After playing Kingmaker..

[Blunderboss]

PoE trying to be spiritual successor to BG is not my opinion it was selling point of first games Kickstarter 

PFKM being true spiritual successor to BG is once again not my opinion but a fact that is widely agreed upon,since no other game got even close to that

BG2 is GOAT crpg and it has nothing to do with me or you liking or disliking it 

Btw your parrot skills are really good you learned to parrot “its just your opinion” now be a good bird and learn some other phrases 

Edited November 5, 2019 by Blunderboss

[xzar_monty]

If it's a fact, it doesn't need agreement, it just is. It's an opinion. There's no need to argue about this.

[Blunderboss]

Nice parrot but you are getting old i will suggest you to learn new phrases once again

[wih]

Well, this forum is mainly for sharing opinions. Facts are more useful, I agree, but are not enough for filling a forum.

[xzar_monty]

@Blunderboss. My understanding was that forums like this are intended for respectful discussion. If you run out of counter-arguments, the cheapest possible response is to get personal: you make no point that anyone cares about, and you just end up looking very silly. Simply leave it, nobody wants to read comments like that.

Edited November 5, 2019 by xzar_monty

[xzar_monty]

2 minutes ago, wih said:

Well, this forum is mainly for sharing opinions. Facts are more useful, I agree, but are not enough for filling a forum.

Fair point. My response was about opinions presented as facts. There's a difference there, I'm sure you'd agree. Discussion of opinions as opinions is very interesting, I agree.

Edited November 5, 2019 by xzar_monty

[Blunderboss]

You are the one that had no counter-arguments and went for cheapest strawman “its just your opinion” .

I am being very respectfull now when i am pointing out that you are a Strawman and a parrot who does not contribute anything to the disccusions 

Edited November 5, 2019 by Blunderboss

[PK htiw klaw eriF]

28 minutes ago, Blunderboss said:

PFKM being true spiritual successor to BG is once again not my opinion but a fact that is widely agreed upon,since no other game got even close to that

That's an opinion bruh, there is no objective criteria for what constitutes a spiritual successor.

[Blunderboss]

3 minutes ago, KaineParker said:

there is no objective criteria for what constitutes a spiritual successor

Sure there is.

 

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spiritual_successor

Edited November 5, 2019 by Blunderboss

[algroth]

On 11/4/2019 at 1:16 PM, Blunderboss said:

I dont think Obsidian forum is right place to compare other games to deadfire since people who are still active in this forum are mostly PoE fanboys (including me to some extent )

PFK is amazing game it is obviously more successfull game than deadfire, since deadfire is commercial failure.

This is the only true fact anything else is just useless discussions and randim opinions from self proclaimed single player game pros

 

Kingmaker being "an amazing game" isn't the "only true fact" because it's a matter of opinion, as is the matter of whether commercial success or failure determines the quality of a game. And who here is proclaiming themselves a "single player game pro" exactly?

Edited November 5, 2019 by algroth

[xzar_monty]

Quoting Wikipedia as proof approaches some kind of folly. And, again, nowhere in that "spiritual successor" entry is objectivity even attempted, let alone reached. It talks about what is "regarded as" or "considered" spiritual successors. These are not factual, objective statements -- at best they talk about some kind of consensus of opinion. Someone is very confused and should probably just stop.

Edited November 5, 2019 by xzar_monty

[algroth]

52 minutes ago, Blunderboss said:

You are the one that had no counter-arguments and went for cheapest strawman “its just your opinion” .

You need to learn what a fact is, and what an argument is as well. You didn't provide an argument, you provided a *statement*. You didn't argue in favour of that statement, simply said it and declared it a fact despite it being an opinion. See this: "PFKM being true spiritual successor to BG is once again not my opinion but a fact that is widely agreed upon,since no other game got even close to that" "Widely agreed" by whom? By what parametres that could be considered fact and not a matter of opinion? *Why* do you believe this? You accuse Xzar of going for the "cheapest strawman" but it's you who seems to be clutching at straws and being senselessly dismissive in turn.

[thelee]

10 hours ago, Kaylon said:

I didn't play P:K yet, but I can understand why Deadfire wasn't a big success, because I had a very hard time myself getting into it. Overall the story is pretty weak (I was never hooked by it), the hero lacks the epicness of this kind of games (being a watcher isn't a big deal overall/doesn't make you feel very special) and the game system is very obscure and unintuitive (many rules feel completely arbitrary/are hard to understand).

