Eternity Did the PoE series fail commercially because it didn't use the D&D ruleset or was it something else?

[Riddler]

The better question is how did original sin sell so many copies?

Belgian blood magic obviously.

 

[Lacrymas]

Co-op + marketing.

 

[santino27]

The POE series failed for a lot of reasons. I do think it would have performed somewhat better with a known combat system. Some people bounced off POE1 because it was overwritten and not particularly engaging, story-wise, but other people found the combat mechanics confusing and off-putting... I mean, Sawyer was tweaking that shit until 3.x, and then tossed half of it out for the sequel, so it seems clear that even he was aware people weren't loving it.

But even if the combat had been accessible, deep, and amazing, the rest of the game would still have been flat, and I think the #s for POE2 would still have suffered as a direct result.

 

[sullynathan]

The better question is how did original sin sell so many copies?

It's a video game that's enjoyable. Surprising isn't it?

 

[PsychoFox]

BTW who says PoE failed commercially? is there actual numbers to back this claim?

 

[Frozen]

I really wanted to like it but I just couldn't.
The game is so fucking boring.

 

[rusty_shackleford]

BTW who says PoE failed commercially? is there actual numbers to back this claim?

not sure about 1, but iirc 2 did based on how much Fig backers got

 

[PsychoFox]

BTW who says PoE failed commercially? is there actual numbers to back this claim?

not sure about 1, but iirc 2 did based on how much Fig backers got

URL?

 

[Chippy]

Feargus Urquart: "Hey guys: our fans that have been with us for 20 years are throwing millions of pounds at us to do an IE style game - what should our priorities be?".
Josh Sawyer: "Let's make an entirely brand new untested ruleset. From scratch".
Feargus: "Good one Josh, you take care of that - I'm sure you can whip something up in no time".
MCA: "Let's try and prioritize the best of the narrative from Fallout, BG, PST, Arcanum and the party mechanics of KOTOR".
Feargus: "Great idea Chris! Now you take a back seat and let all the low-pay, just left college, wet behind the ears, no talent, new hires working for monthly rent money go ahead with that".
Tim Cain: "I'd like to get involved in...".
Feargus: "Ok, that was a great meeting team! I have another meeting to go to with the wife and kids err, I mean higher-ups; so let me know how it's going in 6 months! toodledo!".

 

[Kyl Von Kull]

BTW who says PoE failed commercially? is there actual numbers to back this claim?

not sure about 1, but iirc 2 did based on how much Fig backers got

URL?

There’s a whole thread on this. We have the Fig numbers and they’re really bad. Click through to see more detail.

Fig's annual report has been released.

As expected, the report doesn't say how many copies the game sold, only Fig's revenue from it:

In theory, this would mean PoE2's revenue by September 30 was $3,101,392 (before Valve's cut). Assuming no revenue was shared with other companies before Fig's cut, that would translate to:

• 68,920 copies sold at an average price of $45
• 77,535 at $40
• 88,611 at $35
• 103,380 at $30
• 124,056 at $25

Those are lowball figures that don’t include Fig backers or copies sold by Versus Evil, but it still paints a grim picture.

Long story short, POE sold extremely well, so Obsidian spent a fortune on the sequel figuring it could do even better. Instead, like most direct sequels in the Kickstarter era, it did a lot worse.

 

[PsychoFox]

Yeah i'm not at all convinced those numbers are accurate. This is just conjecture at best. I suspect the real numbers are much higher than this, if anything, considering the post-launch support the game got, which is always a sign of healthy ROI.

I'm not saying the game did or did not do poorly because i don't have actual data, but i don't think it's as bad as what people say it is. I'm willing to bet that the ROI on Deadfire was much better than PoE1, but that's mostly my hunch.

 

[Latro]

not because of the game system, but because of a complete lack of a good story. BG1 didn't start off with words, words, words, it gave you a place and a purpose; and then built upon what the player was introduced to by mid-game. POE suffered from bad pacing, bad plot, and a basic failure by the main designers to understand what makes a RPG story compelling or interesting. world building comes AFTER you give them a reason to care about the world.

