I know there are regular threads on /v/, maybe even a general on Veeky Forums, but I'd like to discuss it here

I know there are regular threads on /v/, maybe even a general on Veeky Forums, but I'd like to discuss it here.

What do you think of the setting and the lore, Veeky Forums?

I personally didn't think much of it at first, but it grew on me. I like that it's set in the Southern Hemisphere and the Celtic feel of the Dyrwood region.

Deities and religion are also pretty good, and the concept of Animancy as a central theme is pretty neat.

I can't really like the races though. Amanua and Orlan really just seem like the devs were really trying hard to add not-Orcs and not-Halflings, but I don't see the added benefit at all.

Also, Godlikes are outright stupid, they should be left out entirely.

Other urls found in this thread:

fig.co/campaigns/deadfire
pcgamer.com/pillars-of-eternity-tabletop-rpg-and-card-game-in-the-works/
twitter.com/SFWRedditGifs

Also, a world map, just in case. I also like the different regions which they only mention.

I'm absolutely fine with Aumaua and Orlan. Agreed on godlikes, they're obviously meant to merge genasi, tiefling and aasimar, but they end up not adding much in a world where only about six creatures can even sire them, especially when the D&D equivalents were just the grandkids of bog-standard outsiders.

I kind of expected them to be very special and important to the plot, but in all honesty they are just there for kids to have a cool character.

Reading wiki was more interesting then playing and learning about the lore in-game.
Plenty of cool ideas, but the obsidian failed to do something interesting with them.

Honestly the whole celtic angle they took to the tribals is the one thing that never stuck well with me because the language sounds so dumb, and I grew up in south west england.

Cornish is a really goofy language (you call your main tribals GLANFARTHENS? it sounds like some fake science particle from futurama) It just took me way out of the entire game.

Haven't read the wiki that much, but I remember hating the lore while playing the game. All the lore you learned focussed too much on the Dyrwood, and not enough about how its effected by the outside world.
I've heard that the gods in the game are interesting and you see them in the end, but I never got far enough to meet them.

Really, the game handled the lore badly. "Who are the Aedyrans and why are they assholes. Durance doesn't seem to like them? Are they elves? I think Aloth mentioned he was Aedyran."

Really, I was more impressed by the companions than the lore.
Aloth is best companion

I kinda liked the Godlike. They had cool racial abilities and made great tanks.

Gonna admit kinda had the same effect on me, as the Glanfarthen language takes some cues from Welsh as well. Yay for a weird Celtic language chimera!

>I kinda liked the Godlike. They had cool racial abilities and made great tanks.

Yeah, but lore-wise they shit. Just a bunch of cool ideas for cool characters but these are not reflected in the lore or the world itself. You would expect the godlike to be special. Leaders, outcasts, but no. They are just you regular Joe, only with a flaming head.

They're mules, so I guess it makes sense that they're not leaders (every leader needs an heir)
Also, the wiki mentions that they have problems fitting in and dealing with the law.

Game doesn't show this that well tho from what i remember.
All this interesting godlike stuff you can find only in the wiki, that's the problem.

>Game doesn't show ___ that well
>All this interesting ___ stuff you can find only in the wiki
Exactly. Tyranny has a similar problem, although it's much better than Pillars of Eternity. It took me hours in that game before I realized that not-sauron was a woman.

>Tyranny has a similar problem
I feel like the places where tyranny has this problem is mostly that they tried hard to avoid massive infodumps like in Pillars. I still feel like it does interesting stuff with what it does show.

>It took me hours in that game before I realized that not-sauron was a woman.
(Sirin) You mean a man.

>Sirin
No, Kyros. She's a woman.

It has it's things

I'm still half expecting the truth to turn out to be that Kyros is a composite character.

Also I found it kind of fitting, few would have recognized ancient god-kings without all the ceremonial trappings they're hidden behind in the real world.

They do have special powers, so you'd expect them to be outstanding individuals. Great archwizards, bandit lords, paladin grandmasters, legendary rangers and stuff.

But all they are are just a race for to make edgy characters.

>assuming someone's gender
KYS shitlord

>nihilist
>philosopher

lolwut

>Kyros is a composite character
You mean like the Voices of Nerat?

>bandit lords
That's ironic. Remember that one Death Godlike bandit that ambushes you later in the game?

the one at the crossroads? the nameless NPC?

yeah

Super excited for PoE 2! It's already made double their goal. Just need a little more to get more voices.
fig.co/campaigns/deadfire

I mean there might not be just one person going around who is Kyros.

I feel like it's hinted at as some sort of possibility during one of the endgame convos with Lantry

dude's referring to the archon of song calling kyros whichever gender she feels like just to fuck with you

Felt dumb, to me. The civilization that you're both in and around are both pretty cookie-cutter, and the strangely blase way that they inform you of the death of a god didn't do them any favors either.

