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Eternity Josh Sawyer at Digital Dragons: Deadfire post-mortem

Cross

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These numbers feed into formulae to produce a range of outcomes. The more inputs a number has and the wider the range of values on those inputs, the more quickly the formulae start to break down. This is why MMORPGs often abstract values and do arcane under-the-hood adjustments or go through periods of “squish” where all of the numbers get recalibrated/normalized (in the case of WoW, both).
His first frame of reference when discussing RPG design is literally MMOs.

Balance.

Balance never changes.
 
Joined
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the Infinity Engine games were dominated by the importance of vertical progression.

That's untrue. Progression was mainly based on getting new spells and weapons. What makes DnD special is that most everything has below 100 hp.
 

Artyoan

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PoE2 never felt like it existed in the same universe as PoE1. Even the returning characters had different personalities. Maintaining that tone is important. This felt like how Diablo 2 transitioned to Diablo 3, though less exaggerated. There is an infusion of humor and self-awareness among the characters that is not welcome. I was turned off in the first two hours. I'm sure I'll revisit it sometime with more appropriate expectations.
 

luj1

You're all shills
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1) Do you think the open world nature of the game contributed to the story/plot/pacing feeling weak?

...

2) Why wasn’t the Penetration system discussed?

...

3) How was ship-to-ship combat, which is seemingly not that complicated, so expensive?

...





Weak pacing? Penetration system? Ship-to-ship combat? None of that shit is really what made PoE unfun, but I'll agree it's bad.

What truly made PoE terrible and anti-fun were Saywer's tendencies to over-architect a PnP system. Obviously he tried too hard to please everybody and it turned out shit.
 
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Diggfinger

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I think that's what he's saying, FreeKaner.

His argument:

1) We designed the world to be more linear and gated at first.

2) But the way we wrote the plot didn't justify it - there was no reason for the world to be gated, so we opened it up.

3) In reality, we should have changed the plot instead. It wasn't a good plot for an open world.

4) So the reason the plot wasn't good wasn't because we intentionally set out to make an open world game. It was just not good, period.

Honestly, is there ever a good plot for an open world?
You could voice the exact same criticism for a game like Arcanum: "Ah, it's a huge world but I'm not invested in the main story".
Basically, the main villain pops up from time to time to remind you about the main quest but you are of course free to ignore it.

Personally, I'd much rather have a open world then a 'great story' (yes, I dont like Torment that much).

Josh is being too hard on himself.
Let's show some Codex luuuv
:love:
 
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Orma

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Torment: Tides of Numenera


Spoilers below:

Eothas gives the Watcher his attention because they’re the Watcher, not because they happen to be the only kith Eothas has talked to. Eothas knows that the Watcher understands the origins of the gods and that the Leaden Key has taken extraordinary steps to guard that secret. This is covered in the Hasongo lighthouse conversation.

Eothas took a big chunk of the Watcher’s soul and understands that the Watcher is on the hook with Berath to find out what Eothas is doing. Because Eothas believes he made a mistake in not telling mortals his plans before the Saint’s War, he decides that he should tell the Watcher what he’s doing. That’s why he tells the Watcher to meet him at Ashen Maw.

When Eothas does tell the Watcher what he’s doing, he asks the Watcher to tell mortals. Protecting the Watcher from Magran’s eruption of Ashen Maw is both out of a sense of obligation as well as a desire to communicate his intent to mortals before he disappears. He does say explicitly that when he is done with his work, he’s leaving forever. When you leave Ashen Maw, Eothas sets off for Ukaizo to do just that.

When you do encounter Eothas at Ukaizo, he asks you why you followed him. He doesn’t ask you for advice. That’s the point where you can ask him to do something. I think it’s fair to critique how influential you are at that point. I could have done more with the conversation to incorporate your choices up to that point and gate the ending options based on those choices (BTW, Paul Kirsch did add a bit in the 5.0 patch where Eothas asks you about your faction choices). But Eothas certainly doesn’t solicit the Watcher for ideas on what to do.
 

2house2fly

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I liked my own theory that the gods being created makes them, on some level, machines, and that the chime of Berath functioned as a kind of override which would make Eothas more susceptible to what you say. Berath even says at the end of the game "you will speak to him as the Hwrald Of Berath, the only person he will listen to".

I had the same theory for Mass Effect 3, that the Crucible was essentially a power source which allowed the Citadel to perform a factory reset on the Catalyst, making it obedient to the next organic it sees- which happens to be Shepard.
 

