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ABearIsHere

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Everything posted by ABearIsHere

  1. Sawyer is working on his own directed small-size project. He recently said during an interview that they made a prototype, the team is very small (around 5 people, though we don't know if they plan to grow from that after pre-production) and during at least one talk he mentioned his current project was "non-violent". He's still the design director at the studio, though.
  2. Woedica never fell, she was made that way. This is something that has been clarified pretty extensively in Deadfire and the DLC and patches. Which makes her PoE1 plot more about her finally doing what she's always wanted to do than her regaining a status she effectively never had.
  3. Craig Matchett hasn't been working for Obsidian since early 2019 according to his resume on ArtStation so it's possible those pictures are not for an Obsidian project.
  4. I'd have to imagine that DLC production was slowed down by the pandemic, much like the Switch port ended up being delayed. I don't know how much outsourcing was done on The Outer Worlds, for example, but a lot of developers in China who handle that sort of stuff would have to either have transitioned to work from home or closed altogether for a while, and this all the way back to the end of last year. Then you get Obsidian transitioning to WFH themselves, and it's easy to see how development would slow down as pipelines get adapted to the new workflow. The game's still getting a Switch port and a Steam release, so, while it's not ideal to release DLC this late into its lifecycle, it can still make a come back in the news thanks to that (and we don't know *what* kind of DLC plans they have... is it a single big DLC? Smaller packs? If it's a single big DLC than the wait also makes more sense).
  5. No, this is incorrect, almost every companion that can have romances with both a female and male Watcher references attraction to both genders in some way as part of their story. Xoti, for example, can have a romance with Maia and obviously has a crush on Edér. She even mentions that in Raedceras a lesbian relationship wouldn't be accepted. Aloth is hinted to have had a crush on both the lady in the starting island and an old classmate now turned brothel worker. Tekehu mentions relationships with both men and women, and I think that's true of Serafen too. I'm not gonna entertain the OP because it's ludicrous to consider this sexual harassment, lmao.
  6. Gunplay is just a game design neologism for the way first-person or third-person shooting works and "feels" in a game. It's a mix of animations/sound design, responsiveness, surfacing of relevant information, etc. It's not the most precise and informative of terms, but it's generally used to compare how different shooters and games with shooter elements play. Hardly indicative of a western setting.
  7. I wouldn't call myself a power gamer, but I thought the DLC fights were designed so that they were difficult but doable by a regular party. Especially the Beast of Winter's Neriscyrlas (had to google the spelling, I got it *almost* right the first time, except for swapping the y and i's position) fight has a bunch of built-in aids like the spirits you can get to fight with you. I'm not gonna say it's easy, but if you pay attention to how to counter her abilities, it's perfectly doable even if you don't have a particularly minmaxed party. The Oracle of Wael is rather hard and it took me a fair few tries on Veteran, *but* you're also given some time to prepare at the start of the fight and I think an important skill to learn during it is which targets to prioritize and how to interrupt some of its abilities (yes, theoretically it's immune to interrupts, but no one said anything about Prone, eheh). That said, I do believe that, outside of the mega-bosses, it's the hardest fight in the game, so I completely understand the frustration.
  8. I just wanted to say thanks for the efforts done to communicate the state of things and work on solving the issues with The Outer Worlds, Shyla, it's appreciated. I don't have an ultrawide monitor, so admittedly it's far easier for me to wait for a fix than for someone who does, but I'm glad to hear the issue is being worked on and hopefully they'll soon get to enjoy the experience as it was intended. Also, I'm hopeful that now that Obsidian is under Microsoft, this feedback will be at the forefront of future projects, just like accessibility in general.
  9. Sales are always tied to budget. 2 million is very good for a project that had a relatively quick turnover and relatively (and I mean, relatively! It was probably still rather expensive) low budget as The Outer Worlds. Of course it's not comparable to something like New Vegas, but New Vegas was kind of the perfect storm of being based on a franchise that had exploded in popularity recently, having a relatively low budget, and getting Bethesda's incredibly powerful promotional machine behind it. It's very rare that you get that kind of success and those kind of circumstances. EDIT: I also think it's worth remembering that a lot of people played The Outer Worlds on Game Pass, and Private Division probably received a lump sum of money for that too.
  10. There has been no mention of a GOG release and the Epic Store/Windows Store exclusivity was stated to be for a year, which means the game will probably come out on Steam in October (source: https://www.polygon.com/2019/3/20/18274456/epic-games-store-exclusives-outer-worlds-control )
  11. Avellone's story has been available for a while for the backers of the Pillars Kickstarter. I think I've read recently that his adventure path was released recently too. I don't know anything about any Torment content besides the stuff he wrote for the game.
  12. They've already said (and showed) that the game will also feature a third-person camera view.
  13. I think 2d10 in this case just means 2d10, if it was a percentile roll it would probably be indicated in some other way. Rolling multiple dice with a smaller number of faces is common in a lot of roleplaying games as it changes the probability curve and makes the very lowest and very highest results more rare. I can't even begin to speculate as to why *specifically* 2d10 was chosen for that roll, but 3d6 is, for example, a *very* common roll in a lot of modern RPG, especially those that are based on the Apocalypse World ruleset (usually abbreviated as PbtA). I don't know the specifics of the PoE ruleset because I haven't had the time to pore over it in detail and it seems to still be in a state where it's iterated on very heavily.
  14. VGChartz is not a very trustworthy source, though. Their methodology is pretty poor and I'm not sure they even track digital sales.
