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Now is the best time to play Pillars of Eternity 2, easily one of the greatest games of 2018
- Thread starter Durante
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I've been meaning to play the Pillars games, both of them, since they came out. I recently put together a little treadmill gaming setup in a spare bedroom, so I'll probably end up playing them that way
Based on what we know about some of those titles I would guess that Bronze was 250-500k, silver was 500k-1M, gold was some range over 1M, and Platinum was the multimillion sellers.
Pillars 1 definitely sold more up front at full price, and more in that first year.
I've been controlling every character's every turn, and I honestly wouldn't do it any other way. I know you can set some pretty advanced conditional logic for characters, but I just don't trust them and don't want to try to extrapolate general rules from specific situations. Taking the time to handle each character's turn only takes a second and is fun, anyway.
I haven't had troubles with pathfinding, personally. The closest thing is that characters (especially Maia, for whatever reason) will get caught in some loop that paralyzes them. It seems to happen when they're just on the cusp of the allowable range for an attack or something? They'll rapidly toggle back and forth between 'attack' and 'nothing', and I have to budge them a bit in some direction before they snap back to it.
Anyway, not to discount anyone's experience, but this has easily been the best combat I've ever seen in one of these games. Reminds me of Gloomhaven. Could definitely use Gloomhaven's approach to stochastic action resolution (card-counting is more interesting than playing dice probability), but stuff like the Penetration/Crit systems are a pretty good step in that direction.
I haven't had troubles with pathfinding, personally. The closest thing is that characters (especially Maia, for whatever reason) will get caught in some loop that paralyzes them. It seems to happen when they're just on the cusp of the allowable range for an attack or something? They'll rapidly toggle back and forth between 'attack' and 'nothing', and I have to budge them a bit in some direction before they snap back to it.
Anyway, not to discount anyone's experience, but this has easily been the best combat I've ever seen in one of these games. Reminds me of Gloomhaven. Could definitely use Gloomhaven's approach to stochastic action resolution (card-counting is more interesting than playing dice probability), but stuff like the Penetration/Crit systems are a pretty good step in that direction.
Oh yeah, I never got to the end, but I also remember people being mad about it.
Plus, the ship-to-ship combat is sooo bad.
Decided to finish my full cipher party run in poe1 so I could finally dig into this. I'm about 15 hours in and enjoying it quite a bit.
-I'm liking the companions a lot. Lot's of personality and banter to go around. I wish Mirke was a full companion. Xoti's personality and voice don't seem to fit her portrait though....
-The graphic upgrade, while small, is still very welcome coming right off the first game. It sounds like a waste but I would kill for a game like this with witcher 3 level graphics.
-I haven't done much of it, but ship management and combat seems interesting enough, and seems to be a welcome gold sink, for now at least.
-Combat seems to be more of the same really, which isn't a bad thing. Since I used nothing but ciphers in poe1, every other class is interesting to play, and subclases and multi gives a shit ton of variety. I miss the 6 man parties though.
But....
-I feel like the game should run smoother on a 970/4790k. I get 30-40 fps when its raining, or in Neketaka. The graphics ain't THAT good
-Nekataka is just too damn big. I feel like it could of easily been split into 2 or 3 smaller cities. It's just so densely packed with quests and bounties and conversations it can be easily overwhelming.
-There is an information overload in general I think, especially with this language everyone speaks. I feel like I'm constantly having to mouse over different sayings and phrases to remember what they mean, or what this faction is or do I know this guild or is it a different trading company? Are all these people in the same tribe? I pity the fool who tried to go into this game without playing the first, or they don't remember much about it, they will drown.
-stealing/stealth is still too damn powerful and beneficial, although this is a problem in pretty much all crpgs. Divinity 2 atleast has people telling you to stay out of their damn room. In poe2 you can just waltz into anyones room and they dont give a shit. just close the door and start dumping their belongings in pillow cases and walk out the front door.
As I said I'm not too far in, still stomping around Neketaka, but I'm enjoying the game quite a bit. I bought the season pass since it was onsale so I'll have plenty of things to do for awhile, should be fun.
-I'm liking the companions a lot. Lot's of personality and banter to go around. I wish Mirke was a full companion. Xoti's personality and voice don't seem to fit her portrait though....
-The graphic upgrade, while small, is still very welcome coming right off the first game. It sounds like a waste but I would kill for a game like this with witcher 3 level graphics.
-I haven't done much of it, but ship management and combat seems interesting enough, and seems to be a welcome gold sink, for now at least.
-Combat seems to be more of the same really, which isn't a bad thing. Since I used nothing but ciphers in poe1, every other class is interesting to play, and subclases and multi gives a shit ton of variety. I miss the 6 man parties though.
But....
-I feel like the game should run smoother on a 970/4790k. I get 30-40 fps when its raining, or in Neketaka. The graphics ain't THAT good
-Nekataka is just too damn big. I feel like it could of easily been split into 2 or 3 smaller cities. It's just so densely packed with quests and bounties and conversations it can be easily overwhelming.
