thelee

There are some avellone die-hards out there. Definitely not 600k+ sales drop number of die-hards. Probably like hundreds, if that.

this is the only real compelling theory or sub-theory that i've seen hashed out in the forums, that basically goes like: "rpgamers are a more conservative bunch than you would think and resist major changes to the things they like" which is especially true for a nostalgia-fueled product. i don't think people always know what they want; or if they know what they want, know how to express it; or if they do know what they want or how to express it they don't want to come off as the uncool curmudgeon who "just wants another BG2." I agree with @Gromnir that there was a lot of nit-picking debate over mechanics and it was probably less about the specific mechanics and more about the broader "this isn't BG2" that wasn't being expressed well. it's a smart business insight from OBS to realize that you can't just lean on nostalgia (those people die off or move on) and you have to expand your audience somehow and modernize the game. It might also just be that there's no easy transition point to bridge nostalgia RTwP to modern RTwP and that's why Deadfire flopped. This would imply that for a PoE3 they would have to go all-in one direction or another: completely break with the past and push a "modern RTwP" as hard as they can (which may not exist and may require TB-mode), or go back and pick up on as many BG cues as they can (hopefully without regressing the mechanics). But I'm not sure either will get the same sales as PoE1 - PoE1 had the advantage of being first out of the gates for the latter, and I am increasingly skeptical about the size of the market for the former. edit - a constant confounding factor is Tyranny. Tyranny sold better than Deadfire (though according the publisher it still disappointed). It might have benefited from not even having the pretense of being like PoE or BG, so there was no "alienation" factor and could be treated as a thing in and of itself. The sales might have been lower than PoE1 but I think OBS would be happy for Tyranny-level sales for Deadfire (not to mention Deadfire likely had a bigger budget - Tyranny might have done even better if it received the same focus).

oh boy, there has been so much hashed about this already (in currently active threads even), so hopefully i will only say relatively new things. 2. This is opinion, also one I strongly disagree with. One of the biggest criticisms I have of PoE1 was how flat all the faction stuff was. It was literally like, do two quests for one faction and WHOOPS now you failed all the other factions. There was no feeling of impact or weight to those decisions. There was basically a thin central plot line (which admittedly I find more compelling than Deadfire) and everything else was pretty weak. 3. This is opinion, really, and can't explain a sales drop of like 600k+ 4. This is opinion, really, and can't explain a sales drop of like 600k+ 5. Difficulty was not amped up for PotD until well after the peak of sales for a game should have happened. While this is not opinion, it can't explain a sales drop of like 600k+, because it's not even relevant (the game was in fact criticized for being too easy on PotD). 6. Less of an opinion, but still can't explain a sales drop of like 600k+, because there's literally no perfectly balanced role playing system out there. I challenge anyone to argue otherwise. 7. This has nothing to do with Obsidian "not loving the game." Obsidian time is limited, and in any big RPG there are going to be tons of bugs to iron out. Dev time costs money, lots of it, easily 100k+ per person per year, probably 200k-ish considering benefits. It's a cost-benefit decision. If Deadfire sold like PoE1 i'm pretty sure we'd still be seeing ongoing support and even more mini-content. However, given the low sales, Obsidian can't sink the same kind of resources as they could in PoE1 (and frankly there are more game-breaking bugs in PoE1 at end of life than Deadfire anyway), it would be stealing money that could be spent for more successful projects (TOW) or new projects. While a lot of the original post was a lot of opinion, I think here you're just objectively wrong. Frankly, given how much new content they gave out (including fully-voiced mini-content, like the woedica book), I feel like all the support they gave helped them lose more money given the low initial sales. I think they persisted in spite of that because they love their game. If they didn't love their game, why did they make it? Obsidian is (was) a small indie dev studio with lower pay and worse job security than big corporate minders, love for their own style of RPG is (was) what drives (drove) them despite that.

