Looking Back and Moving Forward with Pillars of Eternity
ฝัง
- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 23 มิ.ย. 2024
- In this GDC Europe 2016 session, Obsidian Entertainment's Josh Sawyer looks at the origins of Pillars of Eternity, and how Obsidian aimed to update the classic PC RPG genre while paying tribute to the games that inspired it.
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Video games aside, Josh is just one of the most interesting and engaging speakers I've seen! All of his talks are just great.
I am so sad that Deadfire didn't perform comercially. It's freedom had hints of new brilliance. Yes it had weaknesses, but the things which were good were so good. With more money and 2 years more time ... wow what would have been possible. The dev team behind this is so talented. Love the game either way.
blame stupid pirate setting, dull and boring story, Nekataka being too big with fedex quests taking 30% of the game, bad pacing, bugs at launch, low FPS even on high end PCs, DLS that takes places before the ending, etc etc
Well hey Avowed will give the setting another chance, so there's that.
@@Jack91790 But it won't be PoE. Josh said that he doesn't like classes and attributes and by the looks of it, Avowed will be very linear in this aspect.
They really didn't needed Avowed, they needed a PoE sequel or at least an spin off.
PoE2 was amazing, the best game released in the past decade or so.
I feel like part of that was due to lack of marketing and ad presence. I didn't know Deadfire was a sequel until almost a year after its release, and I remembered the original game getting all kinds of ads and such, whereas I saw nothing for Deadfire. Maybe I just wasn't looking for it, but press coverage seemed to be next to nonexistent for it.
Yes, it is a shame. This could indeed have been the new Baldur's Gate. Great game, but underfinanced. I'm happy that such games still happen in times of abos and free-to-play(harhar)
I'd listen to an hour of anything Josh would have to say. He's just so interesting!
No. Information is fine. But he talks weird. I know somebody who talks like that.
@@seanleastria4478 I... What?
Yeah, love the guy!
Pillars was my first isometric rpg and converted me to its fandom. Breaks my heart that deadfire didn’t sell well, the game was remarkable.
it wasn't remarkable. pirate islands are boring for an rpg setting. A dance with Rogues shits all over poe2 and i got 100 hours in poe1 so i will state with full confidence that poe2 let me down. if there is ever a poe3 please do not go near pirates or islands it is dumb and shallow.
@@Pekopekope how the fuck a set with pirates in a market full of generic medieval fantasy settings is supposed to be boring?
@@templariox32 they compared it to a porn mod for Planescape so they're not a serious person
Deadfire actually did end up selling well it was just an extremely slow ramp
Pillars 1 and 2 are among my absolute favorite games. I sincerely hope we'll see a third installment some day, but until then I'm really glad that at least the world of Eora keeps going in Avowed.
Wow it's so nice just to see game developer being honest. We made a game this is where we did good this is where we failed. And not our game is amazing and next will be even more amazing.
more more more MORE MORE MORE MORE Pillars of Eternity GDC
Man I really love hearing Josh talking about games and development, it is clear when he does that he loves games and also love listening to what the fans are thinking, feels like he would be a player has he not become a developer.
Just now playing Deadfire…. lore/world a bit much to take in going in blind, but the gameplay…. Wow! Loving it.
39:18 "It's not just 10 people on your forums arguing about one aspect of your game."
I remember 10 of us arguing the absolute toss for weeks about whether or not there should be sticky-tanking or standard IE RTS movement. I got my way, and would go on to regret it.
I just finished pillars on the switch, loved it! Can’t wait to play dead fire in March. Such a good game to play on a handheld.