-There is an information overload in general I think, especially with this language everyone speaks. I feel like I'm constantly having to mouse over different sayings and phrases to remember what they mean, or what this faction is or do I know this guild or is it a different trading company? Are all these people in the same tribe? I pity the fool who tried to go into this game without playing the first, or they don't remember much about it, they will drown.
-stealing/stealth is still too damn powerful and beneficial, although this is a problem in pretty much all crpgs. Divinity 2 atleast has people telling you to stay out of their damn room. In poe2 you can just waltz into anyones room and they dont give a shit. just close the door and start dumping their belongings in pillow cases and walk out the front door.
As I said I'm not too far in, still stomping around Neketaka, but I'm enjoying the game quite a bit. I bought the season pass since it was onsale so I'll have plenty of things to do for awhile, should be fun.
As for performance it appears the game suffers due to poor management of CPUs with high core counts, reducing the number of cores used seems to help out a lot. Check this out. It's helped to give me a near perfect 60fps in the game and its beyond simple to implement. https://steamcommunity.com/app/560130/discussions/0/2572002906843374108/
I love Neketaka, I actually wish there was more content there. But really I think you're meant to tackle it piece by piece and not try to explore it all at once and talk to everyone, but rather explore an area, get some quests, complete them and then move on. If you instead just talk to everyone and get a whole bunch of stuff to do it can get overwhelming as things pile up. As for the general information overload, yeah it happens at the start, but it's a long game and overtime I found it to be a really great touch and brings a real authenticity to the world. The number of phrases and foreign words used is actually pretty small and they're repeated a lot so you become quite familiar with them over time. The number of one off or infrequent phrases is pretty small.
As for Steath/Stealing, I don't find it that powerful personally since most of the items you find aren't that valuable for the most part and don't sell for much. Almost anything of real worth has to be bought or taken from a defeated enemy. And if you do enjoy the ship stuff you'll never have enough gold.
One of the best changes was being able to travel directly to the interior of buildings from the map. I get why, but I wish you could just fast travel within the city once you discover thing. It's still a little annoying having to walk to the edge of the map to trigger travel. At least for me, all my encounters have been triggered between districts so I'm not sure what it would break.
hmm, I tried this and dropped my cores down to 4 from 8 and it made no difference. I then changed some other settings and apparently it didn't like that because now the game won't...show anything if I launch with those files in the poe2 folder, but I still hear the music in the background. I even reinstalled the game and downloaded the speacial k files. weird. Sucks because now I'm noticing the shit fps more and more lol. It could just be Neketaka in general, combined with the rain effects, but that really shouldn't be stressing a 4790k to 30 fps..even on low settings it's in the 30's.
edit: or maybe its just the building I was in...whatever...
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I just got my Relative Pacifism trophy yesterday on PS4 for Pillars of Eternity 1. I only need The Storied Adventurer trophy to plat the game (stupid dice roll system for adventures in my 1st playthrough where I was locked out of a minor adventure). This is good preparation for the Pillars of Eternity 2 release on PS4 for me.
Sorry that didn't work for you. going from 12 logical threads to 3 helped to really tighten things up for me.
Neketaka is always hard since it's so dense with stuff, especially Queen's Berth, and especially when raining which seems like always. Really it's an issue with Unity at the end of the day, despite everyone constantly trying to say it's not. Every single one of these games on the engine have had performance issues despite not being graphically taxing, particularly with memory leak issues. I just don't think the teams have the resources to really optimize stuff like multithreading and chase these memory leak issues and seeing as certain some of these issues seem to be present in damn near every Unity game they may simply not be able to fix them regardless of time/resources. It helps to restart the game after a few hours of play because of that, which is a bit of a bother. Same issue as Battletech, which can actually get a lot more issue prone during extended play.
Are there any good ways to run this game with a controller? I'm quite interested in trying it (I love pirates, I love fantasy, match made in heaven) -- but i'd vastly prefer to play it on my TV rather than at a desk with a m/kb.
I don't think there's one currently, but with console ports coming, it should be a thing in the near future.
If you have a Steam controller it should be very easy and comfortable to setup and use. I believe a ton of people have played both PoE and Deadfire extensively with them. A standard controller should work too, if a bit more finicky. I think SteamLink should be easy to setup to stream to TV and map controller buttons to keymappings.
I definitely need to pick this up when it comes to console's.
Does anyone know how the Forum funded Island turned out? I put 500 into the effort.
Does anyone know how the Forum funded Island turned out? I put 500 into the effort.
Is the first game worth it? I have it in my cart right now on PS4, but I'm still trying to decide whether to buy it or not.
It turned out pretty well. Most of the game's islands are small, one-event locations so I wouldn't get my hopes up in terms of the scope of the content. But there's a solid early sidequest attached.
The first game is good too.
Waiting for the 1X version for this reason.
Even if there's no X support, they will surely patch the controller settings into the PC version right?
White March pt 1 is meant to be played kind of midway through PoE around lvls 7-9 like just before or after Chapter 2 and then pt 2 is kind of meant more for the end game when your party is pretty much max level and well equipped.