found the article from feb 2019: https://www.pcgamer.com/obsidian-has-three-ish-teams-working-on-different-projects/ 'Obsidian CEO Feargus Urquhart had quite a bit to say in a new interview with Game Informer about The Outer Worlds, the Fallout-esque sci-fi RPG the studio is currently working on, and its recent acquisition by Microsoft. He also teased a couple of new things that the studio's "three-ish" development teams are working on, and hinted that even though The Outer Wilds doesn't have a release date yet, Obsidian already has its eyes on a sequel. "We have The Outer Worlds team, which is the majority of our development," Urquhart says in the video. "We saw the small group of people that are finishing up in Pillars of Eternity. And then we have two other teams that are starting things up."' i don't expect anything has changed re: pillars dev since then.

yeah, another article. it was from an article talking about the microsoft acquisition, which was nov 2018. it might even be a word-for-word requote, which is games "journalism" at its finest and really blurring the line of when it was talked about.

wow, did not know that. boy that gib-on-crit-death option is the biggest (only?) "not actually a purely cosmetic option" trap setting in the game. (personally i leave it on just for the extra challenge, but man what a way to confuse and/or screw over less-plugged-in players)

I'm not trying to pick on OP (everyone has different tolerances for difficulty), but I'm just really surprised by this sentiment. Possibly colored by some nostalgia? Baldur's Gate and Baldur's Gate 2 I remember being very challenging games at the age I picked them up (teens). And not always in a "fair way." In BG, it would be like "enemy gets a critical hit on someone not wearing a helmet and you get instagibbed" or "you fail a saving throw to avoid a hold person spell/effect." In BG2, it's those fricken mind flayers and liches. There were definitely fights that were both hard and "fair" (Dragons, in fact I remember the whole Windspear red dragon dungeon being an extremely challenging (but fun!) crawl, and the red dragon is so hard you don't even have to fight it), but there were just so much random instantaneous ways to die (edit - eegad, forgot about excessive level drain and mind control from vampires - even if i survive minsc beating on aerie, i still have to re-configure my spellbook after each fight post-restore). This has been litigated a lot on this forum in the past, so I don't want to re-open it. I'm just puzzled by this particular sentiment. I max out Deadfire difficulty. I do not touch the difficulty slider in BG2, or BG2EE even (I even used to leave it at the 2nd lowest notch, where you couldn't permadie and you always got max health per level). edit - BG gets a lot easier when you realize that Sleep is the most OP spell that has ever been created in any cRPG.

This is also a world where there is actually magic. In Deadire you go around telling people that a god has incarnated a gigantic statue and is trampling through the deadfire, and some people roll their eyes at you -- not necessarily that they don't believe you about seeing a gigantic animated statue, but rather that it's inhabited by a literal god. If there are people wandering around who can literally make fantastical things happen just by mumbling a few words and waving their hands, it seems like it would be even easier to be athiest. A miracle happened? No, wasn't divine intervention, was just Bob the level 1 Thaumaturge over there messing up a cantrip.

Yeah, I'm curious about this too. There have been complaints in the past about megabosses being too hard, but the standard reply was that "megabosses aren't intended to be something that everyone can beat." At level 20, there really isn't that much content for a party to tackle with much challenge, other than megabosses (and possibly FS Oracle or SSS Porokoa). DLC does significantly amp up the challenge significantly over base game. Frankly, I'm astonished that Beast of Winter has such a low "target" level in your journal because outside of min-maxed parties or exploitive cheese I think Ner and some of the content (Bridge Ablaze) is insane to tackle at that level (at least on PotD). edit - but still, even FS at level 20 isn't that bad.

I'm dubious that any beans were spilt. The quote from that article I've seen before, in an older context - I think they're referring to the skeleton dev team that Pillars had up until the "end of life" notice this past summer.

Thanks for that. Yeah, I tried that before posting, tried it again after you posted that. Eventually it worked. I dug around a bit more on my laptop (since info online is scarce) - it's definitely related to entitlements - trying to start up Deadfire kickstarts an os x process named 'tccd' (which appears to be related to handling privacy entitlements). It ate up an entire CPU core, and after literally 50+ gigabytes of data read, Deadfire finally launched (I had to leave Deadfire in a bouncing/hanging state the entire time instead of force-closing it). (While messing with it, Deadfire at one point requested some input keyboard permissions, but crashed my whole system before I could grant it. Even after granting it, I had to sit through tccd parsing 50+ GB of data. I vaguely suspect tccd was scanning all 55 GBs of Deadfire data for some privacy related reasons [I even was streaming the tccd logs, and data was definitely coming in for Deadfire and Steam related stuff], but not being an Apple engineer I couldn't say for sure what on earth was happening.) TL;DR: I suspect this is actually a macOS catalina-caused trash fire, not an obsidian one.

