kanisatha

Agreed. The final straw was areas where you had burning lava fire and then literally right next to it a bunch of cheery flowers and birds and bunnies hopping about. WTF. Yeah, it has to be human-like races for me to be able to play them (as the PC). Even orcs are perfectly fine. But lizards? Just no.

I agree very much that whether one likes the setting of a game is not just a critical factor but even a foundational factor in whether one will end up liking a game in that setting. The setting is the starting point for whether you like a game. I love the Eora setting. But I can appreciate others may not. That I absolutely hate the Rivellon setting is a big part of why I found D:OS to be a horrible game.

Yes I think the issue of people having to buy and play a game to know exactly what's in it and how it plays is overblown imo. In today's world, one can use gameplay videos and streams from other people, including pro reviewers who get their copy of the game in advance, to get a pretty good sense of whether they will like a game. And this can happen fairly soon after a game is released.

In any case, that they are once again going to first-person really bothers me. It is why I already have to miss out on TOW. I would be so very unhappy to have to miss out on a second major Obsidian game.

I know it's off-topic, but do you suppose the "cheesiness" of some of the writing in P:Km is the result of everything having first been written in Russian and then being translated to English? In the most recent AMA for P:WotR, the devs mention how the English translations from Russian often don't come across the way the writers intended and that this is a continuing source of much frustration for the writers.

This could be. They specifically use the word "gunplay."

It's one opinion. Doesn't make it definitive. I'm quite sure we will see more "PoE" games. It is likely they won't be in the same form as PoE 1&2 and maybe something more similar to DA:I or Skyrim.

I agree that it wont be post-apoc as that is essentially TOW. But it really sucks that it will be first-person. I hope they will find a way to give the option of third-person.

Well, correct me if this is not true, but my understanding is that for both PoE games the DLCs had someone other than Josh being the lead on making them. And for me, for both games, the DLCs were significantly better than the base game. My personal opinion, but just saying. Obsidian has a lot of very talented individuals who have the chops to be project lead. Having Josh be the overall creative director of the studio is perfect. But someone else can and should be project lead on a PoE3.

But is this meaningful consequence? What exactly happens when the guards come and try to arrest you? Either they let you go or you kill them with no further repercussions. I don't see any meaningful consequences there at all. If you get hauled away to a prison cell in which you languish for a long time and you gain a widespread reputation as an untrustworthy crook, that would be consequence. But of course players would reject that as too extreme, even those who keep saying they want consequences in their RPGs. I think self-described RPG fans love to talk a good talk about wanting meaningful consequences in their games, but in reality don't (though I want to be clear I'm not saying this is the case with you).

Well I'm not a beta backer so I'm not involved. No expectation of a survey for me. But as a general backer, if the beta is about to be released (the new promised date was June), then of course I am very happy about that development.

I have stated on many occasions how much respect I have for Josh, but as far as PoE goes I actually think it would be better if Josh walked away from PoE and left it to someone else to take the lead on any future PoE game. I think Josh is an extremely talented game designer, and clearly very passionate about his craft. But I disagree with him on many of his preferences for game design.

The claim is implied. If A criticizes/attacks B's post for being "personal opinion," but A's posts are all personal opinions too in exactly the same way as B's post, then A is implying that their posts are fact when they're not. Trying to claim that some people's guesswork/speculation involves a more or less thorough look at the data available is a part of this. The people who try to put this spin on their posts are essentially trying to glorify what is in reality just personal opinion and nothing more. Claiming your opinion is based on an examination of data does not actually make it so. Everybody can, and many do, claim that their personal opinions are based on data they've seen somewhere. You want to create grey areas where I see only black and white, and that too based on an extremely high threshold for what is objective truth/fact. Everything that falls below my very high threshold is uniformly just opinion and nothing more and therefore all the same.

A perfect post. Agree with every last word, especially that people being upset with BG3 specifically is completely different from people being upset with a game being TB/RTwP. Just taking Larian as an example, yes a lot of RTwP fans are angry in their BG3 threads, but no RTwP fans are angry in their D:OS threads. That's all the evidence one needs, the pontificatings of certain individuals who've appointed themselves as the grand wizards of all things on this forum not withstanding.

