Starwars

I'm currently playing Beautiful Desolation, which I also backed on kickstarter. Very cool game that feels quite unique, which is always a plus in my mind. Interesting setting too. The gameplay is basically top down point and click with just a hint of RPG spice to it. It's also interspersed with some fun CG cutscenes which are super well made given the very small development team. Not perfect but definitely enjoying it.

The arena style DLC isn't my problem with it (even though it definitely wouldn't have been my personal choice). It is that they decided to drop it where they did in the timeline of the main campaign. FS at least "fits" as a sort of endgame thing, even though that too screws up the pacing. But SSS just feels completely out of place for the time where you get access to it. Like you said, would've been way cooler to have it accessible from the start of the game and have it running with increasing difficulty throughout. Sort of a thing to return to as you play.

There are also other problems with how the DLC's were integrated. I think SSS is the worst offender of them all. Dropping a huge combat chunk DLC that late in the main campaign (especially when FS is also endgame stuff) was not a good move. There's something about the smaller DLC model that always rubs me wrong. Even though part of them are always of a higher quality in a sense than the main campaign, I also think there tends to be other stuff that just drags them down. Little gameplay gimmicks like the awful teleportation "puzzles" in BoW, or the "knock books over" thing in FS. Or combat that turns into even more of a slow slog overall even though you also get the occasional great and difficult combat encounter. Even though the White March isn't perfect (Galvino's workshop is pretty much a perfect example of a combat slog area), I like that it feels substantial, thoroughly designed. Like a campaign on its own with pacing and ups and downs.

Those characters are from people who supported the game in the crowdfunding campaign when the game was being developed. It wasn't a very good implementation of those characters but you can safely ignore all those NPCs (I think they have a different color than the rest if I remember correctly?). You won't miss out on anything at all in terms of experience points or anything relevant to the story. They are just there for extra flavour. I would definitely just skip them if I were you.

I don't think there's much to be gained by directly comparing DE and TOW, they are very different from one another. BUT, as someone who also played DE just before TOW, it was pretty hard for me to shake the feeling of having just played something that felt bold, fresh, wild and extremely ambitious, flaws and all (and I could list many), and then going into TOW which is pretty much anything but as far as I'm concerned. I've been been a big fan of Obsidian in the past, even through projects that some considered to be downright bad, and I've always managed to squeeze enjoyment out of them (well, except for stuff like Armored Warfare and Pathfinder maybe, which I didn't play) and look forward to the next project. But TOW is the first game by them where I just felt like the whole experience was too lukewarm, too "safe," too... boring. It just didn't move me in any way whatsoever, the whole thing felt very "meh" to me despite there being flashes of brilliance in there such as solutions to quests, good reactivity, stuff that I usually eat up with delight. It's the first Obsidian game where I could not wait for the NPCs to finish talking (and that's coming from someone who usually loves dialogue and always play dialogue-centric characters), but then it only meant that I was back to an incredibly uninspired loot system and very boring combat encounters instead. I just could not bring myself to care about anything in the game, it never pulled me in at all. And again, if we bring up DE, it was a game that I just could not put down, despite its many flaws. I don't know, it's not my jam at all obviously and that's fine. I'm glad there are others who enjoy it. But I was pretty surprised by my reaction to it because I was looking forward to the game quite a bit.

I'm not as crazy about Stalwart as most people seem to be but yeah, The White March is absolutely superb all in all. I just finished replaying PoE and all in all it's an *amazing* expansion. I didn't feel the DLCs of Deadfire were nearly as good unfortunately.

I also think Twin Elms suffers for its place in the game. Like... I don't think the content there is amazing (well, except the conversations with the gods) but the biggest problem is where it shows up in the game. Like you say, you're kinda gathering momentum for the final parts of the story at that point, so it feels a bit weird running around even more doing people's sidequests and stuff. It's even more noticeable with the White March expansion, all the Twin Elms content just seems to fade into the background even more.

Defiance Bay kinda failed the "feels like a city" test for me. There's no bustle to it, it doesn't feel like there's much secrets to uncover. Kinda like Neverwinter in NWN2 for me, it just feels like a collection of buildings more than anything. Though I really did like Ondra's Gift, that was the one area in the city that won me over. Twin Elms definitely feels a bit rushed. But I gotta say that those areas are beautiful, and the Twin Elms music (the track that starts with the harp and then piano) is one of my favorites in the game. It was such a cool feeling to reach Baldur's Gate for the first time and get inside. That's one of my top video game memories of all time I think. You'd explored this already large world and then you enter this big city that has even more content. What a grand adventure it was to play that game back then.

