Eternity Josh Sawyer reflects on his failures with Pillars of Eternity

[Machocruz]

This ties back into my main point.

while a "regular gamer" will have barely stomached the game for an hour or two, and turn around say "yeah PoE is a good game". They do this because people are sheep, and will believe whatever the general consensus is all the while, they buy and play games that might be completely contrary to what they say they like/say is good

I buy this. Anecdotal, but outside of here, I've seen mostly praise for PoE1 among players, the "normies*" if you will. They say this but in practice they'd rather not spend any more money on any more PoE. It was good enough for that one go they had with it and/or they don't want to rock the boat with their true, contrary opinion.

*I don't mean actual normies, who don't even play games like this or haven't even heard of it. I mean your everyday gamer nerds who post on forums/YT comments but aren't serious RPG enthusiasts/grognards.

 

[AW8]

Instead of winding up in a stupid cave after the natives attack the caravans, we could've been abducted by them and then met Eder in their encampment, trying to escape together. This could've been a Raedric's style map where you have a variety of ways to go about escaping. When you do it, it's a no-brainer to travel with Eder because he's a local and knows what's up, he tells you that Raedric is looking for recruits and, having no other choice, you go to Gilded Vale to meet him. He tells you about the problems in the land (he still hasn't killed his wife) and letting you in his employ maybe on the condition you take what's-her-face's, his animancer in the basement, "apprentice" (Aloth) with you. Much better opener and one which isn't full of contrivances at each corner.

Your post should be sent back in time to Obsidian's office in 2012.

No matter how you look at it, the opening to Pillars is weak. It's not memorable and save for Thaos' brief appaerance in the end it has nothing to do with the rest of the world. The caravan was, from what I remember, just random people emigrating to America Dyrwood because they wanted work. The faction of native elves protecting the ruins never featured again from what I recall. The biawac soul-storm was just some random thing that happened once, wasn't it? Then there's the temporary companions that was a really dumb move. And the generic lizardmen trash mobs that had nothing to with the main plot whatsoever.

Deadfire's opening is equally baffling. They should have let the player loose with a ship to instantly explore the world map (the best part of the game), or started off the game on an island with some tutorialization before reaching the ship.
Instead the player starts in the afterlife(!!!) and is barraged with lore, before waking up on their ship and gets hastily thrown into a combat tutorial so lackluster it fails to explain anything, after which the ship crashes and the tutorial island starts.
The pacing is terrible. Why do we start on the ship if it instantly crashes? It's not Mass Effect 2 where returning players would recognize the Normandy. The iconic moment of seeing our ship for the first time never happens because we already start on it, and when we later repair it and push it offshore the triumphant moment just feels weird.

Imagine if the game had started on Tutorial Island, where you're shipwrecked or dumped or just stuck. Then you make your way to Port Maje and in the harbor you see your ticket out of there - the Defiant, a ship you then proceed to buy/win/steal.
It could also be tied to the factions where the Vailian Trading Company would give you the ship for helping them deal with the Principi, or having the Principi help you steal the ship to fuck with the Vailians. It would have been much more fun to both play and replay than having to do a generic dungeon where you reach out psychically to Dr. Manhattan Eothas who couldn't give a single shit about you (feeling's mutual).

Compare either of these opening hooks to FONV where Benny just shoots the player in the head. BANG. Strong. Simple. Memorable.

My suggestion is to abandon the PoE brand. It's worthless. Start fro Scratch, get a pre-implemented ruleset like OGL and write good stories. But yeah, who am I kidding.

Agreed. I liked both games, but I have no interest in the world. I disliked the god nonsense in the first game, and was tired to death by it by the second game. The whole animancy/soul incarnation business is just confusing and I would have problems trying to describe this - the heart of the setting - in simple terms to someone who's never played the game.

The good parts, which are the factions, universal character death and PC platform focus, can be replicated in any other setting. Edér is a bro but I would be hardpressed to describe anything of significance that he's done or experienced beyond "uhmm he took a puff from his pipe once".

