Creatures restructure

This page is for discussing the restructuring of creatures, both ahead of the release of Pillars of Eternity II, but also the wiki in general. Please refer to the Pillars_of_Eternity_Wiki_talk:Guidelines/Creature_pages for a detailed discussion on the topic. I've copied over my post from there as a starting point.

Introduction

Currently there are no creature pages; instead there are pages for creature 'families' for lack of a better term, such as Troll. This is certainly useful, and should remain, but the wiki would look more professional and content-filled for users looking for information if there is also a page for each creature in the game.

Suggestion on structure

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
    • ...

I think this gives a good enough hierarchy, without over-complicating things. Then we use categories. Maybe something like:

• Creatures
  • Beasts
    • Bears
      • Young Bear
      • etc

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

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: Becoming a multi-game Wiki

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

Stats and infoboxes

I've made a "Work In Process" (WIP) example: User:Pangaearocks/Beast. The image is arguably too large currently, and the loot list at the bottom has an error, but otherwise it's coming along okay I think? I've tried to use the colour scheme of the site, while also making some different design decisions.

Currently there is (partial) information about the stats for creatures on Easy-Normal-Hard/PotD difficulty levels in the creature 'master' pages, like the mentioned Troll. Considering the stats are similar for Easy-Normal-Hard, this is not necessary. In my opinion, the former category is enough information for the infoboxes in the (hopefully to-come) individual creature pages -- otherwise it will become rather cluttered, and possibly confusing. What we do know is that on PotD, Accuracy and Deflection is increased by 15. Informing about his might suffice? Adding up-scaling to the mix would certainly be confusing, so I think we should not delve deeply into that.

As mentioned above, and I know there are different approaches on different Wikis, I favour the approach where creature (and item) pages inform about the relevant items in both POE1 and POE2 (and POE3+?). This makes it easy to compare them, and crucially, it makes it much easier for randoms to edit pages without needing to use long and unwieldy links. And truth be told, we could use some helping hands in updating information :)

To most practically solve this, we could create infoboxes for the different games, so there is creature infobox and creature2 infobox (or maybe better, bestiary infobox and bestiary2 infobox).

A little admission, since I'm quite new to this: The item infobox is exceedingly difficult to wrap one's head around :cry:

First creature page published

After working on the template and underlying documentation, I have finally published the first creature page, the Adra Animat, using the Template:Infobox bestiary template. Hope people like it, and unless I encounter big problems, the idea is to create many more of these. The pages will be Stubs for now, with limited information besides the infobox, but hopefully that will change with time, and I hope others will join me in the cause. Pangaearocks (talk) 20:42, 25 August 2017 (UTC)