thelee

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.

I'm just surprised you people are talking about science weapons being gimmicky or underpowered when mind control ray is unbelievably unbalanced (haven't actually tried it against automechanicals, but everyone else it works). Insta control an enemy (pick the hardest one), and even if there's no one around to fight it or for it to fight, your companions will just unleash upon it while it just stands there mind controlled. All this with a science skill of 30.

"I'm not racist, look, I have a black friend!" yeah; how people react to media says a lot more about them than the media imo

Yeah, the surprising MVP for some of these harder fights is that if they're not actually immune to dex afflictions or body afflictions and are merely resistant, Petrify is A+ because it counts as a tier-4 affliction and will be resisted down to a "mere" paralyze (which is functionally identical), and the wizard AL9 petrification is still permanent at near death.

Maybe I'm colored by the fact that I played PoE1 since backer beta, but I agree with Wormerine's take. There was just so many filler fights in base game on PotD. Like, basically an entire map would be covered with trash fights of no consequence: every time you reveal fog of war there would be more enemies to fight. Like WTF. By the time WM1 came around, they had already started learning their lesson, and I thought WM2 was a great balance (and by then they had trimmed filler fights from parts of the base game). I espeically liked that WM2 had larger areas with more things to do in them, versus the PoE1/WM1/Deadfire(unfortunately) common approach of having small areas with a few things to do in them. Felt like there was more exploration. Reminded me of the better wilderness areas of BG and some of the best maps in BG2. Deadfire did better on the trash side. If anything, until the DLCs came out, I thought there wasn't enough fighting.

I didn't play PsT when it first came, I came around to it a few years after wards. It think it has incredibly awful gameplay (which is weird, because it's based on the same infinity engine as everyone else, which means they had to actively make it worse). I thought the numerous custom spells suffered from Final Fantasy-itis, having none of the nice complexity of normal D&D: virtually all the high-level spells I remember just being pure damage and high-level ones having annoyingly long "cinematic" qualities, hence I kept thinking that they were trying to be like FF7 somehow. On top of that the UI was extremely clunky, the color palette was dull, and the CGI portraits aged very poorly compared to the stylized art/watercolor of BG/BG2/IWD/IWD2. All that being said, I thought the game's saving grace was the writing, and the fact that if I wanted to (and I did), I could simply avoid most of all the annoying combat and gameplay by just sticking to pacifist options (and you were aggressively awarded for investing in the "soft" stats of wisdom, intelligence, and charisma which in other IE games were only situationally not dump stats). It was basically a point-and-click adventure game at that point, and a pretty well-written one IMO. If I were to revisit it now, I imagine I might find it a bit too floral or dense, but it would still likely be remarkable for how much was invested in the writing. I'm pretty sure the gameplay still sucks though. So if I were to recommend PsT to anyone, it would solely be on the virtue of the writing and I would be actively warning them about everything else.

Sometimes I can get around the crashes by zoning into another area and then coming back to the area in question. Sometimes it's a 100% crash to desktop no matter what, at least until I play for a while elsewhere (which makes me think the crashes are related to some sort of game state). I was getting 100% edgewater crash until I did some other quests for a while, and I was getting 100% cascadia crash until I did some other quests for a while (and I could zone in to another part of Monarch anyway, even though cascadia is in the same overall zone as the other landing spots in Monarch). TL;DR: even the 100% crashes appear to be resolvable eventually. That is, except for: that happens to me 100% of the time, no matter when, whether at start of game, or after hours of playing.

Had 3x adrena-time crashes. Died during a fight. Reloaded. Suddenly I have no crashes?

Actually I think this may be a dupe of the other game crash (PC) thread, since I just tried to go to cascadia (also mentioned in that other thread) and got a crash to desktop. Yikes! What happened?

I've been able to go to Edgewater before, but not now. Game crashes with 100% consistency. Gonna have to do some other quest instead. Here's a dropbox link to what I think is the save: https://www.dropbox.com/sh/h9dbja5x410ke8w/AAAdzpoQ1M3EgTR0A5u7vifAa?dl=0

I haven't gotten any acknowledgment that OBS has even received my emails, despite a reminder email. Does anyone have any channel to help prod some attention from OBS (like how Tenray finally got validated)? I have a sneaking suspicion that theultimate is not a very closely monitored inbox.

psions are actually amazing for caster-cipher multiclass because they don't have the same constraints on action economy. other caster-cipher multiclasses you have to do something to actively generate focus. a caster-psion can be a caster and then all of a sudden they can use some cipher powers when needed. i would actually say most caster-cipher multiclasses are underwhelming and psion is the only good one (said as someone who has rolled two different mystics). edit - i would concede though with the particulars of psion focus generation and the party-unfriendly interrupt spell they have that it is not a cipher subclass for any player looking for an "easy in". It is probably more micromanagement intensive, which may not play well for console.

