xzar_monty

Spark crackers and the like appear to be so ineffective that I gave up on them rather early. Stun bombs, for example, sound like a great idea, but in practice they do so little there's just no point. If you put a huge amount of points into explosives, will things improve significantly? I agree it's a lost opportunity.

Well, the number of titles that utterly bomb (and Deadfire certainly bombed to a certain extent) kinda shows that while lessons can be learned to an extent, the entire field is actually and inherently unpredictable. In other words: the amount of uncertainty is a lot bigger than anyone in the producing end would want. To take a parallel from the movie industry which has been extensively studied: the fact remains that nobody knows anything. Neither well-known star actors, nor the budget, nor pre-release hype, nor advertising, nor timing can be regarded as reliable predictors of success. This has been studied by Arthur de Vany et al., and you look it up if you want. (http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.521.7885&rep=rep1&type=pdf)

Not in the game, but it (rather obviously) does in the manuals.

You've got to understand, though, that the marketing and PR professionals are only going to try to explain things after the fact. In other words, they can and will come up with some kind of a story, but whether it's true or not is a completely different thing. I'm not saying they're not professionals, I'm only saying they're working in a field where true knowledge is essentially impossible. Marketing professionals and economists are both in the same positions: they are always good at coming up with stories after the fact, and that's it. Look at the history of their respective fields and see how many times and how often everybody has been completely stumped and surprised by how things went. That's how you know they're working with unknowables. It's not anybody's fault, it's just that the field is too complex.

Don't worry, no offense taken. Hmm. You present an interesting thesis which may indeed explain some of the reasons why Deadfire was not a success. That's quite something. Incidentally, I believe some fights are intended to be quite difficult no matter what your level. I think it is because winning them is intended to give you a sense of accomplishment in the end. Obviously, these fights only should and I think do appear towards the end of the game. (Like, Maerwald is supposed to be some great figure but is actually dead easy to beat, and I can perfectly well understand why -- that's a fight you're supposed to win, to give you a start.) In PoE, the only fight I seriously struggled with was the alpine dragon, and I was a bit disappointed by the fact that the game cheated so blatantly, i.e. there were these spirits beaming in that you absolutely couldn't prepare for.

No, I only went up to Veteran which I found quite nice -- I almost never had to reload but there were decent enough challenges on the way. I would be quite happy to agree that PotD is a proper challenge, so when I refer to "too easy" I mean that you have to crank up the difficult to get anything resembling a challenge, i.e. the game is definitely a breezy walkthrough on Normal mode. As for your last question, I am also curious about this. Surely the lowest difficulties should allow starters/amateurs to survive?

I'm not sure whether it's fair to say that my comment was "frankly useless", unless we agree that it would be fair to claim that the people you refer to are just stupid. I don't think either of those things is productive. However, you are absolutely right in pointing out that the cliche about stepping into other people's shoes is a particularly hard thing to do, so I take your point on that. You are also probably right in saying that games like this might require a certain "ease of play" in order to become massive successes. But then, BG2 was a big success, and it certainly wasn't easy. So it's not only about that, although I do agree that it is a factor. Also, Pathfinder: Kingmaker appears to be doing well, and it's incredibly difficult. Perhaps it has found every potential buyer it can have, whereas Deadfire, for whatever reason, has failed rather miserably at that. I don't know. Anyway, my takeaway from your comment would probably be this theory: plenty of players from the -- let's say -- "new generation" tried PoE, found it too hard, got frustrated and didn't come back for Deadfire, which shows rather dramatically in the sales. We can't prove it, but it's plausible, so thanks for that, it's appreciated.

