The Pillars of Eternity backer beta is coming out today (screams like a schoolgirl)!!!
You might want to be on the lookout for your keys if you backed it, or the inevitable live streams from the community of backers. You can also back it now while you still can! You can get the base game for $35 and if you want in on the beta it’s $25 more. I got the digital deluxe version for $68 and the beta for another $25. Love supporting titles like this!
The beta will contain 3-5 hours of gameplay, all the races and classes and will support levels from 5 to 8. It’s purely a sidequest from the full game without any of the main henchmen in order to avoid spoilers as much as possible.
This year continues to be one hell of a ride for RPG lovers
Other RPG goodness I’d recommend btw: Might and Magic X, Divinity:OS, Shadowrun returns: Dragon fall. Also coming out si Wasteland 2, PoE of course, and Dragon Age Inquisition. 2014 is the year of the RPG.
So I got sucked in to the vortex of time sucking that is Rome II thanks to the greatness of patch 14 and haven’t had that much time to test drive this baby yet. Hopefully I’ll get to it tonight.
But impressions from the couple of hours I’ve played so far:
This truly feels like the BG3 we never got. Right down to the way the cursor looks
The story telling, the branching paths of dialogue, the skill checks testing your party’s abilities at coercion or worldplay, the alternative ways to solve just about every quest - it seems like that’s ALL there. I’m not at all worried about this aspect of the game now, where as with Dragon Age: Inquisition, well given what was shit mountain, the jury is still very much out on that one.I think this is going to be one fo the most story rich RPG’s to come out in a long while.
The music is very good, IMHO. Very evocative of oldschool RPG’s and great in it’s own right. We don’t get to hear too much of it in the Beta, but what is there is making me want more. Haven’t really heard anything as memorable as say, Morrowind’s theme yet though
The art is stupendous. The backgrounds are incredibly detailed and rendered at a nice high resolution. Every inch of the screen is covered with elements that make the world feel lived in. The first area you’re dropped in is a small sleepy town with veyr private, salt of the earth people. They settled down on what where the remains of a previous settlement that mysteriously vanished a long time ago. The Leather tanner set up shop in the crumbling ruin of an old tower, and the smell wafts down to the least desirable room at the Inn. The roads are muddy and they display the tracks of the carts and people that walk the main street. I was worried about how well static, 2D backgrounds would portray a modern RPG world, and well, my worries are gone. Coupled with some animated, hand-drawn interactions and the rich amount of story/dialogue, the whole thing takes on this deep fantasy novel quality where the game gives you just enough to get your imagination juices flowing.
There are a few issues however and they mostly come in to play during combat. First of all the beta is definitely buggy. Some quests will break, summoned pets will sometimes clone themselves, and your characters will often forget what they were supposed to be doing in combat, and will just stand there doing nothing. Sometimes they will get stuck in running animations trying to path find around an enemy or ally.
There is some real issues with the UI and feedback during combat. It’s hard to impossible sometimes to tell who you are currently controlling, who they are currently targeting, and what action they are currently performing. It’s also difficult to know for sure if you have properly targeted a special attack or if you miss clicked, or if your target is not a valid one.They REALLY need to make this things much more apparent/obvious to the user.
There was some feedback early on about the characters not blending in to the 2D background enough. So they implemented a simple global illumination solution which tints the 3D character models with samples from the nearby calculated light on the 2D background.Well, they did too good a job with it! The characters blend in TOO much with the background now. Sometimes they look like amorphous blobs because they just seem to fade in to the backdrop. Like someone had slid the opacity slider down to 40%. They need to lower this effect a bit, and maybe add some better self-shadowing/SSAO to the models in order to bring out their detail and improve contrast with the backdrop. Same goes for enemies! Also there needs to be some sort of visual effect on enemies obscured by elements of the scene that are closer to the camera, like tree tops. Right now, they prety much dissapear making them impossible to target.
I’m hoping some of the UI is still in pre-production. In scout mode for example, detection circles appear around your characters and enemies. They look pretty ugly. Just these huge single pixel colored circles that someone like me could have put together, but that’s just 'cause I haven’t a single artistic bone in my body!
SO yeah. The overall impression I got was positive. I can’t wait to dive into this rich world, in fact I’m looking forward to it more than DA:I, which for all of it’s grandeur and big budget graphics, doesn’t seem half as interesting (at least right now, though my feelings on that game kind of wax and wane from week to week).
But the combat UI, the amount of feedback it gives you, and the fact that the characters blend in to the background too much need to be fixed/improved, IMHO.
First off, here’s PAX’s panel, which includes some gameplay and a little tidbit on some of the game companions in the game (there will be 8 in total):
The latest backer beta version has seen a lot of improvement as well. They've polished the hell out of the UI, and especially the combat. It's clear now who's doing what and to whom, and managing your party member's positioning and abilities is a cinch. Combat now has a slow mode for more control if you want it too, and there is a double time mode for any retreading fo old areas you might have to do.
I never got very far into the backer beta because of the previous issues with combat, but now that I’ve played through the main questline, I’m super happy in the direction side quests are going. There were just so many twists and turns, as well as various options in how to resolve the quest based on your actions, on various dialogue decisions, and even on class based abilities. Playing with two different characters, not only was I able to get very different endings to the quests, but I could not replicate some of the things that happened in the middle of the quest my first time around. Things just developed differently, in an organic fashion.
So yeah, definitely mark March 26th on your calendars. This game is going to be an RPG of the year contender!
I saw the release date recently and cried. My family planned vacation (to celebrate my M-i-L’s 80th) for that week, which means I’ll be a few days late. Which is still earlier than I hit most games (rarely do I buy anything for more than 50% of release price). I’m looking forward to totally screwing up my first playthrough because I didn’t check out any message boards, FAQs, or strategies ahead of time, and just playing with what I think is cool at the moment.
That’s part 1 of a documentary on the making of Pillars of Eternity called “The Road to Eternity”. Jeebus what a somber note to start on. Apparently Obsidian almost went under. They had to lay off a bunch of employees because of Microsoft and came very close to closing shop. It seems they were contracted by Microsoft to develop a next gen RPG for the Xbone, but after the game being in full production, Microsoft just burned them. Pulled out of the project and cancelled it.
Gahhh, Thursday! What kind of syphilitic unclefuckers release a game on Thursday?
I have had in the back of my mind for a while that next week is the release. I assumed it was going to be on a Tuesday like all respectable non Jesus-raping game companies have done since the beginning of time. So I figured I would be playing this Tuesday. But noooooo, 4 more days to wait. :mad:
The stream embargo is up today, so there are a ton of youtubers and twitch people streaming the game.
So be careful, lots of spoilers, I’d suggest, if you are going to watch, don’t watch past near the end of the first ruin. There is a story development there that you should experience for yourself. Or maybe skip to about 10 minutes after that.
The beginning leading up to the first ruin was mostly showed off late last year, so you might have seen sections of it already.
