Pillars of Eternity, Obsidian's new CRPG in the vein of Baldur's Gate

Just got hit with the item stacking bug, I'll probably wait for the patch before starting over again.List of bugs that everyone should know about (Game Breaking) - Pillars of Eternity: Technical Support (Spoiler Warning!) - Obsidian Forum Community. My Eder has 70+ deflection naked at lvl 5, Kana Nua the chanter has 23 INT from his cap when I reloaded a couple times in Caed Nua.

A couple PSA's

Spread your gear around, having 2 rings of minor protection on your tank is a waste since they will suppress each other. Ex. Ring of +5 Will and Fort vs Cloak of 10 Will. You won't get 15 Will/5 Fort but 10 Will/5 Fort, the 5 will from the ring will get suppressed.

The Wizard has some of the best CC and debuff spells. For level 1 Slicken and Chill fog is amazing, Eldrich Aim is also good if you need to boost accuracy to land spells. Level 2 Bewildering Spectacle and Miasma of Dull Mind very good CC and Debuff spells. Level 3 Expose Vulnerabilities is another good debuff. If you get swarmed by lots of trash mobs Kalakoth's Minor Blights along with the Blast talent is incredible for AE damage. You can't cast spells while you have the buff though, I think it's 60 seconds.

Priest is all about buffs. Armor of Faith, consecrate ground and circle of protection is amazing. Consecrate ground is a very good heal, 8 endurance per second for 20 seconds, beat the hell out of the restore stamina spells. Finally with the lvl 1 spell Withdraw you can cheese a ton of stuff with good positioning. It makes a party member immune for 20 seconds, so you cast this on a tank who's blocking a doorway you can pretty much drop mass nukes on him and everything around him without worry.

The chanter corpse explosion spell can also be cheesed. The corpses don't despawn until you reload or leave the area so you can just keep pulling packs onto the corpses of their former mates and blow em up. I used this a lot in the Od Nua dungeon, towards the end you can have massive piles of 20+ bodies to explode and pretty much 1 shot everything.

Don't know about other classes like Ciphers and Druids since I haven't played em yet.

You know, that list is making me think. Imma hold off on playing this anymore until the patch comes. bad shit there.

Vorph_sl said:

You can do some pretty cool stuff with ReShade:

Spoiler

That's a custom one I made myself, since I think all the ones uploaded to the SweetFX repository look like ass. Actually, I guessthis oneisn't too bad, but it didn't exist the other day when I was tinkering with it.

Also, IEMod adds in a command "ForceAA 8" (0/2/4 also valid options, 4 being default). That's 8xMSAA in my screenshot above, which I think looks considerably better than 4x. PoE is pretty light on the hardware reqs so I haven't noticed any change to my framerate.

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That ReShade looks great. Could up post the settings?

Also, thanks for the tip on 'ForceAA', makes a big difference.

Is there any way to quick-switch your party's weapons, for example to equip everyone's ranged weapons and then back to melee when the enemies get close? Is this something moddable in their engine if I messed around enough?

Fuse_sl said:

That ReShade looks great. Could up post the settings?

Also, thanks for the tip on 'ForceAA', makes a big difference.

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This is the SweetFX_settings.cfg I used for that screenshot:

Not sure why but a lot of people seem to still be using ReShade 0.15 or 0.16. I use the latest public beta build of 0.17.

Also I ended up switching over to the one I linked above, after editing that guy's settings to turn off Bloom and Dither. I think it looks a little better than mine and I'm tired of making small adjustments to try to fix it. Either one looks considerably better than the default game though, imo.

Sir Funk_sl said:

Is there any way to quick-switch your party's weapons, for example to equip everyone's ranged weapons and then back to melee when the enemies get close? Is this something moddable in their engine if I messed around enough?

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No, for some stupid and/or bizarre reason you can't hotkey weapon swap at all, not even for one character.

Ah so that is why my quick saves seem to take longer and longer...I wonder if I ditches all my extra gear and companions would it improve.

Kickstarted this but waiting until a few patches. Did the same With Shadowrun and Wasteland 2. Both awesome games but glad I waited for the initial bugs to be patched out.

