The Sharmat

I'd say PoE is riding in a weird forgotten middle place between a small indie game and a big budget AAA game, and that's a good thing. The market has lacked flexibility until recently thanks to logistical realities that made the whole industry reliant on large publishers. Thanks to digital delivery this is less and less the case, and we should be glad. Having more market niches can only benefit the consumer. It leads to experimentation, innovation, and greater choice and competition.

Hey remember when Pillars 1 also had shopkeeper NPCs that said the same voiced line over and over when you talked to them?

No option to put on your robe and wizard hat? Shame, Obsidian.

Well you're clearly better at the game than most players. Good on you, but you're not someone that complained about the alleged lack of warning I'm going to guess.

At first no; Matt Mercer is doing a wonderful job But these are instantly recognized Sagani = Calisca Raedric = Odema = Od Nua Kana Rua = Sparfel EDIT: But not a big deal, 'cause some of these characters don't "last" long (iykwim). Funnily enough I didn't notice the Sagani=Calisca thing until my third playthrough when it just hit me all at once. Somethign about the accent change threw me off. Probably doesn't help that Sagani and Calisca are encountered so far apart. For me Pallegina=Adra Dragon was the most obvious duplication besides Raedric/Odema/Od Nua all being the same dude.

Eh, I played all the infinity engine games for the first time well into adulthood long after they were released. I'd say Torment holds up simply because there's not really any other game like it, warts and all, and I'm glad I played it despite the flaws. Baldur's Gate 1/2 I found to be a chore on every level and I can't see why it's so widely praised beyond nostalgia when say, the Neverwinter Nights 2 original campaign is considered pure ****. Clearly a bunch of people see something I don't.

They aren't just successors in term of mechanics/concepts, unlike the FF games, the Elder Scrolls games share the same world and follow each other chronologically. Arena to Oblivion is just 44 years apart. Skyrim is 201 years after Oblivion. Only in the absolute loosest sense. For all it has to do with Morrowind Oblivion might as well be a Final Fantasy game, cracks about St. Jiub in one line of dialogue aside. Loosest sense? There is a few recurring NPCs across game (Uriel Septim, Hesleth, etc). You visit dungeons/areas in Skyrim, Morrowind and Oblivion that you could visit in Arena. You start Oblivion in the same prison/dungeon you started in Arena, goblins included. The games refer to the events of the previous games and some hint to future games too. The lore stays the same across all the games as well and each new game is just further on the same timeline. Well an old balding vaguely British man is in the prologue of two games, and two entirely different regions, one a tropical rain forest and the other a pastoral temperate forest, are both called Cyrodiil. I guess that kind of counts. Helseth actually had plot relevance so I'll give you that but that's just Daggerfall to Morrowind. The rest is meaningless. I guess since the games recycle the same in-game books for twenty real life years makes it easier for people to think they're at all connected but it's basically a different plot with a different generic fantasy world each time. Except for Morrowind. Really it's only slightly more valid than acting like all the Final Fantasy games are one great continuous epic because Gilgamesh is in a bunch of them, and the developers have made some feeble effort to say VII and X and Tactics and XII are all in the same setting in vastly different time periods. Not sure why "At the owner level" is an ominous sign since Obsidian isn't owned by a publisher. The decision to crowdfund PoE at all was at " the Owner Level"

They aren't just successors in term of mechanics/concepts, unlike the FF games, the Elder Scrolls games share the same world and follow each other chronologically. Arena to Oblivion is just 44 years apart. Skyrim is 201 years after Oblivion. Only in the absolute loosest sense. For all it has to do with Morrowind Oblivion might as well be a Final Fantasy game, cracks about St. Jiub in one line of dialogue aside.

If the stream someone linked earlier in the thread is indicative of the overall quality, I'm well satisfied.

I miss those big fat 100 page manuals with tons of useless fluff information.

A better time. Incidentally I hate the way this forum handles replies now and I give up wrangling with nested quotes.

I'm willing to be there's a way to set that up. I did the reverse with Gothic and it wasn't really meant to be moddable. POE 2 is.

It was a joke.

That assumption is untrue. Going back to early 80s (I’m old...) some video game trilogies required completion of game 1 in order to continue in game 2. Other trilogies did not. It all depends on the developer. Interesting. I've never played any game that old. I wish they hadn't stopped doing that.

Wait I do actually have a problem with Deadfire. Five character parties. I prefer six. But other than that it's all good so far.

I don't have a problem with Deadfire as far as I know. I do dislike that developers feel pressured to water down their sequels, but that doesn't really apply here since PoE1 never set up expectation for a continuing story in the first place. The conversation just kind of drifted in that direction.

Ok but how do you feel about the Mercer one man show?

Point taken. I guess there's an assumption that when someone does something over and over again they'll improve, and I guess you really shouldn't judge a first effort by the same standards as a fifth effort.

Does it always have to be that way, though? Also to be fair, there's been at least one major public case of a company claiming they had a big overarching story in mind for a whole series and blatantly lying about it. It was a franchise that rhymes with Ass Effect.

No, the better metaphor is the one I made. The Hobbit is a complete story. The Witcher 2 is not. It ends on at least one cliffhanger, maybe more depending on in-game outcomes. These are largely unaddressed in the sequel.

Eh, I'm not convinced. People will buy it if it has little to nothing to do with the first game's story. And why not? The first game's story is pretty complete. Even if it wasn't, I doubt it would negatively impact the sales in a negative way to ignore it, judging by every single other game of this type. I advise you to keep your expectations about save importing and etc very low. It's basically never been more than cosmetic.

This would be a better comparison if Deadfire was a one man show where Mercer played every single character.

It is the designers' job to make a sequel as easy for everyone to get into as it can possibly be. One might not know about your previous game for whatever reason. You should't force people buy your previous games in order to play your last. Each of your work should stand as its own even if it's a part of a series. No one says this about anything but videogames. If someone chose to read Lord of the Rings starting with the Two Towers, you'd think they were crazy. It's only video games that are expected to have either little to no continuity or tons of recap. I don't know how this happened but it's universal to the medium and will prevent meaningful continuations from ever occurring.

From what I've seen that's only because the main plot not making much sense goes totally over their heads, presumably because they assume it would have made sense if they'd played the other games. Nevermind the books, most aren't aware they exist, and if they are they think they're based on the games instead of the other way around. People that start with sequels simply don't care that much about getting into the plot, and I can't see anything in Deadfire's premise that builds tremendously on the previous game's plot anyway. the Saint's War stuff was all backstory that's easy to relate.

Well the mere fact that there is a console port will be used as evidence that the game was dumbed down and a complete disaster, I'm sure. But realistically, is this bad news for console players? You simply can't do this kind of game with a controller as an interface without making major compromises in gameplay. See the original Dragon Age for an earnest attempt to do it, then compare it to PoE. Unless they were willing to practically move the game to a different subgenre of RPG, the console port is predestined to be lackluster. Still, it can't be as bad as Starcraft 64.