Why is PoE2 not successful ?

[daven]

16 hours ago, Wormerine said:

Joke all you want, but that might be the wisest thing anyone said in this post so far.

Boob armor, or a grumpy male with a gun. 

I mean I was sort of half joking, but I genuinely think it would have done better with that sort of advertising. 

[Archaven]

Now I'm regards to sexualisation in PoE2 this is just solely my own opinion. But I do know my opinion may get attacked by certain feminist.

First thing I noticed PoE Vs PoE2.. was female body. In PoE female body is very appealing. In PoE2 you get the picture.  Also don't get me started on the armour at all in PoE. I can't recall any of them are appealing at all.

Secondly, portrayal of gods in PoE2 were that they are all UGLY. They are being drawn really ugly. You can see Ondra statue. It's barely naked yes but they quickly cover it with an ugly fish head.

Thirdly, look at character portraits. Pallegina initially being drawn so manly compared to her more feminine look in first PoE. They have changed it before the final release. Also look at Ydwin. She looks more like a trans to me than a female. They however couldn't cover her voice over where try voice actress voice is beautiful. A sense of disconnection here. Thankfully there is someone kind enough to "beautify" their looks which I personally use them in my games.

PoE2 is a mature rated game? It has drugs? Alcohol? Yes some nudity in bath house but they really shy away from it from the game. Not really sure who are Obsidian target audience. If it were for kids turn it should not even have heavy influence on drugs or alcohol.

Now I'm sure some offended people may come in and insult me as basement dweller or pervert. Just FYI I'm none of them and I have a partner IRL. Just sharing my opinion for whoever that may be interested.

PS. Also for some who have not noticed, banshee in PoE was an attractive lady? PoE2 you guessed it right. A male. I'm just highlighting out why they purposely go this far in doin this.

It's same like EA dragon age inquisition they make a desire demon as a male. It's also same as going so far that a succubus can be a man. But what's the purpose that they are trying to tell me?

 

 

Edited November 19, 2019 by Archaven

[Boeroer]

24 minutes ago, Archaven said:

 But I do know my opinion may get attacked by certain feminist.

Or simply may get ignored?

25 minutes ago, Archaven said:

It's also same as going so far that a succubus can be a man. But what's the purpose that they are trying to tell me?

I guess they are trying to tell you that a male succubus is called an incubus.

[xzar_monty]

2 hours ago, Boeroer said:

I guess they are trying to tell you that a male succubus is called an incubus.

Touché. That was just about the best comeback I've ever seen on these forums, especially because it wasn't unkind. Superb. @Archaven gets grumpy because he doesn't know that historically there were two sexual demons of this sort, the succubus and the incubus. What can you say when someone gets grumpy simply because he doesn't know enough? Well, you educate them. Again, touché.

Edited November 19, 2019 by xzar_monty

[algroth]

5 hours ago, Archaven said:

Now I'm regards to sexualisation in PoE2 this is just solely my own opinion. But I do know my opinion may get attacked by certain feminist.

Or maybe just get attacked because of the blatant sexism contained therein? It's one thing to say "I find the women in this game to be more sexually-appealing/attractively-rendered than the ones in its sequel", it's another entirely to say "this female looks like/was made into a male" when she very obviously wasn't, or calling Ydwin trans based on her appearance and assuming a disconnect when her "voice actress voice is beautiful". One doesn't have to be a BLM supporter to decry obvious racism and one certainly doesn't have to be a feminist to see how utterly misogynist some of your remarks are.

5 hours ago, Archaven said:

First thing I noticed PoE Vs PoE2.. was female body. In PoE female body is very appealing. In PoE2 you get the picture.

No, I don't. Here's a random female PC on Pillars:

Here's a random female PC on Deadfire:

Granted, beauty is in the eye of the beholder and all that, but I honestly don't see how the latter isn't more appealing than the former already by virtue of not looking like a low-poly potatohead straight out of the 00s. And I certainly don't see how the latter is any less distinguishably female. But, you do you.

