Favourite improvement in deadfire? Biggest step back?

[Ouroboros226]

Well Boeroer, since you necroed this back to life anyway I'll share mine too  

 

Most favorite

I like the world map system and travel.

Despite feeling unfinished and not living up to its potential, I actually enjoyed boat combat. 

I liked multiclassing

I enjoyed meeting the gods directly. I disagree with other poster saying it's silly they act childish, gods in all mythos do this all the time. 

Neketaka is prob my favorite RPG city of all time. I love how it's built up a mountain in a caste system, and how the gullet is, and secret ruins at the bottom.

Loved the writing. All the characters felt like real actual people. 

More replay value than POE1

 

Least favorite

NO OPTION TO FLIRT WITH BERATH

Disappointed that there isn't a hard, but possible way, to unite all the factions

Almost no interesting and unique passive skills for most casters

Damage immunities. High resistance is ok, immunity is not. I don't care about logic here - it's a bad gameplay "feature" and simply isn't enjoyable.

Some subclasses are still badly balanced. Some are too good, some are useless. Why was this never fixed?

Last area of the game felt too short for its importance in the story and lore. I was looking forward to exploring this area just to be disappointed how small and quick you go through it. Horribly anti-climactic. 

 

 

 

[xzar_monty]

Things I really enjoy:

- The graphics. By god the game looks lovely.

- The fact that you can solve the same quests in different ways, often with or without violence.

- Serafen. His story, his dialogue lines and his voice acting. This is extremely well done. Stands out from a group of well-written NPCs.

- A change of scenery, i.e. the archipelago setting. A brave choice, and I applaud it. It works.

- No big dungeons. Again, a welcome change. A brave choice, and I applaud it. This works, too.

- The Beast of Winter. An extremely tight story that is written really, really well. (Btw, notice how Obsidian plays with the dragon encounter: it is displayed on the loading screen whenever you're in BoW. But when the encounter finally happens, the dragon is sucked away from you into the void. Once you get into the void, the dragon again escapes from you, diving through the ice into yet another layer of the realm. Then, only then do you finally get to meet the beast. This was very clever.)

- Neketaka is right up there with Athkatla as the best city in all the cRPGs I've played.

- Apart from Mirke, none of the characters are overtly cheesy (but Mirke makes up for it!). The characterization is really good. The writers have done an excellent job, in general.

- The meeting with Eothas in Ashen Maw looks frigging fantastic. No wonder Xoti just about dies from astonishment, awe and other big words beginning with A.

 

Things I don't really enjoy:

- Well the story is all over the place, and there's a fundamental lack of logic at the heart of it: you're supposed to be in a hurry to stop this Eothas fellow, but he only ever does anything when you go to meet him. So you have all the time in the world to explore the entire archipelago. And if you actually play the game and explore the archipelago, you'll come to realize that the main story of this game is essentially reduced to an afterthought -- it's just something that happens while you're doing other things. I don't know the percentages, but someone could probably do the math, and I'm fairly certain that most players spend a lot less than 25% of their game time furthering the main story.

- The factions. Obsidian should just ditch this line of thinking altogether. You're very clearly and strongly suggested to side with one of the factions, but I just wasn't interested. I didn't like any of them, but I also couldn't completely ignore them. In the end I did what I did to avoid having to side with any of them, and I wasn't entirely satisfied with that.

- The difficulty curve. It's singularly odd. The most difficult encounters, by far, are on the first island: Gorecci Street and the Engwithian Digsite. Nothing, and I do mean nothing, comes even close.

- I understand that there's been a conscious effort to create a balanced system, and I must say Obsidian has succeeded in this very well. However, this creates a problem: nothing stands out. There's no must-have loot, there was never a moment where I found something that gave me any kind of wow moment, because I knew this item was going to be good. Granted, some items are better than others, but the differences are minute.

- You can do perfectly well without ever once using potions, scrolls, explosives and drugs. It's a bit of a pity, because clearly a lot of time and effort has been spent in creating all of that stuff.

