kanisatha

I'm not convinced an FPS game can make for a good RPG. The two game concepts seem antithetical. I guess we'll see. The 'controversial' part of my post was my positive reaction to the prospect of a new DA game. I very much liked and enjoyed playing all three DA games, yes including DA2 for which I paid full price and felt I fully got my money's worth in spite of its shortcomings.

I realize this will be very unpopular here but don't really care. The Outer Worlds is a first-person shooter so it's a hard NO for me. The Dragon Age teaser looks really good.

Sadly for me, since first-person is a hard deal-breaker, I'll have to pass on this game. Pity's all the greater given that the game looks to be very fun.

The first-person view is a deal-breaker for me as well. So, sadly, I will have to skip this game.

The devs have a kingdom building 'guide' of sorts heading up a thread on the Owlcat forums. It is meant for people to comment on before they incorporate it into the game in a future patch to help players with their kingdom building woes.

I'm ok with the game not being isometric if it is also not first-person. Open world and AAA are also ok with me. But that it should be an RPG and be party-based are the key elements for me. As much as I agree with the claims of The Witcher 3 being an awesome game, I have yet to play it precisely because it is not party-based. Solo play really bores me; I need companions.

If you were expecting Arcanum or Fallout with modern graphics, yeah you're going to be disappointed. This is what some people were expecting with PoE, that it would be the same as Baldur's Gate but new, and subsequently those folks became bitterly disappointed. I for one am very happy developers don't want to just remake old games.

Non-existant. It's a multiplatform game for PC, PS4 and Xbox. Yup. New IP, AAA, and multiplatform are the three things about this game that kept coming up again and again from OE itself since the project began.

That would make little sense. It’s not Microsoft sponsored game just yet, and I doubt Obs and Take2 would have much business limiting game release to console. Even if Microsoft will inherit the project with Obs purchase (I can’t see Micr logos anywere in the teasers, so my guess would be that it’s Obsidians pre-purchase commitment to Take-2) the buyout happened very recently. Doubt it would have much influence on development a this stage. Good to hear. There was just a lot of talk about Microsoft buying Obsidian and inXile in order to have them make console exclusives, so it seemed plausible that they might shelve the PC version of this game (at least for a while). Although Microsoft also make this niche OS for PCs, and maybe they'd want to release it on that simultaneously. The talk has been about "Xbox exclusive" which is not the same as "console exclusive." But Microsoft has nothing to do with this game anyway.

Wasn't it already established that this was OE's solution to not being able to do Fallout games anymore? I've long been expecting this will be a new IP that is Fallout-esque but more sci-fi than post-apoc.

There are a whole lot of things you could find there that are way more valuable than oil.

Yup. Sadly nobody does reruns of it, at least in my area. And I won't pay for any streaming service.

CDPR is just investing efficiently in guarenteed returns which helps to attract long-term investment. It amortizes the performance of peoples investments and helps yield more consistent dividents. Thus people stay invested. (Many investors have to pull investments due to life needs when they really want to vote with their wallets.) As long as CDPR doesn't gut their heavy hitting development teams just because they have lower margins than some side team, the I think they'll maintain their current philosophy. A lot of devs when they lose the old guard start to let margins drive what the company produces, which is essentially shifting the business from funding something of high intrinsic value to something that has a return value through consumer wealth extraction via inflated pricing. I still trust the upper rungs of CDPR for the time being, and I think they'll be able to convince the shareholders to run the Rockstar production model (high/long investment for high return) for the foreseeable future. Albeit CDPR mostly references pre-GTAOnline Rockstar in their financial structuring back pre-TW3 when they were planning that game as the 2077 franchise. The whole, no annual always rotating through IP long dev cycle sort of studio. Their investment in that direction will give them a lot of locked in momentum to stay that course as well. Seeing as rpgs have such a strong history of storytelling, but with not everyone being hardcore enthusiasts over mechanics and gameplay, being able to split off a story-centric digital experience off of what was a split-off deep dive of a card game mini-game within a major rpg, is not a terrible business strategy. It also demonstrates that these sorts of products are highly dependent on a core reputable product that defines the IP. In the case of CDPR even their major titles are all further backed by prior art. We can breath for the time being. I've also read in multiple places online that CDPR already has another new RPG in development to follow Cyberpunk, a new IP that has nothing to do with the Witcher franchise.

