lobotomy42

Ugh, what? I had assumed the tower was right around the corner and would end Act 1. This is...not encouraging.

Okay, it's been slow going for me. I think I'm just about to finish Act 1. But I have to be honest, the last 5 hours or so crawling around the Underdark have felt incredibly underwhelming compared to the earlier stuff. The game feels like it peaked when There it reach the height of interactivity, of different quest threads interlocking for a feeling of a real world, and also some of the most fleshed out character interactions. But once I entered the Underdark, the game suddenly felt much emptier. Yes, there are some quests and quest-givers down there, but they feel much deader, and much more predictable *pick one of these two sides and murder the other* and *fetch me the thing I left behind* setups. Also my companions, who previously were spilling their guts left and right, suddenly clammed up and have very little to say. No more cross-party conversations while exploring, and no new dialogue options in camp. One nice thing in the Underdark was: Anyway, I'm curious -- does the storytelling pick back up again in Act 2 and 3? Do more things happen with the companions? Or is the quietness I'm suddenly experiencing indicative of the rest of the game, and the first 20 hours or so just happen to be where all the effort went?

"Everything available to everyone" is definitely the ethos of the game, from romances, to quests, to skills, to tactics, to dice rolls. It's similar to Bethesda games in that way -- no real limits on anything, so you can pretty much experience all there is to offer on one playthrough. The only limits are the ones you impose on yourself for role-playing purposes. The game certainly isn't going to force you to role-play. From a sales perspective, this seems like a good strategy. Everyone who plays finds that they are good at whatever they try to do, and have success at everything. What a great time! No one ever has to feel like they are failing.

I'm posting here again. I really want to play Pentiment but don't use Steam. It'd be great it if were released on GOG. Alternatively, you could release it on PS5? I don't really have anything new to add, just repeeating this request into the void. MANIFEST!

God, yes. This, along with a party switching UI, would go a long way towards me actually using companions other than the first three I met. I know, I know. I just wish it were "Forgotten Realms: Revenge of the Tadpoles" or something. Sticking a number after a title feels like a big deal!

From the interview: You know, this almost total disregard for Baldur's Gate 1 and 2 still doesn't sit great with me. BG3 is a fine game, but comments like these drive home the idea that this is fundamentally "Larian D&D Game" not "sequel to Baldur's Gate." Which is a fine thing to make! (I like the game!) But it makes the title feel all the more like a cynical marketing ploy to piggyback off of the popularity of some beloved CRPG classics. And frankly, playing the game, it does really show that this is not much of a sequel at all. (Maybe I'll change my tune once a certain someone shows up...) EDIT: Maybe now I finally understand how Dungeon Siege fans felt about Dungeon Siege 3...

After playing a bit more, I will add that I think they did a great job with the implementation of the camp. The way characters can show up there, even non-party characters, and everyone reacts to what has happened in the story so far -- this is A+. I just passed the part where and I have to say the use of the camp for this kind of "big story moment" while allowing for the player to pace themselves through conversations -- rather than having some big cutscene -- was excellent. It took more than a few notes from the best bits of the Dragon Age: Origins camp as well as the Citadel DLC from ME3 and incorporated them well, without feeling like shallow fan service. Also just the way the camp clearly moves with you and reflects the environment you're in -- the "dungeon camp" vs the "wilderness camp" and all the others -- adds a nice touch and makes the rest anywhere mechanic feel less silly. One nitpick about the companion conversations -- I've noticed that when the companions have a "I have something to tell you" conversation (which seems like every 5 goddamn minutes?) they immediately take you into some conversation tree about their own issues (fine) and then finally dump you out of the conversation entirely (not fine.) This means if I just want to say "Hey Gale, leave my party for a bit" -- I have to first listen to all of Gale's issues, then leave the conversation, then re-enter the conversation, and then finally ask him to leave. This is tedious and pretty much breaks the flow narratively. My character wanted to make a quick tactical party change and got caught up talking about somebody's past? Does anyone know if there's a UI somewhere for just making party changes? It really feels like this does not need to be a dialogue tree.

So far, BG3 is hitting a lot of the right notes for me. Not all of them, but enough that I'm more excited to keep playing it than I have any other game in a long time. I think it hits the right sweet spot on a couple of fronts. It has pretty high levels of polish and attention to detail, almost on the level of Dragon Age or a Bioware game, but it balances that with a reasonable committment to playstyle flexibility and options for problem-solving. Dialogue in particular seems carefully constructed -- there seems to be lots of abilities, items, story states and companions that can grant additional dialogue options. Combining this with a cinematic-ish presentation for dialogue is a tough achievement. But there are lots of surprises -- a fairly robust implementation with Speak with Dead, where many major areas have corpses that will give you scene-relevant dialogue if you have the spell -- these add up to a fleshed out experience. There are still some Larian-isms that I don't love. It's weird that I can stumble onto buried treasure chests for no reason, for example. And although the combat is better than my experience with D:OS, it still feels heavily weighted in favor of elemental and environmental effects. Now they've coupled it with height advantage/disadvantage so you have to constantly worry about getting the high ground before attacking. This adds up to reducing the impact of character builds and turning the combat into something more tactical and, frankly, slow, than I'd like. I also do think that RTwP like original Baldur's Gate or Neverwinter would still fit the genre well. Though I confess that turn-based is a bit less chaotic to manage. I'm also not sure yet about the writing. There are some good bits. But the pacing feels off. All of the companions show up within the first few hours and immediately start spilling their guts to you. Is there enough companion content to last the whole game? Am I going to get to Act 3 and everyone's run out of things to say? Either the game is much shorter than I think, or has a lot more content than I think, or the pacing is just bad. The companions are also all kinda similar to each other? They all have weird addictions and secrets. All in all, it feels like a blend of Neverwinter Nights, Dragon Age, and Divinity: Original Sin. We'll see!