- The hugely annoying bug where a character spends all that time going through the potion-drinking animation but ends up not actually drinking the potion. Shame on you, Obsidian, shame on you.

 

Overall: a superb game, one of the best in the genre.

[kanisatha]

3 hours ago, Ouroboros226 said:

Well Boeroer, since you necroed this back to life anyway I'll share mine too  

 

Most favorite

I like the world map system and travel.

Despite feeling unfinished and not living up to its potential, I actually enjoyed boat combat. 

I liked multiclassing

I enjoyed meeting the gods directly. I disagree with other poster saying it's silly they act childish, gods in all mythos do this all the time. 

Neketaka is prob my favorite RPG city of all time. I love how it's built up a mountain in a caste system, and how the gullet is, and secret ruins at the bottom.

Loved the writing. All the characters felt like real actual people. 

More replay value than POE1

 

Least favorite

NO OPTION TO FLIRT WITH BERATH

Disappointed that there isn't a hard, but possible way, to unite all the factions

Almost no interesting and unique passive skills for most casters

Damage immunities. High resistance is ok, immunity is not. I don't care about logic here - it's a bad gameplay "feature" and simply isn't enjoyable.

Some subclasses are still badly balanced. Some are too good, some are useless. Why was this never fixed?

Last area of the game felt too short for its importance in the story and lore. I was looking forward to exploring this area just to be disappointed how small and quick you go through it. Horribly anti-climactic.

I wish I could give multiple hearts for this post.

You capture a lot of my own feelings about the game.

[thelee]

16 hours ago, xzar_monty said:

- The hugely annoying bug where a character spends all that time going through the potion-drinking animation but ends up not actually drinking the potion. Shame on you, Obsidian, shame on you.

absolutely the worst regression of the turn-based betas to 5.0 patch. sigh...

16 hours ago, xzar_monty said:

- The graphics. By god the game looks lovely.

i forget the game is many years old already. part of it is the death of moore's law for gaming/computing, but the combination of the graphical choices (detailed 2D-ish environments) and creative art direction, it still looks fantastic even after playing newer AAA games.

16 hours ago, xzar_monty said:

You're very clearly and strongly suggested to side with one of the factions, but I just wasn't interested.

really? which?

 

any, quite the ancient thread that's gotten necro-ed. mechanically, multiclassing and per-encounter are great step forwards, though i imagine the latter is more controversial even today. After playing some other newer RTwP and trying to replay the IE enhanced editions, I really do not miss the eternal cycle of pre-buffing for combat, so I think this is a great step forward. mechanically, double-inversions and power-level scaling are huge steps back. double-inversions amount for so much endless confusion even today. sure in poe1, pure additive system was hard to balance for maluses, but double-inversions are just so hard to reason about (beyond a few common values I have in my head, I still have to bust out the calculator for everything else). as i've said elsewhere, if they do something like this again, they should just do a pure-additive system and carve out an exception purely just for AR/PEN and for graze/crits, that's it. and nothing wrong with power-level scaling in principle, but the way it happens in practice is extremely obtuse. it's never clear anywhere in-game, which i think was a deliberate decision early on so that designers had freedom to get abilities to scale in particular ways, but after all the re-balancing, power-level scaling is pretty much standardized everywhere (except, as far as i can tell, for chants and carnage) and is just a needlessly hidden mechanic.

 

non-mechanically i'm really glad they stretched and did a polynesian setting. too bad it seemed to have turned a lot of people away. however, i thought the crit path really should've been a *bit* more intense. act iv is extremely anti-climactic IMO (i think I even had an early bug report asking if some encounters are missing because it felt so empty), and the ease with which you can breeze through the crit path makes it hard to invest in the stakes of what's happening. going back to an iconic example: BG2 was open for a huge chunk of the first game, but then became extremely linear (with limited flexibility in the underdark) so that you could actually invest yourself in the main story arc. the dlcs really make up for it though.

