Clawdius_Talonious

I don't know about *the opposite* but I definitely hope they've planned to go in a totally different direction. As much as I am looking forward to both, we'll see Avowed before TOW2 so there's probably not a ton that's entirely concrete at this point. Then again, they've got Microsoft money, so they won't be living from game budget to game budget, who knows? They could be blocking out levels right now. I'll also point out that, AFAIK the 10% increases were things you unlock by using them, so if you unlock an SMG perk and never shoot an SMG you won't get anything else, but if you use ARs then your AR perk will improve through use, unlocking those percentage based improvements. I was annoyed myself, when I thought that they were falling into the same "Perk every level means we need filler perks everyone will have to have" build flattening trap Fallout 4 fell into. What I found the most hilarious to me about Fallout 4 was the fact that it copied the stuff that made me shrug and say "Well, I don't have any desire to do that again atm." when I finished New Vegas the first time after launch. NV did so much right, but their 4 factions (if you could Yes-man as a faction leader) was the least appealing aspect to me. When I finished as the head of the wastes I didn't look at Caesar's Legion or the NCR and say "Yeah, I want to back them instead." I will say that each faction was fleshed out respectably, even if Ulysses' original incarnation got cut. Fallout 4 did much worse IMO by forcing you to destroy the Institute with every non-Institute faction. "Hey, there's all this amazing R&D and tech, should be save it? Nah, let's blow up the only known major R&D done since the apocalypse. Hey, we think these synths are people! Let's blow up the only place they're manufactured so if they all have some manufactured genetic defect we'll have no idea how to cure it and they may well all die. Hey, we love technology and are scattered across the country, let's blow up teleportation technology because there's a funky 3D printer nearby that we really don't like. More, the lack of minor factions in Fallout 4 really hurts the setting and world building, leaving vast holes for people named Settler that will never be a part of some people's games because they don't like building in single player titles since no other person will use their work. F4 mechanics are tight, I've got over 1700 hours in the game, but it's almost entirely about collecting junk and shooting for me. I put on an audiobook if I want to be interested in a story while I play it. Bethesda has definitely been going in a direction for the last several games, and it's not the one I'd choose for them, for sure. Fallout 4 is about reshaping the immediate Wasteland with duct tape, where I'd prefer choices and consequences that made me feel like I did more than build a series of concrete fortresses that no one acknowledges in any way (and seriously, would it have been hard to have people say "Have you seen the new construction at X" when you were near the settlement build limit? Or remark on a settlement being attacked/repelling an attack? So many potential barks that aren't accusing me of being a synth there to spy on some dirt farmer.) Game developers aren't working in opposition though, especially not to a sister-studio under the Microsoft umbrella, so there's plenty of room for one of the biggest RPG developers to stop developing RPGs and start developing simulation/shooters with lite RPG trappings (numbers get bigger, that's RPG, right?) and still have Obsidian and InXile working on choices and consequences, world building that could actually be changed (Defeated The Master? Well, Supermutants are everywhere in Bethesda's Fallout, forever. Almost all dumb-dumbs too, even the talking super mutants.) I'm curious if the first original IP from Bethesda with Todd as CEO will actually improve and adapt over time. Everything else they inherited from Black Isle or Michael Kirkbride era Bethesda. Even Morrowind, which could easily be said to be the most alien of the "modern" Bethesda Elder Scrolls titles, was mostly finished when Todd finished up Redguard. Since then Todd's seemingly only had one desire, to remove elements from RPGs. He got down to "Can we do one without NPCs?" which... yeah. No? I feel like the answer was a resounding no. They didn't even format the game like Rust, where there could conceivably have been a lot more interactions and reasons to interact with other potentially hostile players with caution against a definitely hostile world. Worse IMO, they didn't even let the PLAYERS do that, because they want to sell Fallout 1st in perpetuity and releasing dedicated server software so people who would prefer that gameplay could have it. That, despite having said they would. I may be bitter about 76. And I may also think that Todd's imposter syndrome may have e.g. cost us the chance to see what Bethesda could do with an engine designed from the ground up by John Carmack, but that's neither here nor there. I know game developers don't like to see people building their work up by tearing someone else's down. At any rate, since this is the first thing where the answer "What can we take away" will only be "Something we added for a reason" I'm curious what will happen. Will Starfield launch and become an untouchable timeless (because Bethesda doesn't know how time works, and thinks 20 years and 220 years are approximately equivalent as for how much nature will reclaim structures) IP where people who have an architectural motif will maintain that exact standard for the next thousand years implying a disturbing level of cultural stagnation? Only time will tell. There's vast potential there, either way. I hope that Starfield goes in a more simulation focused direction, part Sim Settlements, part Satisfactory, where we can build our own parts for spaceships and weapons. If I had my druthers, we'd see an equipment manufacturing section of the game that was completely decoupled from the leveling, by which I mean if I build a colony to manufacture top tier weapons, I don't have to actually be the world's greatest marksman. It's more than a little silly when F4 weapons upgrades need e.g. sniper perks to make the best sniper rifles, manufacturing things you can't use as well as your customer base is common practice, and it's way more jarring to my suspension of disbelief to say "You need to be level 40 to manufacture this widget" than... just about anything else? If they did go that route, I hope they did it sensibly and made some kind of BS certification you need to get and need to be a certain level for (or better, need to complete a quest filled with enemies of that level where I can sneak and avoid combat or talk my way past or whatever.) There's so much room in the "Science Fiction RPG" genre it's not even funny. If they announced tomorrow that InXile's rumored Steampunk FPS RPG, Starfield, and TOW2 were all launching the same year, I'd play them all before the year was out (provided they weren't all launching in late December.) On top of that, I'd play Fallout London, Miami, and Cascadia in the same timeframe (though admittedly Fallout is only loosely sci-fi.) I lived through the 90s, when it was hip for games publishers to say "RPGs? Why would we make any of those? We haven't sold one copy of a new RPG in the last year! How many did we make? Zero, obviously, duh. What do you mean, self fulfilling prophecy?" so I'll never feel like there's a glut of these things. More, though, they retain their value and replayability for many years. Some of the people who are going to love Starfield and The Outer Worlds 2 haven't even been born yet, they're not likely to care if they were shipped in the same decade as one another. We don't want to give people the impression that Microsoft is in danger of reaching market saturation or competing with itself. So, even if I'm inclined to agree with most of what you're saying, it's patently false to think that these titles have to be in competition with one another. I try to keep my Starfield complaints to the Starfield subreddit, and my TOW2 speculation... here, mostly, I guess? TL;DR: I get what you're saying, but keep in mind for the future that it's a bummer to developers when fans tear another game down to build theirs up.