I wish Obsidian was patching the game like Larian did at the release of D:OS. That game got like 1-3 patches practically daily for the first couple weeks, even on weekends.

the games been out 2 and a half days. haha

It's more that my mind is boggled that bugs of that magnitude ever made it live at all. How could nobody in their QA notice the double click bug, or the thing where companions suddenly have 30+ stats, and defenses creeping up towards triple-digits.

And as I said, D:OS went from 1.0.40 to 1.0.57 in the same time after its release. Some of those were internal version increments but it was at least 5 actual patches released to users.

How does one rest at the stronghold ? I have brighthelm hollow upgraded and i go in and can't see a way to rest there. Any ideas ?

nvm, FOUND, click the damn beds.

Vorph_sl said:

This is the SweetFX_settings.cfg I used for that screenshot:

Not sure why but a lot of people seem to still be using ReShade 0.15 or 0.16. I use the latest public beta build of 0.17.

Also I ended up switching over to the one I linked above, after editing that guy's settings to turn off Bloom and Dither. I think it looks a little better than mine and I'm tired of making small adjustments to try to fix it. Either one looks considerably better than the default game though, imo.



No, for some stupid and/or bizarre reason you can't hotkey weapon swap at all, not even for one character.

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using the one linked above just removing dither and lowering sharpness a bit and the game looks SOOOO much better.

http://sfx.thelazy.net/games/preset/3313/

Started up an expert/path of the damned game. Don't know why but it seems buggier then hard mode was. Had to redo the first quest 3 times before it would progress. Think i'm going to wait awhile before continuing that play through. Really buggy.

Dandain_sl said:

I agree with you about one thing, Eder should have been the first companion and not required you to rest at the inn before he would join you. But beyond that I'm not sure that suggesting that playing the game with only 2 mages (with a party limit of 6) is the most genuine way to express your full commentary about gameplay. My experience does not match the one you express.

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I'm not expressing my "full commentary about the gameplay," I'm referring to the shitty experience of playing the wizard class in general, and specifically because of the limitation on resting preventing the wizard actually doing what they're supposed to do - cast spells.

Chopxsticks_sl said:

Wizards never got to cast continually though, not any any BG game, not in any D&D version. I dont know what you expected but casters always start slow and end up absolutely amazing later. It seems more of a misunderstanding of how the traditional caster classes played.

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Neg. I've lost count of the number of BG/BG2 replays I've done as a wizard/sorc, I've played the first few chapters of IWD2 probably four or five times (I really wanna like the game, I do, but...) and I just spent a week powering through most of the IWDEE.

Putting aside BG2, which starts you at a decent level with a bunch of spells, you're right, you start out without many memorization slots - 1 or 2 depending on whether you specialize (3 if you're using the EE or BGTutu and play a sorc). But combat at that stage in the game is really short as well (packs of gibberlings/goblins scaled to your party size, maybe a few wolves or skeletons, the exception being one or two ogres you wander across and have to kite/CC), and the delays between getting spells off combined with the duration of the fights meant by the time you were out of spells the melee were finishing off the last one or two "Near Death" mobs. Throw off a Sleep, the melee/archers start laying into the mobs, by the time you get off a magic missile the pack is dead. Within two hours or so you've cleared the Nashkel mines, you're at level 3/4 with 3 - 6 spell slots, which is enough to keep you casting through the longer fights that start occurring. With the exception of the first half hour or so if you play a pure wizard and only have one spell slot, in which case yeah, you throw out a Sleep and then sling/throwing dagger it for the next 15 seconds, the number of spells you have scales pretty well with the duration of combat.

A smaller issue, but you also have a second companion literally the moment you leave Candlekeep, another two within 2 minutes and another 2 for a full, well rounded party within half an hour (BG2 is the same, you start out with 4 and have 6 within an hour, and IWD/2 obviously you have as many as you want from the stat), instead of having to solo your way as a squishy wizard with limited spells through a random environment zone with serves no storyline purpose before getting one companion (another wizard...) and then one companion you can easily miss if you're like me and go to round up the sidequests first before moving the main storyline forward in each zone. That's the kind of shit they should have picked up in beta, mechanics and gameworld/storyline stuff that actively makes certain classes a pain in the ass to play.

