Beneath a Starless Sky - free book about the history of the Infinity Engine and Pillars of Eternity

[AwesomeButton]

Deadfire sales must’ve been a gutpunch. A shame.

They have only their own marketing strategy to blame. I maintain that being a successor to PoE is not good PR for Deadfire.

 

[FreeKaner]

It's time to move on.

 

[FreeKaner]

Also maybe the failure of dumpsterfire will mean they will no longer try to make "the dream" IE derivative generic fantasy. Now that would mean this dumpsterfire could at least have some warmth.

 

[Lacrymas]

I don't think PoE2 has been made with the intention of aping the IE games anymore, it's too different for that. It didn't even benefit from pretending it's like BG2, judging from the sales. Not being like BG2 was the wrong decision tbh. The new stuff they added (Pen, Empower, removal of per rest) don't work well and actively work against the system. I vaguely remember saying PoE1 would've benefited from being more like BG1 and hoping I don't say the same with PoE2 and BG2, hope always has the curious ability to bring you down. When P:K finally ends up in a playable state, I'm very curious what I'd think about it and whether the 'Dex love it only because it's literally BG with a different coat of paint.

 

[FreeKaner]

The problem with this franchise from start is trying to be recognisable as a BG within its own terms which results in being worst of both worlds. Another thing is D&D is a boring generic fantasy setting, PoE is also a boring generic fantasy setting that's also derivative on top and pretends it's original because they make vague references to Renaissance. This is not even touching the subject of supremacist tendencies of Sawyer.

Tyranny is better than PoE, actually somewhat unique and more interesting too, despite being done as a side project by a b-team. Its flaws are its lack in volume and diversity, which are definitely qualitative issues that come from being a side project. I would take a Tyranny-like it's own thing project with poe production values over any half-hearted BG-clone. Tyranny also was mismarketed as a philosophical and historical game (I don't understand obsession), instead of being a reactive and different game that has more in common with AoD than BG.

 

[The Bishop]

They probably care more about good reviews than sales.

Obsidian has a triple-A game in development funded by Private Division. If they need funding for a smaller project, they can always crowdfund or find a publisher to work under contract for.

Why would you ever worry about reviews when you know exactly what they're going to be? Unless you forgot to pop that check in the mail. But I'm sure a tripple-A game developer like Obsidian has a separate person to handle these types of things.

 

[FreeKaner]

"Boring" is highly subjective, and it really matters how you go about executing your idea, more than what your idea is. Avellone's example about the story "about a guy who dresses as a bat and fights a criminal who paints his face as a clown" is very good for illustrating that point.

Yes, fun is also highly subjective. Some people have a lot of fun doing things others don't. This subjectivity is irrelevant because it's neither quantifiable nor accountable, it's fairly empty platitude.

It's still a generic fantasy setting, indeed it's actually THE generic fantasy setting and PoE is its derivative, even worse. Can you make an interesting story in any setting whatsoever? Yes, if you are good enough. I mean Tolstoy made really compelling story about a woman's cheating in bumfuck nowhere in Russia, but unfortunately for us not everyone is Tolstoy. Moreover, you can call Batman whatever but "generic" is definitely not one of those, superhero stories are generally wacky as a principle.

The fact of the matter is Tyranny takes in a place that has absolutely has nothing to do with BG, and is much better for it. Hopefully there will be a PoE3, whatever little talent they have left should be used for things that are not mindnumbing prostrations to satisfy a cargo cult.

 

[Safav Hamon]

What's generic about Deadfire's setting? There has never been a CRPG in a Polynesian or Caribbean inspired setting before.

 

[J_C]

https://www.shacknews.com/article/107682/24-til-launch-pillars-of-eternity-ii-deadfire

Oh man, these documentaries always make me soft-hearted. Seeing all the passion and hard work put into the game, PoE II deserved more sales. But I hope it will have a long tail on Steam and will make it a success.

 

[Jarpie]

Passion? I haven't played PoE 2 but I never got the feeling from the first one that there was passion behind the game. People might disagree with me, but you can feel the passion in any creative work, if the people creating it are just going through the motions "I have to make this because we are required to", it seeps into the work, the game in this case. You can feel the passion in many other crpgs, like Arcanum, Baldur's Gate 2, and from the newer games, for all its faults, Divinity: Original Sin, The Age of Decadence, Underrail, Serpent in the Staglands.

