xzar_monty

I can report that a (locally) famous Scandinavian musical group went to Texas to record an album. On a break from recording, they decided to take a walk in the studio neighborhood. They were stopped by the police. Because you just don't walk around in Texas, it's suspicious. My experience is that English-speaking countries in general tend to be fearful, or at least quite concerned. The English-speaking countries I've experienced are England, Ireland, the United States, Australia, New Zealand and Malta, of which Malta is the only exception to the rule. (However, I would also agree that Americans tend to be very friendly.) I find it quite odd.

Hey, that was good! And funny, which is always a plus. It immediately made me think of NetHack, at which I'm very good and whose latest incarnation (3.6.6) I recently finished playing a tourist, generally regarded as the hardest class. There is a certain combination of items and intrinsic properties that you can legally acquire and that make you almost immortal. By the way, I wish to stress that the word *almost* is crucial, both in NetHack and with your rule in general.

But there is no need to battle either the superbosses or the dragons. So you are not, in fact, forced to choose your main weapons from the beginning. Your options are going to be more limited if you specifically want to do certain things, but I see nothing wrong with that..

What? I can't see how this could be true. I changed my weapons and experimented with them. What exactly would force you to choose? If you can't get your weapons up to mythic or even legendary status, that doesn't matter one bit.

Ahh, yes. That was indeed difficult at the time. Thanks!

What does this refer to? I have no memory of this kind of thing, at all.

As much as I'd like P:WotR to be a great game and a huge success, there were so many things wrong with the design in P:K that I wouldn't be overly surprised if the game lost a lot of customers. I was particularly annoyed by the way the developers simply cheated with some of the encounters, and the way they apparently gave serious stat boosts to so many monsters. I mean, you just don't do that. There was also a shocking lack of logic with some of the area designs. There's that village by the lake whose map is full of fairly difficult monsters, even some kind of fairies if my memory serves me correctly. And it just doesn't make sense. I mean, how can you have ordinary non-adventuring people living in an ordinary village with these deadly creatures right next to them? I was frankly astonished that the developres apparently didn't think this was a problem at all. But, I did enjoy P:K well enough to finish it.

Fair point. Could Tyranny still have ridden that wave of nostalgia that was gone by the time Deadfire came out? Well, there's no way of knowing. Because of the corona, I decided to give Tyranny a chance, after all, and I must say it's not my kind of game. I really dislike Obsidian's obsession with factions (why do they do that?!), and the overly dark tone of the game does not really appeal to me. Oh well.

I was suggesting something slightly more subtle than this -- and I'll be happy to admit that I didn't make my point clearly enough. PoE did not disappoint as such, in this you are probably quite correct. But it did not charm, either. An awful lot of players came to the game through the power of nostalgia, and while it fed that old flame for a while, it didn't make it burn brightly enough. Or, conversely, it fulfilled the nostalgia need so thoroughly that no more was needed. When I look back on my experience of PoE, it's actually a little bit strange. It goes like this: 1) The beginning is absolutely superb (actually, I still hold that the beginning of PoE is the best thing that exists in PoE or Deadfire, hands down). 2) By the time I get to the battle with Raedric, I'm already wondering about certain things. Like, he's got an archmage protecting him, among others. An archmage? I'm on level 4 or 5. And I can beat that archmage easily enough. So what does "archmage" mean in this game? Apparently nothing. There's a strange diluting of terminology going on, and I don't like it. 3) The story progresses nicely enough, but once I get to Twin Elms, I almost don't care anymore. I've reached level cap (always very bad, that), the "gods aren't real" discussion is very muddy indeed and I don't have the energy to explore another city in this game (to this day, I know almost nothing about what goes on in Twin Elms -- I just can't care). 4) The end is not exactly an anticlimax, but it's not great, either. Also, the ending slides are very dark indeed. Like, it seems that very little good went on in the game world after my adventures. So, I might have well been one of those customers who didn't come back for Deadfire, because PoE just didn't caputre my imagination strongly enough. But I did, because this is almost the only genre of games that I play these days.

