thelee

I actually don't really get the prebuffing argument, either way. Deadfire and PoE1 still have lots of buffing, I guess the main difference now is that it's part of the fight and subject to the action economy so things can be balanced around that. (Also you can automate it a lot better in Deadfire.) Sure you don't have to lay on tons of buffs before each fight, but whenever I have a druid or priest (and sometimes a wizard), their actions at the start every fight are pretty samey. From a purely mechanical standpoint, you can still lay a delayed fireball or a seal or traps in advance of a fight. I guess because that's such a narrow thing you can do, people don't care or do that much? Or maybe it's saving us from ourselves. It was pretty annoying to cast Protection from Evil, Bless, Chant, etc. in advance of every fight and remember the precise order to maximize durations. But I still pretty much do that now (e.g. in my aforementioned party Tekehu pretty much starts off every fight with Woodskin, Nature's Fit, Moon's Light in that order), the only difference is that it feels a bit more "interactive" now that it's actually part of a fight where I have to worry about interrupts or circumstances that might get me to change up the order a bit.

i agree that the companions in deadfire are narrower even if deeper. all the companions in poe1 had deep aspects to them, whereas in deadfire you get a handful of even deeper interaction, but another handful of very shallow (BG1-level) interaction. Combined with the fact that you had a larger party size in poe1, and deadfire actually feels a bit emptier in this respect, especially outside the DLCs. Using my most recent run as an example, I have a hired companion, two sidekicks, and tekehu. The net effect is that I only ever really get interactivity from tekehu (and briefly from serafen when I was trying to get his hand mortars) so this party feels shallower and less reactive than my typical poe1 party: myself, maybe one or two hired companions, and four or three (respectively) companions who--though they might not have the same reactivity as in deadfire--would each have their own quests and might chime in on stuff. Even at a low end of just three OBS companions and even considering poe1's lower bar, that is way more interactivity/reactivity than my typical deadfire party. But i think this is in part because of: once you commit to full VO, adding content for companions becomes an ordeal. Sidekicks existed as a sort of bridge compromise IIRC. They did add some extra sidekick-specific reactivity in the DLCs (especially konstanten in sss, ydwin in fs, and fassina in fs; and heck even mirke got random dialogue) but nothing like even what poe1 offered and very little (if any) in the base game. Again, using my last party as an example, the first time Tekehu did an out-of-band conversation it was a little surprising because I had gotten used to the utter silence of my party (which uses konstanten and rekke as sidekick companions). Full VO is a pandora's box that is going to squeeze the quality of games from smaller and indie studios, full stop.

wow! I totally had no idea about this bit o' history. But i mean, josh isn't wrong . IWD2 min-maxing is all about taking 1 or 2 levels of random classes because it's like WotC had no idea that players would ever actually multiclass with their multiclass-friendly system (and the only reason why min-maxing is optimal in IWD2 is because of hte increased level cap to 30; so poorly-balanced was multiclassing on both the bottom and top end in base 3e). edit - i appreciate 3e because it set up the d20 world of systems, and how it rationalized some of the mechanics a bit. but in terms of "fun" AD&D is better to me. I tried 4th edition in a couple tabletop sessions and it really seemed like "World of D&Dcraft". Haven't touched 5th ed.

They would have to strike a deal, much in the way Larian is doing (as I understand it). Licensing is expensive though, and most license-holders these days are risk-averse, so unfortunately Deadfire not doing well is probably not going to build a case with WotC to license an IWD3 unless there's a strong change in direction. Also, IWD and IWD2 did significantly worse than BG and BG2 (critically and in terms of sales). I mean, I'm pretty sure Black Isle made decent money off of them since they saved a lot of costs by leveraging the IE engine from BG and the IE engine from BG2 and the general lower complexity of building a super-linear dungeon crawl, but while we're here talking about "niche of a niche" I would go so far as to speculate that Eora has more of a cache than Icewind Dale as a franchise.

I feel like literally a lot of the enemy assets were recycled with minor technical upgrades for Deadfire. And yes, all the PCs look much better in Deadfire - before they were all basically what happens if you crank Red Dead Redemption into potato mode. And I wouldn't spend too much debating @Archaven, it's clear that they're arguing in bad faith. As for them, jesus, just go look at some porn. How can someone be so hard up that they spend so much time analyzing whether or not a spirit known more in fantasy and mythology for dooming people with its wails is adequately sexy or not.

it sounds like you already skipped ahead and did the successive part of the RDC quest chain. if that's the case, then all faction quests are gated on you going to Ashen Maw first (because then you have to align yourself with a faction and they all come a-courtin')

Have you somehow done Sayuka/Overgrowth yet? How far along the main quest are you?

a) have you already been to Poko Kohara/Tikawara? b) did you talk to Atsura downstairs? He's the one who gives you the first RDC quest.

Not to mention that MSFT has plenty of market research and marketing staff. They might not be able to fully create the esoteric games they might have wanted to make, but what games they do make are probably going to be better set up for success

only problem with that is that if that is true, then the same effect should be at play for American developers in American markets, no? (which may be a larger market than eastern europe anywa)

...are you an echo? see:

Hmmm, is there sourcing for this? Why would it have sold particularly well there?

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.