Obsidian and inXile acquired by Microsoft

[commie]

I just don't get the hate here and 'lol sellout' type shit for the likes of Fargo....he tried, got closer to the old school vibe than Obsidian did(I always saw them as aspiring to AAA rather than trying to eke out a mid level niche compared to inXile) but ultimately came up short. Just didn't quite have the talent, sales and thus money, to keep going alone. Let's be honest; Wasteland, Torment, Bard's Tale....they aren't exactly massive franchises and effectively hark back to a time when what most people now call 'old school' was actually 'the new shit'.

Take TTON....I like the game quite a lot, despite the varied quality of writing, but for all the goodwill, even with the decent previews on general gaming sites it didn't sell much. You can argue about mismanagement, missed deadlines, lack of focus and too many writers of varying skills, but I don't think it would have mattered....PS:T is regarded as some kind of eternal classic, but even Beamturd couldn't shift many copies of their EE version compared to the BG EE's.

I give Fargo credit for trying these experiments and not dying wondering if there's still a place for these kinds of games at the mid-tier level, something which Obsidian; much to my chagrin; didn't risk trying. Unlike almost every other guy from that time, he actually made effort to go in that direction rather than just pay lip service and name drop, then do something totally different or fucked up like the Ultima Ascendant guys.

 

[Mustawd]

I dunno what the hate for Fargo is either. inXike would likely be closed down if it wasn’t for this deal. I mean, I guess ppl are mad it didn’t close down?

I dunno.

 

[Quillon]

I dunno what the hate for Fargo is either.

I like Fargo, when is season 4 coming?

 

[IHaveHugeNick]

What backlash? Few people are happy about it, but everybody gets that for InXile it was either that or go out of business.
Excluding one linuxrtard on InXile forums who made like 50 posts regurgitating the usual linuxtard talking points from the mid 1990s.

 

[Wunderbar]

I dunno what the hate for Fargo is either.

I like Fargo, when is season 4 coming?

season 3 was pretty bad though.

 

[Luckmann]

I ... don't get the ... sellout' type shit for the likes of Fargo

he ... got closer to the old school vibe than Obsidian did

Take TTON....I like the game quite a lot

 

[Quillon]

I dunno what the hate for Fargo is either.

I like Fargo, when is season 4 coming?

season 3 was pretty bad though.

Nah, you can never have too much ewan mcgregor.

 

[Kyl Von Kull]

I dunno what the hate for Fargo is either. inXike would likely be closed down if it wasn’t for this deal. I mean, I guess ppl are mad it didn’t close down?

I dunno.

People here already hated Fargo, though—the sale is incidental.

My theory of Fargo: nobody wants to believe that Fargo’s a (relatively) well-intentioned CEO, who genuinely loves RPGs and wants to make great ones, but for a variety of reasons he can’t seem to consistently deliver. Fargo’s sin is being fabulously optimistic. I think he truly believed inXile could make a worthy spiritual succesor to PS:T. I think he truly believed people wanted a combat system like BT4 (he was tweeting about what he’d do if they sold millions of copies before launch for heaven’s sake). He’s an effective salesman precisely because he believes what he’s saying, at least when he’s enthusiastic about something.

Yet many of you guys would rather believe Fargo disappoints out of malice, that he just wants your money and doesn’t care about the end product. But he wouldn’t put so much additional money into these projects if he didn’t believe they would be successful. I mean, sure, inXile got millions from Kickstarter backers, but they spent even more on top of that and presumably ended up losing a good deal of money on their last two games. A con artist would’ve spent a lot less than they raised and then pocketed the difference..

I don’t know if he just has bad judgment, or he’s a bad manager (maybe he’s too friendly and easygoing), or he simply lacks the self-reflection necessary to figure out where his strengths and weaknesses lie so that he can do a better job going forward.

However, the “ambitious but in-over-his-head” Fargo thesis makes more sense to me than the “shrewd snakeoil salesman” thesis.

MRY Chris Avellone you’ve both worked for the guy. He really believes in what he’s doing and loves the genre, right? Whatever his alleged failings, isn’t he operating in good faith?

 

[MRY]

Give me a reason why someone should play Deadfire? What did developers want people to say about the game? "Oh man, it's just like PoE but with a ship!"?

I quit POE in like 10 minutes and don't really know much about POE2, but even I know: (1) fairly novel "fantasy island chain" setting; (2) gameplay is less linear; (3) ship combat; and (4) much more "woke" for those who are looking for that in their game.

