xzar_monty

Explain to me, then. I have not used such words. I would like to understand your viewpoint.

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Sidekick. Sidekicks do count toward the 5 member limit. You can only ever have 5 members at the same time.

Read the history a little bit and you will see a black male nearly always portrayed as not only bad but also stupid, incapable of learning, subhuman, etc. We are living in a period where certain norms are in flux. Mostly, it appears to be an excellent thing, although some people go too far with it. This always happens, because people don't change.

It is not helpful to generalize. It may happen, or it may not. It has not happened here, right now. It is unnecesasry to bring it up in a discussion that has not been hampered by it.

Don't assume the victim mentality, it's whiny and accomplishes nothing. (Cf. your words "I am also a white male, so I must be evil anyways" above.)

In case you haven't noticed, this has been going on since the 1950s. Here's Frank Zappa talking about it in the very early 1990s.

Very interesting viewpoint, I have to say. Seems even a little bit illogical from my perspective. Because I also play these games for the narrative, which is why I love the DLCs (except for SSS), because they mean more narrative content, more story, more immersion. SSS is mostly battle, so that's not so interesting. But otherwise: count me in! Stories within stories is one of the oldest tricks in the book; just think of how many stories within stories there are in Lord of the Rings, for instance. Often, it works beautifully.

I'm not entirely sure about this, but I'm guessing that you could actually play Aloth as a fighter, even though he is a wizard. Simply ignore all his spells and use him in melee, or as a ranged fighter. Give him excellent armor and weapons, and he'll work as a fighter. He won't have the fighter abilities, but he can survive without, except perhaps on PotD. That's how "overly balanced" the game is. I like the game a lot, but I think something was lost a little bit when they went so far down the balancing road.

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So, Tekehu makes an advance (which to me is fine), you reject it (which to me is fine), he then expresses disappointment (which to me is fine). Where is the harassment? How, exactly, has that dialogue crossed the line, and where and what is the line?

This phenomenon is an extremely important factor for both success and lack of it. It's unfortunate and unfair, but there's essentially nothing you can do about it. If something starts selling well, its sales tend to increase, and there's even a point of critical mass somewhere in the sense that once something is successful enough, the fact of its success alone is enough to make it even more successful (in popular music, think of Dark Side of the Moon or Metallica's so-called black album, both of which have had an incredibly long tail and just continue to sell and sell and sell). Conversely, if something fails to get going, sales-wise, it is extremely difficult to get the circle going.

That's an astonishing failure, by the way, from a fairly established company.

The problem with copying Disco Elysium is that you actually need a pretty good writer. Obsidian haven't any writers of that quality, at least so far. One hour of playing Disco Elysium will reveal that the charm of the game is in the writing, not the combat or the graphics or the companions or anything like that. It's the writing. And it has to be good, if you want to copy it.

@anameforobsidian: Citing the main plot as a major reason for the game's commercial failure is problematic. Before you can see that the main plot doesn't really work, you must play the game quite a bit, and that, in turn, means that you have already bought the game. Deadfire's sales were poor right from the start. So in all probability, it was not the main plot. If the main plot had been great, word would've got around and the game might have started to sell better later on. But that's conjecture.

Some of Obsidian's translations, sadly, were simply awful. Like they were done by a company that had no idea what it was doing. If you @SchroedsCat play game in your own language that is English language and is done from translation from different language perhaps maybe Spain language, and then when you play you see the English language in game is like this, will you SchroedsCat will you be happy playing game?

