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The problem here is MS having a target of 30% profit for their games. So if Avowed/TOW2 came in at 20% profit, which by any measure would be a success story, the mere mention of them "not meeting sales targets" sets off an avalanche of "the games bombed/were a failure" type of unfair asinine comments which undermines those games and Obsidian's reputation. :(

I´ve been waiting for so long for the new patch to release just to learn that it´s still not possible to get the "all for none" trophy after dissmissing all crew members. It´s a known bug, mentioned more than once in the technical support area. I´ve killed two of the companions in my actual safe to check if there is any progress, but the tracker stucks at 1/6... It can´t be that difficult to fix that guys. I fullfilled every task to get the platinum trophy and I can´t get it. It´s very dissapointing! Playing on PS5.

Long time lurker here. For whatever reason still playing this game in current year - thankfully with some great mods like Elric's which dramatically improve the balance and experience of the game. I just got finished up with my latest run, using BPM + Community Patch and All Upscaling (Upwards only). Used the following party (Note that I used mods to change the character classes and attributes around so that I could effectively have a full custom party without missing dialogue) Me: Crusader (Devoted / Bleakwalker) Eder: Crusader (Devoted / Bleakwalker) Xoti: SC Beguiler Custom Char: SC Priest of Wael Tekehu: SC Skald The party was the most effective of any that I had ever done. The two crusaders used a Greatsword + Morningstar (Willbreaker w/ Modal always on) and were the primary front-liners. Once past the early game, they would have enough engagement slots and survivability to survive nearly anything. Triumph of the crusaders (Strong AOE for ~100+ seconds + full heal on kill) made it so the action economy of the priest was incredible. Almost zero reason to ever use healing spells other than in emergencies. The crusaders would use the Acc + Crit auras and the Heal/Armor ones. Because the Acc aura doesn't fully stack with the acc stance, I would make both of them use the upgraded cleaving stance. This would obliterate packs with FoD spam, hitting 200+ regularly on the greatsword character. The Skald would usually open with an empowered Eld Nary or summoned weapons w/ the unique sabre and then switch back to using a pike w/ the deflection reduction modal. The beguiler was incredibly strong and almost never needed to attack. The debuffs from the willbreaker (usually -10 or more Will + -25 fort), the Ngati Tusk w/ Hunter of Hunter, and nearly every affliction under the sun would debuff the enemies to the point where almost any skill would land and have a high crit rate. I think I killed the Magran Teeth dragon in under 20 seconds because the party just did so much damage (Eld Nary carrying big time). Maybe mortar monk does more damage, but this party has been the strongest in the 10+ variations of potd upscaled runs I had done. Haven't tried megabosses yet but I will soon Not sure why I made this post, but just wanted to give a big shoutout to Boerer, Thelee, and Elric for all the useful posts, mod contributions, etc. After playing so many different CRPGs over the years I just really appreciate how good the systems and depth are in deadfire. Rogue Trader, BG3, DOS2, are all great games but none of them have had me constantly lurking forums like a madman quite like deadfire has.

Just passing by and seeing this thread warms my heart 😀

Avowed could never be Elders Scrolls, because one big part of it being so popular still is it's easy moddability. I don't know why they just can't see this. If you put out your game on Unreal, there won't be any mods. The game will be forgotten in a month. This happens all the time with those games. You need mods, to keep people in the loop. Making mods for Bethsoft games is so incredibly easy that anyone can do it. Sure they sell more on consoles than PC yadda-yadda, but mods in the news are what brings people back over and over. Hell, you just have to look at Skyrim or FNV Nexus. The amount of mods for those games is crazy.

Not only Feargus.... Apparently Chris Parker et all were pushing for it too. That had carried over for far longer though. Avowed wasn't supposed to just channel Obsidian's inner The Elder Scrolls -- it was supposed to do that AND be multiplayer on top of it. If dev cycles and processes wouldn't be an issue, they wouldn't be talking now about trying to shorten them to three or four years as one of the main commitments. From Bloomberg: A few successes later, Urquhart and his co-founders were in talks to sell the business to the company that had almost killed it. During the negotiations with Microsoft, Obsidian’s executives assembled a slideshow presentation for the concept that would become AVOWED, pitched as an ambitious cross between megahits The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim and Destiny that would allow players to battle monsters together in a massive fantasy world. It was an impressive if unlikely proposition. “My thought when I first saw it was, ‘I don’t think there’s a team on the planet that could execute on this,’” says Josh Sawyer, Obsidian’s studio design director. Two years later, Obsidian stripped out the multiplayer feature, and a year after that it assigned a new director to the project. By the time AVOWED came out, it had been in the works for nearly seven years. Also pretty curious how Feargus now wishes that MS would allow for risky and/or smaller projects to be made still, when it was Josh Sawyer who had to once again (see Project Eternity) battle hard with Feargus to get Pentiment off the ground. He even considered to leave had it fallen through. Credits where credits are due: Back at Interplay, when Feargus suggested to a then little known company called Bioware that they better make their next project a D&D game, he struck Gold. No less as no decent big D&D game had come out in many years before. Otherwise, he really doesn't strike me as somebody that should get too deeply involved on the creative side of things (the other founders aren't as regularly "visible" with wonky decisions, as Feargus is pretty much the public face of Obsidian, but who knows...) You know who should be in charge of all things creative? Whoever came up with the initial idea for say Grounded. Not only does that game cater to a specific niche rather than trying to be a little bit of everything for everyone: "It's ELDER SCROLLS MEETS OBSIDIAN MEETS DESTINY!" (Scope issues aside: A game made for everyone is a game made for no one). Grounded, unlike most recent Obsidian games, also has a distinct hook that nobody else on the market has: "Oh LOOK! It's Honey I Shrunk The Kids -- THE GAME!"