I don't think Deadfire had an obscure and unintuitive system. Rather, it had a new system.  Even well-known licensed games have obsure interactions: e.g. go consult sorcerers.net for BG2, e.g. the manual for BG was pretty useless since it talked a bunch about D&D mechanics that were utterly irrelevant to the game, etc. The difference is that PoE1 and the like have some sort of common ground or shared cultural knowledge for players to ramp up on or to read up on (PoE1 was very D&D-like, and the AR system was very much like F:NV, a system that is even used in TOW). Deadfire, aside from some superficial similarities, is bottoms-up new and in many places rather unprecedented (what biggish CRPG has used a PEN/AR system before?).

I could see how it would make some people a little more antsy about buying into Deadfire versus more well-known systems, but I don't think it could possibly explain a 600k+ sales drop. (This is constantly the issue - for all the pet theories people have, they have to explain a huge sales drop.) 

As for story and hero - I don't think any personal opinion on it can matter, because it's down to a matter of taste. Critics and audience reviewers seemed to be positive about it. 

 

6 hours ago, Infinitron said:

This isn't true. Tyranny almost certainly did not sell better than Deadfire before sales & discounts.

What does this mean, "before sales & discounts?" Weird qualifier. And anyway, yes, it is objectively true. Tyranny, two years after the fact, sold around 550k+ copies, as sourced from steam sales leak data (and semi-verified by Fig disclosures). Deadfire is approaching two years and at last check (Fig disclosures) has sold around 300-400k copies. Console release may help some, but they aren't treated as sales by OBS (they just get a licensing fee). Given that game sales follow a steep power curve law from date of release, it seems unlikely that Deadfire is going to make 200k ish sales in the next few months.

 

1 hour ago, KaineParker said:

That's an opinion bruh, there is no objective criteria for what constitutes a spiritual successor.

 

1 hour ago, Blunderboss said:

Sure there is.

 

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spiritual_successor

The only objective criteria really is if the game designers themselves say so. Beyond that it is basically reading between the lines and fan/critic consensus. (Example: I'm not sure if Prey was ever explicitly explained as a System Shock 2 successor, but there are plenty of clues, including the first keypad code is 0451 which is the tell-tale sign that someone is trying to make a system shock successor. BioShock--mentioned in the wikipedia article--also had this keycode, though was also much more explicitly a System Shock 2 successor.)

I would definitely not be as cheeky as Blunderboss in saying that PoE1 "tried" and PK "is" a spiritual successor since that is definitely pure opinion (and by sales numbers and critical success, one could argue that Blunderboss got the verbs switched). Both were obviously trying to ape the tradition of IE games. Even for all its differences, Deadfire was also trying to ape BG2, which included a settings change to a "warmer" less european setting (I recall this being explicitly mentioned extremely early on in the Deadfire development process).

 

By the way while I think @xzar_monty's aversion to wikipedia quoting is fallacious, I do agree that one should actually read the wikipedia article they are trying to quote. Nothing about that wikipedia article lists objective criteria. It doesn't demonstrate anything other than that @Blunderboss was trying to link-spam their way into winning an argument.

Edited November 5, 2019 by thelee

[xzar_monty]

My aversion to wikipedia quoting stems from the fact that it's wildly unpredictable in its trustworthiness, i.e. the quality of wikipedia entries varies an awful lot. I am happy to concede that some of the best wikipedia entries are excellent indeed, but there's an awful lot of dross in there, too. Too many contributors and not enough editors, which means that it is worlds away from an old-fashioned encyclopedia (e.g. Britannica).

[xzar_monty]

21 minutes ago, thelee said:

Tyranny, two years after the fact, sold around 550k+ copies, as sourced from steam sales leak data (and semi-verified by Fig disclosures). Deadfire is approaching two years and at last check (Fig disclosures) has sold around 300-400k copies. Console release may help some, but they aren't treated as sales by OBS (they just get a licensing fee). Given that game sales follow a steep power curve law from date of release, it seems unlikely that Deadfire is going to make 200k ish sales in the next few months.

Wow. Just wow. I hadn't seen these two figures against each other before, so thank you for this. I am utterly stunned. What the heck happened? (That's a sort-of rhetorical question, btw... we don't know.)

Given how much I enjoyed Deadfire, this is harrowingly sad. It must have been a huge disappointment for Sawyer & co.

Edited November 5, 2019 by xzar_monty

[algroth]

35 minutes ago, xzar_monty said:

Wow. Just wow. I hadn't seen these two figures against each other before, so thank you for this. I am utterly stunned. What the heck happened? (That's a sort-of rhetorical question, btw... we don't know.)

Given how much I enjoyed Deadfire, this is harrowingly sad. It must have been a huge disappointment for Sawyer & co.

I don't know how truthful or accurate the numbers are nowadays, but SteamSpy does state 500k-1M for both Deadfire and Tyranny (and Pathfinder: Kingmaker for that matter). Maybe The Outer Worlds' buzz helped boost the sales some? Again though, I understand they're not entirely trustworthy nowadays either.