To me, it would be better to have an NPC watcher if they're not going to go heavy into the effects of being a Watcher, with a spirit vision layer or some such and interesting mechanics. In isometric it was fine for the stuff to just pop up and be a bit of fluff content, trying to get across the visions that you're seeing. First person necessitates a different approach IMO, depending on when they are in the timeline you could have a soul capture minigame, to try to get souls of the fallen into some Adra for storage. Some conversations with spirits to offer alternate quest solutions is kind of low hanging fruit, but it would be neat. I feel like the main game mechanics need to be solid in this title, if there's going to be a new character each title instead of following a single character like Pillars, they can really just give it a miss this title. An ally who was a Watcher would be fine, instead of being able to interact with every spirit we'll be able to interact through an NPC whose motivations for telling us things aren't our own. A Watcher should be capable of talking to a lot of spirits, which means a ton of NPCs could have "before and after" conversation trees, or other interactions. Finding and helping ghosts could be an awesome thing, but if they're not all in on it I don't want some crumbs because they wanted the PC to be a Watcher. To me, I'd be interested to see the Player Character be Awakened and not a Watcher. Why can my character level up in the field and doesn't have to go into town to train? Unlocking memories of his past life. Why do I know magic now, after I just had a slog of a battle instead of before? Unlocked soul memories. Give us an antagonist who's a fragment of a soul we used to be, and that's a story that tells itself. I'm more than willing to take a wait and see approach with this one though, with that Microsoft money I just want Obsidian to focus on making the best product they can. Lore fluff is all well and good, but I don't really want anything shoehorned in. I'd rather new interesting things be cut from whole cloth than get a poor exploration of a concept that has so many possibilities that I can't keep track of them all, especially in a game set after Deadfire. I don't think entirely optional Watcher side content would justify enough attention to make it a valuable addition to the game, but I'm not the one budgeting that Microsoft money.