Edited September 6, 2021 by thelee

[xzar_monty]

4 hours ago, thelee said:

really? which?

Whichever you choose. There are at least a couple of big conversations with the honchos of the main factions where the conclusion is that you'd be best off joining forces with one of them. I mean, after the Ashen Maw, the next thing you wake up to is precisely this kind of conversation. It's not exactly railroading but there's a strong sense of "Choose one, dude". Unsubtle and unenjoyable, this, for me.

[daven]

2 years wow... so yeah I really like the map and songs when you're on the boat.

 

I hate levelling up, holy **** that music grates.

[Ouroboros226]

9 hours ago, daven said:

2 years wow... so yeah I really like the map and songs when you're on the boat.

 

I hate levelling up, holy **** that music grates.

There's level up music? I disabled music early, because I felt the music in this game was a bit tiresome on the ears (not because I found it bad).

Also. We can necro it back to life in 2 more years again. Make it a tradition. This way we can pass down this forum thread to our grandchildren.  "To my grandson Jimmiboy: My car and my golf clubs, and this forum link. PS: Username and password is written at the back of my gravestone! I always told people if they wanted to know my opinions on politics they can just ask, but if they want to know my opinion on best class in deadfire - they would have to walk over my grave to get. Don't roll Bloodmage Jimmy or I'll haunt you"  

  

Ok I definitely need to go to sleep.

[Obsidianware]

On 9/19/2021 at 3:01 PM, Ouroboros226 said:

There's level up music? I disabled music early, because I felt the music in this game was a bit tiresome on the ears (not because I found it bad).

I turn the music and voice down, as I find the ambient noise more immersive (turning the other two down lets me raise the volume).

 

Anyway for me the biggest improvement is without a doubt the full voice acting, that's a game changer. It's more immersive, gives more personality to characters, and lets you relax more in a game that has a lot of writing.

 

 

 

[Telas]

Biggest step back?

1) Reused maps(especially bog and rocky mountain). It feels very cheap and Pillars as series doesn't deserve such treatment. 

2) Full voice acting. No disrespect to the actors but the overall performance is bad. So bad that i actually had to to drop the voice volume down to zero for my current and my last 3 games. Way more immersive and relaxing experience now. 

3) Unity Engine. 25-30FPS combat in a pseudo 3D game is a disaster, plain and simple. Even more so when you know that your machine is able to run the likes of Cyberpunk and Dishonored 2 at 60FPS

4) Nostalgia based graphics. Pick a road and go either 2D or 3D. Beautiful pseudo 3D renders for maps in combination with low tier fully 3D models for characters just looks ugly. 

Favorite improvements

1) Resource based combat system.

2) Level gated semi open world. The game gives you the freedom to find some nice 'exquisite' uniques at low and mid levels but you still need a high level team for the serious 'superior' and 'legendary' stuff. 

3) Rest buffs and crafting system. Tons of hidden power in there but you have to dig first. 

4) Economy loop and pirating. Hunting random expert and master captains to sell their loot will net you more money than you'll ever need. 

5) Ship to ship combat. I find it relaxing, addicting and i can spend an entire gaming session just sinking ships and selling loot. 

[thelee]

2 hours ago, Telas said:

3) Unity Engine. 25-30FPS combat in a pseudo 3D game is a disaster, plain and simple. Even more so when you know that your machine is able to run the likes of Cyberpunk and Dishonored 2 at 60FPS

my computer these days is way better than when i first started playing deadfire, and I think what's telling is that the only thing that has really improved performance in deadfire are:

• SSD or NVME for hard drive instead of a spinning disk
• faster cores (not even more cores) but with very low elasticity

there's some extremely profound inefficiencies in the engine. i can drop resolution completely on my main gaming pc and get no uplift in fps - it's all cpu bound. and i highly doubt deadfire is doing as much cpu work as cities: skylines (which can eventually bring my beefy main gaming pc to a crawl in big cities), it just does it much more inefficiently, with odd I/O or disk read attempts (read: 100% chance of stutter upon certain spells being cast) that cannot be sufficiently be sped up over several generations of AMD CPUs i've had over the course of playing this game.

it must be unity, because poe1 had its own problems, but i know obsidian can make games that are much more performant, if they're not unity-based (e.g. outer worlds).