With the end of life note in May you said that no issue would be addressed that wasn't deemed "non-game breaking." Well this is pretty game breaking. macOS Catalina ends support for 32-bit apps. Consider me astonished that Deadfire was apparently a 32-bit app in this day and age. (This wasn't clear at all until after the upgrade, at which point it stopped working.) It's been known since like High Sierra that 32-bit support for OS X was ending. It seems irresponsible to release a product that was doomed to be unplayable shortly after it's end of support cycle. More to the point, Deadfire isn't even released on consoles yet, and it's already broken and unusable for current OS X users. Right now I'm setting up dual booting, but this should not be considered an acceptable requirement for a game that is not even fully released yet (see again: consoles).

IIRC, the "good choice" in PoE1 was one that resulted in her being (dis)honorably discharged from her order in the ending slides (and ostensibly joins the shieldbearers). The outcome in Deadfire where she is pretty normalsauce upon meeting you is one where you convince her to abandon her convictions and therefore she's still with her order. Remember this is an Obsidian game, so "morally good choices" does not necessarily mean "happy outcomes." edit - and with Pallegina's case, it's kind of murky what exactly the "morally good" choice was. Good for whom?

Imoen complains and will actually leave your party if you take too long, which is a nice way Bioware added extra urgency. Though Imoen will leave your party just to wait until the heat death of the universe in the Promenade by Irenicus (and how did she get past all those traps without setting them off?)

YESSSSSSS PLEASE GIVE US THIS. I want survival mode without having to reload every time Felix bites the dust.

The game seems to imply that stuff that goes into your inhaler have durations that are altered by the medicine skill. It might be the best way to make use of those extremely short Spacer's Choice 15s versions of consumables. Also, I unlocked some slots because putting consumable types into the spare inhaler slots amounted to my version of inventory management. Also in terms of "right consumable" the way I get a handle on it is that the only consumable I really care about the "right situation" are the +10 armor rating ones or -50% hostile effect duration ones, and I consider everything else as generalized combat buffs that improve me somehow. so I slot booze and/or cigarettes and/or food for general use and only pop open the inventory if I need the others.

I don't think this is a very good explanation - BG2 had a very long intro and and an intro dungeon that could become mindless filler the umpteenth time you do it. (Meanwhile I'm on like my umpteenth run of Deadfire and Gorecci Street is still a challenge.) Though I actually thought it worked in BG2's favor because it was a fairly "cinematic" opening with a dynamic cutscene given the time and how non-cinematic BG and IWD were. It was kind of fun being dropped in media res. Similarly I liked suddenly being tossed into a more cinematic/cut-scene-y Deadfire intro. That being said, if another thread is any indication, Deadfire might be a bit too in media res in terms of new-player complexity, whereas BG2 requires less active lore knowledge.

(i don't know how to delete a post)

