Obsidian and inXile acquired by Microsoft

[AwesomeButton]

I cared about Eder's quest because I thought he would leave the party unless I get to his son, or whatever the boy was. Now that I see he wouldn't leave, I'm kind of disappointed.

 

[Bohr]

Where is he btw? MS paid him off/threatened him into silence? :D

To be fair, he has bigger fish to fry right now

Spoiler

 

[2house2fly]

That's not the same with what VD was talking about though. A quest (and a companion quest to make things worse) with a premise no one will care about isn't good enough. And if this quest is indicative for the writting of the whole game (i haven't played it yet), then the low sale is absolutely deserved

It isn't a premise nobody will care about. My good buddy Eder wants to look up his old girlfriend and all of a sudden finds out he might be a father. I'm in buddy, let's do it

 

[AwesomeButton]

I agree with what has been said above - what makes companion quests uninteresting is the execution, not the premise itself. Look again at those Josh quotes I posted. They "overcompensated" with simple companion quests. This kind of reasoning gets me crazy. As if they were putting a little less cream on my latte, not doing creative work which should come from inspiration, be attractive and entertaining.

 

[IHaveHugeNick]

Yeah, people are taking Eder's quest out of context a bit. If that quest was being given by a generic NPC #532, criticism would be valid. But Eder is a returning companion and everyone's favorite bro.

 

[2house2fly]

I agree with what has been said above - what makes companion quests uninteresting is the execution, not the premise itself. Look again at those Josh quotes I posted. They "overcompensated" with simple companion quests. This kind of reasoning gets me crazy. As if they were putting a little less cream on my latte, not doing creative work which should come from inspiration, be attractive and entertaining.

It's really aggravating. Just don't do companion quests if you can't do them right, and have them be more involved in the main quest instead.

 

[Tenebris]

I wish Eder's quest also was a continuation of the quest from the first game. The guy meets Eothas face to face and he doesn't ask him about Woden? He even meets Eothas as Waidwen and misses a huge opportunity there.

 

[Ismaul]

Also he made me buy ELEX the fucker

The joke's on you. I never fell for this meme.

Yeah well a guy makes mistak-

~gzzrzzz
Get out of my head Darth Roxor! This is not-
~gzzrzrwhtwl

elex
Elex!
ELEX!!

 

[Rake]

That's not the same with what VD was talking about though. A quest (and a companion quest to make things worse) with a premise no one will care about isn't good enough. And if this quest is indicative for the writting of the whole game (i haven't played it yet), then the low sale is absolutely deserved

It isn't a premise nobody will care about. My good buddy Eder wants to look up his old girlfriend and all of a sudden finds out he might be a father. I'm in buddy, let's do it

And when he discovered the child wasn't his, you cared about it why exactly? Personal preference aside, the whole questline sounds so unepic and unfun, that i can't imagine many people geting excited about it.
This kind of writting is not a bad thing by itself, but i would argue is a bad fit for an adventure in fantasyland in the vein of BG

Yeah, people are taking Eder's quest out of context a bit. If that quest was being given by a generic NPC #532, criticism would be valid. But Eder is a returning companion and everyone's favorite bro.

As i said i haven't played the game yet so it's very possible i'm taking it out fo context. But the second part of your comment, i found Eder a total bore in the first game, so having an unexciting quest just because i'm supposed to care deeply about this cuck isn't sound reasoning. Preferably the companion questlines should be exciting/interesting enough that they compensate even for characters the player isn't thrilled about

 

[2house2fly]

It was a woman he was close to and now the boy is all that's left of her. Besides, finding out the boy isn't his isn't the initial premise of the quest.

 

[Fenix]

It's interesting that there are two camps with regards to Pillars Of Eternity:

1) They did what they wanted, instead of refining a commercial product with a specific audience in mind

2) They just checked off features and there was no passion put into it

I wonder if these apparently-irreconcilable positions are a result of blind men touching an elephant, or if they can both be true and thus speak to division within the development team

I'll give you third:

1) only thing they were interested in was "moral" teaching and preaching, Messiah complex is what usually attributed to a Jews, and now it's the company.
2) because they were interested in preaching, they were "just checked off features and there was no passion put into it".

This game was a hollowborn.

The most obvious example is that Sawyer gave companion writers free choice of companion sexuality.

Oh come on, tell as about free choice in society of online lynching and instant accusations in racism, sexism, -ism if you didn't slurped figural ass on homosexual of both sexes, negroes, trannies and in near future, I believe - pedophiles. They couldn't even get this job if they didn't know which side of the sandwich is smeared with butter. Freedom of choice my ass.