That's upsetting. These games are very much for me. I don't finish a lot of games, but for some reason, Avowed and OW2 captured my attention and held it until the end. I'm disappointed that they aren't doing better financially. In comparison, while I enjoyed BG3, I never finished it. They did seem to do well critically, so I hope it isn't just unreasonable sales expectations. I don't know, I just hope Obsidian doesn't end up in another hole. They've been remarkably resilient so far.

I mean, there is no shame in taking a break. I've bought Elden Ring on release, played it for like a month straight and then stopped. A year later I picked it up again, played for a while, stopped again. Middle of last year I finally completed it, then went into the DLC... and after like half of it took a break again to finally finish it last week. This game is so big and it can get very tedious with the continuous attempts on bosses etc.. getting burnt out feels like a natural part of it at this point.

A single class Priest can absolutely fight in melee. It's just so that his damage output with a weapon would be better if he multiclassed with a class which added some melee prowess. But in general you can stand in the front line and swing a great sword. I place Xoit as SC Priest at the front line all the time - often with a Morning Star - and it works fine. Will she be tanking many enemies? No - but that's not her role. But she can stand her ground against an enemy or two for long enough. In Deadfire, a Priest of Berath can summon a spiritual great sword for himself which has a nice corrosive lash that grows if your reputation matches your god's dispositions. It can become quite powerful. That way even a single class Priest can contribute with weapon damage. If you are okay with giving up the highest tier spells you can multiclass with not much regret. I personally love to multiclass a Priest with the Helwalker Monk because this has two main kinds of synergies: better melee output: with stuff such as Lightning Strikes + Turning Wheel and some attack abilities such as Force of Anguish or Torment's Reach you can do some serious damage, especially when paired with the spiritual great sword (resulting in a shocking lash, a burning lash and a corrosive lash on the sword). Also the high MIG of the Helwalker leads to more weapon damage. the Helwalker can offer +15 MIG (+1 MIG per wound and +5 from Thunderous Blows) and +10 INT (Turning Wheel) which are both fantastic buffs for casting: INT enlargens the AoEs and prolongs all durations, MIG raises damage and healing power(!). Spells like Shining Beacon profit a lot from +15 MIG (higher dmg per tick) and +10 INT (a lot more ticks) and so does healing over time such as Consecrated Ground. Aso you can be a bit faster (Lightning Strikes add +5 DEX and +15% action speed) and get some other goodies. The Monk is a great multiclass choice for a lot of classes, Priest is no exception.

I think I'm actually leaning more towards caster classes tbh. I get a bit bored with the melee types and they make me play bad. (That's my excuse and I'm sticking to it 😆)

Necro'ing to say that this build was as fun as advertised. Thanks for the work to build and share it. I completed a BPM Triple Crown - kill all the things - run and the poet carried the group! I swapped out chanter for Fury Shaper barbarian, which was slightly less fast (if my math is correct), but equally fun. I found myself not messing much with the imbues because of expert mode, but it ran on auto-pilot for the most part, which is another kind of bonus. @Aestus and @thelee talk about this in their class tier list conversation, but having a strong build that can run well without much micro, is great in RTWP party play, where there is a finite limit to player micro capacity. Great for Megabosses - somewhat trivializes HoW and Belranga, who can be interrupted.

Yeah you are absolutely correct about that IMHO insane profit margin. I doubt, that in MS anyone, except iD and Bethesda can meet this target (even Blizzard cannot do it anymore). I am kind of disappointed, that they bought so many smaller AA studios, and then they decides to come up with such crazy profit margin target for them. This might pretty much kill all the smaller size projects in these studios for the foreseeable future.

