thelee

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/obsidian/project-eternity 70k backers Deadfire: https://www.fig.co/campaigns/deadfire 33k backers (the rest were "investors" who don't get a copy of the game)

when it comes to pets, the party-wide effect is always weaker than the mainchar-only effect. in this case, nalvi gives you a much smaller improvement to armor recovery than epsilon or pirate cosmo (albeit it gives it to everyone). you can lean that way if you want, but this class is such a glass cannon you really want to be selfish with the armor recovery reduction. also, in more recent versions of the game (due to consumables nerf), we don't actually want too much extra resolve because it hurts our ability to distract ourself (either with powder burns or sparkcrackers). if you're not going that route, then maybe the +1 resolve is decent. 34% for 55% armor just for PC vs 38% for 55% armor for everyone. IF soloi then sure, but with an entire party? I think the latter is preferable. What do you think? Also looking forward to more guides, like Cipher/x Druid/x etc. Great work. Possibly. It really depends on the rest of your party. I tend to value +stride bonuses significantly (Epsilon in current revision of guide is recommended over Cosmo Pirate/Abraham) because of the huge survivability boost they can give your squishies. One thing to be aware of is the difference between nalvi and epsilon's armor recovery when it comes to using miscreant's leather. when you have nalvi equipped the advantage is so slight over just wearing cloth that you might be rather using actual cloth with other bonuses, e.g. vatnir's harbinger robes. (that would make this build even more glass cannon-y)

What I meant was, PoE1 had a big hook, "Hey everyone a spiritual successor to a beloved game!". People flocked to the new game. Then they received it...and using myself as an example, maybe felt that the only resemblance to the BG series was the isometric view or some other minor similarity? I have a hard time believing that the developers changed the mechanics in PoE2 for the lulz, so imo, PoE2 shifted because of what the data showed about how players were engaging the game. It still feels like if people were let down so much by PoE1 it wouldn't have climbed all the way to 1.2m in sales and have such decently high user reviews (if a bit lower than metacritic). So far only Boeroer's theory above seems to make sense given the other data points we actually have.

it's not that hard actually. I may not have bought the game but I might have played it in a friends place as a demo experience. It may not give me an idea of the full story but I can see the changed mechanics and naval stuff Number of people who had such experience is minimal. People don't always have friend with "demo experience of their next gaming purchase". POE1 sucked. POE is nice little game, but it sucked anyways. It lack charm and it takes itself way too seriously. Not because of humor, but some of stuff was heaaaavy as hell. Heavy experience like burden to play. I can definitely see why people skipped POE2. if a lot of people thought that, it would be reflected in user reviews. i'm not saying there don't exist people who thought PoE1 sucked (like yourself), and it's clear that user reviews are a little lower than critic reviews as a result, but it's by far not a big enough chunk to really explain the sales drop.

Thinking about Tyranny, a silver lining here: (this is based on me paying way too much attention to my guides' hits/day over the past few days; it's somewhat anecdotal and i'm just one data point so take with a grain of salt) - when tyranny first came out and i first put out my tyranny guide, it had really crappy traction. it was sort of demoralizing actually, enough so that i basically stopped actively updating it (it didn't help that I didn't love tyranny). - paying attention to the numbers, though, my tyranny hits/day has actually grown to be my third most popular guide on gamefaqs. this is a stark reversal of the trend of every other game I have a guide for, which is an early surge that tapers off with some varying level of long-tail support (BGEE and PoE1 have great long-tail support and are by far my two most popular guides in terms of long-term support; by contrast my Bioshock Infinite had insane hits/day at first and has basically 0 now). this is actually enough that i'm feeling like i need to go back and play tyranny again with some of the DLC I skipped, just to provide support for my own guide which I personally don't feel deserves the traffic it's getting right now. similarly, my BGEE guide actually had a random surge at some point in its lifetime... i could never figure out why, but I figured there must've been some sale or promotion that happened at that time. It's possible when Paradox expressed their Tyranny disappointment Tyranny really was doing really crappily with sales numbers, but given enough long-term support a game can develop some good long-tail traction. It's probably not what Obsidian wanted for Deadfire, but I can only hope that their apparent dedication to the game into 2019 will keep sales and fans flowing in for the game. edit - all these numbers ignore varying guide quality and demographics who may or may not use gamefaqs, but I personally like to think my quality is fairly consistent so changes in popularity instead tend to be correlated with current size of an active fanbase for a game.

