Just bought it!

[Slack83er]

Greetings, I'm happy to be here in the POE2 community. Just bought this game, and hope to enjoy it as much as I did with POE. I'll get in touch with the new game and then will surely come here to get advices about builds and so on. I've understood this game revolves a lot around sea, so maybe my monk idea was not excellent in terms of lore, but I'll see what I come up with.

See you!

[thelee]

Welcome!

Monks can be wandering types (like Zahua in poe1, and "Wanderer" is literally one of the multiclass types), and what better way to wander than by boat?

[Slack83er]

Thank you mate! Yes I figured as much. Boeroer (I think he should also roam this board) told me they're good and fun in POE2, so I'll try and do it. Who knows...

[Boeroer]

Greetings! 

[asnjas]

Of course monks fit the lore. The whole game is made by the same devs. They designed the entire game with the classes, deputies and world all in mind. 

Its like when people say the pirate theme doesnt fit.  

[algroth]

Hope you enjoy!

[MedicineDan]

Truly an awesome game.  It really brings the Pillars story to an excellent end.  The pirate aspect never got old for me.  I loved it the whole time.

[Wormerine]

21 minutes ago, MedicineDan said:

Truly an awesome game.  It really brings the Pillars story to an excellent end.

 Surely you mean an interesting setting for the third installement?

@Slack83er Have fun!

[MedicineDan]

I want another game, of course, but I think the main story arc is completed. There's a lot to do in the setting. 

[Slack83er]

Oh well, I'll try to enjoy then. Some time ago, I read an article about how POE2 was supposedly not up to the previous chapter.. I would have bought it anyway as I'm a huge fan of the lore and the game itself, but it relieves me to hear your enthusiastic comments. Keep up!

[xzar_monty]

1 hour ago, Slack83er said:

Oh well, I'll try to enjoy then. Some time ago, I read an article about how POE2 was supposedly not up to the previous chapter.. I would have bought it anyway as I'm a huge fan of the lore and the game itself, but it relieves me to hear your enthusiastic comments. Keep up!

This is an interesting topic, because Deadfire was a serious financial disappointment, so one might think that a lot of people didn't like it as much as the previous one. However, there's a fault in that logic: in order to not like it, they would have had to buy it, and this would have been reflected in the sales. So, the most obvious reason for the poor sales (right from the start) would appear to be that an awful lot of people were in fact seriously disappointed with PoE1 and therefore did not want to continue with the franchise. I wish to stress, however, that this is only a theory, although a logical one, and our only answer to the question of Deadfire's commercial failure, at the moment, is: "We don't know."

As for the game itself, I think it's excellent and better than PoE1, although it does have its drawbacks and the best part in the entire saga for me is the early part of PoE1.

As far as articles go, by the way, it seems to me that computer game journalism, as a serious form of journalism, has essentially disappeared. I would love to be proven wrong. I will be extremely grateful to anybody who can point me towards a site or a mag that contains proper computer game journalism and is impartial enough, well researched and exhaustive. Opinions are not journalism.

Edited October 30, 2019 by xzar_monty

[Slack83er]

Hi Xzar, I think you are perfectly right. I just bought the game and I like to form my own opinions only AFTER I try something. And since I was not at all disappointed with POE1, quite the contrary, I bought this game and expect it to be fun. No game is without flaws, that goes without saying, but I think the devs made efforts to make it up to -and better than- the previous one. Here in Italy we have a mag, it's called TGM (The games machine) which, as far as I know and have been able to understand, is impartial and very highly regarded upon the "nerdy world". Give it  a try if you understand Italian!

[daven]

The game flopped because there was virtually 0 marketing. The first game had a push from being on Kickstarter and the amount it generated through there.

Nobody knows what FIG is.

[xzar_monty]

2 minutes ago, daven said:

The game flopped because there was virtually 0 marketing. The first game had a push from being on Kickstarter and the amount it generated through there.

But we just don't know if that's true. There is no way of proving it.

[xzar_monty]

1 hour ago, Slack83er said:

Here in Italy we have a mag, it's called TGM (The games machine) which, as far as I know and have been able to understand, is impartial and very highly regarded upon the "nerdy world". Give it  a try if you understand Italian!

Wow. Interesting. Thank you for this. My Italian is very rudimentary, and I certainly cannot read a magazine in Italian. Maybe in a year or two, though.

I have previously noted that there have been excellent game mags in Scandinavia, even at a time when there were (apparently) none in the English-speaking world.

[daven]

21 minutes ago, xzar_monty said:

But we just don't know if that's true. There is no way of proving it.

Of course we don't, but it is likely. Marketing is key.

[Wormerine]

4 hours ago, Slack83er said:

Oh well, I'll try to enjoy then. Some time ago, I read an article about how POE2 was supposedly not up to the previous chapter.. 