2house2fly

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How do you think guise, does he legitimately believe that Deadfire was better than Pillars 1 in every regard and it just magically flopped because of some incomprehensible higher power, or he just doesn't want to admit that it was his and his SJW brigade's abysmal writing that did Deadfire in? Notice how he talks about Metacritic scores and not sales, despite latter being a much better metric of how the game turned out.
How would the writing put people off before they've played the game and seen the writing?

Thanks for thinking of me Orma but I saw it when Infini posted it earlier in the week! Removing ship combat (which is reeeeally boring) only to have the bosses put it back in the game.......that was so stupid.
I'm actually kind of on the boss's side on this one. The ship combat may not be very good, but the game would feel weird without it.

PoE2 never felt like it existed in the same universe as PoE1. Even the returning characters had different personalities. Maintaining that tone is important. This felt like how Diablo 2 transitioned to Diablo 3, though less exaggerated. There is an infusion of humor and self-awareness among the characters that is not welcome. I was turned off in the first two hours. I'm sure I'll revisit it sometime with more appropriate expectations.
Yeah, the tone is lacking. People complained the first game was too dry, so here you go.
 

Beastro

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Spoilers below:

Eothas gives the Watcher his attention because they’re the Watcher, not because they happen to be the only kith Eothas has talked to. Eothas knows that the Watcher understands the origins of the gods and that the Leaden Key has taken extraordinary steps to guard that secret. This is covered in the Hasongo lighthouse conversation.

Eothas took a big chunk of the Watcher’s soul and understands that the Watcher is on the hook with Berath to find out what Eothas is doing. Because Eothas believes he made a mistake in not telling mortals his plans before the Saint’s War, he decides that he should tell the Watcher what he’s doing. That’s why he tells the Watcher to meet him at Ashen Maw.

When Eothas does tell the Watcher what he’s doing, he asks the Watcher to tell mortals. Protecting the Watcher from Magran’s eruption of Ashen Maw is both out of a sense of obligation as well as a desire to communicate his intent to mortals before he disappears. He does say explicitly that when he is done with his work, he’s leaving forever. When you leave Ashen Maw, Eothas sets off for Ukaizo to do just that.

When you do encounter Eothas at Ukaizo, he asks you why you followed him. He doesn’t ask you for advice. That’s the point where you can ask him to do something. I think it’s fair to critique how influential you are at that point. I could have done more with the conversation to incorporate your choices up to that point and gate the ending options based on those choices (BTW, Paul Kirsch did add a bit in the 5.0 patch where Eothas asks you about your faction choices). But Eothas certainly doesn’t solicit the Watcher for ideas on what to do.


I wonder how well Sawyer would be in writing up the world building of a setting that others then use to make stories out of. I've wondered that about my own world building and how well the stories are I've intended for them, or rather, how I work well creating events that chain together to make good "history" of the setting that I'd think would be rather boring if told as stories. I've only played PoE1, but going by it's revelations, they are stated rather factually rather than with the weight one would expect to have around the nature of the deities of such a world. I wouldn't be surprised if what's described here is similarly dry in presentation in PoE2.

I think more and more Sawyer's direct involvement in his historical RPG should be limited towards being the overarching keeper of the "spirit" of the RPG. That the way he is it's best he let others fill things in and relegate himself to making sure it remains in the spirit of a historical RPG that is grounded and befittingly subdued and mundane. That's what Darklands did, yet the gift of those behind it was that it made both the historical setting and experiencing it fun that got you into the mood of wanting to play the game through the perspective of someone with a straight Medieval outlook that didn't have you having branching chatter and drama with Baphomet or Archangel Michael, etc like a modern RPG.

Edit: I was gonna go with the analogy that he should be like Gygax and Co. and create everything for the "DMs" that would create a game to work with, since his story telling in PoE show him to be a bland DM, but then comes in all the mechanics and his issues with "balance" that make him a bad fit from the mechnical side of the world building.

His role on the mechanical end should be oversight and doing essentially what he did above in what Orma posted: Instead of getting sucked into making the ship combat system they chose work he should be the person that should have looked over it all, paused and then asked 'Wouldn't it be better if we just shoved in a Pirates! minigame?".

That then makes me wonder how much of this is something he realizes on himself. His binging on Skyrim could be him messing with others games looking for gameplay elements that work rather than repeating this sort of mess of badly reinventing wheels that wind up square.
 