5 hours ago, Archaven said:

NPS. Also for some who have not noticed, banshee in PoE was an attractive lady? PoE2 you guessed it right. A male. I'm just highlighting out why they purposely go this far in doin this.

Mind that like the others I'm not entirely in disagreement that the lack of sex appeal could've factored into the franchise's declining popularity, but the assumptions you make from game to game - and ffs, the way you express them - are very far off the mark. Personally I think the lack of sexualization in the Eoran setting was already evident in the first game: contrary to how you portray her the banshee *wasn't* an attractive lady in the first game, and even normally "attractive" mythical creatures like their take on the dryads were much more monstrous, what with their skin covered in thick bark and their limbs and hair resembling roots and branches, than other settings' green-skinned naked ladies and whatnot; or the lack of a succubus variant in the setting, or fampyrs not really exploiting the "sexual predator" parallel so prevalent in vampires and so on. In this sense Deadfire is no different, and if anything I'd argue it's a step *towards* a more sexually appealing franchise, what with the models being more detailed and giving clear predominance to traditionally attractive options and so on, and what with companion romance finally being a thing as well.

The whole thing for me ties back to the streaming/media issue we spoke about a while back. Much like streaming and gaming channels have become another huge part of game consumption and promotion in the present day, so has fanart and cosplay for example, and it's no secret that the characters that tend to inspire most of these (or at least the most popular and widely-consumed products within these) are either very specific "mascot"-type characters (in Pillars' case, Edér and the space pig had a bit of love in this mold, but likewise other franchises have the likes of Minsc and Boo or Vault Boy) or, indeed, attractive female characters. Even entirely secondary characters like twi'leks in Star Wars can inspire art and cosplay beyond what even the male protagonists of these series have.

After all, sex sells. Though much like some of the previous points I've mentioned, much like some decisions can overly alienate the audience or be too niche or in the sake of art, some can also harm the series as an artistic product. I wouldn't want to play a Pillars game that followed a heroic monomyth that's all about beating a big bad behind an army of minions and becoming a god simply because it's what sells, because there's way more interesting things being explored in this setting and games, all in a far more interesting and involving manner. I wouldn't want Pillars to be more like The Witcher or Dragon Age: Origins any more than I'd like Joon-ho Bong to be more like Michael Bay, and in the particular mood and setting they've established with the Pillars universe it would feel plain jarring to introduce overtly sexualized characters, creature types or scenarios all of a sudden.

Regardless, all of this sure as hell isn't due to some completely imagined push away from sexual appeal from the first Pillars to Deadfire the way you're assuming above.

Edited November 19, 2019 by algroth

[thelee]

I feel like literally a lot of the enemy assets were recycled with minor technical upgrades for Deadfire. And yes, all the PCs look much better in Deadfire - before they were all basically what happens if you crank Red Dead Redemption into potato mode.

And I wouldn't spend too much debating @Archaven, it's clear that they're arguing in bad faith. As for them, jesus, just go look at some porn. How can someone be so hard up that they spend so much time analyzing whether or not a spirit known more in fantasy and mythology for dooming people with its wails is adequately sexy or not.

Edited November 19, 2019 by thelee

[Boeroer]

In Deadfire we had bare-naked Mirke. If that didn't draw enough horny players in I don't know what would have...

[Starwars]

I think it's pretty hard to pinpoint why a game does badly in terms of sales, and I'm not entirely sure it's particularly helpful to speculate in it unless you're in the business of... selling games to as many people as you can. I think a large part of why games, or any other media, do good or bad sales-wise is just the way the strange winds of consumerism is blowing. It's not always possible to pinpoint. Sometimes a game is just a dud. It may be a great game, it may be a well known game but... for some reason it's just a dud.

Now, my personal views on Deadfire is that it's a great game overall. However, for me it also feels like it's a game of compromise where the devs from the first game desperately tried to identify the parts of the game that were not well-received and tried to mold the second game into something that was more "appealing" and less offensive in terms of game mechanics to more people. While of course, staying true to the fans of the original. It's been done a million times before. It feels like "we should try and make this, admittedly sort of niche game, appealing to as many as we can" instead of "this is the game we're excited to make, this is the game we're going to make, screw the rest."  To me it took a lot of the feedback about PoE1 and fixed it in the wrong way.

