thelee

No, the requirement is "long crawl", as I said. If it takes me literally no effort to just leave and restock in a lot of those, and/or they are like one area long it doesn't count. Old City I'll grant you (I forgot about that one) but I mean c'mon, e.g. Nemnok can be *literally* two fights long (enter in mouth), that's not a dungeon crawl. Similar thing with Arkemyr, I literally just did last night entering the front door with guns blazing (to maximize fighting) and thanks to enemy pulls it was also literally four fights long (one for each level, two for basement). Even just the basement of the inventor in WM was more substantially a dungeon crawl than some of those.

one thing I still find wanting in Deadfire versus PoE1 is the lack of a real good dungeon crawl. Yes, BoW and FS were "dense" but they were more like "quest hubs with enemies" as opposed to the "long crawl" of the endless paths, or even some of the smaller areas of PoE1 (temple of eothas or raedric's hold in the hostile path). Oathbinder sanctum and Poko Kohara are pretty much it.

I'm a simple man. When I see "new posts" icon on a 20-page thread, I run screaming out of the room

By the way, JE Sawyer had an update talking about the types of games that he would love to make if he had unlimited resources and nothing else to worry about. I think for whatever rumors there are about another Pillars, we can take these as stuff that they are definitely not working on right now: I don't know about you but I personally would love a Pillars Tactics game. That would be a great way to reuse the Deadfire engine and still have a lot of consequence without as much work. (They would have to fix the action economy issue in TB-mode for it to really work, ironically best by adopting a Final Fantasy Tactics-style speed/tick system.)

The thing about the plot - I think there's an oversampling about the gripes about the plot (the loudest voices in the room don't necessarily reflect the audience at large) -- as evidenced by audience scores. JE Sawyer is not exactly the most unbiased participant, but he tends to have a pretty decent self-awareness and self-critical eye. He was more exposed to the community than any of us, and the general sense I got from his writings was that there was at worst minor aggregate disappointment about the plot (either about the actual narrative or how it was structured). If the plot was trash and that could explain sales drop (or even just a significant chunk of it), I think Sawyer would be one of the first to acknowledge it. It would even be great, because then they 'd know precisely what to fix for PoE3!

+1. The base game/critical path is rather short (I mentioned in another thread that at release it was actually pretty hard to scrounge up enough content to hit level cap), which was sorta by design. DLCs definitely add a lot of extra life to the game. If you're not too heavy into the combat, be warned that all the DLCs are fairly combat heavy compared to the base game (SSS the most), but do agree that BoW in particular is very well done narratively and helps flesh out a lot of the lore.

some london thing (i've never heard of it before, I only know because I pestered OBS again about my ultimate run and schin gave me his schedule for the next two weeks to show how slowly he's able to work through the vids)

dang that's a good point. this is why everything is part of a larger franchise these days *sigh* this is also a good point. Yeah, the fig campaign funding stream was shallower and this time around had speculators (due to the presence of fig shares work) instead of some true-believer fans. However, I also saw some (minor) backlash that PoE1 was successful, so why were they reaching out to fans to help fund the sequel? I don't know how much of a factor that could've been (maybe not much).

This is why I also fall back on my experience with peers/friends. Pure anecdote, but of all the many people who bought/backed PoE1 only two followed through with Deadfire (and one only after it had been out for a while). I haven't asked them directly but the sense from the non-Deadfire-players mostly seems "meh" even though they liked PoE1, which suggests to me that some nostalgic niche had been satisfied or low enough awareness that they aren't motivated to get it. (And it's not like they picked up P:K instead, either. In fact, only the two Deadfire players have picked up other top-down RPGs [excluding things like bethesda games], one played DOS2, the other picked up Wasteland 2.) edit - we are all also several years older than when PoE1 is out so it might also just be life getting in the way. hard to tell, if only someone had the money to do actual market research here.

More to the point, P:K was excoriated for bugs (the reason why the completion rate was so low was in part because there were bugs preventing people from getting to the endgame, and even after that, from logging the achievement). Even here, there was some schadenfreude from regular forum-goers mocking P:K fans (who were PoE-ers who flounced away) for the bugginess of their preferred product. Didn't seem to have hurt their sales.

