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Americans fought and died for the privilege of ignoring the Royals. I honor their sacrifice.

I don't want to repeat myself - but it seems that several people still don't consider the following (very basic) point that contradicts most of their arguments, including this one: If the sales numbers dropped so harshly because a lot of players didn't like PoE or Deadfire for whatever reasons (be it overly complex mechanics - you name it) then the user reviews would reflect that. Which. They. Do. Not. If anything then this is glaring obvious - and indisputable. I don't understand how such arguments can be repeated over and over again when this question hasn't been solved yet. Nobody who came up with such a theory was able to explain this baffling conflict. Even if some of those arguments sound reasonable: this simple point seems to invalidate most of them. But maybe there is an explanation for this. I just can't think of one. It would make some sense if players knew beforehand how the mechanics of Deadfire worked - like from playing PoE - and decided not to buy it then (hence no reviews from those players). But then why didn't they voice their dissapointment in the PoE reviews?

Reports are Winston want's $30M per season from a new contract : https://dailycaller.com/2020/01/09/jameis-winston-salary-demand-30-million/ $1M per interception!

So I tried reinstalling this game, see if the patches have done something to fix some of the problems it had. Just a few hours in, and I'm already sick of it. Reinforcements keep dropping literally in my face, and they get to act in that turn too. So much for DropShips being valuable and rare pieces of hardware that wouldn't risk being shot at. And that's only half the times, the other half enemies just... appear, out of thin air. I guess the designer dgaf about anything except muh challenge. And even that is pitiful because you can still spam laser vomit at center torso with max JJ for evasion and win against anything. The effects of bad AI and poorly balanced skills are apparently only made worse by the obligatory power creep from the actual expacs. So to give players something to do, missions are frequently 45-minute 12v4 slogs. Googled a bit, seems people believe that this is the epitome of "tactics". Can't tell what's worse, the bad design or a community that excuses any shortcomings while condescendingly waxing clausewitzian. Uninstalled, probably for the last time.

It sounds like you guys should have played Descent in the 90s'...

Majesty Gold HD

I must say I am finding the whole Prince Harry & Meghan Markle Brexit to be very entertaining. Usually I don't pay the British royal family any mind. Sure they do some good stuff but in the end they are sort of like national pets for Great Britain. Heck I think the Queen's corgis have more agency over their lives than she does. Now Harry and Meghan want out and everyone is shocked. Can't imagine why. I mean everyone has been so nice to her there right? The nicest things they said about her was that she had "exotic DNA". Less nice was she was "Straight out of Compton". And of course who can forget comparing he baby to a chimpanzee. Her treatment by the other royals hasn't been much better apparently. Yep... can't imagine why anyone would want to get away from all that.

for a goodly number o' years we indulged in commercial and residential real estate ventures. there were a common hurdle we faced with sellers, a singularly common hurdle. price at which a person would wish to sell property were as much a matter o' what the seller needed as it were dependent on what the property were worth. property is worth $5 million, but seller needs $5.5 million. solution? well, obviously the seller should invest a couple hundred thousand in improvements and advertising and then wait for the right seller in order to get price needed, yes? after making additional investments o' time and money, the seller would become even more wedded to needed sell price. such thinking is obvious idiotic, yes? *shrug* perhaps feargus needed deadfire to make X dollars? easiest way to cut costs o' pretty much any business is to fire folks. especial when the people working for you is well known and/or friends, cost cutting will be a painful endeavour and non-heartless bosses will go to extreme and sometimes stoopid lengths to avoid the obvious firings. "if deadfire makes X dollars, then i don't need to fire bob and jane and steve and..." am not making excuses for feargus. lord knows we wouldn't make excuses for feargus. am also having no idea what were feargus' actual thinkings regarding seeming curious development choices for deadfire. nevertheless, we has been in the situation where we needed X dollars to keep from firing bob and jane and steve. it is not an enviable position and am gonna admit we have gambled stoopid in the hope success would mean we wouldn't need make obvious needed labor cuts. turnover at even successful indie game developers is notorious common. being the boss at an indie game developer who genuine tries to keep good people employed for longer than the duration o' a single game development must needs be challenging. am not saying feargus pushed for vo, and ship-to-ship combat, and whatever other bad moves you wanna catalog 'cause he needed deadfire to be successful. we don't know. is an example o' a mere possibility. nevertheless, when otherwise intelligent people make obvious blunders, there is often a reason for such mistakes. perhaps the reasoning were foolish, but rare is obvious blunders as simple as they first appear. HA! Good Fun!

