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Eternity PoE II: Deadfire Sales Analysis Thread

Trashos

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Inb4 Ancient Greek strong women fight off the Persians.
 

fantadomat

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And jungles don't have green in them? I don't have a preference, as long as it's well made, but if I had to choose it'd be something other than medieval Europe. It literally doesn't matter apart from that. Sci-fi, cyberpunk, Renaissance, Ancient Greece, Arabia, underground caverns, alien worlds, whatever.
Yeah but medieval greenery is different,it have a lot of decoration on it....like hanged man/elfs .

Honestly i don't care about the setting as long as the writing is making it interesting. I don't see any difference between PoE and Deadfire,they both feel extremely generic because of the writing level. Even Tranny felt generic....and it lacked a good greenery.
 

AwesomeButton

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PC RPG Website of the Year, 2015 Make the Codex Great Again! Grab the Codex by the pussy Insert Title Here RPG Wokedex Divinity: Original Sin 2 A Beautifully Desolate Campaign Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag. Pathfinder: Wrath
What is this obsession with medieval settings? Haven't we had enough of those? I'd take PoE's jungles over another castle any day.
The problem isn't with the settings being medieval - there is great variance in "visuals" if you travel across Medieval Europe from north to south and from west to east - but that everyone presents the generic western European medieval style from the 13th-14th century (albeit with some armors form the late 15th) when it comes to architecture, clothing, weapons, political landscape and specific local politics in the region where the game takes place.

If people studied more before they set out to work - like Warhorse does with KCD - the Middle Ages are a universe of styles and local peculiarities, and they span for about 10 centuries.
 

FreeKaner

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A lot of genre tropes of RPGs that are used in "Medieval" RPGs aren't even medieval anyhow. Plus, Early Modern period, especially 16th and 17th century are much more interesting than Not-England/France in 14th century.
 

Brancaleone

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What is this obsession with medieval settings? Haven't we had enough of those? I'd take PoE's jungles over another castle any day.
The problem isn't with the settings being medieval - there is great variance in "visuals" if you travel across Medieval Europe from north to south and from west to east - but that everyone presents the generic western European medieval style from the 13th-14th century (albeit with some armors form the late 15th) when it comes to architecture, clothing, weapons, political landscape and specific local politics in the region where the game takes place.

If people studied more before they set out to work - like Warhorse does with KCD - the Middle Ages are a universe of styles and local peculiarities, and they span for about 10 centuries.
Agreed. While Obsidian specializes in giving settings a slightly different patina from the standard Medieval-generic one (PoE: Renaissance, sort of; Tyranny: Bronze Age, sort of; PoE2: colonial, sort of) and calling it a day.
 

Kyl Von Kull

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Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag.
A lot of genre tropes of RPGs that are used in "Medieval" RPGs aren't even medieval anyhow. Plus, Early Modern period, especially 16th and 17th century are much more interesting than Not-England/France in 14th century.

That is an opinion. I consider the era of Charlemagne and Norman conquest quite interesting.

You almost never see an RPG setting that looks like the early Middle Ages, though, except for Expeditions Viking. It’s always late medieval with a mix of early renaissance. I’d go for something around the time of Charlemagne, too, although his grandfather’s era would be more fun. No feudalism, no plate armour, no prosperous towns, just a bunch of Germanic warlords and their bros ruling over squalor and fighting with their family members.

But if developers are going to keep doing the late Middle Ages, they should set it somewhere interesting like faux Venice or faux Rome or faux Byzantium. You could have a fun AoD style game where you’re trying to help elect the next pope or install the next emperor (or both!), maybe as an assassin or a con man or a thug or a banker.
 

FreeKaner

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Setting a late medieval game in Byzantium or Venice would be a major step up over not-England. In fact they seem like the worst examples you can give due how underutilised both eastern roman empire and medieval republics are in these settings, on top of how factionised, diverse and open to agency both of them are. Not to mention completely different aesthetics.
 

