A critic to the unpolished work done by Obsidian

[Belsirk]

TL;DR: This is going to be a rant that basically is focused on the lack of polishing on the finished product for PC from part of Obsidian.

I'm a backer who felt greatly satisfied with PoE1. I have more of 7 characters on said game and had tested multiple variants for some of them. I consider the final version of PoE1 enough good to play it mostly on the vanilla version.

I was more than happy to support the crowdfunding for PoE2. Yet, I was unable to play it until this year. And to my surprise, the current version of the game (V5.0) feels unpolished as if Obsidian just did not have cared about this game after its initial release.

I will try to elaborate my affirmation on three aspects: Dialogues, companions’ quests and the battle system.

Dialogue options are written poorly

Early quests at PoE1 were beautifully written and you had multiple alternatives. E.G. Raedric’s stronghold. However, this doesn’t seem to be the case for PoE2. Once that you leave the first island the quests have issues. A good example is early in the game with my Paladin from the Shieldbearers of St. Elcga order and Zamar the shipwright:

• I can use diplomacy to coerce him into accepting the principi's control over his trade.  
• I can make an aggressive act to protect the merchant from the principi (thus failing my vows).

Therefore, early in the game I was forced into getting an aggressive reputation because there were no more alternatives through the dialogues for favoring Zamar over the principi (not even something like “I just can’t let you do that”). Eventually I even got a second point on said reputation, but I don’t have any idea when it was, so it’s not relevant.

Another notable example of poorly written quests is at the end (WARNING: SPOILERS AHEAD): I had Tekehu, Pallegina and Maia on the party for the final quests with the trade companies and the huana’s queen. With the VTC, Maia protested and I refused the offer. This choice would break my relationship with Pallegina, but I would discover that until I sailed on my ship, not that bad.

The problem is with the events with the RDC and Maia: once I refuse their offer, I’m forced to kill everyone with Maia on the party; zero dialogue from her part at all before or after that battle. I had to kill her brethren on self-defense and the only one who had something to say was Tekehu. This behavior with Maia is even worse on the last battle of the game against Atsura. I was expecting her to betray my party at that point or refusing to help me in the battle. But, nope, she is silently helping to kill her great mentor without any single protest before or after.

It would be a big surprise for me that after installing the DLC I would discover the problem:  I never speak with Maia between the events at RDC and the final battle. Even when there were no indications that I had to talk with her...

Companion quests are buggy

The quest for Aloth is forever stuck for me. Why? Because I explored too much before his quest started.

After only speaking with VTC and the principi, I went to Crookspur and cleaned it from slavers. Suddenly the RDC got control of that island. I would discover much later that this chain of actions would become an automatic fail for talking with the Wahaki's leader.  And because the quest with Whakai failed, once that Aloth’s quest was finally available to me it was too late. AFAIK, this is a bug know from early as V2, and it is still in the game.

I even got a buggy situation on the last DLC where I only battled once with the Wael's oracle and I had conversations with NPCs that were not on the screen. First time playing the DLC and I screwed it, just because I didn't pick a single item from a shelf…

There are more quests with bugs easy to trigger or big inconsistencies, but those two bugs are the best representatives of this issue.

The battle system has serious bugs

I’m not speaking about the battle mechanics per se.  Moving from PoE1 to PoE2 is like moving from D&D 3.x to 5.0.  That is all. I'm speaking about proper bugs on the battle system.

I personally prefer real time approach over turn-based one. And, I also play on Path of the Damned setting. Eventually I started to try my luck with the mega-bosses and then I discovered it: Potions are bugged, they just don’t work on battle if an A.I. is active. Plus, your characters can get stuck in an infinite animation in the middle of the battle randomly. Probably I fell victim of those bugs on previous battles, but I was able to mitigate it. Still, at the end, I was forced to make strategies for mitigating the bugs… yey!

Conclusion

On brief, quests are poorly written, they have serious bugs and the battle system is strongly bugged. Frankly, I suspect those bugs will be left unsolved, thus I lost my respect for Obsidian. Not more support from my part to them in any form.

Sure, PoE2 main bugs can be solved with mods created by the community. Yet, Obsidian ended its support for the game with serious issues in its core and even with simple bugs that were known from long time ago.

P.S. Of course, If I’m wrong and Obsidian eventually fixes the bugs, at least the battle system, I would consider my words. But  it’s not going to happen, they will  release some more patches for the Nintendo Switch console and that is all.

[Haljamar]

Obsidian walked away from it after the 5.0 release. Any further bugs you'll have to take up with the publisher.