I have arrived some time ago into White March expansion of the Pillars of Eternity. The expansion is little bit harder than anticipated, but still doable First I have saved the Village of Stalwart from big bad Ogres and then, I have run around and tried to get as many quests I could, today I have entered the Russetwood and I almost get wiped out, thankfully I survived with my main character with probably 10 health or so . So far I am satisfied with the expansion

Dogs Prefer to Poo Along a North-South Axis " Researchers have found that dogs use Earth’s magnetic fields to align their bowel and bladder movements - and they prefer to relieve themselves along a north-south axis. In fact, canines will actively avoid going to the bathroom in an east-west direction, the study found. "

You mean because we won't follow your line of argumentation but keep challenging it with... reason? Sounds a bit like You can ask Gromnir why Josh left the forums. I can assure you our civil style of discussion was not the case. I'm pretty sure Josh could easily handle the forum in its current form. His departure had other reasons than simply not agreeing.

"I'm unable to make a coherent argument that addresses objectively-verifiable constraints on any theory/hypothesis, and am doing worse at this even compared to a forum poster who is literally perpetually in-character as an ogre mage, but it's clear it's everyone else's fault, not mine. I am a scientist, by the way." bye_felicia.gif

"Exhaustive critical scrutiny"? Yeah right. Basically your entire post boils down to: We who know what's what were having a wonderful discussion involving patting each other on the back about how incredible our insights are, and you who don't belong here barged into our discussion with an alternative view that we disagree with and reject. So we don't like you and you need to go away. Whatever. I'm not interested in this any further. The best thing Obsidian can do to make their next game popular is to completely disregard any and all "discussions" in this forum. It's no wonder Sawyer prefers to interact with every other forum except this one.

I'm going to go out on a limb and say when you sea-lion in and say "Sorry but I think you all are continuing to over-think and over-analyze this question." and keep making appeals to authority (repeatedly saying that you're a scientist) you're going to come off badly. I too also went to grad school in social science and live and breath data science as part of my day job in tech, but I'm not making underlining that fact in every other post except where it's actually relevant (e.g. using industry experience to explain why tool-tip-writing/internationalization can be extremely expensive). It does conflict with known data, in several ways: - it fails to account for the success of other numerically complex systems (not just P:K, but even Tyranny apparently did better than Deadfire) - it fails to make any convincing argument about a massive drop-off in sales from PoE1 to Deadfire; we have plenty of theories that can explain smaller drop-offs, but not something that is closer to an order of magnitude - despite your best efforts, it fails to account for Deadfire being a critical success in terms of both journalistic reviews as well as user reviews despite significant drop-off in sales As a social/behavioral scientist, surely you understand the idea of a lit review, to make sure that your research and findings are part of an ongoing dialogue and not just a non-sequitur or spurious finding. Well, we've been at this for months, and we've exhaustively discussed even points like yours throughout. When people raise issues like setting, marketing, or nostalgia as topics, it's because those are the only ones that have continued to survive exhaustive critical scrutiny. What you're doing is basically barging in without having done the lit review, pointing out something that may be true but with at best a minute effect size, and being surprised that we're not all just automatically deferring to your expertise.

