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Pillars of or relating to Eternity, with unmarked PoE1 spoilers abounding
QuetziHere we may reign secure, and in my choice,To reign is worth ambition though in HellRegistered User, Moderatormod
I finished this the other day
It was pretty good
I hit the level cap way early, and didn't even get close to doing all the quests I don't think, as I severely slowed down on taking on sidequests by the time chapter three hit
I was kind of annoyed that more things didn't change after chapter three began, actually
Like, it's a minor complaint, but like, the rooms that had been under construction for the lighthouse hotel for most of chapter two, I wish those had opened up after chapter three started
Just as an example - there were a bunch of other bits I had been hoping would change with the passage of time
But the game was pretty solid, and I really enjoyed all of the character endings, although I'm pretty sure I fucked up because Grieving Mother and Sagani both had the saddest goddamn endings
Eder was happy though, and really all I was doing was trying to make Eder happy
This is one of the SEVERAL games I bought recently and started but have yet to devote serious time to
I dig the setting and the general tone of the thing, though
I'm going to resurrect this thread, because both parts of the White March expansion are now out
I just started a replay of the game in order to get to the expansion, so I'm still a ways out, but I'm getting back into it pretty easily
I'm excited for this game to become like Baldur's Gate for replays, and I think it's happening
Has anyone else played through the White March yet? The two new companions for it look sick as hell, I'm pumped to hang out with them at very least
I just completed the second half the other day. I really enjoyed it. I didn't actually use the newest companion, though. My party was pretty set in stone already. Next time, though.
Steam and CFN: Enexemander
0
QuetziHere we may reign secure, and in my choice,To reign is worth ambition though in HellRegistered User, Moderatormod
I'm going to resurrect this thread, because both parts of the White March expansion are now out
I just started a replay of the game in order to get to the expansion, so I'm still a ways out, but I'm getting back into it pretty easily
I'm excited for this game to become like Baldur's Gate for replays, and I think it's happening
Has anyone else played through the White March yet? The two new companions for it look sick as hell, I'm pumped to hang out with them at very least
I just completed the second half the other day. I really enjoyed it. I didn't actually use the newest companion, though. My party was pretty set in stone already. Next time, though.
They're a barbarian, right? I probably won't use them either, as I'm playing barbarian this go around myself
Although there seems to be a pretty wide spread on what you can do with every class, and with the game now letting you spec out your individual companions no matter what level you get them at, I could probably make it work
I'm going to resurrect this thread, because both parts of the White March expansion are now out
I just started a replay of the game in order to get to the expansion, so I'm still a ways out, but I'm getting back into it pretty easily
I'm excited for this game to become like Baldur's Gate for replays, and I think it's happening
Has anyone else played through the White March yet? The two new companions for it look sick as hell, I'm pumped to hang out with them at very least
I just completed the second half the other day. I really enjoyed it. I didn't actually use the newest companion, though. My party was pretty set in stone already. Next time, though.
They're a barbarian, right? I probably won't use them either, as I'm playing barbarian this go around myself
Although there seems to be a pretty wide spread on what you can do with every class, and with the game now letting you spec out your individual companions no matter what level you get them at, I could probably make it work
I'm going to resurrect this thread, because both parts of the White March expansion are now out
I just started a replay of the game in order to get to the expansion, so I'm still a ways out, but I'm getting back into it pretty easily
I'm excited for this game to become like Baldur's Gate for replays, and I think it's happening
Has anyone else played through the White March yet? The two new companions for it look sick as hell, I'm pumped to hang out with them at very least
I just completed the second half the other day. I really enjoyed it. I didn't actually use the newest companion, though. My party was pretty set in stone already. Next time, though.
They're a barbarian, right? I probably won't use them either, as I'm playing barbarian this go around myself
Although there seems to be a pretty wide spread on what you can do with every class, and with the game now letting you spec out your individual companions no matter what level you get them at, I could probably make it work
Yep, she's a barbarian. You can definitely make a two party barb party work, too. The easiest solution would be to put one in the tank spot, but you can switch up the damage types such that it still works if they're both in dps roles.
The Steam thread was getting pretty be-clogged, so I figured I'd resuscitate this one for Deadfire talk.
I continue to be over the moon with this dang game. Mechanically, aesthetically, narratively. I feel like gushin', so I'll explain.
