I'm not a troll in that I say things to be provocative but I will admit it did occur to me yesterday that appearing to argue against a games sequel on that games own forum is a bit...odd. But I like this forum and generally much prefer reading the thoughts of others than espousing my own but I'll try and summarize better my thoughts and will always read any response in good faith.
As you brought up Fallout I'll use it to illustrate my point and I agree PoE is much closer in tone than any of the IE games to Fallout 1 which was partly inspired by A Canticle for Leibowitz, a book about the how even nuclear holocaust won't put an end to human blundering.
In it the monks of surviving organised religion covet the remnants of historical knowledge and dogmatically misinterpret them and in doing so ensure a continued cycle of assured annihilation.
Basic message from the book and which Fallout 1 captured beautifully is that the real wisdom in pre-apocalypse knowledge is that it's from a world that destroyed itself, any attempt to re-create it is doomed to fail. New Vegas has a lot of this going on and are the best parts of it but are unnecessary because Fallout 1 doesn't need repeating.
It's a cruel irony that Fallout itself was delivered into the careless hands of people who did not understand it and grossly and with great ignorance took all the wrong lessons from it. Seeing Vaults, Plasma rifles and ultra violence as the important things in Fallout has lead us from something that was original, intelligent and hermetically sealed to what is now simply a juggernaut commercial franchise. An empty power armor shell hoisted into an upright position and held aloft by the shackles of financial expediency.
Bethesda are perhaps better (or worse) than their counterparts from Canticle because they appear to know exactly what they are doing.
So unnecessary sequels make me cautious and the least persuasive arguments for them are that it's commercially compelling to do them.
Overall I think PoE advances a beautiful and subtle argument that to everything should come an ending and not because Josh Sawyer says it or the developers even intended it. The game just makes that argument to me in a thousand ways large and small that belong in another thread entitled 'NegativeEdges sophomoric reading of PoE" and not here. This quote from Julian Barnes:
“History is that certainty produced at the point where the imperfections of memory meet the inadequacies of documentation”
For me sums up the games sub text if you like as a passion project for 70,000 people who could stand to be reminded of that, myself included of course.
What does a crowd funded sequel, another appeal to nostalgia wait to tell us? the same? anything?
I think it could also be argued that the theme had something to do with reincarnation, and the fact that what one person may perceive as an ending, could also be interpreted as the start of something new
