Rumor has it that our own Jason McMaster is doing a Let’s Play of PoE.
I caught a bit of him playing on Twitch the other day, but I think he’s also uploading them to Youtube.
Hey Jason, be a peach and post a link?
NM, found it in my twitter feed: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLK1SLFY2qj9HHIZKdN55QR304toNT3yf4
BTW, patch is up on GOG as well, though some people had issues. If you have the game on GOG, make sure you download all the patches and apply them in order (there are separate patches for White March 1 and 2), or patch through Galaxy.
I’m curious how many of you are making use of the companion AI and how many are still micromanaging. I’m getting ready to start a new game. I have a hard time using automation features in any game like this because I don’t like giving up control, but on the other hand it may be fun to just control my character and treat the others as their own people.
I’ve also never done this before in a game like this, but I’m thinking of having multiple games going at once, where I play a small amount as one character, then load up another and play the same portion, possibly with other choices available due to different classes and skills.
I had been microing everything myself before this thread reminded me that they added companion AI. I’ve since enabled that on the entire party including the PC. On hard-expert it’s enough to breeze me through most of the easy combats, and on harder encounters I either give occasional orders (Taking my mage-geeking squad around the side to beat up the enemy’s nerds while the frontliners tie the majority of them up, most often) and then on especially difficult encounters I either temporarily disable it or adjust it so the AI can use per-rest abilities, etc.
Overall it works really well. If you haven’t already played PoE it might pose an issue in that you won’t really know what’s effective if the game’s mostly playing itself, but once you know what’s going on it’s really nice for taking care of the easy stuff really quickly. Like you mentioned, you could leave your PC as entirely self controlled while you set the NPCs to various AI types, then can give basic orders (Think of it as yelling RUN AROUND THE BACK during combat or whatever) as needed. I’d definitely recommend it after trying it myself.
I’m using it for the auto attack on my ranged characters, set to defensive. My melee are on self defense since i use them to tank and are mostly positional and i dont want them moving around leaving space for the enemy to sneak into my mages.
Looking to resume my time with this as a bit of a mellower, turn-based antidote to the crazy antics of Assassin’s creed stuff.
What’s the general opinion of the White March DLC?
Favorable. Soulbound items alone are worth it.
I’m not that far on it, so trust others more then me. So far the story seems a lot more about local problems and less world-altering, which I prefer, but the new companions don’t seem terribly interesting. It’s just great to play through new content though, there seems to be a lot of it, and I’ve enjoyed what I’ve seen. I don’t think it’s going to eclipse the main game’s thread, though I’d love to hear if others disagree.
I think my plan was too ambitious :-)
I created a character of each class, then played the first map with each one. Now I’m playing the 2nd map with one of those characters. My goal was to take a character from each class through the game - completing a map with each character before moving on. I’m thinking that is too ambitious a plan, coming from a guy who rarely plays through a game like this more than once. At this pace I’ll never get to the new content. Also, it makes for some disjointed play. On the plus side, I can breeze through most of the text after I read it for the first character.
I’m wondering if I should just pick a character and play through the whole damn game. If I do that though I worry that I’ll never give the other classes a try. At release I played a fighter. Many of the other classes look promising. I only set the difficulty on hard, so I’m going to try to keep the number of party members low and see how that goes - try to keep 4 or less if I can.
Could you just play with no companions and make 5 allies at the Inn? That’d get you half the classes covered. You’d get full control over the whole progression and visuals of all the characters that way. Seems like it’d give a similar experience more easily.
I was hoping to at least get each companion covered once. I did use a bunch of them at release, but I skipped some too. I think they added some new onces too in the DLC, right?
I also wanted to play with a variety of main characters to get different dialog / event options - based on class, race, abilities - like athletics, reputation etc. Since only the primary character is used, that would require a bunch of playthroughs. I’m probably kidding myself thinking I’d ever make it through. I also rarely ever play as a cruel character in RPGs and it would be interesting to do so, but I’d also like to make sure I play the new content as a good character.
That is pretty ambitious. Even running through the game with “Fast” mode on and skipping almost all original game dialog I’ve sunk something like 35 hours in to my second playthrough and I still haven’t finished white march 1 (I maybe could have by this point, but I dropped back to the main story a bit to open up act 3 at least). PoE’s somewhere between BG1 and BG2 in size, which is to say still pretty damn big even with modern amenities speeding things up.
And yeah, they added 3 new companions (2 in WM1, 1 in WM2) with the expansions. A rogue, a monk, and a barbarian, so now PoE has a story NPC for every class. I’d also say that reputation/race/class don’t shake things up very much in PoE. I’m playing an extremely mercenary fighter that kills first and asks questions later, and apart from the occasional “Well I hear you’re cruel” dialog I haven’t noticed any quests opening or closing or even solutions changing because of it. There is one object that you can only interact with if you have at least 1 point of cruelty reputation and that’s the biggest thing I can think of in the whole game thus far. That’s one of PoE’s weaknesses, even Baldur’s Gate does a better job with your choices and reputation influencing things and it’s still pretty light in that. I don’t think you can even piss your party members enough that they try to kill you, let alone leave your party.