Perhaps. This seems to support a random comment I made in another thread which suggests that a possible PoE3 should be heralded as a "return-to-form" (with per-rest system, more traditional high fantasy) that happens to have Deadfire multiclassing added in. Personally I agree with most of JE Sawyer's changes to the pillars system, but ultimately the customer is always right.

I am inclined to say nobody really has engagement unless they have + engagement gear or modals equipped or turned on, i.e. the base value is 0 (despite the fact that these character can still flank), perhaps with some exceptions. Cotta, for example, who is a ranger and appears to have an axe + stiletto in one slot and a crossbow in the other, engages alright, while Maia, also a ranger, does not. Maybe he is ranger/something, but that would be for another thread. I'd go so far as to say that this is one of the biggest things that can trip someone up comign from PoE1. It definitely took me a while to realize that enemies were running around easily because in contrast to PoE1 in Deadfire no one starts with any engagement (the only "free" universal source of engagement in Deadfire is equipping a shield).

sounds like fun. would definitely have to script a lot of that self-buffing away though or else it could get real tedious real fast. FWIW my blackjacket+streetfighter build basically put a blunderbuss in each of 4 weapon slots and used quick switch to switch to an un-fired blunderbuss as necessary to trigger powder burns, with zero delay. not as much peak damage as the zealot here or i'm sure the spellblade there, but frequently found it to be a "good enough" way to sustain heating up uptime for a long time (and just relied on heavy armor for survivability); worked well with mob stance to boot. streetfighter is just a fun subclass that rewards you for metagaming even just a little bit.

Funnily enough, Magic: The Gathering recently did their own "colonialism and pirates" set (Ixalan and Rivals of Ixalan) and from what I can tell it was also much less popular than e.g. Dominaria (more traditional M:TG setting). What's wrong with sailing and pirates? *feels alone*

(possible spoilers) The main plot in Deadfire is interesting in that regard. Reminded me of Raiders of the Lost Ark; in that movie, Indiana Jones ends up being completely superfluous. He fails to prevent the ark from falling into Nazi hands, and when the Nazis open it, divine power annihilates them all anyway. He was basically just there for the ride. Or, "the adventure was the friends we made along the way" kind of after-school special message. Similarly, in contrast to PoE1's message of the coming animancy revolution and impending obsolescence of the gods (read: they blew up eothas), Deadfire's message is like "oh ho ho not yet you dumb non-engwithan mortals" and it's more about the factions you interact with along the way to Eothas's unstoppable plan. That's why I really want a PoE3 to bring everything to a conclusion because there's clearly a tension between the old gods and kith progress that needs to be resolved.

Still dont get it. If it sold $4m (even if part of it was investors (not half of it by the way)) it still made a lot of money in a niche market. If I recall correctly it made more than double of what POE did in the campaign (even discounting the investors). If we are talking about a niche market (number of players are low/restricted) then we might assume the majority of it backed the game in the campaign since it made more money than POE. If the majority of the player base already backed the game, sure it will sell less afterwards... Sorry, I don't think that's even close. PoE1 raised 4m, too, PoE2 just did slightly better and half that was "investors" (2.25m) Lifetime sales as of December 2017 for PoE1 was 16m, not counting it's original 4m funding, not counting 2m more from DLCs. I don't see how in any world you could rationalize Deadfire's current trajectory as comparable.

Deadfire is really a game that you have to approach like a lawyer, paying attention to very very specific wording

Anecdotally, I heard way less buzz with Deadfire than with PoE1. The reason? Beats me. Possibly hubris.

everyone's entitled to their own opinion, but serafen? seriously? says a lot more about you i think. are you insane? that was pointless filler that was a waste of utter time that was there just to fulfill some backer pledges. once i realized all those gold-plated names had no bearing on the story whatsoever i was just like "Eff this" (some friends who also played PoE1 were similarly like "Wtf").

