Pillars Of Eternity Options

[SubRosa]

I bought it from Gog, though Steam has it too. Those look like the only two outlets. I just looked at Obsidian's (the developer) website, and they refer to you one of them. So I would definitely go Gog, and maybe wait for a sale. Right now the standard edition of the game is $40, and there are a bunch of dlc, though many are free.

Speaking of which, I have the free Critical Role pack dlc, which adds new voices. All are from the folks who do Critical Role, a group of voice actors who are also super nerds and post their gaming sessions online. They even have a comic book, which is pretty good. Matt Mercer, who is their GM, does many of the voices for Pillars already, like Eder and Aloth. I have been using the Keyleth voice for January. Keyleth is a somewhat innocent and naive character, and has been a perfect fit for Jan. She probably would be great for Buffy as well.

[Acadian]

Oh good. I do have GoG so could get it there when/if the time comes I figure. Can you think of any reason I could not pass on PoE 1 and just get PoE 2? I understand the changes to BG style play you've discussed and quite like some of the changes to classic AD&D you spoke of.

[SubRosa]

You can definitely skip PoE1 completely. The plot of PoE2 depends on things that happened in PoE1. But as I said, you can tell the game exactly what those things are. I even found they have some pre-made PoE1 endings already in PoE2 that you can select. Basically from the kindest to the evilest options. Or you can get really granular and pick every single thing that happened. And you can save those choices for future characters.

The beginning of PoE2 even takes you back through the major events in PoE1, so it will tell you the basics of what happened.

I do know that where you find Pallegenia in PoE2 and I think her circumstances depend on how her quest in PoE1 ended. There is also an item called the Devil's Cuirass (or something like that) which is built from the Devil of Caroc's body. She was an automatron in PoE1. The Cuirass only appears in PoE2 if you chose to not kill her arch-enemy Harmke in PoE1. Killing him actually gives her a much nicer ending in PoE1, which is how I went. Even though it means that armor does not appear in PoE2.

I played a bit more today, and I am liking how magic works better in PoE2. In PoE1 my spellcasters were essentially archers who occasionally cast spells. Now they are using all their spells every fight. I may have gone a little overboard in modding how many spells they can cast per encounter. So I will probably pare it down a little. OTOH, casting spells seems to take a long time compared to swinging a sword, so I might not have gone too far after all.

Stealth has also been refined more. Now when you go into stealth mode and approach enemies, you will see a white ring appear around them. This shows the range that they can hear things. You will also see an orange wedge radiating out in front of them. That is where they can see things. That can help you get right up to the edge of detection. There are also items like firecrackers that you can throw while in stealth. The noise they make distracts monsters and gets them to go investigate where they went off. Which can clear a path for you if you want to avoid a fight. Here is an example. The patch of pure red is a trap I detected.

And here is an example of moving around on the world map, and discovering a location

[Acadian]

Very encouraging. I enjoyed BG II, especially once I got comfy with the command console and customizing things a bit. And the 'improvements' you highlight also seem to be exactly that to me as well - improvements. Thanks again.

[SubRosa]

You will probably appreciate The Funnening - Improved Ranger, a mod that tweaks the Ranger class. I think the vanilla Ranger was kind of underpowered, and this improves it. There are a number of these 'Funnening' mods that improve a single class.

Ranger Unleashed - Arcane Archer scaling fix - 2 companions - Gunhawk seems to fix some of the issues with the Arcane Archer's Imbue ability.

[SubRosa]

I spent a couple hours playing yesterday, and was not really thrilled. I finally got my ship fixed and left the first island. I decided to do some Elder Scrolls style exploring of the world. There was not much to find. There are plenty of islands around. You can only land on the ones that have an anchor icon, which is where you can go ashore. Even then though, almost all of these had nothing but text-based encounters, or simple click on the trees and you get vegetables added to your inventory situations. Only a tiny handful had actual dungeons, and those were tiny, just 3 or 4 rooms.

I did fight pirates a lot. There is a scripted meeting with a pirate ship that happens shortly after you first set sail. This one is friendly, and you get another companion from it, and Orlan Cipher. I tried him out in one of the only dungeons, and I still don't like Ciphers. Like in PoE1, their Perks are all still based on their Focus and Soul Whip, which I still cannot make any sense of. So I stopped using him quickly.

After that I encountered a lot of pirate ships while on the seas. When you encounter a hostile ship the game gives you the option of immediately boarding, fighting a sea battle, or attempting to escape. I tried a naval battle once. It is completely text-based affair, and was really, really underwhelming. Especially given the kind of real naval combat games like Shogun 2 Total War had, or Assassin's Creed Black Flag. Even the original Pirates from the 1980s was better.

