xzar_monty
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Everything posted by xzar_monty
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Agreed. And not only that: it positively interrupts the sense of group adventuring (possibly even solo adventuring, for those who prefer that), because once you start a ship battle, both you and your adventurers basically disappear. This does not hold for boarding fights -- which is the way I did my naval fighting -- because your group is there and you command a substantial portion of it. Luckily, it was possible to simply ignore this side of the game, so I did, and I had an awful lot of fun playing the game. Towards the end, I noticed that I had huge amounts of money and I could have spent it on ship improvements, but I didn't see any reason to do so, because nothing in my game would have changed. If I wanted to flee from other ships, even that was always possible without any improvements at all. So why get a better ship? It isn't needed. Here's another thing that I think is true but I'm not entirely sure about: if you want to sail to Ukaizo on your own ship, there are a number of improvements that you need. You can buy some of them (like -- I think -- the dragonwing sails), but there's no way you can buy all of them. So money is not enough: you can't buy the hull. Correct me if I'm wrong. You need to build the hull, and for that you need adventuring, not money. (I found some of the blackwood logs, but not all of them, and I have no idea where the rest of them were.)
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Yes. The interface was unappealing, the mechanics felt poor, the sound effects were unpleasant, and overall, I didn't think there was anything enjoyable about it. Years ago, I played Sid Meier's Pirates for a while, and that was quite a nice game for its time. Everything in that game was made an awful lot better, when it comes to ship battles. I didn't upgrade my ship because there was no need for it: even if you have extra crew, it makes no difference. When you concentrate on boarding other ships, everything works just fine no matter which ship or what kind of crew you have. If anyone enjoys this sub-game in Deadfire, that's just great. The fact that you never no need to take part in it (i.e. you never have to engage in ship battles, you never have to upgrade your ship) shows that it is not an essential part of the game in any sense.
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Wow! This is a really interesting and surprising comment. I mean, you love isometric games and loved PoE, but the fact of pirates alone was enough to make you not even try the sequel (at first). I know there's apparently been a lot of hype around the Pirates of the Caribbean movies, but I haven't seen any of them and aren't interested in seeing any of them, so all of that has completely passed me by. Moreover, I thought that any setting other than the classical (which they sort of used in PoE) had a chance of being more interesting than your average RPG, so I was very interested in seeing what the game was going to be like. After playing it twice, my sense is that the pirates part is the worst in the game, and I basically ignored the idea of improving my ship (it's not necessary). I only ever fought one naval battle, as I thought they were poorly done. So the pirates theme as such didn't really add to the game. But the game was great. If your opinion is common, and I suppose we don't know whether it is, it could explain at least part of the drop in sales.
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As a side note, this is also a good example of a word where not all of its meanings follow the logic you'd expect. So while "unconscious" means both "insensible / insentient" and "unintentional / unwitting", "unsconsciously" only means "unwittingly". It doesn't mean "while insensible", although it most certainly could, logically. @kanisatha's question is valid, but the word doesn't really have the meaning he suggests. Language is extremely interesting. And the more languages you know, the more interesting it seems to get.
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I haven't seen one, but that doesn't mean much. (Frankly, I might not make such a statement if what you say was the case and I was Obsidian. I mean, it would be so embarrassing to have to make a statement to that effect.) The ending seemed extremely rushed, there's no getting away from that. Ukaizo was built up for the entire game in so many ways, and once you get there, it's one encounter with a nice-looking ancient beast and that's about it. It's such a disappointment. I suppose this feeling is quite common.
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Did you ever play Ultima IV? That was the one game where the Open World approach really, really worked. But then, it was a special case in other ways, too: it took a while for you to figure out what the "problem" or your objective even was, and the main quest was more philosophical than anything else (although pretty basic in terms of philosophy or self-improvement, of course). I agree that Open World certainly isn't necessary and can lead to aimlessness. But boy did it work in that one game.
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@Himself: I understand your point, but I don't agree with your general complaint, because I think your problems stem from your very specific approach to how you want to play the game. The fact that the game doesn't provide a good experience when approached in the way you do is obviously not very nice, but I don't think you can blame Obsidian for it; it's not possible for the developer to consider all possible approaches. Yours seems very specific. I'm sure that your approach may work just fine with some other games, but I'm inclined to think that's simply due to chance, it's not that anybody has planned for that approach. I can't really claim anything about PotD, but my experience with these forums would strongly suggest that a lot of people have indeed played PoE on PotD without meta. I can be wrong.
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Indeed. It is rare that they do. Sometimes, of course, feelings do change, but rarely because of facts or reasons. There is also the interesting experience of not knowing if you like something. You know, with computer games this happens when you start the game, don't really feel much one way or the other, stop playing, find yourself coming back to it, perhaps even wondering why, and this can go on for a while until one day you know whether you're just going to stop or whether you'll really try a playthrough. On a related topic: I have worked as a critic in the past, quite some time ago, and one of the useful things you learn in that profession is the distinction between your personal feelings and the somewhat more objective quality of a given work you're talking about. For example, if I were to write a review of James Joyce's Ulysses or Radiohead's OK Computer, I would have to agree that they are very inventive, both works are very aware of what has been done before and very genuine in their attempts to break some new ground, so they both are to be applauded, and they are recommended for anyone interested in books or music. But on a personal level, I don't really like either of them, they don't touch me. They're not bad, by any means, but they don't touch me. (I can also explain why.)
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Did Josh Sawyer address this problem in his post-mortem for Deadfire? I have only watched parts of it. This is certainly a question where his purchasers have a legitimate cause for complaint; sometimes it is difficult to know what is happening, and sometimes I even wonder whether anyone at Obsidian knows.