Mechanically: The game feels more forgiving than PoE1, which has made it much more interesting for me, because I don't fear experimenting as much. If I try something out and it doesn't work, I'm less likely to get immediately destroyed, and can course correct once I'm out of the fight. The game seems to have much more respect for my time (also reflected in the move away from Vancian magic), and I love that. Even the "difficulty" rating on quests ties into this new philosophy. The skulls aren't some hardline, "Do a three skull mission and you will get one-shotted by the first bandit you see." It's more like, "If you want a tough fight that takes a little longer and makes you strategize a bit, give one of these a shot! If you want to breeze on through, maybe wait a couple of levels."
Aesthetically: The animations in this game rule. Especially the reveals of big, bossfight enemies - there's a sense of scale and menace that really, really works.
Narratively: Gosh, they've set up the factions well in this thing. I'm going more a pro-native route (to absolutely nobody's surprise), and it's really well-nuanced. Like, some of the native folks want to work with the colonizers (something that has historical precedent, yeah), and if you fuck up what the colonizers are doing, some of the native folks can get piiiisssed. There's no clear "good" faction, and even the "bad" faction (the pirates) are a really useful way to, say, fuck up the oppressive colonizers. Everything is interconnected and shaded in really smart, really interesting ways. I normally don't do "evil" playthroughs, because they're often kinda... dumb. But I can totally envision a hardline capitalist playthrough, or a completely cutthroat pirate playthrough. I've really enjoyed all of Obsidian's new shit, but I haven't finished any of 'em more than once. I feel like I'm gonna come back to this one time and time again.
I'm also thrilled that they've fixed the in-game economy. I finished PoE one with about half a mil in the vault. Here, money is much harder-earned, which makes the spending of it all the more satisfying.
JacobkoshGamble a stamp.I can show you how to be a real man!Moderatormod
It's early days yet so there's still plenty of time for this to change, but after twenty years, this may be the first Infinity Engine game where the combat and character building shit isn't just something I kind of grimly tolerate to get to the story. Zooming in a bit more, cutting your party down to five, and ditching Vancian magic have all contributed to making it a better experience: partly because fewer moving parts means things are easier to manage conceptually, but also the simple reduction in visual clutter and increased clarity is a kindness to my damaged eyesight and means I have a better shot at figuring out what's going on in real, literal terms. The most transparent, user-friendly game system in the world is going to feel shitty and arbitrary if the fonts are unreadable, the color contrast is bad, and I can't pick my dudes out of the swirl of spell effects. I'm glad to say that so far that hasn't been the case in Deadfire.
Story-wise, I find this much more immediately gripping and engaging than the first game. I really loved PoE1 after about the halfway mark, but early on there were motivation issues: specifically, my motivation. The setup for the game was that I stumbled on a really obviously bad news ritual that killed the nice people I was with and almost killed me and gave me a spooky superpower that (I was told) would slowly drive me mad. And whenever another character asked my PC why he was going after the mysterious cult leader, the options were always something like
1. "I need him to fix what he did to me."
2. "I want answers." [Rational]
3. "I want to give him this nice pamphlet about Eothas." [Clever]
4. "I want to snap every bone in his body one by one and let his shrieks serve a a warning to the world not to mess with me." [Aggressive]
5. "I have my reasons."
6. Say nothing. [Stoic]
Notably absent were options like "man, he's leading a murder cult and I'm against that on principle" or "[Intelligence higher than 2] I'm pretty sure an evil murder cult messing with sinister ancient machines might be connected to the plague of soullessness, maybe."
Even when you find out that the dude's cult worships a horrible dead goddess of authoritarian violence, your dialogue options regarding the main quest are still weirdly fixated on, like, personal revenge or personal gain. It felt like the game kept trying to stand in the way of just playing as a decent, prosocial person with decent, prosocial motives, and along with stuff like :waves hand generally at the entire character of Durance: it was hard to escape the impression that this was all part of shoring up Obsidian's brand identity as edgy boundary-pushers.
I'm sure part of the thinking was that this was a personal quest with personal motives but I was never really sold on those personal motives. Your character's spooky superpower are going to kill you at some vague distant future date, but that doesn't feel very urgent, and in the meantime being able to read souls and see ghosts lets you go around righting all these wrongs in the world. It was really hard for me to invest in the idea that my self-sacrificing guy would singlemindedly seek a cure for this situation; he might even consider it a fair trade! Like, the power to make life better for tons of people but you die in ten years? That doesn't actually sound super bad to me.