It will be paid out on nett revenue- ie revenue after relevant deductions- not the gross revenue. If that weren't the case I would be extraordinarily surprised and question whether OEI had got decent, or any, accounting and legal advice. It will be set up to minimise payments to investors, that's just the reality of being a company rather than a charity and the investment only being shares in a product rather than shares in a company. Exactly how that nett revenue is counted and what can be deducted about it will depend on the exact definitions and terms used, but I'd bet pretty much everything I own that the 4.5 million is after they've deducted every single expense and cost they can. Fig is a pretty bad investment for sure, though I do believe that OEI did genuinely think they would get those numbers and it would be successful, as they put a decent amount of extra money in themselves. SEC filings says "gross revenue" everywhere and defines it very specifically. Granted there are some spots that to me look like typos, but the difference between "Gross revenue" and "net revenue" is pretty severe and it would be pretty bad (legally or financially speaking) if they messed it up. They do distinguish between "gross receipts" (gross revenue minus distributor's cut) and "gross revenue" but the reverse calculation that leads to 4.5m definitely accounts for the difference between gross receipts and gross revenue (it's 192.67 / (.7 * .16 * .85 / 2250)) where the ".7" is accounting for the distributor's cut. edit - Obsidian probably thought that PoE1 numbers were achievable, but the graph of the 500k break-even point is still really overly optimistic. I mean, it's completely normal practice for companies to use only optimistic assumptions in their projections, but there tends to be a reason why investors don't advise laypeople to make these kinds of investing decisions on their own.

berserker + smoke cloud is an interesting idea. i might have to test rolling one soon because that might be an easy way to trigger it (at the cost of some guile). I was talking about disoriented -> distracted because i thought i had accounted for every possible distracted effect my own hubris, since i clearly didn't think about confusion + party-friendly distraction effects.

man, i've wasted too much time on this. i guess my parting shot is that nothing anyone can say (including myself) changes the following bullet points: - Deadfire is selling less well than PoE1 - only Obsidian knows the specific numbers and the best guess we got is probably high 100k, closer to 200k - it's anyone's guess as to why it's selling less well - only Obsidian knows if Deadfire is tracking expectations or not edit: one more bullet point - fig shares has always been and continues to be a rotten deal for people. the pretty graph that showed a breakeven point at 500k-ish copies relied on an unchanging average sales price of 45 USD. any amount of discounting or international sales would significantly start reducing that sales price, and similarly stretch how many sales you'd need to hit breakeven. (if deadfire settles on an average sales price of ~26 like PoE1 you'd basically need to sell as well as PoE1 just to get your money back.) it also excludes console sales (which the PoE1 numbers include) and DLC sales. Welcome to America, buyer beware.

so i have to modify some things i said; i had to go look up the steam data leak from earlier this summer just to verify some things. A. tyranny did not sell that poorly, all things considered. the total number of players was 560k. this is not necessarily number of sales since it just counts players who have ever played the game, but for a non-crowdfunded game it's somewhat close. i don't know where i got the 60k number from. it might have been an initial release number or something. sorry about the error. B. deadfire might have higher sale counts and much lower unit sales price. i don't know why i remember something like 108k from the data leak, but the data from july 1st data leak was 200k players. a good number of this is backers and their free copies, but even allowing for that, i think 125k is on the low side of actual sales combined with sales from GoG. C. poe1 had 1.2m players. a small portion of this is backers and their free copies. it probably has a much lower per-unit sales price at this point due to all the discounted sales that have happened since its release From SEC filings (dec 2017, seven months before C above): as of the time they were written, poe1 had revenues to obsidian of about 16.5m on sales of about 900k, which accounting for a 30% distributor's cut amounts to an average sales price of 26 bucks per copy. (this excludes white march which alone contributed 2m more) Anyway, reddit calculations relies on using the base USD sales price with some discounting as a starting point. Upon going through this stuff this is a very bad starting point, actually, because this is an international game, and the base price can be as little as 14 USD for someone buying in Russia. (EDIT - I missed that Zoraptor ninja-ed me on this point above.) I think we can definitely say that there's 4.5m in gross revenue, but the actual sales is still probably going to all over the place. I think it's safe to say that we're actually closer to 200k in terms of sales including GoG than we are to 100k. Definitely slower than PoE1. Tyranny took almost two years and lots of sales to get to 560k, Deadfire is 1/3 of the way there in 1/4 of the time with minimal discounting so far... maybe it can do better? i'm actually surprised that tyranny did so well, considering that paradox themselves considered it disappointing. 560k for a niche style of a niche genre is not shabby in my book; i guess they were expecting PoE1-style numbers?

