TychoCelchuuu

Project Eternity, Obsidian's Isometric Fantasy RPG

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Part of the problem for me is that each encounter can be swayed one way or another by the first few die rolls. If a couple of enemies are successful in doing their abilities and you fail yours then it's totally over. On hard mode I kept dying to a couple of wolves because they were able to knock me down right off the bat. In another area there was a child-sized monster with a spear that paralyzed me for seven seconds at the beginning of each fight. This guy was hanging out at the very beginning of an area so it was not possible to avoid him.

 

I think a lot of the problem stems from physical damage causing stuns so if you are going 2 on 1, unless you are massively doing more damage that is a losing proposition, having a few NPCs gives you enough of a meat shield to let you get hits in. I am currently in a fight that just seems so damn hard, it is like a brick wall atm.

 

The fight with Lord Raedic is kicking my ass, there are just too many dudes, wailing too hard. I dropped it down to easy but still get murdered.

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Part of the problem for me is that each encounter can be swayed one way or another by the first few die rolls. If a couple of enemies are successful in doing their abilities and you fail yours then it's totally over. On hard mode I kept dying to a couple of wolves because they were able to knock me down right off the bat. In another area there was a child-sized monster with a spear that paralyzed me for seven seconds at the beginning of each fight. This guy was hanging out at the very beginning of an area so it was not possible to avoid him.

 I think a lot of the problem stems from physical damage causing stuns so if you are going 2 on 1, unless you are massively doing more damage that is a losing proposition, having a few NPCs gives you enough of a meat shield to let you get hits in. I am currently in a fight that just seems so damn hard, it is like a brick wall atm.

 

The fight with Lord Raedic is kicking my ass, there are just too many dudes, wailing too hard. I dropped it down to easy but still get murdered.

 

Yeah, if you don't want to create an NPC, push ahead in the plot until you have at least three if not four members in your party. That was definitely the point where the combat went from "wildly unpredictable and seemingly unfair" to "under some kind of control." I really like the combat tuning, at least once I turned off the option in menus that required double-clicking for party members to move in a way that incurred an attack of opportunity (or whatever it's called in their non-D&D terminology), but it's balanced very aggressively for five or six party members, which makes the one-man party achievement a little confusing.

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I normal I had a tough time in fights with my cipher and the mage. The mage was in the first town. I got a fighter companion in the first town as well and then things were alright. 

 

On hard you probably want a larger group, the next recrutable companion is near the first town

One screen to the south, follow the road.

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I don't know that I "feel weird" about it, but I am committed to getting through without doing it? There's a fighter available in the same map as Aloth, that's all I've got so far.

 

Please keep us updated! :) I'd like to know how it works out for you. Even if I didn't miss that fighter I'd still have to roll my priest to clear out the dungeon in that first town.

 

I realized yesterday that this game breaks a lot of old school conventions and has some really interesting classes, but when I decided to make a party I immediately went Fighter, Priest, Rogue and Wizard. It's probably for the best; I picked up the NPC Chanter and I don't understand how he is supposed to be useful. He is incredibly slow to take actions and the payoff for chanting is rarely impressive. Edit: But he has a goddamn rifle, and sometimes it does 30 damage, so I guess he can stay.

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I think a lot of the problem stems from physical damage causing stuns so if you are going 2 on 1, unless you are massively doing more damage that is a losing proposition, having a few NPCs gives you enough of a meat shield to let you get hits in. I am currently in a fight that just seems so damn hard, it is like a brick wall atm.

 

The fight with Lord Raedic is kicking my ass, there are just too many dudes, wailing too hard. I dropped it down to easy but still get murdered.

 

In regards to that very hard fight

Lord Raedic is also kicking my ass with a team of 6 (me, Eder, Durance, Aloth, crazy chanter dude and a rogue I hired) at level 4 (normal difficulty). I am a bit wary of tackling him again, since I lost quite a bit of progress due to a bug where I could go between floors in the castle, but not leave as it crashed to desktop when I went outside. Apparently, I'm not the only one this has happened to, but it doesn't happen every time.

 

Also I like the fact that you can basically pick sides in this depending on whether you want to go for a more scientific or faith based approach.

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Kana, the chanter is pretty cool. He starts with heavier armour than you can buy at the start so he's really slow with it. I have him shoot things mostly. I like that he isn't as spell heavy as druids, priests or mages. Even the fighter has more abilties.