[Gizmo]

9 hours ago, Haljamar said:

Obsidian walked away from it...

That's a shame to learn.

I've had it installed since its release, but have not yet played it past the initial scene with climbing onto the ship. So it's still got bugs and design flaws?

Edited May 12, 2020 by Gizmo

[Boeroer]

Which game hasn't? They patched it with 5 major patches (PoE only got 3) and they did 3 fairly big DLCs. 

You have to "walk away" from a game at some point. You can't patch it forever because it makes no sense to patch a game that barely nobody's playing anymore. There's no shame in that.

There are still some things that should have been fixed and OP has valid points, but the bugs are not gamebreaking and there are not that many and the game is absolutely playable and fun (at least on PC).

 

[Elric Galad]

19 minutes ago, Gizmo said:

That's a shame to learn.

I've had it installed since its release, but have not yet played it past the initial scene with climbing onto the ship. So it's still got bugs and design flaws?

Most games end up with a couple bugs and design flaws, including the old legendary BG2.

I can't speak about console port but the PC version is pretty OK for me.

There's a couple of buggy abilities (respec help, you might even consider using my mod : shameless adverstising : https://forums.obsidian.net/topic/114861-balance-polishing-mod-release-10/) and a couple of bugged quests (a total of 1 in my last playthrough), but nothing gamebreaking in my own experience.

[Elric Galad]

18 minutes ago, Boeroer said:

Which game hasn't? They patched it with 5 major patches (PoE only got 3) and they did 3 fairly big DLCs. 

To be honnest, they could even have walked away before, given the disappointing sales. They even introduced subclasses that weren't even planned, or new ranger abilities because players found them a bit lacking.

[Belsirk]

9 hours ago, Boeroer said:

Which game hasn't? They patched it with 5 major patches (PoE only got 3) and they did 3 fairly big DLCs. 

sure, but you don't leave the battle mechanics broken at its core. Not be able to drink potions is just too big to let it pass. It's not an uber spell or an ability of a class that is broken. It's something that affects all the long battles for all the characters.  And  as far as I can see on the forums, those bugs were known before  the last patch done by Obsidian (E.g. Aloth's quest).

As I said originally,  with mods from the community most of those things will be mitigated. But  the decay  from PoE1 to PoE2 was amazing for me.  Obsidian had a safety net from the successes of the crowd-funding for developing the game, yet it seems they never focused too much on this game.

9 hours ago, Elric Galad said:

There's a couple of buggy abilities (respec help, you might even consider using my mod : shameless adverstising : https://forums.obsidian.net/topic/114861-balance-polishing-mod-release-10/) and a couple of bugged quests (a total of 1 in my last playthrough), but nothing gamebreaking in my own experience.

Thanks!  It seems to be a very good starting point to see  for options for future replays 

18 hours ago, Haljamar said:

Obsidian walked away from it after the 5.0 release. Any further bugs you'll have to take up with the publisher.

Yeah, I had a similar  impression due the last patches are  only for consoles.

[Boeroer]

To be fair they developed Deadfire pretty quickly. Also the whole mechanics got changed from PoE to Deadfire during that rather short period. Maybe that's why some things feel hasted. 

Potions are no problem as long as you don't use AI or don't drink them manually with AI on. I know: still not ok, but it's a bug that is circumventable. No idea why that's still in though. Seems to have been a difficult fix.

Aloth's bug doesn't get encountered often so I guess it had a low priority. 

[AeonsLegend]

Some of the issues are scripting issues or something like that. This means that a reload of a save might actually prevent the issue from resurfacing. I never ran into the issues reported here. The Zamar quest line can be solved differently as well. If you simply accept to help him you can deal with the baddies any which way.

[thelee]

On 5/11/2020 at 2:54 PM, Belsirk said:

A good example is early in the game with my Paladin from the Shieldbearers of St. Elcga order and Zamar the shipwright:

• I can use diplomacy to coerce him into accepting the principi's control over his trade.  
• I can make an aggressive act to protect the merchant from the principi (thus failing my vows).

Therefore, early in the game I was forced into getting an aggressive reputation because there were no more alternatives through the dialogues for favoring Zamar over the principi

this is less forced than you think - there are more options than that, but it sounds like you got into a dialogue tree that limited your options. (i say this having played tons of priests of different alignment and managing to not messing up roleplay dispositions). in general, there are many resolutions to quests, even if the choice can be binary how you get there might have flexible nuance. however, to your point, this is not always telegraphed to the player very clearly, so sometimes i've found out to avoid a forced choice just by reloading an earlier save and doing something subtly (i quicksave aggressively).