what would be the best is if there existed some AoE disorienting effect, because then you could just equip that that gives you perception resistance and it would be far more fool-proof than powder burns, sparkcrackers, or trying to get flanked/<50% health. but as far as I can tell, disorienting is extremely rare to do; mule kick maybe? you're largely left with distracted or blinded (which can be resisted down to disoriented, but that's still +50% recovery time penalty so it's not ideal).

arkemyr's dazzling lights is a "dazed" effect, no?

If it was 125K sales that's about $5m from a game that's already funded. Obsidian don't see money from sales from their other games. $5m not including DLC which tends to be higher margin or the ports to the consoles. Deadfire was rapidly developed, with a small team. I think the people in that thread took the break even total and divided it with the dividend given to get the just over 110K figure. I don't think that's how shares work, the dividend system that Fig out laid seemed a lot more complicated. Without the long tail and deep discounts, I would be surprised if a game like Deadfire would get over 300K sales. There's a lot of competition in the market place, even from Obsidian with Tyranny. the sales calculations were a bit more complicated than that and took into account the fig dividend system. the revenue is essentially known, it's the number of copies sold that is the unknown. from one of the posts: "If they sold the maximum number of shares, we'd each be getting $42.50 per share per million dollars of revenue until the investment amount is paid back." and they sold out the maximum number of fig shares so 192.67/42.5 => 4.5m revenue; depending on the unit sale prices you can get a range of sales, but people were assuming something close to ~$40 after some discounts and steam/gog's share of the cut. but definitely dividends implies 4.5m revenue, or else fig is committing financial fraud. it's important to remember that the game was fully funded on Fig, but as I've repeatedly tried to remind everyone, half of that is in the form of these fig shares, which have to be paid back through these dividends. Which is different from the $4m that PoE1 got, which was basically pure up-front profit (after kickstarter's cut and assuming that the backer rewards were extremely cheap relative to the total funding). Frankly I personally didn't expect Deadfire to do as well as PoE1 because it seems a lot of things lined up to make lightning strike for PoE1 (this was one among many, many, many, many reasons why i thought fig shares were a horrible idea for the average person), but even considering that this seems very low. Tyranny has sold only like 60k copies so far I think, so perhaps Obsidian was aware of the potentially extremely low ceiling for RTwP games, but maybe they thought the PoE IP would carry it ever higher. It basically all boils down to what Obsidian was relying on for their own financial projections. For all we know this is all in line with their internal projections. But to me it honestly seems like a miss; on top of Chris Avellone's grousing 4.5m plus 2m in unconditional up-front funding sounds like a lot but programmer salaries + benefits and office rent in California don't come cheap and that money needs to cover not just Deadfire but the next project, too.

At a certain mid-level point of AR, on PotD and upscaling, the main reason you'd go for moderate AR over cloth basically just boils down to avoiding overpenetration (because the enemy needs 12 PEN to overpen you on superb cloth, but a whopping 20 PEN to overpen you on superb medium armor), which is not nothing, but pales in comparison to the situation that boeroer and others mention that you can get significantly huge survivability boosts with heavy armor and/or AR buffs. With upscaling/PotD it's sort of an arms race against the enemy, so unless you're investing a lot in AR, as boeroer says you can eventually get away with less and less armor because you're not really keeping up enough to protect yourself much anyway and your raw health and higher action rate matters more. (i think spell damage might be easier to mitigate than enemy weapon attacks and might still mean significant utility from medium armor and such)

when it comes to pets, the party-wide effect is always weaker than the mainchar-only effect. in this case, nalvi gives you a much smaller improvement to armor recovery than epsilon or pirate cosmo (albeit it gives it to everyone). you can lean that way if you want, but this class is such a glass cannon you really want to be selfish with the armor recovery reduction. also, in more recent versions of the game (due to consumables nerf), we don't actually want too much extra resolve because it hurts our ability to distract ourself (either with powder burns or sparkcrackers). if you're not going that route, then maybe the +1 resolve is decent.

