AwesomeOcelot

Obsidian owns Pillars of Eternity. Pillars of Eternity is running under Obsidian. If MS buys Obsidian they get Pillars of Eternity.

If it was all about the money then they wouldn't be in the games business, Obsidian wouldn't exist, and they certainly wouldn't have been making RPGs for the PC. Owners of companies generally care about their company and their employees. Which isn't to say they don't have a price, but that price would be pretty high, even for Microsoft, especially considering how little interest Microsoft has shown to what Obsidian can offer. Also if someone ****ed me over and made me lay off a bunch of staff, I'd hardly be inclined to hand over anything I care about to them.

Microsoft wouldn't know about that I imagine, given that it's an arrangement between Private Division and Obsidian. Also they haven't see that game, no one has bought it yet. I thought it was a medium project anyway, Private Division said themselves they're not funding to AAA levels, it can't be that big of a project. When Microsoft bought Rare people left. When Microsoft bought Ensemble people left. When Microsoft bought Lionhead people left. Bungie had a bit of different relationship and were well into Halo.

The only IP Obsidian owns is Pillars, a niche PC CRPG, an engine to make Cavalier Oblique 2.5D games, and tools for making RPGs. I'm confident if Microsoft buys Obsidian key talent will leave. I also think a portion of the fans of Pillars won't use the Microsoft Store, won't play on Xbox, or won't buy the game at all.

It's strange how a developer that made some of the best console games of the 90's can struggle really badly in 2001 and ask to be bought out by Nintendo, Activision, or Microsoft. In the end Rare was going to die regardless of who bought them. It's why I have pledged a lot of money to Kickstarter, the model is broken, the publishers are not good for the industry. Why does Obsidian need to sell to Microsoft to die in a few years? I want developers to own IP, to receive the majority of royalties from sales, to reinvest into development. I don't understand after what happened at Interplay, what happened with Microsoft cancelling a project, how anyone at Obsidian thinks it's a good idea. The same type of people are still at Microsoft, they think and act like the idiots at Interplay. PC gaming has a bigger share of revenue, a larger market than the consoles, all of them, that's despite publishers for 20 years under investing in PC games, despite development being console led producing worse games on PC.

Can we please all go there tomorrow and only ask questions about the 2011 film Rampart.

I think you could argue New Vegas was considering the stagnation of the consoles limiting what multiplatform games could be and Oblivion/Fallout 3/Skyrim being considered AAA despite everything. All the other games look 2-5 years behind the top of the line. Or Baldur's Gate: Dark Alliance. Fallout: Brotherhood of Steel.

I don't rate the exclusives, I don't feel like I've been missing out not owning a Playstation. Xbox has never had must have exclusives. Nintendo has always had way more exclusives and they're highly rated. PS4 had better hardware and was cheaper. If you look at failed consoles, highly successful consoles, the hardware, the release date, and the price are the most important things. Are they easy to develop for? Exclusives are more important if they aren't because the only good games are 1st party because 3rd party developers are having a hard time for the first few years, a console needs games on launch. PC isn't competing with consoles. Microsoft should have leveraged their IP and tech to become the biggest game publisher on PC. They shouldn't have cannibalized their PC studios for Xbox, having a strong PC gaming platform could have supported Xbox. Microsoft have the capacity to waste incredible talent and wealth by being incredibly short-sighted and greedy, they've never wanted to compete on price or quality.

And this is why I didn't believe the rumour to begin with, and still don't because this new one is coming from Kotaku and I don't trust them at all. Obsidian aren't a AAA open world RPG developer and Larian produces niche games in a niche genre that Microsoft can't be that interested in, especially since they don't translate well to consoles. The other studios they bought recently make more sense, being hits on the Xbox platform. They did buy Compulsion games, which has released two games with mediocre reviews and not a lot of sales, which is odd. Although maybe they pitched Microsoft a really good project when they were working together on the We Happy Few Xbox One version. Something doesn't make sense, if this is happening there's something that hasn't been mentioned in this thread.

Last of Us was made by Naughty Dog, a studio owned by Sony Horizon: Zero Dawn was made by Guerrilla Games, a studio owned by Sony Yeah, maybe it is a good thing Does anyone remember Rare, Ensemble, Aces, and Lionhead? Slow and disappointing death march. Working under Microsoft is so good Bungie is now an independent company. Remember when Microsoft bought Bungie and made them stop developing Halo for Windows? How about the time Microsoft paid Cyrstal Dynamics to delay the release of Rise of the Tomb Raider on Windows for 3 months?

Rumours* as it's spelt correctly. It is one of the best albums ever made. Fleetwood Mac, known for answering the question whether cocaine helps or hinders performance and creativity.

I look forward to not buying any more Obsidian games. **** sake. From the studio that tried to kill Obsidian before, we bring you Xbox exclusives and the Microsoft Store.