I never have defined my character as skillfully as OP (I hate writing my own bio, having to do the same for my character would be just as grueling). However, I do find it necessary to define who my character is (past, personality, personal believes and goals) to enjoy most Obsidian RPGs. That was the main hurdle I had to overcome when moving from Bioware games to Obsidian's. Never played or really knew about table-top RPGs at the time, so creating your character, outsided gameplay stats was an abstract concept for me. Something I complained about was that I didn't have a character I would care about - while was invested in the conflict of Bhaalspawn, hero of Jade Empire or KOTOR, or Shephard, I found it difficult at first to care about blankslates of KOTOR2, NWN2. By the time I played Fallout: New Vegas, I read more about roleplaying, and decided to do a bit of an experiment, and defined my character before starting the game - and found the experience to be immensely engaging and satisfying. PoEs are probably first games I really tried very hard to roleplay, though it is still challenging for me not to metagame (for example I killed Llengrath in PoE1 because I didn't want to miss on the hardest fight in the game, even though reaching a mutual deal, was what my character would be more willing to pursue). When playing Outer Worlds I never felt a need to define who my character is, and I think that is one of the main reasons why it felt more like Bioware RPG, then Obsidian's - most decisions I made were based on what I personally believed was a better choice, rather then being based on my character viewpoint. Being able most of the time to find the morally superior middle ground only reinforced that playstyle.

I read something about The Banner Saga 2 having disappointing sales compared to the first when they ad moved away from Kickstarter and went back to it for the third game. I think the marketing associated with Kickstarter must be quite significant.

The important thing about Iconic Projection is - as Silvaren said - that it only has to overcome 25% of DR. This makes it a viable spamming option. And of course it heals which we shouldn't forget. Shining Beacon (as nearly all DoT effects) profits additively from MIG (which adds +x% of the base dmg per tick) and then multiplicatively from INT (adds more ticks) and crits (+50% duration, also adds more ticks). DoTs don't profit from Scion of Flame and such and also don't get increased dmg per tick from crits. So stuff like Merciless Hand won't work either. This would simply be too good since we already have MIG * INT * crit bonus which can lead to absurdly big dmg numbers. Priests have the ability to not only raise their MIG into stellar regions (Aggrandizing Radiance, Champions Boon, Minor Avatar) but also their INT (Aggrandizing Rad., Minor Avatar) and Accuracy (for crits, Aggrandizing Rad., Champion's Boon, Minor Avatar, Inspiring Radiance, Devotions...). Those mostly stack (Champion's Boon doesn't stack with Minor Avatar). This makes Shining Beacon one of the most devastating spells - I mean if you build around it. Also because it can be used as spell mastery later on and thus becomes 1/encounter. If you had 6 Priests and they all had Inspiring + Aggrandizing Radiance, Minor Avatar and Shining Beacon you could cast 6 beacons with +70 accuracy (since Inspiring Radiance stacks with itself) and +30% additive dmg (if you had only 10 MIG before) and if you crit (easy with +70 ACC) with an unbelievable duration. Everything that isn't immune or extremely resistant to fire will most likely die. If you already start with 20 MIG and 20 INT it's even more ridiculous of course.

But you are arguing with anecdotal references. Usually, if a game is sold 1,000,000 times and 10,000 players write a review (see PoE on Steam) or simply somehow voice their opinion and judge a game (when it lands on Metacritic) and the professional critics come to the same conclusion by the way - then first of all it's a relevant sample size and secondly it would be extremely surprising if all the players who didn't review the game hated it while the ones who did review it mostly think it's good. Very unlikely. This is no solid proof. Reviews are more like a survey - and surveys can be misleading. But it has a lot more substance than just picking stuff one didn't like and then bloating it up to be "the" reason for the sales drop (as if one's taste determines what most people like or dislike) - while at the same time ridiculing the arguments of others. I still saw no proper explanation for this (anecdotal reference is no proper explanation unless you reach a significant sample size - finding like 10 friends who support your claim is not statistically significant). I read a lot of Twitter messages that praise PoE and Deadfire. This is because I follow some Obs devs and WorldOfEternity. I never read bad things. Obviously nobody who hates PoE would go to Twitter and post it into the timeline of an Obsidian dev (I mean nobody but weird ones). So this is anecdotal reference ("So many people on Twitter loved it!") but at the same time it's meaningless unless those voices would reach significant numbers.

