Rataan

With being acquired by the Borg, I would hope to see an infusion of capital that would allow Obsidian to hire writers and coders that would give us the engaging and reasonably bug-free RPG's we all crave. But in reality, we will probably see Obsidian stamp its moniker on console oriented online multiplayer clickers as they are slowly chewed up and digested by a soul-destroying corporate culture. Then one day a few years from now refugees will put together another Kickstarter campaign to give the PC gaming public the RPG's that they want but the major studios will never produce. RIP, Obsidian. It was nice while it lasted.

If you say so. I don't specifically remember that, but I don't really care. It doesn't change my opinion that the inclusion of guns added little to the game and detracted from its identity as a sword and sorcery epic. I never said it had to be anything. They can make it whatever they want. A good enough story can make any world building choices tolerable. But PoE was 97% sword and sorcery epic with with 3% primitive guns and, according to you, renaissance rationalism. It just came off as a hodgepodge that was trying to be too many things to too many people, like a 10 year old MMO. Of course saying nobody was a bit of hyperbole. There's a lid for every pot. It's funny that you should bring up Ps:T. That's another game that I started and never finished, and I wrote a dissenting critique of that on the BGII forums back in 2001. I didn't like that the Nameless One was a Frankenstein clone. I didn't like that everything looked washed out and generally ugly. I got fed up with Mort's endless necrophilic and cannibalistic gross-outs. Obviously, I wasn't alone, because Ps:T was generally considered a commercial failure, at least in terms of initial sales. It eventually got enough of a cult following to be profitable, or so I hear, but nothing near the magnitude of the Baldur's Gate franchise.

Hoping to rerail this thread back to PoE and not other games or the Trump/Obama political knife fight, I also never finished PoE, and I also quit some time after entering Twin Elms. Interestingly, some of the things that irked me about PoE haven't been mentioned much by others. The first thing about PoE that took the wind out of my sails was the inclusion of guns. I almost opted not to buy PoE for this reason alone. Why did OE do this? Guns just destroy the epic fantasy sword and sorcery mystique for me. I suppose I should be grateful that the guns were the crudest and earliest types and that they weren't particularly OP, but since they are so peripheral, it just begs the question all the more why they were included at all. If we can have a blunderbuss, then why not a rifle? If we have a rifle then why not a machine gun? We all can see the slippery slope. Guns were a renaissance invention, not a medieval one. 'Nuff said. The main story line was dull and lackluster, but that wasn't the biggest problem for me. The fact that it was also depressing and horrifying was far worse. This is escapist fantasy. It's a genre that is supposed to make us want to go on an adventure somewhere exotic and exciting. Nobody gets into epic fantasy just to enter a nightmare that makes us wonder why the protagonist doesn't just hang himself. Sure, there needs to be conflict and crisis, or else there wouldn't be anything to do, but there needs to be light along with the dark. There was simply nothing uplifting about the PoE story line that I can recall. Children are being born without souls. Children--the only things in our real-life world that are genuinely sweet and innocent, and that is what is being annihilated in PoE. It's not just a bad idea. It's like if we had a contest for outrageously bad ideas, that would be the winner. In a similar vein, I just don't get why so many people cite the Grieving Mother story as a high point in PoE. GM has to be one of my least favorite RPG characters in any game I have ever played. I just could not understand what she was going on about, and let's face it, that was really the point. Too much mystery, not enough revelation. The only thing I was sure about was that her story was another horrifying and depressing version of the horrifying and depressing main story. I could go on about some of the wooden, paint-by-numbers implementations like the main city and the keep, the other companions whose names and purposes completely escape me now and the animancy sideshow which had the redeeming quality of being less horrific than the main story, but only by a slim margin. But I didn't hate PoE. I think OE did try to deliver what CRPG players have been asking for since 2001. They just didn't have on hand the quality of content that was implied when PoE was touted as the spiritual successor to the Infinity Engine games. I'm sure I will buy Deadfire, but I will wait until it is a year old and most of the patching has been done. Let's all raise a glass and hope that the second time is the charm.