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Nano

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Grab the Codex by the pussy Strap Yourselves In
Hey, a positive post about Deadfire. https://jesawyer.tumblr.com/post/185760161266/hey-josh-your-deadfire-postmortem-and-follow-up

anichea asked:

Hey Josh, your deadfire postmortem and follow up posts have (naturally) focused on the bits of the game that players and reviewers had issues with. Taken alone, they end up giving the impression that you were pretty disspointed with the way the game turned out overall. But Deadfire is still a really well reviewed game (and one of my favourite RPGs ever). I'd appreciate hearing which bits of the game you thought were really sucessful, and how they evolved during development.

I have to say that I think the team really did great work overall. The failures of the game were more due to leadership decisions than anything on the part of the larger dev team. Some things of particular note:

I think that the narrative designers and faction quest designers did a fantastic job building up the factions. How they are introduced, how they are developed, and how the player gets integrated into their organizations (or into opposing them) was a lot of difficult work. It required a lot of up-front planning, a lot of implementation time, and, critically, a ton of time for reviewing and revising the faction content. Because of how the faction quest lines overlap each other, it also required a lot of constant communication between different designers. Carrie Patel (narrative co-lead with me) directed the narrative designers and Bobby Null (lead designer and area lead) helped architect the faction questlines.

Faction leaders, gods, and companions were all wonderful. All of the narrative designers involved did terrific work and the artists captured them well both in their concepts and their final execution. Of course, I also think all of the voice actors who brought them to life were awesome.

Along the same lines, our concept artists and character artists were instrumental in developing the distinctive looks of the factions, their outfits, and their leaders. Incredible work by everyone involved, but I want to credit Lindsey Laney and Matt Hansen for the work they did on faction outfits/styles and 2d portraits, respectively. Furthermore, all of our 2D art was just incredible, from the UI reskin that Mitch Loidolt did to the massive amount of icons and black and white illustrations that Lindsey and Matt did. Phenomenal work and it’s honestly incredible they produced it all at such a high level of quality.

Our environment artists built what I think is the most beautiful isometric RPG to date. I think it will hold up well over time (as many beautiful iso RPGs do). Kaz Aruga, our lead artist, and Sean Dunny, our environment lead, set an extremely high quality bar. Kaz worked very closely with our programmers to refine the environment/light/shadow rendering in Deadfire and the leap in quality between Pillars 1 and Deadfire is huge (IMO, anyway).

Dimitri Berman, James Chea, and Ian Randall massively improved our character models. We caught some justifiable criticism for the quality of character models in Pillars 1, but I was very happy with our Deadfire models. For a team that had (effectively) only two character artists I think they did a great job. The personality poses and fidgets that Seth McCaughey animated for our companions also really brought the characters to life.

I think our visual effects in Pillars 1 were good, but somewhat hampered by renderer limitations in Unity 4. In Deadfire, John Lewis and James Melilli knocked it out of the park. The programming team’s work (especially Adam Brennecke’s) on revising the rendering pipeline also massively helped with combat legibility and overall visual quality.

The system designers managed to make what I think is a pretty great multiclassing system with a ton of subclass options that’s very robust and well-balanced (in terms of viability). Dave Williams, Nick Carver, Brian Heins, Matt Sheets, and John Schmauz had an enormous amount of critters, spells, companion tables, and abilities to implement and tune. Even though the balance was off at launch, that had much more to do with the breadth of features in the game how I prioritized time than with the work that they did.

There are other people that I haven’t mentioned, but again, the team did great work. And to re-state what I said in my talk, I think the DLC team really raised the bar above the quality of the main game. Tighter, more well-paced stories, beautiful visuals, cool new characters, and some really wild combat content/item goodies. DLCs are often rated below the games that spawned them, but I really don’t understand why, especially in RPGs, where they often feel like significant refinements. They certainly did for Deadfire (IMO, IMO, IMO, etc.).
 
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Riddler

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Bubbles In Memoria
The reason Deadfire flopped was because it was a direct continuation of a turd that had a weak hook and non-existent marketing.

Easy as that.

The game has numerous major issues but those would not have been apparent to the large number of people that simply didn't try the game at all.
 
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Robert Erick

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The reason Deadfire flopped was because it was a direct continuation of a turd that had a weak hook and non-existent marketing.

Easy as that.

The game has numerous major issues but those would not have been apparent to the large number of people that simply didn't try the game at all.
How could it be a turd when it was the critical darling of march 2015 and it had such memorable characters and a timeless story written by industry veterans
 

Deadyawn

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For all the sales and praise PoE got, a quick glance at the stats should have clued them that for all the raving very few people actually bothered to finish the thing. Making Deadfire a direct continuation was probably a very bad move.
 

