Why has PoE2 been sold so badly?

[IST]

On 3/7/2020 at 9:05 PM, Boeroer said:

The end of what? Your posting career? Come on, it barely started!

Why did people like PoE then - which is far more dark and gritty and has a lot more text to read - and doesn't even have a lot of VO?

 

 

 

After going back to PoE1 whilst waiting.for the PS4 PoE2 next patch, it's so stark the difference in voice acting, quality of.combat and such- the only thing PoE1 does possibly better is story, but that's cause I like darker plot.

[Climhazzard]

It's a shame because the story leaves room for a 3rd game, but now we'll probably never get to experience it.  

I personally consider it and PoE must haves for CRPG fans.  But I guess a lot of people were lost on the first game.  

[Biberon]

First, excuse me for my bad english.

I know that in my country (france), the traduction and localization was so bad that almost all players just throw the game and never played it again. 

That was a very bad lunch, and people saying "don't buy this game it is unfinished". Devs didn't even start the game in french or german. From the main menu you could tell that something was wrong.

POE wants you to read, a lot, and you can't just spit to your european customers and think everybody is going to buy it. A shame, I loved POE and I was thinking it was the future of "BG style" games.

[xzar_monty]

1 hour ago, Biberon said:

I know that in my country (france), the traduction and localization was so bad that almost all players just throw the game and never played it again.

This is a good point. As has been said before, the general consensus is that Obsidian's translations for Deadfire were terrible, just absolutely awful and useless. There's a twofold problem here: for the translation-using player him/herself, the translation looks like an insult, a spit in the face, because it is so poor. And for some of the rest of us looking at this from the outside, the translations are a huge hit on Obsidian's credibility, for clearly the company didn't know what it was doing.

Edited April 18, 2020 by xzar_monty

[Boeroer]

I wouldn't say useless or even awful (looking at the German localisation), but it wasn't all that good.

You can tell that the translation studio didn't have all the context it needed. I guess you'd have to know the lore and play the game first (and I mean thoroughly) in order to be able to translate it properly. If translations take place in a vacuum (so to speak) you'll end up with weirdness, especially in a complex fantasy (or scifi) setting where you have oozes, sporelings and whatnot.  

Can't say anything about the other langages, although I heard from some Russians that the Russian one was quite poor as well. 

I personally wouldn't have done any localisation but gave the community good mod support for coming up with their own ones.

Localisation is such a pain in the backside - it also prevents adding content later, precise tooltips and descriptions because you have to fixate all that (and keep it vague) before the game goes out to the translators. 

I would also include good mod support for adding custom VO. 

Edited April 18, 2020 by Boeroer

[xzar_monty]

You're right in saying that the quality of translations will (quite naturally) vary -- but I haven't heard anywhere that any of them was actually good. And that's quite poor.

Your other arguments are rather sound as well. Translation is a field that I really know a lot about, and the way computer game companies tend to go about it just doesn't make for good results. You describe some of the reasons quite well. If I were Obsidian or any other game company, I would just forget about translations, unless I had a lot money and time and trustworthy people I could give the job to.

[Biberon]

2 hours ago, Boeroer said:

You can tell that the translation studio didn't have all the context it needed. I guess you'd have to know the lore and play the game first (and I mean thoroughly) in order to be able to translate it properly. If translations take place in a vacuum (so to speak) you'll end up with weirdness, especially in a complex fantasy (or scifi) setting where you have oozes, sporelings and whatnot.  

I agree the translation studio didn't have what they needed to work, obviously. But it's part of Obsi work to 1- give them the right tools to work and 2- at least look at what have been done.

We're talking here of main menu mistranslation, false tooltips, different skills having the same name, bad traduction in the story (especially vaccum)... 

Immersion  is realy important in a crpg game, and reading is a lot of time in POE. The first feelings are very important and once you have done so bad, it is difficult to make the way back.

I made 4-5 people buying POE, 0 buying POE2. 

One good thing, the main story plot was not so badly translate, but if you can't understand a game and the mechanics, you don't realy care of the plot because you can't enjoy your game.

