Boeroer

That's what I meant when I wrote that players don't know what the description means. And how could they? What you said would also be a reasonable interpretation. However my tests with Justice and the two flails (long time ago) indicated that it's a separate lash and the base dmg is unchanged. You can't see the separate lash in the combat log very often because it gets eaten up by DR most of times (there is no MIN dmg for lashes). But if you do high dmg per hit or attack enemies with low DR you can witness the second lash in the combat log. With Justice it's visible a bit more often since the base dmg of a great sword is higher than that of flails and thus the chance of the 10% lash to overcome 1/4 DR is higher. I don't think that mechanic ever changed.

@kanisatha Interesting that you bring this up now when somebody doesn't agree with you. Before it didn't seem to bother you, the would-be champion of the downtrodden whom got caught in our devastating stampede. Or is it just...

It's not really hidden. But the weapon description is not very clear and many players just overlook the second lash or don't realize what the description means: There are two other weapons that have this (with a double burning lash instead of crush): Starcaller and Unforgiven, both unique flails.

I think PoE's publicity mostly came from its Kickstarter campaign - and that it was promoted as "spiritual successor to Baldur's Gate from former Black Isle devs (now Obsidian)" which made several gaming magazines and -sites pick it up.

Justice is a good Great Sword. It often gets overlooked that it has a secret additional mini-crushing lash of 10% on top of it's obvious 25% crushing lash. If you do significant per-hit damage this additional 10% can make some difference. Per-hit damage has to be high to enable the 10% lash to overcome 1/4 of crush DR. So rogue is a good fit. Or use everything to lower crush DR on enemies (like Fighter's Sundering Blow). DR bypass like Vulnerable Attack does not help with lashes unfortunately.

No. Afaik it has +100% turning time (takes 2 turns for a jibe instead of 1), its chance getting hit is 60% instead of 55% (sloop) and with the money you need to buy a dhow (35,000) I can easily buy the Red Dream hull upgrade (16,000) and still having faster jibe, more hull health (90 vs. 65) and spared 18k. With master cannoneers it's not that important to deal a ton of damage per cannon salve but to cause special events like flooding, man over board and such. If you can cause this often you win since the enemy will always have to react to that and can't fire back. And the 1 turn jibe helps a lot with that. You can send enemies into a never-ending loop of special events which will win you the fight. That's why I always would use Berath's Blessing points for the cheap multi-master sailors you can buy in Port Maje. I never had any troubles without a boatswain that are worth remembering. Hence the sloop is by far the best ship in my book (if you look at the cost-benefit ratio). I use the Berath sails which came with my game. Usually don't need to upgrade the sloop's sails for ship combat. It's only a thing with the Voyager (+flamethrower) for me.

Thank you for translating my thoughts into better English than my German brain ever could. --- So back to the armchair. Another hint for thelee's #1: Pathfinder: Kingmaker was funded with Kickstarter. D:OS I and II were funded with Kickstarter as well. As was PoE. Keeping in mind that they are targeting a rel. small audience all sold well enough regardless of critics (in a certain spectrum) it seems. Deadfire was funded with Fig. This is no proof but it seems that Kickstarter has quite some impact on the publicity. Like daven already said. I think you need to reach that niche audience, reach those RPG players - as many as possible - in order to sell a lot of copies of an isometric, text-heavy cRPG. Add to this the assumption that some of the cRPG crowds who cherish Baldur's Gate etc. might be a tad conservative with their settings and might not be too hyped for a Caribbean pirate themed Pillars game - also because the first one already wasn't too much like Baldur's Gate despite the "spiritual successor" tag. We got the grog pet for a reason. Then add the situation where there suddenly was a lot more competition in that niche market. Then this conglomeration would be a plausible theory for a significant sales drop. No evidence, still educated guessing. The other stuff comes on top. Also maybe applicable to Tyranny? Expectations too high, no Kickstarter, different marketing strategy and setting ("this time you're evil in the kinda bronze age, hohoho") more competition... However, if this was true it would be kind of bad? Smaller RPG studios would be trapped into using Kickstarter (if they didn't have a potent publisher who can put up a big marketing campaign), use the old settings if they wanted to maximize sales... Druidstone did none of that and didn't do too well either (despite having some publicity as creators of Legend of Grimrock I & Ii). And then we have Disco Elysium which did none of that. Although I think in this case the game profited immensely from its uniqueness and overall quality which led to overwhelmingly good press reviews and an overall hype before release. Also the marketing material I saw was very neat and convincing and I saw it in a lot of places. I didn't see any of that for Deadfire. If you weren't following Obsidian or WorldOfEternity on Twitter or roaming these forums I guess you would not have seen any marketing material for it...? Did somebody experience that campaign otherwise?

