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I concur with the people that said deadfire didn't really sell to the degree Obsidian expected because many people who bought pillars of eternity 1 didn't really like or even play pillars of eternity 1. its really that simple. The original pillars came out around the time of a nostalgia wave from people like me who were 90s teens who played too much Baldur's Gate and wanted a grand adventure real time with pause game like those, however when pillars actually came out they found they didn't like this gameplay conceit so much anymore. it was clunky, immersion ruining, awkward, a relic, and so on. turn based is just clearly superior, they said. A shift in taste that is kind of amazing if you gamed at all in the late 90s while diablo and RTS ruled the universe and being able to real time multitask just showed how much more intellectually superior you were but i digress. i have always preferred turn based and currently do a lot of gloomhaven so i'm perfectly aware that turn based can be more thoughtful and fun but criticizing a game pitched and produced to be a successor to infinity engine games for being real time with pause is kind of like complaining that a wes anderson movie would have been better off if it was grim & gritty. I think a lot of people bought pillars 1 because of critical reviews and high ratings. I know some who never really played it purchased it because of baldur's gate nostalgia and when they fired up the new game they were like ah, yeah, i'm so over this. A lot of people just simply didn't understand the way the game was made because they didn't ever play Baldur's Gate and had no nostalgia for it. they simply just don't want to read too much and think that its 'bad writing' (phrases like wall-of-text or text vomit), they don't want to explore much on their own (complaints of 'pointless' wilderness maps), need quest markers to find things, and so on. Contemporary gamers need games to have simple stories with unambiguous universal morals, quippy dialogue, action packed and full of avatar customization drops and cheevos for them to stay invested. As we all get older and many of us have careers and families to spend time on, under 30s are going to be the main people who buy games and will make your game successful by turning it into an ubiquitous meme, especially games that aren't multi-million dollar, football game ad packaging, casual-oriented pick up and play for 30 mins and put them down again AAA cross-platform titles. So if you're shooting for big sales numbers this is the demographic you have to appeal to. if you're making arty indie games for old people who like to read with modest sales goals, like weather factory does, you'll have more "success" since that's all based on perception anyway. This reaction was compounded when deadfire came out because the flavor of the month at that time was divinity original sin 2: a straightforward godmode story in which you were practically encouraged to be batman villain evil with quippy dialogue full of jokes and Easter eggs and to top it all off glorious turn based combat. Go browse the negative reviews of Deadfire on steam from the year or two after it was released and you'll see almost every single one of them cross-promotes D:OS2. I think its interesting nobody has really mentioned DOS2 in this thread. I mean its easy to forget its not like people still talk about it, and Larian seems to be stuck in some kind of early access grift loop with the wholly unnecessary Baldur's Gate 3. At the time it seemed like the consensus verdict from the people who were searching for the objective, definitive reason why the game missed sales expectations was that pillars was a throwback to Baldur's Gate and not built like D:OS2. Perhaps this is true, but that's not a flaw with the game, that was the entire pitch for funding development, which I've already said. The grousing about RtWP in particular became so inescapable here on the obsidian boards that the pillars team literally added a turn based mode at the end of the support cycle in an attempt to appease them. and frankly, this is a recurring issue. I don't necessarily think this is why it didn't meet sales expectations but I want to dig into this, at the risk of being blathersome. i think pillars series shows the pitfalls of sourcing the community for direct involvement in game design. after the first game was released people complained about the pacing and how boring and dreary the setting was so in deadfire they changed it to make it less "edgy" & more open world, like the Baldur's Gates were. And people complained about that instead, that it wasn't as deep and dark as the first game. And those aren't the only changes made from "community feedback" eg complaining from randos: the backer NPCs were stupid and boring (facts), there's too many spells to choose from, can't multiclass, its not 100% voice acted (ugh), there's too many 'walls of text' (double ugh; its called a paragraph) etc and yet when deadfire came out: what happened to the backer npcs, there's not enough spells, multiclassing is not that good, the dialogue is simplified and the story isn't as compelling, the voice acting is uneven, etc. the lesson? never make a game based on kickstarter promises and fanbase feedback and wishlisting or you'll be forced to try to please that which is unpleasable. and maybe i'm wrong but thats probably why tyranny performed relatively better, it wasn't saddled with kickstarter promises and backer wishlisting and nostalgia for playing baldur's gate games or pie-in-the-sky sales goals tbh, it was just able to do and be its own thing. it seems like no matter how many changes you make to reflect feedback the negative feedback will flow in against whatever choice you make. its a law of the internet: people who are happy with things don't comment and people who have an axe to grind do. furthermore i think the sales rumors and perceptions (this game didn't really sell badly, it didn't totally bomb either, its not lawbreakers) tended to have a negative feedback loop for people buying into the game. People, especially mainline gamers, don't like buying unpopular things, they want to play the game that is trending on twitter, stuff they can either play with friends or talk about with friends. That seems to be the main motivation to buy any game in this stage of the social network economy. Not only is there the rampaging Fortnite gorilla, but recall stuff like the brief fleeting infatuation with fall guys leading into the endless punishment of among us. this game didn't trend on twitter. no amount of marketing can make up for the fact that streamers aren't streaming and posters aren't posting. Honestly, would this game even be fun to watch on a stream? I have a hard time imagining it would be, compared to something like GTA, Fortnite or Elden Ring. At the time, people on here seemed to believe that the perception of low sales meant definitively that it was a bad game and searched out the objective design reasons why it failed which is extremely faulty reasoning. Stuff that isn't broadly popular is not objectively bad, in fact a lot of times the stuff that is broadly popular has attained that popularity at the expense of depth and uniqueness. This game makes a very direct reference to Deep Space Nine by naming the ship the Defiant. Little history lesson from an old person who was there, that show got ragged on by everybody for being boring and not actually star trek because they weren't exploring. yet over time, thanks probably to streaming facilitating binging serials, DS9 has grown to be regarded as one of the best things under the Star Trek brand and one of the earliest examples of the emerging "prestige television" serial. i said at the time deadfire is peter gabriel genesis: full of great steve hackett riffs, bizarre but heady lyrics, big ambitious ideas it sometimes realizes, totally messy and all over the place, it reaches for things that it can't quite grasp but i like that approach and find it more interesting and laudable than phil collins genesis. thats me tho Its a good game, its not a great game and it seems to have made money so I'm not sure why anyone should worry about its popularity. Many things greater than this game aren't broadly popular either. And like DS9 or the Velvet Underground maybe it will become more appreciated with age.

