taking advantage of everyone dead at the duc's palace and Dunryd Row to loot the corpses and all the stashes that were too well-guarded when everyone was alive.

I'm having so much damn fun with this story right now.

 

I seem to be rather popular every time I venture into the city after every loading screen I am met with an assasin squad. Free exp tho.

 

Joke's on you; once you fill up the codex entry for a specific enemy, they give no more experience. The assassins'll either waste you or waste your time, there is no productive middle ground, I'm sad to say.

 

that isome qaulity bullshit that my unarmed monk buddy wont put up.

 

I like it.

Without the OOC reward of XP gains, the only considerations as to whether or not you kill someone/thing are also relevant in character, material gains, getting them out of your way, just wanting them to die.

It also helps balance the xp progression by reducing the xp discrepancy between between the classic kill everything approach and non-violent/stealth approaches.

 

Heh, I'm just going to keep killing mobs/NPCs until I reach the Super Murderer title.

It would be interesting to do a playthrough to achieve Relative Pacifism where you can only kill 175 or less mobs. Not quite sure how that would work (other than maxing out your chars in stealth).

 

Patch 1.05 is out. Patch Notes

Pretty big patch, lots of bug fixes, quality of life improvements and balance changes.
There's an option to reset companions to level one when you recruit them so you can pick all their skills yourself. They fixed the XP rewards so you can do the stronghold bounties, imo some of the most fun encounters, without gaining a progression breaking amount of XP. Ciphers start fights with less focus so you actually have to attack before you can toss out your big abilities. A few spells made Foe Only and petrify nerfed.

All in all, pretty nice patch.

 

Looks like some big buffs for mage. Too bad i have already played through the game and i don't feel like playing through it again. Death ring and ghost blades foe only = god tier mage. The end game was a very easy as a wizard and looks like it will be even easier.

 

Still waiting for a good time to pick this up. Probably after Witcher 3. Good patches make me happy. For the first time ever, I'm kinda seeing the "wait for a few patches" mentality.

 

So I tried this when it first came out, but I got a bit frustrated by having to micro manage everything and let it fall to the side. I never got very far at all. 5 hours at most.

Seeing as 2.0 is out, and it introduced party AI, I'm planning on finally playing this properly.

However, question, do you need The White March expansion for Party AI?

Also, anyone have any suggestions on classes? I started out with chanter last time but found it kind of boring. I've always enjoyed mage type classes, perhaps a warrior thing. I don't know.

Any kind of tips/advice for a new player to get the most out of the game would be welcome really.

 

Forget all you know from D&D about building charcters. In this game building a warrior with high Inteligence and low Strength has merits.

As for classes I personally enjoyed playing as cipher (psion-like character), but they got nerfed hard recently. If you want an easy class then I would recomend playing as Death-godlike rouge.

 

How is everyone's experience with the White March DLC so far? I've enjoyed the addition of party AI, which is a definite improvement to the gameplay.

 

Just started playing this recently, having quite a bit of fun with it.

I feel like I'm battling wrong, though, as I don't have much experience with games like these. I don't know, I'm kind of winging it.

Trying to go full Wizard Who Blasts Fucking Everything with my main character, but there's some frustration with all the AoE that hits party. Feels like there's an excessive amount of micromanagement required in battles, sometimes, but that may just be how games like this work and I'm not used to it.

Found a couple typos in the text, which was surprising.

Story seems fun enough, so far, but I've just hit Defiance Bay and I'm wandering around doing those quests and tasks, so I may not be very far into it.

Oh, and I stepped into an area and got wrecked by four drakes out of nowhere. That was surprising. I'm assuming I wasn't supposed to go there yet.

 

Deadfire is out!

I actually ended up playing through Pillars of Eternity four times, finishing my prepationary Deadfire run a week ago. I really fell in love with the game, the expansions helped a lot. Easy 9/10. And now the sequel's here. The beta reviews have been very positive, the game looks downright gorgeous, and from my ~6 hours first impressions, it has the potential to be better than the first game. We'll see as we get to the meat of the game. Definitely recommended for anyone who enjoyed the first game.

 

But is there romance?

 

I was really disappointed with PoE's story. Too many things were inconsistent or outright did not make sense (ie one of the main 'plot points' was that the gods were fake - except that fuck no they weren't, they were just created instead of spontaneously appearing out of nothingness, which really didn't change anything). Most of the companions were rather 'meh', and only Durance really stood out head and shoulders above the rest. By now I can hardly remember anyone without looking at the Wiki. Additionally the game absolutely shat itself if you did most of the content in the earlier chapters but rushed only the story starting halfway through, like I never had any idea that Aloth had any connection with the Leaden Key whatsoever and suddenly he becomes their leader? Wut? The 'resolution' of the Od Nua was also underwhelming at best.

Still, for all of PoE's problems it was good enough to pick up Deadfire. Shame my mad bro Durance won't be in it.


The combat was moderately fun though, even if I had a lot of trouble when running 3 or 4 man squad during some of the more difficult fights (Longwatch farms was borderline impossible around the hotspring area as the mobs were chained in large groups).