Do you think you could please continue to release PC games on GOG?

I would also like to buy Pentiment from GOG.

Man. The merger means that the subsidiary accomplished little. Microsoft (a publicly-traded company) could still someday decide to fire everyone from Obsidian and give Eora to any internal or external team they want. If it's better in the short-term for Obsidian employees, then at least no one got fired. But there's no way to spin this as good news for the company as a whole.

So the new question is -- did Microsoft also buy Dark Rock Industries?

Most RPGs are power fantasies anyway. Why shouldn't that power fantasy include some hot dude/lady being *totally* into the PC for no discernible reason? If you're trying to do something *other* than power fantasy, then maybe not.

I thought one of the pieces mentioned that there was going to be another update coming this week with news of their latest project? Am I making that up?

Boy, he is really bitter about whatever went down at Obsidian. He can't even bring himself to mention them by name.

I think the main problem with porting to the Switch would be mapping the controls. Both Pillars and Tyranny use a point and click interface with lots of buttons that are easily accessed with a mouse but not so easily with a touchscreen. So a non-trivial amount of effort would be needed to customize the control scheme for the Switch. Only Obsidian knows how much that would cost and how much they would need to sell to make that money back. I suspect that they are not likely to start on any port until the Switch can demonstrate some decently high sales numbers.

Jury Stack: Rain

Sad!

But we're definitely done with expansions after White March, then? I vaguely recall rumblings of there being two expansion packs planned some years back and it's conceivable that someone was counting "The White March" collectively as one. But it sounds like that is not the case.

The last Obsidian game I strongly enjoyed was Dungeon Siege III, so Dungeon Siege IV I guess.

TL;DR - I agree with a lot of katie's frustrations and my experience has been similar to hers. I think your experiences and frustrations with the game are reasonable reactions to some design decisions (some, such as I, would say problems) with the game. The difficulty in this game is very weird. All the difficulty spikes in the game happen early on - the ghosts, as you mentioned, are incredibly difficult if you don't already have a party of 6 and some levelling under your belt. And as the game progresses, if you do any serious amount of exploring, the combat shifts to become absurdly easy to the point where the most efficient route through most fights is selecting all party members and clicking "Attack" on each enemy one by one. The combat *feels* like the Infinity Engine games at first, but under the hood it's quite different. The spells are mostly all different across classes, so learning what the spells do from one caster doesn't give you any leg up when you start learning the next caster. (As opposed to there being overlap between wizard / sorceror / cleric spells in D&D.) Compound this with sometimes acquiring a party member later in the game who has four tiers of spells already, and the incentive to learn what the spells are is small. As for the story and writing, let me repost what I wrote on reddit awhile back:

Have you played this game called, um, Pillars of Eternity, I think? It has pretty long load times.

Well now he's just trolling us.

Maybe it's because he IS a co-owner and co-founder that he is leaving? This is pure conjecture on my part but anything is conjecture at the moment and it's fun so let's go with it: perhaps as a co-owner he had obligations he couldn't get away from that got in the way of his wanting to do game design more, and felt that it influenced everything he did? He may have held off from pushing for things precisely because he was owner and was worried that it would look like he was abusing his position, and constantly having to deal with people as 'employees' as opposed to co-workers and so actually wound up exerting less influence as a result? He could be going for a more freelance role, where he can pick up work from Obsidian, inXile, and anywhere else that he fancies doing without any obligation to do things he isn't interested in, to deal with people on his terms etc. To shed responsibilities. Complete theorycraft with no relevance to reality and probably offensive, for which I apologise but I love sticking my oar in. :D I think this is probable. As a co-owner, especially of a perpetually-in-crisis studio like Obsidian, you are often worried about taking care of your employees, trying to avoid layoffs, keep the lights on, etc. It may be that it would have been irresponsible of him to push for his weirder ideas if he knew they would likely not have been sustainable for the company. (Obsidian is a relatively big studio, remember, they need fairly big projects to stay sustainable.)

He's spent so much time on inXile stuff lately that this is not surprising. Still, this is a huge loss for Obsidian! Avellone's writing is the number one thing I like about Obsidian games over other RPG developers. I hope he stays in the field.