Looks like he has been badly misled by youtubers, because though spells/abilities are often "the same", or seem so, PoE 2 differs from 1 quite substantially (unlike in case of BG1/2, let alone their EE versions). If that the only beef he has with Deadfire, he can buy it, no worries. Anyway, I would prefer starting from level 1 even if it did not differ, because RPG systems invariantly work best at lower levels and only get worse the further one progresses, so I am happy with Deadfire not mimicking BG2. ^This. Plus PoE1 took us well beyond level 9 in comparison with BG1, so in effect PoE1 did what BG1 and 2 combined did from a levels standpoint. One additional thing that I feel is important to this discussion is that Obs specifically did NOT title PoE2 as "PoE2". That is how we're talking about the game in these forums, but there is no "2" in the title of the game. So the proper way to look at the game is that it is a completely new game relative to PoE1 and you really don't need to have played 1 to enjoy 2. lol yes there is Fair enough. I stand corrected. But if you look at references to the game made by the devs including Sawyer they always refer to it simply as 'Deadfire' and not as PoE2.

Looks like he has been badly misled by youtubers, because though spells/abilities are often "the same", or seem so, PoE 2 differs from 1 quite substantially (unlike in case of BG1/2, let alone their EE versions). If that the only beef he has with Deadfire, he can buy it, no worries. Anyway, I would prefer starting from level 1 even if it did not differ, because RPG systems invariantly work best at lower levels and only get worse the further one progresses, so I am happy with Deadfire not mimicking BG2. ^This. Plus PoE1 took us well beyond level 9 in comparison with BG1, so in effect PoE1 did what BG1 and 2 combined did from a levels standpoint. One additional thing that I feel is important to this discussion is that Obs specifically did NOT title PoE2 as "PoE2". That is how we're talking about the game in these forums, but there is no "2" in the title of the game. So the proper way to look at the game is that it is a completely new game relative to PoE1 and you really don't need to have played 1 to enjoy 2.

Yeah I have the Alienware R2. Not as powerful but still extremely nice. Everything runs beautifully, especially with my 24" 4K display. And Dell's been awesome! Recently my GTX video card started misbehaving, and they sent a tech to my home to replace it on the warranty at no charge to me. It's PC 'til I die for me. I'm over 50 with no kids. Why would I ever buy a console? And people like me will happily pay FULL price for the games we love. It would be stupid of MS to throw customers like me under the bus.

In all seriousness though, at this point, Obsidian is probably happy about working on consoles. Look at the Retrospect video where Josh Sawyer said Pillars would never be on console because they couldn't stand consoles, now we all know they're gonna love Xbox because the fixed hardware is always better for developers. Add to that, the fact that the Xbox One X has a bit of power to it so it's not like it's a loss of tech going from pc to it. As we approach the new gen of consoles, it's looking even bleaker for pc users, this year's goty awards (from well, everyone) is more console exclusives and console oriented games than anything because this year cobsole gaming proved that hype and broad audience/sales doesn't make the game have high ratings but the love put into it, the content and story-writing determines the quality. I believe that if Obsidian puts out games like this but with better story-writing than Pillars and Tyranny - more depth, than they can be on the same level of today's top games. Sorry, but this goes against what the MS execs are saying, though. Again from those interviews I saw, Matt Booty and others were saying their mission is to strengthen the Windows Store, Game Pass, and the porting of XBox games to PC. They understand they have already lost the console battle to PS4 and even Switch, but that they have dominance in the PC market where tens of millions of gamers play their games exclusively or largely on their PC. So it is to this dominance they want to play. When they say "XBox exclusive," they mean XBox exclusive among consoles, not exclusive versus the PC. And btw, Bethesda also recently emphasized they will not be walking away from PC games anytime soon. So PC gaming is here for the long haul and is not going to be "replaced" by consoles. What I see increasingly happening is people plugging their PC into their UHD big-screen TV, whereby their PC becomes a kind of console.

Exactly. What I'm trying to imagine now is how would (will?) PoE3 look like. Would it still be isometric? Will they reinvent the rules? Will they go for a traditional setting (e.g. Aedyr)? For me, I can take third person, open world, and co-op/multiplayer if alongside single player. But it would be a resolute NO if first person, not party based, co-op/multiplayer only, console only, or Windows Store only.

