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Sep. 20th, 2021
You know what, I’m just gonna do some misc Pillars of Eternity gushing:
1): It’s so much harder to minmax, because every stat is at least slightly useful to every class. The equivalent of Strength also improves your spell damage, Charisma determines your armor class, and when you push someone flat to the floor, your Intelligence determines how long until they get back up. Choosing to have a terrible stat actually feels like you’re giving something up.
2): The second game does a lot of stuff to make it more “approachable.” I didn’t welcome the stuff that made all the classes more similar (I liked the first game having Wizards learn spells from scrolls!), but it’s elegant how most status effects are variants of stat buffs and debuffs. They come in three tiers each, where the first tier just increases or decreases the stat, while the second and third have additional effects, and they can cancel out by level. So if you have a basic intelligence buff, and the enemy tries to Charm you, they cancel out enough to Confuse you instead. It incentivizes having a lot of kinds of buffs, so the enemy can try to Frighten or Sicken you, and you can put out a Charisma or Constitution buff and say “nope.”
3): Starting with the first game’s DLC, they do a lot better about remembering you have magic, so you can do things like using a water spell to take down a fire barrier that blocks your progress.
4): Some species don’t have an organized government for historical reasons, or have difficulty communicating in human verbal languages, or just don’t interact with surface-dwellers that often, but there aren’t really any “evil” races. You can sometimes negotiate with this setting’s equivalent of an imp or a mind flayer, and when you can’t, it’s because the individual is a bloodthirsty git, not the species.
1): It’s so much harder to minmax, because every stat is at least slightly useful to every class. The equivalent of Strength also improves your spell damage, Charisma determines your armor class, and when you push someone flat to the floor, your Intelligence determines how long until they get back up. Choosing to have a terrible stat actually feels like you’re giving something up.
2): The second game does a lot of stuff to make it more “approachable.” I didn’t welcome the stuff that made all the classes more similar (I liked the first game having Wizards learn spells from scrolls!), but it’s elegant how most status effects are variants of stat buffs and debuffs. They come in three tiers each, where the first tier just increases or decreases the stat, while the second and third have additional effects, and they can cancel out by level. So if you have a basic intelligence buff, and the enemy tries to Charm you, they cancel out enough to Confuse you instead. It incentivizes having a lot of kinds of buffs, so the enemy can try to Frighten or Sicken you, and you can put out a Charisma or Constitution buff and say “nope.”
3): Starting with the first game’s DLC, they do a lot better about remembering you have magic, so you can do things like using a water spell to take down a fire barrier that blocks your progress.
4): Some species don’t have an organized government for historical reasons, or have difficulty communicating in human verbal languages, or just don’t interact with surface-dwellers that often, but there aren’t really any “evil” races. You can sometimes negotiate with this setting’s equivalent of an imp or a mind flayer, and when you can’t, it’s because the individual is a bloodthirsty git, not the species.