Do we know if Obsidian has managed to overcome the technical problems with Unity that plagued PoE?

  • We have updated our Community Code of Conduct. Please read through the new rules for the forum that are an integral part of Paradox Interactive’s User Agreement.

Arsene-Lupin

Sergeant
34 Badges
Aug 31, 2013
53
5
  • Europa Universalis III
  • Tyranny - Tales from the Tiers
  • Magicka 2
  • Sword of the Stars
  • Magicka
  • Heir to the Throne
  • Crusader Kings II
  • Divine Wind
  • Europa Universalis III: Chronicles
  • Age of Wonders: Planetfall
  • BATTLETECH: Flashpoint
  • Shadowrun: Hong Kong
  • Shadowrun: Dragonfall
  • Shadowrun Returns
  • Stellaris: Apocalypse
  • Stellaris: Humanoids Species Pack
  • Age of Wonders
  • Age of Wonders III
  • Tyranny - Bastards Wound
  • Age of Wonders: Planetfall Deluxe edition
  • Surviving Mars
  • BATTLETECH
  • Stellaris - Path to Destruction bundle
  • Stellaris: Leviathans Story Pack
  • Stellaris: Digital Anniversary Edition
  • Tyranny: Archon Edition
  • Stellaris
  • Pillars of Eternity
  • Cities: Skylines
  • Warlock: Master of the Arcane
  • Stellaris: Synthetic Dawn
  • Stellaris: Distant Stars
  • Imperator: Rome
  • Europa Universalis IV
I'm specifically concerned about PoE's inability to render very many characters on a map. Obsidian tried to make it less noticeable by making the areas smaller, but it's still super noticeable in the Defiance Bay maps where you can hear the ambient SFX of a bustling city while only a single NPC is rendered.

Does anyone know if this is still an issue?
 
It's Obsidian. It's going to have serious technical issues at launch, but be fantastic if you're able to play through them. Alternatively, it will be pushed out the door before it's finished and the last act will be horribly rushed and probably just a mindless dungeon crawl through a horde of boring enemies.

I love Obsidian to death; they're easily my favorite RPG dev team. But patterns emerge after awhile :)
 
It's Obsidian. It's going to have serious technical issues at launch, but be fantastic if you're able to play through them. Alternatively, it will be pushed out the door before it's finished and the last act will be horribly rushed and probably just a mindless dungeon crawl through a horde of boring enemies.

I love Obsidian to death; they're easily my favorite RPG dev team. But patterns emerge after awhile :)

They are good nowadays. In olden days, Obsidian was... well, back then they could probably cause a BSoD by playing Minecraft.
 
They are good nowadays. In olden days, Obsidian was... well, back then they could probably cause a BSoD by playing Minecraft.

Eh, even Pillars had a few crippling bugs at launch. My particular bugbear was that any abilities that left an effect on the map--like traps or the frost steps left by a chanter's songs--remained permanently in the game's memory. If you used abilities like that, loading times would get longer and longer, reaching about 2 minutes per screen for me--and with the game installed on an SSD.

It made the game either unplayable or a good chance to read a book, depending on your tolerance level. I still pushed through and loved it, but it just goes to show that Obsidian will always be Obsidian.
 
Obsidian games were always shit from a technical perspective, I never played NWN2 because of they're bad character movement. I even installed a 3rd party program that modifies how the character moves and managed to play half the game with that lol
I wish they would hire a good programmer but they only focus on level designers and artists...
Btw I just finished PoE yesterday, never played it till now because I waited for patches then expansions and more patches. And still the latest expansion has some bad issues like a pink fog glitch in some areas lol but the game was fun.
Another thing while playing PoE I had developer commentary on and it's just sad how they changed the game and cut from it since lack of time and that lack of time comes from the fact they moved some veterans from the team to a new project during mid development (to Tyrany maybe?) and this left a few new junior members to finish things up.
 
I find it hard to blame Unity, as there have been plenty of other Unity games without these problems. Let's be real as well, it isn't like Obsidian hasn't launched buggy games before. Whether it is an issue with their programmers, their QA process, or some combination we may never know.

I do believe this is a separate team and all we can do is hope for the best. At least Pillars has seen a lot of post release support and honestly that is good enough for me.
 
They are good nowadays. In olden days, Obsidian was... well, back then they could probably cause a BSoD by playing Minecraft.
The thing then is that they were under the thumb of Atari. They were so meddling nobody could make a decent non-buggy game under them. It would take mountains of patches to bring it to norm.

That's a main reason why nobody wanted to use the DND license for so long. They were toxic. A lot of the other major publishers from that era were the same way, such as Sega.

PoE was buggy in some ways but no more than any other recent games i've played and certainly not like Atari era Bioware or Obsidian.

Look at all the games released under Atari post-Infogrames and you will see a list of games plagued with bugs.
 
One thing that annoyed me about pillars, was how character development was so heavily weighted around these best in slot type items.

Character builds weren't "I want to make a tanky melee fighter" it was "I want to make a tanky melee fighter, but to do it I need this item and that item and this other items and then boom I have my character!"

Basically, instead of augmenting builds, items MADE builds.

I much prefer the augment approach, which allows for a more take it or leave it style of character development.

Now, keep in mind, this is strictly for path of the damned. You could beat Pillars with just about anything on lower difficulties, but on higher difficulties, especially the first 1/3rd of the game, the game was a delight, difficult, challenging, items were not so intertwined with the builds. However as you progressed, if you didn't want the game to be a brutal slog, you had to adopt an item centric min/max build, and it kind of sucked.