Pillars of Eternity Wiki talk:Guidelines/Creature pages

Restructuring the creature pages
FurloSK, CompleCCity, based on your comments at Pillars of Eternity Wiki talk:Community portal, I take it we're all in agreement that the creature pages are in need of major restructuring. Here are my thoughts so far, split into two areas of concern:

Creature hierarchy
First, some observations:


 * Every non-kith enemy you meet in the game, is an incarnation of a "creature type", which can usually be uniquely identified by the name shown in its mouse-over tooltip, e.g. "Young Wolf".
 * Suggestion: Each of these should have its own page.

 Bear '-- Young Bear '-- Snow Bear '-- Young Snow Bear
 * Some creature types have sub-types, which can in turn have sub-types of their own:
 * Suggestion: Each sub-type should have its own page, but the base type should have a section "Variants" with a table (hopefully auto-generated with Semantic MediaWiki) listing all its sub-types.

 Battery Defender Battery Priest Battery Shieldwall Forge Guardian
 * In some cases, multiple creature types clearly belong to the same "species" or "family", even though there exists no creature type in the game of which they are all sub-types:
 * Suggestion: In this case, we should create a 'creature family' page that list them all (using the category title from the in-game bestiary as the page name, e.g. in this case "Battery Guard").


 * Some NPCs are their own unique creature types (e.g. "Sky Dragon").
 * Suggestion: Just merge the NPC and Creature infobox on those pages.

Here's an example of what these suggestions would mean (let's call this "option A"):

This is not the only way to handle the hierarchy, of course. Option B would be to always create a separate 'creature family' page to group multuple creature types under, even if a specific creature type of that name already exists, using a disambiguation suffix in the page title:

Benefit of option B would be that if readers follow a link like "'you will find drakes there'", they're not left wondering whether the author specifically meant only the "Drake" creature type, or if it could be a mix of Drakes and Young Drakes. On the flip side, it would be more pages (with potentially duplicate info) to manage, and disambiguation suffixes in page titles kinda suck and should be used sparingly. So I'm leaning toward option A, but don't feel very strongly about it.

--Ineth2 (talk) 16:10, 15 February 2017 (UTC)

Creature stats
There are many stats that could be represented on a 'creature type' page in an infobox and as Semantic MediaWiki properties, including:

Looks complex enough, but there are two further complications:


 * The bestiary is unreliable.


 * Some creature stats change based on the difficulty level (at least PotD vs non-PotD), and additionally based on upscaled vs non-upscaled critical path. You know, when you go to the White March or enter act 3 while your main character is above a certain level, the game will ask you whether you want to up-scale the creatures along the critical path, and if you click "Yes" this will, I think, both replace some creatures with different ones (e.g. Lion -> Elder lion), and change some unique creatures' stats (e.g. the Sky Dragon).

Ideally, we would capture all creature stats for all combinations of difficulty and upscaling – but it'll be difficult to do so while ensuring...
 * that we prevent the infoboxes from becoming too long and messy.
 * that contributors only have to enter/update stats for each creature in one place (it's specific creature page).

--Ineth2 (talk) 16:10, 15 February 2017 (UTC)