I feel like Obsidian has a good track record with these things, so I'm inclined to say "If Obsidian thinks they've got a reason to." I don't feel like they would accept a Bethesda/Skyrim route of effectively marry practically any unimportant NPC you want, so long as you've done their quest. But I don't expect them to make shallow companion characters you can pick up on the street for 500 gold, either. If they made content around a relationship, I don't think it would be reduced to "here's the money from our store, and if you ask I'll give you food once a day" (or "can I have an allowance" interactions for adopted children.) I wouldn't want them to have a whiteboard of features, checking off boxes on a list, but if the nature of the project lends itself to that... Hell, I could see an RPG with a Watcher love interest NPC (where the game asks you your preferences, and the PC/NPC both have male and female voice talent now that they've got Microsoft money) bound up in prophecy or some such nonsense. I don't feel like you'd hate such a thing if it was done well, especially if they didn't force you to develop any relationship (and why would they?) I felt like Enderal's Calia Sakaresh and Jespar Dal'Varek did a great job of being potential love interests, in a way that was so non-obtrusive the fact that romances are possible in the game could be missed. Something like that, where it's not too much content considering the number of people that will see it, I think isn't a bad thing since some people enjoy it. It's a question of resource efficacy I think, if the NPC is vital and entertaining in their own right, their voice actor and mocap work is already being handled etc. So a bit of additional voice work to lead down those kind of paths isn't a big deal. It becomes a bigger deal the more NPCs you have as options. Options are great, but one well done potential romance is way better than having every NPC in Fallout 4 come around all the time to make sure I didn't want to initiate a relationship with them, ad infinitum. I've got games where I just started romancing them all to get them to stop walking up to me and talking to me when I went into a settlement. It doesn't help that the sexuality of all the companions is "The Sole Survivor" and once you start down that rabbit hole I agree that dating sims are a better avenue for exploration of that sort of thing. I will admit that if Avowed has romance, I would definitely like to see it given more thought than dark Xoti still having "If you need me I'm just two whoops and a hollar away" as an exit line. Edit: I was thinking I was in the Avowed part of the forums, but my point stands for TOW2 as well.

We now can surmise with relative certainty that the name of TOW2 is Project Arkansas. Let's read entirely too much into this! Arkansas' motto is, AFAIK, the Natural State officially. That said, the state motto is "Regnat Populus" or The People Rule. This could actually be an interesting take on this second colony system world. Does the game touch on colonialism? Is the "natural state" an indication that life was already present on the worlds of this new (to us) colony? I'm just brainstorming, but I'm curious if anyone else wants to extrapolate wildly for no reason with me.

We have no idea what the timeframe for this is, but... What if Earth detected some sort of imminent, unavoidable, extinction level event? What if they packed up every ship they could with cryo pods and sent every human they could to some other world? That could explain what happened to the directorate ships, they were commandeered for the evacuation of Earth. That would explain a lot of stuff about what happened to Earth as well as where and why there's a new colony. If the Earth knew that people in Halcyon could very well be dying and doomed, it would make sense to say "Well, let's not put all our eggs in that basket" for the evac. As for the reason why people from Halcyon make their way to a new colony, new jobs, a new place full of consumers, trade of goods for food would keep Halcyon afloat? Or possibly, they need Phineas Welles' research on thawing people who were in cryo for longer than expected... Hell, that would give the second game a similar potential intro, Phineas picking a new subject to send hither and yon in search of stuff.

I'm of two minds about this, honestly. To me it comes down to this, are we playing a blank slate character like The Watcher? Or are we playing a character whose personality isn't entirely ours to shape, like Commander Shepard? I'd prefer the former, and thus no voiceover for the PC, but if it is the latter I don't mind voiced dialog at all. It's a waste of money for blank slates, IMO, and if you're going to spend money on blank slates I'd prefer a variety of voices for barks etc so the player can pick what suits them. For games where you're a specific character, it's not so jarring for them to have their own voice that differs from mine.

