thelee

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.

I used to be a type who wanted all of his RPGs to be sprawling epics. Then I had kids and got a busy day job. I don't think the industry should shift wholesale away from sprawling epics, but I appreciate a game here and there that doesn't require me to play for month+ to complete once with daily evenings carved out away from the family. I appreciated it with Tyranny, and I appreciate it TOW. My only major gripe is that Tyranny justified the shorter length with tons more reactivity to encourage replays, whereas TOW seems like it has fairly boiler-plate F:NV/FO3-style or level of reactivity, that is - some alternate quest endings, a choice here or there, but nothing like "this area is closed off for you during this run."

Probably one of the most common tropes about The Elder Scrolls games (and to a lesser extent the newer Fallouts) is that the main story quest is the worst part about them. I know plenty of friends and acquiantances who have never beaten those games (instead creating a character and futzing around for a while before stopping or rolling a new character); I myself have beaten Oblivion and Skyrim precisely once each just to see what it was like, and out of all my Fallout 4 replays I beat it exactly twice (when I was still motivated to hunt down achievements). I and all my peers still go back to successive sequels and do the same thing (except Fallout 76 which a lot of us saw an impending disaster). Going back in time: I never beat BG until well after I beat BG2 multiple times. I never beat Fallout, but then played Fallout 2 to death. I still have never beaten Fallout, despite rolling characters for it several times and getting a fresh copy relatively recently. So yes, people do that. It is anecdota, but if you want real data you should go trawling through the achievements of basically any other game (including AAA) and see how many people actually beat a game, even as the sequels do better and better.

This has been discussed elsewhere, but context is needed: very few players actually finish any game. 13% is actually probably pretty decent given how big the crit path in PoE1 is. (@Slotharinga also provides context from PK) This is why Beraths Blessing exists the way it does because OBS didn't want to gate new game+ behind finishing the game, which very few people actually do.

i think it's because most (all?) science weapons have an extremely low item level, and people haven't really figured out tinker. hell, i'm about to finish my first run through and it took me like half the game to figure out what exactly "tinker" really did (it was just a tab on the workbench menu i kept passing over).

Very few of the reactivity are meaningful in terms of gameplay or story outcomes, and most of it is just fan service and lore. It seems self-evident that you don't care too much about the latter (not intending that as an insult, just a realistic observation), so really just pick a "character concept" for yourself and pick a pre-baked background. You can go into the options to turn on PoE1 Reactivity to see what choices are being influenced by such a selection, but realistically given that you don't remember much about PoE1 it probably wouldn't matter to you either way. You could also pick the "Everything Bad" option edit - the fact that you can't back out or set up a background once you start the game is an annoying thing that took me several run throughs to finally get used to. literally no game in modern history has ever basically required you to tinker around the options menu before starting a game, or if it does so, make it impossible to back out to do that.

I can accept that what really matters is how much money each game earned, but nothing that follows after that statement makes sense or is evidence of that fact. The fig disclosures actually do list actual money earned, not sales units. The sales units are estimated from the actual money earned (hence why a huge range for Deadfire). IIRC, tyranny still outearned deadfire (though perhaps the margin is closer than the sales numbers since Deadfire likely has a higher average sales price).

I think JE Sawyer literally had a screenshot of that in his post mortem talk. Regardless of what form it took, the fundamental problem was that any ship mini game required a lot of work and custom assets to be done for a part of that game that couldn't be used anywhere else. It was basically wasted time and money. Sounded like it would've been preferred if they just had ship boarding fights and not bothered with the mini-game. But apparently it was a top-down decision to force the ship mini game, and to make it a backer stretch goal, which tied their hands. JE Sawyer called it the most expensive and least value part of Deadfire. To get it right, they needed way more resources, and even if they got it right only a small fraction of players would ever have interacted with it. There was basically no cost-benefit analysis that made the ship mini game in any form worth it. edit - I mean, to be charitable, I thought the ship mini game wasn't bad, it was "serviceable." But I'm pretty sure it's small comfort to the many dev-hours spent on that and bug fixing that even one of their biggest fans thought that it was merely "serviceable."