I agree that it is personal opinion, but seems to me that almost all posts in this thread and others are also similarly personal opinion, so why pick on this one individual? Far too often in this forum people (and a certain handful of individuals especially) like to label others' posts as personal opinion while claiming their own posts are fact/truth. This is nonsense. Only Obsidian knows (maybe) what really happened with PoE2 sales. Everything in this thread is speculation, theorizing, and personal opinion.

It's funny. I hear a lot of people putting down Oblivion, but I actually enjoyed it way more than Skyrim.

I agree with this. I would be cautious about a Skyrim in Eora. Skyrim became utterly boring to me around the midpoint of the game and I never finished it. But the general concept of a AAA open world RPG in third-person I am quite open to if done well. A Pillars tactics game, and especially anything that were TB, would absolutely make me feel betrayed as a very early supporter of the PoE1 KS and drive me away.

Sorry, no. I was a first time player and I never had any of those questions. The game did an excellent job of providing all the information I needed to understand all those characters and all of the story. So much so that after having been a person who disdained AAA action RPGs, I so loved TW3 that I am now open to AAA action RPGs if they are of the quality of TW3.

I guess this varies from person to person. I also played TW3 without ever having played the other games or having any knowledge whatsoever about that franchise, and I not only did I not have any problems understanding what was going on but I found the game very easy to get into and a very enjoyable experience.

Yes I am well aware of that figure from iterating some Fig data. But not only was that before consoles, it was before TB option was added and actually quite early on. Plus, like some others, I'm not convinced people are properly interpreting that Fig data correctly. So, while I agree that is a valid data point, it is just one data point. I've since seen some stories in the gaming news media including some interpretations of Steam data, and they point to numbers somewhat higher, though still very much disappointing. But ultimately, none of this really matters. The bottom line is that relative to Obsidian's expectations, the game sold poorly. And that is what will drive Obsidian's internal calculations about whether they will ever make a similar game again. These are my sentiments exactly as well. As for similar games to play, if you played P:Km at an early stage, you may want to give it a try now after all the patching. It is a hugely improved experience. Also, Tower of Time is a good game out there. And soon we will have several more similar games coming out: The Darkeye: Book of Heroes (June 9th), Realms Beyond, Black Geyser, Solasta, and eventually P:WotR. Furthermore, I've personally made the choice that I will expand my gaming niche by being more open to action RPGs. After many years of rejecting trying Witcher 3, I finally broke down and tried it. It is a magnificent game. So I'm looking forward to the next 'Witcher' game, and also (seriously) the next Dragon Age game. Bethesda's Starfield looks interesting as well. My point being: no need to lose hope just yet.

But where is that 200k number for PoE2 sales coming from? From all I can tell, the number is probably in the 400-500k range. As for your second point, I think we will still (occasionally) see those games. But they will come only from small indie studios with modest sales expectations, games like 'Black Geyser' and 'Darkeye: Book of Heroes' being good examples.

I would agree with this, though I'm not sure I'd say the group is "significantly" larger. I have no data to back this up but my gut feeling is that the hardcore group as I described it is probably around 1 million globally.

This exactly. D&D/D&D-based mechanics are ok even when they are obtuse and confusing and poorly explained, because there is always a core group of gamers who "know" D&D. But going even further, P:Km's sales were not that great. The difference between P:Km sales and PoE2 sales is that for the former the expectations for sales were lower and those lower expectations were (more than) satisfied, so we declare that game to have been a sales success, whereas for the latter the expectations were higher and so we declare PoE2 to have been a sales "failure." Ultimately, it's about the gap between sales expectations and reality, and not sales in some absolute sense.

This is exactly what I have argued too about why I believe PoE2 did not sell well. The PoE mechanics/ruleset is too complex, confusing, and non-intuitive for the average gamer today. It is fine for hardcore cRPG fans/grogs, but the average gamer (who is not represented in forums like this one) is not going to care to invest time and effort trying to figure out those complex mechanics when they have plenty of other games to choose from, games with simple and shallow but intuitive and easy to understand and use mechanics (for example D:OS), that they can go play instead.

We will get a sense of whether classic, old-school, single-player cRPGs are on their way out when Obsidian announces its next big game (TOW2 and Grounded excluded).