Deadfire raised more than $4m, but it came from a shallower base of backers, and a lot of it was "investors"... which you could potentially draw as similar to backers, but personally I would put it more as a speculative gamble by coattail riders/curious gamers and not necessarily an excited player base (though it could've been and these players were more interested in monetary rewards than a collector's edition box). The big difference is that the "investors" are actually supposed to be paid back from revenue, which means that of the $4m, something like half of it is actually a liability that Obsidian needs to pay off to some degree, so it's not just pure cash in the bank. Also an argument that some people are making (that I don't find altogether uncompelling) is that fig is such a small crowdfunding site that $4m on Fig is different from $4m on Kickstarter in terms of free press and marketing. Plus, all the people who are getting burned to the tune of -80% on their "investment" (maybe as "little" as -60% after another year) aren't exactly going to line up to do the same thing for a PoE3 bid on Fig. Bronze on steam is actually a meaninglessly broad result. Gold or silver meant something in terms of sales, bronze was basically awarded to everyone else who was in the top 100 or something. There was a data leak from steam some months back that was able to compute the specific number of Deadfire sales as something like 108k (I remember looking at the specific data dump just for Deadfire sales numbers). The fig dividend calculations seems to back that and confirm that not much other sales from GoG. It's possible that this is all fine and something that Obsidian anticipated, but there are indications that this is not. For example, the full VO is extremely expensive and suggests an anticipation of bigger returns. Chris Avellone (keeping in mind he seems to have an axe to grind these days so take with a grain of salt) mentioned somewhere that the expectation was that Deadfire was going to be a BG2 to BG moment in terms of sales numbers (BG2 did much better than BG I believe)--he had a tweet very recently (that I think prompted all this recent speculation) that if the MSFT takeover rumors are true, MSFT should axe all the upper management at Obsidian (Feargus and the other co-owners) and pointed to Deadfire sales as signaled by fig dividends as proof. edit - i'm an optimist, so the periodic talk about future directions for Eora makes me believe that Eora is not dead (and having your own IP is a very valuable thing), but something is going to have to change because I don't think ~200k lifetime unit sales (completely ballparking that number based on the fact that game sales are front-loaded) is going to warrant the kind of investment and support that Deadfire has/had.

Yeah, this. Can anyone explain this phenomenon to any degree? I find it totally baffling. Some areas are perfectly fine, no problems whatsoever, and some are so slow you want to go and watch paint dry for some excitement. And I mean these areas are slow without any encounters. Just walking around. This totally baffles me. Either the unity engine is plain bad or the developers in obsidian aren't doing it right. There are places with really bad performance. For example Queen's berth where Cotta party resides. If you add in stealth, the frame rate can come to a crawl. Also another biggest gripe for me about Deadfire. Many screenshots look awesome but in game they are just plain flat. for example poko kohara ruins. I didn't think there were performance issues, because I was playing on a 6-year old CPU, with a 1060, and getting mostly smooth frame rates with occasional stutters and occasional sections of low fps like arriving in queen's berth, so I was happy with it. I very very very recently (like in the past few days) built a new CPU, with an amd ryzen 2700x, nvidia 2080 ti, etc. It can play shadow of the tomb raider all settings maxed at 4k with nearly constant 60 fps. On Deadfire I get.... mostly smooth frame rates with occasional stutters and occasional sections of low fps like arriving in queen's berth... (!?!?!?!?) it leads me to strongly believe that there's something just fundamentally clunky about the unity engine being used here. I mysteriously dip well below 60fps and no graphical settings tweaks improve it. I was willing to give it a pass before because of my oldish system and budget gpu, but there's literally no excuse now. It suggests that there's something that's not GPU-bound but just fundamental inefficiencies in the game engine... given that i'm using a current-gen CPU now it doesn't even seem like it's a CPU-bound issue (like maybe they're doing random blocking I/O reads or have very inefficient algorithms that no amount of processing power can speed up, like hell maybe they're bubble-sorting everything).