Going to 5 max party members is great, and I wish they decided to go to four. There's just too much shit going on with six party members, and things like properly positioning for a Fan of Flames takes tons of micromanagement where a party of four works great. Might be nostalgia, but I think that DAO had an incredible combat system for its year and I wish more RPGs were like that. Deadfire's looks somewhat slower than I expected, though, but I'm cautiously optimistic.

Hoping the writing became a bit tighter. I like reading, but a game is not a book and there was a lot of superfluous verbosity in the first game that didn't add much.

Not sure about the pirate life that seems to be one of the main... pillars of this game. Soooo many games get it wrong to the point that it becomes downright annoying instead of fun.

Will be picking it up on the weekend. We'll see how it goes, though I have little hope that it will pull me into its world like BG2 once did.

 

Yes. In fact, there can be romance between your pc and a party member, and between two party members. There's now full voice acting too. You can now fully romance your waifu. "There isn't a single blemish on her flawlesss skin." Do it for the waifus, man.

@blob While there is a huge nautical exploration theme, and pirates are one of the four major factions, you can absolutely tell them to fuck off and never be a pirate. But between hostile enemy ships, feeding your crew rum, sea shanties... it does toe the line between piracy and normal sailoring. Then again, you can absolutely be a pirate should you want. That'd be the very well developed roleplaying part of the game.

 

This post is likely somewhat rambling but I'm just about to go to sleep so whatevs.

Spent some time on Deadfire. It's... decent. A decent CRPG that lets you obsess over statistics and micromanaging your party members with lots of text to read. Obviously a sequel, would not recommend playing as the first game. More polished and slightly more streamlined and just as flat as the first one.

I don't know *why*, but the world Obsidian created just doesn't pull me in. There are good moments here and there, but the majority of it falls somewhat flat; places I don't really care about, people that (while somewhat interesting) are not memorable along with their irrelevant troubles, boring items and loot, a setting and politics that just don't do it for me. I don't know, man. I want to like it, but it's tepid at best. Perhaps it'll improve with time as my party grows in strength.

Random thoughts so far, in no particular order (no spoilers, I think):

• voiced narrator - y u do dis? Y u no let me disable? It is a *terrible* first impression
• Eder fucking died in tutorial - thought he was just temporarily gone and found out ~4h after the fact that I wasn't supposed to start solo, requiring me to restart from the beginning. Not sure if I missed something the first time, but I don't think so (like a comment that hey, your first bro you've been traveling with for months just fucking died on you, but apparently my Watcher is tough shit and doesn't care at all)
• ship boarding - text description tells you four guys are alive, but when you board you fight fifteen - prolly a bug
• ship combat - textual part is just... cmon
• a bit unsure what the sea combat and boarding adds to the game (like, what's the point of it all? Might be it becomes more interesting in the future, but I'm not holding my breath)
• exploration system isn't anything special but doesn't feel like a complete chore
• thankfully no backer characters clogging up everything
• pretty graphics are pretty; some combat animations look amazing
• a decent selection of portraits to choose from
• building a character is rather complicated but it's not too difficult to mix and match to make a decent build; multiclassing lets you do some funky stuff, which is nice
• I might or might not be planning to kill Xoti on purpose, priestess or not. I have little doubt she improves over time, because Obsidian wouldn't create a companion that is so obnoxious for the entire game, but I have little patience left
• loads of side-quests. LOADS. But mixing the main quest and sidequests could be done better; there is little sense of urgency in chasing the living god while the side-quests feel rather inconsequential and not really connected with anything else
• so far the main quest isn't particularly interesting. Hoping it gains more steam, because "follow that divine giant that stole your soul" is not quite enough to get me going
• give me a reliable way of tracking quests, or at the very least describe thoroughly who, what and why
• performance is kinda iffy sometimes and the game has a memory leak; gotta restart every 2-3hrs or so else the FPS drops become noticeable
• loads of depth to the lore, though the majority of it doesn't grip me as much as it probably ought to.
• reverse pickpocketing made it's way into the game. On a completely unrelated note, people on the archipelago seem to have a strange affliction that causes them to spontaneously explode sometimes
• thought the maps will be just a lil bigger
• some strange fucking accents can be found in this game; most VA is good, but some of them are soooo ill-fitting that I just can't even
• wish combat was ~33% quicker; outside of the biggest fights things happen rather slowly
• wizard spells - there's a fuckton of them, but few are truly interesting (at least so far, gotta unlock the high-end stuff); for the most part you pick ~2 spells from a certain level and spam them until things are dead
• per combat spells are excellent; I LOATHE per rest stuff
• no shadowflame makes me a sad panda (it was laughably OP but still)
• spell retargeting is a great addition, esp with the increased cast times

 

I started playing Pillars of eternity and the story just hasn't gripped me. Its quite dull...

Is deadfire any better?

 

@blob A few notes from me - Xoti seems like the best written companion, even if you disagree with her personality and faith. I'd wait until finishing her personal quest before killing her. You can really... uh... see for yourself. The text based ship combat is indeed pointless once you figure it out. The map gets bigger. You wish combat was faster? I wish it was a little slower, things happen too fast compared to PoE1.

My biggest complaint would be that the story indeed isn't exactly gripping. It's fine. It's all right. It's pretty immersive. But it's not super story driven or super immersive. @Arthellion I think the voice acting makes it more gripping that Pillar 1's story, but the focus still remails on exploration, roleplaying, combat and character building.