Some independent studies have shown that wikipedia is more accurate than an encyclopedia on certain topics. Basically the question is "are nerds on the internet into this topic" and if the answer is yes, then it's going to be better on wikipedia than any comparable resource. (Think math, science topics, pokemon, a little less so for literature or contemporary philosophy). SteamSpy has ceased being usefully accurate since Steam closed off whatever data source they were originally using (circa a year ago). That's why it was a big deal when steam inadvertently leaked their sales data, because SteamSpy wasn't a very useful source anymore. Though it is possible that TOW boosted sales, or that PoE1 Ultimate Edition release helped halo effect some sales. The fig disclosure numbers are a few months old. But it seems unlikely to make a huge difference. (especially since TOW isn't even on any of the stores that Deadfire is sold on)

If you want to work within the system, you want a mage slayer, possibly a mage slayer + (non trickster, non-debonaire) rogue. A mage slayer can be thought of as an arcanum-style magic-averse type, where not only do they want to purify the world away from froofy magic, magic literally can't effect them nearly as well because of their convictions. You can definitely interpret barbarian abilities as nothing intrisinscially supernatural, but sheer force of will and war-time morale boosting/shattering (for the yells). A rogue has extra item slots. You can stay away from the explicit invisibility effects (shadowing beyond, vanishing strike) and stick to the smoke cloud->smoke grenade path since that makes it seem like the rogue just has a utility belt full of smoke grenades and smoke bombs. Just go around throwing explosives and using poisons while you're at it.

I don't think Deadfire had an obscure and unintuitive system. Rather, it had a new system. Even well-known licensed games have obsure interactions: e.g. go consult sorcerers.net for BG2, e.g. the manual for BG was pretty useless since it talked a bunch about D&D mechanics that were utterly irrelevant to the game, etc. The difference is that PoE1 and the like have some sort of common ground or shared cultural knowledge for players to ramp up on or to read up on (PoE1 was very D&D-like, and the AR system was very much like F:NV, a system that is even used in TOW). Deadfire, aside from some superficial similarities, is bottoms-up new and in many places rather unprecedented (what biggish CRPG has used a PEN/AR system before?). I could see how it would make some people a little more antsy about buying into Deadfire versus more well-known systems, but I don't think it could possibly explain a 600k+ sales drop. (This is constantly the issue - for all the pet theories people have, they have to explain a huge sales drop.) As for story and hero - I don't think any personal opinion on it can matter, because it's down to a matter of taste. Critics and audience reviewers seemed to be positive about it. What does this mean, "before sales & discounts?" Weird qualifier. And anyway, yes, it is objectively true. Tyranny, two years after the fact, sold around 550k+ copies, as sourced from steam sales leak data (and semi-verified by Fig disclosures). Deadfire is approaching two years and at last check (Fig disclosures) has sold around 300-400k copies. Console release may help some, but they aren't treated as sales by OBS (they just get a licensing fee). Given that game sales follow a steep power curve law from date of release, it seems unlikely that Deadfire is going to make 200k ish sales in the next few months. The only objective criteria really is if the game designers themselves say so. Beyond that it is basically reading between the lines and fan/critic consensus. (Example: I'm not sure if Prey was ever explicitly explained as a System Shock 2 successor, but there are plenty of clues, including the first keypad code is 0451 which is the tell-tale sign that someone is trying to make a system shock successor. BioShock--mentioned in the wikipedia article--also had this keycode, though was also much more explicitly a System Shock 2 successor.) I would definitely not be as cheeky as Blunderboss in saying that PoE1 "tried" and PK "is" a spiritual successor since that is definitely pure opinion (and by sales numbers and critical success, one could argue that Blunderboss got the verbs switched). Both were obviously trying to ape the tradition of IE games. Even for all its differences, Deadfire was also trying to ape BG2, which included a settings change to a "warmer" less european setting (I recall this being explicitly mentioned extremely early on in the Deadfire development process). By the way while I think @xzar_monty's aversion to wikipedia quoting is fallacious, I do agree that one should actually read the wikipedia article they are trying to quote. Nothing about that wikipedia article lists objective criteria. It doesn't demonstrate anything other than that @Blunderboss was trying to link-spam their way into winning an argument.

what are they, 12?

