xzar_monty

That is correct. However, I never felt any need to get into the specifics, because all weapons work well enough. I understand that this is a question of temperament: some people like to micromanage and calculate probabilites and so and so forth, but I wonder if you agree that you don't have to, especially in PoE and Deadfire. Everything works.

Well if Deadfire sold less than 200k, then that 1M is five times larger as a group, which in my view qualifies as "significantly" larger. It'll be interesting to see if there'll ever be another isometric cRPG that isn't based upon DD. I mean, the Wrath of the Righteous is a DD-derivative, since it's Pathfinder.

Does anybody in the game actually have anything worthwhile to pickpocket? I'm genuinely curious about this. I never pickpocketed in Deadfire, so I don't know. In BG2, pickpocketing is worth it, whereas in the original NWN campaign, it is not.

Most likely it's just critical mass. Once anything becomes popular enough, its popularity alone is enough to make it even more popular. It is impossible to predict which things this will start to happen to. Note: I know nothing about the Fortnite, have never seen it and have no interest in it. But I do know something about human psychology and its effects on consumer culture. Right now, it is almost inconceivable that the prog rock band Emerson Lake & Palmer played at sold out stadiums in the late 1970s. But they did. It was the coolest thing of the era.

This is correct, but it also implies that the group of "hardcore cRPG fans/grogs" (mentioned by @kanisatha above) is significantly larger than the sales numbers of Deadfire would make you think -- and that was my main point. Surely we can agree that dnd is for hardcore gamers, right?

But Pathfinder: Kingmaker did well, and not only is its ruleset equally complex, confusing and non-intuitive, to use your terms, it is also badly described and basically requires you to know an awful lot of stuff that is not explained in the game (which is not the case for PoE). So that cannot be the big reason.

Doesn't it appear essentially set in stone that BG3 will be turn-based (only)? This is my understanding at the moment. So in that sense the future does look a bit bleak. Wrath of the Righteous will (surely?) be RtwP, though, so there's at least once single game to look forward to (although the writing department could use some serious improvement).

I don't think this comparison works. In other words, I think that the open world in BG1 was a lot more haphazard than it is in Deadfire. You are quite correct that some areas are connected, but the same holds true for Deadfire as well. The bigger problem in BG1 (and the problem that makes BG1 by far and away the worst of these four games, i.e BG1, BG2, PoE, Deadfire) is that many of the maps have almost nothing of interest in them. There's so much scenery where nothing or almost nothing never happens. This is extremely poor -- and this is precisely the problem that was fixed in BG2 to stunning effect. You say that Pillars2 has "repeating content". What do you mean by this? What is the content that repeats?

Ok. So there are two different things, the cataclysm on the island and the formal invitation you may receive from Llengrath? If this is so, then apologies -- I didn't know about this second possibility at all.

This is peculiar. When I started POE1, I quite obviously knew nothing about the ruleset. I played the game on the Classic mode (or Normal or whatever the name was: the not easy and not hard mode anyway), and there was nothing impossible about the game. The bear encounter in the cave was too difficult to do alone and at low level, but the guy who told me about the cave did explicitly say that to me as well. So I went back later at a higher level and with a bigger group and did just fine. The first Forest Lurker encounter was very difficult, but again: I retreated and came back later. After a certain point, the only thing that was really difficult was the Adra Dragon. I also didn't find the ruleset hard to learn or unintuitive, but this is of course very subjective.

This is incorrect. Ashen Maw is enough. I have never prepped my ship, and I have never finished any of the faction quest lines, but I have done the Forgotten Sanctum twice. After the Ashen Maw, there is an event at sea that tells you of a cataclysm at the Black Isle, and once you return to the maze there, you are able to start the last DLC. I agree that this is somewhat hazy and blurry in the game, as I also wasn't sure about how to start this DLC the first time.