You are missing that we have two games here, the second being a sequel to the first one. If we only had one game and its reviews then your point would be more viable. But we have a first game which sold well and did get good reviews from users and critics alike - which weakens the argument that a lot of players didn't like certain aspects of the game and therefore didn't buy the second. And then we have the second game which score is equally good but sold less than half. So no matter how you look at it: it is unlikely (not impossible) that the massive sales drop stems from the things you listed alone. And of course user reviews are known data. As are surveys. They are very similar. Tell your favorite polling agency that they were working with non-data all the time... In this case we even have significant sample sizes (around 10,000 reviews on Steam alone). Of course it doesn't need to be a representative sample of the population[sic] but a representative sample of PoE- or Deadfire players. If Pillars had sold 1,000,000 Steam copies then 10,000 Steam reviews is def. a representative sample size. And while a survey may not be 100% accurate most of times it can give a good approximation. Reviews don't prove any theory, but they are indications and make some theories less likely than others. That's what I'm pointing out again and again and that's what you refuse to acknowledge for whatever reason. Besides reviews we also had the Obsidian Backer survey they did after PoE, telemetry from Deadfire, post mortem talk of Josh Sawyer, a fired* marketing person at Obsidian and other pieces of information that nearly all do not align with your theory. Reviews was just one data point but I think it is the most obvious one and it's easy to verify. *wasn't actually fired but his contract was based on success of the marketing campaign. He had to go so it is safe to assume that the marketing goals were not achieved.

Afaik Josh said using bugs is fair game. But it's their call after all so maybe you should ask him on Twitter before investing all that time.

Sadly it seems that both @Phenomenum as well as @MaxQuest have left the forum.

Correct. You cannot know that the fight in Gorecci Str. is avoidable a lot easier if you come from the south. The usual way in is from the jail. If you don't have good stealth already on one party member it's very difficult to not trigger the fight. Fun fact though: if you reload the map from autosave (after getting crushed) you can usually sneak past them without them turning hostile. I guess it has something to do with the dialogue the looters usually have when you enter for the first time and which triggers their hostility. It's missing when you reload.

This is a theory I can get behind. Don't know if it plays a major role but at least it explains nicely why players may have dropped PoE and didn't buy Deadfire without having an impact on its score. On the other hand: isometric RPGs occupy a narrow niche in today's gaming market. I would argue that the majority of players who bought PoE knew what to expect (I mean lots of text and all that "boring" stuff that's usually in those games). After all even PoE is nowhere near even low-selling AAA titles. So in order to let the sequel drop as hard as Deadfire dropped there has to be something more it seems...? Also only anecdotal, but I read about several players (who played PoE and found it good but were no hardcore fans) who completely missed that Deadfire was even happening.