 

[Infinitron]

I think FO:NV's opening hook is overrated. Which isn't to say that it's not a better opening than PoE's, but I think the people who view it as this, like, major thing that totally MAKES the game are getting it wrong.

I mean I can easily imagine an Obsidian isometric RPG that starts with you getting killed and then waking up at some healer's abode with lots of dialogue and people going "Wtf is this shit, I'm not invested". That's not really what it's about.

I think it's the events that happen after the opening that sell FO:NV. Encountering the game's first factions, organizing the townsfolk of Goodspring against the Powder Gangers, liberating Primm, participating in the NCR raid on the prison that visibly changes the balance of power in the world, all within the first hours of the game. THAT'S fucking cool.

 

[Kyl Von Kull]

Sawyer has a very particular sensibility that bleeds into his projects: dark and gritty, but very low-key. Maybe quotidian is the word I’m looking for—the opposite of melodramatic. Anti-epic. Even when the world goes crazy in Deadfire, everyone just tries to get on with their lives. This was a problem in both POE games as the director and the management mandated story were pulling in opposite directions.

I think Sawyer’s sensibility is perfect for a post apocalyptic setting, which is among the reasons why New Vegas was so good. But it’s a terrible filter to put over an epic fantasy game; it creates an enormous amount of dissonance. If you’re going to tell an epic story, you need to fucking commit to it. I can just see him telling the writers to tone everything down, when they really needed to do the opposite. And Lacrymas is right that the opening of POE is packed with some really basic storytelling mistakes, like it’s deliberately trying to alienate players.

For all that Tyranny was an unfinished game with much worse combat than POE, the story and the setting are miles ahead of Sawyer’s fantasy games because Tyranny commits to its premise.

 

[Roguey]

White March has nowhere near that pedigree, and if Steamspy is to be trusted even a little bit, only up to 20k people own White March, compared to TToSC's 600k back when digital distribution wasn't a thing.

Disregard steamspy when it comes to DLC, it has no idea what it's talking about. Unless you also think Dead Money and Dawnguard both also sold fewer than 20,000: https://steamspy.com/app/72730 https://steamspy.com/app/211720

TotSC appears to be roughly 30% of BG sales in both 2000 and 2003. Looking at Steam achievements, the highest Pillars expansion one is getting Maneha at 8.4% which certainly isn't 30% but one can also look at the highest New Vegas DLC achievement which is When We Remembered Zion at 16.7%. The highest Dawnguard achievement is Awakening at 28.4% so it appears that even when you have the most popular RPGs ever you can only hope for 30% of your existing playerbase to engage with DLC/expansion content at the very most.

Meanwhile the top Kingmaker DLC achivement is 4.2%. Looks like most people really felt like they had more than enough with the base game. Is this an indication that a follow-up would bomb? Probably not.

 

[Xeon]

One of the best things I loved about the start of FNV is the fast start, you start right in the middle of a hub either decide to do quests in it or just fuck off, there are no tutorial or start in the middle of no where to get to a hub or anything like that. It was like the start of Morrowind, fast with no hassle.

 

[Lacrymas]

Obsidian had appropriate ingredients to make both PoE1 and 2 compelling, they just didn't know how to mix them and in what order to put them in. The factions in PoE2 could've been so much more and so much more logical and connected. Even Eothas could've been involved for that sought-after "woah" moment from normies, but then swiftly be disposed of and continued on to the factions. Again, very easy to switch the order of events to completely sidestep the budget issue. You start on the ship following Eothas, stop in Sayuka to figure out where exactly he is going and to see what he is doing, get to Magran's Teeth/Ukaizo and deal with Eothas there and then, they could add you dying here and meeting Berath who returns you to your body for another mission, even though I'd advise against this. Bam, act 1 complete, Eothas' body plummets to the ground, causing luminous adra to be uncovered/created, leading to a faction war in which you get embroiled.

It just needs a good lead (narrative) designer to know what to put where and how.