I don't think anyone's disputing or disagreeing with you that it would be nice to get a really bug-free experience (I'm more than a little annoyed that at some point along the way from 4.0->5.0 the once-solid potion usage--especially compared to PoE1--is back to being almost as buggy as PoE1 *sigh*), most of us was disagreeing with you that Obsidian "didn't love the game." I also work in the tech industry and sometimes there are plenty of things I want to keep improving or fixing on a product but higher ups will decide that dev resources are better spent elsewhere. It's just an ugly fact of business. It's why in most big RPGs I spend a lot of time looking around for a bugfix patch (like for Skyrim) because hobbyists are the ones who have the endless time to keep fixing a game (and sometimes devs in their spare time, too; the one non-critical-bugfixing mod I will use for F:NV is Josh Sawyer's own tweaking mod). Speaking of which, now that I no longer have to keep a pristine copy around for my ultimate run, time to go see about that bugfixing community mod.

one of the more ambiguous ones is the ability to switch back and forth between turn-based mode. I say "ambiguous" because I don't know if it would actually pass muster with an ultimate run validation, despite not being gated behind iroll20s.

yeah, in the postmortem talk, Josh seemed apologetic in that their use of full VO basically has upped the ante for other small developers as well. Wanting full VO is truly a perspective I have difficulty getting behind, though I do understand the pressure, and I do see the demand. TOW is still getting criticism for having an unvoiced protagonist, even though everything else is fully voiced. I guess it's just because I grew up on SNES RPGs and old PC games that I'm used to reading walls of text, and frankly I find VO alienating sometimes (in part because I have a fast reading speed so I only ever really hear the first few words of any snippet of dialogue). What I imagine could be a "cost-saving" measure in the future for smaller RPG devs is to rely more on prose description and limit actual dialogue that needs to be voiced. Or not voicing the narrator.

"FTL" is a funny way to spell "Cities: Skylines"

yeah, I think "being an icon in the PC gaming" industry is like being a D-list celebrity in Hollywood. I know who Avellone, Sawyer, Feargus, Tim Cain, etc. are because I played lots of PC games in the 90s/early 2000s (not to mention John Carmack, American McGee, and... ugh... John Romero). But PC games are tiny market compared to the video game market at large - afaict AAA tiles bank most of their sales from consoles and PC is just a fraction. It's one thing to try to bank your game sales on Chris Avellone or Tim Cain, it's a whole other thing on Kojima (Death Stranding) or Miyamoto (all Mario). I do think it matters a bit for PC games (hence my "hundreds of sales" comment) - the fact that Avellone and Sawyer were on PoE1 was what first piqued my interest in kickstarter at all, since I recognized their names from Black Isle Studios, but I hardly doubt it matters to the degree that you can move mountains.

As a person who wasn't love PoE, what does Deadfire do better? Honestly curious, since before I thought Deadfire was the best crpg, I thought PoE was the best crpg, so I am Keen on other perspectives. Especially from someone whose opinion of the series improves.

I highly doubt it. I think also most of the tell-all came after Deadfire was out (that's how I seem to remember the timing because he was blaming low... sales?... on Feargus's insistence on using Fig). I would venture to say if you sampled the PoE1 audience, the vast, vast, vast majority would have no idea who Avellone (or JE Sawyer) even are. Obviously I can't prove this or have the resources to run such a survey, so at this point it's all opinions and buttholes, to paraphrase someone else.

feel free to put together a waterfall diagram of how all these random nit-picky things (including trivially verifiably false things) add up to 600k+ in lost sales. my basic thesis is that a sales miss that large, despite glowing critical and positive audience reviews, indicates something more foundational or market-based at work. edit - JE Sawyer and others at OBS are going to have more access to data anyway; if they can't figure it out I highly doubt anyone here will have the right answer. The recent stuff he shared also provided new info: a) low market awareness leading up to launch b) difficulty getting places to publish marketing pieces c) 3x higher pre-sales rate compared to PoE1, but much lower launch day and after sales To me that reads as "modern IE-style RtWP is too niche or too small a market" (the people who did buy were really excited and really liked it, but they weren't large enough of a market) and poe1 benefited too from being first out of the gate or having unfulfilled nostalgia sales. I like @Gromnir's take of avoiding blame on marketing because it's the easy way out (and apparently point B suggests that OBS tried, but the media just wasn't too interested in the story). in this theory, P:K did well (despite lower critical and possibly audience scores) because it leaned harder into the nostalgia market (which Deadfire lost). D:OS2 did extremely well by being a cRPG without the baggage of RTwP (which may have been a short cultural phenomena when RTSes were also extremely popular)

Not 50. But yes, I do really enjoy Deadfire. But tell me, what fact am i denying that is colored by me liking this game? Please, go through this thread and any other thread discussing Deadfire sales and highlight any factual inaccuracies or logical fallacies. (Hell, I'm the one correcting people about just how low Deadfire sold--lower than they speculate.) I don't claim to know the answer of why Deadfire sold poorly, all I can do is offer my own theories, backed by whatever data I have access to. But if we're trying to explain why Deadfire sold poorly, it's going to have to be a major explanation to explain 600k+ drop (and that is only compared to PoE1 sales, like I mentioned before OBS likely expected to do even better so the drop is even larger). And sorry, as JE Sawyer pointed out, if the game's metacritic score is about as good as PoE1 (and far better than P:K, which sold much better) and audience reviews are good, nit-picky arguments about side quests or other small things are not going to answer that question about the huge sales drop. All you've offered is conjecture that's trivial to verify as not being true. You're almost as bad as the dude chiming in "rage rage Chris Avellone rage rage"

