Eternity Avowed - Obsidian's first person action-RPG in the Pillars of Eternity setting - coming February 18th

[Iskramor]

So let me get this straight i use ice

You put the lime in the coconut, you drink them both up.

I prefer mojito

 

[AwesomeButton]

Why Paramo looks like failed crossbreed between neanderthal and homo sapiens?

Funny, my association was Kiril Budanov.

So let me get this straight i use ice

You put the lime in the coconut, you drink them both up.

I prefer mojito

 

[Roguey]

Oh no, did they pull an Anthem, and kept developing this thing hoping to "find the game" eventually?

It's "too big to fail." (that is, too big to not ever ship)

The indications from Obs. is that Chris Parker is calling the shots for the next "AAA" project (his shallow take: "hey, I get to make Skyrim!"), so I'm already done even if ol' "hope my employees guess frame of mind today" Chris Parker's management style wastes countless dollars and time. (To his defense, he learned this shit-stained argument from Fergie McFerg who would change his mind on a daily basis and not tell anyone - but what I can't condone from Parker is how pig-eager he embraced it, and also, how he was the best person to... "realize" it. Cue sad trombones - all of them, everywhere.)

But in terms of money vs. time: MS has the former (dollars) to spare... the best part, is the secondary part, time, which is a FAR more rare resource for MS.

Eventually, regardless of terrible producer/exec producer* demands, you need to deliver on something players want/may want... and I'd never want to play a Chris Parker-inspired game, esp. if it was one Fergus agreed to... without profanity.

I may be getting some times wrong, but back in January 2021 the project was so screwed up that Chris Parker was pulled off as project director and replaced with Carrie Patel, Bobby Null was pulled off as creative lead, and Dan Platt was replaced by Matt Hansen as art director. In April 2021 the lead writer Lucien Soulban quit and was replaced by Kate Dollarhyde. In May 2021 Jorge Salgado quit as lead area designer. In May 2022 Dollarhyde quit and was replaced by Robert Lo.

 

[Atlantico]

Chris Avellone sounds like a woman scorned. He probably thinks it is peak unfairness that people like Josh Sawyer float to the top, while he's cast out. But Chris welcomed Carrie Patel and Kate Dollarhyde, so in a way he got what he wanted. More diversity.

On the other hand Chris Parker and Feargus are managers and as such they'll always float to the top, the shits that they are.

 

[Cross]

I may be getting some times wrong, but back in January 2021 the project was so screwed up that Chris Parker was pulled off as project director and replaced with Carrie Patel, Bobby Null was pulled off as creative lead, and Dan Platt was replaced by Matt Hansen as art director. In April 2021 the lead writer Lucien Soulban quit and was replaced by Kate Dollarhyde. In May 2021 Jorge Salgado quit as lead area designer. In May 2022 Dollarhyde quit and was replaced by Robert Lo.

No wonder 90% of the areas they showed of were kobold xaurip camps. Their shared love for xaurip trash mobs is probably the only thing they could agree on.

 

[Grunker]

Chris Avellone sounds like a woman scorned.

He does indeed sound like he’s got sand in his vagina, but to paraphrase a bad movie: “Unfortunately, that doesn’t make him wrong.”

 

[Latelistener]

Chris Avellone sounds like a woman scorned. He probably thinks it is peak unfairness that people like Josh Sawyer float to the top, while he's cast out. But Chris welcomed Carrie Patel and Kate Dollarhyde, so in a way he got what he wanted. More diversity.

On the other hand Chris Parker and Feargus are managers and as such they'll always float to the top, the shits that they are.

For what it's worth, Feargus never said anything in return. The last time I remember he was praising his work in Planescape: Torment.

 

[abija]

From those quotes this game seems to be getting Diablo 4 / OW2 treatment... all hands on deck, salvage what's possible and ship it.

 

[Artyoan]

From those quotes this game seems to be getting Diablo 4 / OW2 treatment... all hands on deck, salvage what's possible and ship it.

At least they were honest when they set out to lower expectations and make people aware that the scope no longer included rivaling elder scrolls. Blizzard will fail spectacularly with the marketing still going full blast that they've returned to form.

 

[StrongBelwas]

For what it's worth, Feargus never said anything in return. The last time I remember he was praising his work in Planescape: Torment.

For all the foolish things he has done, Feargus would never be dumb enough to get into a slapfight during/after he is in the process of being acquired by a big company unless he had a silver bullet that proved everything Avellone said wrong, Obsidian just waited it out.

 

[Peachcurl]

Can we put Avoid, Outer Worlds, Underworld Ascendant and Starfield in a rocket and launch it to the Moon

And then, for no reason at all ...