this is a deeply stupid thread and i can't believe someone brought up participation trophies dr roleplaying nerd, phd of the blowhard fellowship expert in diagnosing the internet maladies of the common "millennial" most of these ratings bombers are zoomers (under 24s) who believe in some kind of market-based gaming Renaissance if they actively participate in the ratings and critical aspect of gaming media so this is one of their only recourse of participation, like voting, since they are otaku and dont understand anything about capitalism or life really. i think most generational observations about millennials are weaponized clickbait bull**** at best and lazy thinking and prejudiced at worst but don't let me stop you citing "a whole heap o' studies" keep being old geezers my dudes ps josh is really politically left, publicly, on twitter: i think it makes his games targets

dear blizzard, you are incompetent morons. why is ther no party members in diablo? i am outraged, please fix this bug immediate also i noticed there is a gap in your lore, i have attached diagrams you are an incomnpetent boob sincerely yours, cartoons plural

i'll argue they're so powerful they should be hard to place, vast amounts of arcane energies and so on and so fourth

i'm the one who likes cormac mccarthy he said eyes narrowing perhaps his lack of punctuation especially quotation marks is lazy hmmmm nope

yeah that always tickles me, i'm history grad with a good command of language and my own personal style guide when writing informally: no caps, very little punctuation, no stops, i find capitalizing the first person "i" to be very unnecessary and self-absorbed language is organic. we create it as we speak & write it, being a grammarian is tiresome (and maybe even some ists) even if you're perfect let alone someone who actually is making dozens of mistakes

if you're paying attention to the story at all you shouldn't have any trouble figuring out which characters are ride or die with their faction