Disregard steamspy when it comes to DLC, it has no idea what it's talking about. Unless you also think Dead Money and Dawnguard both also sold fewer than 20,000: https://steamspy.com/app/72730 https://steamspy.com/app/211720

TotSC appears to be roughly 30% of BG sales in both 2000 and 2003. Looking at Steam achievements, the highest Pillars expansion one is getting Maneha at 8.4% which certainly isn't 30% but one can also look at the highest New Vegas DLC achievement which is When We Remembered Zion at 16.7%. The highest Dawnguard achievement is Awakening at 28.4% so it appears that even when you have the most popular RPGs ever you can only hope for 30% of your existing playerbase to engage with DLC/expansion content at the very most.

Meanwhile the top Kingmaker DLC achivement is 4.2%. Looks like most people really felt like they had more than enough with the base game. Is this an indication that a follow-up would bomb? Probably not.

Two problems with this. The first is that achievements don't really correspond to sales numbers, I'm 100% certain a lot of people buy DLC for games they like but end up never playing them. Obsidian are in this business, they should know the numbers and what to extrapolate from them.

The second problem is that if DLC in general has such a low turn-over, nobody would make DLC/expansions ever, it doesn't seem worth it unless their budget is veeeeery tiny.

 

[Daidre]

By WM2 Pillars was solid both mechanically and as a setting. They should’ve made Tyranny with the same mechanics leveraging the (then) good brand of Pillars: “The Dark Sun of Pillars.” Then they should have left mechanics the fuck alone, just scaling it up a few levels, told Feargus to stuff it with the epic god MQ and Watcher protag, gone all in with the factions, and finally stamped down hard on the romances, coaching the writers to create proper well grounded characters instead of Mary Sues.

Wow, I went from excusing Deadfire to spitting venom in Obsidian's general direction back in 2018 when Kingmaker was released and happened to be a game I expected from them for a ten fucking years.

But Prime Junta turned out to be one slow boiling kettle - it took dichotomic double strike of Disco Elysium + Outer Worlds on his sanity to start vehemently criticize second PoE.

 

[IHaveHugeNick]

I mean I can easily imagine an Obsidian isometric RPG that starts with you getting killed and people going "Wtf is this shit, I'm not invested".

I have good news: that isometric RPG already exists and it's called Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire.

 

[DalekFlay]

I wonder how much the advice in this thread is really related to its sales. Not defending the game itself (in fact I haven't played it yet) but he says in the quote the problem was they didn't reach outside the "core market" like they did the first time. I don't think it's you fucks he's wondering about. He's wondering why the less "hardcore" who ate up Divinity OS but didn't eat up Pillars.

 

[Viata]

My suggestion is to abandon the PoE brand. It's worthless. Start fro Scratch, get a pre-implemented ruleset like OGL and write good stories. But yeah, who am I kidding.

Yeah. In fact, they should never try to push a brand. Just make different kinds of rpg settings.

 

[Alpan]

BTW don’t forget that the Figstarter went very well. It wasn’t at all obvious at that point that it was going to flop, quite the contrary.

Actually, this interpretation of the Fig campaign is incorrect (though a very easy mistake to make). Because half of the money in that campaign came from "investors", the Fig ended up raising more money than the PoE 1 kickstarter (4.4m vs 3.9m) with less than half the number of backers (33.6k vs 74k). And which do you think is a better predictor of sales numbers?

A similar thing is going on with David Gaider's Chorus Fig right now where a project that was languishing at ~150K two weeks ago is suddenly up to ~540k due to "investors", with barely a shift in backer numbers. That project will likewise flop even should they secure funding.

 

[ga♥]

Prime Junta: the figstarter was a bad. It brought less money that the Kickaster of PoE and also some of those money paid dividends to the "investors" (who apparently got cucked).

 

[AW8]

I think FO:NV's opening hook is overrated. Which isn't to say that it's not a better opening than PoE's, but I think the people who view it as this, like, major thing that totally MAKES the game are getting it wrong.

I mean I can easily imagine an Obsidian isometric RPG that starts with you getting killed and then waking up at some healer's abode with lots of dialogue and people going "Wtf is this shit, I'm not invested". That's not really what it's about.