Well, we can talk about it once you beat the game. PoE2 is better and worse then PoE1 in various ways. The reception was mostly positive but lukewarm. I don't think it was un-deserves. It is a good game but my recommendation always comes with couple disclaimers. 

Edited October 30, 2019 by Wormerine

[thelee]

2 hours ago, daven said:

Of course we don't, but it is likely. Marketing is key.

One data point - the marketing person had a contract with obsidian that was decidedly not renewed. When I heard that news, my only thought was "they had a marketing person?" Which seems like self-evidence that the marketing sucked.

That being said it feels like most everyone who played PoE1 should have known about Deadfire. That tends to work in favor of sequels and gives them a good boost up. So I don't think marketing is even a major explanation - the best marketing in the world can't hold back turning tides. (A data point in counter is that Ars Technica--despite talking about the PoE1 kickstarter--never reviewed PoE1. They did review Deadfire, gave it a glowing review, and made it their top story pinned for a while. I took it as a signal that people definitely recognized Deadfire, but for whatever consumers just didn't want to buy it. You know how there are like academy award winning movies that hardly anyone actually sees? Same deal.)

 

The main explanation I saw from people in the industry (possibly Obsidian themselves) is that when PoE1 first came out it was basically the first or only one of its kind, and there was a huge pent-up demand for this kind of cRPG experience. With Deadfire, there was plenty of competition. So it could be that whatever pent up demand had already been fulfilled, or the market was much more competitive or saturated.

Edited October 30, 2019 by thelee

[xzar_monty]

4 hours ago, daven said:

Of course we don't, but it is likely. Marketing is key.

I simply wish to reiterate what thelee says above. Everyone who played PoE knew about Deadfire. So it's not marketing.

[xzar_monty]

2 hours ago, thelee said:

The main explanation I saw from people in the industry (possibly Obsidian themselves) is that when PoE1 first came out it was basically the first or only one of its kind, and there was a huge pent-up demand for this kind of cRPG experience. With Deadfire, there was plenty of competition. So it could be that whatever pent up demand had already been fulfilled, or the market was much more competitive or saturated.

That's a fair point, particularly when it comes to PoE1 being the first or only of its kind, but I'm not so sure about the later part. Plenty of competition? That should imply something like five titles to, or at least three. But were there seriously even two? If so, which ones?

 

Btw, when it comes to movies, there is NO correlation between hype, marketing, budget, famous actors and success. NONE. There is NO predicting which movies become successes. The best predictor is excellent word of mouth, and that is completely unpredictable. (This has been studied mathematically, I can provide links if anyone's interested.)

Edited October 30, 2019 by xzar_monty

[thelee]

1 hour ago, xzar_monty said:

But were there seriously even two? If so, which ones?

Here are some off the top of my head: Torment Numenara, Wasteland 2, PF: Kingmaker, DOS2 (arguably one of the main reasons they added a TB mode to Deadfire), Shadowrun, Tyranny - these all precede Deadfire and they all postcede PoE1. edit - some of these were backed on kickstarter as well; even if Deadfire was on kickstarter instead of fig, it would have still have faced a different backign environment than PoE1 did. (Though I don't discount the fig theory entirely - while I don't think it would singlehandedly saved the sales, I think being on a big platform like kickstarter would certainly have helped a little bit.)

 

edit - interestingly, at the time Tyranny was considered a financial disappointment, but from fig's numbers/disclosures we know that Tyranny has outsold Deadfire so far (admittedly tyranny has been out for a while, but sales drop off steeply after a short period of time). At this point, it would be great if Deadfire sells as well as Tyranny. This suggests a broader trend than anything wrong with Tyranny or Deadfire per se. 

Edited October 30, 2019 by thelee

[xzar_monty]

I suppose what it may come down to is your last point: there is a broader trend. PoE1 succeeded because of a significant romantic and nostalgia-tinged desire for a game whose kind had essentially disappeared, but it did not create a market for the re-emergence of the genre as a whole. Although P:K did quite well, didn't it? So that may speak against that theory. This is an interesting discussion, however.

Thank you for the list, btw. I know nothing at all about Torment, Wasteland and Shadowrun. Are they worth anything? I have tried Tyranny and DOS but stopped playing both in less than an hour and got my money back from Stream. They weren't for me.

[thelee]

1 hour ago, xzar_monty said:

Thank you for the list, btw. I know nothing at all about Torment, Wasteland and Shadowrun. Are they worth anything? I have tried Tyranny and DOS but stopped playing both in less than an hour and got my money back from Stream. They weren't for me.

lol, the only thing i know about them is friends who got them, played them for a little bit, and stopped.

[xzar_monty]

That doesn't exactly spell "stiff competition for PoE/Deadfire" for me.

[thelee]

1 minute ago, xzar_monty said:

That doesn't exactly spell "stiff competition for PoE/Deadfire" for me.

well, "played for a little bit and stopped" is still a sale

though given the achivement rate for deadfire (and even poe1), most players barely play through just the crit path.