There is no science in this thread. I mean besides the "scientist" card you waved around in a rather self-contradictory way in order to answer xar's question . But there are some numbers, facts and insights from the devs (who have access to telemetry) we can use. And some of them clash with what you and Bleak deem to be the main cause for the massive sales drop of Deadfire compared to PoE. What clashes are for example critics' and users' reviews. Doesn't mean your take is completely wrong, but those discrepancies make your theories very unlikely to be the main reason of a massive sales drop. In my opinion they played a minor part. But that's just my guess. I can't say how big the part is. I'm just quite sure that they can't play a major role since that would mean we would see that in users' and critics' reviews. I didn't claim my or several other theories are the definite answer. I only said that they don't clash as hard with the numbers/facts/statements. For example the "marketing failure" (here I include the move from Kickstarter to Fig). Or the theory that the setting put potential players off. Those are also only educated guesses - but they align with what we know. Those aren't even my theories. The only thing I brought up was that maybe the setting put players off and others chimed in. The rest is a collection of theories that were brought up and deemed reasonable when we look at the data at hand. And therefore, yes: they are not entirely unsubstantiated and "better" (in the sense that they seem to be more likely) than others which clash with the data. Are they true? We will most likely never now. Still it is reasonable to point logical errors out and it is reasonable to question your theories if they don't take known data into account. Unless you can't give a plausible explanation how this clash can get resolved then I'll continue to question your take. You may not like it and get frustrated or even angry, but it's reasonable. It's not "my theory vs. your theory". It's me seeing a flaw in your argumentation and pointing it out. Did the same with xar - he took it better I must say. If you point out an error of mine then that's fine as well. It's a discussion after all and that's what these forums are for. I'm the last person to not say "good point" once you make one. But so far you didn't. That doesn't mean that those cases you described aren't there. I just question that those lead to such a massive sales drop while players who actually played the game obviously liked it (on average). Another theory that runs into the exact same problem: "It's the bugs". Because they are indeed annoying. Would make sense if user critics would reflect that. But same rebuttal: There were complaints about bugs - but reviews don't hint that it was a major problem for most players. Obsidian has a reputation for buggy games: hasn't hurt PoE or Outer World sales. --- Disco Elysium: if we want to take the number of reviews on Steam and try to guess sales numbers then we can see that it has about the same amount of reviews as Deadfire iirc (or was it PoE? correct me if I'm wrong) then I guess we could deduce that it sold about as many copies? Not reliable of course, more of a hint. At the same time I believe its budget was a lot smaller than Deadfire's so it should have been a financial success. After all Josh said that Deadfire was a disappointment when it comes to sales, but was doing "ok" financially. Don't know how that statement fits into the whole "fig investment" disaster though. Deadfire would have been a financial success if Ship Combat and Full VO hadn't been included. Also what Gromnir said seems to be true: expectations were way too high. Mostly due to the success of D:OS --> D:OS2 as Josh said. Note that Larian didn't switch crowdfunding platforms...

I wasn't there (only joined after the release of PoE) and thus I didn't witness what was going on first-hand during beta and pre-release. Afaik Sensuki was very outspoken about stuff he didn't like in the beta. But I can't say if he was a source of toxicity or not. Gromnir once spoke about that time but I can't find his post anymore.

Pillar of Faith? Interesting! Those spells all do single target dmg only so I guess it's maybe not worth it if you don't want to take it for your weapon anyway. But good to know. If there was an AoE spell that accidentially worked with Vulnerable Attack - that would be really neat.

You mean because we won't follow your line of argumentation but keep challenging it with... reason? Sounds a bit like You can ask Gromnir why Josh left the forums. I can assure you our civil style of discussion was not the case. I'm pretty sure Josh could easily handle the forum in its current form. His departure had other reasons than simply not agreeing.

Science doesn't use anecdotal reference or personal intuition as its base. It's exactly the opposite of what science should do. I didn't mean you but the post from Bleak who said that the "pirate setting" theory was amusing. That got mixed up a bit while trying to address several posts about the "players didn't like the implementation of X" theories.

I don't really know if Penetrating Shot works with Iconic Projection. If so then good. Azalin's Helmet doesn't stack with Rabbit Fur Gloves. Merciless Hand (+30% crit dmg, Doemenel) and Dungeon Delver (+10% cri damage) would stack with Helm or Gloves for a total of +100% dmg on crit (50% regular + 30% + 10% +10%).

Yes. Just just have to swap them in and out of your party. Some companion quests can take a really long time and don't have special quest points but require you to spend time with the party member (see Durance and also Grieving Mother). For Edér and Aloth: you can simply follow the questline (mostly Defiance Bay), complete their quests and then swap them out for other companions once you are finished. Kana's quest is easy to solve as well. It's in the Endless Paths only. Hiravias, Maneha, Zahua, Devil, Sagani have quests that are spread out a bit more and reach into the late game. But it's no problem to put them into the stronghold while you do other party members' quests and pick them up later to finish their quests. The quests will not fail if you swap them out temporarily.

I also believe so. It's understandable that Feargus wanted to have Deadfire on his own crowdfunding platform (that only few people heard about before). I don't know how bad it hurt sales but I think it's reasonable to assume that it did hurt them.