I'm playing pillars 1 on xbox and was looking to get pillars 2 on switch but it's surprisingly mia, xbox it is
@@robby024 yeah next gen consoles are the the way to go because the loading screens suck in that game
Just a point of reference for the developers. The game took me a week on and off before I really got really into it and understood what I was doing. Then when I was around level 4 I couldn’t stop playing the game because it was so good and addicting. I complained that some of the models you controlled weren’t cool enough looking. So more character customization and body types would of been really cool. Once I was able to use big head mode I had a lot of fun with that. I found it cool and endearing. Thanks for making Pillars its an epic game. It did have a lot of soul. The difficulty was what kept bringing me back. Challenge is very important. It legitimizes a game. I believe games like these should come with a note when you install. Saying to stay with the game until you get higher level because it just gets better and the firsts parts are just to get one accustomed to the game. I think the game should start by giving you a taste of what it will be like later. I have over 200 hours playing this and deadfire
Pillars of Eternity had its issues, but I enjoyed it even more than BG1 or BG2, and I wasn't coming from a place of nostalgia either. Played them in order BG1->BG2->PoE for the first time last year.
BG2 still beats poe pretty much for me on all fronts, poe2 is a closer match i’d say. But i do admit that the fact that i play bg games on pc and with mods plus personal edits versus poe series on console make it a somewhat crooked comparison. I played literally all the old games he mentioned before i played the ie games lol
@@hanli5416 I played BG1 religously back in the day. Did some runs on BG2 but not so much as BG1 and I have to say, PoE is 100% better than those games. The build variety that makes everything viable, the intricate setting, the dialogue and writting, art style and so on.
I also hated AD&D (THAC0 and multiclass suck) and could only get into PnP when 3.5e was released though, so I'm kinda biased.
@@abnnizzy i actually rate bg1 lower then poe series completely. Bg1 was too much a battle mechanic game for me. Bg2 was way more character story driven with npc interactions banters and quests. It is the main reason why i pretty much finish games in this vein bg1 and icewinddale series pretty much just once and finish games like bg2 and dragon age origins at least 4 times over.
Offcourse like you biased cause my roleplaying forays actually started in The forgotten realms so i knew a lot of bg lore before the games plus my pen and paper games were ad&d rules so very familiar with thaco systems and bg is dumbed down for me lol. Not to mention prolly nostalgia but i like classes and multiclass structure, however roleplay wise i like just picking one class and match party around it over multiclassing and becoming weaker jack of all trades.
Even while known as munchkin and rules lawyer of the group i actually kinda disliked 3.5 for its level up and features buildswise. Like pathfinder while having those options is great i somehow feel having too much freedom in having weird somewhat conflicting skills (roleplaying wise) leads to op characters that kinda break the story immersion for me. Yh i know it is conflicting considering my penchant for doing this within the confines of the older ad&d rules lol.
@@abnnizzy nope. Bg2 is by far superior in almost every way. There is a reason poe2 didnt sell well and why it reviewed mediocre. It just wasnt very good, sadly. It was better than bg1 for sure, because honestly bg1 kinda sucks lol.
@@johnathanera5863 ???
PoE2 is at 88/7.8 on Metacritic, that isn't "reviewed mediocre" by any means whatsoever, in fact, its a great review. Baldur's Gate 2 EE, for example, is sitting at a 78/7.4 score there, so you can make of that what you will.
Also, the game flopped only on the projected months, while it sold only 110k copies the first day it was released and didn't made the cut on Obsidian projected months, it actually sold A LOT after some time. Josh even said it left the whole team confused and they don't know why or how this happened.
I won't say thats the real reason cause even Josh said he doesn't know what heppened, but a lot of people seems to think the only reason it didn't sold much in the projected months was because of piss poor marketing and people for some reason didn't liked the "pirate" theme of the game which I, on the other hand, absolutely adore. After the reviews kicked in and people started to notice the game, the sales skyrocketed.
When he talks about how the game was "maybe too serious".. That's why I love about it, it respects me and it doesn't make the story seem like it doesn't matter. It's one of the reasons I MUCH prefer it to the Divinity series which is full of stupid goofing around and jokes that drag down the story to the point where I start to think "well if everyone keeps making jokes all the time, maybe it isn't that serious".