So the rest of the time I did boarding actions. The game goes to the tactical screen with your two ships side by side and a wide board linking the two. You start up opposite the board, and so far I have just ran forward to stop the enemy there, and eventually push on to their ship. The NPCs in your crew do join in the fight, though you cannot control them. People can even jump over the sides of the ships rather than using the boarding plank. But I have not figured out how that works yet.

It was interesting at first, but after a while it gets tedious, as it is the exact same map every time, and the fight generally goes the same way because of it. I am sure the maps will change as I face pirates with different kinds of ships. So far I have only fought those with a Dhow.

There is a lot of overhead with ship management. You have to assign crew members to different tasks on the ship. Each sailor has skills in different areas, so you have to juggle them around to make the most of them. You have to assign food and drink to them. It is not enough to simply have the stuff in your inventory. You have to physically move it to a queue on the ship management screen. Otherwise you crew will starve while you are literally sitting on a mountain of rice.

You can easily buy more of this stuff when you go to ports. When you are on the strategy map you just have to click on the port, and the screen will come up to buy supplies. But it is a lot of overhead which I personally do not give a crap about. I wanted to play a game about adventuring, exploring dungeons, slaying monsters, grinding my toons, Ph3R M3 N00b$!, all that good fantasy rpg stuff. Playing a ship captain simulator is not my idea of a good time.

The game points you to the capital city in the region once you leave the first island. I think I am just going to head straight there, and see if that opens up some quests, or something to point me to an actual dungeon I can raid.

[Acadian]

Hmm, hope things look up for in the game. It sounds too like it may be pushing you in linear direction. And we are rather spoiled by the free-flowing open world exploration of TES.

[SubRosa]

TBH, right now it does really seem to be a free-flowing open world. Just one with nothing in it to find.

[SubRosa]

I made it to the capital city of Neketaka today, and started exploring it. It is just like the cities in the Baldur's Gate games, PoE1, and the like. Lots of places, people, and little quests around the city. There are a lot of bounty quests. It turns out I did a lot of them already, by killing pirates along the journey to get to the city.

I also hired a generic adventurer, and used him to create one of January's pals from the Knights of Nerddom - Ryo. He is a Rogue. I am getting to know the class through him. They have some neat new Perks in PoE2.

[Lopov]

Are islands randomly generated or will they be exactly the same on your next playthrough?

Neketaka looks really big, from the map I've seen online.

[SubRosa]

The islands are fixed. There is an Map here showing them all. So far I have explored the south-west corner of the map. Then bypassed Katapu Channel and went straight for Neketaka.

Neketaka itself is huge. It is much bigger than Defiance Bay was in PoE1.

[SubRosa]

I did some more exploring in and around Neketaka over the last few days, and had more fun. As I said before, the city is huge. Something like 6 or 7 separate districts. I found an undercity of several levels, and a couple of explorable tombs. Of course there are tons of the 'normal' city quests, steal this, find medicine to these people, arrange with pirates to feed those people, and so on.

I have noticed that even in the pure dungeons, there are fewer monsters than normal. It seems like the direction for the game is smaller dungeons, fewer battles. Which is too bad, as that is the most fun for me. Especially given all the per rest stuff like spells has been done away with. It is easier than ever to do huge dungeon crawls now. In fact, I have only had to rest a handful of times so far.

There is a map maker in the port district who gives you a quest to map out parts of the Deadfire, and name the islands there. You can also buy a spyglass there, which I did in spite of how pricey it was. I have read that it helps you avoid ambushes on the high seas, especially of pirates lurking in wait within wrecks.

I also found another companion - Ydwin. She is a Cipher or Rogue. I picked Rogue, and retired Ryo. Though now that I look her up, she is classified as a Sidekick. This is one of the new things in PoE2. The game has a handful of companions. What I read is that you can only have yourself + 4 Companions in your party. So the cap is 5 characters instead of the normal 6.

I am not really sure what the difference is other than that. Ydwin has a uinque voice and dialogue. She seems to be involved in a lot of quests in two of the DLCs. But it looks like she does not have a personal quest. Most companions do.

I found another full Companion in the Watershapers Guild named Tekēhu. He seems to be a Druid/Chanter. I was utterly unimpressed with him, so left him to his own devices.

I have found some console commands which have been changed since the first game.

Shift + T = Teleports you to your cursor location. Use it with the console closed.

GiveItem now does what AddItem did.

Fog now does what NoFog did = removes the fog of war from the map you are currently on.