The important thing about Iconic Projection is - as Silvaren said - that it only has to overcome 25% of DR. This makes it a viable spamming option. And of course it heals which we shouldn't forget. Shining Beacon (as nearly all DoT effects) profits additively from MIG (which adds +x% of the base dmg per tick) and then multiplicatively from INT (adds more ticks) and crits (+50% duration, also adds more ticks). DoTs don't profit from Scion of Flame and such and also don't get increased dmg per tick from crits. So stuff like Merciless Hand won't work either. This would simply be too good since we already have MIG * INT * crit bonus which can lead to absurdly big dmg numbers. Priests have the ability to not only raise their MIG into stellar regions (Aggrandizing Radiance, Champions Boon, Minor Avatar) but also their INT (Aggrandizing Rad., Minor Avatar) and Accuracy (for crits, Aggrandizing Rad., Champion's Boon, Minor Avatar, Inspiring Radiance, Devotions...). Those mostly stack (Champion's Boon doesn't stack with Minor Avatar). This makes Shining Beacon one of the most devastating spells - I mean if you build around it. Also because it can be used as spell mastery later on and thus becomes 1/encounter. If you had 6 Priests and they all had Inspiring + Aggrandizing Radiance, Minor Avatar and Shining Beacon you could cast 6 beacons with +70 accuracy (since Inspiring Radiance stacks with itself) and +30% additive dmg (if you had only 10 MIG before) and if you crit (easy with +70 ACC) with an unbelievable duration. Everything that isn't immune or extremely resistant to fire will most likely die. If you already start with 20 MIG and 20 INT it's even more ridiculous of course.

@thelee: what? You are not using my custom passive icons? What a disappointment!

Exactly. That's why I listed the most likely reasons that line up with (or don't contradict) the data we have. Like bad marketing, setting, change of crowdfunding platforms etc. I personally have 0 problems with the setting. It's just a theory that is a) reasonable and b) doesn't collide with the data we have (e.g. reviews). Because somebody who didn't buy Deadfire because they don't like pirate settings in RPGs would indeed not write a negative review. Same with bad marketing and so on: those are reasons not to buy a game and they wouldn't be reflected by reviews (since you didn't play the game in the first place).

But you are arguing with anecdotal references. Usually, if a game is sold 1,000,000 times and 10,000 players write a review (see PoE on Steam) or simply somehow voice their opinion and judge a game (when it lands on Metacritic) and the professional critics come to the same conclusion by the way - then first of all it's a relevant sample size and secondly it would be extremely surprising if all the players who didn't review the game hated it while the ones who did review it mostly think it's good. Very unlikely. This is no solid proof. Reviews are more like a survey - and surveys can be misleading. But it has a lot more substance than just picking stuff one didn't like and then bloating it up to be "the" reason for the sales drop (as if one's taste determines what most people like or dislike) - while at the same time ridiculing the arguments of others. I still saw no proper explanation for this (anecdotal reference is no proper explanation unless you reach a significant sample size - finding like 10 friends who support your claim is not statistically significant). I read a lot of Twitter messages that praise PoE and Deadfire. This is because I follow some Obs devs and WorldOfEternity. I never read bad things. Obviously nobody who hates PoE would go to Twitter and post it into the timeline of an Obsidian dev (I mean nobody but weird ones). So this is anecdotal reference ("So many people on Twitter loved it!") but at the same time it's meaningless unless those voices would reach significant numbers.

I don't want to repeat myself - but it seems that several people still don't consider the following (very basic) point that contradicts most of their arguments, including this one: If the sales numbers dropped so harshly because a lot of players didn't like PoE or Deadfire for whatever reasons (be it overly complex mechanics - you name it) then the user reviews would reflect that. Which. They. Do. Not. If anything then this is glaring obvious - and indisputable. I don't understand how such arguments can be repeated over and over again when this question hasn't been solved yet. Nobody who came up with such a theory was able to explain this baffling conflict. Even if some of those arguments sound reasonable: this simple point seems to invalidate most of them. But maybe there is an explanation for this. I just can't think of one. It would make some sense if players knew beforehand how the mechanics of Deadfire worked - like from playing PoE - and decided not to buy it then (hence no reviews from those players). But then why didn't they voice their dissapointment in the PoE reviews?