Would you kindly stop making sense Sir?... it's unbecoming, unusual and it baffles people HAAAAA! Thanks. I needed that.

But what kind of game would that be? Oh, i absolutely agree this is not necessarily good news, just that it is now possible, maybe even likely. I'm pretty harsh in my criticism of inXile's handling of their T:ToN and BT4 projects (as a backer of both those projects), not so much the games themselves as their attude towards customers and post-release customer and game support.

For what it's worth, a couple of MS high-ups have been commenting in various interviews (i recall one guy named Matt Booty) that the whole reason they bought these two studios is because they want them to be MS's RPG-focused studios and it is for their RPG expertise that they were targeted. So i for one don't see any reason to be concerned that OE is going to stop making RPGs. If anything, they will no longer have to take on projects like Armored Warfare and Pathfinder Adventures to help pay the bills and instead can (and will) focus exclusively on RPGs. MS has 11 other studios to make those other types of games so why would they force OE and inXile to deviate from what they do best? The question is what kind of RPGs will they make? And what store options will customers have for buying those games?

The issue of what happens to these forums is also of great concern to me, and again something I hope we hear officially from OE about very soon. I have no interest in browsing the MS forums. The smallness and the community nature of these forums is precisely why I care to spend my time here. Relatedly, I imagine now we will never have anyone of significance from OE interacting with us core fans ever again in these forums. Some low-level person will be assigned the job of occasionally posting here and that will be it for us. After all, to the extent that any high-up person ever posted here, it has been almost exclusively related to one or another of OE's crowdfunded games. So, no more crowdfunded OE games must surely mean no more developer interactions with us.

I'd be surprised if many games that are "xbox exclusive" aren't eventually ported to the PC. By and large the two markets aren't competing in the same way that xbox and playstation are, so not porting to PC hurts overall profits. Of course you'll likely have to wait before it happens, and more bothersome for me is the tendency for UIs not to be properly adapted when ported from consoles to PCs.True but not sure if that will be exactly true for the future. I mean, Sony doesn't port their games to pc and they're making for more with 1 game on PS4 alone than Microsoft does with 3 Xbox exclusives which are also available on pc. Xbox titles don't particularly sell well on Windows Store as many have demonstrated here in the comments with "We don't want console ports" or "Casualized games, no thanks" and "I wouldn't touch Windows Store with a ten foot pole". So it's more of a waste in the end really. My hope is that Microsoft is doing is preparing to take the Xbox exclusive road by getting actual console exclusives again (non-pc) and get Xbox players to put their consoles first again for games rather than just owning a an Xbox One and treating it as a secondary pc. I think they're starting to give up on hoping to beat Sony and Nintendo their "Crossbuy" way and doing things how they used to last gen - which was working far better for them. Besides that Xbox loyalists hate when Xbox "exclusives" get ported to pc/Windows 10 so perhaps Spencer is pulling that plug and Microsoft will start to acknowledge that. Actually, a MS executive, maybe actually this Spencer chap, has a YT interview where he says exactly the opposite. He says he is personally taking charge of strengthening the porting of games to PC and also strengthening the MS Store because the company acknowledges those are areas of weakness for them right now.

For what it's worth, inXile's been actively responding on Twitter at many of the questions asked to them about their own acquisition by Microsoft. On the question of online stores and GoG, their response is: "We're keeping our backer commitments for BT4 and WL3. Beyond that, it's hard to say. It's still very early in this new relationship." This would suggest other platforms are not out of the question, at least for the community-backed stuff currently in the works. On the other hand this suggests Win/Xbox exclusivity may be a part of the deal for future non-backer games for them. So, assuming the deal with Obsidian was similar, sad times. Yeah this exact line is also what someone from inXile posted on their forums which I also browse. But it doesn't really tell me anything about what happens to new games in the future, which is what I am concerned about.

It's pretty clear to me that the dismal sales numbers for PoE2 must have played a significant role in convincing OE's owners to sell to MS. I would not be surprised if, given just how dismal those sales numbers truly are (I would even use the word catastrophic), OE was once again facing a very grim financial outlook.