This question brings up two separate points that I think I must address to answer you. 1) There is cheesiness strictly related to content -- and this was my main thrust when I brought up how cheesy some of the writing is. In P:K, most dialogue trees are very simplistic and straightforward: what you basically have to do is click every possible option to see all possible content. There is almost no subtlety; in other words, choosing to click one particular option rarely makes other options unavailable like it does in PoE and Deadfire. In P:K dialogues, you are quite often not even given the opportunity to have a viewpoint or a strategy related to the person you're talking to, you just have to click all the options and that's it. The most common exception to this is that sometimes, in the end, you get to make a choice that affects your alignment or is restricted by your alignment. So in this sense, when compared to PoE and Deadfire, this type of content in P:K is so simplistic that it qualifies as cheesy. This type of cheesiness is made worse by the fact that the narrative itself so hopelessly simplistic. The lines between good and evil tend to be very well defined, especially because the narrator / commentator Linzi is telling her story from a clasically naive "We the marvelous heroes in this world of evil!" viewpoint. So even if I, as a player, personally have ambiguity about whether I'm doing the right thing or not, Linzi doesn't have any: her journal entries underline that I am a hero and we "did the right thing with that awful wizard" (note: not a direct quote, but faithful enough in style), and so on. I think this is also cheesy. The characters are also cheesy. Linzi is exaggerated in her naivety. Valerie is exaggerated in her humorless posturing. Amiri is exaggerated in her butch warrioriness. And so on. I wonder if you agree with me on this: many of the characters are so exaggerated that they look like comic stereotypes. And this is, inevitably, cheesy. 2) More directly related to what you're talking about, there is also cheesiness on the level of language irrespective of its content, and I am certain that this is not helped by the fact that the writers are Russian. Or, to be more precise, not helped by the fact that their command of English is lacking. There are grammatical errors in the game. There are even some spelling errors. There are word choices that immediately betray an inexperienced and/or clumsy writer(*). Like, using too many adjectives or adjectives that are way too obvious. And if memory serves me right on this point, using far too many exclamation marks! It doesn't look good! So yes, the language itself is not quite right and greatly contributes to the overall cheesiness. Translation from Russian to English is no different from other translation jobs, but what a lot of people don't appreciate well enough is that all good translation is difficult and translators often aren't as educated as they should be (translation is one of the very few areas where I have no qualms about claiming expertise: I know what I'm talking about). But this particular language problem doesn't explain all the language problems. For example, Nok-Nok was entirely written by Chris Avellone, and I'm pretty sure he wrote in English. But Nok-Nok is still cheesy, although it's cheesy in a way that appears to know that it's cheesy -- and this is one of the reasons why I sometimes wonder just how much of a parody the whole game possibly is. So, after all this, I think the answer your question is yes, but the whole issue is more complicated than that. Good question, by the way. (*) In fairness, it has to be said that some of the word choices in Deadfire seem to betray a writer who's trying just a bit too hard. You know, there is the sense that the writer is thinking, "I must make this sound literary." But I didn't mind this very much. It was not a problem for me. I know there are other opinions.

Nope, RTwP.

Just to make sure: are you aware of Pathfinder: Kingmaker (already out) and its sequel that is coming out next year? It's not BG, and some of the writing is so incredibly cheesy that it almost feels like it must be a parody, but somehow I still found the game quite charming. Except for the last part where the encounters got just stupid. I also will probably skip BG3. Neither TB nor the previous attempts of BG3's creator appeal to me.

Hmm. I wonder what that would entail. (I suppose the answer is, "Anything they want"). It's potentially an interesting concept, although I can't see it being rich in a narrative sense, which is always the aspect that fascinates me the most.

What Sawyer said at Deadfire's post-mortem was, in my view, an extremely clear indication that the PoE world is over. A company boss will not come out and bluntly state that we're not going to spend our resources doing this because everything went to hell the last time, he's going to put it in more pleasant terms, which I think is precisely what Sawyer did. So, when he says something like "The problem is that without really understanding the reason(s)[*], it’s hard to know how to move forward", or "I don’t have that confidence, which is one of several reasons why I am leery about trying to direct a sequel", it's pretty clear it's all over. [*] That means reasons for Deadfire's lack of success.

As far as I know, there is no indication that Deadfire had a long tail or that it has been able to catch up at all. Note: I have no idea about the console sales. "Less expensive" does not mean "inexpensive", it just means less expensive. Eora is done and dusted, as far as cRPGs are concerned, I'm quite sure. And yes, I would love to be proven wrong.

I genuinely have not seen it in Deadfire, ever. And you haven't seen some of the annoyances I have noted here. Are we even, then?

We don't know why Deadfire bombed but I'm pretty sure we can say that we know there will definitely not be any POE3.

Yep, the pushing effect in Deadfire is excellent and (in my experience) completely solves these problems.