If your theory is correct, and it could well be, then the successor of P:K may turn out to be a failure in terms of sales, because some of P:K was designed in an incredibly mean way. I mean, the encounters were just cruel, the game cheated against the player and so on. I suppose there must be people who were very disappointed with that. I was disappointed, too, but not enough to quit. Just speculating here. And yes, I agree with you in the sense that whatever caused the failure of Deadfire had a lot to do with PoE, not Deadfire itself.

I think this is a good point. However, we are still pretty much in the dark as to why PoE2 failed. All cRPGs reward metagaming, at least to some extent. Deadfire rewards it much less than P:K, for instance, but there is a drawback to this, too: Deadfire tends to be so balanced that nothing essentially stands out. I never found loot that made me go wow (and towards the end my inventory was full of unique items that I had never even tried and I felt were completely useless), whereas in all DD-related games you will be very happy with certain pieces of equipment that you find. Both approaches have their strengths and drawbacks, and I'm fine with both, i.e. this is not a factor (for me) that decides whether a game's good or not.

Well, if that's how you look at it, then fine. If I thought a game system was broken, I'd stop playing. Three playthroughs with a broken system? Never.

First of all, it has to be said that your writing is quite hard to follow. Second, if you finished three playthroughs, either the system cannot be broken, or what you mean by "broken" is something other than broken. So there is a contradiction in the premise of what you write.

This claim does not sound true to me. I finished P:K, and in no way did I think that the system "barely functioned". I started playing tabletop DD in the 1980s, so I know the roots of this system reasonably well. Could you perhaps explain what you mean?

I pretty much agree. Not knowning Obsidian outside these two games, I don't know if bad explanations are the norm.

I'm not entirely sure whether we'd all agree on this, but my sense is that most of us would: point d, especially, is pretty bad and a no-no when it comes to game development. Again: Deadfire is a great game, but it does have its oddities.

In my view, the short answer is probably no. I also think I won't be getting BG3. Turn-based combat is enough to put me off. Well, there's Wrath of the Righteous to look forward to...

I felt there was also a slight problem of logic with the megabosses. It is only realistic to try them at the very end of the game. So whatever you gain from can be used for... what? The guardian of Ukaizo, realistically, but nothing else, really. I thought this was not enough. If somebody likes the fights as such, that's fine, of course. But the fights as a means to an end don't really serve much purpose, in my view.

So that's my first guess disproven! Very good.

That's a really good question! My guess -- and mind you, without knowing anything for sure -- is almost zero. Practically none at all.

But I have not accused you of anything. My rationale for keeping this within the cRPG world is that genres are different, and what works in one may not work in another. Or may be entirely superfluous, etc. Also, I am not sure whether it's necessary to pick up the youngsters. Sure, the companies would rather have them than not, but it would be actually be interesting to see the age distribution of these games, even the very successful ones. Not sure at all if there are many youngsters involved -- depending on the definitions, of course.

Another question is whether "most customers expect it", as has been claimed in this thread. I do not think this is true at all, within the cRPG genre. For me, conceptually speaking, the most troublesome aspect of full VO is that it effectively ties the writers' hands too early, and this is not a good thing. I know that things can be retrospectively changed (and more material can be added, like was done in Deadfire), but full VO creates unnecessary complications, which, in my view, are probably not worth the financial cost.

So, do I understand this correctly: for you, the experience is something like watching a movie voiced in English and subtitled in German? In other words, both languages are present, one in voice and one in text. Is this correct? I just want to make sure I understand your playing experience right.

But hey, if D:OS2 was the first one to really do it, how many cRPGs actually have full VO? Seriously. Two? How many? Look at these facts: Deadfire had full VO, and it bombed big time. Pathfinder did not, and it sold very well. Its sequel also quickly got over $2M in backer money even if full VO is not forthcoming. So I still don't think you have an argument within the world of cRPGs, at all. Right on this very forum, people were complaining because they couldn't get Deadfire's narrator to shut up.

Of course it matters. It's an extremely significant question for anyone who tries to make these kind of games. If it's a choice between an investment of $0 or $200 000, you can rest assured that it matters. It's a bit funny that you never even try to back up your opinions in any way whatsoever, while many people contributing to these discussions try to take the larger picture into consideration, too.