Edited November 5, 2019 by algroth

[thelee]

44 minutes ago, xzar_monty said:

My aversion to wikipedia quoting stems from the fact that it's wildly unpredictable in its trustworthiness, i.e. the quality of wikipedia entries varies an awful lot. I am happy to concede that some of the best wikipedia entries are excellent indeed, but there's an awful lot of dross in there, too. Too many contributors and not enough editors, which means that it is worlds away from an old-fashioned encyclopedia (e.g. Britannica).

Some independent studies have shown that wikipedia is more accurate than an encyclopedia on certain topics. Basically the question is "are nerds on the internet into this topic" and if the answer is yes, then it's going to be better on wikipedia than any comparable resource. (Think math, science topics, pokemon, a little less so for literature or contemporary philosophy).

21 minutes ago, algroth said:

I don't know how trustworthy the numbers are nowadays, but SteamSpy does state 500k-1M for both Deadfire and Tyranny (and Pathfinder: Kingmaker for that matter). Maybe The Outer Worlds' buzz helped boost the sales some? Again though, I understand they're not entirely trustworthy nowadays either.

SteamSpy has ceased being usefully accurate since Steam closed off whatever data source they were originally using (circa a year ago). That's why it was a big deal when steam inadvertently leaked their sales data, because SteamSpy wasn't a very useful source anymore.

 

Though it is possible that TOW boosted sales, or that PoE1 Ultimate Edition release helped halo effect some sales. The fig disclosure numbers are a few months old. But it seems unlikely to make a huge difference. (especially since TOW isn't even on any of the stores that Deadfire is sold on)

Edited November 5, 2019 by thelee

[xzar_monty]

18 minutes ago, thelee said:

Some independent studies have shown that wikipedia is more accurate than an encyclopedia on certain topics. Basically the question is "are nerds on the internet into this topic" and if the answer is yes, then it's going to be better on wikipedia than any comparable resource. (Think math, science topics, pokemon, a little less so for literature or contemporary philosophy).

Yep, I'm aware of this, and you're quite right. Funnily enough, my aversion to and knowledge of the limitations of wikipedia stems precisely from the fact that much of my working life revolves around literature. I have also worked in music, which is another less than stellar topic, when it comes to wikipedia's accuracy.

Edited November 5, 2019 by xzar_monty

[Bleak]

Next to asking a certified expert on a specific field, Wikipedia is easily the most reliable source of information one can access, due to the way it works and its citations.  As for the spiritual successor thing you don't need wiki to realize that the more something reminisces its predecessor, by using common elements etc, the more of a spiritual successor it is. But I don't know why you are arguing about that, is doesn't seem of any importance.

Anyway, about what went wrong with Deadfire, one can only discuss about an individual thing at a time. E.g. Ship battles. Frankly, I don't know why they didn't just make a battle mini-game similar to this with even lower poly models and less detail, with crew members influencing the controls/stats in an more obvious way. It would take like very little time and resources. I am sure someone has asked this already - have the developers commented on it?

[thelee]

5 minutes ago, Bleak said:

Next to asking a certified expert on a specific field, Wikipedia is easily the most reliable source of information one can access, due to the way it works and its citations.  As for the spiritual successor thing you don't need wiki to realize that the more something reminisces its predecessor, by using common elements etc, the more of a spiritual successor it is. But I don't know why you are arguing about that, is doesn't seem of any importance.

Anyway, about what went wrong with Deadfire, one can only discuss about an individual thing at a time. E.g. Ship battles. Frankly, I don't know why they didn't just make a battle mini-game similar to this with even lower poly models and less detail, with crew members influencing the controls/stats in an more obvious way. It would take like very little time and resources. I am sure someone has asked this already - have the developers commented on it?

I think JE Sawyer literally had a screenshot of that in his post mortem talk.

Regardless of what form it took, the fundamental problem was that any ship mini game required a lot of work and custom assets to be done for a part of that game that couldn't be used anywhere else. It was basically wasted time and money. Sounded like it would've been preferred if they just had ship boarding fights and not bothered with the mini-game. But apparently it was a top-down decision to force the ship mini game, and to make it a backer stretch goal, which tied their hands. JE Sawyer called it the most expensive and least value part of Deadfire. To get it right, they needed way more resources, and even if they got it right only a small fraction of players would ever have interacted with it. There was basically no cost-benefit analysis that made the ship mini game in any form worth it.

 

edit - I mean, to be charitable, I thought the ship mini game wasn't bad, it was "serviceable." But I'm pretty sure it's small comfort to the many dev-hours spent on that and bug fixing that even one of their biggest fans thought that it was merely "serviceable."

