Jeff Vogel vs Pillars of Eternity

[Jimmious]

Am I correct to assume that the guy that has created masterpieces like Avernum 1,2,3,4,5,6 and Geneforge 1,2,3,4,5 is criticizing the oh-so mediocre Pillars of Eternity? Because he obviously knows how to create non-generic, not boring at all RPGs.

 

[Kruno]

Just out of curiosity, how was he wrong on Steam pricing?

 

[Sizzle]

Jimmious Geneforge isn't generic at all, quite the opposite.

Vogel can turn out a good setting, his problems (nowadays) are that he's constantly trying to streamline his games (as evident in the solutions he offered in this article), because he feels he has to capture the ever-elusive modern RPG crowd.

That's why his last few games - the Avadon series - are riddled with his attempts to get closer to that market. So, instead of focusing on quality combat encounters and character building, he wastes his energy on companion relationships.

 

[Lhynn]

Vogel made exile and geneforge, this gives him the right to criticize anyone and anything within the genre, and they should listen.
He may be old, tired, and misguided, but he gave too much to cRPG fans to be ignored.

 

[Jimmious]

Meh...never liked his games. I tried a lot of times to get into them... But they look bad and they play way too slowly. I don't think he can criticize such productions just because he keeps churning the same game out constantly

 

[Chaotic_Heretic]

Vogel made exile and geneforge, this gives him the right to criticize anyone and anything within the genre, and they should listen.
He may be old, tired, and misguided, but he gave too much to cRPG fans to be ignored.

Geneforge is a masterpiece i agree. And Exile is q. solid too. Also liked nethergate.

But Jeff has gone full retard with Avadon and the nu Avernum remakes.

His days of glory are long past, and all the incline has been squeezed out of him.

He should be treated like his present opinions. Which is total shit.

 

[Doktor Best]

Meh...never liked his games. I tried a lot of times to get into them... But they look bad and they play way too slowly. I don't think he can criticize such productions just because he keeps churning the same game out constantly

Avernum and Geneforge are far from being the same game.

 

[TigerKnee]

Because he obviously knows how to create non-generic, not boring at all RPGs.

Buddy, he created Exile before he was an old washed up hack.

 

[Dayyālu]

Vogel made exile and geneforge, this gives him the right to criticize anyone and anything within the genre, and they should listen.
He may be old, tired, and misguided, but he gave too much to cRPG fans to be ignored.

Daily reminder that Vogel does not like you, never liked you, and you aren't his core audience.

http://jeff-vogel.blogspot.it/2011/05/avadon-out-for-windows-responding-to.html

http://jeff-vogel.blogspot.it/2011/05/on-making-lots-of-people-angry.html

And he's also old and tired. So old, so tired.

(and this comes from a guy with a Geneforge avatar, man)

Just out of curiosity, how was he wrong on Steam pricing?

Vogel's positions about pricing can be described as "wildly incoherent". It's good to make cheap indies suddenly it isn't suddenly it's good again oh god Steam is shortchanging us wait Steam is great bundles are bad bundles are great

He pretty much changes opinion every year or so.

 

[Sizzle]

The saddest and most frustrating thing about Vogel is that you can plainly see him holding back out of fear.

He's capable of producing much stronger work, but he's convinced that he has to "play ball" to stay in the indie-development game, that he's become the kind of designer who'll water-down his own ideas just to cater to a demographic he will never be able to please - as they could care less about his games.

 

[Iznaliu]

just to cater to a demographic he will never be able to please

Because he is part of that demographic - but he's stuck making mediocre games.

 

[Lacrymas]

Sizzle, what has Jeff said about PoE? Do you have a link?

 

[Sizzle]

Sizzle, what has Jeff said about PoE? Do you have a link?

Sure, here :D

 

[Chaotic_Heretic]

Vogel made exile and geneforge, this gives him the right to criticize anyone and anything within the genre, and they should listen.
He may be old, tired, and misguided, but he gave too much to cRPG fans to be ignored.

Geneforge is a masterpiece i agree. And Exile is q. solid too. Also liked nethergate.

But Jeff has gone full retard with Avadon and the nu Avernum remakes.

His days of glory are long past, and all the incline has been squeezed out of him.

He should be treated like his present opinions. Which is total shit.

But P:E is shti too so i kinda agree on his views on this.