I don't know if you're being willfully obtuse here. I am talking about "sales predictions" because I'm talking about the expected norm for sequels in the industry, which is in direct contravention of your argument. "Anecdote" is data that is not extremely meaningful (that is why I explicitly highlighted it as anecdote), but absent any other data a Bayesian can use to adjust their priors. More relevantly, Baldur's Gate sold about 2.2 million lifetime copies. Baldur's Gate 2 sold about 3.5 million copies. Baldur's Gate 2 is basically almost as much of a direct sequel as Deadfire was. About 1.3 million players had no problem jumping into a direct sequel (and who knows what the completion rate for BG even was back then, pre-achievements). Sales numbers are more closely guarded for modern games, but it seems that every successive entry in the main Mass Effect trilogy sold better than the previous entry.

Apparently you're unable to see the thrust of my argument and get caught up in irrelevant details, mistaking pedantry for insight. Completion rates likely do not predict anything about the success of a game or its sequel. You asked how people play successive games if they didn't complete prior games. I gave you anecdotal data where people (myself included) don't complete prior games but complete or jump into (yes, even direct) sequels (in another thread I mentioned mysefl not having played prior Mass Effects or Dragon Ages, but jumped into the third). This is the fundamental basis why sales expectations for sequels tend to be higher than prior games, because the mind share already exists. This is by all accounts the same assumption OBS was using for Deadfire going into Deadfire - they were expecting it to be a BG2-level hit (even then, BG2 wildly outsold BG), which colors some of the hugely expensive decisions they made (like full voice-over). I also provided empirical data of wildly successful games (and one more "successful" game) with low completion rates. edit - as mentioned many times, over and over, and even in backer beta updates, the fact that virtually all games have low completion rates (especially RPGs) is precisely why OBS designed their version of "new game+" the way they did [berath's blessings], where you don't actually have to beat the game to start unlocking its benefits. From a logical perspective, it's up to the person making the claim to provide the evidence anyway, so I await you sharing market research on how direct sequels and "non-direct" sequels are treated differently by consumers.

dude, with all due respect, between you and me, there's only one person actually trying to draw in actual evidence. go get hired as a product manager for obsidian if you're so confident.

we have to keep in mind that the sales drop explanation has to account for a massive amount. all these threads frequently hash out minute details that most people just plain wouldn't care about, at least to do the degree that it would predict possibly a 60% sales drop. the only really compelling theories i've heard - 1. gromnir summarizes it in another thread, basically the "deadfire not enough nostalgia/it wasn't BG2-enough" theory. 2. based on a casual survey of my own peer group (many of whom bought/backed poe1 but only one backed deadfire, and one more bought it much later) if i were to ask them their response would probably be "meh" which leads to the "market now saturated/already satisfied the demand" theory that has been put forth by paradox and possibly je sawyer. those are examples of games with extremely low completion rates that keep having huge sales. the difference between "sequel" and "direct sequel" is one that consumers probably wouldn't care about.

Aw man, this is all thoroughly hashed out in another concurrent thread. Anecdote - 1. I beat BG2 way before I ever finished BG. 2. I still have not beaten Fallout, but I have beaten Fallout 2 tons of times. 3. I know plenty of people who never finish RPGs like Fallout 3/4/NV, Oblivion, but always buy sequels. I would imagine any new player would just pick a random background. It's not even mentioned in many reviews, any hurdle here would not account for 600k+ in dropped sales.

ugh, ok, now i do have to rehash stuff mentioned elsewhere. very few people ever complete a game. this is true about any game. the completion rate may very, but even getting a majority of players to finish a game is a challenge and seems basically limited to linear, relatively short action games. Fallout 4, for example, has a 25.9% completion rate (this is just for the main quest). https://steamhunters.com/stats/377160/achievements "Prepared for the Future" Pathfinder: Kingmaker (which keeps getting brought up by comparison as more "successful") has only a 6% completion rate: https://steamcommunity.com/stats/640820/achievements "The Story's End" (though apparently this is understated due to how buggy P:K is) D:OS 2 (which also gets brought up as wildly more successful) has a 11% completion rate: https://steamcommunity.com/stats/435150/achievements "Sourcerer" edit - For reference, Deadfire has an 18% completion rate: https://steamcommunity.com/stats/560130/achievements ("The End of the Beginning") I don't think you can draw many (if any) conclusions about a game's critical or audience success from a completion rate. It probably just tells you a lot more about how accessible/long the main quest is. edit 2 - just to really pile on, completion rate is information that is trivially available to anyone, including--for example--product managers. If completion rate was predictive of future game success at all, and this was signaled by PoE1 completion rates, there's no way that Obsidian would've plowed ahead on a bigger-budget sequel.