There are aspects of Skyrim, and other Bethesda games, that work. There are aspects that do not work, at least for me. Being able to start a game and head just about anywhere? Honestly, I could take or leave that aspect, I end up modding Skyrim to the point it no longer has such strict level scaling and I do use alternate start mods to add some variety. That said, it's more difficult to have a cohesive narrative experience when you're able to say "Nope, no dragons for me, thanks!" and go bum around stealing cheese wheels and mining ore. I enjoy open worlds, but New Vegas' approach of "You can head north, but that's bat country" (cazadores, whatever.) works better for me. It lets me theoretically go anywhere I want, but has a path I am far more likely to take my first time through. Land masses routinely have natural obstacles that preclude venturing where ever the bloody hell you please. Unreal being what it is, I expect these to play a role preventing us wandering off in any given direction. Open world doesn't mean contiguous open world. Bethesda doesn't really have sole ownership of first person RPGs, but most companies avoid first person because it's extremely difficult to make the combat feel impactful. Third person games feel somehow less clunky when you get to see a character model stagger, being staggered in first person is more frustrating and can feel unresponsive rather than like a legitimate mechanic. I'm curious to see what Obsidian manages, vis a vis solid feeling melee first person combat. I gather that some multiplayer games have done a good job lately, but I haven't experienced them myself. I do know that I found Kingdom Come's system to be unreliable and unintuitive. People compare it to Skyrim because it's the king of the FPSRPG hill, we called FPS games Doom-clones for longer than seems reasonable. FPSRPG isn't even exactly accurate if you can slip into third person. We need a catchy initialism, or better yet an acronym. Otherwise we'll just be calling games Skyrim-esque.

Yeah, they know it's a well loved feature, and that it helps some people with e.g. motion sickness or what have you for more people than just being able to adjust FOV. The issue with third person for TOW was budgetary, animations for all the various weapons would have to be polished, armor clipping and so on might necessitate changes to assets and so on. I can't see any reason they wouldn't have designed Avowed to use Third Person, since they were much earlier in development and had a publisher who would be more likely to fund a less svelte game design. TOW was trying to escape the "buggy" reputation Obsidian has (personally I think that they get too much flak for that, since they might launch buggy but are rapidly patched.) Cutting "luxury" features, and even entire planets out of the game kept the game trim and easier to maintain. Anything with tens of thousands of lines of dialog among hundreds of characters and a crazy amount of potential quest states is going to have some undiscovered interactions at launch. Once you start coding something more complex than hello world you're gonna have some bugs. Microsoft's QA assistance will help even a more robust game design reach a relatively bug free state at launch I think. And of course, other than graphical glitches, third person cameras don't generally cause bugs per se.

I'd like to see an ending reactivity that seems like it has an impact on the end of the game overall. It wouldn't have to actually affect any other ending slides, just one that makes it feel like the choices you made in the DLC had an impact. An area with a lot of reactivity and choices and consequences. I would enjoy a new companion as well, but that's not absolutely essential.

I feel like a good setting for Avowed, temporally speaking, would be about the time the events of Pillars of Eternity are happening. The lore is firmly established for other places, so all the books and so on will easily be able to be imported into Avowed. Furthermore, rumors ranging from the likely accurate to the outlandish about The Hollowborn Crisis and The Watcher of Caed Nua could be sparsely sprinkled in random NPC dialog. Since there's not exactly a canonical ending to Pillars, even if there basically is one to 2, there wouldn't have to be anything that disputed events of people who have played the games. At the same time, that time period would allow for a solid set of known unknowns to explore, known knowns that can be easily redistributed, and unknown unknowns to discover. By placing the games concurrent in the timeline, players who know the end of Deadfire would know something was coming that would be really interesting to explore from a new perspective. Moreover, you could gradually introduce concepts to new players instead of giving them a deluge of WTF at the start of the first game of a new series in an established universe. I'd love to explore the consequences and aftermath of the events of Deadfire, but I'm fairly certain that it's not a great idea to do it in the first game of a new series. The events are so massive that there's no real good way to engage with them without covering a huge swath of fantastic concepts. An organic introduction to the universe, where you meet people who explain what things are, perspectives offered on e.g. souls, animancy, adra, and so on could be explored at player's own pace instead of having to be like "First there was the natural wheel, then there was Berath's wheel..." and so on fairly soon into the game. Lore dumps aren't generally enjoyable experiences, and a lot of people will skip over them and be confused. As for Deadfire sales, I really honestly feel like Deadfire had two major issues it failed to overcome. One, people bounced off of Pillars, I can't offer percentages or anything but most of the people I know never got out of the first chapter of the game and had no desire to play it anymore. They did various things, reading the fan NPCs "history" stuff a lot before realizing it was completely extraneous, not paying much attention to what was happening and being confused and turned around. Missing things that felt obvious to me my first time through the game, but clearly weren't spelled out quite as well as some players might have benefited from... And the second issue, Isometric RPGs look and play the same a decade after launch as they do at launch, more or less. Planescape Torment looks rather good on a 1360x768 resolution 50" screen, and while Pillars has more 3D in the pipeline it's still all baked into flat backgrounds. People who jumped at Pillars and bounced off probably want a Deadfire experience with all the DLC for like five bucks in case the same thing happens. They're not necessarily paying attention to e.g. a lighter tone and everything being voiced, they just know they didn't care for the first game and they're not eager to return. I guess you could also say that there are a lot more 50+ hour RPGs on the market than there were when Pillars came out, so people can afford to be pickier about what they'll pay full price for and what they'll sleep on. Honestly IMO the worst time period to set Avowed in is probably post-Deadfire, any time prior to any of the Pillars titles that's post-Engwithan would be fine, right up to being concurrent with the Pillars games. There's just too much lore to cover to really get into what's going on and why after Deadfire, IMO. That said, I am pretty sure Obsidian wouldn't set Avowed post Deadfire because then there needs to be an established canonical story for Pillars and Deadfire. It also would eat into any potential Pillars 3 which isn't necessarily out of the question if Avowed does well and brings attention back to the universe. It's not inconceivable that Deadfire could see a sales spike if people love the world of Eora and enough people are getting their first taste of it from Avowed.