With 5.0, I do appreciate--to an extent-- that they buff up the Ukaizo boss depending on how many megabosses you have killed. It doesn't change the fact that you can roflstomp the adds, but it does make the actual fight a bit more of a challenge. Also, in this respect I feel like Deadfire strongly exceeds expectations, because they have kept amping up difficulty and adding new late game challenges for the .1% of the already small player base that is into that. But I think it is a sorry state of the current field of games that even here Deadfire still suffers from the "I have tons of money and power at end" problem, especially considering how well they had actually balanced the game economy at first: you were never really flush with cash and there were always money sinks - now after a couple DLCs you can have literally hundreds of G and nothing to spend it on. Even in my Ultimate run, which involved doing as little content as possible, after doing FS I literally had more than 100k gold, whereas before that I only had less than 9k. RE: solo, I would not compare solo to party-based gameplay. A lot of solo essentially results in bending game interactions, and there are some solo tricks that only work because you're solo (the biggest one being invisibility/untargetability = de-aggroing, which doesn't work in party unless everyone has invisibility/untargetability). I consider PoE1 and Deadfire essentially two different games, one for solo, and one for party. I think that's part of why there were was backlash about making solo an achievement in PoE1 - you could love PoE1 to death but solo play could be (and was) extremely banal and uninteresting. Whereas I venture to say there are some forum regulars who prefer to play solo.

yeah that's the reason why they have berath's blessing the way they do, because most people just tend to play or replay the start of the game. which is... odd! so they wanted a new game+ method without actually requiring players to beat the game first. i mean, i kinda get it, the first time I had Baldur's Gate in the 90s I probably played candlekeep and the first part of chapter 1 over and over again re-rolling different characters. didn't actually beat the game until coming back to it years later. but i thought i was a weirdo, guess this is actually more typical than i thought. edit - in hindsight, i also did this with Fallouts 1 and 2 and Icewind Dale. I think it took around BG2 before I settled into my current playstyle.

this is my main criticism of the mechanics. I think they should lower the threshold for when you need to specialize, down to 40 at least. There's just too much of a margin for same-iness otherwise between different characters.

well, "played for a little bit and stopped" is still a sale though given the achivement rate for deadfire (and even poe1), most players barely play through just the crit path.

lol, the only thing i know about them is friends who got them, played them for a little bit, and stopped.

Here are some off the top of my head: Torment Numenara, Wasteland 2, PF: Kingmaker, DOS2 (arguably one of the main reasons they added a TB mode to Deadfire), Shadowrun, Tyranny - these all precede Deadfire and they all postcede PoE1. edit - some of these were backed on kickstarter as well; even if Deadfire was on kickstarter instead of fig, it would have still have faced a different backign environment than PoE1 did. (Though I don't discount the fig theory entirely - while I don't think it would singlehandedly saved the sales, I think being on a big platform like kickstarter would certainly have helped a little bit.) edit - interestingly, at the time Tyranny was considered a financial disappointment, but from fig's numbers/disclosures we know that Tyranny has outsold Deadfire so far (admittedly tyranny has been out for a while, but sales drop off steeply after a short period of time). At this point, it would be great if Deadfire sells as well as Tyranny. This suggests a broader trend than anything wrong with Tyranny or Deadfire per se.

One data point - the marketing person had a contract with obsidian that was decidedly not renewed. When I heard that news, my only thought was "they had a marketing person?" Which seems like self-evidence that the marketing sucked. That being said it feels like most everyone who played PoE1 should have known about Deadfire. That tends to work in favor of sequels and gives them a good boost up. So I don't think marketing is even a major explanation - the best marketing in the world can't hold back turning tides. (A data point in counter is that Ars Technica--despite talking about the PoE1 kickstarter--never reviewed PoE1. They did review Deadfire, gave it a glowing review, and made it their top story pinned for a while. I took it as a signal that people definitely recognized Deadfire, but for whatever consumers just didn't want to buy it. You know how there are like academy award winning movies that hardly anyone actually sees? Same deal.) The main explanation I saw from people in the industry (possibly Obsidian themselves) is that when PoE1 first came out it was basically the first or only one of its kind, and there was a huge pent-up demand for this kind of cRPG experience. With Deadfire, there was plenty of competition. So it could be that whatever pent up demand had already been fulfilled, or the market was much more competitive or saturated.

That was the main one I was thinking of.