Even though Deadfire is by all means more exotic and "out there" when compared to PoE1, it still feels... less inspired to me, more bland  in a way, less spice to it all, more safe. And if you look at the individual bits, it should not. But it just does.

Still a fantastic game for me, but not as memorable as I would've liked it. Not as memorable at all.

But in terms of sales and all of that stuff, who knows? I think PoE came with the kickstarter craze, the promise of the IE games reborn, all of that stuff. There was hype about it, and I think even people who didn't play the IE games at all, or not much, got caught up in that. Hell yeah, old school is coming back in a new form, woooooo, screw the publishers! With Deadfire, I think all of that had died down a lot. And I guess the  direct sequel may be a hard sell as well, I don't know. But who knows?

 

Edited November 20, 2019 by Starwars

[xzar_monty]

32 minutes ago, Starwars said:

I think a large part of why games, or any other media, do good or bad sales-wise is just the way the strange winds of consumerism is blowing. It's not always possible to pinpoint. Sometimes a game is just a dud. It may be a great game, it may be a well known game but... for some reason it's just a dud.

You hit the nail right on the head. Below is a link to a thorough mathematical study conducted in the movie business. The bottom line is: just as William Goldman once said, no one knows anything. Success is entirely unpredictable, and box office revenues diverge over all scales. This almost certainly applies to games as well, as well as many other consumer products.

 

A quote from the article: We conclude: (1) The studio model of risk management lacks a foundation in theory or evidence and revenue forecasts have zero precision. In other words, "Anything can happen." (2) Movies are complex products and the cascade of information among film-goers during the course of a film's run can evolve along so many paths that it is impossible to attribute the success of a movie to individual causal factors. In other words, "No one knows anything."

 

http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.521.7885&rep=rep1&type=pdf

[IndiraLightfoot]

These two last posts are very sobering too. And, perhaps, we were all so starved for a new party-based isometric CRPG at the time that we has rose-tinted glasses on when playing PoE1 that we really couldn't tell if that was a semi-dud. Funny thing is: When I replay many of the classics I knew I really liked, I'm actually surprised that despite a decade or two, I'm still having so much fun. That, I thought, would be the fault of my old nostalgic pair of rose-tinted glasses, but then again, I'm not sure. It may very well be that since these loved CRPGs often take place in settings that many of us already knew a lot about (thanks to years or decades of corresponding PnP RPGs) that we automatically pad them all with depth and quality fluff - some perfect filler that's nowhere but in our own minds.

[Wormerine]

1 hour ago, IndiraLightfoot said:

And, perhaps, we were all so starved for a new party-based isometric CRPG at the time that we has rose-tinted glasses on when playing PoE1 that we really couldn't tell if that was a semi-dud.

I don’t know about that. Sounds more like my experience with Wasteland2, which I liked much at the time, but couldn’t keep deep into when I tried it couple months ago. I found my first playthrough of PoE1 to be a slog, actually. I did like it mechanically - how they bounced from D&D, but created more flexible, easy to understand system, better suited for real time gameplay. After the good start, I stopped being engaged by it once I reached Defience Bay, with its static feel and the story went all over the place. I took a months long break. The thing which kept me returning to PoE was my friend saying that I should see it to the end, and I trust his judgement. Things picked up when I reached bottom of The Endless Slog of Caed Nua, started White March expansion, started interacting with Gods (which I think should have happened early in the game to give players context they so desperately needed). And then I reached the ending, which put everything in perspective: the odd companion quests left unresolved, seeing how faith in Gods positively and negatively influenced kith, all the plot builds up leading up to the reveal. 