[Guest 4ward]

On 3/15/2020 at 5:13 PM, Morrydwen said:

I have honestly no clue why this game sold so badly. I absolutely loved BG 2 (which I prefer over BG 1 and both classic Fallouts). It was only in 2018 that I managed to get  a time slot to play POE 1.

Also for TC: Might and Magic 6 >>>>>>>>>>>>> Might and Magic 7

back then there was no fortnite… there’s no way to explain my nephew to stop playing fortnite with his friends… no way.. it’s a drug. I would be interested in a further installment, there’s still a good amount of single-players out there and these kind of games i’d guess don’t take up that many resources. My preferences are still the same, no rotating camera, hand-drawn graphics as much possible, good writing. We just need a game that feeds our imagination. I never finished the pillars games, the first one … didn’t sit well with me and the second one for me was a better game, just i stopped because of summer vacation and didn’t find the motivatioon to pick it up again.

I’ll post my points out of pure boredom anyway

-Philosophical aspects in a story are ok like dream sequences in the baldurs games or riddles in e.g. spellhold, just the main motivation should be more captivating, personal

-More npcs with backstories;

-More interesting effects like invisibilty and thus cooler enemies and fights; i really have respect for enemies who go invisible and are even hasted on top of that

-The need for more countering of a.m. effects

-Allow us to do silly things if we want; part of charm and cult status of the old games is that players figured out fake talk strategies, running in and out of combat..

-More potions please; what casters cast, fighters drink

-It sounds strange, but i’d like more restrictions to differ the classes a bit. The less jack-of-all trades, the more interesting a party for me is…

I know thats a very general list oft hings, but well that’s just off the top  of my head… stay healthy

On 3/1/2020 at 7:28 PM, Madscientist said:

https://forums.obsidian.net/topic/112610-armchair-theories-on-why-poe2-didnt-sell-super-well/

Here you get 13 pages of speculation what other people think about it.

13 is unlucky number, won't post there..

[AeonsLegend]

3 minutes ago, 4ward said:

back then there was no fortnite… there’s no way to explain my nephew to stop playing fortnite with his friends… no way.. it’s a drug.

Once governments start listening to research proving the immense negative side effects of social media and online gaming on young people we may eventually get rid of it. I will probably not live to see it unfortunately. But I sure as hell will vote for anything banning these things.

[Boeroer]

Fortnite can't be the reason for Deadfire to sell badly - because D:OS II (which was released after Fortnite) sold over 5 million copies right before Deadfire came out.

Granted: it has an online multiplayer mode as well, so...  

[Guest 4ward]

i didn’t know that DOS2 sold that well, i’m a little bit sceptical about sales numbers in general though… e.g. judging from this wiki list DOS2 sold only 1 million, in comparison BG2 sold 2 million, i don’t know how accurate this is though. Fortnite came out just couple months before DOS2 and i believe that fortnite really grew more and more popular over time. I’m thinking why have they decided to call their next game BG3 instead of DOS3? My nephew really grew addicted to fortnite since a year or so, before that he played it but it wasn’t such a problem. It’s only when he discovered the fun when playing with friends in the creative free mode instead of solo or duo with someone he didn’t knew that it became a drug. It’s not really that much in playing the game, it’s more in communicating / chatting with school friends.

[Boeroer]

D:OS 2 passed 1 million sold copies in November 2017. It was released in September of the same year. That was the Windows version only.

After that it came out for MacOS, Linux, XBox, Playstation and Switch (last release was Mai 2019). Fortnite was already very popular then. ~5 Million seems to be absolutely plausible and correct (read it like three days ago) and so may be the statement that the popularity of Fortnite can't be the sole reason for dwindling sales numbers of any CRPG.

Afaik Deadfire didn't even sell 200K on PC (that's based on the return that investors got from fig.co). I don't know the current numbers - now that it is out on consoles.

Funny: in the last few weeks PoE as well as Deadfire surged a bit on Steam again (ergo PC version). Maybe because of all the lockdowns and people having more time for games. CRPGs ususally take some time to dive into.

Edited April 20, 2020 by Boeroer

[xzar_monty]

20 minutes ago, Boeroer said:

Funny: in the last few weeks PoE as well as Deadfire surged a bit on Steam again (ergo PC version). Maybe because of all the lockdowns and people having more time for games. CRPGs ususally take some time to dive into.