 

But with 4 people shooting guns near him, he has a chant that reduces reload times and increases range attack speed, as well as one that gives them all extra burn (fire) damage. I just got an incantation that allows him to summon a drake.

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Please keep us updated! :) I'd like to know how it works out for you. Even if I didn't miss that fighter I'd still have to roll my priest to clear out the dungeon in that first town.

 

Well to be fair, I'm playing on easy so I don't expect it to be particularly tough.

I picked up the priest somewhere south of that first town on my way to do one of the sidequests, so I'm up to a party of 4 now.

 

edit: Just got the chanter so up to party of 5 now.

Forest lurker in Black Meadow

 was a pretty rough, ended up reloading and just avoiding it for now.

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Man, it's nuts how much that first round determines your success in a tough fight, I finally won the hard fight, more details below.

 

My first go at Raedric today, I started the convo with him and attacked him out right. My main tank was hit hard and my thief nearly outright killed and my second tank down half health in the first round, this picture was after the first volley of blows. I did not even make a dent in that fight on easy.

 

G7fvA1s.jpg

I tried a second time and slaughtered them, I did not even start a conversation I went in guns blazing. I had my mage cast chill fog and then opened fire with my ranged from the back row and had my heavy melee guys up front. They didn't even have a chance to touch me, it was crazy.

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Kana, the chanter is pretty cool. He starts with heavier armour than you can buy at the start so he's really slow with it.

Thank you for reminding me! I stripped Kana naked after reading this  B) .

 

 

Man, it's nuts how much that first round determines your success in a tough fight, I finally won the hard fight, more details below.

It took me a few tries but I got him. I upgraded my melee weapons to have elemental damage. I chugged my best potions. I focused on the spell casters. Then I had Aloth cast confusion, which would take the champions out of the fight but would also make them run behind my tanks. When they came to their senses, they would start fighting my back line. Luckily, Kana can send enemies flying with one of his chants. Kana was the only one to go down in the end, and from what it seems he didn't miss out on XP  :o .

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Bummer! First broken quest for me. Warning: if you want to complete the Parable of Wael, do it before you attempt any part of the Theorems of Pandgram. There's a broken trigger in the latter that turns everyone in that location hostile on all subsequent visits.

 

 

EDIT: Actually, I've started to get a whole raft of bugs in just the last hour or so. The loot image left on the ground when an enemy is killed doesn't go away when its items are picked up, unless I double-click on it again and pick up the nothing that's there. A lot of the yellow-tagged NPCs are permanently rendered as ghosts now, not just when I "read their soul" or whatever. One of my party stopped walking in the middle of a map and I had to babysit him by clicking every five seconds to keep him moving to the next area.

 

All these are nothing as far as bugs concern, but they've all happened at once, late at night, and it's making me feel really down on the game. Hopefully some of them are fixed by the patch that's looming by the time I have the opportunity to play again later this week.

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Hey guys, remember when RPGs started scaling things to your level, and we hated it? Turns out that was an good thing. Just cleared a cultists' lair without ease, only spend an hour hitting my head against a boss fight. I'm pretty sure I'm going to ruin any sense of story with this quest by leaving and coming back (in-game) months later to finish it. Also, I rolled a Rogue specifcally so I would never come across a lock I couldn't pick and a trap I couldn't detect/deactivate. So much for that! I am so looking forward to running through this dungeon again to pick up the loot I missed, once I am a god-like character. This really does feel like Baldur's Gate 1, in all the good ways and bad ways.

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I picked up the NPC Chanter and I don't understand how he is supposed to be useful. He is incredibly slow to take actions and the payoff for chanting is rarely impressive. Edit: But he has a goddamn rifle, and sometimes it does 30 damage, so I guess he can stay.

The whole idea of chanters is that they are able to do chants while attacking etc that buff your party. If you overlap chants you get more than one buff at once. After doing the chant 3 times, you can set off a spell. A long chant might give a bunch of awesome buffs but with less frequent spells; a short chant gives more spells and less buffs. Chanters can fight fairly well too

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Chanters are great off-tanks melee or ranged that provide passive buffs or debuffs and it's great to have at least one in the party. Focus on debuffing the opponents if you're in melee, and maybe using buff chants if you're in the ranged group for slight optimizations. The summon Incantations (or AOE stuns) end up being encounter finishers or can salvage a bad situation if you're in trouble,

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I recently got this game, and having read over the ability list on the wiki and knowing that you can make custom party-members, I plan to assemble a team of 6 fighters built for maximum deflection, each running the fighter +deflection aura. Before I commit to this course, is there any strong reason I shouldn't? Mandatory wizard checks, entire dungeons full of enemies that ignore deflection, buffs not stacking, that sort of thing?