I also didn't really care for the Baldur's Gate series (I beat the second game, but that's it). IMO, it turns out that BG was really about a particular kind of game arriving at a particular moment in time.* It doesn't have some timeless genius to it, the way Fallout does. A game that was a faithful successor to it, even with snazzier graphics, is going to do well with (1) oldtimers looking to recapture the old thrill and (2) youngsters who either couldn't figure out BG or never even bothered looking to see what all the fuss is about. Then they play the game and it's nothing earth-shattering, and they don't come back the next time.

(* Specifically, it had RTS-ish controls at a time when RTS games were hot, it had a jRPG companions when computer RPGs didn't, it had a high-production-value epic fantasy plot at a time when high-production-value epic fantasy multimedia was extremely rare, and it was a technologically interesting achievement. Release BG today and it is a mediocre fantasy story with weird controls and dated look-and-feel, in a world where high-production-level fantasy multimedia abounds, whether in film, TV, comics, video games, whatever.)

The basic building blocks of the D:OS franchise seem quite different -- it looks vaguely BG-ish, but it's not, really.

That said, I have become persuaded by VD's basic thesis. In a sense, the "sequels are doomed" view reflects the core characteristic of the Codex, which is to be fabulously optimistic about games before they come out, then unimpressed (at best) on release, and perhaps, many years later, nostalgically fond of them. A sequel that comes hot on the heels of the first game is too early for nostalgia; the fact that it's a sequel means that you can't be fabulously optimistic. There's no, "This time the high fantasy setting will fill me with the LOTR sense of wonder." Or "The story is going to go places other RPGs haven't." Or "The combat is actually going to be strategic with this one." A sequel promises more of the same, and the same was never what we dreamed it would be.

 

[ItsChon]

(* Specifically, it had RTS-ish controls at a time when RTS games were hot, it had a jRPG companions when computer RPGs didn't, it had an epic fantasy plot at a time when epic fantasy multimedia was extremely rare, and it was a technologically interesting achievement. Release BG today and it is a mediocre fantasy story with weird controls and dated look-and-feel, in a world where high-production-level fantasy multimedia abounds, whether in film, TV, comics, video games, whatever.)

I don't think your assessment of Baldur's Gate is really fair. It had an interesting story, a great setting that made me want to learn more about it, and I actually enjoy RTwP combat, so that wasn't a problem either. Look at how successful this new Pathfinder game has been. It's literally an offshoot of the IE formula that BG set the stage for so well. If you take a game like Baldur's Gate with the exact same mechanics and gameplay but plugged it into a new setting and story that were both well written, it would still be a damn good game.

 

[TemplarGR]

What backlash? Few people are happy about it, but everybody gets that for InXile it was either that or go out of business.
Excluding one linuxrtard on InXile forums who made like 50 posts regurgitating the usual linuxtard talking points from the mid 1990s.

"Linuxtard"?

You realize Microsoft is attempting an "Apple" right? They are going to turn windows into a walled garden and software will only be sold through their store, that is their plan. So say bye bye to sales, mods and competition and say welcome to censorship.

"Linuxtards" are fighting the good fight but windows faggots are imbeciles who are going to wake up only when it is too late...

 

[J_C]

It wasn't. People who liked it left positive reviews, rating etc, and those who don't - mostly didn't bother to do that.

What the fuck? It is generally accepted that most people who voice their opinions on something are complaining because generally being bothered by something is a bigger motivator to just go login somewhere and leave a review, than just liking a game.

If you play a game and like it, you just go on with your life, if you buy a game and you think it crashed your hopes and dreams and wasted your money, you visit every place on the internet and complain about it and go on a hate crusade...

So you claim that this general rule got inverted for PoE specifically? Perhaps the earth is flat for PoE too?

Yep, it is so retarded that people try to come up with bullshit reasons to explain why a supposedly terrible game has good reviews everywhere.

 

[TemplarGR]

What's your problem with communism and marxism? Do you belong in the 1% richest people? If not, why support their regime? Makes you feel warm and fuzzy inside while you are being cucked of your wealth in order to support the 1%?

 

[Funposter]

What's your problem with communism and marxism? Do you belong in the 1% richest people? If not, why support their regime? Makes you feel warm and fuzzy inside while you are being cucked of your wealth in order to support the 1%?

i am going to refrain from sperging out but disdain for marxism =! endorsement of unfettered campitalism you brainlet.