Edited November 1, 2021 by thelee

[Telas]

3 hours ago, thelee said:

it must be unity, because poe1 had its own problems, but i know obsidian can make games that are much more performant, if they're not unity-based (e.g. outer worlds).

I just want them to develop their own in-house engine instead of grabbing whatever free and easy to use tool exists in the market, to be honest. Why can an outsider like Larian(heh, Kings currently) do it but not the old wolves from Obsidian? DOS2 with Divinity Engine 2.0 looks and plays 10 times better than Deadfire and Baldur's Gate 3 with Divinity Engine 4.0 is going to break the charts again.

[Boeroer]

4 hours ago, Telas said:

DOS2 with Divinity Engine 2.0 looks [...] 10 times better than Deadfire

That is a matter of taste. I find the visuals of D:OS games to be extremely unappealing. BG3 is better but still not what I would prefer.

---

The reason why they took Unity3D was most likely that they crowdfunded PoE as the last straw before going bankrupt. Unity3D is cheap and easy to use. It also allows mixing 2D and 3D content without modding the engine a ton. PoE was done as a spiritual successor of the old infinity engine games. Something like Larian's look amd feel (including rotating camera etc.) wouldn't have achieved that. 

Then, if you want to make a sequel that doesn't look fundamentally different from the first game you have to stick to the engine I guess. 

I think most players don't realize what an effort it is to develop an inhouse engine and which immense downsides such an approach has. I'll just name two for starters:

- it takes a huge amount of time, know-how and money... while it per se doesn't generate any profit

- if you employ new staff you have to school them for your inhouse-tech. This takes time and money again. It may also repell people who'd rather pick a job where they a) can start right with what they know and b) can improve their skills with an engine that other potential employers might be using as well.

There's more of course but those two hurt the most imo. Well, having to deal with so many different platforms (Win, Mac, PS, Xbox etc.) is equally painful, bit I never released a game so I can't say for sure if this is a mess that hurts your business equally bad. I only produced "normal" software and even there it was so annoying to tailor your software to all the different platforms, browsers even until frameworks emerged which did all the work for you. I suspect games are no different in this case. 

The only advantage is that you can build an engine that fits your ideas 100%.

But even then I'd argue that you're almost always better off modding an existing one or developing plugins/components.

The only case where it might make sense is when you need a near to 100% optimized engine for a super demanding game, like most AAA+ tiles are, and you can't achieve it with existing engines. But games like PoE are not such games.  

I worked as a programmer, software engineer, project manager and then business owner long enough to have learned the hard way that if somebody suggests new inhouse solutions for stuff that can be done with existing frameworks you must take them to the broom closet and slap them to their senses.

Maybe at the time Larian was starting with D:OS there was no engine that fit their special needs. Also they might have had a lot of legacy stuff and know-how from all the games they did, back to the original Divine Divinity - so it might be they didn't start from scratch.   

 

 

 

Edited November 2, 2021 by Boeroer

[xzar_monty]

12 hours ago, Telas said:

Biggest step back?

4) Nostalgia based graphics. Pick a road and go either 2D or 3D. Beautiful pseudo 3D renders for maps in combination with low tier fully 3D models for characters just looks ugly. 

What makes them nostalgia based? It's fine if you don't like them, but why are they nostalgia based? I don't see it.

In my view, Deadfire is graphically the most gorgeous game I have ever played.

[Boeroer]

6 hours ago, xzar_monty said:

What makes them nostalgia based?