The only person I know confirmed to have tried Pillars and then shortly abandoned it was because it was too hard. If there is anything making this game (or at least the first one - I've never tried Deadfire's lower difficulties) inaccessible it's because it was made for and by powergamers. People who just want to pick a character to RP and click things to death are intimidated by how punishing it is. Wow. I cannot disqualify anyone's experience, but I cannot see how this could be true. I am not a powergamer, I have absolutely no interest in it and I frankly find it a bit strange that some people take powergaming so far. I just want to pick a character and see the story, and PoE definitely wasn't too hard. If anything, it was too easy. Pathfinder: Kingmaker is way too hard for people like that. But not PoE.

thelee: No, I have not seen the survey. However, what you said there is very surprising and encouraging. Wow. Very interesting, thank you.

Incidentally, this whole conversation is a nice example of how logic, realism and such still matter greatly in a world that is completely unrealistic and impossible as a whole. It's a lovely contradictory fact. Tolkien talked about it in his letters, when discussing his fantasy world.

Or just preternatural sensory sensitivity as a compensation for visual blindness, which happens.

Please don't assume. I'm not saying anything of the sort, I was merely curious about the success of Dragon Age. And yes, it's going to interesting to see how Deadfire succeeds in another medium. Microsoft obviously had a reason for the acquisition of Obsidian, that is definitely true. It'll be interesting to see what happens. Supposing there's going to be a console-only release in the future, that's going to be the point where I leave the party, as I can't see any point in getting a console.

Was Dragon Age a commercial success?

Only if it's good brevity. Similarly, less is more only if the small thing is very, very good. Neither brevity nor verbosity are an end unto themselves.

I entirely disagree with your assessment that there was too much text in PoE. Not at all. The text created a very interesting world, and it succeeded really quite well in this. However, this is a fairly difficult argument to quantify, because I don't think you're likely to want to demonstrate all the places where you think there's too much text (and I don't blame you for that). Incidentally, my side of the argument rests on the idea that all texts related to the gold-plated NPCs are to be skipped entirely. Maybe there was something interesting in there, I don't know. But I wasn't interested in any of it, and none of it was necessary. But that doesn't qualify as "too much text" because you didn't need any of it for your game.

I only heard of PoE through word of mouth, in a passing comment. Otherwise I would've never of Obsidian at all.

Yes. But explaining the findings is not the same as explaining why Deadfire did the way it did. My point was precisely was that definite conclusion is not reachable. And then you started arguing.

To examine something is to attempt to understand a phenomenon -- in this case, the question of what happened with Deadfire. This would mean a study of marketing, player response and so on, via consumer surveys, telemetry and data collection, etc. To explain is to state (ideally, in a comprehensive and conclusive manner) why something is the way it is and/or happened the way it happened. In terms of chronology, first you examine, only then can you attempt to explain. When it comes to a commercial product such as this, an examination of the causes and effects for its success or lack thereof can only be so thorough. This is because many of the important reasons for the success or lack thereof are unique phenomena that cannot be replicated or studied. To give you a few examples: 1) It is realistic to pose the idea that Deadfire suffered from poor timing in relation to other products on the market, i.e. plenty of consumers spent their money either on a different game or a different thing altogether. Would it have done better, had it come out at a different time? This is an impossible question, because we cannot make the experiment: the game's already out there, we cannot take it back and release it anew at a different time. 2) It is realistic to pose the idea that Deadfire came out either too late or too early in relation to PoE, in the sense that consumers were not expetant and/or enthusiastic enough. Would it have done better, had it come out at a different time? Again, this is an impossible question. 3) Interestingly, the question of other related products and their effect to the sales of other products is anything but straightforward. A competitor on the market can make all customers stampede for that particular product and not yours, but it can also be that a competitor on the market can generally activate potential customers, which in turns generates better sales for all products on that market. But, again, the variables surrounding any one particular product are numerous, and we cannot really study their effect, because any given product is only released once, in the circumstances that happen to surround its release when it happens. We can never study what would have happened in other circumstances. 4) It is realistic to pose the idea that the money spent on marketing was spent poorly, and in the wrong place, perhaps even at the wrong time. But there is ultimately no way to know what would have happened if Obsidian had spent more money, or in a different way, or in different places. So, the question of Deadfire's lack of success can be examined -- and probably should. We can examine the variables, we can come up with plausible theories, we can ask the customers, we can study the data, we can do all of this, and it's not meaningless. But, and it's a big but, all of this examination can never add up to an explanation of why things happened the way they did, because as I iterated above, there are too many variables that cannot be studied. (And again, I only brought up four variables. There are dozens.) A good examination can be done. Reasonably plausible conclusions can be drawn. But a thorough explanation is irrideemably beyond anyone's reach.