 

On 5/11/2020 at 2:54 PM, Belsirk said:

Potions are bugged, they just don’t work on battle if an A.I. is active.

this is one that really grates on me. If you played Deadfire earlier, this was rock-solid. Then they added turn-based mode (4.0 or so) and clearly didn't have the right testing or staffing for it, because they broke a lot of things that used to work. It annoyed me that however rock-solid Deadfire consumable usage was versus PoE1 (which even soft-locked my game on a few occasions), now it's almost as bad. I'm sure they thought turn-based mode was some sort of hail mary to boost sales or interest, but I'm really annoyed at how much existing stuff they broke, and how while they fixed a lot they still left like 5-10% of the regressions unfixed by the time the final 5.0 patch landed. Before 4.0 i never worried about toggling AI, now I literally have it as a hotkey just to help use potions.

Edited May 14, 2020 by thelee

[Belsirk]

First, and most important. Sorry for my long silence

> The Zamar quest line can be solved differently as well. If you simply accept to help him you can deal with the baddies any which way.

 

On 5/13/2020 at 10:28 AM, AeonsLegend said:

The Zamar quest line can be solved differently as well. If you simply accept to help him you can deal with the baddies any which way.

Yes, That quest can be solved in any way. However, AFAIK it's only offering diplomatic approach for coercing and an aggressive approach for protecting. You don't have a rational, passionate, cruel or even neutral approaches. It sucks if your class can be affected negatively by those approaches This didn't happen that easily on PoE1.

 

On 5/14/2020 at 8:19 PM, thelee said:

this is less forced than you think - there are more options than that, but it sounds like you got into a dialogue tree that limited your options. (i say this having played tons of priests of different alignment and managing to not messing up roleplay dispositions). in general, there are many resolutions to quests, even if the choice can be binary how you get there might have flexible nuance

Uh ? Truly?!  I didn't show  any non-reachable conversation options  But then, that is good to know   On my next run I'll analyze that quest on more detail

 

On 5/14/2020 at 8:19 PM, thelee said:

Before 4.0 i never worried about toggling AI, now I literally have it as a hotkey just to help use potions.

Yeah, and this is truly annoying 
 

[thelee]

20 hours ago, Belsirk said:

Uh ? Truly?!  I didn't show  any non-reachable conversation options  But then, that is good to know   On my next run I'll analyze that quest on more detail

an example here is the beach you wake up on. if you go get beodul first, you'll be forced into an aggressive option to tell him to get out of the cave. even with all UI options enabled, there doesn't appear to be any other dialogue choice.

if, however, you go rescue the other pirate stuck on the ship first, she'll create a fire, and when you go to rescue beodul, you'll have an extra, non-aggressive option to tell him to go wait by the fire. 

i'm guessing because that option isn't linked to a skill or background or class or stat, it doesn't count for "show unqualified interactions", but it definitely exists.

 

but again, to your point, such things are not telegraphed well to the player. but suffice to say i don't think i've ever played a priest variant where i was truly forced into an uncharacteristic dialogue option (this does mean giving up on certain "optimal" quest resolutions, though).

Edited May 26, 2020 by thelee

[uuuhhii]

it is obvious obsidian put effort on the wrong focus in the first district of neketaka

judging by the day night cycle a few character have and one of few quest that run on a timer

and the disposition system still barely work

most writing in deadfire are much better then most of poe main game

and have much less awful watcher soul reading vision text

Edited June 7, 2020 by uuuhhii

[Boeroer]

The "awful watcher soul reading vision text" of PoE are background stories that backers send in who got an NPC for their pledge. Naturally the quality of those texts may vary. Besides that there isn't more "soul reading" than in Deadfire. Backer NPCs have golden name plates while genuine NPCs have silver ones - so you can tell them apart.

How could you determine whether the writing of Deadfire was better or worse than that of PoE?

[uuuhhii]

 

23 hours ago, Boeroer said:

The "awful watcher soul reading vision text" of PoE are background stories that backers send in who got an NPC for their pledge. Naturally the quality of those texts may vary. Besides that there isn't more "soul reading" than in Deadfire. Backer NPCs have golden name plates while genuine NPCs have silver ones - so you can tell them apart.

How could you determine whether the writing of Deadfire was better or worse than that of PoE?

those text awful because they are hard to read

much fewer in deadfire

certainly a improvement

in poe the main character motive for pursuing main story are pointless nonsense

no matter how much writers carefully cultivate bleak atmosphere it will always be much worse than deadfire

[Boeroer]

1 hour ago, uuuhhii said:

those text awful because they are hard to read

much fewer in deadfire

certainly a improvement

You judge quality of writing based on the amount of words - the less text you have to read the better the quality.