AwesomeButton

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PC RPG Website of the Year, 2015 Make the Codex Great Again! Grab the Codex by the pussy Insert Title Here RPG Wokedex Divinity: Original Sin 2 A Beautifully Desolate Campaign Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag. Pathfinder: Wrath
Agreed. While Obsidian specializes in giving settings a slightly different patina from the standard Medieval-generic one (PoE: Renaissance, sort of; Tyranny: Bronze Age, sort of; PoE2: colonial, sort of) and calling it a day.
What Obsidian does sort of works, and is still better than generic fantasy western Europe stuff. Also when you have the intended audience of those three games, reasearch into historically correct settings wouldn't get any special appreciation from that audience, and isn't really worth investing in, and there is no point in even marketing it as a feature. PoE2 has this problem to some extent - it doesn't know what to market first - the fantasy RPG, the IE-like "spiritual successor" aspect, the "narrative driven", "deep story, characters and interactions", the free roam on your ship stronghold?

If Sawyer gets to make his Darklands style RPG, that would be something else entirely of course.
 

FreeKaner

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Post-Akkad Mesapotamia would be an amazing setting, in fact anything middle-east that isn't 1001 nights vaguely Saracens would be. Yet here we are getting same medieval England over and over again.
 

Brancaleone

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Agreed. While Obsidian specializes in giving settings a slightly different patina from the standard Medieval-generic one (PoE: Renaissance, sort of; Tyranny: Bronze Age, sort of; PoE2: colonial, sort of) and calling it a day.
What Obsidian does sort of works, and is still better than generic fantasy western Europe stuff. Also when you have the intended audience of those three games, reasearch into historically correct settings wouldn't get any special appreciation from that audience, and isn't really worth investing in, and there is no point in even marketing it as a feature. PoE2 has this problem to some extent - it doesn't know what to market first - the fantasy RPG, the IE-like "spiritual successor" aspect, the "narrative driven", "deep story, characters and interactions", the free roam on your ship stronghold?
It 'sort of works' in the same ways the generic medieval patina 'sort of works' also. Which is why I get the feeling that the effort in creating the setting was due mainly to the legal requirements for the IP.
 

dragonul09

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Avellone killed Deadfire. The true Eothas.

I think everyone from Obsidian beside management, knew that PoE is a deformed fetus and should have been aborted immediatly

Eric Fenstermaker said:
  • I don’t like discussing anything remotely negative about coworkers in the press. No one comes out looking worse than you when you do that. But here, I think I need to get more detailed than I would want to in order to clear something up.

    To the suggestion that Josh “interfered” in the process involving cutting down Durance and the Grieving Mother, everything he did was professional and warranted by the circumstances. The budget on those companions was blown, not just a little but a lot. Very late in development. They were unimplementable in the time we had, and the company had promised them to the Kickstarter backers. So while I’d have preferred to have just worked it out between myself and Chris, at that point in production it was unfortunately not what the situation called for. A high-level decision needed to be made, so more people had to be looped in.

    The interview characterizes ownership as having gotten worked up over something they didn’t know the specifics of, and I won’t speak for them, but if I were in their shoes, faced with this development, I would have been concerned. None of the potential outcomes looked rosy.

    It’s been thrown around that objectionable subject matter was the reason behind the cuts. Sexual violence is dealt with elsewhere in the game, and there is swearing all over the place. So there was no looming censor. I don’t want to get into criticism here, but there were some choices that Chris made later in the writing that I thought bore more consideration, and in better circumstances if we’d been able to keep the thread, I’d have liked to discuss a different approach in some specific places. I believe it would have been possible without altering their story or defanging the material. It ended up being beside the point – the easiest cuts to make by far involved that story thread, and so it was left on the cutting room floor.

    I did have a role in things turning out this way and I did apologize to Chris for it. I gave far too little oversight, thinking that a set of constraints and approval of an initial design, with periodic email check-ins would be sufficient. Chris was often offsite, I was swamped, and it was all too easy to backburner communication. I thought more regular feedback would only have been a hindrance to someone who’d made a lot of his reputation off of so many well-liked companions. If I had caught the issue sooner, we could have made the cuts sooner, in a much better context, and in that regard I should have done better. He did put genuine effort into the creative aspect, and that made the outcome that much more regrettable. I don’t know what Chris thinks about his own responsibilities and missteps in the matter, but I hope he recognizes them.
  • The PoE story was approved by management not because of poor judgment but because it was time to say “good enough” and hope for the best. We had something that was a completed draft that incorporated many of the best elements from previous pitches. As a place to start, it was workable. An independent developer can only pay its employees to spin their wheels with nothing to work on for so long. I suspect that the story wasn’t far off from something that was more deeply satisfying, so I don’t think it was a bad bet to make, even if the end result was flawed. Sometimes in development, we get the story figured out well in advance, sometimes it doesn’t work out that way. Here, it didn’t.

