xzar_monty

That's good. It's a great game, so happy adventuring!

This is true. The lore side of the game has a bit of a problem, in my view, because on the one hand, there's quite a lot of it to read, and on the other hand, it's not always all that clear.

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.)

This is interesting! I thought they were always optional -- but then, I probably started playing only after the game was patched up a bit, because that tends to be a good strategy. You know, buy a game, wait six months.

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.

Thanks! The voice quality was better than I expected. Will be interesting to see if this is something that actual game developers will eventually use.

Can you give a link where I could listen to a voice engine in a Morrowind mod? It would be interesting. I am somewhat sceptical, but I will be very happy to be proven wrong.

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.

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.

Agreed. Good point. Its success also indicates that there's still a market for a story-heavy game with a lot of subtlety in dialogue and choices. This makes me happy. There market may not be D:OS2-sized, but it's there, and it's not small, either.

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.

My biggest problem with full VO is precisely what you describe: all text has to be locked before you can do it. It makes rewriting a huge hassle. Rewriting should be a possibility right until the end, just like it is in publishing.

I think Baldur's Gate 2 is still an excellent example. There's quite a lot of voice acting there, but there's also an awful lot of dialogue without voice. And it works extremely well. The combination is just great. You get all the immersion you need, but the costs were kept relatively low.

Yeah. Looks modest, but I'm going to try it.

It's too late to try it now (it's way too simplistic for anyone used to today's games), but in its day, it was superb. Groundbreaking.

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.

So yes, Boeroer confirmed by last point: meta is not necessary even on PotD. So @Himself, maybe you're just not a very good player in that regard. Please don't take that as an insult: I myself am certainly not a very good player in that regard -- Hard is hard enough for me, thank you very much.

@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.

Maybe you can give it a rest, come back after some time, a couple of weeks maybe, and try again. It might work. Or it might not. I have also experienced this, although not with Deadfire. Everything is basically ok, but it just doesn't work. It is strange, you're right, but it does happen.

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.)

Right. Then you can't really complain about the game being too easy on Hard. Meta-knowledge is essentially cheating, so of course the game is going to be too easy if you check out stuff that isn't within your own experience of the game.

Sure. But you still haven't explained in any way why you think meta-knowledge or retraining is necessary. They are not. Why do you think they are?

In a sense, it is enough. But heck, I was quite troubled when I saw self-contradictory tips in Deadfire. I wondered who could write this stuff. But then it dawned on me that the text was probably not written, it was auto-generated. Could be wrong, of course.

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.

This, btw, is yet another example of how the documentation, or lack thereof, can be frustrating. Deadfire is a great game, but there's no question this is a blemish.