To demonstrate that you are -- again -- just hopelessly wrong, I suggest you do a search for the words "I stand corrected" in my posts. (But this is the point where there is no point in wasting the forums' space for something as asinine as this. So, this is over.) You might also study the difference between examining and explaining, to get back on track.

Do we know what the last challenge is?

Where's the insult? There is a significant difference between examining and explaining that you apparently choose to ignore -- but in doing so, you also make your rancorous comments lose their thrust. I don't see any losing or winning here, or any point to it, either. You are relentlessly combative and insistenly obdurate, and it certainly does not further the discussion.

Monty you literally said this above, so I'm not sure what you are talking about. Please refer to a dictionary for the difference between examining and explaining. You're embarrassing yourself here. Please stop it.

I am saying this in the spirit of greatest goodwill possible: there is not point in discussing anything, if you respond to arguments that haven't been made and are unable to read the arguments that have been made. The user thelee recently pointed out that you appear to have problems with reading comprehension, and I have no alternative but to agree. (And if it wasn't you that thelee made this claim about, please accept my sincere apologies. I recall it was you.) Now, if you actually read what I have written and understand what it means, you will notice that I have never said there's no way to examine why one game sells better than the other. In fact, I specifically wrote: "without conducting really extensive surveys". Doesn't that rather strongly imply that I in fact DO think it is possible to examine these questions? It just takes a lot of work -- and I don't think anyone's going to make the effort. But that's beside the point: the fact remains that the work can be done. You bring up many potential reasons for why Deadfire did poorly. Nothing wrong with that. However, the fact remains that none of them are proven to be correct, not even Co Op. Questions like this can be examined and studied, but before and until that is done, all we have is speculation. And even after that, we have no real explanations, we only have a set of plausible narratives, some more so than others. There is one extremely important factor to questions like this, and this has actually been studied mathematically, by Arthur de Vany and others. You can look up the relevant literature to get a better idea. The factor I mean is word of mouth. It works like this: a new product gets good word of mouth or bad word of mouth. This sets a self-fulfilling prophecy whereby one of them does well and the other does poorly. Now, generally, word of mouth is much more significant than marketing. Generally, not always. In addition to this, there is the question of psychological critical mass. This means that once something becomes popular enough (it is impossible to determine exactly what this means in any given instance), its popularity itself is enough to make it more popular -- that's human psychology at work, and it can be seen in all commercial cultures. And conversely, once something is regarded as a failure by enough people, it is almost impossible for that product to reverse its downward spiral. This stuff has been studied.

Well, what are your solutions? It's even easier to criticize someone else without offering your own solutions. Let's hear em and I hope they are specific enough. Your argument does not work at all. It is entirely reasonable to point out that someone's suggested solution to a problem is clearly too vague (like in this case) or even wrong. Whether you yourself can solve the problem is not relevant. (Someone says: "Let's fly to the moon on a hot-air balloon." Someone else says: "You can't do that, mate." This is a fair point to make, even if the second person cannot say how to fly to the moon.) As for my solutions: there aren't any. I don't even think there is a problem. So your intent was to come in here and criticism with no thoughts of your own? Odd. Believe me, pointing out why someone's argument is faulty to the point of being useless is actually a constructive thing to do. I'm sure you can figure out why.

Nobody will do extensive surveys. Obsidian knows best what are the reasons, because they have the most experience to judge. However they won't tell us so... Nobody knows the reasons.