I think it's the events that happen after the opening that sell FO:NV. Encountering the game's first factions, organizing the townsfolk of Goodspring against the Powder Gangers, liberating Primm, participating in the NCR raid on the prison that visibly changes the balance of power in the world, all within the first hours of the game. THAT'S fucking cool.

The whole path you (most likely) take during the They Went That-A-Way quest is great, but all that flows from the hook of Benny robbing and shooting you. It's simple, it makes sense and it works.

Becoming an awakened Watcher and having your soul (kind of?) ripped out by Eothas is just confusing, and even if the opening arcs of both games had been fantastically designed, they would still have been built on shaky ground where the player isn't really following the main thread of logic and are asking why they should care.

FONV's opening is also very marketable. "Track down the guy who shot you for revenge and answers." If you try to sell the concept of "you were injured by a weird machine that made you start seeing ghosts, go to the next town and rest", you're gonna have a hard time impressing a potential customer. If Thaos had just jumped you and sucked out your soul, it would have already been an improvement.

 

[ga♥]

BTW don’t forget that the Figstarter went very well. It wasn’t at all obvious at that point that it was going to flop, quite the contrary.

Actually, this interpretation of the Fig campaign is incorrect (though a very easy mistake to make). Because half of the money in that campaign came from "investors", the Fig ended up raising more money than the PoE 1 kickstarter (4.4m vs 3.9m) with less than half the number of backers (33.6k vs 74k). And which do you think is a better predictor of sales numbers?

A similar thing is going on with David Gaider's Chorus Fig right now where a project that was languishing at ~150K two weeks ago is suddenly up to ~540k due to "investors", with barely a shift in backer numbers. That project will likewise flop even should they secure funding.

I think that if you count post-kickstarter funding (like via paypal or w/e), PoE1 brought in more money.

 

[passerby]

For a direct sequels of the "more of the same variety", to the narrative heavy games, only "collectors" and people who own and completed the first game are potential audience and even within this group, not everyone actually liked it enough to be interested in the sequel.
So their expectations were simply out of touch with reality, because a single look at PoE1 achievements suggests that PoE2 did exactly as should be expected, a very low interest in The White March was also a good estimate of a direct sequel expected performance.

I'd attribute the lack of performance drop of FO2, BG2 etc in the 90s to high piracy and used games market. Plenty of pirates, or people who borrowed/bought used copy and really liked the game were buying the sequel and offsetting people who bought but didn't like the first games.
High piracy rate is no longer a reality. Simillar was the fate of Legend of Grimrock 2, a majority of normies that given into the hype and bought LoG 1, hated it and had zero interest in the sequel.

 

[ga♥]

They bullied and marginalized MCA, because he was the better of the lot. Result: the main EVENT of PoE1 is a diarrhea attack that sets the most boring story ever narrated in motion.

 

[IHaveHugeNick]

Actually, this interpretation of the Fig campaign is incorrect (though a very easy mistake to make). Because half of the money in that campaign came from "investors", the Fig ended up raising more money than the PoE 1 kickstarter (4.4m vs 3.9m) with less than half the number of backers (33.6k vs 74k). And which do you think is a better predictor of sales numbers?

Dropping numbers on Figstarter could have easily been waved off as crowdfunding fatigue instead of Pillars fatigue.

I wonder how much the advice in this thread is really related to its sales. Not defending the game itself (in fact I haven't played it yet) but he says in the quote the problem was they didn't reach outside the "core market" like they did the first time. I don't think it's you fucks he's wondering about. He's wondering why the less "hardcore" who ate up Divinity OS but didn't eat up Pillars.

Yup. Whatever you say about Deadfire, they tried to keep grognards happy by fixing the difficulty, adding extensive multiclassing, megabosses and a DLC specifically focused on hardcore combat. It's the casual storyfags who checked out of the sequel.

 

[ga♥]

I'd attribute the good performance of FO2, BG2 etc in the 90s to high piracy and used games market.

This is so retarded I don't even know what to reply.

 

[Machocruz]

People don't necessarily get sequels if they liked a game, and they won't necessarily skip sequels if they hated a game.