I guess the isometric and painted 2D background approach. Obsidian wanted a spiritual successor to IWD/BG and that also meant to somewhat capture the looks of the old infinity engine games (but with more contemporary quality of course) I guess. 

6 hours ago, xzar_monty said:

In my view, Deadfire is graphically the most gorgeous game I have ever played.

I don't know if it's the most gorgeous game I've ever played, but I def. like the aesthetics a lot and can't name another CRPG which I liked better in that regard.

But yeah: matter of taste.

Edited November 2, 2021 by Boeroer

[Telas]

4 hours ago, xzar_monty said:

What makes them nostalgia based? It's fine if you don't like them, but why are they nostalgia based? I don't see it.

In my view, Deadfire is graphically the most gorgeous game I have ever played.

Nostalgia based because the infinity engine games used the ''2D pictures from 3D renders'' style by necessity. It was simple impossible at the time to make their games look how they wanted without using such cool tricks. As for pillars, again, i love the style as much as you but they could have done better for Deadfire. Example below. 

[Boeroer]

It's not unusual to reuse assets. As long as it's not too obvious that's okay. It cuts cost and development time considerably. It's not that easy to spot in 3D games because the environment in 3D games is not made of fixed backgrounds but composed of 3D objects.

Anyway, it may well be that Deadfire's release time was approaching fast and level designers realized they didn't have enough time or budget left to create more unique assets. Such constraints may lead to the designers reusing more assets than is optimal.

That's not a problem of the engine or the general method of designing the levels though. 

I'm pretty sure if they have had more time (and money) the artists would't have reused assets a lot. It's way more fun to create unique environments instead of reusing existing parts - but it's also more expensive. Deadfire's budget and development time got bloated a lot during development by Full VO and stuff like ship combat. It might well be that those took away considerable resources from other parts of the game. 

Edited November 2, 2021 by Boeroer

[Telas]

2 hours ago, Boeroer said:

It's not unusual to reuse assets. As long as it's not too obvious that's okay. It cuts cost and development time considerably. It's not that easy to spot in 3D games because the environment in 3D games is not made of fixed backgrounds but composed of 3D objects.

How much more do you think it will cost them to prepare 3-4 small maps like the one in the last part of my image? I did 3D work in the past and believe me, with todays tools you can easily ''3D paint'' over the river some land, and shuffle the props around to make it look different. All you have to do after that is take some isometric pictures for the 2D preparation, draw the NavMesh and boom. A new bog type map ready for use. I am playing a full priced Obsidian game, not Avernum by Jeff Vogel(cool games tho)  

 

Let's not speak about various item icons that they took from POE to use them in Tyranny. 

Edited November 2, 2021 by Telas

[xzar_monty]

3 hours ago, Telas said:

Nostalgia based because the infinity engine games used the ''2D pictures from 3D renders'' style by necessity. It was simple impossible at the time to make their games look how they wanted without using such cool tricks. As for pillars, again, i love the style as much as you but they could have done better for Deadfire. Example below.

Ok, thanks for this. I also understand your example and can't argue with it, but it didn't bother me when playing the game. Clearly I'm not as sensitive to the occasional copy-pasteing as you are; I suppose this is a matter of preference.

Here's another thing that's clearly a matter of preference: I've just now tried playing Pathfinder: WotR, and once again I find that I am very sensitive to poor writing. Owlcat is really quite poor when it comes to writing, unfortunately.

[kanisatha]

15 hours ago, Telas said:

I just want them to develop their own in-house engine instead of grabbing whatever free and easy to use tool exists in the market, to be honest. Why can an outsider like Larian(heh, Kings currently) do it but not the old wolves from Obsidian? DOS2 with Divinity Engine 2.0 looks and plays 10 times better than Deadfire and Baldur's Gate 3 with Divinity Engine 4.0 is going to break the charts again.