  • There’s kind of a strange insinuation in the interview that maybe I got a bad employee review because of the PoE story (?), and the phrasing almost seems to imply that this might have been related to my departure. I didn’t and it wasn’t. I always found Obsidian to be forgiving of mistakes as long as you were earnest in your efforts to learn from them, and I tried to be that. I appreciate the owners and my managers bearing with me.

    Chris’s experience with Obsidian is his own. But it’s just that, one experience, filtered through a particular point of view, selective in its memory, and biased by its nature. So is mine. No one perspective should be taken for gospel. Me, I liked it there, enough to stay for more than a decade, and I wasn’t without more lucrative options. Good people ran the place. Good people (besides a few genuine personality disorder sufferers) worked there when I was there. Josh was a good director, the owners were good owners. I strongly disagreed with them many times, but it was never because they were coming from a place of bad intentions. Everyone’s just trying to navigate an insanely difficult and stressful business, and for that alone I think you have to approach the profession with a lot of forgiveness in your heart.
  • There were a lot of other corrections I wanted to make or explanations I wanted to give about this or that, but looking at it now, I don’t think they’re important in the scheme of things.

Making games with the idea of being just ''good enough'' is such a terrible thing to say, it seems to me that they don't have the drive or talent to do anything remotely decent anymore and having Avellone crusade agaisnt them is just the tip of the iceberg.
 
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Mustawd

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Making games with idea of being just ''good enough'' is such a terrible thing to say, it seems to me that they don't have the drive or talent to do anything remotely decent anymore and having Avellone crusade agaisnt them is just the tip of the iceberg.

Ehh. I think it’s fine to blame them for mismanagement of the project, but at some point you just need to ship.

What were they supposed to do? They don’t have infinite money.

But yeah, the whole thing was a shitshow it seems. Fuck, working there must suck.
 

dragonul09

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Making games with idea of being just ''good enough'' is such a terrible thing to say, it seems to me that they don't have the drive or talent to do anything remotely decent anymore and having Avellone crusade agaisnt them is just the tip of the iceberg.

Ehh. I think it’s fine to blame them for mismanagement of the project, but at some point you just need to ship.

What were they supposed to do? They don’t have infinite money.

But yeah, the whole thing was a shitshow it seems. Fuck, working there must suck.

Seems to suck for the people that actually want to make a good game and from what I understood from Avellones rants, if you are a good boy and just say ''yes sir'' to Feargus and the other owners, you are basically good to go. It seems to be a decent work place if you are a talentless hack, otherwise you get PowerTrip Feargus™️ chewing on your ass:lol:
 

fantadomat

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Making games with idea of being just ''good enough'' is such a terrible thing to say, it seems to me that they don't have the drive or talent to do anything remotely decent anymore and having Avellone crusade agaisnt them is just the tip of the iceberg.

Ehh. I think it’s fine to blame them for mismanagement of the project, but at some point you just need to ship.

What were they supposed to do? They don’t have infinite money.

But yeah, the whole thing was a shitshow it seems. Fuck, working there must suck.
Yeah,i agree with you. They can't have the project in limbo until it is a masterpiece. But when i look at the game i see huge waste of money and potential. It is the job of management to put a good captain on the ship and the right crew under it. The whole game screams "Wasted potential". Such a shame.
 

Lacrymas

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Pathfinder: Wrath
Really, the final result was the most workable? I can't imagine what kind of shit was thrown around before that. Obsidian's working process has become a circus show, but I guess that was obvious from PoE1. I don't know what Tyranny's excuse is, though. Eh, I guess they won't be able to work on another isometric RPG, so their torture is over. Time to buckle up, buckaroos, I foresee only popamole and licensed "games" in your (Obsidian's) future. Even all the advantages in the world weren't enough for you to create something with impact or a sizeable fanbase.
 
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SymbolicFrank

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Ehh. I think it’s fine to blame them for mismanagement of the project, but at some point you just need to ship.

What were they supposed to do? They don’t have infinite money.

But yeah, the whole thing was a shitshow it seems. Fuck, working there must suck.

There is a difference:

1. Aim for the Moon. Try to make the best ever. But do make sure the individual parts work. And deliver what you have when the patience runs out.

2. Do random things whenever they seem worthwhile. Everyone can contribute as they see fit. And ship whatever that amounts to when time is up.
 
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