What I really enjoyed are two subsequent playthroughs, when I gained certain competence in gameplay and with knowing where the story leads (and had a better understanding of the lore) I could better appreciate the story and characters. 

that’s why I oppose PoE1 vs PoE2 argument. PoE2 objectively does so many things better: quest design, storytelling, systems, encounters, pacing, art, setting, lore introduction - are all better. But PoE1 felt like it had a point, while PoE2... just ends? and there are those disappointments: like reactivity to PoE1 rarely felt right.

I had better time playing through PoE2 though, but whenever it is because I already cared for the IP or not, I cannot really say.

[Boeroer]

What drew me into PoE1 was the tone. It felt a lot more mature than most RPGish titles at that time. After understanding most of the mechanics after half a playthrough I started again and finished. After that I played a ton more because if you already understood all the poorly documented mechanics you really had to put that to use, else all the effort would have been for nothing, right?

But honestly what keeps me playing PoE and Deadfire the most is this forum. Believe it or not.  

Edited November 20, 2019 by Boeroer

[xzar_monty]

I was also attracted by the tone, and the beginning of the game was, and is, superb, although it is admittedly very dark. But I also admit that there's some evidence for the game being something of a "semi-dud", as @IndiraLightfoot said above. I was never able to get into the faction idea, I felt it was superfluous; Caed Nua was a great idea but felt half-baked in the end, because I felt there were more filler levels than proper levels; some of the stronghold stuff was very poor (especially the prison, and the attacks you could auto-resolve or manually resolve); and because I reached level cap so early, I was never able to become interested in Twin Elms -- there was nothing to gain anymore, so why bother? Also, I thought the "gods are not real" stuff that you got to at Twin Elms was articulated fairly poorly. There was some dodgy writing there, which may have had something to do with being able to choose such dialogue options that things remained quite vague -- does anyone share this experience?

But, it was a good game. No question.

Edited November 20, 2019 by xzar_monty

[IndiraLightfoot]

Yeah, PoE1's rather dark tone and much of the content up until Twin Elms were excellent - except the factions. I couldn't agree more. I avoided them in my first playthrough, going on how I'd like to play, and then I needed that conveniently planted story-driver Madame just in order to leave that town and get further into the game. I'd like to add that for the most part the areas and the dungeons were much more focused and well-packaged as well compared to PoE2 The systems in PoE1 was perhaps more fun to tinker with, but I actually replayed this start I'm rambling on about perhaps 7 times in all - which is a lot, after all. I have a much harder time replaying PoE2, challenges or not.

Edited November 20, 2019 by IndiraLightfoot

[Boeroer]

Agreed. I played Deadfire a lot, but I put twice the hours into PoE despite Deadfire's multiclassing which would suggest that you'd have more motivation to tinker around (which I like doing). Maybe it's the (more) open world approach that does this. I don't like that too much and I think it's a totally overrated concept in CRPGs. You often feel kind of lost and I get demotivated to push forward. 

Edited November 21, 2019 by Boeroer

[xzar_monty]

@Boeroer: Did you play Ultima IV or V, back in the day? (Concerning open world games.)

[Boeroer]

Nope. My first Ultima game was Underworld: the Stygian Abyss.

The first RPG I played with a friend at his house (on a Commodore 1218d) was Pools of Radiance.

My family didn't have a computer until the late 1980s iirc - then we got an IBM  80386 and it was mainly used by my dad who needed it for work. The only game on it was "Alley Cat" and it was already very old. At some point, when the PC got older and it wouldn't be a total disaster if I would infect it with some nasty virus I was allowed to install my own stuff and even install a Soundblaster(TM). My first own game was Eye of the Beholder I believe. It's really non-open world and I loved it. EoB2 was even better.

Edited November 20, 2019 by Boeroer

[daven]

2 hours ago, Boeroer said:

Agreed. I played Deadfire a lot, but I put twice the hours into PoE despite Deadfire's multiclassing which would suggest that you'd have more motivation to tinker around (which I like doing). Maybe it's the (more) open world approach that does this. I don't like that too much and I think it's a totally overrated concept in CRPGs. You often feel kind of lost and I get demotivted to push forward. 