CRPGs, like high-quality literature, appear to have certainly taken a hit from the way many people's lifestyle has changed in the 2000s. This is just a statement, no blaming implied.

Edited April 20, 2020 by xzar_monty

[Boeroer]

You think? As I said: D:OS2 sold 5 million copies. Witcher series sold over 40 million (Witcher 3 alone: 28 million). Skyrim alone: 30 million. That's pretty insane.
Baldur's Gate sold about 5 million copies by now (including the enhanced editions). If you mean CRPGs are only party based isometric titles for you then maybe you're right.

Also D&D is more popular than ever it seems. That's not a CRPG but a TTRPG - but it also takes a lot of time. 

If you exchange CRPG with theater, opera, church, classical concerts and so on then I would agree.  But I didn't do any research whatsoever - just a feeling. 

No idea about "high quality" literature since that's not really a finely outlined thing. However - nowadays more people are writing books than ever. Doesn't necessarily mean that the result is a higher quality on average of course. But stuff like Atonement, Oblivion and Gilead didn't seem to be so bad. Not that I read them.  Wait... Atonement I actually did read.

[AeonsLegend]

I think classical single player CRPGs as we know them will die out with GenZ. Those people want fortnite and crap like that. Enjoy it while it lasts. Everything will be open world, loot chests, micro transactions and social interactions. That's not to say that there won't be people that want a game like this, but they will be too few for any company to invest in. If it's not going to make a company money they won't build it.

I'm not really sure on the demographics, but I have the distinct feeling that games like these are predominantly played by 30-60 year old white males. While we are alive, we will buy the games, but in 20-30 years... who knows.

Also marketing and such helps. I recall Fallout 4 vs New Vegas. Even though New Vegas now has some sort of awkward cult following and is deemed to be many times better than Fallout 4. People seem to ignore that New Vegas sold as many copies in the first year as Fallout 4 did in the first week.

Edited April 20, 2020 by AeonsLegend

[xzar_monty]

1 hour ago, AeonsLegend said:

I think classical single player CRPGs as we know them will die out with GenZ.

Given that computer games have only been around for a generation or so (a bit more, if a generation is approximately 30 years), talking about generations is perhaps a bit bombastic here. Besides, many game types have already died out. When was the last time anyone made a text adventure, for instance? They used to be a thing, and some of them had some pretty nice things in them.

In my view, there have been less than ten really good CRPGs, but I'm really happy for all of them. So let's see: Ultima IV, Ultima V, Ultima VI, Dungeon Master, Baldur's Gate II, PoE, Deadfire, Pathfinder: Kingmaker. That's everything of real value the genre has produced since 1985, in my view.

[Wormerine]

4 hours ago, Boeroer said:

If you exchange CRPG with (...) classical concerts and so on then I would agree.

[kanisatha]

We will get a sense of whether classic, old-school, single-player cRPGs are on their way out when Obsidian announces its next big game (TOW2 and Grounded excluded).

[Boeroer]

I have the feeling the next games from Obsidian will be no CRPGs in the classical sense. We will most likely see TOW2 and Josh's project (which is non-violent and thus also not a classic CRPG). Also he seems to be the only writer so maybe it isn't very big in the first place.

Edited April 21, 2020 by Boeroer

[Guest Ontarah]

I already posted this in another thread but I'll cross post it here.  I think it didn't do well because it failed to retain a critical mass of new players interested in RTwP RPGs that POE1 managed to attract.  The "I love the pants off Infinity Engine games and I want to keep playing games like that forever" crowd is not sufficient to maintain this type of game indefinitely without new blood. 

And the people I have personally talked to who tried POE1 and noped off of it hard (which admittedly is only a handful) all said the same thing which amounted to  "The game is impossible to play in anything above hold my hand mode without learning the ruleset through and through and that hard-to-learn, unintiutive ruleset can go f*** itself."

My opinion is a watered down version of this.  I pushed through these games based pretty much 100% on Infinity Engine nostalgia.  I'm glad I did it but without that fuel I probably would have noped out as well.   