They might have put a lot of effort and work into both Eternity-games, but at least the first one lacks that spark, it's like talking with someone on the phone, you can hear it in their voice if they are smiling or frowning. I agree with many others in here, one of the big mistakes they did with PoE 2 was to make it direct sequel. Vault Dweller has said that direct sequels rarely sells as well as the first one, Obsidian should've hired someone to make an actual market study.

 

[Valtiel]

I was thinking about Deadfire, when it come out I thought it was ok to cool...but looking retrospectively, I struggle to quote a single standpoint in the game, like some really cool mission or place. Is it me, or in the end it's just dull and forgettable? Maybe it was also the bugged difficulty, I slipped through the game at hard without any challenge and so I couldn't even get attached to some boss fight or quest.
I guess I'll try the dlc when the thing is fully patched.

 

[Roguey]

Passion? I haven't played PoE 2 but I never got the feeling from the first one that there was passion behind the game. People might disagree with me, but you can feel the passion in any creative work, if the people creating it are just going through the motions "I have to make this because we are required to", it seeps into the work, the game in this case. You can feel the passion in many other crpgs, like Arcanum, Baldur's Gate 2, and from the newer games, for all its faults, Divinity: Original Sin, The Age of Decadence, Underrail, Serpent in the Staglands.

Before PoE's release perhaps I should have trolled more with Joshquotes such as

The things I make don't belong to me, they aren't made for me, they aren't made on my own timetable, and I don't have much, if any, control over when they are released. I make things to fit into boxes that are put in front of me. At any point in time that box can be changed, moved around, pulled away, or removed entirely -- sometimes because I screwed up, and sometimes for reasons that have nothing to do with me. It's hard to find good reasons to invest a lot of myself in something like that, especially when there are personal interests for me to pursue outside of my job.

Pillars of Eternity was always a product, not a work of creative passion. Codex tends to prefer the latter far more than the former.

 

[J_C]

You can feel the passion in many other crpgs, like Arcanum, Baldur's Gate 2, and from the newer games, for all its faults, Divinity: Original Sin, The Age of Decadence, Underrail, Serpent in the Staglands.

I don't really feel any more or less passion in those game than in PoE, but maybe you do. From my point of view, a game either has good mechanics, story, world and mission or don't. Some of those games you mention has more of these than PoE, some don't. Passion only pushes you in the first few months of development, after that initial boost runs out, you are creating a product like any other.

 

[Jarpie]

I don't see something being creative endeavour or product as mutually exclusive things, games should be both things at the same time. Creative works by definition are IMO products, there are the makers and then there are the buyers, but you can have passion for it, genre or something in the game. Of course you need professionalism and pragmatism when it comes to doing anything, but IMO if you don't have the passion, you are also less likely to get the lure of it, or the genre/style to the your customer base.

 

[2house2fly]

Why would you ever worry about reviews when you know exactly what they're going to be? Unless you forgot to pop that check in the mail. But I'm sure a tripple-A game developer like Obsidian has a separate person to handle these types of things.

lol as if Obsidian would have anything like the clout to buy reviews. Or the fucking publisher who can barely get it together to throw up a trailer on youtube

Before PoE's release perhaps I should have trolled more with Joshquotes such as


Pillars of Eternity was always a product, not a work of creative passion. Codex tends to prefer the latter far more than the former.

Josh says that, but his actions tell a different story. He gets defensive all the time about stuff he's worked on, specifically chose to take over Deadfire's narrative rather than putting someone else on it(for better or worse...) and specifically mentioned fanboy complaints as a reason he's burned out. He clearly gets more invested in these things than he's willing to admit

 

[AwesomeButton]

This is the moment to mention something overlooked about Deadfire's writing. Whatever bad we can say about the writing, it's more uneven than universally bad. There are well written characters and quests in it, and I could give examples. I know it would be wrong to attribute "everything that's good is good because Josh worked on it" but the DRC / VTC conflict and the characters leading those factions ar pretty damn good and realistic within the world they inhabit.

 

[Semper]

The things I make don't belong to me, they aren't made for me, they aren't made on my own timetable, and I don't have much, if any, control over when they are released. I make things to fit into boxes that are put in front of me. At any point in time that box can be changed, moved around, pulled away, or removed entirely -- sometimes because I screwed up, and sometimes for reasons that have nothing to do with me. It's hard to find good reasons to invest a lot of myself in something like that, especially when there are personal interests for me to pursue outside of my job.