Given that computer games have only been around for a generation or so (a bit more, if a generation is approximately 30 years), talking about generations is perhaps a bit bombastic here. Besides, many game types have already died out. When was the last time anyone made a text adventure, for instance? They used to be a thing, and some of them had some pretty nice things in them. In my view, there have been less than ten really good CRPGs, but I'm really happy for all of them. So let's see: Ultima IV, Ultima V, Ultima VI, Dungeon Master, Baldur's Gate II, PoE, Deadfire, Pathfinder: Kingmaker. That's everything of real value the genre has produced since 1985, in my view.

CRPGs, like high-quality literature, appear to have certainly taken a hit from the way many people's lifestyle has changed in the 2000s. This is just a statement, no blaming implied.

That's a bit strange, by the way: there are some monsters that you can deal with even if they are shown to be "three red skulls" baddies, i.e. way above your level(*). But then there are monsters like the Risen Armsmen that -- I fully agree -- are extremely difficult if you're not at or above their level. (*) The Engwithian Titan, for instance, was "three red skulls" for me in both of my playthroughs, but posed no difficulty whatsoever.

I must assume you're talking about PotD and/or other extra-high level deals, because on Hard/Veteran (whatever it's called), there is only just the one Death Guard in the game. He's in the crypt in the mapping the archipelago quest. No Death Guards in the Sepulchers, nor in the Flooded Cave.

I would also agree that Deadfire is a lot easier than PoE. Death Guards are quite powerful, as @AeonsLegend legend rightly says, but I only met one in the whole game.

You're right in saying that the quality of translations will (quite naturally) vary -- but I haven't heard anywhere that any of them was actually good. And that's quite poor. Your other arguments are rather sound as well. Translation is a field that I really know a lot about, and the way computer game companies tend to go about it just doesn't make for good results. You describe some of the reasons quite well. If I were Obsidian or any other game company, I would just forget about translations, unless I had a lot money and time and trustworthy people I could give the job to.

This is a good point. As has been said before, the general consensus is that Obsidian's translations for Deadfire were terrible, just absolutely awful and useless. There's a twofold problem here: for the translation-using player him/herself, the translation looks like an insult, a spit in the face, because it is so poor. And for some of the rest of us looking at this from the outside, the translations are a huge hit on Obsidian's credibility, for clearly the company didn't know what it was doing.

Is this on a PC?

It's older than that, I'd say. Some of us were here for the games that came out in the mid-1980s, and they started with ZX81.

Does it succeed? If so, what happens to Eothas's plan to destroy the Wheel? This is very interesting!

Wow. I therefore stand corrected. Thanks for that! I wonder if this kind of influence is regarded as "cruel" in the game. Do you know?

I just finished my second playthrough a couple of days ago, and to certain extent I agree with what you're saying here. The main character is completely irrelevant in Deadfire(*). Eothas does whatever he does no matter what you do. The only thing that you can affect is timing. In other words: Eothas does nothing until you go to the places where he does his things, but once you get there, he always does the same things no matter what you say or do. So, in one sense, everything that's truly interesting about Deadfire (and for me, there's plenty of that) happens completely outside the main storyline. I cannot help but think that this is, in some sense, poor design and poor storytelling. There's no getting around that. (*) It's a bit like Indiana Jones in The Raiders of the Lost Ark. Indy does nothing in the story. He affects absolutely none of it. The Nazis would have found the ark, opened it and died without Indy. Indy is a non-entity in the movie, nothing he does has any effect on anything.

7 times lower? That really hurts. And I don't mean mathematically, because it's incorrect -- you should be saying Deadfire only sold 1/7 of PoE, as 7 times lower doesn't really make mathematical sense(*) -- but in almost every other conceivable way. I mean, Deadfire is an excellent game. I'm perfectly open to the debate about whether it's better or Poe or not (I think it is), but I can't see any reasonable way to regard it as that much inferior. Something went wrong somewhere, and it certainly didn't deserve sales as poor as that. What a shame. (*) Couldn't help it. Sorry. Don't mean to be pedantic, although I am, of course.

The elephant in the room is of course the well-nigh incontrovertible fact that there is no road to Pillars of Eternity 3, because such a game will never be made. Boy would I be happy to be proven wrong.