 

[2house2fly]

Uh. I'm not sure which game you're talking about, but Pillars Of Eternity doesn't do any moral preaching.

 

[Fenix]

All SJW bullshit is about that - in a sense, how they understand that.
The rest is a personal preference of "hear no evil see no evil speak no evil" kind.

 

[Ismaul]

I think one of the main issues with PoE is that they disconnected the setting from the story in their design. Sawyer is the setting guy, historical stuff and whatnot. The hollowborn plague, the saint's war, colonialism involving rival factions rather than focussing on oppression, I see his hand in this. But then the story writers made an unrelated story. They failed to explore the premises of the setting, while at the same time dumping much lore about it. So the lore dumping never pays off, which in turn makes it pointless. And worse, the game would've been much better if, instead of lore dumping, the story made you discover the lore organically through what you are doing, rather than just telling you about it while you do something else.

This might be related to how thery manage a project. Everyone has an area of expertise, they each do their thing in their corner but lack a direction and vision strong enough to make it a cohesive whole. Hell, take PoE2's Eder son story, and put it back in PoE1. Make him search for his lost son only to find out that he's hollowborn. A father's pain would drive the theme home, coming from a companion you interact with from the start. It would make the hollowborn crisis personal and tangible for the player. But they didn't apply such design principles at all. Fenstermaker shares a lot of the blame here, as lead narrative designer. They shouldn't have chosen Eric.

 

[Brancaleone]

I agree with what has been said above - what makes companion quests uninteresting is the execution, not the premise itself. Look again at those Josh quotes I posted. They "overcompensated" with simple companion quests. This kind of reasoning gets me crazy. As if they were putting a little less cream on my latte, not doing creative work which should come from inspiration, be attractive and entertaining.

Doubling and halving, does it ring a bell?

 

[Ismaul]

Also, the only writer worth his salt on PoE was Avellone, who created two companions that embodied the setting's main issues. Sad that the way Obsidian parcels their writing and design lead to Avellone having only dialogue and dumps to work with, rather than things to do / quests.

 

[Roguey]

Improved. By a lot. Yeah, right:

You also won't find anything like that in Fallout, so I would argue about art.

Improved in other genres, not necessarily RPGs which have always lagged behind other 3D games until recently.

Additionally, Arcanum looks like this

And this is certainly easier on the eyes.

Fallout was made with a much larger team than Arcanum, they could afford to make much better art.

It's actually $45 and had a -10% ($40) discount for several months until the release. And according to SteamSpy they sold 50-100k copies. Clearly it's still overpriced.

And now that you said it I would ask you to link proofs next time you mention prices. I had a feeling you were possibly bullshitting me, but let it slide.

I'm talkin' consoles here.
https://www.amazon.com/d/Xbox-One-Games/Call-Cthulhu-Xbox-One/B07C5LQ7NT

CoC was never going to be a huge seller, but we'll see if it was enough for Cyanide if Werewolf is still a go (and if it has the same prices).

Which only goes to show how clueless they've constantly have been about what works in IE games and what doesn't.
I mean, you've got very little time, and you set your priorities on a complete overhaul of the graphics of what is the best looking IE game (IWD) and systems that while outdated had proved to be hugely successful in BG2. Which doesn't mean that moving to 3.5E is in general a bad idea, but when you are strapped for time you should really think hard about it.

?? I was talking about Bioware and DAII. IWDII didn't change any graphics other than the UI, they were just rushed when it came to making those levels and the paintover pass. JES was convinced they had to move to 3rd edition and it didn't hurt the game itself.

 

[fantadomat]

Improved. By a lot. Yeah, right:

You also won't find anything like that in Fallout, so I would argue about art.

Improved in other genres, not necessarily RPGs which have always lagged behind other 3D games until recently.

Additionally, Arcanum looks like this

And this is certainly easier on the eyes.

Fallout was made with a much larger team than Arcanum, they could afford to make much better art.

It's actually $45 and had a -10% ($40) discount for several months until the release. And according to SteamSpy they sold 50-100k copies. Clearly it's still overpriced.

And now that you said it I would ask you to link proofs next time you mention prices. I had a feeling you were possibly bullshitting me, but let it slide.

I'm talkin' consoles here.
https://www.amazon.com/d/Xbox-One-Games/Call-Cthulhu-Xbox-One/B07C5LQ7NT

CoC was never going to be a huge seller, but we'll see if it was enough for Cyanide if Werewolf is still a go (and if it has the same prices).