Athkatla and Sigil are probably my favorites. What I like about them is that they feel "down to earth". They get the feel right, the density, the ambience. And there's a feeling of danger to them. You get the feeling of "city life". As a sidenote, and nostalgia talking here, but one of my strongest memories of the Baldur's Gate games is the feeling of... relative safety when nearing an inn in the middle of the night, seeing the light spill out and hearing the tavern music play from within. You'd survived the wilderness, finally the safety of an inn... but, you still never knew what could happen. It really vibed with my pen and paper experiences at the time, as well as reading stuff like the Prancing Pony segment of Lord of the Rings. Huge nostalgia. But anyways, I think Neketaka was fantastic overall. I liked the districts, I think they felt nice and different. I liked that there was something like the little scripted interaction bit (The Narrows I think it was called?). I liked that you could get "stuck" if you take the elevator down to the old city. And locations like the Luminous Bathhouse were just cool, though I wish some of the locations had been used more and more "in-depth". But yeah, it was superfun to explore. I don't think it really nailed the "city atmosphere" personally. I think part of it is the music in those areas. I like the PoE soundtracks, and I liked the town tracks on their own, but they never really sold the idea of a city in my mind. I wish Neketaka's music had just a bit more tension to it, and with something connecting it to the culture and people of Neketaka. The tracks feel a bit lacking in identity for me. Anyways, another city I loved was Vizima in the Witcher. That whole game oozes atmosphere and the various parts of Vizima are no exception. I know lots of people like Novigrad from Witcher 3 but Vizima in the first game is where it's at for me.

For me, stuff like prebuffing, required resting, and that using camping supplies... does it all add immensely to the gameplay? Hmm, not really. But I like that it adds a sort of link between the "here's the exploration part of the game" and "here's the combat side of the game". I like the feeling of overlap, the feeling of atrition for your party (however easy it may be to handle) and I like that it creates a... not a simulation type of gameplay, but *something* like that. I was never fond of prebuffing but... I like how it feels. I like the feeling of actually being able to prepare my party before I head into a dangerous area. Because it makes sense to be able to do that. It annoys me to no end that I can't cast certain spells outside of combat in Pillars. It *feels* so wrong. Balance be damned. In a game like Tyranny, and to a lesser extent Deadfire, the focus on per-encounter abilities and the fact that everything takes place inside the actual encounter makes the whole thing feel "gamey" to me. And yes, I'm very well aware that we are playing a game and blablabla but it doesn't do much for MAH IMMERSION. To me it completely reduces the feel of the game down to "exploration/combat/exploration/combat" with not much that "glues" them together. Especially with how you get everything back that very second you complete an encounter. For me it really takes away from the feeling of, yes, my character actually inhabits this world. And I have to say that, as far as I'm concerned, that's an overlooked aspect of a lot of games. I get that designing games with a per-encounter base is waaaaaaaay easier to balance of course. But I like my gameworlds to be a little wild and crazy, with the possibility of wrecking an encounter because I did good in terms of preserving my per-rest resources, or getting stomped because I headed into an encounter with a completely drained party. Probably better ways to handle it than prebuffing of course.

IN FACT, it is not. In all seriousness, it's one of my least favorite Obsidian RPG releases. I was very disappointed with it overall. Though I must say, while I didn't like the look of the visuals prior to the release, I really ended up liking how the game looked. I did not expect it to come together as well as it did. I just finished up a replay of Dragon Age Origins. Always kind of liked the game, and had been a while since I played it. It was kinda like I remembered it I guess. What I like about it is that it feels pretty substantial, especially given how it was a brand new IP. The world feels fleshed out, there's a fair amount of reactivity, you have the Origins, the dialogues are actually better than I remember. Some great choices here and there. It's a pretty impressive effort. Of course, on the other hand, you have a lot of really bad fetch quests and combat which is... maybe not horrible on its own but at times the sheer amount of just completely bogs the game down. Orzammar and the Deep Roads are probably my favorite location in the game when it comes to setting and lore but oh my god is there a lot of combat. It kind of saps my will to play the longer the game goes on, which is also how I remember it. Still, a good game and it's a shame what they did to the franchise. Oh well.