OpenCharacterCreation = this is handy. It allows you to recreate your character from scratch, which the retraining option in the game does not even allow (That just sets you back to 1st level, but still leaves you with the appearance, race, and class you originally began with). This starts completely over. The downside is that you lose all your experience points, and any special Perks you picked up along the way. But you can get the first back with the AddExperienceToLevel command, which has not changed. The others can be added back through the console too.

It does not look like there are many options for a Kind Wayfarer Paladin. So far I have come across only a single one. So I might try resetting January back to a Knight Of The Storm after all.

[SubRosa]

January explores an island on the strategy map

An example of the stealth system. The white ring is the hearing radius of the skeleton, the orange wedge is its sight

Xoti tries not to lie

Spleckt!

Battling the undead

Iron Man

Revenant

Stormcrow

[Acadian]

Nice shots. Those detection aides for stealthing make great sense. It is nice being able to pause combat to issue orders and control how quickly combat proceeds. A necessity really if you're controlling a group of NPCs. No doubt which one is Stormcrow in that last shot!

[SubRosa]

I just finished (mostly) a mod that replaces all the 'watercolor' pictures with real artwork from various portraits packs or otherwise stolen from the internet. It was a real pain going through every picture, resizing and renaming them all. But it looks so much better.

I still have to go through the game and see how appropriate they are for the characters. A lot of the watercolors are so poorly done that I literally cannot tell the race or gender of the individuals. I looked them all upon the Pillars wiki, and that helped with a lot of them. But some did not have entries, so I just had to guess.

Finally there are about 2 dozen from the expansions that I could not replace, as they are just too weird to find anything appropriate to replace them with.

[SubRosa]

I just found out that Sidekicks do not exceed the 5 character limit to your party. It seems that Sidekicks are just Companions without a quest or as much unique dialogue.

[SubRosa]

I am still playing PoE2. I am enjoying it, now that I know what to expect. I really like the setting, which is a big departure from the standard Merry Old England of so many CRPGs. It is part Maori, part Italian, part African, part Japanese. The music is just pure awesomesauce. The actual gameplay within battles is an improvement from the past. I just wish there were more battles.

I have taken to using the Ctrl + T command to teleport around when sailing. That allows me to cover the big, empty spaces of the ocean without wasting much time in the real world, which really drove me nuts playing the game the normal way. It allows me to skip over the islands with nothing on them, to find the few where there is something to actually do.

The capital city of Neketaka is amazing! It is jam-packed with quests to do, and has a number of hidden dungeons to explore.

I am still playing January as a Kind Wayfarer Paladin. But I decided to use the console to give her some of the Lightning-based powers from the Knights of the Storm mod. This way I get the best of both worlds. I still get dialogue options based on being the Wayfarer, and I still get lightning in her games. I started with just the Avenging Storm power, which is like the lightning cloak spell from Skyrim. It does shock damage to enemies around you. I will also be giving her the lightning bolt power that comes with Knights of the Storm too soon, once she reaches the same level it normally becomes available to the KotS.

I also discovered some handy graphics tweaks. The visual effects can become overwhelming in a fight. But in the Graphics options there is a slider call VFX Pause Opacity. What that means it that it makes the visual effects transparent whenever you pause. If you put it all the way over to the left they disappear entirely. There is also an Occlusion Opacity option too. What it does is make your characters visible with a white outline around them whenever they walk 'behind' a wall that would otherwise obscure them. Both are handy little tools to help see what is going on.


January disarms a ruffian

Don't look back!

Boom!

Jan is called the Stormcrow for a reason

Battling the reptilian hordes

[Acadian]

Haha, Lopov is right – nice Jack Sparrow outfit.

The only Rolling Flame that really hurts is the one you don’t see!

Stormcrow opens up a can of shock and awe!

[SubRosa]

Jan started out with the pirate outfit - a Vailian Frock Coat - but had to move up to some more serious armor.


Here is an example of an ordinary island (most of them are like this)

Walking up to that little stand of trees and clicking on it gives you some fruit

Down in the corner of the island is an Abandoned Village and a little pond

Clicking on the pond gives you some water

Clicking on the village gives you to option to search it

It always takes hours to search any place

This one did not yield anything. Sometimes you get a weapon or piece of armor. That's it for the entire island. You never leave the Strat Map.

[Lopov]

Interesting, so it's point'n'click, I thought that as you click on the village or on something else that can be interacted with, that the view switches to 3rd person.

Can combat take place from this perspective?

This post has been edited by Lopov: May 25 2020, 09:56 AM