Yeah... except for the part that 90% of the early dialogue is kickstarter backer fanfictions.
Tyranny felt more like a serious game than Pillars ever could. I thought I was just reading flavor text most of the time.
@@idunno402 not sure what you mean; I get the npc backer stuff but i very quickly learned to skip all of that.
@@robzs8388 Yes, "golden backer-plates", wouldn't mind if it was just that, but the opening is also horrible. There's no sense of direction with the early story, you're just some dude / dudett who stumbles upon a machine and gets mind-reading soul amnesia. The game tries to portray it as some serious condition with awakening lore and all that later, but falls flat on it's face early. The only relevant story pay-off is Council of the Stars, which is fairly late into the game, when you start talking to the gods (and it is only when you get here, when you can make sense of all that talk about the different types of gods early on, unless you religiously read ALL the books on every god, and are really into the manuals that came with the game)
There's nothing wrong with complex worldbuilding (which the game is really good at) but how you're introduced to it is absolutely relevant. Throwing world-specific buzzwords(which makes not having the tag system from Tyranny and Poe 2 even more noticeable) and flowery prose at you right from the get-go is not good, and absolutely lessens the impact the rest of the game will have.
Take a look at how Engwithans are introduced, you're immediately exposed to the worst. most violent of the bunch and they slaughter the caravan, but then you don't really get to really find out about them until the very last few acts, when you reach twin elms, by which point you could give less of a fuck about what they did to the caravan, because so much stuff has already happened.
I can go on and on about this game, it's one of my favorites but nowhere near well written as people claim it is. The "bear through the early part, it pays off later" trope is extremely apparent here.
@@idunno402 sure i was merely responding to the idea that a great bulk of the writing is in any way interfacing with backer fan-fic :P
@@robzs8388 Yeah, but it doesn't add to the story in any way either, which is a waste of the Watcher's talent.
Honestly, being someone coming from the mmo side od crpgs moreso than the single player ones, this game initially reminded me of ultima online w the combat feel and is one of the reasons it really stuck with me.
It's interesting he says PoE1 is very Eurocentric as it struck me as being the rare fantasy setting that is actually very American. You have this large empire with lots of nobles that go to a new landmass and found a colony there. That colony then rebels against the empire and becomes an independent country that prides itself on freedom and a rebellious spirit. They also have to live alongside the natives of the land who they have a very rocky past with. It also has a real melting pot thing going on; normally in fantasy you have "elf country", "human country", "dwarf country", etc. In PoE any of the races can be found in any of the countries and none of them are more or less, say, Dyrwoodian.
That sounds like Europe.
Eurocentric in the context of fantasy tends to mean drawing mostly or only from European mythologies, rather than having politics or demographics comparable to Europe.
the modern rpg game was invented in america . the themes vary but fantasy tends to grab alot from European lore .
I just recently got into isometric RPGs. They are really good. I also like the fact that they are not as bloated and riddled with crap like most of the AAA games that take 5-7 years to make. So far, this year, my favorite game has been Wasteland 3. It is so dang good. I have yet to try Pillars of Eternity. I really want to buy it.
If you get the chance, its not isometric but a game you at least should try once in your life, and that is Darklands (1992). It's old as hell and some mechanics (specially the hotkeys) can be a pain in the ass in the early hours, but once you master the game mechanics and character creation, there is not a single RPG that can resist to be cracked.
Just get the GOG version, modify some game files to activate the FM Synth sound (because the Midi is broken thanks to Microsoft's 'clusterfuckation' of the emulated midi map on Windows), get a picture of the "copy proction" symbols, and there you go.
I would reccomend you the Gold Box series of Advanced D&D too but they overuse the manual, of course there is a tool called "Gold Box Companion" that fixes most of those problems, but it would require some heavy modification and learning, that i don't know if you're up to (cuz' you entered into the isometric realm not so long ago). The point is... there is an ocean of really great titles out there, have fun with them and for the sake of the lower planes, go crazy with your role playing because that's where the fun lies.