I think it's pretty hard to pinpoint why a game does badly in terms of sales, and I'm not entirely sure it's particularly helpful to speculate in it unless you're in the business of... selling games to as many people as you can. I think a large part of why games, or any other media, do good or bad sales-wise is just the way the strange winds of consumerism is blowing. It's not always possible to pinpoint. Sometimes a game is just a dud. It may be a great game, it may be a well known game but... for some reason it's just a dud. Now, my personal views on Deadfire is that it's a great game overall. However, for me it also feels like it's a game of compromise where the devs from the first game desperately tried to identify the parts of the game that were not well-received and tried to mold the second game into something that was more "appealing" and less offensive in terms of game mechanics to more people. While of course, staying true to the fans of the original. It's been done a million times before. It feels like "we should try and make this, admittedly sort of niche game, appealing to as many as we can" instead of "this is the game we're excited to make, this is the game we're going to make, screw the rest." To me it took a lot of the feedback about PoE1 and fixed it in the wrong way. Even though Deadfire is by all means more exotic and "out there" when compared to PoE1, it still feels... less inspired to me, more bland in a way, less spice to it all, more safe. And if you look at the individual bits, it should not. But it just does. Still a fantastic game for me, but not as memorable as I would've liked it. Not as memorable at all. But in terms of sales and all of that stuff, who knows? I think PoE came with the kickstarter craze, the promise of the IE games reborn, all of that stuff. There was hype about it, and I think even people who didn't play the IE games at all, or not much, got caught up in that. Hell yeah, old school is coming back in a new form, woooooo, screw the publishers! With Deadfire, I think all of that had died down a lot. And I guess the direct sequel may be a hard sell as well, I don't know. But who knows?

I have many, many problems with this game but I never felt like it was particularly short or anything. Of course, I didn't expect anything like NV or any other open world game because... well, they said that's not what it was going to be beforehand. Good length for a game as far as I'm concerned.

Let me throw in a vote for buying this game as well. It's one of *those* games that just stand out and you know you will remember for a long time. A strong and unique experience. It's not flawless at all, as was pointed out above, the game falters a bit as it goes on and I think there are some parts of the writing that doesn't work as well as they could. But I was glued to my seat until the very end. It doesn't happen that much for me any more that I play a game that I just can't quite let go of, but this was one of them. I just couldn't wait to dive back into it when I got home from work or whatever. It's a special one. I know it's sort of meaningless to compare since they are so different but I still have to point out the difference between The Outer Worlds and Disco Elysium here. Like I said, DE isn't flawless at all in its writing, far from it. But it has such a strong voice and character, an ambition and seemingly a desire to create something that doesn't feel like "your typical RPG" type of writing. TWO feels so extremely bland and "middle of the road" in the writing department when compared to it, despite the fact that both settings are pretty out there. One little sidequest in DE to find a lost husband for his worried wife had more of an impact on me than the whole of TOW, no joking. Again, they try for different things. But yeah, DE really feels like the developers wanted to deliver something unique and strong. And they succeeded.

Good write-up, pretty much agree with everything in there I think. It's a game that never feels like it wants to "push back" in any way. It's like everything was designed to be as non-offensive as possible (and I don't mean politics so let's not bring that up). It never challenges the player in a meaningful way, not in combat and not in terms of solving quests, finding your own way. It feels tepid as an overall game I think. Not horrible but just... forgettable. There's a lot to like in terms of some of the quest design, nice ways to "weave" through quests and some areas. But it never feels like it really amounts to anything special, there's no "whoa, that's awesome" moment. Everything is so laid out for the player. There's not any opportunies for real creativity and for the player him/herself to really shine. You never feel "clever" in how you solve things. The real killer for me is the combat and loot though. It's so uninspired, so samey, so cut and paste. The shooting in itself works well of course, better than NV as you say, but talking about combat encounters. It is downright boring, the way they designed this part of the game. It just reeeaally bogs the game down. I really appreciated Deadfire and how it tried to cut down on filler encounters, allowing the player to soak in the atmosphere a bit. But in TOW we are back to having samey enemy encounters just *everywhere* on the wilderness maps. It's not a terrible game for me but for the most part, it's terribly mediocre. There are some nice bits, really nice even in some cases, and a lot of great ideas and potential. But a lot of it feels buried under blandness. It's a bit of a shame. It's interesting, I actually also wondered as I was playing the game if a lot of my impressions of itwas just that I've been playing RPGs for a really long time now. But I don't think that's quite it.