Edited November 5, 2019 by thelee

[xzar_monty]

Yep. It was a waste of time. In my playthrough, I had a grand total of one ship battle. After that, I always went for the boarding option, because it was (for me) a lot more fun. Ship combat was plain bad.

[Bleak]

41 minutes ago, thelee said:

I think JE Sawyer literally had a screenshot of that in his post mortem talk.

Regardless of what form it took, the fundamental problem was that any ship mini game required a lot of work and custom assets to be done for a part of that game that couldn't be used anywhere else. It was basically wasted time and money. Sounded like it would've been preferred if they just had ship boarding fights and not bothered with the mini-game. But apparently it was a top-down decision to force the ship mini game, and to make it a backer stretch goal, which tied their hands. JE Sawyer called it the most expensive and least value part of Deadfire. To get it right, they needed way more resources, and even if they got it right only a small fraction of players would ever have interacted with it. There was basically no cost-benefit analysis that made the ship mini game in any form worth it.

 

edit - I mean, to be charitable, I thought the ship mini game wasn't bad, it was "serviceable." But I'm pretty sure it's small comfort to the many dev-hours spent on that and bug fixing that even one of their biggest fans thought that it was merely "serviceable."

Heh, kind of expected that, Sid Meier's pirates is a classic. 

It's certain that they are the ones who know better, I am just rambling here. Most of the ship models in the world map seem high poly enough to be reusable in a less detailed and more top-down version of that battle I linked. And a dozen of effects and model variations to represent upgrades would take no time to scoop up. Maybe they were examining that possibility but it fell under the desired quality bar compared to the rest of the game. 

But I agree that only doing that wouldn't suffice for players to want to interact with it. Sid Meier's for example had a great gameplay loop, making you want to upgrade your ship, engage in battles etc. They would have to add some gameplay value interconnected with the rest of the game - with that connection going both ways. Atm only some captain bounties create that connection (mini-game loop helping main game loop) and the only area for which you actually need a good ship is the final one (and naturally its scripted that you get one). The main game -> mini-game connection involves getting special crew and upgrades, but it's not progressive enough and economy makes it too easy anyway. And since the mini->main connection is weak, they make all these upgrades feel rather pointless.

TLDR: There's a general lack of incentives for the player to care about the mini-game. 

Edited November 5, 2019 by Bleak

[Infinitron]

20 hours ago, thelee said:

What does this mean, "before sales & discounts?" Weird qualifier. And anyway, yes, it is objectively true. Tyranny, two years after the fact, sold around 550k+ copies, as sourced from steam sales leak data (and semi-verified by Fig disclosures). Deadfire is approaching two years and at last check (Fig disclosures) has sold around 300-400k copies. Console release may help some, but they aren't treated as sales by OBS (they just get a licensing fee). Given that game sales follow a steep power curve law from date of release, it seems unlikely that Deadfire is going to make 200k ish sales in the next few months.

It's not weird. What really matters is how much money each game earned, which is demonstrated by how well it did when it was new and being sold at full price. The concurrent players all-time peak tells the story:

PoE2: https://steamcharts.com/app/560130

Tyranny: https://steamcharts.com/app/362960

 

Edited November 6, 2019 by Infinitron

[xzar_monty]

21 minutes ago, Bleak said:

and the only area for which you actually need a good ship is the final one (and naturally its scripted that you get one).

Yeah, this was badly planned as well. You have absolutely no need to improve your ship in any way in the whole game. You can do just fine with the Defiant from start to almost finish, at which point you can get the Deadfire equivalent of the Flying Dutchman, and off you go.

It would have been nice if I had ever sensed a need to do something with, about or to my ship.

[Boeroer]

1 hour ago, thelee said:

I think JE Sawyer literally had a screenshot of that in his post mortem talk.

Regardless of what form it took, the fundamental problem was that any ship mini game required a lot of work and custom assets to be done for a part of that game that couldn't be used anywhere else. It was basically wasted time and money. Sounded like it would've been preferred if they just had ship boarding fights and not bothered with the mini-game. But apparently it was a top-down decision to force the ship mini game, and to make it a backer stretch goal, which tied their hands. JE Sawyer called it the most expensive and least value part of Deadfire. To get it right, they needed way more resources, and even if they got it right only a small fraction of players would ever have interacted with it. There was basically no cost-benefit analysis that made the ship mini game in any form worth it.

 

edit - I mean, to be charitable, I thought the ship mini game wasn't bad, it was "serviceable." But I'm pretty sure it's small comfort to the many dev-hours spent on that and bug fixing that even one of their biggest fans thought that it was merely "serviceable."

He called it "Quicksand" several times: Something you keep throwing money and resources at and it just swallows it to no effect.