I totally forgot the difficulty options were going to give Tom an aneurysm.
I just closed my eyes, counted to ten, and took a series of deep breaths. Then I put the difficulty on “Challenging” and stayed away from those settings except to take screenshots for this thread. So far, so good.
But my point is that any developer who abdicates that much responsibility for tuning probably doesn’t have a very good sense for filler vs. content. :(
-Tom
I think a lot of it is a result of coming from a pen and paper background where DMs fudging the rules to make sure everyone is having fun is the norm, not the exception. The huge number of options is there for people who expect to be able to get the kind of game they want. For different people that can mean strict encumbrance, but weak death penalties. Others will want hardcore friendly fire, but have no interest in managing the Kingdom. This is just a substitute for the kind of negotiation that players would have with a live DM.
To Tom’s point: who I thought were the best DMs never negotiated.
I’ve never played a tabletop RPG in which I tell the DM how many hit points a kobold has, whether my encumbrance should have any gameplay impact, or that all my attacks will get a +3 because I don’t like missing when I attack. That said, I understand your point and I still think it’s an abdication of the developer’s job. They’re asking me to do the work they couldn’t be bothered to do.
Wait, are you trolling me? Am I really that easy? Don’t answer that question.
-Tom
And I always thought you were the one trolling us on this matter!
Indeed, “not another pointless battle” was my eventual reaction to PFKM. At first I was surprised by how vibrant and varied it is. Most of the first chapter is interesting adventure where the only battles that feel pointless were random encounters. And you can skip them with a skillcheck. Every location was as big as it needed to be, with meaningful fights. Character improvement was interesting, I got new abilities and new party members that changed the way I play. I was wondering why don’t I hear more about this game.
Then by the end of Chapter 1, you get into a big dungeon. And it’s full of spiders. I think some of them are stronger spiders but the fact is that you spend an hour fighting identical packs of 3 spiders in identical rooms. Then you’re back to the good stuff, ending of chapter 1 was great. But then it turned out that every location you visit from now on is either a “room” with a single encounter (more often than not it’s a lair of some creature) or huge plain with the same enemies again and again.
Right after playing it just for two chapters (which took around 20 hours) I loaded Chrono Trigger PC remaster and was amazed how people in the '90s could fill a 5 mb cartridge with unique monsters and each fight takes some planning - it’s not mind-blowing but it’s entertaining.
Now I have to say that I was playing on Normal. Developers themselves say on forums that Normal is intended to be a challenge for someone familiar with the genre and many people complain about it being too hard. Some players also say that default stats for many enemies are inflated compared to the original tabletop module. Perhaps playing Pillars of Eternity 2 had made me too strong and I should have taken higher difficulty. But I don’t know the roleplaying system and with all the complexity and ability to reroll your characters. Now with a recent Enhanced Edition they’ve added character reroll so I can actually try to experiment with characters instead of going for the safest boring options. And I have some hope that higher difficulty turns a boring hour of mindless spider smashing into exciting two hours of mindful spider smashing. Who knows?
Would love to see Tom streaming it. Pretty sure he will have fun with it at least for several hours.
Started on Kingmaker. After the tutorial and playing some of the first few story beats the writing and plot didn’t really do much for me and got me thinking how much I liked that in Pillars 1. So I went back and picked up my Pillars 1 game. I’ve been stalled in Act 2 for months and I’ve been meaning to get back to it but never have. Damn I love this game, powered through to the end and bought Pillars 2 on sale. So thanks Jason your recommendation of Kingmaker over Pillars of Eternity 2 ended up getting me back into Pillars of Eternity! Now I have a ship and can play turn based.
Good call, PoE2 is up there among the best RPGs ever. Whoever says otherwise is your enemy.