Gonna be honest, at 32:42 Josh mentions how people weren't crying out about not being able to play halflings or gnomes - I am apparently one of the few who saw the Orlan and cried because I couldn't play my tiny-man without looking like a creature from Labyrinth
I was just talking about Darklands today...hell yeah.
I would of loved to have been given the opportunity to work for a company like this making games like these. Ive always been fascinated by the rpg experience. i would love create something a bit more realistic in the sense of gated knowledge; starting out as average joe and learning new skills/classes by joining certain groups or gaining certain reputations. Molding your own unique path each and every playthrough. ( like joining the order of paladins to learn there ways but doing so blocks u from joining other orders at the same time, so if u left the order for another u become an enemy cuz you hold their knowledge and are essentially a traitor)
ah, so that´s the guy... I LOVED the levels in IWD/ IWD2, in fact were my favs of the D&D games back when.
POE Deadfire is one of my favourite cRPGs and I've played pretty much all of them, I dont know what in the systems clicked so well for me since I didnt even like the first POE that much (my main gripe is how overly verbose it could be at times and the ending was a bit weak or at least not clearly explained, also Ship > Stronghold).
I am always sad to hear how it didnt do too well, specially compared to Divinity OS 2, which in my opinion isnt that good, I wouldve rather seen Baldur's Gate 3 from Obsidian :(
The new turn based combat system saved Deadfire for me. I'm convinced that this system is the key to make Pillars more successful. Granted, it could use a few tweaks (only ONE action per turn? Really?), but all in all the battles became so much less chaotic, it was a different game entirely.
Oh, yes. And make the ship battles like those in Pirates!. I imagine that would not harm the budget to much and would be WAY more fun.
Aah, the game that saved Obsidian from closure.
If I could ask for one thing from this guy's team, it would have been for actual ship battles in Deadfire instead of a lame turn-based narrative event after all the resources you dump into the ship--especially given that boarding the enemy directly is almost always more likely to succeed than the ship battles due to bad RNG mechanics.
The only thing PoE Deadfire failed was sales. Everything else is brilliant to the core. Pretty sure it was just a mix between bad release period, saturated market at the time and not enough marketing. It certainly had nothing to do with the game itself.
to this game be perfect only needed co op mode, would be insane
there was maybe 3 big things that didn't vibe with me when playing the games.
quick summary: hard to understand game mechanics, restrictive gameplay and hard to gauge power levels.
i think most of these things was exacerbated by the fact you had so much to manage while being completely foreign to the game itself that you had to grasp or understand before you could fully immerse yourself into the game.
a good idea for anyone playing the game for the first time is to just have a small unfinished playthrough trying to understand how the game works and how the game wants you to play it before you make your actual playthrough in which you fully immerse yourself into the story and game itself.
(detailed explanations below of my issues with the game of my first playthroughs of them.)
The first thing i had serious problems with for a long time was how to actually play the game because certain things wasn't clear enough or explained to me.
for example in the first game i went through the entire game except the end not knowing there was "health potions" even though i tried looking for them but i was looking obviously for the wrong kind of thing when i was looking for a vial of red liquid that said health or healing on it or something along those lines instead of what it actually was,
a small bottle of blue liquid that was called something like endurance restoration.
which in hindsight makes sense but because endurance is not how you usually measure your health in games it didn't click for me until i went looking far and wide for potions that would aid me in killing the last boss so i read up on every potion i could buy carefully (mind you this was about 60-80 hours into the game).