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I recently got this game, and having read over the ability list on the wiki and knowing that you can make custom party-members, I plan to assemble a team of 6 fighters built for maximum deflection, each running the fighter +deflection aura. Before I commit to this course, is there any strong reason I shouldn't? Mandatory wizard checks, entire dungeons full of enemies that ignore deflection, buffs not stacking, that sort of thing?

I don't know that there are entire dungeons full of wizards or what have you, but most magic is going to ignore deflection plus I know that for sure similar equipment buffs do not stack, not sure about that aura.

Also, personally, I play as much for story as the other stuff so you're going to miss out on that with a full boat of self-created dudes.

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They also added a few graphics options which will help performance on lower end machines for.@castorp

Thanks for the heads up. I'll see whether is runs better now.

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Quick Q: Is this game funny, at all? I've only seen one review even mention it, and that reviewer said it was all pretty stern and serious (albeit well-written) Naturally, humour is a subjective thing, so I'll say that I really like the humour in Planescape and particularly the first two Fallout games. Cheers :)

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I have somehow managed to not hear or see anything about this game besides the basic facts that it's a kickstarted obsidian isometric rpg in the style of BG and a lot of people are talking about it. Makes me want to get it and go in unknowing, and then I become sad realizing that I still haven't started Divinity: Original Sin or Wasteland 2.

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I have somehow managed to not hear or see anything about this game besides the basic facts that it's a kickstarted obsidian isometric rpg in the style of BG and a lot of people are talking about it. Makes me want to get it and go in unknowing, and then I become sad realizing that I still haven't started Divinity: Original Sin or Wasteland 2.

 

Just an early warning: Neither of those games are apparently anywhere near as good as Pillars is, at face value.

 

I didn't play Wasteland 2, so look at someone else's opinion there. But for Divinity: Original Sin, you're racked with moment after moment of it only being slightly different than the CRPGs of yesteryear, with all of their mistakes fully intact.

 

For what it's worth, the combat system is competently developed, and the class variety would be amazing if not for how poorly it's implemented. Within the first 5 hours of the game, you will be made painfully aware of just how royally fucked you are if you do not have someone who can create fire in your group, and furthermore how out-of-control in love the game is with its environmental effects. You, by contrast, are nothing short of worthless- your best attacks early on will damage the enemy for 1/3rd of what a single environmental effect does in one turn, let alone the following 5 turns where it continues.

 

This doesn't make it impossible- it's still entirely possible to get through this, you just won't have any fun doing so. And you'll find the quest design both needlessly opaque and stupendously boring, as the story is poor and poorly written, and the quests themselves often are only able to be solved by talking to literally every single person in town after each step of the quest. I lost track of the number of times the resolution of a quest didn't make sense in D:OS. It's quest/story writing is to D&D what recent Call of Duty is to serious war media.

 

For what it's worth though, if you do play the game the 'right' way(which it illuminates you to), you're given what is the best co-op experience that a CRPG has ever managed, and a surprisingly well-thought-out one at that. Not only is combat co-op, but every decision in every quest can either be agreed upon or fought over, and the ways that changes your gameplay experience is really, really remarkable. If you have a significant other, I'd nearly say it's a must-play experience, because you'll get as much time out of it as you would watching 8 seasons of a TV show, but you'll really get to know each other better in the process, too. Just uh, dial that difficulty down if you're gonna do that.

 

 

But back to how D:OS compares to Pillars of Eternity. In contrast, PoE continually feels like the best game writing I've experienced in years. It doesn't feel like a throwback in terms of mechanics(even though it is) because of smart design constraints around combat and enemies within the game. The story is intelligent and nuanced, with truly a wide variety of personal choice being shown in its portrayal. On top of this, the class variety is remarkable(the only class I've found lacking is the Hunter, who has the ability variety of the Fighter, without the intricacies of enemy management via serious CC and the engagement mechanic), the side quests are capable of both being small and personal, or deceptively huge and complex. The locations are well-realized, with each having its own distinct culture within its own world, which is funny in the face of the near-complete lack of culture defined by the races themselves(who more or less are all the same culturally, aside from small moments of visual recognition for certain races).