You mean Iconic Projection? Its damage has to overcome only 1/4 of DR (all spells which deal fixed number of damage do that) so it's pretty good option. Shining Beacon is DoT effect - those don't work with Scion of Flame, Secrets of Rime etc and don't gain bonuses from slayer talents too. Shining Beacon is great damage spell though. It's stacking with itself, so you can cast it several times in a row. Cleansing Flame will twice the damage from DoT effects. Enemies will melt quickly. Cleansing Flame has to overcome only 1/4 DR too, thanks to fixed damage. Best option to scale spell damage: incrase your Might. Penetrating Shot talent will overcome 5 DR so it is 5 more damage most of the time - it affects spells which hit only one target (can do splash damage near the target) and spells which hit in the line (eg. Crackling Bolt, so I guess Iconic Projection qualify too). Best part of Penetrating Shot is that recovery malus doesn't affect your recovery while casting spells, only base weapon strikes. You can use Vulnerable attack for spells like Divine Mark in the same way - it will decrease enemy's DR too for such spell. I've read that Glanfathan Stalking Boots and similar items increase spell damage too, but I didn't checked it. You have to flank the target by 2 party members or cast cipher power - Phantom Foes to activate damage bonus.

wow i hardly ever use mods, but i might break my rule just for this.

Poe's Law, man.

Dude, it's satire.

There's Magran's Blessing - the shield and Magran's blessing - the buff (but I'm not sure it's implemented). Irwena gives +1 to all skills, maybe they changed the name...

@Mannock I don't know about you, but even though the Packers should be favored in pretty much every matchup besides QB, I'm still having PTSD flashbacks to that 2014 NFCCG. @Injuries: One thing I'd like to see is the cap being adjusted for time lost to injuries. Something with a lot of conditions like if a guy is injured pre-season (or near the end of a season) and loses the entire ensuing regular season, don't count his salary against the cap at all, while maybe if they're lost for the season mid-season, count the games lost only half against the cap (half is better than nothing, but it's "only" half to reduce gaming the system which I'm sure teams would do with minor injuries if they got the full number back), etc. The cap is so, so important to constructing a football team that having a couple of key injuries can absolutely cripple a team, so it'd be nice to make the team's job a little easier on this front in at least regards to injuries.

This headline is just priceless: https://genesiustimes.com/democrats-sue-iran-over-right-to-use-death-to-america-as-2020-campaign-slogan/

Hello fellow no-resters. I take it you're all used to filling up your buff list to the point that it relays almost no useful information in combat. With the help of @Kvellen I wrote a mod to address this. Please help me make it awesome.

^ Maybe it's a New York thing? The J E T S Jets Jets Jets don't exactly have a sparkling record of draft picks and trades. Furthermore, over on the hoopsphere side of things, the Knicks are the posterchild for baffling drafting, questionable trades, and crippling contracts. The Nets aren't far behind them in those categories.

given expectations, deadfire sold poorly. expectations were all wrong. the fig campaign were successful; brought in loads o' money. while the pledges were considerably fewer in number, dollar total were higher for deadfire than poe. whatever sales expectations obsidian had for deadfire, the fig campaign shoulda' clarified the situation. poe disappointed many purchasers. no surprise. particular given the manner in which obsidian were advertising poe, many purchasers wanted poe to be bg3 ultra, combining all the stuff people liked bestest from the ie games. try and pinpoint what were the essential aspects o' bg2 and ie game success were elusive. nostalgia is emotional far more than rational, so trying to identify and balance essential features for everybody were a doomed proposition from the start. followers o' feedback for poe development no doubt observed how frequent the case people were not 'membering the ie games reality, but their recollections were illuminated and altered by the warm and highly personal nostalgia glow. even so, am suspecting obsidian did a pretty good job o' satisfying numerous poe purchasers. again, the robust fig pledges for deadfire revealed an enthusiastic core following, yes? obsidian failed to realize what they had and as such their expectations for deadfire sales were all wrong. invest more money to make deadfire were misguided. obsidian had built up considerable brand loyalty with a single game, but while fans o' poe were arguably more enthusiastic for deadfire than they were for poe, there were clear signs there would be fewer such fans. in spite o' such signs, obsidian indulged in extravagances such as full vo? ... given the fanbase created by poe, am suspecting (am no expert) obsidian coulda' made financial successful poe games in perpetuity just so long expectations and development costs were reasonable. in fact, am suspecting deadfire "failure" did not hurt poe brand loyalty. no doubt obsidian could still make successful poe games in the future 'cause the people who liked poe by and large liked deadfire and would probable buy a poe3. however, expectations need be reasonable. try and sell microsoft on the idea o' poe3 challenging bg3 sales would be fanciful. HA! Good Fun!