 

[Mr. Magniloquent]

1. The rule set sucked. Lots of numbers, not much happening.
2. Too many classes. Created tons of gimmicky crap to distinguish them while leaving most of it dissatisfying.
3. Balance.
4. Lame setting that tried not to be Forgotten Realms, while being an entirely inferior version of it.
5. Boooooring plot. Boring quests.
6. Too itself far too seriously.
7. Lore dumps, of all kinds.

It was the cRPG that almost was. Josh Sawyer was on the right track with trying to create a true real-time RPG at its core, but lot lost in his autistic preferences, which are frankly bland.

D:OS was mostly the opposite. The campaign and NPCs were like something you'd write for your kid's first D&D experience. It didn't take itself seriously and only wanted you to have fun with it. It gave players agency, adventure, and whimsy. Both D:OS and PoE has bullshit mechanics, but at least D:OS focused on giving the player flexibility, while PoE merely condescend with try-hard variations that nobody asked for.

 

[Cryomancer]

PoE is a decent game, but is not an great game and is IMO the worst Obsidian RPG.

- Has classes, but offer much less choice than NWN2 and classes are far more homogenized
- Has firearms, but you can't upgrade and use all types of ammo like FNV
- Has attributes, but is inferior to NWN2, to FNV Kotor 2(...)
- Has spells, but much less and in smaller amount than other Obsidian games
- Has strongholds, but is very inferior to NwN2 crossroad keep
- Has an story, but inferior to kotor 2, to fnv, to motb(...)
(...)

So, IMO PoE is a good game, but compared to other Obsidian games, is not that interesting.

 

[Beastro]

The story was numbingly indiffering to the player while the combat was very off, so no wonder it united the two extremes of RPGs against it who love those things.

 

[rusty_shackleford]

is IMO the worst Obsidian RPG.

nwn2 OC and ds3 are worse

 

[Cryomancer]

nwn2 OC and ds3 are worse

NwN2 OC is not that bad. And i can't consider dungeon siege 3 as an rpg. Is like D3.

 

[Lacrymas]

If there's a single big misstep in PoE's combat system it's too many classes for the type of design they were going for. They either should've scaled back the abilities of classes, make them have very distinct roles which can be influenced by builds instead of everyone being able to do everything; or remove at least Monks, Rangers, Druids and Barbarians. Maybe even both. There just isn't enough variety between the classes to justify a class-based system in the current state.

 

[glass blackbird]

Feargus Urquart: "Hey guys: our fans that have been with us for 20 years are throwing millions of pounds at us to do an IE style game - what should our priorities be?".
Josh Sawyer: "Let's make an entirely brand new untested ruleset. From scratch".
Feargus: "Good one Josh, you take care of that - I'm sure you can whip something up in no time".
MCA: "Let's try and prioritize the best of the narrative from Fallout, BG, PST, Arcanum and the party mechanics of KOTOR".
Feargus: "Great idea Chris! Now you take a back seat and let all the low-pay, just left college, wet behind the ears, no talent, new hires working for monthly rent money go ahead with that".
Tim Cain: "I'd like to get involved in...".
Feargus: "Ok, that was a great meeting team! I have another meeting to go to with the wife and kids err, I mean higher-ups; so let me know how it's going in 6 months! toodledo!".

i think the game is probably better off without an even greater focus on the world's most boring and wordy rpg companion ever, grieving mother

 

[Lawntoilet]

The first game falters imo because of it's poor story and poor story delivery. The actual lore and characters of the game as well as the RP mechanics are fairly decent, but the main plot is boring and the buried behind paragraph after paragraph of autistic drivel. PoE II on the other hand is a pretty great game imo, at least so far after 10 hours.

-snip-

The best thing about PoE is the world itself. They made a real poor choice by choosing Dyrwood for the first game because it's a totally uninspiring landscape, but the the world of PoE is rich with a lot of very well written, interesting lore.