Desiderius

Found your egg, Robinett, you sneaky bastard
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Insert Title Here Pathfinder: Wrath
For all the sales and praise PoE got, a quick glance at the stats should have clued them that for all the raving very few people actually bothered to finish the thing. Making Deadfire a direct continuation was probably a very bad move.

I liked PoE a lot. I didn't finish it because Thaos was meh and I don't finish a lot of games that I like these days. You master it then start on something else or else you restart with a different approach if the game has good replayability (like P:K). Did finish Twin Elms and Endless Paths. Restarted and played most of White Marches. If Deadfire had done what D:OS 2 did and embraced/expanded on the original it would have done great. Instead it was a content desert faceroll that abandoned a lot of the strengths of the original.
 
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Desiderius

Found your egg, Robinett, you sneaky bastard
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Insert Title Here Pathfinder: Wrath
Another thing: I would be careful of exaggerating the degree to which Sawyer "admits the grognards were right all along!"

One thing he notably doesn't do in this talk is say the game's commercial failure had anything to do with ~balance~. In fact, he praises himself for removing overpowered builds quickly after launch.

He blames the unengaging story, he blames the ship combat, he blames the game being real-time instead of turn-based. He doesn't blame balance, or any of his changes to the D&D formula.

Removing overpowered builds is exactly what should be done. That's completely different than streamlining the vast majority of meaningful decisions out of a game, in my mind to some extent to rationalize delivering a content desert dud of a sequel. Creating those decisions (and that meaning) is the heart of good game design and for whatever reason they didn't put the requisite time and effort in to deliver it.
 

Desiderius

Found your egg, Robinett, you sneaky bastard
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Insert Title Here Pathfinder: Wrath
the map being almost entirely open does have positive aspects, that being the freedom to explore. Was it worth the trade off?

Prolly would have been if they hadn't forgotten to fucking populate it with anything meaningful. Pretty stoked to pick up 13 pieces of fruit and 17 waterskins. Is a freakin Skomp village too much to ask?
 

Tenebris

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For all the sales and praise PoE got, a quick glance at the stats should have clued them that for all the raving very few people actually bothered to finish the thing. Making Deadfire a direct continuation was probably a very bad move.

Agreed. I actually had a very good time playing PoE and completed PotD multiple times and was genuinely excited for a sequel. But making it a direct sequel was such a retarded move and the setting too. Josh recently mentioned that they discussed having it take place in The Vailian Republics and The Living Lands along with Deadfire. Why they decided to go with Deadfire is beyond me though. I remember seeing a lot of people wanting it to be in the Living Lands, White that Wends, and the Aedyr Empire but Deadfire? I hardly saw anyone asking for it.
 

S.torch

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Making a direct or an indirect sequel is irrelevant if the quality of the writing is the same.
 

Tigranes

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For all the sales and praise PoE got, a quick glance at the stats should have clued them that for all the raving very few people actually bothered to finish the thing. Making Deadfire a direct continuation was probably a very bad move.

In most games, like 10-20% of buyers ever finish... and a sizable chunk of your players will play between 0 and 120 minutes. It's the norm now to have many people buy Steam games they'll never really play, and only a minority actually finish even once.

Would be interesting to know if POE's completion stats or other proxy data were even lower than this dismal average, though.

Sequels always seem to invite stupid and pointless ways to piss people off, though. E.g. direct sequel = plenty of people whining they can't import their game and all their XP and items and decisions from first game. Surely it could have been something set in Old Vailia where Eder and a couple others make a reappearance, and maybe the whole place is being turned upside down by the major consequences to the setting, like fake gods -> everyone goes all in on animancy.
 

TwoEdge

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For all the sales and praise PoE got, a quick glance at the stats should have clued them that for all the raving very few people actually bothered to finish the thing. Making Deadfire a direct continuation was probably a very bad move.

In most games, like 10-20% of buyers ever finish... and a sizable chunk of your players will play between 0 and 120 minutes. It's the norm now to have many people buy Steam games they'll never really play, and only a minority actually finish even once.

Would be interesting to know if POE's completion stats or other proxy data were even lower than this dismal average, though.

Sequels always seem to invite stupid and pointless ways to piss people off, though. E.g. direct sequel = plenty of people whining they can't import their game and all their XP and items and decisions from first game. Surely it could have been something set in Old Vailia where Eder and a couple others make a reappearance, and maybe the whole place is being turned upside down by the major consequences to the setting, like fake gods -> everyone goes all in on animancy.

13.2% of players beat the first game on Steam, according to the achievement tracker: https://steamcommunity.com/stats/291650/achievements
About what I expected, given its length and mass appeal.
 

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