Pillars 2 has recommended companions, showing those with extra dialog and so on. I'm open to whatever design Obsidian has in mind, they've done a lot of good work. Tyranny has a great companion system and setting, The story was majorly affected by which factions you backed, you could actually obliterate your ability to choose a prominent storyline and one of the "most wanted" for a certain style of player. I know I wanted that option my first play. You could choose to do things in your profession, in the lead up to the game. There was an option that seemed prudent but lead the rest of the character's life down the path of collaboration to minimize suffering. That's the theme of the game and hit some emotional notes in me I hadn't expected or previously experienced. It also left me a second experience closer to what I enjoy. I'm not sure whose writing comprises the story as it stands, but they have a lot of consultants whose work I already love. Obsidian has so much work to draw upon, they know what works and what doesn't. It makes people think they've grown more timid but they leave less on the cutting room floor. It will be their second experience with the Unreal Engine, their tools are more integrated, they can experiment more with Microsoft's funding. QA will hammer out the experience that TOW got to through what you might call limited ambition. I'm eager to see where they go for their first foray into Microsoft's piggy bank.

The DLCs are almost definitely going to be like Pillars 1/2 and thus you can load the "Just before endgame" save and then fly to the DLC planet. If you haven't even gotten that far, then yes you should just be able to load your game and head straight there. As I understand it, you'll have to be past Monarch IIRC in order to go to the DLC world.

Obsidian DLC have a tendency to occur during the game they're set in, so you can go to them during a game. This is why they warn you about the point of no return and make a save before the very end of the game. When all the DLC come out you can replay the end after you play all the DLC.

If Obsidian wants to make a new Fallout New Vegas style game, they could go back to the IP of the predecessor that Fallout was the spiritual successor of in the first place. Wasteland has a lot of potential, and since InXile and Obsidian are both subsidiaries of Microsoft I imagine that it wouldn't take much effort to swing that IP. Wasteland has a lot of similarities to Fallout, and if they want to make a new game in the same vein it would be easy for them to flesh out what happened e.g. in California post Wasteland 2 or what have you.

I'd like to see a dual classing system, even if it was just a couple of factions from various classes, e.g. Kind Wayfarers and Bleak Walkers for Paladins. I'd like to see it be like the Guilds from Elder Scrolls titles, just limited to joining two. The way I see that working is through a classless advancement system, as well as a way to advance in the classes to unlock skills and spells possibly through money so XP lets you get classless advancement. I've seen someone say they'd like to see Tyranny style rune based magic, I think that would be an interesting way to handle spells. Learning basic runes for things like elements and power level classless and then more advanced runes for Class based magics. This could make things that were OP not stack between classes because they were the same type of rune, or let you learn entirely new rune types from your class. The rune we see used in the reveal could require being drawn every time you cast a spell as a reload animation sort of so more advanced sigils require more time. Then you could have other ways to cast based on class of course, Barbarians shouts, Paladin auras, Chants and so on. Rogue skills and Fighter skills would probably not exactly count as magic, but I'm not the one handling game balance in those regards. I don't think it will be handled that way, but if I could have it be any way at all I feel like that would be pretty awesome.