I agree that Ydwin is interesting. OTOH, it's just strange to me that she's a pale elf. Frankly, I think that she'd have made a ton more sense as a regular wood elf. I don't really get a vibe that pale elves should be seen as intellectuals and scientists. It just seems to me that a pale elf companion or sidekick would have been better as a ranger, or a barbarian, possibly a cleric or druid. Even a paladin or monk might have been possible, though perhaps of an unknown order that was based in The White That Wends. I just find the idea of a pale elf as a well educated and seemingly sophisticated animancer highly counter intuitive. I think that Ywdin could have been a wood elf and hardly missed a beat in her character. she has dialogs in beast of winter that explain this fwiw

i just can't believe you'd spend any part of your life arguing about this, expecting it, demanding it narration is bad ok we get it man big deal, move on, play another game do something else. you seem like you're logging 100s of hours in something you grudgingly tolerate and thats no way to live the thing is with this game is that its not first person and its not animated so you actually do have to describe how characters react sometimes, there's really no way around that, maybe you should go write a story mod for an infinity-like instead of being mad online so you can find out for yourself i personally would like east and west come together and have big portraits that change expression if necessary above the dialog box but thats not implemented in deadfire yes she's like a breathless geek gf, like a dorky, barely contained excited dm and you don't like it at all, i don't either. i like ydwin who is the same actress so its just an aesthetic choice we don't like man its gonna happen to you sometimes try to appreciate it for what it is i guarantee you'll have a better time That's a long time to stay outside. drastic cases take drastic measures

1. do people not realize the game you played as a kid seemed harder because you were a kid 2. every game ever has a board somewhere with about 12 dudes who post constantly complaining it's too easy. if the extremely hard niche game is too easy I suggest trying to learn how to play an instrument or something personally I'm frustrated by how hard the dragon fight is on heart of winter and the fact that the other dlc is EVEN HARDER. I want to have FUN thanks guys for the constant complaints about difficulty now the DLC can only be finished by 1 percent of the audience

anyone who feels entitled to this option needs to stop playing the game and go outside for a few years

loading screens for fast travel mode often take longer you ever notice that...

yes. please stop acting like every consumers reaction is fair, informed or important

.... Yeah, people who want to actually make MONEY, they don't get to go 'Tough cookies, IDC if my customers don't like it.' That's... yeah no, you don't get to do that, especially not in a competitve industry. Maybe if you were the only donut shop for fifty miles or something, but Obsidian sure as hell doesn't get to do that. yeah it's really a shame nobody in games has any creative freedom. also odd how many fans of games are completely fine with this yet still want people to take it seriously as art

it literally says "two-handed weapons" which all arquebuses are also described as on their info... some things in systems should be obfuscated because its built to have depth with character creation and min/maxing so that takes effort on the part of the player to dig into. if everyone could have an broken character because the interface hand held you the whole way we'd have a lot more bored gamers complaining about being bored but this really isn't buried or obfuscated if i understood it

god this debate about turn based is so insanely tiresome i wish you'd all just stop forever divinity 2 is multiplayer, like i said in some other thread codedudes that have more money than sense will drop a chunk to buy four games to play with friends for a weekend. but nobody brings that up because channers or somebody decided rtwp is bad now and so we have to hear about this FOREVER i guess who cares??? stop!!! libertarian gamers: sales does not equal quality i'm sorry to break it to you but your dumb philosophy is dumb. stop acting like pillars 2 reportedly having bad sales says anything about the game at all, or about any mistakes they need to fix. maybe they don't need to fix **** and maybe the dumb-ass market revolves around twitch and can't stop playing ****ing fortnite is the problem. maybe its the fact that i'm playing witcher 3 the most raved about game of the year i guess because of the graphics idk its really not that great, its not prestige, its not sophisticated or adult. its kind of like a gory metal album with a ****ed up wizard on the cover which is fine but the gaming press talked about it like it was high art maybe this was always a niche game for niche nostalgia gaming and if you like it, you should be happy with it.

