Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire Catch-All

So they just reached 4.5m and have added Ship Crews.

Vector wrote:

So they just reached 4.5m and have added Ship Crews.

Nice. Hoping for sea monsters and fishing too.

Looking good.

-swoon- at the game. Looking so good. Glad I backed and looking forward to it. Working on another PoE runthrough right now, in fact.

Oh, and Ms. Garsten's ability to repeatedly belt out absurd things like 'Concelhaut's Draining Touch' within a sentence, without batting an eye or missing a beat, was quite impressive as well.

First gameplay footage.

Can't believe how great it looks when it's still pretty far out. The paper doll in particular looks fantastic.

It helps that they are now just improving an existing game engine

I ended up liking Pillars a lot more than Tyranny, so Pillars 2 should be pretty good - especially if they incorporate some of the mechanics improvements from Tyranny - like how potions are used.

Uncharacteristically, I love everything about that video. I am a fan of Obsidian and Pillars but there is always something among the awesomeness that gives me pause.
I love the open world ship exploration and random encounter. (please have giant sea creature battles and ship boarding that is more than just "congratulations, you've boarded and here is some flavor text".
I love the slower paced combat, the dual classing and the lack of the injury system that forces backtracking.
I am excited to here more about the changes to the pet system and seeing more of the larger enemies with more examples of the grappling and kicking.

Cant wait to throw hundreds of hours at this game. PoE had one of my favorite combat and class system of any RPG ever - a streamlined but deep Infinity Engine system really. Tyrannys combat on the other hand was quite disappointing, so hope they aren't taking too much from that.

Removal of injury/health system is something I dont like in theory, but I hope it works well. Think Health worked well as a system to keep you from just outhealing everything, rather than avoid damage, and it added a choice between fighting on with low health or use a rest (or, it would have, if you could not simply backtrack to an inn, that part was arguably a problem).
Very glad that they seem to be getting rid of abilities resetting on rest on the other hand. That both went entirely against the health system of trying not to rest all the time, and making classes more shallow by taking away their abilities for 90% of combat is a weird game design choice in general.

I dont really care much about the combat speed, since I would pause the game every ½ second regardless. Can't imagine playing it in 'real time'.

Very much not a fan of "only" having 5 character parties instead of 6. Hopefully it will still work fine. I guess dual classing should alleviate the loss of a character slot. At least 5 slots is still decent, 3-4 slots run into the problem of all slots being taken by the Holy trinity of classes by default.

See I feel like I liked playing with 4 or less characters in a party and I tried to solo or duo a lot. So the dual class will help quite bit there.
I like bigger parties in turned based games but I mostly like to play in real time with as little pausing as possible in Pillars. So smaller parties are easier to position and aren't overwhelming with which party member has which ability.

It's right about now that I'm regretting not backing. I didn't because I never finished Pillars 1. But this looks really damn impressive.

The E3 footage with dev commentary

About to check the latest video here but have to say that, despite very much looking forward to PoE2, everything Shadout said could have come straight from my brain. I feel that a lot of folks didn't like the dual 'health' system (endurance per battle vs long term health between rest) but I thought it was novel and really enjoyed it once I got passed it being different. The only downside, for me to a lesser extent but maybe more for some folks, is that yeah you pretty much always spec Eder the same -- to hold max aggro|max tank because it's so critical.

I thought it would have been nice if there were no "camping kit" requirement. Not only is it forcing you to rest, but then you have to go back to town too or you just save spam. I'm not sure what they think they were fixing when you can just save every 10 feet anyway.

^To be fair, there's a huge preference spread on this for folks that like to use rest limited spells for trash mobs vs those that only whip out rest-limited spells vs special groups or bosses. Granted, half my playtime has gone to ciphers so I was usually ok for renewable CC.

I'm on the extreme side of OCD with this and hate to camp in random places. Usually if I am at a town with an inn or passing Caed Nua I'll rest. After all, what's the point of the extensive injury system with all the twisted this, burned that, broken this if you never see it or have to struggle with effectively being down a man most of the time. Down a ranger, well ok... down a cleric.. oh, those two triage health type skills suddenly don't seem so throw-away.