Which only goes to show how clueless they've constantly have been about what works in IE games and what doesn't.
I mean, you've got very little time, and you set your priorities on a complete overhaul of the graphics of what is the best looking IE game (IWD) and systems that while outdated had proved to be hugely successful in BG2. Which doesn't mean that moving to 3.5E is in general a bad idea, but when you are strapped for time you should really think hard about it.

?? I was talking about Bioware and DAII. IWDII didn't change any graphics other than the UI, they were just rushed when it came to making those levels and the paintover pass. JES was convinced they had to move to 3rd edition and it didn't hurt the game itself.

Aesthetics are subjective thing,both art/level design catch the atmosphere of the games they represent. It is stupid to compare them and say which one is better.

 

[Brancaleone]

?? I was talking about Bioware and DAII. IWDII didn't change any graphics other than the UI, they were just rushed when it came to making those levels and the paintover pass. JES was convinced they had to move to 3rd edition and it didn't hurt the game itself.

My bad, I read Obsidian instead of Bioware.
I'm not saying it hurt the game, but they really were strapped for time. And they had to modify the IE engine as well.
I always had the feeling that IWD2 had different sprites and backgrounds, but evidently not.

 

[Whiny-Butthurt-Liberal]

Does this mean we need to merge obshitian and ineptile into a Microsoft sub-forum?

 

[Ismaul]

This game was a hollowborn.

Deep.

 

[Fairfax]

JES was convinced they had to move to 3rd edition and it didn't hurt the game itself.

It was a bad decision. Even if you don't think 3E is decline, the switch had a high opportunity cost and didn't help the game's reception or sales. Sawyer thought it was necessary to compete with NWN, and the idea that it could turned out to be a joke.

 

[Latelistener]

Improved in other genres, not necessarily RPGs which have always lagged behind other 3D games until recently.

I can agree with that, but that doesn't mean RPGs were suppose to be cheaper: they just had different strengths. However, if you compare games inside the genre, using 3D was a questionable decision at first (not just for RPGs), so I would understand why Arcanum and NWN had the same price.

A few years later Troika was already using Source engine and made Bloodlines, which was fairly competitive against KotOR as well as other games. This was probably the time when you couldn't charge an AAA price for an isometric RPG anymore.

Fallout was made with a much larger team than Arcanum, they could afford to make much better art.

Arcanum has much more diversity in the art. Different cities look different (Tarant vs Qintarra vs Tulla). There are various zones, like deserts and tropical islands. It's also twice bigger than Fallout (too big for its own good).

I don't know how they did it, but Leonard said the engine was very easy to work with.

I'm talkin' consoles here.
https://www.amazon.com/d/Xbox-One-Games/Call-Cthulhu-Xbox-One/B07C5LQ7NT

CoC was never going to be a huge seller, but we'll see if it was enough for Cyanide if Werewolf is still a go (and if it has the same prices).

Okay. I don't think their care though, as they were consumed by Bigben. It's a problem for Focus Interactive now.

 

[Roguey]

It was a bad decision. Even if you don't think 3E is decline, the switch had a high opportunity cost and didn't help the game's reception or sales. Sawyer thought it was necessary to compete with NWN, and the idea that it could turned out to be a joke.

https://forums.obsidian.net/topic/49192-iwd2s-use-of-3e-was-a-mistake/

If you think it would have been better to stick with 2nd Ed. than to change the engine as we did, I cannot disagree with you more strongly. There's stuff that BioWare never got working even according to 2nd Ed. rules (and, in fact, would have been very difficult to change given the code base) that we got working properly according to 3E rules for IWD2. For example: multiclassing. On a personal level, I feel the incomplete 3E in IWD2 was still better than the incomplete 2nd Ed. in the other IE games. Based on the reviews that sites and individuals gave to IWD2, I think that the general consensus was that the use of 3E was one of the things that made IWD2 very appealing to many people.

Our content in IWD2 was very uneven, but I feel that the gameplay was great, and our implementation of 3E was a huge part of that. ToEE got 3.x gameplay as good as it can get (though again, some bad content). NWN and IWD2 both really had good 3E gameplay (though I am biased toward IWD2)
...
Fundamentally, the things from 3E that we did put into IWD2 made it a lot better (in my opinion) than if we had just rolled on with the IE's 2nd Ed. implementation, which was still lacking in a lot of areas -- both from a general system perspective and an implementation perspective. That is, 2nd Ed. was terrible and stupid compared to 3E AND ALSO, the way that some of those 2nd Ed. elements were integrated in the IE was terrible

Bring on the autism ratings.

 

[Strange Fellow]

And 4E would have been better still, right?