That said: Even the greatest games in the world may struggle to find an audience if they're pitched to the public like canned tuna rolling en masse from the factory line. Case in point, TOW2's companion trailer. Bioware-style companions (get companion, unlock backstory and companion quest) are pretty cooked anyway (personal opinion, I know). But what was that? At worst, it's selling blandness without realizing. At best, it's meant to be a joke. However, it is a bad one. As it is always a joke on the designers. Like the one in The Outer Worlds 1 on Monarch, where after a string of boring fetch quests, there's a joke about how fetch quest-y the prior hour all was. Or the one in a gazillion bad adventure games, where after combining stinky cheese with dynamite and cat hair and maple syrup, you get the world's deadliest nuclear bomb. And to top that off, a line of dialogue is promptly rubbing it in of how ridiculous that just was. (There's actually great adventure games to this day, mind). Back to the trailer: Even making a joke about how bland and unremarkable and everyday your companions would be -- that's unlikely to make anybody more excited to spend any time with them. Say what you will about Larian (and I know they're divisive here, not a huge fan of at least DOS myself). But they've nailed how to sell their product. They've even nailed to sell the pitch of 80% of Obsidian (and even Arkane) games in existence. As their entire campaign for BG3 was focused on promoting player expression and could be summarized like this: "Do whatever you like... which may or may not include shagging a bear." Players sharing on TikTok how they'd turn themselves into cheeses to make cheeses boldly go to places no cheese had gone before, or Streamers promoting and sharing the many ways you could handle the Goblin camp in act one -- that got people talking. In the end, it was the perfect storm nobody could have anticipated, naturally. But the message and intent to actually get noticed by a few people was there from the go.

Much respect for surviving in this industry for a quarter of a century -- and then by doing mostly RPG-Likes. But to be honest, Obsidian's management seems to suck a bit also. At least once it gets heavily involved with creative decisions.... which seems too often. Avowed got delayed and rebooted a couple times to hit in 2025 because the founders first wanted their $kyrim-Like in Eora. Then they shifted it all towards multiplayer (the trend of the mid 2010s, see also Bioware and Anthem, Arkane Austin (RIP) and Redfall). Then they decided that all of that wasn't to their strenghts and restarted another time. The Outer Worlds seemed to have started out as a similar shallow sales pitch: "Fallout-Like... in SPACE!" (Legend has it that Feargus kept neglecting Tim Cain's ideas until Cain proposed what Urquhart had been waiting for all along). Tim Cain is certainly on record as saying that the direction given was targeting a more "casual audience". Whether that helped to attract players and keep them excited long-term for mucho sequels, who knows. I'd argue it certainly didn't help the game to leave a more impactful footprint. Given that it's a game of heavy looting, but loot (and ammo) is to be had in such an abundance, it doesn't even matter. Same as with the "stealth", even the quest design seemed to assume an audience that would get lost in their own toilet, with everything being blatantly signposted -- in a game supposedly all about player expression! Nintendo shows more confidence all throughout Zelda than any this. Deadfire balooned in cost and workload because of the management's late decision to include Full-VO, contributing to the initial commercial underperformance. Even Josh Sawyer talked openly about this in a Post Mortem. Hindsight bias in parts, to be fair. As that decision was of course driven by Larian doing full VO at the time and Larian... well look at where they are now. Not sure if there's any truth behind the story about the development of Tyranny and how Paradox money was supposedly used... creatively (so let's not go there). It's too easy to look at the game as a confirmation all itself, given that it never had a proper ending (I still liked Tyranny). And then don't forget the Kickstarter and Pillars Of Eternity that helped saving the company back then. That was initially blocked by management, they were rather hesistant at the very least. Josh Sawyer and Adam Brennecke had to fight hard to get them to agree and give it a go. Later on, they were even threatened to get laid off if they wouldn't have met the final deadline. Seems "just", smacks me as big time disrespectful however, in particular considering how Sawyer had helped in saving management's ass at least once before (see the remarkable development and crazy deadlines of Icewind Dale II at Black Isle / Interplay). TL;DR: It seems that Obisidian is at its best when the creatives have a bit of leeway... Grounded initially was a small team project, Pentiment naturally never meant to be a big money machine, Mask Of The Betrayer a DLC that didn't have the pressure to deliver the revenue of a main release also. And back with New Vegas, it's easy to see an environment where developers could do a little bit more of their thing also. As the mere prospect of doing another Fallout, any Fallout after Bethesda's commercial smash of FO3 must have won Obsidian management over. Here's hoping for more Groundeds and Pentiments and Pillars Of Eternitys anyway... in whichever format!

Rock Paper ShotgunThe Outer Worlds 2 sounds like it's not getting a follow-...Obsidian have revealed they aren't working on The Outer Worlds 3,but have plans to make more games in Avowed's fantasy setting Eora.1) releasing three games within same year: Not their intention, and don't want to do it again. 2) Avowed and Outer Worlds 2 didn't meet Microsoft's sale targets 3) No Outer Worlds3 in development 4) more titles in the setting in Eora - whenever it is Avowed2, Pillars of Eternity3 or something else entirely.

Nah, you just need to anticipate when to dodge. It's not that badly telegraphed. Worst by far is Radhan in the DLC. This is probably the most bullcrap boss of any FromSoft game I've ever dealt with so far.

On topic of Elden Ring: the single worst boss fight in the base game was Alecto.