 

[Infinitron]

https://www.pcgamer.com/obsidians-a...uilds-in-favour-of-skyrim-like-ability-trees/

Obsidian's Avowed is going 'classless', ditching Pillars of Eternity's crunchy stat-heavy builds in favour of Skyrim-like ability trees​

I suppose classlessness is the logical next step for a studio so keen on historical materialism.

I was downright gleeful when I learnt that Avowed—Obsidian's upcoming first-person fantasy RPG—was set in the Pillars of Eternity world of Eora. If there's one thing I'm perpetually a bit mad about, it's that the Pillars games didn't do much, much better than they did (If there's a second, it's that Tyranny somehow managed to do even worse). To my eyes, Avowed is the series' second shot at mainstream success.

But just because Avowed is returning to the Pillarsverse™ doesn't mean we're merely getting those isometric CRPGs in a swanky first-person wrapper. In a recent chat with PC Gamer's Ted Litchfield, Avowed's game director Carrie Patel and gameplay director Gabe Paramo mentioned that the new game is going a bit Skyrim with it, leaving behind the Pillars games' class system in favour of a set of ability trees you can sample from as you level up.

"There's multiple ability trees," Paramo told PCG, "it is a classless game. The player will be able to kind of pick and choose their abilities as they level up and progress, and you will be able to respec." You will choose between different background archetypes at the game's start, but those "don't bind the player to particular choices or builds," said Patel, and instead "provide kind of a starting point for building your character, your headcanon."

It's a dramatic but not wholly unexpected shift away from Pillars of Eternity's crunchy salad of Paladins, Ciphers, Mages, Chanters and so on. I suspect quite a few people will be sad to see them go, but it's probably the right choice for a first-person RPG that's aiming to be as accessible as your standard modern Bethesda fare. Then again, I've heard that Baldur's Gate 3 is quite popular even with its classes, stats, and number crunching. Perhaps a Pillars-style class system would get a fairer hearing if it was released today.

Plus, it's not like all traces of the classes you know and love are being scrubbed from Eora. Somewhere on those ability trees lurks "as many cool abilities [as] made sense to translate from a kind of CRPG top-down perspective into first-person," said Paramo, "so you'll just have to wait" to see whether you can run headlong into battle singing songs like Kana Rua did.

https://www.pcgamer.com/obsidians-n...its-first-person-sword-swinging-feel-weighty/

Obsidian's next big RPG Avowed is looking to Vermintide's 'masterclass in having a sense of hitting and impact' to make its first-person sword-swinging feel weighty​

FPS: First Person Swordster.

Obsidian (the studio behind Pillars of Eternity, Fallout: New Vegas, and The Outer Worlds) released an extended gameplay trailer diving into its first-person RPG Avowed last week. PC Gamer's own Ted Litchfield sat down with both the game's director Carrie Patel and the gameplay director Gabe Paramo to talk shop.

First-person melee combat is hard to design. In any third-person action game, you have all kinds of tools at your disposal—bespoke animations, the situational awareness of bird's-eye view, cool flips—things that are much harder to execute on when you're in your protagonist's skull. Especially the cool flips thing, that'll just get you motion sick.

Luckily, Obsidian is looking to a dev studio that's basically perfected it over the years: Fatshark, developer of Warhammer's Vermintide and 40k's Darktide.

"Our goal was to try to make it feel visceral, right?" Paramo explains. "To make the sense of hitting [enemies] feel impactful … like Vermintide. We're trying to get our inspiration from there, just that masterclass in having a sense of hitting and impact."

Honestly, fair play. If you want a great example of meaty first-person blade swinging, then both Vermintide and Darktide are great places to look. Fatshark took Left 4 Dead's formula of mowing down zombies with a frying pan and expanded on it—adding complex systems that sent enemies stumbling and ragdolling in certain directions based on both the weapon type and the angle of attack (as per this excellent video by Polygon's Patrick Gill).

"I'm definitely really proud of what the gameplay team has done … even our melee combat is feeling fantastic," says Patel. "I really do feel like it's going to stand head and shoulders above when it comes to fantasy first-person action RPG melee combat."

Honestly, I'm pretty stoked about this all on paper. It's been a while since we've had a non-horde shooter game with properly meaty first-person combat—where are our Zeno Clashes? Our Dark Messiah of Might and Magic games? Likely locked behind the fact that first-person brawling's a pain in the rear to design, but still—here's hoping Obsidian pulls it off.

 

[Grunker]

Obsidian's next big RPG Avowed is looking to Vermintide's 'masterclass in having a sense of hitting and impact' to make its first-person sword-swinging feel weighty​

lol

 

[Tyranicon]

There is basically no hype for this game, not even reddit cares. Getting huge VtMB2 vibes from the project, especially with the lolworthy "We don't have anything to show besides this ugly beginning area with nu-kobolds" and "we're also releasing this year."

Avowed is going to sell like a wet fart and will be the dex's whipping boy for the foreseeable future.