 

[Alpan]

Actually, this interpretation of the Fig campaign is incorrect (though a very easy mistake to make). Because half of the money in that campaign came from "investors", the Fig ended up raising more money than the PoE 1 kickstarter (4.4m vs 3.9m) with less than half the number of backers (33.6k vs 74k). And which do you think is a better predictor of sales numbers?

Dropping numbers on Figstarter could have easily been waved off as crowdfunding fatigue instead of Pillars fatigue.

Isn't that the point though -- you don't wave off crowdfunding fatigue either, seeing as your original product relied on crowdfunding (and its associated nostalgia) being perky.

 

[Lacrymas]

FONV's opening is also very marketable. "Track down the guy who shot you for revenge and answers." If you try to sell the concept of "you were injured by a weird machine that made you start seeing ghosts, go to the next town and rest", you're gonna have a hard time impressing a potential customer. If Thaos had just jumped you and sucked out your soul, it would have already been an improvement.

I don't think protagonist motivation works the same way in video games as it does in books/films unless the protagonist is fixed and shows his own thoughts and emotions. Most RPGs don't have a fixed protagonist, I'm actually at a loss to think of even 1 example of a proper RPG where that's the case. Anyway, I think the biggest motivation for a blank slate-ish protagonist is either a very strong cast of companions who carry him/her (think KotOR2) and flesh him/her out through their interactions, or a very strong gameplay hook. Even though I despise New Vegas because of its genre, I think it has a good opener, but not because of Benny, but because of Goodsprings and the gameplay loop of being able to do a lot in the town, including betraying it completely to attack it with the bandits. Strong gameplay openers work for both normies and grognards, even though normies wouldn't know what they are looking at.

Would you call gods are fakkkeee!!! Poe story low key? Because from what I understand that was Sawyer.

Most people didn't get that far and it's one of the worst "twists" in the history of this medium. Not only is the "revelation" pointless in its own story, it also features characters nobody cares about, especially Iovara.

 

[IHaveHugeNick]

Some guy I never met shoots me in the head: such a strong opening, much wow

50 meter statue stomps on my home, kills me and I start the game in the afterlife talking to the god of death: I don't know, this seems kind of bland, I feel that my protagonist has no reason to be interested in this story.

 

[Stokowski]

Dear Josh,

You were responsible for Icewind Dale II, so I will always you.

However,

1. You make single player games. Stop obsessing over balance. It's a nebulous goal that does nothing to improve gameplay in a single player title.

2. Separation of base attributes into physical and mental/spiritual isn't evil. It works really well. Hybridisation and synergies develop naturally enough from deratives (skills), not bases (attributes). Attempting to hydridise base attributes (and balance them, naturally) leads to conceptual idiocy like Might affecting spell power, or Barbarians needing high Intelligence to fuel Area-of-Effect abilities. Stop it.

3. Re-inventing the wheel, with worse spelling, does not great lore make. If you cannot be truly original, then just steal from the best and save a lot of labour (and eye-strain).

5. If your story revolves around a major conceptual conundrum, get the fundamental question correct. No point harping on about "what if the gods don't really exist?" when the crux is "how does it matter if the gods are created, rather than creators?"

4. If your story revolves around a major conceptual conundrum, integrate it properly into the plot, rather than being an occasional visitor.

EDIT: Not your idea apparently: 5. Short text adventures are neat. But they are a wholly inadequate form for a game of naval combat. FFS.

6. Pre-buffing isn't a metagaming sin. If we're travelling in tombs infested with undead, an anti-fear buff makes sense. If in a fire cave, facing fire creatures, a shield against fire damage is logical. This isn't breaking holy writ; it's common sense adventuring. Taking that away makes the game world seem more stupid. Can you afford that?

7. If your priestess must speak with such an accent, make them a priestess of NASCAR. It would make more sense. (And be more fun.)



Yeah, remember fun?

 

[passerby]

I'd attribute the good performance of FO2, BG2 etc in the 90s to high piracy and used games market.

This is so retarded I don't even know what to reply.

How about replying to the whole paragraph that had a very clear message, instead of unfortunately worded sentence quoted out of context, before I fixed it ?