A big flaw of BG2 for me is that there is just so much stuff to do straight away (After initial dungeon). I think some of that content should have been gated behind other quests. And some of the harder ones should have been available after Spellhold.

Breath of the Wild is probably the best example of an open world game... it uses it all to its advantage and doesn't just make it open world for the sake of it because that's what is popular. I think Deadfire would have benefitted from a lot more linearity. I feel like they make some of these games 'open world' just to put that on the features on the advert.

[Boeroer]

I also think it's mostly there because it's popular, not because it's good for the game.

Nobody advertises their games with "And hey: it's totally linear! Yay!"

[xzar_monty]

@Boeroer: Ok, thanks. I was totally enthralled by both Ultima IV and V back in the mid to I guess late 1980s. But of course they were such open world games that it could be troublesome to even figure out what you were supposed to be doing, especially if English wasn't your first language and you were sort of slow to figure out some of the admittedly basic stuff. They remain some of my fondest CRPG memories; in fact they're right there at the top with BG2. I'd say nothing comes even close. (PoE, Deadfire and P:K are all good, though, and for sure were worth playing.)

[Wormerine]

54 minutes ago, Boeroer said:

I also think it's mostly there because it's popular, not because it's good for the game.

Nobody advertises their games with "And hey: it's totally linear! Yay!"

Well, there are benefits to keeping the world open - for one, with bunch of unique items one can plan ahead for the future playthroughs, and not wait for chapter 4 to get weapon they want to use for their build.

Opening Deadfire was a direct response to players complaining about content gating in PoE1 - though personally I feel Obs might have missed the point. While I disliked how content was gated in PoE1, I didn't per say have an issue with it being gated - while certain amount of freedom in exploration is desirable in an RPG, a I do recognise and welcome a need for direction and progression. My problem with PoE1 gating was how artificial it was. For example I loved White March, and it was a much more linear adventure then the base game.

[xzar_monty]

33 minutes ago, Wormerine said:

Well, there are benefits to keeping the world open - for one, with bunch of unique items one can plan ahead for the future playthroughs, and not wait for chapter 4 to get weapon they want to use for their build.

That's true, but it's a strategy used by relatively few players. We've already established that not that many players have completed the game even once. And there is the group of players (like me) who have completed the game and are not interested in meta-gaming in the way you describe, because they want the world to be new -- and once it isn't anymore, it stops being interesting. But note that this is not to deny the benefit you describe; it certainly is there. But it's a niche phenomenon, for a small subgroup of players.

[Gfted1]

I wonder if there is a way to determine the number of copies of PoE that were sold during the kickstart and the number of copies sold after release. Of course the per unit price was not the same but I wouldn't be surprised if the majority were sold during kickstart.

[deserk]

I liked PoE2 much more than PoE1, so I'm a bit perplexed as to why it did worse than PoE1.

But personally I really wish Obsidian would go back to making DnD-based games, like Icewind Dale and Neverwinter Nights. The world of Pillars is alright, but I personally don't find it as compelling as the setting of those past titles. Also I like the mechanics of DnD and the feel of Forgotten Realms, as well as the plethora of monsters, races, faiths, factions and locales (both material plane and beyond) to play around with. With Baldur's Gate 3 being made by Larian, it seems like such a ripe opportunity for Obsidian to make an Icewind Dale 3 (that is at least before WotC potentially hires another studio to do that) or some other Forgotten Realms title. That would truly be nostalgic, in my opinion at least. After all the hopes of many of us fans who helped kickstart these PoE games were for them to make a spiritual successor to Baldur's Gate I-II and Icewind Dale I-II. What if we could get literal sequels instead of figurative ones?

[Wormerine]

4 minutes ago, Gfted1 said:

I wonder if there is a way to determine the number of copies of PoE that were sold during the kickstart and the number of copies sold after release. Of course the per unit price was not the same but I wouldn't be surprised if the majority were sold during kickstart.

Well, there were less then 80k backers, while the game was supposively sell over 1,000,000 copies?