So I, as a player, was much more invested in literally everything else in the world - the Hollowborn plague, the mad baron murdering his townsfolk, the unrest in Defiance Bay - than following the thread of the main quest, until the halfway mark when the game gave me a broader reason to pursue Thaos. It was a weird, uncomfortable feeling, like having grit in your shoe, and it colored my impression of everything else in the early part of the game (also the fact that I was playing it at launch and it was full of the usual Obsidian bugs and slow loading times and etc didn't help).
This game, by contrast, gives me a more compelling personal situation right off the bat and is much better at giving me options to express how my character feels about the situation - which in turn helps me invest more deeply in the situation. It feels like everything in the game is working to draw me along in a really natural, organic way, rather than feeling like the main quest and world situation are working at cross purposes.
Literally my only complaint so far, and this is hardly unique to this game, is that the volume of information and options available even very early on feels like drinking from a firehose. Every time I enter a new town and see that it has multiple districts and each district has its own quests and merchants and...I just sigh and save and go for a walk.
If I bounced off of POE1 for mechanical reasons as well as the ones Jacob described, but liked the setting and saw potential in the writing, would I be good going straight into 2, or at least reading a summary of the rest of the plot of 1?
If I bounced off of POE1 for mechanical reasons as well as the ones Jacob described, but liked the setting and saw potential in the writing, would I be good going straight into 2, or at least reading a summary of the rest of the plot of 1?
I'm doing the wavy-handy thing here
my issues with the first game were very real but the non-combat complaints evaporated after about the halfway mark, and I feel like the story's many very genuine high points would be lost in a wiki readthrough. Deadfire is much more connected to its predecessor than Baldur's Gate II was to its, as well. This basically feels like you turned the page and got the next chapter in the story.
If you have the time, I would super recommend just setting the first game to story mode and blitzing it. You'd be getting the best part of the experience while leaving behind about 85% of the frustrations.
QuetziHere we may reign secure, and in my choice,To reign is worth ambition though in HellRegistered User, Moderatormod
Specific Deadfire quest question - The Courier's Calling
Okay so in order to deliver the letter to Tuaha, you need to find her stalker, but the game gives you absolutely no direction, other than "average looking Huana." And there's like, no way to ask around town or anything useful, so I'm just combing the place to find a random dude?
Specific Deadfire quest question - The Courier's Calling
Okay so in order to deliver the letter to Tuaha, you need to find her stalker, but the game gives you absolutely no direction, other than "average looking Huana." And there's like, no way to ask around town or anything useful, so I'm just combing the place to find a random dude?
Has anyone figured out who this is referring to?
When I did that one, there was a guy walking around nearby who would sometimes pass very close to Tuaha. He isn't named - just says "Common Worker" or the equivalent. He was very close to Tuaha, in my playthrough.
Specific Deadfire quest question - The Courier's Calling
Okay so in order to deliver the letter to Tuaha, you need to find her stalker, but the game gives you absolutely no direction, other than "average looking Huana." And there's like, no way to ask around town or anything useful, so I'm just combing the place to find a random dude?
I've heard ranges from "Eder's background is messed up if you import" to "everything having to do with any backstory is fucked" if you imported a save. The beta patch that got released today says some stuff about Eder and imports but directly underneath it people are still complaining about things like Pallegina having the wrong background.
Kinda hard to tell what is and isn't actually still happening, which is why I asked if anyone here has had issues.
Just kinda worried because Obsidian has a reputation for bugs and save-import is a pretty big deal to me.
So far every character in my imported game has behaved like normal.
Welp, that's good enough for me then.
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QuetziHere we may reign secure, and in my choice,To reign is worth ambition though in HellRegistered User, Moderatormod
If you know the relevant choices made you could also recreate your history from the options menu.
It's kind of barebones there, so you have to have a pretty good memory of the first game to know what it's talking about, but there definitely wouldn't be history issues pulling from there.
This google doc has the choices and more context for them, as well as a summary of the previous game.
I think i'm going to try to play through PoE 1 one more time, while this one's issues get patched up, before I jump in. I already bought it for some reason.
