Flouride

Yep, they expected PoE numbers from the get go. Not realizing how much of a marketing push PoE had due to the Kickstarter campaign. Tyranny didn't have much marketing before the DLCs were released. But with those numbers, there's just no way that Paradox ended up losing money with the project.

Tyranny didn't fail economically. It didn't reach what Paradox expected it to sell at release. But 562k copies + GOG + whoever haven't even started the game yet is profitable for Paradox. The team wasn't huge and the game wasn't being worked on for years.

It's also noteworthy that those sales only include people who have actually played the games. So if someone has the game on his/her backlog it doesn't show up there. Tyranny has sold pretty well after all. Makes you wonder if Paradox and Obsidian would be open to a sequel to finish up the story.

It's not just up to Obsidian. LucasArts as the publisher has the final say on such matters. Naturally it's possible, Kotor 2 had way less words in it than Deadfire. They obviously had a bigger budget for it as well, since it's LucasArts behind the game.

You do know that the fact that some of their artists are adding some new art assets into the game doesn't take away any time from the actual bug fixing. Implementing those into the game takes pretty much no time when compared to testing if a bug has been fixed and that it doesn't create any new problems somewhere else.

I know few translators and I've talked with them about their job, since I considered it as a job at one point. Obviously their take on the issue won't be true in every company and country. Printed media is a different beast than the gaming and film industry. Some of the smaller printing houses at least here in Finland take their time translating books. It might take over a year for them to finish the translated version. It shows in the quality. Books are way better translated than say movies. Games and films you need to get them out at the same time pretty much everywhere. Translators had more time back in the day (and they could actually do the translations while watching the show), when tv shows would air a year later in Finnish tv, but thesedays you will need to have the translations done when the show airs on HBO/NetFlix etc. since it will get released here on the same day as well. And quite often they don't have the context on what they are translating (doing it from transcripts or audio only) and they might get the text/audio quite late, so they are in a rush.

So, in your words. Gaming companies 1st pay professional translators X amount of dollars to translate their games into a language, then some amount to an editor in the same company to edit all the translations and then they go ahead and hire some 3rd party company to **** it all up by having someone pulled from the street with no apparent translating skills to go ahead and change up anything they want in "Localization testing" without the actual translators having a say in it? Sounds like great method to **** up games. Why anyone would do that... I don't understand. But if that's localization testing, then the whole gaming business is beyond retarded on this issue.

You are just pulling that out of your ***. If they didn't care about translations they wouldn't do them in the 1st place. No one works for free, not even translators who I bet are paid according to the norms since they are using a well known company to do the translations. Is it enough? Dunno, but it's up the contractor to decide what they pay their employees. Obsidian can't go handpicking people off the streets/LinkedIn to translate their games and paying them more than they would get by working for a translating company. Should they do immense background check on everyone who their contractor hires? They aren't fluent in said languages and can't check millions of words due to that, you have to trust these companies to do the job they are hired to do. They even changed the company that did the Pillars 1 since they got flak on the translation. If they hire a 3rd party, it doesn't solve ****. You still have someone who isn't deep into the lore doing the reviews, they will miss stuff. Josh even said Jorge Salgado did some reviews on the translations, but obviously you can't have your staffers reading endless amount of translations since they have other stuff to work on. Translators rarely if ever, have enough time to translate properly. Bigger project, bigger the mess.

That's how translations work on both movies and tv series as well. The translator doesn't have the context for what he is translating as he isn't seeing what is happening on the screen. That leads to stupid translation mistakes, but that's just how it goes most of the time. Everytime I watch a movie on NetFlix and I pay any attention to the actual subtitles, I notice multiple simple errors that even a 7th grader would notice. But since the translator has no actual context it becomes a guessing game when words can mean multiple things.

It's called testing, not actual translating for a reason. Like I said, the actual translating was done by different company than QLOC on Pillars 1. QLOC also did some normal Q&A for both games and did the translations for Polish, Russian and Chinese on Deadfire. Paradox uses that same company on pretty much every game they publish. Obsidian went with multiple different companies this time. You honestly think anyone would pay a bunch of Polish people to translate games into Italian, German or French? I seriously ****ing doubt it when there are so many translators on those said languages to hire at a relatively cheap price.

Actually, no. http://www.mobygames.com/game/windows/pillars-of-eternity-collectors-edition/credit QLOC did the Localization testing, actual localization was done by a different company. While GameScribes is based in USA, the actual translators might be living on the Moon. Translating doesn't require you to be at location.

They used different company this time. S&H Entertainment Localization did most of the localization for Pillars 1. QLOC did the QA Localization testing. GameScribes (Italian, Spanish, German and French), QLOC (Chinese, Russian and Polish), Red Cerberus (Portuguese) and H2 Interactive (Korean) on Deadfire.

Localization QA Testers Amine Ouahabi, Augusto Ferreira, Daria Bloch, Denisse Mallqui, Enrico Sposato, Fabrício Almeida, Filipo Teixeira, Helena Kardash, Holger Schott, Irina Dorabiato, Jean Lucas Bahia, Leonardo Marinho, Magdalena Marciniak, Nello Amadei, Patrícia Amaro, Priscila Vitta, Pedro Nakanish, Raquel Ghazal, Sandra Rodrigo, Thais Bortoletto, Yan Qiao, Yassine Benfaqyrah Those were under Red Cerberus. They did the Portuguese version I think.