 

[IHaveHugeNick]

What backlash? Few people are happy about it, but everybody gets that for InXile it was either that or go out of business.
Excluding one linuxrtard on InXile forums who made like 50 posts regurgitating the usual linuxtard talking points from the mid 1990s.

"Linuxtard"?

You realize Microsoft is attempting an "Apple" right? They are going to turn windows into a walled garden and software will only be sold through their store, that is their plan. So say bye bye to sales, mods and competition and say welcome to censorship.

"Linuxtards" are fighting the good fight but windows faggots are imbeciles who are going to wake up only when it is too late...

If by fighting the good fight you mean making the devs burn away fan given money. Linuxtards swarm every Kickstarter like a locust begging for ports and then don't even buy enough units to cover the cost of making the port.

The only appropriate fate for these parasites is if they all get cancer of everything from feet all the way up to ears and die slowly for a month in a hospital with no painkillers.

 

[MRY]

[MRY Chris Avellone you’ve both worked for the guy. He really believes in what he’s doing and loves the genre, right? Whatever his alleged failings, isn’t he operating in good faith?

Here's what I wrote more than four years ago, before I worked for him, when the Codex gave me a golden ticket to the Wasteland 2 release party (and, ultimately, to my job on TTON):

Talking to Fargo impresses several things upon me. The first is how young this industry is. Fargo's career seems to span most of its meaningful history -- I know, Chester Bolingbroke would say I'm leaving out decades of PLATO games -- and in fact covers my entire lifetime as a gamer, including almost every high point in it. And yet he's a youthful 50, and his kids are hardly older than mine. At various times over the night he describes himself as "just an entertainer" and "a gamer at heart"; in fact, he is at once an elder statesman and new frontiersman.

He's also, quite obviously, a shrewd businessman who has survived tremendous upheavals both in his own career and in the industry as a whole. At one point, he mentions that when doing a deal, he looks at the other side's headquarters on Google Maps and gets a feel for how lavishly they live. "It says one thing if they're in a strip mall. It says something else if they're in a palace." (*cough*Double Fine*cough*) I get the sense that he's had both sets of digs in his days.

The same savvy that has served him so well makes me cautious about drawing any conclusions about Fargo's inner character. He certainly seemed charming, sincere, generous with his time and attention, a doting dad, a gentle boss, a true believer in games, and so on. But, as the Bard wrote, "One may smile, and smile, and be a villain -- at least I am sure it may be so in Newport." Or something like that. I want to believe in him -- and I have no reason not to -- but I wouldn't stake my life on it.

Still, to listen to the man talk about games he's played, games he's made, games he's dreaming of making, it's hard not to fall a little bit in love. He complains passionately about reviewers who can't, or won't, understand complex RPGs, and vows that next time he's following Larian's lead and not distributing advance review copies. At one point, he declares that Sacrifice is the best multiplayer game of all time. Sacrifice happens to be one of my all-time favorites -- for the art design, the voice acting, the writing (which combines po-faced Soul Reaver-ism with sly subversiveness and lots of wordplay) -- but in my opinion the multiplayer is trash. I tell him as much, and he rolls his eyes. "I'm sure you weren't playing it 3 on 3." He's right. He launches into stories of thrilling matches over the years, of hustling kids in some tournament, of little cheats to juggle enemy wizards. The word "manahoar" rolls off his tongue with practiced fluency.

I want to believe.

After working on TTON, I wouldn't really change my assessment. In every interaction we've had, he had a politician's gift for making you feel like he cared sincerely about you and the things you care about. My innate skepticism of people makes me immune to critical charm failures -- that is, though charmed, I assumed that it was because I was being worked -- so I can't say that he really cares, only that he seems really to care.

It's possible he has spent his entire life like Chung Ling Soo, with no actual love for video games or gamers in his heart, only a fishbowl of fakery perpetually clutched between his thighs. But at some point, what difference does it make? I'll never know what the answer to that question is; real or fake, from my standpoint, he spent his life producing fishbowls for my amusement.

 

[Nuclear Explosion]

What backlash? Few people are happy about it, but everybody gets that for InXile it was either that or go out of business.
Excluding one linuxrtard on InXile forums who made like 50 posts regurgitating the usual linuxtard talking points from the mid 1990s.

PoE was not finished by 90% or so of its players. Let that sink in. There was no backlash. There was withdrawal. People found out that the BG nostalgia they craved for was simply not to be sated here.

PoE's completion rates are similar to D:OS's.

 

[Haba]

Deadfire [--] improved the writing

You have to improve your trolling there.