Yeah pretty sure you can't make that happen through the history editor.
you can because it's dependent on quest decisions that the editor covers, rather than manually selecting the outcome
Did Pallegina follow the Ducs' orders? Did you empower the Dyrwood with the souls in Sun-in-Shadow? Those two choices are the deciding factors.[/spoilers]
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Though as I remember last time the resolution was just “slaughter these assholes or slaughter these other assholes”, and I don’t remember there being any proper way to convince one side to just give in
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It was pretty good
I hit the level cap way early, and didn't even get close to doing all the quests I don't think, as I severely slowed down on taking on sidequests by the time chapter three hit
I was kind of annoyed that more things didn't change after chapter three began, actually
Like, it's a minor complaint, but like, the rooms that had been under construction for the lighthouse hotel for most of chapter two, I wish those had opened up after chapter three started
Just as an example - there were a bunch of other bits I had been hoping would change with the passage of time
But the game was pretty solid, and I really enjoyed all of the character endings, although I'm pretty sure I fucked up because Grieving Mother and Sagani both had the saddest goddamn endings
Eder was happy though, and really all I was doing was trying to make Eder happy
YES
I just started a replay of the game in order to get to the expansion, so I'm still a ways out, but I'm getting back into it pretty easily
I'm excited for this game to become like Baldur's Gate for replays, and I think it's happening
Has anyone else played through the White March yet? The two new companions for it look sick as hell, I'm pumped to hang out with them at very least
I dig the setting and the general tone of the thing, though
I just completed the second half the other day. I really enjoyed it. I didn't actually use the newest companion, though. My party was pretty set in stone already. Next time, though.
They're a barbarian, right? I probably won't use them either, as I'm playing barbarian this go around myself
Although there seems to be a pretty wide spread on what you can do with every class, and with the game now letting you spec out your individual companions no matter what level you get them at, I could probably make it work
Yep, she's a barbarian. You can definitely make a two party barb party work, too. The easiest solution would be to put one in the tank spot, but you can switch up the damage types such that it still works if they're both in dps roles.
I continue to be over the moon with this dang game. Mechanically, aesthetically, narratively. I feel like gushin', so I'll explain.
Mechanically: The game feels more forgiving than PoE1, which has made it much more interesting for me, because I don't fear experimenting as much. If I try something out and it doesn't work, I'm less likely to get immediately destroyed, and can course correct once I'm out of the fight. The game seems to have much more respect for my time (also reflected in the move away from Vancian magic), and I love that. Even the "difficulty" rating on quests ties into this new philosophy. The skulls aren't some hardline, "Do a three skull mission and you will get one-shotted by the first bandit you see." It's more like, "If you want a tough fight that takes a little longer and makes you strategize a bit, give one of these a shot! If you want to breeze on through, maybe wait a couple of levels."
Aesthetically: The animations in this game rule. Especially the reveals of big, bossfight enemies - there's a sense of scale and menace that really, really works.
Narratively: Gosh, they've set up the factions well in this thing. I'm going more a pro-native route (to absolutely nobody's surprise), and it's really well-nuanced. Like, some of the native folks want to work with the colonizers (something that has historical precedent, yeah), and if you fuck up what the colonizers are doing, some of the native folks can get piiiisssed. There's no clear "good" faction, and even the "bad" faction (the pirates) are a really useful way to, say, fuck up the oppressive colonizers. Everything is interconnected and shaded in really smart, really interesting ways. I normally don't do "evil" playthroughs, because they're often kinda... dumb. But I can totally envision a hardline capitalist playthrough, or a completely cutthroat pirate playthrough. I've really enjoyed all of Obsidian's new shit, but I haven't finished any of 'em more than once. I feel like I'm gonna come back to this one time and time again.
I'm also thrilled that they've fixed the in-game economy. I finished PoE one with about half a mil in the vault. Here, money is much harder-earned, which makes the spending of it all the more satisfying.
https://naijaro.github.io/deadfire-speed-calculator/
this actually convinced me to go full rogue instead of scout, because your attack speed/recovery/reload increases MASSIVELY when you're in stealth
in addition, you get diminishing returns for beneficial effects
and negative effects compound each other
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but, today, it's looking like pirates
Twitch (I stream most days of the week)
Twitter (mean leftist discourse)
Not quite as far as I was in my earlier attempt, but getting there.
THE REST OF THE GAME I SAY.
The most I've liked any old school type RPG I think
Monk/Wizard is very fun
Story-wise, I find this much more immediately gripping and engaging than the first game. I really loved PoE1 after about the halfway mark, but early on there were motivation issues: specifically, my motivation. The setup for the game was that I stumbled on a really obviously bad news ritual that killed the nice people I was with and almost killed me and gave me a spooky superpower that (I was told) would slowly drive me mad. And whenever another character asked my PC why he was going after the mysterious cult leader, the options were always something like
1. "I need him to fix what he did to me."