Hated animancy, both because people are weirded out by it but not by any of the other magical bullshit, and because of how relevant it is to the plot, it's made apparent that it is more desirable/powerful than other forms of magic.

Godlikes were indeed stupid, yes.

>lolwut
>Most well known Nihilist and the dude who established Nihilism as a Thing was a philosopher

I mean that you can actually pick shit like that in a game. Kind of cringy. I hate when shitty fantasy tries to be 'deep' and philosophical even if sidenoted.

Aside from being an obvious joke I'm 90% sure that's an edit.

It was pretty cliche. But the problem was in execution.

Knowing the industry state now who knows.

>I personally didn't think much of it at first, but it grew on me.
I had the opposite experience in a way, I loved it at first, but eventually got tired of it and ultimately never finished it
The world was interesting enough, but I thought it was presented too much through lore dumps and too little through things highly relevant to the player/things the player had to figure out
The characters (companions, specifically) were a decent attempt, but only Durance was fleshed out enough for me to care about
What really wore me down though was the modular, world-based approach (ie. you've finished everything in this town, now the next one is unlocked, and you'll never have a reason to go back). In some video games that's fine, but when they're trying to get me to buy into the world, I found it really disappointing and disjointed

Still curious about what they'll do in #2 though, I guess I'll reinstall it and finish it when that comes out

>Godlikes

My problem with Godlikes is that they were a stretch goal and felt like a stretch goal. Like, they were never properly implemented in the story which I assume would make a huge deal - if you consider Palleginas Dialogue.
I am okay with the concept of them but they should never have been a playable race.
Oh yeah and the implementation of all the Backer Godlikes made them feel even worse. Felt like every second yellow NPC was a god-damn Godlike.

Then again the implementation of races was generally pretty meh. In fact I think it handled them even more poorly than D&D. Elves and Dwarfs mostly came off as variants of humans, especially with the whole GLANFATHANS ding dong were I am supposed to believe that you have tribes/tribals consisting of multiple races at the same time?
Instead of giving 12 races how about you just give me a handful but make the differences between at least kinda meaningful? Make it feel like a difference according to what race I choose to play at sometimes?
It feels like all that focus only went into Orlans and Aumaua.


Id say the Tribals, how they were written and implemented as some sort of multi-cultural Native American Stand in with Welsh language was the absolute worst about PoE.
>Woooo its like the discovery of Americas by the Europeans but they never managed to subdue the Natives, what a tweeest
No, Josh, just stop.

>Deities and religion are also pretty good, and the concept of Animancy as a central theme is pretty neat.
These easily were the best parts for me. But maybe I just biased because I am sucker for those forbidden magic/forbidden science kinda things.

try it again with the expansions, it's much better

>Kickstarter physical copy is $59
Isn't that the going rate of physical copies already? At least you get an in game pet I guess.

>>Woooo its like the discovery of Americas by the Europeans but they never managed to subdue the Natives, what a tweeest
To be fair the natives wouldn't have been subdued at a comparable point in time irl. But the glanfathans were still pretty badly designed.

Do they make the base game better? I've heard WM2 is very good with WM1 close behind, but I thought they were separate stories tacked on

They mostly balance stuff in the base game. What they give is a new area with locations, quests,companions, etc.

Ok, cheers. Didn't realise that, I guess I hadn't really read the features of the expansions before, I'll have to try them out sometime.

My other gripe is that I didn't find the combat very interesting, and that there's so goddamn much of it, but I think that's just my taste and the fact that I didn't play any infinity engine games growing up. Maybe the UI/AI stuff they tweaked will make it more fun.

>My other gripe is that I didn't find the combat very interesting

Me neither, that's why I played on the story mode or whatever difficulty. You can just set the AI for companions and your MC and the game handles the combat for you.

Obsidian proved that they can't into fun combat since NWN2 original campaign, if not since kotor2.
I remember also that in PoE you don't recieve exp for defeating enemies, so filler combat felt even more like a filler combat.
At least Pillars look beautiful, we need more isometric goodness.

Playing this game really convinced me that you either do races-as-culture or you might as well go full 100% human.
None of the races really felt different from the other.
Also the Orlan are shit. Small races in general are annoying by themselves, add to that the a coat of furry and you get a trainwreck. The new companion from the sequel is very off-putting.

>My other gripe is that I didn't find the combat very interesting,
>Me neither, that's why I played on the story mode or whatever difficulty

Well that is because you are playing without a challenge in the first place, isn't it?
I had loadsa fun with the combat and I would say it hast better designed encounters than BG + IWD but worse than IWD2 but then again I played through the game twice once Path of the Damned and once in Iron Man Mode.