  15. That's only for PoE2 and I think Wasteland 3, btw, because of the acquisition by Microsoft. Phoenix Point already turned a profit for the investors because of the Epic money but I do think they're continuing to pay dividends.
  16. I did point out that SteamSpy's inaccurate and counts copies owned and not sold, but it's the only source available now that Microsoft bought Obsidian and Fig isn't paying dividends anymore (they paid a final lump sum).
  17. Pathfinder: Kingmaker most likely didn't do in the same ballpark as PoE1 but it's a relative success because it was developed on a lower budget. Even the most conservative budget for PoE2 (before it was decided to go full VO) was something like 40% more than PoE1 (which I think ended up costing around $7 million), so the fact that commercially did worse than its predecessor and apparently lower than the grognard-friendly, more budget-conscious Russian Pathfinder IE-like, is certainly proof that something in Obsidian's strategy/choice to iterate on PoE1 in the ways they did failed to attract the necessary audience. Perhaps Divinity: Original Sin 2 gave Obsidian a false sense of confidence when it's the exception to the rule and the audience for these games just isn't that big. Perhaps Pillars 2 didn't have enough marketing or the marketing was of poor quality/didn't get the message across. Perhaps the original game failed to resonate in spite of good sales with a long tail and people didn't feel the need to come back for a sequel. Perhaps, perhaps, perhaps. There are a million possible reasons and I'm no armchair market analyst (I certainly think the discussion of the pros and cons of PoE2 also doesn't necessarily have a *huge* effect on its sales outside of maybe word of mouth, given the game failed to reach its audience in the first place rather than getting an overwhelmingly negative reception from the people that bought it) so I really can't give an informed opinion besides the fact that it obviously was a commercial failure for Obsidian. P.S. : Also, we discuss copies sold and owned a lot, but I wanna reiterate: 1) copies sold could be sold at a very steep discount, reducing the profit margins; 2) SteamSpy estimates "copies owned" so it's also counting all the people that own Steam copies because of the Figstarter.
  18. We don't really know. The most we can see is a rough estimate of copies *owned* on Steam, which also includes copies redeemed from the crowdfunded campaign or included in bundles. SteamSpy estimates those copies as 500k-1million (the estimates have a very wide margin since Steam hid a lot of information that was used to come up with more accurate estimates). You also have to consider that other factors play a part in the game's financial performance: how discounted were those copies? how much money did Obsidian spend supporting the game? was the DLC successful relative to the main game sales? Basically, we don't have a lot of information on what's going on with the game financially and even Sawyer's information is apparently slightly out of date, but it all points to the game underperforming compared to the original even though the budget was clearly higher.
  19. I mean, I guess that's *sorta* what the South Park people did with their South Park games? Although they're also creatives and took a large stake into writing the games' stories.
  20. It's a choice between either sinking money into upgrading the weapon you've custom-fitted exactly how you want, or swapping to a Mk II/Ultra version that is generic and doesn't have the mods you want. Obviously, this is just when we're discussing the base weapons, Science Weapons and Uniques can only be upgraded via Tinkering and there isn't an alternative to that, so in that specific case, it's a money sink (especially for builds that don't have high combat abilities, which can compensate for the level difference/lower base DPS).
  21. I do agree that maybe making tinkering costs exponential wasn't the best solution, though it does incentivize swapping weapons more often and theoretically makes you think twice about installing rare mods. Ultimately I just feel like the system could be improved/fine-tuned, especially if a sequel had better weapon progression, but it's obvious that The Outer Worlds didn't have an enormous budget and the luxury of starting with a lot of weapons inherited from a previous game, like Fallout: New Vegas did.
  22. I know I'm late, but it's not specifically that I only play RPGs, but rather that survival games don't greatly appeal to me. I've played The Forest with friends when it was in Early Access and it was a fun experience, but I haven't really booted it up since then. However, again, it's no biggie, Obsidian's developers are probably gonna do better work and be happier people if they aren't chained to their desk with the expectation that they have to make RPGS ALL THE TIME.
  23. That's very cute! I like the posing and how fluid the action feels in your piece. It's got a great energy!
  24. It's not the game for me, but I think it's healthy for a company to let their employees pursue their passion projects and branch off in different directions. If you, like me, don't have much interest in another survival game, see it like this: this is a team that is learning important, interesting know-how on Unreal Engine 4 they might not have if they had just spent time working on an Outer Worlds sequel and worked out on all the shooty stuff, design know-how that might apply to future RPGs, and is flexing creative muscles that usually don't find much space in the genres and kind of stories that RPGs tell. Besides, the recent interviews they've given confirm that Obsidian's also working on other projects (that was obvious enough, given this game has a team of 13 people and Obsidian has more than 10 times the number of people) and that they're RPGs. Nothing to worry about the future of the company in the sense of them suddenly pivoting away from the genre. Now, will Obsidian's corporate culture be negatively affected by Microsoft's acquisition? Will Feargus Urquhart be more involved on a day-to-day level and perhaps directing RPGs again be a good or a bad thing? Who knows, I can't predict the future, but a lot of the doomsaying is based on wrong assumptions about certain things. I'm not saying to give this game a chance because I'm not part of Obsidian's marketing department and quite frankly I'm not super-interested in either, just saying that it doesn't warrant huge reactions yet. Not that I'll be able to stop them, lmao. Also, source on Obsidian having other projects in the works and Feargus wanting to go back to directing: https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2019-11-14-visiting-obsidian-post-acquisition-to-see-what-has-changed
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