2. "I want answers." [Rational]
3. "I want to give him this nice pamphlet about Eothas." [Clever]
4. "I want to snap every bone in his body one by one and let his shrieks serve a a warning to the world not to mess with me." [Aggressive]
5. "I have my reasons."
6. Say nothing. [Stoic]
Notably absent were options like "man, he's leading a murder cult and I'm against that on principle" or "[Intelligence higher than 2] I'm pretty sure an evil murder cult messing with sinister ancient machines might be connected to the plague of soullessness, maybe."
Even when you find out that the dude's cult worships a horrible dead goddess of authoritarian violence, your dialogue options regarding the main quest are still weirdly fixated on, like, personal revenge or personal gain. It felt like the game kept trying to stand in the way of just playing as a decent, prosocial person with decent, prosocial motives, and along with stuff like :waves hand generally at the entire character of Durance: it was hard to escape the impression that this was all part of shoring up Obsidian's brand identity as edgy boundary-pushers.
I'm sure part of the thinking was that this was a personal quest with personal motives but I was never really sold on those personal motives. Your character's spooky superpower are going to kill you at some vague distant future date, but that doesn't feel very urgent, and in the meantime being able to read souls and see ghosts lets you go around righting all these wrongs in the world. It was really hard for me to invest in the idea that my self-sacrificing guy would singlemindedly seek a cure for this situation; he might even consider it a fair trade! Like, the power to make life better for tons of people but you die in ten years? That doesn't actually sound super bad to me.
So I, as a player, was much more invested in literally everything else in the world - the Hollowborn plague, the mad baron murdering his townsfolk, the unrest in Defiance Bay - than following the thread of the main quest, until the halfway mark when the game gave me a broader reason to pursue Thaos. It was a weird, uncomfortable feeling, like having grit in your shoe, and it colored my impression of everything else in the early part of the game (also the fact that I was playing it at launch and it was full of the usual Obsidian bugs and slow loading times and etc didn't help).
This game, by contrast, gives me a more compelling personal situation right off the bat and is much better at giving me options to express how my character feels about the situation - which in turn helps me invest more deeply in the situation. It feels like everything in the game is working to draw me along in a really natural, organic way, rather than feeling like the main quest and world situation are working at cross purposes.
Literally my only complaint so far, and this is hardly unique to this game, is that the volume of information and options available even very early on feels like drinking from a firehose. Every time I enter a new town and see that it has multiple districts and each district has its own quests and merchants and...I just sigh and save and go for a walk.
But then, after an hour or two, I come back.
I bounced off of PoE a bunch of times until my latest attempt stuck
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I'm doing the wavy-handy thing here
my issues with the first game were very real but the non-combat complaints evaporated after about the halfway mark, and I feel like the story's many very genuine high points would be lost in a wiki readthrough. Deadfire is much more connected to its predecessor than Baldur's Gate II was to its, as well. This basically feels like you turned the page and got the next chapter in the story.
If you have the time, I would super recommend just setting the first game to story mode and blitzing it. You'd be getting the best part of the experience while leaving behind about 85% of the frustrations.
Apparently there's quite a few bugs around respeccing which is a shame as I want to change my swashbuckler Eder to be more offensive.
Has anyone figured out who this is referring to?
When I did that one, there was a guy walking around nearby who would sometimes pass very close to Tuaha. He isn't named - just says "Common Worker" or the equivalent. He was very close to Tuaha, in my playthrough.
I was just about to import my PoE save when I heard about it and it looks like a fix won't be in until next week.
Kinda hard to tell what is and isn't actually still happening, which is why I asked if anyone here has had issues.
Just kinda worried because Obsidian has a reputation for bugs and save-import is a pretty big deal to me.
Welp, that's good enough for me then.
It's kind of barebones there, so you have to have a pretty good memory of the first game to know what it's talking about, but there definitely wouldn't be history issues pulling from there.
I think i'm going to try to play through PoE 1 one more time, while this one's issues get patched up, before I jump in. I already bought it for some reason.
Which one?
Is it the one where she gets exilled then the Ducs realize they fucked up and invite her back? Because that is the one I got in my game.
you can because it's dependent on quest decisions that the editor covers, rather than manually selecting the outcome
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Though as I remember last time the resolution was just “slaughter these assholes or slaughter these other assholes”, and I don’t remember there being any proper way to convince one side to just give in
Not that either side is is any good, granted