This is from the Credits. Same company did Italian, German and Spanish. Localization: GameScribes Producer William Farrell French Translators Bertrand Bonnet-Badille, Sebastien Bigay, Laurent Calluaud, Catherine Dussault, Loic Laulanie, Adriaan Maitre, Juliette Martin, Thierry Soual French Editors Grégory Bardin, David Manson

You are right about Obsidian not being able to review the finished work. They would have to hire a 3rd party to do a proof reading to check it, even then the end result might be what it is. Everytime someone translates the original text gets a bit twisted and changed, no matter how good you are. Not to mention at that point it's too late to change the company, the game is about to get released. They have to work in hurry though. But that's the job, when you are a translator doing movies etc. You get the finished product pretty late, and even then they might end up changing something you've already translated. Translators get paid poorly. At least in Finland, they aren't making much money translating books/movies/tv-series. Can't remember if it was one of the least paid jobs you could land with University degree that you specifically speciliaze into at University. But it made the news some years ago, how poorly translators doing movies/tv series were paid. Enough so, that many quit their jobs. Calling the translations unimportant is wrong though. Europe is a big market for cRPGs and Obsidian knows this. Thus the translations are an important part. It's not by chance they threw in those localizations into pretty much every Fig reach goal tier. They had clear data from the 1st game. Obviously they care. Bad translations hurt their review scores in said countries, not to mention it makes people steer away from the game thus hurting their income.

Localizations were one of the most asked features during the Fig campaign. I wouldn't ever want to play a game translated into Finnish, but especially in central/southern europe there are just that many people who don't speak english well enough. Obsidian has to outsource it. They are an American company and don't have a large number of translators who can do the job for them. It's a normal business procedure. Even EA outsources it's translations. They probably have enough data and experience to stay away from the companies that do piss poor job at it.

I enjoyed the game, could have used a few less bugs in the game, but that's a risk I took when playing it immediately after launch. I loved the parts with the archmages and the gods (that includes Nemnok). I think the game really kicked in to gear with those areas and conversations. Main questline could have used an another quest or two. Now it just seemed so fast to play through after running around the Deadfire sailing around and killing everything. Loved the graphics and lighting. The game looks just so much better than Pillars. Not missing the long load times either from Pillars. Level design was a lot better than it was on Pillars as well. There was more consistency when it comes to overall quality of areas, even though some areas were clearly better than most (Fort Deadlight for example). It took me 52 hours to finish the game. I missed at least 3 quests and some bounties. So maybe around 55 hours to go through everything. Don't think I will play replay the game, but I will definately play the DLCs and finish up the quests I missed. While I understand the freedom to roam around was the point in this game, I hope the 3rd game will be a bit more focused on the main plot. Not quite sure I would rate it among Obsidian's other games. Definately one of the best games I've played this year.

I didn't find the companions bland. Sure, they aren't as well written as some of the best companions in Obsidian's games, but they aren't bland. They are not a group of people that will get along just fine, since they come from different cultures and points of views. It gets annoying at some points of the game for sure. I'm still very fond of Eder as a companion. Aloth could have used some more content. I found Xoti well written, though her accent felt wrong for me. Pallegina annoyed the **** out of me. She was just too pro-Vailian for me and her bickering with Xoti just made me send her sit in the cabin of my ship. Serafen and Tekehu weren't bad either. I liked both of them. Ondra talking through Tekehu was nicely done. If anything some of the dialogue was weak at times and the triggers for the companions were bugged which kinda ruined some of the feeling.

Translations are always outsourced to a local company that is then paid to translate eveeeeerything in the game to that said language. You can probably find the company that did the French and German localization by looking through the credits.

You should remember the word "malaka" from The Wire, season 2!

They had ½ of a project being worked on a year ago or so. According to one of the many Feargus interviews. It didn't have a project name back then, but it might have by now.

Maybe this time they will at least spit on it. Asking for lube would be asking too much from Bethesda. Sucks to see the IP ruined.

So, if you manage to reach Cignath Mor right at the moment when Melnaj reaches you the game will bug. It will show you the storyboards (?) leading to the encounter with Melnaj, but will load Cignath Mor map where you can't do anything and you have to shut down the game manually as the game won't respond to anything.

POE1 high concurrent peak is probably the results of the amount of backers starting the game on release day. DOS1 peak happened ~2 months after the game was released and it was a peak, not a steady increase (there was probably a sale). POE2 had a lot less backers than POE1 (~34k vs ~77k) which would affect release peak. Looking at achievement is interesting. Early last week, when I checked on GOG not even 40% of owners had left tutorial island. Today that amount is 61.7%. The stats is similar on Steam (63.7%). Looks like ~25% of owners waited for the first patch. Yup, many will wait for a patch or two before they start playing a game like Deadfire. Previous encounters with Obsidian's games or any other crpgs have taught them that waiting a month or two won't hurt. In fact it will only make the 1st playthrough so much better. Peak numbers on singleplayer games never go that high either. Because you play these games whenever you can, not when your friends are online as well (peak hours). Naturally it's a shame that the game couldn't reach DOS2 numbers. But I think that game had stronger marketing push which shows (a lot) when you look at the numbers.

Added Brian LeLeux as a Lighting Artist. Source: LinkedIn.