They're not adventure games, they're barely games. Adventure games aren't really struggling, it's just a niche genre that became a fad for a short time because of CD-ROM capacity and pre-rendered 3D graphics that aren't really related to the genre. They've been an unpopular genre for about 20 years, they were just a small fish in the small pond of PC gaming, and when gaming expanded the genre didn't. Some of the gameplay of adventure games transferred to other genres like RPGs, platformers, action-adventure, which scratches the itch for some people. Adventures were primarily narrative based where as most games weren't, but now most games are narrative focused. All the money goes to mutli-platform, graphically impressive 3D games, but adventures never worked well in 3D or on controller.

Telltale games "success" made no sense to me. I watched some playthroughs of their "best" games and they were badly written, badly animated, with mediocre voice acting and graphics, and the worst part was they were essentially non-interactive. They reminded me of the worst television shows, but by machinima in a dated game engine. Also I imagine any developer could at least match a Telltale game, it can't be that hard to make them, competition probably hurt their sales, and their team seems unjustifiably huge.

That's not Streets of Rage 4 that's a fan game and it looks awful. The SoR Remake made by fans wasn't bad, combines all 3 games, adds new content, looks like SoR 3, plays well. Streets of Rage 4 at least doesn't look awful, I'm not sure I prefer the style though. I'm sceptical someone can make a sequel that's any good. SoR 2 is one of my favourite games, I still play it, it stills looks and sounds great.

I think ray tracing has the potential to be far more influential to gameplay than most of the advances over the last 10 years. Realistic lighting that's not baked in would be pretty important to stealth games. You could have reflections and shadows in ways not possible before. Real time ray tracing means a lot less time is dedicated to baking in ray tracing and shaders for edge cases, it should free up development time and allow for far more dynamic and fluid development as you can change a map without having to redo all the assets, you don't even have to involve the artists to change geometry, you won't be able to screw up the lighting. Procedural maps could be much different in a real time ray traced world, if things can be changed without so much being baked in. I don't think we know the performance hit of real time ray tracing because no developer has a final release, or the release drivers, the BF5 demo apparently wasn't even using important features of Turing, partly because they were using the Titan V for development. Price has far more to do with over supply of Pascal GPUs due to mining and lack of competition from AMD. I think people's negative attitude is mainly due to this, and it has nothing to do with the new technology in these cards.

I don't understand the response to Real-Time Ray Tracing. The demos look insane, it's a genuine leap in lighting technology we haven't seen for years. There's questions of how widely adopted it will be, the performance hit, but I want to wait for independent review. DLSS seems to be super-sampling for "free", meaning almost double the performance of Pascal on similar image quality. This obviously comes at the cost of bigger more complicated chips with tensor cores, prices have increased, although the price is also a function of not having any competition in the high end GPU space.

Obsidian has just become more secure in revenue. Releasing more games per year than ever, owning an IP i.e. getting royalties on sales. Obsidian might have sold when they had trouble securing jobs with publishers like Microsoft pulling the plug on contracts, but they wouldn't sell when they are on the up. Also Microsoft wouldn't be interested in a PC RPG developer, that's hardly going to effect their Xbox platform.

As a digital backer more of my pledge went towards Obsidian than physical backers because the physical rewards had to be bought by Obsidian, and physical backers got all the digital rewards anyway. Yes, complain that your rewards haven't been fulfilled, but don't claim you showed the most support, because you did not.

To the main question, no the Kahanga are the worst of the factions, but all the factions are bad. The reasons have all been written here, the societal structure, backwardness, and the leadership are irrational, illiberal, non-egalitarian, and regressive. As for colonialism, there's two myths about the world that certain political forces have adopted, one is that the problems facing the people of the world were lesser before colonialism (nativism, anti-Western bias) and that groups like the Huana morally own property and people in a way that's better than colonial powers. My view of the Deadfire and why I chose the independent route was that power vacuums are going to create disasters, and while knocking out some leaders from each faction was probably going to make things better as long as the other two factions were keeping them busy they couldn't do too much damage. The Huana was somewhat shielding the tribes from full-on exploitation, the Valians would eventually lead to progress, and the Rautai would enforce order in the chaos.

Nice, couldn't stand that ****. These people aren't progressive, they wouldn't know progress if it punched them up the arse, they're regressive authoritarians. They're far more interested in what language you use and the quota of superficial characteristics than they are in individuals and how you treat people.

Easy. 1. Fallout 2. VtM: Bloodlines 3. PoE:Deadfire Honourable mentions: Deus Ex, PoE + WM, Diablo 2, Torchlight 2, Rings of Power, Bastion, Arcanum, New Vegas, Fallout 2. DX: Human Revolution and Bioshock aren't really RPGs.

I'm getting 15FPS with a 1080 running at 1080p, and I'm wondering where all that performance is going because the game is not exactly cutting edge. I'm playing all my other games at 144fps. I can't believe Obsidian released the game in this state. From the start of the Beta to the end of the Beta the performance got worse, and even that wasn't as bad as this.

No, I don't think the meaning changes, just one is informal and one is formal. The way they've written it is artistic license.

Seems more colloquial than error, it's a figure of speech, as if to interject oneself. Correct grammar: The Engwithan woodcutter, who carried this bronze-headed hatchet, was a (likely) tradesman rather than warrior; though he undoubtedly faced countless dangers in the ancient woods where he earned his living.