well, it's an indier indie game than deadfire. Also they didn't spend money on full VO

But then: why are the user ratings for PoE so good? One should think if so many players were disappointed this should lead to mediocre reviews. But it didn't. On Steam (very positive), on Metacritic (8.3 user score) - the user ratings are so good. That contradicts that theory (being the single biggest reason) a bit.

My image of humanity is generally positive. But this has nothing to do with underestimating people. It has to do with the time and money that the average player generally has at hand and the scope of sales numbers we are talking about. There surely are players who can't spare a lot of money but have time and will examine a game very closely before buying it. On the other hand there are players who don't have a lot of time but money so they just buy what they think looks good. And then there's a lot of players in between. Those specific behaviors cannot explain a massive sales drop like Deadfire's (compared to PoE) while - and I repeat myself - the reviews given by streamers, critics and users are nearly the same(!). So - if the problem was the execution of the things you asked above then the reviews should reflect that. Which they don't. So the overall quality and implementation of Deadfire doesn't seem to be the problem. But we discussed this in length already. So - is it more likely that a) all the players who passed on Deadfire did it because they consumed a lot of Let's Plays and asked themselves the same questions you did - or is it more likely that b) those players saw the new nautic setting and passed because they think "Hm... not my cup of tea"? If you ask me and lots of others b) seems to be more likely than a). So far we have collected some simple yet reasonable explanations why Deadfire dropped so hard (since reviews were on par which suggests implementation and quality was not the problem): Players didn't like PoE for whatever reason and thus didn't buy Deadfire - while new players wouldn't want to start with the second part (sequel problem) Players didn't hear/read about Deadfire (marketing failure) Players didn't like changes that were announced before release (e.g. party size reduction) Players didn't like the move from Kickstarter to Fig Players didn't like the setting (pirate vs. medieval) Other reasons like story, implementation, companions and whatnot can be an additional reason. But they can't explain such a massive drop while the reviews from critics and users didn't tank at all. If the reviews would have been bad then I'd say "sure". But they aren't bad. I didn't aswer your post because I object that there are players who asked themselves those questions before they decided to not buy Deadfire. That was not the reason. I'm just not thinking that this can explain a massive sales drop. I also answered because you made it sound as if the theory "the setting put people off" is somehow ridiculous while your theory "they all closely monitored influencers" is really what explains it all: Which sounds like a rather presumptuous approach that needed a refutation.

Because people. At least not in the way you suggested. Because "Ehh pirate game, no thanks" beats "So you know I had a little bit of time and watched the whole thing where StreamerDude played 123 hours of Deadfire and found out stuff about the mobile fortress, islands with skillchecks and meaningful variations during a chase for a god and now I think I'd rather buy Flappy Bird" as a reasonable part of an explanation to why Deadfire sold vastly less copies despite getting similarly good reviews from press, streamers and players.

@Shyla: Interesting. For me there's not much difference whether it's tabletop or computer RPG (in this regard). I never play myself but always try to combine a mechanically interesting character with a plausible backstory that explains his stats and numbers in a somewhat original way. And then roll with it. Never thought about it to be honest: that people might approach those two forms of "role-playing" differently.