Pillars of Eternity was always a product, not a work of creative passion. Codex tends to prefer the latter far more than the former.

while this may be true for pillars, i still think that this attitude is relatively new. he just put up a barrier to shield himself from suffering too much disappointment. being lead on the black hound, f3 and aliens, all settings i think he really cared for, left him destroyed after their cancellation. he searched for a way to cope with those feelings and found contemplation in restoration of vintage bikes, and riding bikes in general. if those words of his were really true, he would not create mods (nwn2's black hound, new vegas' jesawyer mod, in a sense deadfire's pnp derivate too) for this box products in his spare time.

 

[Infinitron]

This was much more interesting than the documentary FYI.

Coolest/most Codexian guy there is Dan Spitzley. Turns out he's never actually played through any of the games he made except Fallout 1 & 2, and he's also - I kid you not - a BLOBBER SUPREMACIST.

 

[Roguey]

Dan always comes across to me as the happiest guy at Obsidian. When you love what you do, you never work a day in your life and such.

 

[Bohr]

Interesting that TSR was so cheap

 

[KeighnMcDeath]

TSR hit monumental fallout. No wonder it was bought out by WOTC and in turn HASBRO.

Old schoolers look at 5e with mixed views depending on who they are. I know a few who say it’s been shit since the end of 2e and before the unofficial 2.5e. What’s really sad is seeing adventures labeled like patches:

Z3.1b Red Nose’s Bad Day - The Beginning.
Z3.2a Red Nose’s Bad Day - Towny Times Turnover (test edition)
Etc etc.

And there are token sets sold separately, battle mats sold separately, map booklets, DM And Player versions all SOLD SEPARATELY. Don’t forget there are figurine sets also sold separately.

Yeah, I’m going to pass on that crap since I’m no rich man and don’t have the space to fill up an entire shelf for just one module to completion.

 

[Fairfax]

BRIAN FARGO

D&D was kind of going out of favor. In fact, I think it was [TSR vice president] Lorraine Williams, they wanted to sell TSR to us. I wanted to buy it. I think Universal Studios had invested in the company at that point, and I told them, "We've got to do it." I think it would have been less than $20 million. I said, "Let's do it." They didn't want to, which was a huge shame.

I really doubt he could've bought TSR for $20 million in 94-95. The company was doing much worse and almost went bankrupt in 97, yet WotC still paid $25 million for it.

TSR hit monumental fallout. No wonder bought out by WOTC and in turn HASBRO.

Old schoolers look at 5e with mixed views depending on who they are. I know a few who say it’s been shit since the end of 2e and before the unofficial 2.5e. What’s really sad is seeing adventures labeled like patches.

5E was a step in the right direction, it's the best WotC edition in some aspects, but overall it's very far from 2E.

Also, there's no such thing as unofficial 2.5E. That was a derogatory term created by 3E fanboys to pretend the 3.5E thing had happened before.

 

[KeighnMcDeath]

I read somewhere that Pathfinder 2 will run smoother than 5e. By that, I guess they mean it has rules to address just about any question or situation. I wasn’t aware there was a Pathfinder 2. Some of us 2e fans say the original UE was 1.5E. And hell, I swear Holmes almost read as AD&D lite.... soooo 0.5e.

I never knew of the 3.75 joke though.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ODwKR65IsJ4

Bah... nonsense. Favorite games of this sort end up with many editions it seems. I never played Hackmaster and before I new it, there were multiple editions. I’d be hard pressed to write a list of every retroclone or game and the number of editions each has. I certainly couldn’t afford them all if I was a collector.

I guess I’ll stick with computer gaming and even that I hardly have time for. Maybe I will keep tabs on future InXile products in their workshop and maybe not. They must have more on their plate than Wasteland 3 and patches of the games already out.

 

[Infinitron]

Fairfax Roguey The Fargo-Cain reconciliation is complete: https://www.shacknews.com/article/1...ty-and-the-infinity-engine-era-of-rpgs?page=7

LEONARD BOYARSKY

He liked what we were doing when he saw it, and he was very much behind us after he saw it. Nothing against Brian or anybody else at Interplay, but at the time, no one really thought much about Fallout. I'm glad they let us do it. Brian gave us the money and let us do whatever we wanted to do. I don't think that was their intent, but that's how it ended up, because they started going all-hands-on-deck when they started doing D&D games.