As others have said, this is subjective. I hate the D:OS games, and consider some of the limitations of Larian's engine to be a huge part of my dislike. For instance, the Larian engine does not allow for pausing the game during real time exploration, and hence why it can only be used to make a TB game and not a RTwP game. And since I hate TB combat and much prefer RTwP, Larian's engine suck for me. I also don't like the visuals of the Larian engine, which to me comes across as garrish and cartoonish. Plus, I also think the reason they have that utterly stupid and annoying party movement system of chain-linking characters rather than the standard IE games way of handling party movement is a limitation of their engine.

Now, obviously, if Obsidian were to develop an in-house engine, they don't have to be limited in any of these ways. But I don't want any such engine to use the Larian engine as some sort of rolemodel.

Edited November 2, 2021 by kanisatha

[Boeroer]

1 hour ago, Telas said:

How much more do you think it will cost them to prepare 3-4 small maps like the one in the last part of my image? I did 3D work in the past and believe me, with todays tools you can easily ''3D paint'' over the river some land, and shuffle the props around to make it look different. All you have to do after that is take some isometric pictures for the 2D preparation, draw the NavMesh and boom. A new bog type map ready for use. I am playing a full priced Obsidian game, not Avernum by Jeff Vogel(cool games tho)  

It costs time. Time is invaluable once the release date comes near. At least that's the case for regular software development - but I'm fairly confident it's the same with games development.

Like how much more do you think it would have cost them to prepare unique items for every passive ability? Doesn't seem much but yet they didn't do it - because something else seemed more important (at least Josh said so when asked about it in a stream).

For the Community Patch mod I then created unique icons for all passive abilities - and it took me quite some time not only to draw them (that was the "easy" part), but also to check back with the others to get feedback, then alter the icons, get feedback again - and once they were all considered as good enough they weren't even in the game yet - an atlas had to be made etc., then feedback came in about how the icons looked in the actual game... and so on and so forth.

Creating assets for the game and then really putting them there isn't just painting over something. It would be if one would create a game alone I guess.

Anyway: if the producer deemed other things more important... then stuff has to be cut out - even if it's easy to do stuff. 

1 hour ago, Telas said:

I did 3D work in the past

Nice. I have a diploma in media computer science from a German university. One of my main courses was 3D graphics and animation. I did 3D animations for commercials and presentations for a living when I was younger. The most time was spend in the feedback loop.  Also the pay was pretty terrible, hehe...

Edited November 2, 2021 by Boeroer

[xzar_monty]

15 hours ago, Telas said:

DOS2 with Divinity Engine 2.0 looks and plays 10 times better than Deadfire and Baldur's Gate 3 with Divinity Engine 4.0 is going to break the charts again.

This, again, is a matter of preference. It took me all of two hours to get completely fed up with DOS2. It doesn't look good, it doesn't play well and the game itself is decidedly uninteresting. So here we are: two rather contrasting opinions.

As for breaking the charts, I'm not sure if you mean playing quality or commercial success (I suppose it's the latter), but either way, it's not much of an argument. The relation between quality and success is extraordinarily difficult to analyse or break down, and quite often they don't have all that much to do with each other. (Like, there's a fairly convincing argument to be made that essentially everything in the Star Wars movie franchise after the Empire Strikes Back is rubbish, but that certainly hasn't hurt its success one bit.)

[Telas]

56 minutes ago, xzar_monty said:

This, again, is a matter of preference. It took me all of two hours to get completely fed up with DOS2. It doesn't look good, it doesn't play well and the game itself is decidedly uninteresting. So here we are: two rather contrasting opinions.

1 hour ago, kanisatha said:

As others have said, this is subjective. I hate the D:OS games, and consider some of the limitations of Larian's engine to be a huge part of my dislike.

Not my favorite games either but the quality of their graphics engine(for a crpg) and the overall level design is top notch. And again, situations with both companies were very similar money wise. They had it rough as much as Obsidian but for some reason they came out on top.

All and all, Pillars may be MY favorite Crpg's but i understand why Deadfire didn't sell. Cut corners here with reused Maps and other art assets, cut corners there by using a cheap engine, cut some more to put full VO... and final product is a withered game. Not many people are willing to pay 40-60$ for a loading screen simulator, especially when it looks 2D with 3D elements. 