@Boeroer That was what I was thinking, but it's never occurred to me. Something clicked reading this that I need to give this a try next time I start a game; writing backstories is one of my favorite things to do when playing tabletop games so it makes sense to try it here!

Obviously I can't answer for @Alendra - but that's totally the case for me. If I put some effort into a backstory etc. it immensely affects my choices in the game.

This… I like this! Thank you for sharing this, I really enjoyed reading the thought behind your character and her background. You really took my emotions for a turn on this and left me feeling for Alendra. I have a question for you, by writing out your character's backstory do you find that it changes some of the choices you make in the game in order to fit your character better? Did this help you play as Alendra instead of yourself?

Anyone else, who wants ultrawide-support for The Outer Worlds? Am I the only one? Hey Obsidian, its 2020 right now!

Or so guerilla marketing teams would have one believe. Though Aladdin is probably more a result of rewriting a story being a doomed effort, rather than some corporate sexism masquerading as veneer of progress #ghostbusters. Still Jasmine's number was awful all around, tonally a departure from the score, and thematically could have been actually empowering without immediately denying her her moment by turning her into a damsel in distress.

Dragons terrify you with their aura. Let a priest cast Prayer against Fear and you instantly gain 20 Accuracy. Or use a scroll with the same spell. Adra Dragon can be charmed - if you use Inspiring Radiance (+10 ACC), Devotions (+20), a marking weapon (+10) and then cast Whisper of Treason on her she will most likely kill all other ads for you. She can also go prone.

If Avellone would be such a legend that he draws in hundreds of thousands of customers by using his name alone then Kingmaker would have sold way better than it did, wouldn't it? Maybe it's indeed best to steer away from isometric RTwP for a while and instead try to establish the Pillars IP more with more popular game formats that don't need to feed on nostalgia - like a Skyrim on Eora or something like that. I would even be very happy with a more Battle Brothers of the Eastrn Reach, a Slay the Spire of Old Vailia or even a Faster than the Child of Light (all with more roleplaying tweaks). Just keep telling the story of the world with differnt games. Once your IP has drawn in more players that love and cherish the stories, the lore, the whole world you can shrug off nostalgic IE ballast and try again with an isometric party based RPG I guess. Or you simply use a smaller team with a smaller budget, use the actual Deadfire engine and focus on new story, quests, awesome vilains etc. and keep the mechanics as is. Lower sales numbers don't hurt if you don't put too much money into development, right?

I highly doubt it. I think also most of the tell-all came after Deadfire was out (that's how I seem to remember the timing because he was blaming low... sales?... on Feargus's insistence on using Fig). I would venture to say if you sampled the PoE1 audience, the vast, vast, vast majority would have no idea who Avellone (or JE Sawyer) even are. Obviously I can't prove this or have the resources to run such a survey, so at this point it's all opinions and buttholes, to paraphrase someone else.

There are some avellone die-hards out there. Definitely not 600k+ sales drop number of die-hards. Probably like hundreds, if that.

As someone who bought the game and spent 400h with it, I cannot say why would someone wouldn’t do that.

I actually waited a few seconds thinking something may be loading.

Here is a picture of them when they were older Pretty cool looking

More haunted hotel-like levels please.

If you don't have an engine preference, but want to mod—for modding [demo/portfolio] sake, try modding 'Legend of Grimrock' 1 or 2. It is very possible to make a functional map with encounters, in a matter of minutes to hours with the built in dungeon editors. Rapid (playable) results are good for building one's confidence. It also serves as a foundation to later modify with user scripts. You don't need to know any scripting to start with; it has a visual behavior interface for basic tasks. https://store.steampowered.com/app/207170/Legend_of_Grimrock/ https://www.gog.com/game/legend_of_grimrock With a bit of experience, it is possible to customize the default game assets, and make new ones; even new monsters, and to affect (and in LoG2 even rewrite) the game AI. They have a persistent modder's community forum where you can ask any question that come to mind—a receive technical answers.

I cant give you odds on finding a job but its never too late to learn new things and improve oneself. Good luck!