For what it’s worth, I’m about 20 hours in, and though I’ve had issues with Obsidian titles in the past, I probably wouldn’t know about a single bug in this one if I didn’t follow things on the internet. Some of that’s luck, obviously, but I had a lot more trouble with DA:I on PS4 than I’ve had with Pillars so far. Mileage obviously varies!
I wouldn’t call it my favorite game ever, or anything - I’ve always been more partial to the true turn-based stuff than real-time-with-pause - but I’m still enjoying it, and I’m looking forward to some sessions of decent length this weekend.
I wish Steam tracked playtime in time where the game was actually the program in the foreground, or even when you’re actually sending input to the game, because the playtime in that application gives no useful guide to compare your playtime. Of course, the game itself doesn’t accurately indicate playtime either, because time I spend doing dishes while the game is running in the background counts. I might have still been trying to find a PC portrait I liked by the time I hit 20 hours, so I don’t know what 20 hours means to anybody else.
The only bug that is somewhat annoying is the multi-monitor scroll bug, and I’m happy with my workaround (mapping the aswd keys to scroll with.) Other than that, I’m not sure I would have noticed any bugs except that I read about them. Overall, I like the game.
I don’t know how far I’m in - like Johnny Angel, I tend to leave games paused for a few hours as I go do errands or the dishes or whatever. Sometimes I forget and leave them paused overnight, so the hour counter is definitely off. I went through most of the quests in the first town, then made my way to the area where the stronghold is, now I’m in the big town in the bay.
Even with being crowdfunded, they have to get published - in thise case, by Paradox (which is not entirely unknown for pushing out beautiful, hot bugridden messes).
See, this is the clear benefit of playing a Goldpact Paladin. None of this hemming and hawing and moral quandaries. You pay me more than the other guy ? You’ve got my oath and I’ll do your deed. Don’t much matter if you want a good deed done or a bad one : morality is subjective, consequences are unpredictable but coinage is absolute (also fungible). Hurray for soulless mercernarying !
I’ve been pretty lucky too. No major bugs encountered whatsoever. Once, early in the game, I couldn’t open containers, but reloading my save fixed that.
I’m about 30 hours in, what I’m guessing is 1/2 way through Act 2, and haven’t experienced anything else.
Super engrossed in the game and the story, I just hope the issues others are having are sorted quickly.
The downside to independence, I suspect, is that they don’t have a whole lot of other revenue streams to keep them afloat while they’re working on their current title. Their Kickstarter was hugely successful, but making a game is also hugely expensive. It might have been a case of, “Release now, before we run out of money to pay our programmers for more bug fixes.”
Finished this at 43 hours played, playing on Normal with a warrior tank. I used Eder as well which meant two tanks - more control, less damage. Normal is fairly easy most of the time so I’m not sure if it matters that much what you play.
I did skip a fair bit of side quests and such but I still hit the level cap with 5 of my 6 characters. Once I knew I don’t need more xp and was unlikely to get better equipment from all the stuff I hadn’t done yet I kinda lost interest and went straight for the main plot.
Overall I liked the game a lot and I definitely got my money’s worth (paid 25 USD ages ago) but I do wish they had gotten the bugs squished before launch. I actually wasn’t sure if I’d enjoy it given I’m not really nostalgic when it comes to computer games. I mean I was there for BG1 and BG2 back in the day, and Icewind Dale and so on, but I don’t really like to replay old games - I tend to feel they age badly. PoE had removed most of the oldschool annoyances though and was mostly pleasant to play.
But on another topic: WTH is up with wizard spells that bounce around randomly and most of the time tend to hit your characters more than the mobs? I’m talking about the fireball one and I’m pretty sure I saw a lightening one where the ball of fire/lightening bounce off the walls in a random fashion. Is there an effective way to use them? Every once in a while I get a good chance to use them, but not very often. I’m about to just drop them from my memorized-spells because they are mostly useless, unless I want to kill my party.
You can use them outdoors without fearing their inevitable and disasterous return. Other than that I got nothing - there’s plenty of better spells. In general the spells aren’t very well balanced. A lot of lower level spells are more powerful than higher level stuff, and same level spells can vary from crappy to awesome.
It’s there to remind you of the old Lightning Bolt from Baldur’s Gate. Oh, look, the wizard hit the ogre once, and then it bounced back and killed the wizard! It’s almost weird that I remember keeping Lightning Bolt memorized so often.
Yeah, just say no to firey pinball. Clerics also have a bouncey ball, but it only harms foes and heals friendlies, that one’s golden. Other than that, as Johnny Angel says, it’s a good callback to BG1 and 2, where you’d see enemies nicely lined up in a corridor and went “I could cast Aganazzar Scorcher and hit them all once, or I could LIGHTNING BOLT and hit them a million times ! And my whole party too ! It’ll be great !”
I guess you *could *possibly make it work with a party of all Pale Elves decked in fireproofed gear, but… yeah. Besides, level 2 spell uses are strictly for Curse of Blackened Sight. That spell was already bonkers before the patch, but now that it’s Foe Only ? Ermagerd.
I’ve been pretty lazy in that I don’t really look into what a lot of these spells do until I feel I need a specific application. Like, suddenly I got Drakes up to my eyeballs, so I need absolutely everything I can get that thwarts enemy DR.
Magic items in shops don’t generally seem worth buying. I’m doing pretty well with the stuff I enchant myself. I do buy items that boost things that might come up in dialogue, so that if I find out I’m deficient I can back out and try again. I have an 18 resolve, and one dialogue required 19 resolve, so I reloaded and put on my special hat.
Charms are nice, but not rarely I manage to charm the whole lot and I’m just standing there thumbing my dick until someone makes a clue check.
There’s a horn in the first village that sells for 600 or so. That thing’s pretty cool, it lets you summon an Animat once a day and that guy seems hasted (at least he attacks super fast and hits like a truck) plus he’s got a heal and a knockdown on top of the fire-and-forget dps. It’s been a good panic button for me so far, though I expect he’ll get outclassed in the mid/late game.
I saw something weird when I was playing Saturday afternoon. Something similar might have happened before, but I didn’t notice.
Basically I was working on an item fetch side quest, and the group that had it consisted of almost entirely named characters. They also don’t show up at the location they’re supposed to be at until you activate the quest. (I had been to that location before and they weren’t there the first time.)
But anyway, there they are, all named, and upon wandering into sight of them, they show up as instantly hostile. I’m pretty sure I didn’t do anything ahead of time to make any of them hostile, so it must be written into the quest that they are that way.
But then why do they have names? SOP in these types of games, including this one, seems to be that only NPC’s you can interact with or are mentioned in the quest itself in some way are actually given any names. (Even if the interaction is one line of “Me crush puny humanoid!” before the NPC goes hostile.)
But this group of NPC’s have names I don’t recall ever seeing before, yet they’re just there for me to slaughter them. No chance for interaction at all. (And they weren’t exactly easy having a full mix of abilities plus a bear animal companion to one of the druid’s to boot.)
Maybe there was originally going to be some actual scene with them to talk things out or something, but then it either got removed or never implemented.
And for those who are curious as to which quest I’m talking about or think they know:
It’s the Parable of Wael quest, where the temple/library of Wael sends you out to retrieve the scroll stolen by some bandits and then Wael talks to you once you’ve killed them and gotten the scroll.
I think one of the higher-tier Kickstarter rewards was to design an encounter with “your party” (your IRL gaming party, whatever else), so as a WAG, it might be that?