Also how fights worked, could i run/retreat from a fight? or was it necessary try to beat it or lose and no way of trying to circumvent that fight when you've actually engaged into the fight.
i only assumed that you fought and either won or lost and if you lost you then only had the option to try and avoid that fight if you could.
but if you accidentally engaged into the fight which you assumingly couldn't retreat from and which you probably didn't want to fight your only option was to reload to your last save.
like certain key things could have been more clarified i feel like from a games perspective so it's not an experiment for you to find out unless you try actively experimenting with it or search it out.
the second thing that felt off was that lots of things felt more mandatory to do, like you had to get that castle, you had to improve your ship, you had to do certain quests even if you don't want to do them purely because you would either get stuck in the game or be really behind in terms of strength of the party itself in some way.
the third thing was perceived strength, i had often very little idea how strong something was in correlation to my party until i actually faced off with that said thing or how strong certain abilities or spells or attacks were just looking at their statistics until i've used them and even then it was kind of muddy because you have a whole party to manage and they are all doing stuff to the enemies so it can be hard to discern what's what unless you are willing to sift through the combat text and read a lot of descriptors on what the abilities actually do until you can kind of grasp the power of it. but that thing which gave you an indication of skulls was very welcomed as it kind of gave atleast some easy power indication at some point in the game.
but as an example i had a hard time differentiating if example pirate A was harder than pirate B or identifying what they were gonna do by just looking at them from a quick glance or how much stronger is pirate B compared to pirate A, or even how strong is an elemental blight compared to a pirate.
it's like looking at an ant and an anteater and not know which was actually stronger or how big the power disparity was between them.
I agree with you. I'd also add that not only could you not really gauge enemies before fighting them, even when you were in the fight it could be hard to tell what was actually going on. Someone suddenly has half health (sorry, Endurance, ha) and you have to search through 55 lines of text to see why. I've played a LOT of RPGs of all types and I've never had so little idea what was going on in a battle as I have in PoE. And yes, I've played BG and all those IE classics but they were much slower paced and many of the classes/enemies only auto-attacked.
@@matroska_5625 yeah there was still chaos but it was much more manageable, but i guess maybe running with a smaller party or really using the AI system to manage it might be it's saving grace though, but still it's a lot of hassle and you ideally want a full party i suppose normally aswell if you're not used to the game.
29:20 I love mods but sometimes it does go badly i.e. the "Hot Coffee" mod.
Murder hobos :-D
wait... i played darklands, who the hell hasn't... oh right i'm old, never mind.
I really loved PoE and PoE2: Deadfire. The only minor complaint I could give is to write less stuff to improve pacing. I'm sure there's some literature geeks out there that appreciate the long-winded prose, but I think games like Fallout and Mass Effect have taught us that shorter, more concise dialog can really improve pacing and even immersion. It felt more like reading a novel than being immersed in a story as one of many characters. I hate to say it, but I skipped a lot of the overly long descriptions and narrative exposition dumps - made me fall asleep. I think very little would have been lost if 80% of this type of narration were simply cut. Mostly as we get older, we don't have a lot of time to play, so cutting out stuff like this respects our time a lot more.
I disagree pretty strongly here. I feel like if they had done that they would be missing the spirit of the games they were trying to emulate. They are two very different styles but I think it would be sad if all games were paced and written more like Mass Effect. The experience of playing Pillars is more like reading a book for sure, and I'm not always in the mood for that experience, but there are a ton of games to choose from if I want to play a fast paced thriller. There are relatively few being made in modern day if I want to experience of reading a slow interactive novel.
Do you think it would be better to not have a mini map and have it like you reward the player for exploring and finding everything
Love me some old-school RPGs. PoE was alright until what like thirty minutes to an hour into the story, maybe even two hours, all of a sudden a huge narrative shift (the stronghold management) is thrust on the character. Had I known this in advance and been excited about it, I would have been thrilled. But maybe more like, a 10th level thing? To expand the gameplay once I've exhausted it, you know, not to overwhelm me before I even got started with it. Maybe some day I'll go back and give the game a chance, but it so completely derailed me with that and the generic boring sidequest I was given that I simply put it down and completely forgot the whole story and everything. But I can tell you who the son of Bhaal is.
This talk is more about lessons learned from PoE1 and how to apply them to PoE2(which they already did last year), rather than how they made PoE1.
