xzar_monty

Does "allies" mean one of the possible factions? I never sided with any of them, so I never had any in the first place. If this means no dragon as a helper, that's fine.

I played Pathfinder: Kingmaker on Normal difficulty but with the enemies customized to 100% (they are set to 80% on Normal, for whatever reason), i.e. with the rulebook as it is. (*) Being someone who wants to avoid walkthroughs and discover pretty much everything on their own, I never once had difficulties with the timers. (I have no idea how close I came to that, of course, except in the main quest, where I wasn't close.) However, after finishing the game I found out there were some puzzles which not only did I not solve, I didn't even find the rooms they were in. But that's fine, the game was enjoyable. (*) I did turn the difficulty down to the easiest possible level at the very end, at the House at the End/Edge of Time, because I thought the encounter design there was just ridiculous.

Are there no exceptions to these rules? I'm baffled now. I was promised help but I still received none and had to do battle. Was this because my ship was, shall we say, not of this world?

NetHack was updated less than a month ago (although not in any significant way). Pretty much the best game of all time, although it is an acquired taste, no question. And it's free, doesn't cost anyone anything.

That's a fair point, but apart from NetHack, I don't think you can name one single crpg where the freedom of choice is real to any significant degree. And even in NetHack it's really limited, if you're interested in winning it. I mean, there's only one way.

How and why is that fundamental? It works perfectly well in this game.

That's a good idea, I agree. But it's something like two years too late. Why they didn't think of this is a good question.

Since you ask, it's not correct. With "if", you don't use "would", you use the past perfect. So it should be "If they had put lore or more tips...", and the rest is ok, except that a comma right before "we" would be in order. In the second sentence it should read "grammatically", and "does it sound funny?". It's understandable of course. You asked!

Speaking of which: is it possible for the party to end up in a fight against a huge aquatic monster on the open sea?

Given the lengthy loading times, they could have put some lore in there as well, in addition to tips. It certainly couldn't have harmed, could it? The way it is now looks just lazy.

That's a really good point. Although it is a minor thing, this is something that I also paid attention to while playing the game. Plenty of games have these tips displayed while loading, but Deadfire is by far and away the least impressive game I've ever seen in this regard. There really are only those four or five tips. I mean, come on!

Where did you find that Settings tag?

I wonder where. The steam settings aren't easy.

It's funny: whenever those pop up boxes pop up, they are slightly annoying (can they be disabled? I sure would like to do it), and when I feel I have achieved something in a game, it's rare that a pop up pops up.

It's exactly as Boeroer said. Dear @danielbda, you chose the highest possible difficulty. You have no cause to complain. You're a bit like someone who orders a pizza and then complains that it's round and flat and has tomato sauce and cheese and other stuff on top.

Can you still get your money back? If you can, that's what I would do.

But you're only paranoid because you're metagaming. That's not a criticism, I'm just pointing out that your paranoia comes from the fact that you know how the quest mechanism is supposed to work and you're worried if it actually does. When I played PoE, I was able to finish Durance's quest but certainly not the Grieving Mother's. I'm not sure if if even started, apart from the very first journal entry saying that maybe something would turn up if she travelled with me (or whatever). So in that sense I do agree that maybe these quests were not designed in a perfect way.

Ok, but that still isn't a proper explanation. It only makes you look foolish if you announce a stretch goal about something you're clearly unqualified to do.

Agreed. But given this, the whole decision-making process seems very strange to me. They invest money in something they have no proper knowledge of, and they are willing to accept the results without being able to judge whether they are any good or not. Why would anybody do that? It makes no sense.

Full VO is unnecessary, and localisation -- if that means translations -- has been an absolute disaster, the translations are really poor. So saving money on those two things would be an excellent idea. I sort of hang my head in shame when it comes to localisation: Obsidian simply have no idea what translation means, and they don't have the requisite knowledge to see how poor the translations are.

To a certain extent, you do have a valid point here, and I agree with you. For me, the best example of this problem was in PoE, in Teir Evron, where I was supposed to find out that the gods aren't real. I picked the dialogue options that seemed most reasonable to my character from a role-playing point of view, and after the conversation there I was somewhat baffled. Thinking: what just happened there? What did I learn? Clearly that was a turning point in the story, but how? Either it was not well-written in the first place, or the game allowed you to make your dialogue choices in such a way that you only learned something like half of the stuff the game expected you to have learned.

Here's your answer: https://pillarsofeternity.gamepedia.com/Ondra

There is no answer. Or, rather, there is an answer but it's impossible to find out what it is. There are two simple reasons for this: #1, the number of possible variables affecting the sales of Deadfire is simply too large, and #2, you cannot run new iterations with reality. To illustrate: even if somebody comes up with a decent-sounding explanation concerning just a small number variables A, B, C and D (#1), we still cannot test this theory, because there is no way of knowing what would have happened if a different approach had been taken concerning said variables A, B, C and D (#2). So, we won't ever know. Obsidian won't ever know, either. Theories can range from the ridiculous (malignant astrological influence from Mars) to the plausible (the nostalgia effect wearing off, and other rather good theories presented in this thread, for instance), but ultimately we will not know. The best Obsidian can do is decide upon what the most plausible theories and reasons are, make some changes based on that, and then hope for the best. But this, again, is more complicated than it sounds: supposing that there will be a successor to Deadfire, that game will be released into a different market from the one that Deadfire was released into.

@Wullack: But you did change the topic. You did not even make the attempt to answer my question concerning the source of your supposed information. Care to elaborate on that? You can't just make very strong claims without backing them up.

And your information concerning this comes from where?