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+--- Thread: Pillars of Eternity kickstarter physical-box rewards FINALLY shipped (/showthread.php?tid=6855)
Pillars of Eternity kickstarter physical-box rewards FINALLY shipped - A Black Falcon - 12th June 2015
My physical copy arrived yesterday, finally. It should not have taken months after launch to finally send them. And yeah, it's a bit disappointing; the box is a small cardboard box, in the style of '00s PC games, not a big box as the physical backer edition of Wasteland 2 was. That's too bad. The manual is good and I read through it, but a bit thin at only 71 pages -- it's just got the vital information without any flavor text and very few drawings. If they were trying to make something like the Baldur's Gate games, the manual certainly is not on their level. Two pages also came out of the manual on day one after reading through it, so yeah, not impressed with the quality there (should have gone with spiral-bound like the BG2 or Wasteland 2 manuals!). At least my box was intact and not crushed.
And I install the game to find that there is no way to patch the physical backer copy currently! Until they get around to making a patcher, it's stuck at version 1.04. Uhh... patches. Release them for people with disc copies, come on. The game is up to 1.06 now, on digital-download sites. This is a problem; even if 1.04 is stable, come on, have this set up. I really like that the edition in the box is entirely DRM-free, you just install it off the DVD and play without any online check needed at all. That's awesome. It's also interesting that the whole game can fit on one DVD despite being 15GB -- there are three discs in the case, but it's one each for Windows, Mac, and Linux. However, they should have had a patcher ready.
Still, it is nice to have; I like the artwork on the DVD case in the box, and even if the manual has issues and the box is smaller than it should be, it's better than just having the game digitally, I think. But I don't know if I'd back another physical box from Obsidian again, maybe not. InXile definitely did a better job with the Wasteland 2 box and contents -- that one wasn't just a larger box with a spiral-bound manual (90-something pages, so a bit more than this game but not thick), but they also included a cloth map. A paper map like BG1 or 2 would have been great to have in PoE. This has no map unless you pay for the much more expensive limited-edition tier, which I didn't do. However Wasteland 2 does require Steam even when installing from the discs, so PoE does win in that regard.
Pillars of Eternity kickstarter physical-box rewards FINALLY shipped - Great Rumbler - 13th June 2015
I don't even remember the last time I bought a physical edition of a PC game.
Pillars of Eternity kickstarter physical-box rewards FINALLY shipped - A Black Falcon - 13th June 2015
I haven't bought a new PC game in stores in several years now (I think Guild Wars 2 was the last one...), but I did back several physical-box PC game kickstarters.
Pillars of Eternity kickstarter physical-box rewards FINALLY shipped - A Black Falcon - 13th June 2015
On the note of Obsidian, http://www.pcinvasion.com/chris-avellone-interview-game-design-numenera-and-hints-about-his-future Chris Avellone has left Obsidian, and going by this interview here, it kind of sounds like something happened that no one is talking about -- not just an amicable split, maybe. He never mentions anything he did at Obsidian in this interview, only his work with InXile and such. That's definitely odd. I hope he just chose to leave, but it's not clear.
Regardless, I think it's a big loss for Obsidian. He hasn't been one of the lead designers in one of their games for a while, apparently (PoE is a J.E. Sawyer game), but he's a good writer and should be. He is currently working on some stuff for InXile's Torment: Tides of Numenera, but after that... who knows, we'll see.
Pillars of Eternity kickstarter physical-box rewards FINALLY shipped - Great Rumbler - 13th June 2015
Hard to say. He is one of the founders of Obsidian and a company director [meaning he probably has some kind stock interest in the company], so I'd imagine he wouldn't really want to say anything until all the legal things are taken care of.
Pillars of Eternity kickstarter physical-box rewards FINALLY shipped - A Black Falcon - 23rd June 2015
So I finally started playing Pillars of Eternity a few days ago. So far I REALLY love it; it really is like a new Infinity Engine game, after so many years! The Infinity Engine is my favorite RPG engine, so this is something I've wanted for a long time, and here it is. And it's a great game too, for the most part. I only have two issues with it, but I should say what they are...
First, the load times are obnoxiously long. There are often long black-screen loads before and after the screens with actual loading screens. It's really frustrating to have to wait so long just to go from one map to another, or into and out of buildings, or what have you.
And second, the resting system is overly cruelly designed, I don't like it at all. In Infinity Engine games, you can rest as much as you want. It's a key element of the game. But in this game you can't do that. You use up 1 campfire-supplies stock to rest while out exploring, and the number you can carry depends on your difficulty level. And of course you have to buy these at stores after you use them, unless you find them out in the wild. Worse, in Hard mode you can only carry TWO campfire supplies at a time! This is absurd and makes the game a lot harder than it should be. They really went all-in with limiting your rests and punishing you for taking damage, because the health system is a bit weird. So, you have Endurance, and when hit you lose it. If that reaches 0 a character is knocked out, and if all your characters hit 0 you lose. But if you win, everyone gets up and drains from their second health meter, Health, to refill Endurance. If a character with 1 health takes enough damage for their endurance meter to empty, they're dead forever, no resurrection, so if you've drained away all your health repeatedly refilling endurance, you really should either rest or retreat back to an inn. Resting refills health and endurance, but the number of times you can do is, as I said, is frustratingly limited. And spells are limited too, of course -- you can only cast a certain number of spells per level between rests, which makes mages frustrating because you can barely ever use their spells early on! Apparently later more spells might become per-encounter instead of per-rest, which would be good, but still, they really should have gone with a more D&D-like system here. The limited resting and health/endurance system is annoying and I don't like it.
Otherwise though, it's a really fantastic game so far. The graphics are beautiful, game well written and interesting, art great, gameplay mostly D&D-like apart from what I just described above, and more. I'm going to be playing a lot of this game, for sure.