 

Honestly, the only major criticisms I have been able to offer toward the game after 50 solid hours (with taking 5 days off in between the two halves) is that the world feels very static- nothing moves or changes without you, you feel like the only driving force introducing time to the denizens of the world. Your exploits are what the town crier yells on about, you solve everyone's problems, you are in the unique position of being exactly what this quest needs right now. Oddly, this doesn't come off as a power fantasy, but instead as simply a theme park of a great CRPG. Which, like WoW was in its early years, still means you're going to have a damn good time with a game that for all of its simplification and lack of obfuscation doesn't actually treat you like an idiot, but instead like an intelligent being capable of making choices in what kind of experience you want to have.

 

Which is pretty neato.

 

 

 

Quick Q: Is this game funny, at all? I've only seen one review even mention it, and that reviewer said it was all pretty stern and serious (albeit well-written) Naturally, humour is a subjective thing, so I'll say that I really like the humour in Planescape and particularly the first two Fallout games. Cheers  :)

 

At times, yes. But you'll get a few jokes every few hours, not commonly. They're usually pretty funny though, and not in a "it is supposed to be funny, but really isn't" way, either.

Edited by Pepyri

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I recently got this game, and having read over the ability list on the wiki and knowing that you can make custom party-members, I plan to assemble a team of 6 fighters built for maximum deflection, each running the fighter +deflection aura. Before I commit to this course, is there any strong reason I shouldn't? Mandatory wizard checks, entire dungeons full of enemies that ignore deflection, buffs not stacking, that sort of thing?

I wouldn't do it because the joinable NPCs in this game are rich and interesting. They are also crucial to understanding the world of Pillars; every character has insight into history, factions, religions, etc. because they participated in major events that precede the game. I don't think I've been into an RPG's fiction since Mass Effect 1 and it would be hard to imagine it being as good without the companions.

 

Quick Q: Is this game funny, at all? I've only seen one review even mention it, and that reviewer said it was all pretty stern and serious (albeit well-written) Naturally, humour is a subjective thing, so I'll say that I really like the humour in Planescape and particularly the first two Fallout games. Cheers :)

I don't find any significant humour in the game. This is a world where 99% of infants are born are literally soulless. This is a crisis that effects everyone, making them confused, desperate and paranoid. I usually don't go for the totally serious and stern thing but it this works a lot for me.

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Came across my first choice where I had no Idea what I wanted to do. Reloaded, tried all the options (though didn't play long with each one to check out long term consequences), still don't really know.

defiance bay, last companion (i think? spoilers):

right before you get the paladin, did y'all kill the guy? let him be killed? defend him? Defending him pisses off an entire faction I basically don't really know anything about other than they are the birth control mafia which doesn't sit entirely well with me. Killing him bags me negative Defiance Bay rep which I reckon could be useful. Letting him be killed just seems sort of half hearted and doesn't get me his decent gun.

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I have somehow managed to not hear or see anything about this game besides the basic facts that it's a kickstarted obsidian isometric rpg in the style of BG and a lot of people are talking about it. Makes me want to get it and go in unknowing, and then I become sad realizing that I still haven't started Divinity: Original Sin or Wasteland 2.

 

 

Just an early warning: Neither of those games are apparently anywhere near as good as Pillars is, at face value.

 

In defense of Divinity, if you come at it knowing that you should just skip through all the text without reading, it makes for an amazing hack and slash RPG. It has balance issues, in the sense that all abilities aren't exactly on equal footing, but you have so many tactical options that each fight is interesting, and if you enjoy trying to break and optimize a system, it's great fun. I couldn't say which is better, because their strengths are in very different places.

 

I agree with what Pepyri said, the writing in PoE is actually worth reading (a rare thing), though I've had some frustrations with combat: the melee classes have few activated abilities, so most of their time is spent walking up to the enemies and basic attacking until someone's dead, and the pathfinding in a many-person melee is awful, like really really bad.

 

Regarding Wasteland 2, blech. I found the writing bland and the combat blander, they managed to make the combat system significantly simpler than the not-exactly-complex Fallout 1. Either DoS or PoE would be a much better place to spend your time.

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