xzar_monty

Yeah, you're in a bit of a bind there, if you don't have the save anymore.

How do you define "more successful" here if you are uncertain that it sold as well as Deadfire, which bombed? However, according to Josh Sawyer, it sold better than Deadfire. That's not proof, but given that Sawyer has publicly made that claim, I suppose he knows what he's saying.

Yeah, this was badly planned as well. You have absolutely no need to improve your ship in any way in the whole game. You can do just fine with the Defiant from start to almost finish, at which point you can get the Deadfire equivalent of the Flying Dutchman, and off you go. It would have been nice if I had ever sensed a need to do something with, about or to my ship.

Yep. It was a waste of time. In my playthrough, I had a grand total of one ship battle. After that, I always went for the boarding option, because it was (for me) a lot more fun. Ship combat was plain bad.

Yep, I'm aware of this, and you're quite right. Funnily enough, my aversion to and knowledge of the limitations of wikipedia stems precisely from the fact that much of my working life revolves around literature. I have also worked in music, which is another less than stellar topic, when it comes to wikipedia's accuracy.

Wow. Just wow. I hadn't seen these two figures against each other before, so thank you for this. I am utterly stunned. What the heck happened? (That's a sort-of rhetorical question, btw... we don't know.) Given how much I enjoyed Deadfire, this is harrowingly sad. It must have been a huge disappointment for Sawyer & co.

My aversion to wikipedia quoting stems from the fact that it's wildly unpredictable in its trustworthiness, i.e. the quality of wikipedia entries varies an awful lot. I am happy to concede that some of the best wikipedia entries are excellent indeed, but there's an awful lot of dross in there, too. Too many contributors and not enough editors, which means that it is worlds away from an old-fashioned encyclopedia (e.g. Britannica).

Quoting Wikipedia as proof approaches some kind of folly. And, again, nowhere in that "spiritual successor" entry is objectivity even attempted, let alone reached. It talks about what is "regarded as" or "considered" spiritual successors. These are not factual, objective statements -- at best they talk about some kind of consensus of opinion. Someone is very confused and should probably just stop.

Fair point. My response was about opinions presented as facts. There's a difference there, I'm sure you'd agree. Discussion of opinions as opinions is very interesting, I agree.

@Blunderboss. My understanding was that forums like this are intended for respectful discussion. If you run out of counter-arguments, the cheapest possible response is to get personal: you make no point that anyone cares about, and you just end up looking very silly. Simply leave it, nobody wants to read comments like that.

If it's a fact, it doesn't need agreement, it just is. It's an opinion. There's no need to argue about this.

Apologies for quoting this at such length, but I believe it deserves it. This is Josh Sawyer talking about the relatively poor success of Deadfire. I believe this is excellent: there's no blaming, there appears to be some bafflement and sadness, and everything makes sense to me. And the bottom line, once again, is: we just don't know what went wrong. Sawyer's piece also illustrates how (perceived) quality and commercial success don't have to have anything to do with each other. @wih and @Blunderboss: Those are just your opinions. And wih's explanation to Deadfire's poor sales and P:K's success is just a guess. There's nothing wrong with that, but you shouldn't kid yourself into believing that you know the answers.

By the way, another classic example of poor documentation is that much of the time when you "Press right mouse button for more information" as the screen says, the next screen will have the exact same info as the previous one. If I were a developer, that's the kind of thing that would make me blush in a big way. You can't argue against 100% being a pretty significant chance!

Agreed, that is arbitrary. I'm sure much of it looked logical to the developers. I was particularly baffled by the fact that some descriptions were contradictory even on the level of language (but this is probably explained by the fact that the text is auto-generated). There is one ability that is said to trigger both "some of the time" and "whenever" you're hit. (This was not an exact description, but the contradiction is like I described.)

I'm not sure if snide generalisations contribute anything at all to the discussion. What if you just don't get into them?

Those are strong criticisms, but I'm not sure if you argue well for them -- or even if you argue at all. Why is the story weak? Why isn't being a watcher a big deal? Surely it is, within the game world. Can you give some examples of how the game system is obscure or unintuitive? I found it rather easy to grasp -- but some of the documentation is woeful, that is true.

To the extent that I blame it on anything, I blame it on the fact that apparently an awful lot of people were dissatisfied with PoE and gave up on the franchise. This would explain why sales were poor right from the start. But, we don't know. RPGamers are a conservative bunch indeed, so the setting may have also played a part. But the fact is, we just don't know. As for what @bugarup says about Tolkien: it's really funny that Tolkien both created and destroyed a genre at the same time. His masterpiece was such a masterpiece that nothing else in the genre is worth reading, it seems to me. (And no, obviously I haven't read it all, which I should have done in order to really make that claim with justification. But I have read enough, and everything has been rubbish, except Tolkien.)

This is probably the reason why I didn't experience the base game as being full of filler (sic). I waited a long long time before I started my playthrough.

Hmm, why? I don't think it was that bad by any means. Her tragedy (or the beginning of it, as I didn't see it all) seemed true enough.

I've never complained about the amount of reading required in computer games, believe you me. It just so happened, by the way, that I never got to the end of the Grieving Mother quest, because it was (was it?) rest-related or something like that, and I didn't get all the triggers. But what I did see was too ethereal and lavishly descriptive for my liking.

Yes, the thing is that sales are not an indication of anything other than sales. Commercial success and quality exist on two totally different continuums and they don't need to have anything to do with each other. Of course it's quite natural to regard sales as a mark of quality if you happen to live in a strictly commercial culture like the US, but it's still erroneous. I suppose it's pretty easy for anyone to come up with examples for a) rubbish that sold amazingly, b) rubbish that didn't sell, c) high quality that sold amazingly, and d) high quality that didn't sell. Whether it be literature, music, computer games, anything.

I'm not that familiar with Avellone's writing as a whole, but the two major examples I know, the Grieving Mother in PoE1 and Nok-Nok in P:K are nothing special, in my opinion. The Grieving Mother is over-elaborate (if memory serves, there was a particular overabundance of adjectives, which is very rarely a good sign), and Nok-Nok is just cheesy, like nearly all writing in P:K. I'm not saying either of those two is bad as such, but clearly there's nothing there that would set them apart as examples of particularly good cRPG writing. @Wormerine: White March is great. But heck, at least 50% of the fights are just fillers. That was an astonishingly bad call from the developers. There's an awful lot of fighting, but you don't get XP and you don't get loot worth mentioning and there's nothing to spend that extra money on. That just royally sucks. Luckily this was fixed for Deadfire.

Indeed. But for the record, in case it interests you, I can say that I never even knew about the game when it first came out. Eventually I learned about its reputation, and I decided to give it a try approximately six months before the EE came out (not knowing it was going to come out). It was not interesting. I found it dated, ugly and simply dull. I very quickly gave up trying to get into it. Now, my gold standard has been BG2. I haven't wondered about what you've wondered, but it's definitely a valid question -- to which there is no answer, as you yourself insinuated.

Ok. I hold my hand up and stand corrected, then. (I found NWN2 so poor that I never even got into it.)

To an extent, I understand this, but I don't think it's ultimately reasonable to expect this to be any different from what it is. The fact that they decided to go for a five-man party pretty much set this one in stone.