Damn it! I'm roasting my two most beloved games relentlessly, i need to chill. 

[xzar_monty]

1 hour ago, Telas said:

All and all, Pillars may be MY favorite Crpg's but i understand why Deadfire didn't sell. Cut corners here with reused Maps and other art assets, cut corners there by using a cheap engine, cut some more to put full VO... and final product is a withered game. Not many people are willing to pay 40-60$ for a loading screen simulator, especially when it looks 2D with 3D elements.

Your logic doesn't work. In order to see that maps and other art assets have been reused, you will have to buy the game. The sales of Deadfire were poor right from the start, right from day one, and at that point no one knew that the game contained the issues you brought up. The question of poor sales is much more complicated here.

Similarly, it doesn't matter one jot that I think D:OS2 is rubbish, as a game. I am one of the people who contributed to its sales success, because I bought it. I only played it for about two hours, but I did buy it.

[thelee]

6 hours ago, Telas said:

How much more do you think it will cost them to prepare 3-4 small maps like the one in the last part of my image? I did 3D work in the past and believe me, with todays tools you can easily ''3D paint'' over the river some land, and shuffle the props around to make it look different. All you have to do after that is take some isometric pictures for the 2D preparation, draw the NavMesh and boom. A new bog type map ready for use. I am playing a full priced Obsidian game, not Avernum by Jeff Vogel(cool games tho)  

i don't know man, unless you have actual major industry experience i am going to be pretty skeptical of some rando internet guy saying "what's so hard about this?"

i work at a major global tech company. there's no such thing as a simple change - even if it would've been simpler for a smaller, but still pretty big tech company. so many pipelines, integrations, QA, experiments, etc. even if it remains a technically easy code change, it might be a while before it actually goes out to prod. i'm guessing you get a lot of economies of scale (in terms of production and QA) from asset re-use, whatever shape that takes, and without having the actual obsidian game budget sitting in front of me, i'm going to probably give the ones who barely escaped bankruptcy the benefit of the doubt.

Edited November 2, 2021 by thelee

[Telas]

2 hours ago, xzar_monty said:

Similarly, it doesn't matter one jot that I think D:OS2 is rubbish, as a game. I am one of the people who contributed to its sales success, because I bought it. I only played it for about two hours, but I did buy it.

Same for me. Payed full price and i never finished it but i wouldn't go as far as to call it rubbish. It Is a well made game just not for my taste. 

2 hours ago, xzar_monty said:

Your logic doesn't work. In order to see that maps and other art assets have been reused, you will have to buy the game. The sales of Deadfire were poor right from the start, right from day one, and at that point no one knew that the game contained the issues you brought up. The question of poor sales is much more complicated here.

It does kind of. POE 1, Tyranny, Deadfire. 3 Unity games made by Obsidian in a small timeframe, all sharing the same look, all sharing the same problems, all sharing a low production value. Loss of prestige as a gaming studio. People will simple stop auto buying whatever you throw at them after a while. If Pillars 3 comes out tomorrow, watch a review and see that it looks the same as Deadfire just with different story i know exactly what type of game is going to be.  No matter the praise from IGN or whatever youtube reviewer, i as a player know if that game is for me or not because they sold me the same thing 3 times in a row already. POE, Tyranny, POE II Deadfire, POE III Ixamitl 

50 minutes ago, thelee said:

i work at a major global tech company. there's no such thing as a simple change

Thelee, no one said about sudden change of plans. You make games for 20 years in a row you know how many maps you'll need. If you don't have the money or the time to make maps you simple make your product smaller instead of reusing assets. Non of us will miss those 4 Bog encounters in the game. Nor the other 8 with the same rocky mountainous map. Again we speak about Obsidian not Jeff Vogel and his small family business. 

Edited November 2, 2021 by Telas