Infinitron

https://jesawyer.tumblr.com/post/189270621926/its-become-a-bit-of-a-meme-lately-that-obsidian I can understand where feeling comes from, and I think a lot of it has to do with the relative ages of people in leadership positions. Depending on the specific game we’re talking about, it’s a type of game that some of us have already iterated on 2, 3, or 4 times. And when it comes to things like dialogue structure and quest design, there’s even more structural commonality between our projects, regardless of the underlying genre or camera perspective. I’ve been a game developer for 20 years now. Regardless of my intelligence or creativity compared to a junior designer, I have seen enough quests move from idea to document to alpha implementation to beta to launch to have a pretty good sense about how certain approaches are going to go. There are some quest concepts or details that are - and I stress that I do not mean this pejoratively - naïve. The quest designer does not, and could not, understand the technical implications of what they are trying to do. When it comes to quest design (especially) a little bit of knowledge can be a very dangerous thing, because as with learning any discipline, it’s hard to comprehend how much you don’t know once you get the basics down. One of my favorite bicycle frame builders is Richard Sachs. He’s been essentially building the same type of brazed steel frames for over 45 years. I have one of his 1978 frames and it looks very similar to the frames he builds now. He’s one of the higher-profile living frame builders and he’s vocal about his opinions. In an interview, he recounted interacting with a talented young frame builder who had been working for a few years, built several dozen frames, and concluded he had pretty much learned everything there was to it. Sachs’ reaction was, “You don’t even know how to make the right kind of mistakes,” This is one thing for a craft like frame building, where it’s often (today) one person working alone as a hobbyist. It’s another thing in a big team environment like game development where 30-100 people are trying to work together on a big, interconnected project. More experienced leads tend to be more conservative and critical about design, not necessarily because of some ideological stance, but because we have seen things go very wrong and we want to prevent the kind of collateral damage we have seen play out in the past. Players remember quests like Beyond the Beef, and rightly so, because it’s a very fun quest with a lot of interesting ways to approach and resolve it. What players don’t remember, because they weren’t there, is how long Beyond the Beef took to complete, and the impact it had on the designers’ schedule and the project as a whole. And players don’t remember the cut content, some of it the product of months of a designer’s time, because it was hopelessly broken or inherently not fun to play through. When I write this, it’s not to put blame at on the quest designers. It’s my responsibility to review their work and to approve or disapprove it. On a game like F:NV, which was almost half-my-career-ago, I very often said, “I don’t think you should do that,” or “I wouldn’t do that,” with an explanation of why and some suggestions for alternative approaches. These days, I am more likely to say, “Don’t do that,” because I have seen 10 out of 12 soft warnings go ignored and yield some really tremendous headaches and heartaches. In contrast, when I see young teams (and by this I mean inexperienced developers with inexperienced leads) working, I am often pleasantly reminded of what naïveté can produce - as long as you have the time and money to burn through your mistakes. I talk with and visit a lot of teams at other companies, and there are some high profile developers I’ve visited where their design process is less of a process and more of an ad hoc “fling **** at the wall” experiment that goes on for 3-5 years. Sometimes the cost of this is just time, which is money. Sometimes the cost is polish. Sometimes the cost is burning out half a generation of young developers. Sometimes it’s all of these things. If you’ve never been at the helm when your project goes so over-budget that the company is in serious peril, this might not seem like a big deal. If you’ve never been in charge when the game comes out and gets slammed for being sloppy, buggy, and messy - when a reviewer straight-up says the team that worked massive overtime to get the game out “phoned it in” - this might not seem like a big deal. And if you haven’t watched the people on your team, people for whom you were responsible, get burned-out or laid off because of crunch, or stress, or a project cancelation, it also might not seem like a big deal. But if you have been in that position, it’s hard to see the consequences of inaction and not try to mitigate them, consciously or unconsciously, by pushing for more tried-and-true approaches to design. I’m not saying it’s an objectively good thing, but it is, I think, a natural reaction for leaders who see things go wrong over and over. Personally, I do hope we take more chances at Obsidian in the future, whether it’s on big projects or small ones. Some of this will involve putting less experienced people in leadership roles. Limiting the project scope itself also helps. Small projects and DLCs are easier to experiment with in good conscience because the impact on the company will probably be low if it fails. But when it comes to our big projects, our more experienced leads will have to be more open-minded about letting certain things wander a little bit. There are additional layers of experience and perspective that I will (hopefully) gain if I remain in the industry another 5, 10, 15 years. Hopefully that will allow me and other people working in leadership positions at the company to let people take more risks in good conscience. I want to help people make the right kinds of mistakes.