Fast mode is such a life saver, especially for sneak/search mode.
One of us! I always make these plans to see RPGs from another perspective but when I do eventually get around to replaying them I inevitably end up roleplaying the same character as I did the first time (I have more than 10 full playthroughs of Mass Effect trilogy and I’ve never done a renegade run). Still, it’s nice to have the option.
Re companions - you’re in luck. Their quest triggers seem to be tied to main story progress so you can pretty much chain their quests once you’ve progressed far enough. All you have to do is periodically go back to Caed Nua to swap them in, talk to them, maybe rest to trigger the next sequence and then do their quest.
Is it still neccesary to to run in sneak mode at all times to find all the secrets?
Yep, you still get a bonus to your mechanical skill for detecting traps and your perception for detecting secrets while in “Scout” mode. You TECHNICALLY can detect them without it, but the bonus must be pretty significant since you’ll see more difficult secrets/traps and see things farther away in scout mode.
Edit: Although I will say that the secrets in PoE are nothing special. I can’t remember anything of vital importance in any of them, and you’ll end up with so much money anyway getting a bit of extra loot isn’t that big of a deal anyway.
I recall there was a great 2h sword that you need a pretty high mechanics score to find. Tidefall.
I’ve found a couple of keys and things that got me places I would otherwise have had to solve puzzles or pick my way through, etc. But one could argue that’s actually not desirable.
Got through white march part 1, was actually a bit shorter than I thought it was going to be. Could’ve knocked it out sooner had I not gone back to do more main-quest stuff (And if I had tackled it in the intended order. The zone to the right on the white march map is completely optional and a fair chunk more difficult than the main objective. I cleared it first, thinking the main objective would be harder, only to find it was a relative cakewalk compared) but it was pretty enjoyable. Still not much choice and consequence which is the PoE norm, but some decent combat encounters, some fun characters, a few of the little text bits. Good PoE adventure, and Zahua and the Devil are probably tied for my second favorite PoE character after Durance.
Haven’t started white march part 2 yet, considering killing the snow dragon while I’m underleveled to continue my tradition with killing the adra dragon at level 10, but on the other hand… Eh. Might mop up whatever other bits and bobs I’ve got left (Got a second tier of bounties to do and a couple other small side quests) before moving on.
Also after playing with other classes, druid is a bit of a disappointment. It’s actually not a bad class, it just hurts since I’m running without a priest, chanter, cipher or wizard, so Hiravias is the sole caster and not having access to wizard crowd control or priest buffs/heals kinda hurts. Monk is super great, I wish there was more incentive to have him running low/no armor (Currently he’s wearing heavy plate, but eh) but he dishes a lot of damage out. Barbarian seems to scale with level better than fighter, Maneha seemed a bit iffy initially but she’s turned in to a pretty solid powerhouse now. Rogue… Rogue is good, but I almost think it’s lacking compared to monk. More fragile, absolutely no AoE compared to monk, and while single target damage is definitely better it requires an inordinate amount of fiddling to dish that damage out, as opposed to monk. Still effective, she’s using a stun on hit weapon and a blind on hit weapon and I’m stacking attack speed boosting stuff which makes her more annoying. And finally ranger, which I’m tempted to switch to bow-use since I found a soulbound bow, but using a big fuck-you blunderbuss with the bouncing shot thing that rangers get is pretty enjoyable I have to admit. First time I played PoE a good 4 members of my party used guns with the chanter using the reload speed chant. Love using guns in PoE.
It seems the updates haven’t improved my main complaints:
On Hard difficulty the battles definitely skew towards easy. There are a few where if you try and tackle them right away they can be difficult or impossible (to me at least), the bear cave, the shades in the ruined temple. There were a couple other difficult ones too. I’m just shy of level 5 and went to Caed Nua. Met the guy I was looking for. Up until now, most of the battles can be won be selecting my party and mass attacking a target, repeating until everyone is dead.
There are some where positioning can be important, which brings me to complaint number 2. It’s hard for the battle not to devolve into blobs. Even upgrading the fighter’s hold the line ability, there are usually enough enemies where they can circle around and get to others. So far it hasn’t caused much of a problem really, but it’s unsatisfying. Trying to prevent this leads to some tedious positioning. I wish this game had the Divinity Original Sin action point system, but with the Pillars content and enemies.
I’m glad I abandoned trying to play with multiple characters. I want to get to the point where i can play The White March content.