Old school Tabletop, BG, IWD gamer who still loves POE and Deadfire

[Pseudechis]

Its been a couple of years now but I keep coming back to POE and POE2 Deadfire.

I especially enjoy Deadfire and I'm perplexed as to why it wasn't more popular.

Eora is a brilliantly fleshed out world with a very real and believable level of story charater and depth. The main plot is subdued and subtle like a good film rather than the typical over the top epic where you are the centre of the universe. While you can smash your way through the main story fairly quickly, the world itself gives great sense of scale, everytime I play it I find some extra lil thing that I missed the previous play through, or interacts differently because of history choices or disposition. Its remarkably rewarding.

I like the story book style scripted interactions they create a narritive feel. 

I also like the ship combat, its fun, simple but fun. Its also different and something that I haven't seen in a iso RPG before. I think its great and for those that don't it has the option to bypass it, so you're not even forced to partake in it if you don't want to. As a principi pirate though I go around raiding every merchant I can find. People hate on it and I just don't get why. Yeah it could have been something more complex or compelling but its a side game not the main event and does that role well.  

Deadfire stands out in particular because its not the typical fantasy tropes. High fantasy suffers from a lord of the rings obsession. Tolkien was great but the fantasy genre has been so tied up in re-creating it that games are almost an insufferable collection of tired cliches at this point. 

Deadfire's setting is refreshing. I wish there were more fantasy games set in an age of exploration type world. (Greedfall is another that comes to mind). I get there are some pitfalls with this setting as a lot of the inequalities in the world were born out of the age of colonialism. How is this any different though from the slavery, exploitation and religious oppression of the dark ages where most high fantasy is set. When done well it creates a compelling and conflicted world that Eora has captured beautifully. The factions are all very believable.  

 The idea of a mobile stronghold in the form of your ship is great too and I just wish there were more uncharted islands to find, explore and name. 

I'd love to see POE 3 but given how POE2 was recieved it probably won't happen and that really bums me out because frankly pillars of eternity 1 and 2 are the best RPG games I've played since BG1, 2 and IWD. 

I just wanted to post up a thanks for an awesome game and say don't give up on it because I'd love to see more isometric adventures set in the world of Eora.   

[thelee]

On 12/10/2021 at 11:25 AM, Pseudechis said:

I'd love to see POE 3 but given how POE2 was recieved it probably won't happen and that really bums me out because frankly pillars of eternity 1 and 2 are the best RPG games I've played since BG1, 2 and IWD. 

yeah, i unironically put deadfire as probably my pinnacle video game RPG. i keep hoping that someone internally cracks the puzzle of low initial sales and inspires MSFT to invest a bit of money into poe3, before current mindshare of poe2's engine becomes stale. they already did so much of the work on the engine, they could spend a lot more time on the design and the polish and get great value out of it (much like how WotR leverages a bunch of work owlcat did with P:K or bioware did with the successive dragon age games). Even *within* Deadfire, you can tell how much more they were able to do with the engine just based on the DLC alone - I thought FS had some great set pieces both for combat (I really loved the positioning challenges of the security system fight, for example) and dungeon-exploring, way past anything in the base game. Even BoW (the first DLC) had just a much better design sense and a tighter narrative than the base game.

Edited December 12, 2021 by thelee

[Boeroer]

I doubt that MS wants to see the use of Unity3D again - but maybe they don't care. 

Performance-wise it's not the best choice for such a big game with so many components/prefabs etc.

Maybe one can polish this up, I'm not an expert with Unity3D, only dabbled around with it. 

But they should def. write down the systems/mechanics they had in Deadfire into a dev's handbook. They feel really good right now (for the biggest part) and it would be a shame if somebody thought the wheel has to be reinvented yet again. 

There could be more interaction between effects (like affliction/inspiration but also truly and more cleanly implemented for fire/water poison/antidote and so on) and generally a bit cleanup (see stacking of Mirrored Images + Moonwell/Refreshing Defense/Llengrath's Safeguard and so on, modals being actives etcpp).

But besides that I would love to see them focus on everything else but not systems again.

 

 

[xzar_monty]

On 12/11/2021 at 9:50 AM, Boeroer said:

They feel really good right now (for the biggest part) and it would be a shame if somebody thought the wheel has to be reinvented yet again.

After all that trouble that Eothas went to, it would definitely be a huge shame.

Sorry, I just couldn't resist.

[Boeroer]

Just assume that puns are always intended.  

[kanisatha]

On 12/11/2021 at 2:50 AM, Boeroer said:

But they should def. write down the systems/mechanics they had in Deadfire into a dev's handbook. They feel really good right now (for the biggest part) and it would be a shame if somebody thought the wheel has to be reinvented yet again.

^This. So this.

I think the amount of time the devs had to devote to tinkering with and balancing the mechanics may be is what took away from some other critical parts of the game. So lock down the mechanics; don't keep reopening that can of worms. Put the focus of game development into the story, world, characters, etc.