Comments
Phew, lots of stuff, not sure, I've understood all by now… Some "first" thoughts. So much by me for now. At the moment – and this will last a further week at least, 'til the end of the crowdfunding campaign – my priorities are in the updates, regarding PoE2. And in bringing more structure into the images category. Of which not only a creatures' overhaul would benefit from. --  -- You talkin' to me? -- cCContributions -- 09:29, 16 February 2017 (UTC)
 * You might want to take a look at some early thought by me about this topic…
 * Also at an early attempt, which lies idle since creation due to other priorities: User:CompleCCity/Sandbox/Dragon (as example for a creatures' overhaul – WIP).
 * I strongly support the idea of giving every single variant of some creature its own page, such as – from your example – the bear (creature), the snow bear, the young bear and the young snow bear.
 * The bestiary isn't only not reliable in terms of creature stats – and they not only differ with some WM upscaling, that's also the case in the main campaign for certain enemies –, it also is no perfect systematics for the various creatures, types and/or families.
 * I don't know, yet, if there's information about it in the offical guides for the game… Let's take the real-world humans, who are a part of the "family" hominidae. Transferring this to Eora means: kith = hominidae – humans, elves, orlans, etc. are part of this family.
 * I'd like to see beasts, wilders, primordial, spirits and vessels (which all have no own article, yet) being handled similar to kith. Then there are "races", like ogres, dragons, wolves, etc. – you are naming them "families", @Ineth2. These have subraces, like snow bear, sky dragon, etc. A young wolf, as well as a drake are not subraces or families of their own, they are stages of development. As far as I know, larvae aren't considered a race by their own, they belong to the insects, as their post-metamorphosis states do, moths and butterflies. So a wurm is a dragon, as well as a drake and the dragon itself.
 * This might differ from pure game mechanics, but as long as there is no real or official tool to view/edit the game contents, we can't reference these mechanics.
 * I then would go and make named creatures, such as Cailan, a pure NPC, though categorized as creature. You have the race field in the NPC infobox – insert "dragon" there, and it works.
 * No thoughts about the amount of disambiguations, this would bring. And as long as there is no article for "young snow bear", a redirect to a parent page is fine by me – though they all should be created over time.
 * For the stats… AFAIK there's no scaling in the main campaign. Playing on hard only changes the amount or type of enemy, not its stats. So if you encounter a xaurip high priest in a certain area/at a certain level (don't know which one's factored here), it might be of level 6, and in another area/at a higher level it may be level 7. Which explains the difference between the bestiary and the real stats, referenced in "The bestiary is unreliable".
 * As long as it's unclear, which the actual stats depend on, and how many different stats are possible (might there be a high priest of level 8 as well?), we should go with the basic stats from the bestiary, though making it somehow clear, that these may vary – perhaps without giving fixed values, or display some sort of range, or e.g. "Level = 10+".
 * I also support – similar to the current weapon pages – the SMW generated variants tables.

More comments on creatures
First of all: I completely agree that every creature should have its own page :-)

We need better categorisation (across the wiki actually), and I think it makes sense to have Beasts, Wilders etc on 'top'.

Therefore something along these lines
 * Beasts
 * Bears
 * Bear
 * Young Bear
 * Beetles
 * Primordials
 * Lurkers
 * Forest Lurker
 * Lurkers
 * Forest Lurker

I think this gives a good enough hierarchy, without over-complicating things. Then we use categories. Maybe something like: Then cross-categorise with Category:Pillars of Eternity bestiary and Category:Pillars of Eternity 2 bestiary. Then you magicians can swing the wand and make dynamic lists, like for e.g. weapon pages :))) Looking at above comments, I therefore pretty much agree with User:CompleCCity
 * Creatures
 * Beasts
 * Bears
 * Young Bear
 * etc

I did start to add more data and creatures to the 'master' creature pages, like Vithrack, but haven't completed it due to uncertainly about the best way to do it. Pangaearocks (talk) 01:30, 20 August 2017 (UTC)

Pillars of Eternity II
With the second game coming out in around 6 months, it means the Wiki will need some transforming to turn it from a one-game wiki to a multi-game wiki. In terms of creatures, I really like the approach they have done over at the Witcher Wiki, where for creatures and items that appear in both games (or three in their case), information about them is collected on the same page, with different infoboxes. It makes for a good structure, it's easy to find the info you want, and even compare the same item/creature across different games. Practically, it means it will be easier for users to edit pages when it comes to links. They can use Shadow instead of e.g. Shadow_Pillars of Eternity II One example of what it might look like: https://witcher.gamepedia.com/Drowner

Naturally we need more stats and such, but in terms of the structure moving forward, I think this makes sense. Pangaearocks (talk) 01:29, 20 August 2017 (UTC)