 

[Lord_Potato]

Obsidian's next big RPG Avowed is looking to Vermintide's 'masterclass in having a sense of hitting and impact' to make its first-person sword-swinging feel weighty​

lol

Maybe they're just looking

 

[Tyranicon]

I'm not sure if this has been posted or not, but a longer combat slice so you can see the quality of these animations:

 

[AwesomeButton]

I'll tell you what Carrie thinks: "Who cares anyway?"

The animations remind me of taking control of my creatures in Dungeon Keeper II and hacking at the goody heroes.

 

[Lord_Potato]

I'm not sure if this has been posted or not, but a longer combat slice so you can see the quality of these animations:

At least they've got swimming and diving (unlike Starfield, lol)

 

[AwesomeButton]

There is basically no hype for this game, not even reddit cares. Getting huge VtMB2 vibes from the project, especially with the lolworthy "We don't have anything to show besides this ugly beginning area with nu-kobolds" and "we're also releasing this year."

Avowed is going to sell like a wet fart and will be the dex's whipping boy for the foreseeable future.

If this is indeed all they have, they are in deep shit. I wonder if Carrie knows it.

 

[Readher]

I'm not sure if this has been posted or not, but a longer combat slice so you can see the quality of these animations:

Looks like basement budget japslop shovelware combat, only in first-person.

 

[AwesomeButton]

https://www.pcgamer.com/obsidians-n...its-first-person-sword-swinging-feel-weighty/

Obsidian's next big RPG Avowed is looking to Vermintide's 'masterclass in having a sense of hitting and impact' to make its first-person sword-swinging feel weighty​

FPS: First Person Swordster.

Obsidian (the studio behind Pillars of Eternity, Fallout: New Vegas, and The Outer Worlds) released an extended gameplay trailer diving into its first-person RPG Avowed last week. PC Gamer's own Ted Litchfield sat down with both the game's director Carrie Patel and the gameplay director Gabe Paramo to talk shop.

First-person melee combat is hard to design. In any third-person action game, you have all kinds of tools at your disposal—bespoke animations, the situational awareness of bird's-eye view, cool flips—things that are much harder to execute on when you're in your protagonist's skull. Especially the cool flips thing, that'll just get you motion sick.

Luckily, Obsidian is looking to a dev studio that's basically perfected it over the years: Fatshark, developer of Warhammer's Vermintide and 40k's Darktide.

"Our goal was to try to make it feel visceral, right?" Paramo explains. "To make the sense of hitting [enemies] feel impactful … like Vermintide. We're trying to get our inspiration from there, just that masterclass in having a sense of hitting and impact."

Honestly, fair play. If you want a great example of meaty first-person blade swinging, then both Vermintide and Darktide are great places to look. Fatshark took Left 4 Dead's formula of mowing down zombies with a frying pan and expanded on it—adding complex systems that sent enemies stumbling and ragdolling in certain directions based on both the weapon type and the angle of attack (as per this excellent video by Polygon's Patrick Gill).

"I'm definitely really proud of what the gameplay team has done … even our melee combat is feeling fantastic," says Patel. "I really do feel like it's going to stand head and shoulders above when it comes to fantasy first-person action RPG melee combat."

Honestly, I'm pretty stoked about this all on paper. It's been a while since we've had a non-horde shooter game with properly meaty first-person combat—where are our Zeno Clashes? Our Dark Messiah of Might and Magic games? Likely locked behind the fact that first-person brawling's a pain in the rear to design, but still—here's hoping Obsidian pulls it off.

Gaslight all you want, lady. When the youtube comparison videos start coming up after release, then I'll see what you'll have to say.

 

[Roguey]

All you guys dooming and glooming about the release date, remember:

2024 release date and still not in alpha (and after five years no less)? We may be seeing the return of Bugsidian.

On previous projects Alpha periods were sometimes just a few months long. This is actually the longest we'll have for Alpha/Beta period for any game at Obsidian by a longshot, and is good news.

Of course he could be wrong.

 

[Alienman]

Have you guys looked up the gameplay director?

It's this guy: https://www.mobygames.com/person/390217/gabriel-paramo/

Not the greatest track record. Just look at those games. Not saying it means everything but, yeah.

 

[Rhobar121]

I'm not sure if this has been posted or not, but a longer combat slice so you can see the quality of these animations:

I don't know what you want from this game.
This looks pretty good. I think this will be one of the best Skyrim mods ever released.

 

[mediocrepoet]

And what they'll actually end up delivering... is Bioshock. Well, Bioshock with dialogue trees (and a worse fashion sense), but ultimately, it'll be the same level of gameplay sophistication and that's nothing to get excited about.

You can't be serious. They'd be crying tears of joy if they delivered Bioshock. They're well on their way to delivering Two Worlds or worse on a AAA budget.

Just awful, awful shit.