First play through I just didn't mess with caed nua until later. In hindsight, the best way to deal with it is to make sure you're always working on building something while you're doing other quests (stronghold management is available from anywhere) and go back every few levels to deal with visitors and clearing a level or two of the endless paths dungeon under caed nua.
16:19 small mouse loop movements. As a casual gamer it was MUCH appreciated that I didn't have to memorise sweaty tryhard PC master race hotkeys to play the game.
What a tosser.
"Obviously mods are not necessarily a solution to your development choices."
Tell that to Todd Howard
POE has pretty bad character and NPC occlusion especially during battles - just the ability to rotate, even if it departed from the source, would have really helped with that
please bring back dungeon siege game!!!!!! please Obsidian!! was a good game back in time. But bring back the old Dungeon Siege not like DS3 :/ was good but not greate ;) ....please!!!
@Silvaren cRPG Not for me the fisrt was amazing, the DS3 was ok but not so much. The gameplay was good but sometime to strict. I hoppe they make it a new one. I hoppe!!
@Silvaren cRPG Your opinion, my opinion ;)
@Silvaren cRPG Dont care bro ;)
too bad deadfire flopped initially. they have to move-on from the "nostalgia" angle and just make good turn-based CRPGs with MODERN graphics. Owlcat and Larian Studios are very successful just doing that. meanwhile obsidian who ushered the crpg comeback is nowhere to be seen. still afraid of a crpg flop i guess.
I like Josh but I do think him and rest of the crew really dropped the ball with PoE 2. The open world system just doesn't mesh with a game that was praised for it's strong narrative and engaging themes. The first game was amazing, really well structured where you followed the main plot line but ocasionally had side quests opening. But the narrative was in the focus and it kept you glued to the screen. In PoE2 you are thrust in the world where you really don't care about the main plot, there is no urgency, there is no sense of feeling like you are experiencing something special. THe game was a mess of poor dialect choices, forgettable NPC's with unpronounceable names, uninteresting factions, boring quests and so on...
i feel the opposite of you, which is very weird. The first game doesn't capture me at all, and i can barely drag myself through half of it, even though I tried to go through it three times. PoE2 i beat in two sitting, and go through once more for each of the expansion.
@@vargrhelsing8042 Same situation as you regarding PoE1: lukewarm, humorless and overwritten story & dialogues. Drab, bitter, soulless setting. Combat was more a convoluted chore than a challenge.
I didn't buy PoE2. Moved on to Larian and CDProject to get my rpg fill.
Obsidian might have the same people, but something is way off. Maybe my preferences changed, idk.
PS: I loved the art, and Josh is a likable person... Feels kind of bad to write such harsh words.
It just taste, i guess. Nothing wrong with taste. Personally i hate the Witcher series to my gut, and Larian for me is more of a fun rpg than a, idk, epic one.
You right, although in retrospect my enjoyment of PoE 1 was alot to do with nostalgia and just wanting it to be good. BG and even Icewind Dale are much better RPGs.
@@vargrhelsing8042 Yeah, it's taken my 4.5 years to finally get to the end of PoE1. The main plot is barely there. You get a scene of spooky guys in some ruins, then that guy in the catacombs, then you see him at the end as his grand plan is revealed, then that's it. The game is over. Barely any main story and paced atrociously. It's an absolute slog doing dozens of hours of "find my son", "find a box for me", "speak to that person then come back" type stuff that has nothing to do with the main story which is about your past and Thaos. Out of an around100 hour possible playtime, about 20 minutes was spent on that stuff. Much of the rest is various people repeatedly telling you same pieces of general lore or talking about Hollowborn which, yes, is related to the main plot but is a side-effect of the villains' scheme, not the emotional core of it.
WTF? Ooh spirit ooh so important so fuck decent pathing and fluidity of control.
What exactly is anyone supposed to learn from this when Deadfire was such an uninspired yawn?
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