Hey, a fun thought experiment I learned to do some time back. Every time you want to say "I don't get this" or "I don't understand" about someone else and you barrel on to suggest something else, what you're really saying is "I have an empathy deficit." Try ever so slightly harder to put yourself in another person's shoes. See, in part, what Hurlshot says below: I can still read books by squeezing in a few pages (I've been working my way through a big economics text five minutes at a time in the mornings in between my breakfast and the kids waking up), or by reading them during the commute, or via audiobook. But yes, kids and a day job means I don't read as much anymore, either. I also don't go to the gym as much anymore either (though I still try). Side note: in the US (where most people have to drive around), how many skinny/fit parents of multiple young children do you see wandering around? Kids are tiring without even being good exercise! It's even an effort just to find the time to find and listen to new music: now I know why parents become increasingly "uncool" over time; staying up to date on stuff is time-consuming and sometimes it's just not worth it (my wife has basically given up on finding new music to listen to). For gaming in particular (versus reading a book), there's overhead in gaming, and I want to feel like I "accomplished something" for the hour or two that I can squirrel away in an evening (and 15 minutes is a non-starter because of such overhead). This has meant, in practice, that I play more shooters and action games these days, because I can spin it up real quickly, kill a hundred nazis or zombies or whatnot in like half an hour, and feel like I did something with my rare free time. However much I love Deadfire and games like it, it can be a slog because over like an hour of gameplay, a significant chunk of that will be in load/save menus[1], staring at inventory screens and character screens, wandering through vast empty wilderness areas, and basically not any what I would consider the actual "game" part of the game (questing, dialogue, story, combat). An RPG that is very compact and dense like TOW means there's not a lot of wasted wandering and I spend more time doing the actual game and accomplishing quests, and the mechanics are simple enough that I don't have to spend time during my free time trying to look up stuff or staring at dense info screens trying to determine my next steps - it's optimized to be rich over 15-20 hours which also means I see a lot of progress in story lines and character development in any given chunk of time. (During my game times, I literally set up intermittent timers so I don't lose track of time and forget to go to sleep or something, and I can definitively say that with a 30 minute timer I might be able to clear multiple areas in TOW, but meanwhile literally not even finish a single fight in Deadfire.) [1] this is despite Deadfire having pretty speedy load times in general; meanwhile I literally don't want to play PoE1 anymore because of its buggy load times (they get longer and longer hte further you are in the game) means it would just be a huge waste of my free time to play I'm not saying that companies must make short and simple RPGs - I still enjoy getting through Generic Bethesda Open World(tm) game, and games like Deadfire, but merely that I appreciate it when there exist short games. Like I said before, my own critique of TOW is that the Tyranny approach made reactivity such a deep-cut that it was a short game with a long shelf-life because you would literally have areas shut off from you from one run to the next, so even if one run took 15-20 hours the game's actual life with a person might be multiples of that, whereas I could easily see in games like Deadfire or TOW (with a more modest amount of reactivity) that you could be one and done and it could be more problematic as a value proposition for some people.

Just popped up for me at 100% reproducibility, on PC. Yikes! Guess I'm taking a hiatus from this game until there's a workaround.

I think @asnjas owes you five bucks

There are some minor differences (I wish there was a comprehensive collection somewhere of reactivity). In terms of companions, the big changes are whether or not you got them killed or sacrficied them (to the blood pool or otherwise) because that could either completely remove a possible Deadfire companion for the picture, or determine the existence of the Devil of Caroc Breastplate in a store. There are smaller changes based on how you ended things with certain companions (Eder, Aloth, and Pallegina have slightly different starting equipment based on PoE1 decisions). I think Benevolent Soul assumes you got the "happiest" ending with all companions - I think the descriptions might explicitly explain how you handled certain companions (like convincing Durance the truth).

BG becomes much better after you consult visual map walkthroughs so you figure out what the heck is the point of any given wilderness area, and also walkthroughs to help you sort through all the endless fetch quest dross. It sounds like I'm being cheeky, but I'm not. I enjoy BG much more knowing what I'm actually doing in the game, versus me in the 90s first picking it up (there's a reason why I just stuck to Candlekeep and Nashkel and just kept doing restarts).

oh yeah, i've done that with Mass Effect (jumped in on 3) and Dragon Age (jumped in on Inquisition). For me, the series had name recognition from their early games, so I was intrigued to play, but not intrigued enough to go back to the older games. So completion rate of earlier games was irrelevant, at least directly, and it also speaks to why OBS might have expected Deadfire to do even better than PoE1 (which is kind of a latent assumption based on their early Fig share projections).

"The End of the Beginning" is the completion/final quest achievement. 18.8% side note: Though the number for level 20 is coincidentally very similar, they are likely very different populations and not a good minimum bound. Back in 1.0, it was eminently possible to beat the game at level 12 or so (I did it at level 14) even on PotD. edit - frankly, before the DLCs came out it was actually kind of a slog to gather enough XP to get to level 20.