>Obsidian proved that they can't into fun combat since NWN2 original campaign, if not since kotor2.
Or maybe you are just a PUSH BUTTON = AWESOME kind of person.

Basically I cannot fathom anyone who had fun with any of the IE games and then say "wow I had no fun with PoE".

>Basically I cannot fathom anyone who had fun with any of the IE games and then say "wow I had no fun with PoE".

I'm probably the only one out there who enjoyed NWN combat more than BG/IWD/POE, because there you have your own character to take care of, not the whole team.

>Amanua are not-orcs

I dunno about that. I mean, I didn't really care about the race, but they don't strike me as orc-like in anyway, other than being bigger than the default humans of the setting.

No, the amanua are more like fantasy Samoans: they're fuck-huge islanders with friendly dispositions... just don't make them angry or they'll pick you and turn you into a pretzel.

Yeah, but they might as well just have been orcs with a Samoan twist. Like how orcs in Elder Scrolls are master smiths and such.

I actually like orcs with non-tolkien outlooks.

>orcs
How? They're just big guys, and that's where all possible similarities end (and orcs aren't universally portrayed as large, either). There is nothing in the game resembling traditional greenskins, or their "noble savage" rehash that has been en vogue these last few years.

They do kinda fill the big guy niche that would normally go to orcs, but yes, if they're orc-like they're definitely a unique take on it.

I also liked how animancy allowed them to make some vaguely unique takes on undead, even if in the end it's just different trash mobs.

Again, where do you see the connection? Lots of races are big. That doesn't make them orc-like.

If "they're strong" is all you need to draw parallels, then maybe you're associating too quickly. That says almost nothing about their culture, characters or roles.

>>/v/

This. With the exception that I actually enjoyed that few moments of early-ish atmosphere and lore.

Has obsidian said anything else about a tabletop roleplaying game based off Pillars?
pcgamer.com/pillars-of-eternity-tabletop-rpg-and-card-game-in-the-works/
This article is the only mention of it I have seen in years, and then nothing.

>Or maybe you are just a PUSH BUTTON = AWESOME kind of person.
Nuh, maybe i just have a weird tastes.
Never could replay kotor2, always burn out right after peragus. Usually re-reading SCORCH let's play if i want to remember what i like about this game

Funny that you bringed the awesome button, get quickly bored after reaching kirkwall too.
PoE combat felt to me like the same slog, only more unrewarding with it's boring loot and abilities which felt weak.
Tales of Maj'eyal and Voidspire tactics are the last rpgs i remember where i didn't get bored of combat, and the former is a rogue-like with a lot of trash combat, weird.
Yep, started with some fun stuff about souls and being the watcher or something.
And then everything turned into a rather generic fantasy adventure. Granted, i never played the expansions.

>the expansions
Fags keep telling me to play them, but I can't be bothered to go do it again and otherall I'm seriously disappointed in poor implementation of the lore, since I almost let myself immerse and then it turned out lame.
At least some portraits turned out to be really memetic.

>you are playing without a challenge in the first place, isn't it?
not sure where you're getting that from. I actively went looking for challenge, going deeper into that megadungeon and other newly-unlocked areas than I should have for my level, but it was always tedious and slow. I've played loads of other RPGs, and even ones that felt clunky to me (like I say, I didn't play IE games as a kid, only tried one a couple years ago, so BG fits here) could be challenging and satisfying. PoE was regularly neither, and yet seemed to have even more needless combat

So are you guys anxious for Tides of Numenera?

I never played the original tabletop and not a fan of future fantasy settings, so don't know what to think.

I hadn't even heard about it.

What I do know is that they did no tabletop playtesting of the system used in PoE. Sawyer said it wasn't viable because it was too reliant on long-winded equations.

That makes sense, then it could also mean they would have to either design a new system (which they have no experience with) or use somebody else's system and sell a campaign setting.

Myeah.

The idea behind PoEs system was to let cool character concepts translate into viable, but not necessarily optimal, characters. Unless they figure out how to do that with a simpler system, they'd lose out on a pretty important part of the game.

He's not nameless though. His name's Gramfel.

I happen to remember because I'm replaying the game atm to have a save ready for the sequel, and I just fought him and threw his ass in jail.

I've played the beta. It's a cool game, feels very "Planescape-like", which is appropriate. But like Planescape Torment, the combat is shit. Just for different reasons than PS:T. Luckily there's not a whole lot of combat, but whenever it comes up it takes you right out of the game simply by how mechanically awkward it is.

>I've played the beta

For a second I thought "The Beta" was a character role รก la "Tank", "Face" etc.

I've been losing hope with each update, so no I'm not anxious at all

How are the roleplaying aspects then?

It's pretty retarded that they made the races have no cultural meaning whatsoever except for very specific and minor groups.