 

[IHaveHugeNick]

E]

PoE was not finished by 90% or so of its players. Let that sink in. There was no backlash. There was withdrawal. People found out that the BG nostalgia they craved for was simply not to be sated here.

Excellent theory my dear Watson, except there's one problem - look up Divinity Original Sin 1 achievement statistics and see how many people finished it.

 

[TemplarGR]

Yep, it is so retarded that people try to come up with bullshit reasons to explain why a supposedly terrible game has good reviews everywhere.

The irony is that they themselves are the biggest example of it...

There is no place that PoE is more hated than the codex. Every time PoE is mentioned there is a legion of people spewing vitriol for the game and Obsidian of course. People here don't claim it is "meh", they claim it killed their firstborn.

Why would they do that if the theory is "that the game was mediocre so we didn't bother leaving reviews for it". Yeah, you certainly keep silent about your hatred for the game, and it shows, especially on the Codex...

And it makes sense: People expected to relive their childhoods through PoE, to feel the same feelings the BG saga made them feel in the 90s when they were still young pure souls and not dead inside 30-40somethings. But this was impossible no matter how good PoE was. So after they felt "meh" about PoE, they decided to hate it eternally.

And since Chris Avellone left Obsidian, the hatred multiplied here because we all know rpgcodex is the unoffical Chris Avellone "i beg you please let me lick his balls" fanclub.

To an objective critic, PoE was a really good game. It had many faults at release and it got vastly improved with patches and DLCs. But still deserved its metacritic score. I mean, what competition there was? Outside of Witcher 3 and perhaps Metal Gear, Fallout 4 and Rise of the Tomb Raider what other game was actually good that year? I don't mean masterpiece, just good... Was Age of Decadence released in 2015 IIRC? Add that to the list.

I feel that sometimes people lack context. This generation of games is not exactly chokeful of quality content... We get a metric crapton of games but most of them are shitty shit full of shit. It is nothing like the 90s when interesting quality games were releasing left and right both on PC and on consoles and still Baldur's Gate was king of the hill and considered AAA by then standards.

Yet people hate on PoE because it didn't make them feel like BG made them feel 20 years ago. Then they create circle jerks against the game and people won't buy the sequel...

Divinity Original Sin got away with it because no one expected Baldur's gate. It came out of the blue, had no previous expectations, so people judged it closer to what it was rather than what they wanted it to be.

 

[markec]

Yep, it is so retarded that people try to come up with bullshit reasons to explain why a supposedly terrible game has good reviews everywhere.

When you go to eat in a restaurant and find the food to be shit, do you go to their facebook page and leave a bad review or do you just dont go there ever again?

 

[J_C]

What backlash? Few people are happy about it, but everybody gets that for InXile it was either that or go out of business.
Excluding one linuxrtard on InXile forums who made like 50 posts regurgitating the usual linuxtard talking points from the mid 1990s.

PoE was not finished by 90% or so of its players. Let that sink in.

So like, every other game?

 

[jf8350143]

What backlash? Few people are happy about it, but everybody gets that for InXile it was either that or go out of business.
Excluding one linuxrtard on InXile forums who made like 50 posts regurgitating the usual linuxtard talking points from the mid 1990s.

PoE was not finished by 90% or so of its players. Let that sink in. There was no backlash. There was withdrawal. People found out that the BG nostalgia they craved for was simply not to be sated here.

It's like you guys never check any other game's achievement. Generally games have very low finish rate, RPGs especially so.

Only 12% of the people finished Original sin 2( POE was 12.3%, roughly the same), while 19.8% of the people finished Deadfire. Only 70% of the people find Yennefer in Witcher 3, aka leave the tutorial area.

 

[J_C]

What backlash? Few people are happy about it, but everybody gets that for InXile it was either that or go out of business.
Excluding one linuxrtard on InXile forums who made like 50 posts regurgitating the usual linuxtard talking points from the mid 1990s.

PoE was not finished by 90% or so of its players. Let that sink in.

So like, every other game?

I don't rate it on FB because I try to minimize my FB usage, but as I see other people's behaviour, they rate and complain a LOT on Facebook. So I guess people probably do both.

 

[FeelTheRads]

What's your problem with communism and marxism? Do you belong in the 1% richest people? If not, why support their regime? Makes you feel warm and fuzzy inside while you are being cucked of your wealth in order to support the 1%?

Mmm, yes, indeed. As opposed to communism where you're cucked out of your wealth to support the 0.1%. What a great deal that is.