 

[JarlFrank]

Vogel used to be a guy who made promising games with crappy interface and graphics for a core audience who didn't give a shit about the crap interfaces and graphics, and didn't mind not having music in the games either. He had ultra-low production values but provided the kind of content people who don't care about production values like.

He could've reached a broader audience by making more games like the Geneforge series, or Nethergate, and investing into better graphics and some music. This would've made his games more appealing to the core audience, people who buy and play games like Age of Decadence or Shadowrun Returns. Just imagine a Geneforge with more beautiful 2D graphics, similar to the new Shadowrun games. Higher quality tilesets, high quality paperdolls for characters which show equipped items, a bunch of high quality portraits for important NPCs. Then add one or two music tracks to have a soundtrack, and you've got solid indie production values that make the game appealing to a broad section of RPG fans.

Instead he improves his visuals only marginally - while Avadon might look a little better than the puke-colored tilesets of the Avernum games, it still looks crappy overall and the screenshots don't pull an audience, especially not the shallow Bioware fanbase - yet dumbs down the content to the level of mainstream AAA games, which means they appeal to neither audience. For fans of Bioware games, the production values are too low. For the core RPG audience, the content is too shallow.

He is chasing a different audience than those who bought his games in the past, and he goes about it in all the wrong ways. Avadon is just a terrible business decision, a game whose every design decision has been made for the wrong reasons.

 

[JarlFrank]

PoE has a 10.4% completion rate

• Wasteland 2 has a 7.3% completion rate
• SR:HK has a 6.7% completion rate
• D:OS EE has a 5.3% completion rate
• Avadon has a 2.7% completion rate

Avadon is difficult, especially when you do that first task and think the rest of combat would be as easy. But Divinity OS EE completion rate is rather strange, because it has actual graphic and stuff.

Maybe compare that to the original D:OS?
I imagine a lot of these are replays by people who completed the original but then abandoned their second playthrough before the end.

 

[Iznaliu]

But P:E is shti too so i kinda agree on his views on this.

I think you are shti as well.

 

[Iznaliu]

Maybe compare that to the original D:OS?

That has 6.5%.

 

[Lacrymas]

Sure, here :D

I agree with Jeff and I think Josh didn't get the point of his criticism. PoE obviously didn't get a good enough editing pass, but we've been through this, it's obvious from the character creation screen alone, and Josh agrees with this, but he thinks the background lore is too important to not be shown. Jeff isn't saying to remove all that lore, but to space it out and only reveal it when it's time or relevant. I've been saying this for close to 2 years on the Codex alone, but my argument, apart from being too many words and too much info that doesn't even matter in too little time, is that the characters don't have access to that info yet and that the UI shouldn't be an omniscient entity which reveals meta information about the universe just because. Jeff's idea about the character revealing information about itself (like being an aristocrat or philosopher, or whatever) is good. The more information revealed through gameplay the better. That can extend to the character saying where he's from, like for example:

- So, where do you come from?
- *You now have a bunch of choices, like Ixamitl, Deadfire Archipelago, Aedyr etc. etc; but only in a very succinct way, revealing very basic information, like "The tropical Deadfire Archipelago"*
- I've never been there, what's it like?
- *You now have a few options, revealing more lore around your choice or whether you want to talk about it or not, serving two purposes - it tells you, the player, more about that region of the world you chose AND gives you an opportunity to role-play by giving you options on how to react to the question about your birthplace*

This way not only are you organically revealing information to the player, but also keeping other information veiled for them to discover or explore, instead of prematurely ejaculating all your secrets from the character creation screen AND you aren't using your character as an omniscient lore dispenser by knowing everything about everywhere. This is not something an editing pass can fix, it's about pacing and knowing when and how to convey the narrative/background lore to the player. Some people are going to say that the UI doesn't give you enough info to make a very well informed choice, but so what? Not only is this the very beginning of the game (you can reload your starting save immediately), but it also doesn't matter much, it changes like 2 lines in the entire game after that and you are never going to visit those places in the game anyway. I think Josh should take Jeff's advice seriously about other projects and even PoE2, even if he doesn't take everything, at least a general idea of structuring all that text.

 

[Infinitron]

the characters don't have access to that info yet and that the UI shouldn't be an omniscient entity which reveals meta information about the universe just because

Bad argument. Your character isn't an amnesiac newborn babe.