We were just this little project that was quirky and funny, but, whatever, let Tim and his little group do their thing. Which is kind of ridiculous when you think about it. I'd have thought they would have just cancelled us, but they didn't, so we got to be in our little corner doing whatever we wanted.

CHRIS TAYLOR

I think everyone was very focused on the Dungeons & Dragons titles. I don't think we were slighted. I don't think we were looked down on; I just think they were busy with other stuff. I mean, the Fallout 1 manual? No other game got a manual like that at Interplay. Our support team there came through and gave us a graphic designer, a manual-layout guy for way, way too long. We got to put all this stuff into the manual. We got to [have design input] on the box.

I think the more difficult thing was, they didn't know exactly how to sell Fallout. It had this unique look. It wasn't a conventional, post-apocalyptic game, even though there weren't a lot of those types of games out at the time. I do think that having Brian play the game and get behind it helped. When the boss of the company says, "This is a great game," that's not going to hurt.

TIM CAIN

It was weird. Leonard liked to think, Wow, we've done something amazing, here. My only memory was, we were thought to be the B team pretty much throughout the entire development of Fallout. Then, a few months before we shipped, Brian Fargo took it home with him. He played it all weekend, and he called me all weekend at work, saying, "I'm stuck here, what do I do?"

On Monday he said, "This is amazing. This is the thing. This is the thing that's going to be our next kickass project."

ERIC DeMILT

One of the endearing things about Brian is that he is, at his heart, a gamer. He made choices for his business that I wouldn't make, but at the same time, he digs games. You can talk to the guy about games, and he's just into them. He's super insightful. I think having him like Fallout caused other parts of Interplay, which were maybe a bit more dismissive, helped them get behind it.

BRIAN FARGO

It wasn't like I came on at the very end and said, "Oh my gosh!" Everything that was being built, I was financing, so there were no surprises. However, I think that the things that intrigued me were the same things that intrigued me about Wasteland. When we sat down to do Fallout, we went through and analyzed all the things that we thought made Wasteland resonate.

Those were meaningful cause and effect, a bleak universe, morally gray areas. To me, it was all of those things. So, when I did play it, they hit on all those points that we agreed were important.

SCOTT EVERTS

When Brian Fargo played it, he kept saying, "Wow, this game is really good." That's when we started thinking that this game could be a hit, but marketing really didn't care at the time. We had the box on the website, and were doing all this stuff that normally the marketing and sales staff would do, but we did it because they didn't really care that much. We had a lot more passion for the project than they did.

TIM DONLEY

Brian Fargo was a genius in a lot of ways. He had these insane Christmas parties where he'd get these crazy bands. I don't want to say he'd get something like Aerosmith, but they'd be incredible because the Christmas parties were so over-the-top. We'd go see movies. Everybody loved staying late. Everybody wanted to be there.

LEONARD BOYARSKY

Jason and I made the decision, with Tim's blessing, to put "Brian Fargo Presents" at the beginning of Fallout's intro. As far as we were concerned, he let us make this. He provided the money and he provided the space for us to make this game.

TIM CAIN

When Brian first saw it, he said, "Oh, just take my name off that." I was like, "Brian, you gave us three years and three million dollars. I think your name can be on it."

 

[Fairfax]

Cain's main issue always seemed to be with Feargus, though. He still had bad blood with BIS after Fargo left Interplay, and was clearly talking about Feargus here:

Calis: Say, Fargo accidentally left the FO license in his pants when he quit IPlay and his wife sent it to you with a note "Here you go, love, [insert name]"

Tim Cain: Ah...ok, here's my multiline response (Tim Cain story hour time)...When I finished FO, I was exhausted and tired of FO. After all, I worked on it for 3.5 years! So I gave the whole thing over to my assistant producer and started thinking of a new RPG. Well, things weren't working out. Fargo wanted me to take over. I said no. He said I owed him, for the opportunity he gave me to do the first one. So I started FO2. But things were still bad. People secondguessed what was good for the game, and they wanted in on it, since it looked like a "big thing" now, not some grade B product, which was what FO was viewed as. So I got tired of this whole thing. I felt like I was in a dark hole. So I left. But that was 4 years ago. I have done another game, and designs on 3 other games. I wouldnt mind returning to FO, but not with those people running it. There, I'm done. Whew!

Calis: any chance we can trick you into being more specific than "those people"?

Tim Cain: Nah. They threaten to sue.