So... Hyper Light Drifter is your candidate for best game writing of 2016?

[uuuhhii]

9 hours ago, Boeroer said:

You judge quality of writing based on the amount of words - the less text you have to read the better the quality.

So... Hyper Light Drifter is your candidate for best game writing of 2016?

those are not hard to read because they are long

because those awful watcher soul reading vision text are half translucent

how does one come to the conclusion that those text are awful because they are long?

[Boeroer]

13 hours ago, uuuhhii said:

those text awful because they are hard to read

much fewer in deadfire

 

2 hours ago, uuuhhii said:

how does one come to the conclusion that those text are awful because they are long?

Yeah, totally wild conclusion... 

[uuuhhii]

7 minutes ago, Boeroer said:

 

Yeah, totally wild conclusion... 

there are far less awful watcher soul reading vision text in the deadfire except some memory leak of serafen

fewer occasion these text appear not how long each are

but of of cause shorter bad text and more good text will be better

[ekt0]

I agree with OP. Obsidian ditched Pillars of Eternity 2 : Deadfire too soon. By the time they walked away from this game, it was about only 1 and a half year after initial release.

I do not expect game developers to forever patch their games, but you cannot justify this reason by leaving the game behind so soon too. It is called responsibility.

Someone might stand for them with the reason that they do not have any resource to patch Pillars of Eternity 2 : Deadfire anymore. To some extent, I agree and disagree. I do not believe that currently Obsidian workers and developers do not have any spare time at all (I mean 0 minute / week spare time) for patching the game. There is time but they just do not want to spend it on fixing bugs.

If Obsidian has resource issue, I think they should look at Stardew Valley. There is only 1 person creating that game and I see that he keeps working on the game until now. The new patches have been released for free which including bug fixes.

Again, I want to emphasize my point, the game was released on May 8, 2018. Today is June 25, 2020. Latest patch 5.0.xx was released on ?

[Boeroer]

The problem is that Deadfire barely made any money. Too few players bought it. So patching it forever is burning money with a game that not that many people wanted to play in the first place.

Stardew Valley is a completely different story. That one developer gained so much money with its huge success that there's enough budget to patch it until the sun burns out I guess... Also the motivation is different: if you see that millions of players still play your game then it's obviously less of a discussion wether the game should still receive updates or not.

See PoE in comparison which sold better than Deadfire and was updated for a longer period of time. 

Edited June 26, 2020 by Boeroer

[Belsirk]

On 6/25/2020 at 5:35 PM, Boeroer said:

The problem is that Deadfire barely made any money. Too few players bough it. So patching it forever is burning money with a game that not that many people wanted to play in the first place.

And yet they bet by adding the turn-based based  mode which screwed the original one  permanently in the process.  If they invest like that  after the support lifetime,   they should at least guarantee the original mode was free of new serious bugs. 

And PoE1 & PoE2 were lesser risk as the main financial come from crow-funding (probably more the first one as I remember they were saying they had already a big save for the second one ).

[Wormerine]

On 6/26/2020 at 6:40 PM, Belsirk said:

And PoE1 & PoE2 were lesser risk as the main financial come from crow-funding (probably more the first one as I remember they were saying they had already a big save for the second one ).

Well, I wouldn't say that - PoE1 was made when the company was in danger of closing doors, and then PoE2 budget far exceeded crowdfunding money. Also half of fig money were investments, which I believe need to be paid back as game sells. At the same time, they were also working on Outer Worlds, which was a bigger project then Deadfire. 

Edited August 3, 2020 by Wormerine

[darkling.lithely]

The game's not perfect. So what? There are problems, but how many things did this game get right? There are lots of parts to this game. Lots of parts that are spot on too.

And obviously you enjoyed it because you didn't just finish the game once but are commenting about another play-though.

[Belsirk]

On 8/7/2020 at 12:23 AM, darkling.lithely said:

The game's not perfect. So what? There are problems, but how many things did this game get right?

I'm not saying the game is trash . I'm saying that I'm disappointed with Obsidian work.   With this thread I discovered that  Obsidian screwed their battle mechanical at  the  very end  of their support.  It was not bugged like this before  of it. That is just...  special.

Anyway, the  conclusion for me is very simple: Not more support to Obsidian from my part:  not pre-order, not crowdfunding  backer. And just buying  their games with discounts if they are of my interest.