Hell why not go the entire distance and remove character creation entirely. Strength and Dexterity = omniscient UI. Tim Cain approves.

 

[Lacrymas]

Bad argument. Your character isn't an amnesiac newborn babe.

Hell why not go the entire distance and remove character creation entirely. Strength and Dexterity = omniscient UI. Tim Cain approves.

Not that info, that is mechanical info that isn't lore and should be shown in character creation. We've been through this.

 

[Sizzle]

A few issues with that. First - looking at Avadon's lore, Vogel himself isn't innocent of creating a world where the background fluff often has little to do with the game itself.

Second, while I do believe PoE has a lot of issues with its writing, I agree with Josh that, for a certain amount of people, getting to know the lore of a new setting, reading through all those verbose descriptions of cultures, history, etc. - can be an interesting part of the game as well.

It's a shame that both the culture and background only served to give a flat bonus to attributes and skills, and were so rarely referenced in-game. I remember when the alpha (or was it the beta? Anyway - the first version they released to the backers) featuring Dyrford came out and there was that conversation with the pig farmer who asked you to kill the ogre. In that dialogue, your culture was referenced when you asked about the ogre (for the Living Lands, the farmer said something like: "Oh, but I bet you have even bigger beasties where you come from!", for The White That Wends: "Right, you wouldn't know what an ogre is, being from that frozen place."), and I was expecting that, on release, more of the game would be like that. Even little bits of flavor text such as that could have made the game feel better, and make you think about choosing your culture beyond what attribute your current build needed.

 

[Lacrymas]

Infinitron, what citation do you want? These are basic, obvious things. The character creation screen is NOT your character (in effect it doesn't exist yet), so the "amnesiac newborn babe" thing doesn't make sense, its purpose is to give you mechanical information you need to play the game and create an abstraction of the abilities of the character, that's it, not to be a wizened old sage who recounts stories/factoids about distant lands. That's just absurd. Read my post again where I give a much better example of how to not make your character be an amnesiac, but also not make him an omniscient lore dispenser.

A few issues with that. First - looking at Avadon's lore, Vogel himself isn't innocent of creating a world where the background fluff often has little to do with the game itself.

Second, while I do believe PoE has a lot of issues with its writing, I agree with Josh that, for a certain amount of people, getting to know the lore of a new setting, reading through all those verbose descriptions of cultures, history, etc. - can be an interesting part of the game as well.

Neither him nor I advocate for removal of those verbose descriptions, just moving them around a little. What Vogel himself does or doesn't do is up to him, not everyone follows their own advice and it's hard to see outside yourself and your creation to conceive it in relation to other people or even other works, that's why constructive criticism is good. Anyway, every bit of lore has its place and time, it's just not in the character creation screen nor in random places of the UI.

 

[Average Manatee]

Having your initial information about vital gameworld settings be delivered straight by text is basically always a horrible idea, especially in a fantasy setting where the whole point is to show players something that they might not have imagined before. In situations like this, saying "x is a y from z, a mystical land where a,b and c happen" is a poor choice, providing an overview map so players can start to visually understand the world is essential. A little known series called Lord of the Rings did this, it probably wasn't the first and certainly wasn't the last.

It's fine to use pure text for a few locations intended to maintain a sense of mystery or dread, but when you're just listing off a dozen areas that are essentially the common knowledge of the worlds inhabitants, it feels like the player is preparing for a test. The fact that the test then never comes teaches the player that the text isn't important, and that simply skipping through dialog and following quest markers is the best decision. Of course in older games players would actually be tested in their knowledge of the world, but we just can't have that anymore in a AAA game.

PoE has a 10.4% completion rate

• Wasteland 2 has a 7.3% completion rate
• SR:HK has a 6.7% completion rate
• D:OS EE has a 5.3% completion rate
• Avadon has a 2.7% completion rate

Avadon is difficult, especially when you do that first task and think the rest of combat would be as easy. But Divinity OS EE completion rate is rather strange, because it has actual graphic and stuff.

Maybe compare that to the original D:OS?
I imagine a lot of these are replays by people who completed the original but then abandoned their second playthrough before the end.

AFAIK completion rates are more a sign of how many times the game has been bought in a bundle. High-price buyers would have a higher completion rate, the bundle hordes might not even touch the game forever or have it a long backlog.

 

[Latro]

ponies ruined Vogel, they poisoned his mind