kanisatha

The news section is missing for me. How do you bring it back?

I feel really terrible for Josh. He needs to understand he did not make a bad game. PoE2 is an incredibly good game, regardless of the purchase decisions of RPG gamers.

Over on the Beamdog forum the forum manager posted an excerpt from a post by Josh Sawyer from somewhere called badgame.net for which you need an account there to access it yourself. At the bottom of the excerpt there is a sales comparison with P:K. https://badgame.net/index.php?topic=54476.msg14375799#msg14375799 "i don't really know how productive this discussion can be because it's hard to pinpoint definitively why people bought or didn't buy something. deadfire was made on the assumption that the sales and reviews of that game indicated both a general desire for games of that type in the market and that the press and consumers thought that we did a good job overall. it made money and it reviewed well in the press and among players, which doesn't mean it's objectively good, but to us it indicated that 1) we should make a sequel and 2) we should identify the things that people didn't enjoy in the first game and address them. i was involved in the PR and marketing pushes for both games and we had a lot more trouble getting marketing pieces out for deadfire. when we did research into how product awareness was tracking, deadfire was struggling leading up to its launch. it's true that critical role did draw a lot of attention to the game, but it's unclear how far that reached outside of our core market. yes, by now many more people are aware of the game, but the bulk of most games' sales are still made in the first two weeks following its release. whether the scores and sales are deserved or not, pillars 1 had an 89 metacritic and sold over a million copies within a year of its release. deadfire had an 88 metacritic and sold much worse. i don't think i stuck my head in the sand re: criticism for pillars 1, so if there was a strong undercurrent of indifference or dislike for the first game and i just completely botched the sequel, it's hard for me to identify where i went wrong. the reason why i didn't/don't want to direct another pillars game isn't just general fatigue, but also because i don't think i have the critical insight to understand how to move forward with the series. the quality of the game is my responsibility, so if it's really that bad, it's my fault. still, by the numbers we had, general awareness was low outside of our core leading up to the launch. D:OS2 sold incredibly well, way better than pillars 1. pathfinder: kingmaker sold better than deadfire. idk if it sold better than pillars 1."

Same for me with Ps:T. I actually had bought a CD copy of it many years ago, though not when it first came out, but just never bothered to load it up. Then, when the EE came out, based on all I'd heard about the game for years, I bought it and played it. I did finish the game, but everything @thelee says about it is exactly how I found it as well though for me even the writing was good but not amazing (never been very enamored of Avellone's writing). So when I went into T:ToN, I did not at all do so with Ps:T as my point of reference or comparison. I think unfortunately for T;ToN, many people who were huge fans of Ps:T went into it with Ps:T as their frame of reference, and this badly hurt the game's reception. Not that there aren't legitimate things about T:ToN that can be criticized, but many people I feel never gave the game a fair chance.

Why? It's not like I'm saying we should have access too all the companions all the time. I'm just saying there should've been a specific situation, for example being on your ship, where you can bring up a UI that includes everyone. In fact, it is Obsidian that did exactly this, in NwN2, where within your stronghold you can access all your companions at the same time.

Yup, and apparently there's even a scene of him in a bathtub.

I only have positive things to say about PoE2, with the exception of a few minor things here and there. In fact, my biggest complaint is that they didn't provide a way to access all your companions simultaneously so you can easily distribute equipment to everyone. It just really irritates me to have to swap out companions who are not in my active party four at a time to upgrade their equipment and even to level them up. I guess I am one of the very few people that liked T:ToN. I suppose a big part of that was precisely that you can play that game without having to engage in much combat at all. I also thought the story was interesting. Not amazing, but interesting enough. But most of all, I think the reason that game was fine for me is because I have never seen PsT as a particularly good game, and as such was not comparing T:ToN to something many others seem to identify as one of the greatest RPGs ever made.

Yes increasing fov helps a little bit but ultimately not enough to make it possible for me to get through the game. Also, totally agree that first-person is appropriate for shooters, especially since I don't care for shooter games anyway so it won't affect me. I just wish developers would do a more faithful job of separating shooters from RPGs.

Exactly. TOW and CP2070 both look to be amazing games and yet I have to sadly forego playing them because they're in first-person. And it's not even a medical issue for me. Rather, as someone who came to video games late in life and who does not ever play on consoles, first-person is far to jarring and confusing and chaotic and, ultimately, frustrating in the extreme for me. I never know what's happening or what's going on around me, and constantly keep missing stuff. And of course this is all that much more of a problem in combat.

Why is first-person the only alternative to isometric? Why not third-person?

I was initially so very excited about this because I thought I could finally move my DA games over to Steam. But alas, apparently EA won't give you an automatic Steam code for your Origin games.

Damn! Sucks to be reading all these posts about how awesome TOW is when I can't play it. The first-person perspective is a hard no-go for me.

There's a recent Matt Chat interview which includes a short segment in which Ziets talks about his vision for his new studio. It's available in many places; here's one: https://www.rpgwatch.com/forums/showthread.php?t=43974 The main interview is with Trent Oster of Beamdog, which in itself is rather interesting and includes discussing why his PsT successor game did not work out. The Ziets bit is the last 10 minutes or so.

Treadstone, based on the Bourne movies, finally came out on the USA Network this week.

Right back at you.

This is the kind of first-person feedback i've been hoping for to help me decide on the game. I am completely sold on this game's RPG elements. I just tend to dislike games that are not of a 'medieval' nature and instead are 'contemporary,' so that's the only thing that sort of concerns me.

Ah yes, the old 'it's all capitalism's fault' argument. Sorry no. This has nothing to do with capitalism. To the contrary, this is wokeness gone mad, where being woke means 'how dare anyone criticize China!' in exactly the same way as Google and Facebook and other woke Big Tech companies love to kiss China's ass.

I am pretty sure it's just speculation. Larian hasn't unveal any details just yet. Yes speculation, but I can't imagine it will be anything else. What Larian has stated though is that the combat system has been established a long while ago and that they will not be changing it or adding multiple options for it.

I don't own nor have ever played any Blizzard games, but just wondering ... what's wrong with standing with the people of Hong Kong?

But this assumes there is only one thing (TB v. RTwP) differentiating the two games. This assumption is flat out wrong. There are quite a umber of variables separating the two games. The dependent variable here, sales, could be driven by a range of independent variables and not just the one.

I truly hope you are right. But I'm not sure this is how it will play out. I mean this should also be true for Larian and BG3, right? And yet they are going with only TB. So even though it would make sense to have both, I am expecting Obsidian to pick only one over having both, and the one they pick to be TB. Do I have any evidence to support this? No I don't. It's just my gut feeling is all.

He's long wanted to make an historical RPG, hasn't he? One with a classless system and TB.

If they did that would be fine. But I doubt it because incorporating both into the game from the ground up would likely be both complicated and costly. But now that they have MS's money maybe the cost issue is not an issue.

My guess is that they working on one of everything: TOW2 (all the first-person combat related hiring they've been doing), PoE3 (all the isometric hiring), and a completely new IP project (Sawyer's ?). For PoE3, though, it had better be RTwP. I'm getting tired of people insisting on and demanding that every cRPG made these days be TB. TOW is TB; I would guess a new IP game would also be TB; everything doesn't need to be TB.

I figured as much, but that's a LOT of projects: Mississippi, Illinois, Alabama, Maine, Missouri. Well, hopefully at least a couple of them are games I would want to play, which is to say single-player, party-based, RTwP, and not first-person.