A hard truth in this is that people don't want to play on Easy mode.  Maybe they should get over themselves, but most people won't just get over themselves and play on easy.  They will just not play at all and the devs won't get their money.    

Edited April 21, 2020 by Ontarah

[xzar_monty]

13 hours ago, Ontarah said:

And the people I have personally talked to who tried POE1 and noped off of it hard (which admittedly is only a handful) all said the same thing which amounted to  "The game is impossible to play in anything above hold my hand mode without learning the ruleset through and through and that hard-to-learn, unintiutive ruleset can go f*** itself."

This is peculiar. When I started POE1, I quite obviously knew nothing about the ruleset. I played the game on the Classic mode (or Normal or whatever the name was: the not easy and not hard mode anyway), and there was nothing impossible about the game. The bear encounter in the cave was too difficult to do alone and at low level, but the guy who told me about the cave did explicitly say that to me as well. So I went back later at a higher level and with a bigger group and did just fine. The first Forest Lurker encounter was very difficult, but again: I retreated and came back later.

After a certain point, the only thing that was really difficult was the Adra Dragon.

I also didn't find the ruleset hard to learn or unintuitive, but this is of course very subjective.

[uuuhhii]

12 minutes ago, xzar_monty said:

This is peculiar. When I started POE1, I quite obviously knew nothing about the ruleset. I played the game on the Classic mode (or Normal or whatever the name was: the not easy and not hard mode anyway), and there was nothing impossible about the game. The bear encounter in the cave was too difficult to do alone and at low level, but the guy who told me about the cave did explicitly say that to me as well. So I went back later at a higher level and with a bigger group and did just fine. The first Forest Lurker encounter was very difficult, but again: I retreated and came back later.

After a certain point, the only thing that was really difficult was the Adra Dragon.

I also didn't find the ruleset hard to learn or unintuitive, but this is of course very subjective.

the system poe used are certainly more suited for video game and much easier to learn then antique rule many older crpg used

but it doesn't have the experienced and nostalgic player base old ruleset have

[Guest 4ward]

i disagree, BG2 was my first game (played it before BG1) and i did only need to play the tutorial to learn the basics and also that a sword +2 is better than sword +1 and to reduce armor class value as much possible. Never read a single line from D&D rulebook and had more than a dozen playthroughs.

Obsidian did try to analyze why players didn’t finish the first pillars and they made changes to pillars2. But, imho, I would say that open-world is a problem when areas are disconnected. (BG1 had similar structure but areas were more connected, like cloakwood forest, mines etc. and in Bg2 the fewer areas had massive content to explore) Pillars2 offered an even more open-world concept with repeating content, and imo a weaker story (but for me it did improve in other areas; the quests were better imo; my favourite thing was exploring the narrows through the drawings).

[xzar_monty]

6 minutes ago, 4ward said:

But, imho, I would say that open-world is a problem when areas are disconnected. (BG1 had similar structure but areas were more connected, like cloakwood forest, mines etc.

I don't think this comparison works. In other words, I think that the open world in BG1 was a lot more haphazard than it is in Deadfire. You are quite correct that some areas are connected, but the same holds true for Deadfire as well. The bigger problem in BG1 (and the problem that makes BG1 by far and away the worst of these four games, i.e BG1, BG2, PoE, Deadfire) is that many of the maps have almost nothing of interest in them. There's so much scenery where nothing or almost nothing never happens. This is extremely poor -- and this is precisely the problem that was fixed in BG2 to stunning effect.

You say that Pillars2 has "repeating content". What do you mean by this? What is the content that repeats?

[Guest 4ward]

Last time i played Bg1 is 10 yrs away and i only made 1 playthrough – the areas were more memorable to me even though there wasn’t much content. I remember just off the top of my head: area with the caster and chicken, area with the girl and the cat, area with meeting drizzt, area with the sculptor, area with the ankheg lair, and so on and forth… few content but memorable, more than pillars1 imo.

What i meant with repeating content is repetitive exploration: land on island, loot (incl. eventual random encounter), go back to ship and set sails. Granted, it’s been like 2 yrs i played deadfire but i felt that quite a number of islands were the same.

( It didn't help that ship encounters were also repetitive)