i honestly think the midichlorians is a pretty good parallel to you overthinking this moon/ocean godlike thing. i don't have that many questions. gods have a lot of power, they are vain, fickle, and narcissistic, if they have multiple aspects, guises, duties, why wouldn't they have multiple godlike aspects? ondra is goddess of the moons and the sea and manifests as an angler fish to the huana i mean, how does this exactly contradict the existence of moon godlikes. in a metafictional sense, its also cool and opens up the godlikes to being pretty much anything you can justify relating to one of the gods. this is a perfectly valid reason to do anything in a work of fiction mo nobody needed to explain why klingons developed head ridges beyond "we thought they'd look cooler in the movies" why do godlikes exist is a great question but it didn't necessarily need to be answered in any of the games we have so far but definitely something to keep in the back pocket

We don't have much of one. Deadfire makes it clear that Godlikes are some kind of emergency essence hoard for the Gods, but that doesn't really jive.... Until Deadfire, they had no reason to think they'd ever need any such hoard. The Gods are also pretty clearly not the thinking-ahead, just-in-case sort of creatures, so that really doesn't explain why Godlikes are around, just how the Gods are currently thinking of their Godlikes. It's not clear why ANY Godlikes exist, just that they are the chosen of that God.... Because reasons? Gods have Priests already, no idea why they need 'Chosen' as well. check this out: what if it doesn't even need to be explained at all someone had a character idea for a big fish godlike who was a local legend but a little out of his depth in the real world, they react to him as if he's special in world, he has a special relationship with ondra, is it necessary to answer all of your questions can ambiguity be had?

i don't really agree with the specifics of the OP but i do think devs need to start filtering internet complaints and realizing a lot of it is always going to happen. because with a lot of what seems to be going on with overwatch is that gamers (who post at least) seem to have developed an expectation that its the devs job to entertain them with a product practically forever and what actually happens behaviorally is that they play until they get bored and then they complain about it on the internet. and of course this would happen. so devs take that feedback, change the product, the fans try it out, play until they get bored and then fight over whether it used to be better this is why so often the most detailed and longest negative reviews of a product are people with a billion hours, they think the product failed them when its literally just that they should do something else already. the fact that the complaints about poe1 and poe2 are mirror images of each other and the fact that 90% of the complaining about both i felt was because it wasn't turn based because suddenly everyone loves it. now they are hammering out a turn based mode and lo and behold the whole board is flooded with "turn based is for stupid babies" like this is 1993 one of the overlooked components of divinity's success is multiplayer, people with money to burn just habitually buy multiple copies of these kind of games and barely play them. pillars should be a one player game.

i think the rathun and eyeless are probably more like D&D angels, giants, demons, not "kith" perse but something else entirely whereas godlike is specifically kith that have been touched by the gods

did they take away real time on this game or is this actually about something else

so if moon godlike blong to ondra and she also has marine godlike in tekehu its possible other godlikes are multi aspect as well. like a beastial godlike for galawain. still a lot of variety to play with what about a steel godlike for abydon, basically port colossus into pillars

Sure. 'Cause you said so. By definition doing things sequentially is inferior to and less complex than doing things simultaneously. ah cool its the 90s again

this thread reminds me to ask, who do moon godlike belong to? ondra?

do you work for larian or what's up my dude people whine about rtwp because its suddenly fashionable to do so devs of rtwp game develop and release free turn based mode with late patch support some dude with no avatar sneers about it gamers turning into all the worst things about hipsters haha great to see