"with a lady as a dude" I mean, OK, whatever. Meanwhile every non-straight-possibly-nonwhite-guy gets like one game every once and a while and it tends to be indie dreck. Leads credence to the adage "when you're accustomed to privilege, even equality feels like oppression." If I had a hang up of not being able to play an action game or RPG where I could recreate my own image I'd hardly ever play anything, and that's even as me as a straight dude.

I mean, yes, technically this is true, but we had a lot of people griping about the setting for non-rational reasons, like they just liked their medieval sword-and-board fantasy. As for game systems, "conservative" can also mean "status quo bias." I have been able to get people on board with how Deadfire might be a better designed system, but they still won't like it because it's not what they're used to or expecting. Even for myself the initial Deadfire backer beta took quite a bit of expectations adjustment.

No offense, but do you actually interact with any number of LGBT people on a regular basis? I mean clearly not (other than some level of "biological mom" interaction). From what I've heard it's basically just the background noise of their life since straight lifestyles are the norm. And anyway, from what I can divine, ever done a romance in an RPG with a lady as a dude that you weren't particularly attracted to, but you could get into the spirit of it? (For me it was that winged elf lady whose name escapes me in BG2). Same deal. Don't project your feelings of mild disgust onto what other people think, especially since you know crap-all about them.

to clarify, you do realize that conservative has a non-political meaning other than "conservativism"? not to put words in people's mouths, but when I or other say "RPGers are a conservative bunch" we mean "it looks like RPGamers like to stick to common tropes and settings"

1. "sold ok" "not a commercial failure" pretty sure this is just putting positive spin on bleak news. The payout on fig shares was/is extremely poor. Not just taking a small haircut poor, but never in the realm of possibility of even close to getting within a football field of even getting half your money back (I think so far like 40% money paid out after more than a year). I think at best this means that Deadfire sales wasn't the reason why they sold to Microsoft (sounds like they were banking PoE sales pretty well). 2. I understand JE Sawyer's perspective though. If he doesn't know why Deadfire did poorly, and we on the forum don't know it did poorly, then we're obviously very bad people to decide what direction a hypothetical PoE3 should go. Though I do agree with Boeroer's pet theory - there was a lot of complaint on these forums early on about two things: 1) the setting, 2) per-encounter mechanics. A shame, because I loved both decisions. I have to imagine that if they get a competent marketing person on staff/contract, and then put PoE3 in a vaguely European medieval/renaissance setting and restored per-rest mechanics (except with multiclassing) they'll get gangbusters sales again (pitch it as a "return to its roots" or whatever). Maybe not PoE1-level sales (due to higher crpg competition now), but definitely more than Deadfire. Also: don't waste time on a silly minigame like ship combat, and limit the voiced characters for budget's sake. Though then again, Tyranny had a wild setting (roman-era tech in a crazy world basically) with per-encounter mechanics and sold better than Deadfire. So I dunno...

Like skrelk said, I don't see how "having a non-straight person in a game" is a political agenda and not just a reality of life. Maybe we can consider it social progress that people are "only" complaining about gay companions (or the perception of there being gay companions) instead of complaining that there exist black people (do people remember Diablo 2's black paladin outrage? Pepperidge Farm remembers) By the by, very nearly every action game or aRPG is a pro-gun perspective. Most lefty gamers I know of (myself included) don't care. Also, in my most favorite cRPG ever, Deadfire: but keep being a victim about it, sure.

I would also say that consumables of the same "type" (e.g. +200% natural regen, +25% base health, +1 personality stats, etc.) should all be grouped together, given that your inhaler automatically refills from the same type if possible. right now it's extremely tedious to try to figure out how many of what type of consumable I have.