And more to the point, what it comes down to is that in IE you can rest after every fight. You have those spell slots available forevery encounter. You don't sit there saying 'ok this fight is doable anyway, so I'm just gonna use my sling and let the melee/ranged actually do the fighting,' you can use everything you have at your disposal. Even if you don'thaveto throw out a skull trap, or an acid arrow and a few magic missiles, you do it because it's more fun than sitting in one spot auto-attacking, because it speeds the fight up and because that's what fucking wizards do. That's what they exist for.


On a completely different note, and do the character models improve later in the game with better equipment? They each just look like indistinguishable grey silhouettes. I'm a) not a fan of the "3d model on 2d background" look and b) 99% sure that whoever designed the character models is the same guy who did them in ToEE, where they were equally ugly and indistinguishable grey blobs. There's no point in having 20 hairstyle and 10 beards and 5 faces when it's all covered by a helmet anyway, and all you're left with is a bunch of figures in different shades of grey armor.

I really wish I had more positive stuff to say about this game. I'm enjoying my reroll as a druid a lot more (it's easier on Hard than the Wizard was on Normal), but it feels like it needs another year in development. I'm convinced that all those positive reviews on Steam/Metacritic are buyers remorse from people who dropped hundreds on the kickstarter.

ili_sl said:

The whole game is mainly in act 2. Act 3 is a joke. Stopping to read every book, every soul, sneaking everywhere not to miss that one secret pile of junk then.. yes it will take forever. The game is so different at the start then later. There are no more 3 bell challenges, where you have to find clues to unlock something. I loaded up my 30 hour save just before I jumped down the hole to the last boss( it auto save you there ) and went back and completed the rest of the quests/bounties. I skipped over about 6 hours of stuff.. so 36 hours total and my game is clean of anything to do. I was level 10 when I killed the last boss.. level 12 after(bounties give you a shit ton of exp) cleaning the rest of the game. The dragon in endless was harder then the last boss.

Its almost like the game was rushed, near the end it felt really shitty.

This is the first time I ever completed an RPG fully in a long time. I still haven't even finished Skyrim and have a lot more then 36 hour in it. Same goes with Fallout.

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What difficulty did you play through on? Cause I chose hard and I am getting my ass whooped. Can't imagine getting through this game as fast as you've stated, unless you did it on easy.

Azrayne_sl said:

I'm convinced that all those positive reviews on Steam/Metacritic are buyers remorse from people who dropped hundreds on the kickstarter.

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So in a thread filled with mostly positive response to this game, some very positive response and little negative, you state that you are convinced that all the positive reviews on steam must be some weird buyers remorse?

Come on bro.

I'm saying that, as someone who's childhood gaming experience was defined by the Baldurs Gate series (alongside Diablo 1/2 and the lesser known Lords of Magic) and so falls into the core target market for this game, it is absolutely not an 8.9/10 (metacritic userbase) or 9.3/10 (Steam userbase) gameplay experience. Even if every other aspect of it was so perfect I came in my pants spontaneously while playing, it would lose 2 points on bugginess, clunky gameplay and poor graphics (namely the character models - I like the environments, although I wish they hadn't gone all GRIMDARK just because it's trendy since GOT came out) alone.

khalid_sl said:

So in a thread filled with mostly positive response to this game, some very positive response and little negative, you state that you are convinced that all the positive reviews on steam must be some weird buyers remorse?

Come on bro.

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Well unfortunately Steam reviews are binary, not on any sort of scale. I would say this game is certainly 'better than average' at least but I am not really enjoying this game as much as PS:T, NWN series or PoR. I don't really remember BG/BG2/IWD as fondly as most of the people here (they were OK as I recall them from years ago) but I fall short of thinking this is in the same company as my favorites (so far).

EDIT: to be fair, I loved DnD 3(.5) so the differences irk me so perhaps I'm not the best 'innocent' opinion on that. But still, can't play rogue right now right because it's bugged? *shrug*