I don't disagree, the Dyrwood was pretty generic and Deadfire's setting was a lot cooler and more creative. Base PoE was OK at the start but got pretty lame after Act 2 especially, TWM and Deadfire are big improvements. Deadfire's main story sucks though, and the fact that it is portrayed as an urgent issue (Eothas is sucking up souls and people are dying every day) really weakens the appeal to do sidequests which are the real draw (this was an issue with BG2 as well but the main story was better due to Irenicus, and at least it had the artificial gating of making you raise enough money to hire a ship to Spellhold).

Good luck finding a single-player module balanced for PRC. That screencap is from HotU, which is already a faceroll. Go and play non-PRC Swordflight, you summon-scrub.

Swordflight Part 2 is so fucking awesome. I sort of stalled out on Part 3 but I should really fire up my old reliable Champion of Torm. I started it back in the day based on your recommendation so thanks

 

[frajaq]

Anecdotal as fuck but of the few gaming buddies that I know that played the game, none of them bothered with the sequel. When I asked the reasons it's always something about "boringess/pacing/not fun combat" of their experience while they were playing PoE 1, and I don't think they ever got past Act 2.

And so the first game will just sit on their steam library forever, in that "meh" zone where you don't even bother to write a positive or negative review, and quietly forget about it while you go find something, you know, actually FUN and interesting to play

 

[Delator]

Yeah i'm not at all convinced those numbers are accurate. This is just conjecture at best. I suspect the real numbers are much higher than this, if anything, considering the post-launch support the game got, which is always a sign of healthy ROI.

I'm not saying the game did or did not do poorly because i don't have actual data, but i don't think it's as bad as what people say it is. I'm willing to bet that the ROI on Deadfire was much better than PoE1, but that's mostly my hunch.

The spreadsheet provided here lists Deadfire as having sold 203,867 copies as of 1 July 2018.

 

[Lawntoilet]

Anecdotal as fuck but of the few gaming buddies that I know that played the game, none of them bothered with the sequel. When I asked the reasons it's always something about "boringess/pacing/not fun combat" of their experience while they were playing PoE 1, and I don't think they ever got past Act 2.

And so the first game will just sit on their steam library forever, in that "meh" zone where you don't even bother to write a positive or negative review, and quietly forget about it while you go find something, you know, actually FUN and interesting to play

End of Act 2 in PoE1 sucked. I can't blame anyone for dropping it at that point.

I find Deadfire way more fun but I still haven't beaten it because the main quest is so boring compared to the rest of the game - hopefully I can finish on the TB playthrough I just started.

Kingmaker still made me much happier to play, though.

 

[Lichtbringer]

Implementing a D20-based system would have been good sense, but alas, Dunning–Kruger and Aspergers were just too strong.

 

[Generic-Giant-Spider]

To truly understand why Pillars of Eternity failed, we must start from the beginning.

Josh "Gertrude" Sawyer was born out of a consenting union between Linda Sawyer and Gerald P. Sawyer, otherwise known as Jebediah, in Wisconsin. His mother was a baker and his father was an alleged sculptor but moonlit as an adult video retailer. Joshua, powered by German genetics not seen since the glory days of the Third Reich was christened "Das Wunderkind" by his fellow Wisconsian villagers but had a fairly by-the-books childhood and focused his studies on various subjects which intrigued him. Some of these included languages, history, hairstyling, scales, cryptozoology, theater, and finally... game design.

It was a cold, brisk morning in 1999. The days of eurodance were slowly slipping out of the club scene and industrial rock was at an all time high. Raves were commonplace, Y2K threatened to end all existence, and WinNuke was the terror of mIRC. It was here that Josh Sawyer was hired to Black Isle Studios by Playgirl's Studmuffin of July 1994, Feargus "Papa Bear" Urquhart. While he began as a lowly wage slave and janitor, Joshua's doe eyes and alluring hips made him the belle of the ball to many in the higher positions of management. Sensing this devilish dame was quickly becoming the obsession of the hearts of his men much like a young nun would tempt many priests in ye olden dayz, Feargus took it upon himself to claim Josh as his own. It was a process of breaking in, but Josh would be broken in due time and made submissive to his rotund overlord.

Thus began what many who worked in Black Isle Studios called, "The S&M Years."

(Please insert Disc 2)