For Deadfire they're all meant for late game like lvl 15+, with only Beast of Winter being open to you from the start, the others officially open up later after advancing elsewhere in the game.
I bought the first game a long time ago and only got to play it one hour. Want to make time for it sometime soon
I'm now up to 70 hours in my playthrough it is sublime indeed. My only gripe is its way too easy and having access to all your spell all the time is way too powerful.
Pillars 1 was for me much more difficult on PotD.
As for the above questions I'd definitely play Pillars 1 to completion it's an and gem and for me at least, greatly enhance my appreciation of the second one. On PC the load time for the first game were really a non issue (on an SSD)
Pillars 1 was for me much more difficult on PotD.
As for the above questions I'd definitely play Pillars 1 to completion it's an and gem and for me at least, greatly enhance my appreciation of the second one. On PC the load time for the first game were really a non issue (on an SSD)
I went back to PoE, previously beat it before White March came out and it was one of my favorite games of that year. I had a 45 hour save file but I honestly wanted to re-experience the story before moving to PoE2, so I started over. Just got back to Defiance Bay the other day, damn the game is good... Can't wait to beat it, play White March, then move on to PoE2
WM is best played in act 2. One reason being the soulbound weapons you get from there that take time to level up. It is basically a very large sidequest. It is not a continuation of the main story.
Nope. If it didn't grab you in 5 hours no reason the second one would. Too bad, they are excellent !
They patched in a on optional modifier that will turn your spells back to per-rest abilities.
Huh, I think I'm in act 2 now, right? So how would I go about starting WM Part 1 from where I am?
Oh wow really ? I can't find it in the settings. Could you point me towards it ?
I really disagree with this. The second one is much stronger out the gate, I know plenty of people who bounced off the first but got into the second.
I keep seeing you launch the game, and it's really pushing me toward trying to start the first one again.
Hell, just bought the Obsidian edition of PoE2, so now I guess I have to.
Hell, just bought the Obsidian edition of PoE2, so now I guess I have to.
I really fail to see how it's possible, unless the graphics and presentation are what hold back those people. Everything from trhe opening cinematic to meeting
Berath
Quick question - single or dual class? Good main character class?
Edit: also, play this or divinity original sin 2 first?
Edit: also, play this or divinity original sin 2 first?
Depends, both works. I myself played Rogue in Pillars 1 and kept the same character for Pillars 2 and went as an Assassin subclass. My damage is insane. Good for scouting and good character to invest into Mechanical skills (to pick lock, disarm traps etc). Most of my party member are multiclassed. Only my Support and Tank are singleclassed (Fighter and Priest). The major difference is multiclassed character cannot get the 8th and 9th level of spells and talents (the two highest levels)
As for DOS2 or Pillars 2 that depends, I prefer the gameplay slightly from Divinity but personally the story of Pillars is a LOT better for my taste. I'm almost done playing through Divinity 2 with 3 other friends and the gameplay is stellar but the story is extremely mediocre. Both have awesome voice acting but Pillars is slightly better. Soundtrack for both game are super good. Overall I prefer prefer PoE.
Sounds like you are in act 2. If I recall correctly you start White March from Cad Nua. Talk to the stone statue, and she will guide you the right way. Have fun, WM areas are some of the best in PoE1.
I personally ended up much preferring Divinity Original Sin 2 in terms of gameplay and story,, but the continued updates and content released for Pillars has made me keep coming back to it regardless. Gotta agree that this is probably the best time to get in if you haven't played it yet.
I played through the whole thing on my Steam Link with an xbox one controller. It wasn't ideal, but with proper use of hotkeys it was a pretty smooth experience, all things considered. I bet it'd be even better with a Steam Controller.
I've been meaning to pick this up but I think I'll wait now to see how the console release is. If they do a good job they're I'll pick it up on PS4.
Pillars 2 was one of my disappointments of the year, unfortunately. I was there day 1 to back it.
Main problem I had with it (which sounds like it might be fixed?) was that the tuning of the fights was completely awful. Every fight was an AOE slaughter fest that offered no real challenge. Couple that with a story that I didn't find compelling enough to lift the game on its own and I didn't really have a great time playing it. Just went from island to island destroying everything in sight until it was over. Even the ending of the game was kind of like "Oh, that's it?".
Main problem I had with it (which sounds like it might be fixed?) was that the tuning of the fights was completely awful. Every fight was an AOE slaughter fest that offered no real challenge. Couple that with a story that I didn't find compelling enough to lift the game on its own and I didn't really have a great time playing it. Just went from island to island destroying everything in sight until it was over. Even the ending of the game was kind of like "Oh, that's it?".
Yeah, if you didn't play since they changed Veteran/PotD, it seems like it's changed substantially.
Woedica's challenge. I believe you have to start a new game on PotD in order to select it.
On the main menu there's a skull at the bottom, click on that to bring up Magran's challenges.
Agreed. It's rather subjective, but the first game was far more interesting to me near the beginning. I didn't start to lose interest until you got to the big fortress (Caed Nua, I think) and started really learning more about the whole Watcher business.