Anyways, yeah, resting for health|mana|whatevs is usually a consensus sticking point in western-style party-based RPGs. What's the best way to go here.. variable spell timers or spell-tier timers? Slow, but ever-recharging mana pool? Make all casters have a renewal mechanic? (actually, I'm an in-concept fan of this approach but it requires more dev time, balancing, and dev creativity). They have ciphers, monks, and chanters down... just need to figure out cleric and wizard.

Watched the video. Pickpocketing!

Spells that renew per encounter seems like a much better solution than per rest in all cases. For strong spells, let them come with a high resource cost or circumstantial requirements (like "can only be used on stunned enemies", or "enemies at >50% HP" etc, to avoid front-loading the strongest spells in every combat scenario)

Recreational Villain wrote:

The only downside, for me to a lesser extent but maybe more for some folks, is that yeah you pretty much always spec Eder the same -- to hold max aggro|max tank because it's so critical.

While important to have tanky characters, I dont think this was necessarily the case. Especially at PotD tanks would really struggle with keeping aggro, to the point that going full tank was not that useful. It was important to make them tough so they could survive a heavy beating, but in the end the best way to keep aggro on tanks was to block enemies paths so they had no alternative to attacking the tanks.

^ If we're talking PoTD then high accuracy suddenly becomes king (or at the very least, queen). But yeah, Eder's not going to hold engagement alone. In that case I often make Kana an off-tank w/tower|gear|perks he'd usually not draw from as a pure chanter. It's not like he can't do that and still belt out Ila's whatever-whatever ranged speed+reload chant. That plus saving a custom L v R pincer formation and a Cipher built to constantly stack CC lets you drop some decent hurt before anyone decides they want to slide by to beat on your squishys. Plus, c'mon, they still have to get past Pallegina.

Speaking of, I always have her go sworn enemy (meh on it's own) ---> Wrath of Five Suns. WoFS is love, especially since it's per encounter. I think it even works with scion of flame(?) Argh, I'm so ready for PoE2 and (even more) D:OS2 (which is so much better than D:OS).

That Josh cameo

I like the spell opacity option.

Still looking fantastic. I hope the hitching can be fixed and isn't some weird Unity thing.

Man I really need to get back to my Pillars game and finish it. Such a fantastic RPG and the sequel is looking to surpass it.

Adam Brennecke actually hit me back on twitter and said the hitching isn't due to streaming data and that they haven't done any optimization yet

Animancy cat!

I like how so many of these updates work in 'frivolous' (though entirely awesome) bullet points. NPCs size determines how they interact with the sheep's wheel, muskets (arquebus) put out more smoke, and yes -- animancy cat. Really, my biggest gripe with PoE (once they fixed up combat in later patches) is that the ideas were a bit much (overwrought) given the volume of text that's in a game like PoE-- it was ok in PST but kind of , and cumulatively, meh in PoE despite the end ideas of where they went with stuff being aces.

The stuff they're adding here is really neat and I can't wait for the remaster of PoE down the road. It's really nice that Obsidian is finally able to iterate on their own ideas, even if it meant PoE was a little more bland than I had imagined it would be.

Some good gif material from this one

If I understand what they're saying correctly, with each class having three subclasses (so four classes each, 44 total possibilities), that means there are 946 possible combinations. (edit: however, in the video, it looks like there are about six kinds of invoker, so this may or may not be accurate. Second edit: In the video, monks have five options [base plus four subclasses], and wizards have six, invoker being one of them.)

I strongly suspect that there will be only 55 class names, however.

With their present design, it sounds like multiclass is likely to be a fair bit more powerful than single, especially toward endgame. PoE1 gets a lot of mileage out of the lower-tier powers; the high-tier ones are potent, but tend to be highly situational, not something you want to use often. The limited charges on them has rarely been much of an issue; opportunity has been more of the problem. Having twice as many low-level abilities is likely to be far more useful.

Plus, there will almost certainly be power interactions and corner cases they haven't thought of, combinations that will end up super-powered. It strikes me as exceedingly unlikely that they'll be able to test that many character types.

The lighting looks really good. I still can't wrap my brain around how it works since most of the environment is 2D.

I'm staying away until it's done, but I'd love to hear impressions from anyone that checks it out.

I really wish there was a beta access tier that is less than $115. That seems a bit steep, especially considering the game has funding what, $5 million now?