I really should finish Pillars someday. Maybe I’ll just turn friendly for off and play a 6 Druid party.
I believe there is a Story difficulty that trivializes combat, though I’m of the opinion that if you can’t play PoE’s combat it’s probably not worth it just for the story (which is fine, but not the start of the show here). Finding cool weapons, leveling up, getting your hands on new skills and abilities, upgrading your armor, crafting new and more powerful gear - it’s all meaningless if the combat isn’t there, at least that’s my theory. The visuals are great, imo, however and the voice work is top notch. And if you enjoy the tale being told (it’s solid, but nothing special) then by all means. But as a vehicle to just “get it crossed off a list” I’d say just cross it off the list.
I am going to try Tyranny, it’s 20% off at GMG. I desperately want a good non-first-person RPG to play. Hopefully that will help me master the combat and take it to PoE.
Oh I’m aware. I should see if my saves survived the death of my SSD.
I would say the writing in Pillars is easily its strongest attribute and the main reason I stuck with it as far as I have. (As is often true with Obsidian’s games). Tyranny’s combat is better because among other things there’s a lot less emphasis on fiddly application of buffs and debuffs.
You don’t use Steam Cloud? Pretty sure PoE supports it.
Depends entirely on what the default setting is!
Level cap raised to 18 - confirmed. Now the next milestone (after multi-classed Priest/Monk) is $2.0M and it’s… gambits, if you’ll forgive the Final Fantasy XII parlance. Basically, you’ll be able to customize your own AI down to conditional statements on when and what your party members can do (presumably; such as drink a potion at low health, drop a bolt of lighting on a target weak to lightning, and etc.). Sounds awesome to me!
And I bought Tyranny after reading this post. Hopefully it doesn’t snatch over 100 hours of my life away.
Awesome. With any luck this addition will find its way to PoE and Tyranny as well.
Yes, PoE’s AI was a massive improvement but it still pales when compared against what we had in BG2.
I backed this the instant I saw stusser’s post but that was more out of loyalty to Obsidian than anything. However gambits? That gets me really excited.
I think PoE1 got too epic in scope, too fast. They should have held off with the big BATTLE AGAINST THE GODS stuff until a sequel. It was the smaller stories I liked more.
Tyranny was my favorite game of last year. I enjoyed the story and found that it did not overstay its welcome. I hope you enjoy it!
Custom AI scripting is in now that we’ve passed 2M.
Josh Sawyer just sent out an update explaining multiclassing. It must needs be said that the system is a work in progress and they’re soliciting feedback. Basically, they’re considering a choice between AD&D style (as in, you chose your classes at birth and that’s that), or d20 style (as in, when you level you can take a level of another class you are eligible in at will, and then mix and match levels in your two classes too taste. The difference in PoE2 is that you can only have two classes).
They think the latter system comes with some additional complexity and they’re not sure they like it. The reason being they balance it like this:
Every level up a class gains 3 “resource” points. These determine your power level in that class. 0-2 points = power level 0, 3 = 1, 8 = 2, 14 = 3, 20 = 4, +6 = next level forever more (or at least in the chart in the email, which went to level 10). At level up you also gain a phantom point that isn’t counted unless you multiclass. So a level 1 fighter has 3 “discipline” points. And a phantom bpoint. At level 2 if he takes wizard, the phantom point becomes arcane, and he gains +3 arcane for taking a wizard level, giving him arcane +4. But the level also includes a +1 to his discipline score.
The cost is you lag behind in power level, so that a 5/5 fighter/wizard has 4/4 discipline/arcane level while a level 10 character would be at 5. Presumably the AD&D system just relies on slower XP advancement (with xp’s split between classes).
Sad that the difference in tier rewards and the Canadian exchange rate makes it unlikely for my irascible NPC to reappear (would cost exactly double what it did last time, in Canadian dollars, since the tier is also 50% pricier). Maybe I’ll transmogrify him into a pig, although I don’t really understand the pet tiers - do you name an animal for everyone, or just your own game?
That’s a good thing. It was cool to run across NPCs of people you know, like yours, but overall the glut of useless NPCs standing around did not exactly result in a better game. Just way, way, too many.
Yeah, even though I liked buying into the game, there were way too many, and it’s not surprising that other crowd funded RPGs have either really curtailed that feature or limited it significantly. The first Divinity Original Sin campaign was probably the high water mark for featuring reward tiers that allowed you to inject your writing/creations into the game (either for everyone, or just your own game) and I doubt we’ll see something like that again. It was nice though.
I do really like that Obsidian is finally going the “living world” route - that’s something I’ve really wanted from Black Isle/Obsidian/interplay since the original Fallout, which graphically resembled the Ultima games so it was even more disappointing to not incorporate that feature.
If they tell me where named NPCs are at any given point, it’ll be cool. If not, the extra running around looking for them vastly outweighs any benefits it might have, to me.