Further investigation: It seems you have to enter your ship for the timer to trigger. Sleep anywhere else in Roseway for as long as you want - Anton doesn't disappear. Sleep 12 hours and then enter and exit your ship - he's gone. I guess this is happening because by entering your ship you're considered to have left the planet.

Scratch that. I see what caused it now - the passage of time! I loaded up a saved game from before Anton disappeared, slept in my ship for 48 hours, he was gone. Going to the ship and back to town without sleeping, he was still there. It may be a timer triggered by the conversation you have with him after Jameson returns.

I doubt it's intentional. They probably intended for that stuff to only happen after you'd resolved The Doom That Came To Roseway one way or the other and left the area. So you'd only notice he was gone from Roseway after you'd already encountered him elsewhere.

The quest journal is still directing me towards the Comms building. Perhaps he's meant to appear in Groundbreaker later, but him being missing now seems like a clear bug.

I see this has happened to a lot of people. Here's how things went down for me. After the Jameson quest, told Anton Byzantium wasn't all that great etc. Went through the hills and entered the Covert Lab through the vent before meeting Lillian. Spoke to Cassandra first, didn't accept her quest but didn't kill her either. Spoke to Porter. Gassed the raptidons. Headed back to town through the vent without finishing up because I was carrying too much stuff. At this point, Anton was already gone. I was hoping he'd show up again later, but he didn't... EDIT: Actually, all this is irrelevant. Scroll down for more.

Seems you can vote on Twitter too (click it):

Just noticed that you can also vote on Google: https://www.google.com/search?q=TGA+vote

They might be a bit overloaded right now, try again later.

Vote here: https://thegameawards.com/nominees And here: https://www.google.com/search?q=TGA+vote

No such thing anymore. Xbox and Windows 10 exclusive, maybe.

Haha, pretty sure he means two different IPs.

Btw:

Something Awful, badgame.net https://jesawyer.tumblr.com/post/188915786456/will-there-be-a-pillars-3-that-is-not-something That is not something that I get to decide, but I do think that the relatively low sales of Deadfire mean that if we consider making another Pillars game in this style, we’re going to have to re-examine the entire format of the game. It is difficult to know exactly why a sequel sells worse than its predecessor if both games review relatively well. Is it because the first game satisfied the existing need and the audience just wasn’t interested in the second? Is it because awareness was lower for the sequel? Is it because despite the strong reviews and the strong sales for the first game, people didn’t “really” like it? Maybe it’s a combination of all of these things. The problem is that without really understanding the reason(s), it’s hard to know how to move forward. It would be easier in some ways if Deadfire were also a colossal critical failure and we could point to the massive screw-ups that we needed to address. Players did criticize the low difficulty at launch and the main plot, which I think are fair and reasonable, but those problems alone don’t really explain the difference in sales. And while player reviews were weaker for Deadfire than for Pillars 1, professional criticism tended to say that Deadfire was an improvement over the first game in most areas. (Yes, Deadfire has an 88 Metacritic and Pillars 1 has an 89 Metacritic, but IMO Pillars 1′s review scores benefited from a nostalgia bump.) Players who hate RTwP combat will say that it’s because Deadfire continued using RTwP combat, in contrast to the phenomenally better-selling (and better-reviewed) turn-based Divinity: OS2. Even if that’s true, Pathfinder: Kingmaker, which generally had lower review scores than Deadfire, sold better than Deadfire and had RTwP combat. I’m sure some of the people reading this think they know precisely why Deadfire sold worse than Pillars 1. I don’t have that confidence, which is one of several reasons why I am leery about trying to direct a sequel. I couldn’t give our (Obsidian’s) audience the game that they wanted and without understanding where I went wrong, I would be guessing at what the problems are and how to remedy them.

Confirmed in today's Take-Two Interactive quarterly earnings call: https://venturebeat.com/2019/11/07/take-two-the-outer-worlds-is-outperforming-expectations/

I think it's likely that Pathfinder: Kingmaker has sold more copies than Deadfire, but not that much more. The two games had almost identical numbers of concurrent players on launch, but Kingmaker has clearly had a fatter tail.

It's not weird. What really matters is how much money each game earned, which is demonstrated by how well it did when it was new and being sold at full price. The concurrent players all-time peak tells the story: PoE2: https://steamcharts.com/app/560130 Tyranny: https://steamcharts.com/app/362960

This isn't true. Tyranny almost certainly did not sell better than Deadfire before sales & discounts.

"Day one patch" = release version of the game. It's not something you'll ever actually download separately if you didn't buy a physical copy of the game on disc.

Mikey's response doesn't seem to have been correct.

It's the same time everywhere, just different numbers on the clock.

https://www.epicgames.com/store/en-US/product/the-outer-worlds/home https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/p/the-outer-worlds/9mwd2z8l1fbq

It's live now: