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

[TheDiceMustRoll]

It pains me that Sawyer is not working on the game, he can't do good narrative but at least he should work on the balancing, itemization and combat mechanics.
It honestly scares me that Obsidian might think TOW gameplay&difficulty is the way to go after its supposed commercial success.

What's Saw working on now?

 

[LizardWizard]

It pains me that Sawyer is not working on the game, he can't do good narrative but at least he should work on the balancing, itemization and combat mechanics.
It honestly scares me that Obsidian might think TOW gameplay&difficulty is the way to go after its supposed commercial success.

ToW had a double AA budget and was content locked for a year+ before release. Leo was bitter about all the stuff they had to cut.

Tim/Leo needed a financial win after Arcanum/TOEE/VMB all failed financially. Codex needs to stop being hypocritical.

At the very least, Troika Bros can pretty much demand what they want and Spencer will cuck out for them considering how much ToW is selling.

 

[rusty_shackleford]

It pains me that Sawyer is not working on the game, he can't do good narrative but at least he should work on the balancing, itemization and combat mechanics.
It honestly scares me that Obsidian might think TOW gameplay&difficulty is the way to go after its supposed commercial success.

ToW had a double AA budget and was content locked for a year+ before release. Leo was bitter about all the stuff they had to cut.

Tim/Leo needed a financial win after Arcanum/TOEE/VMB all failed financially. Codex needs to stop being hypocritical.

At the very least, Troika Bros can pretty much demand what they want and Spencer will cuck out for them considering how much ToW is selling.

Many better games have been made on smaller budgets.

Tim/Leo needed a financial win after Arcanum/TOEE/VMB all failed financially. Codex needs to stop being hypocritical.

They failed because they were unfinished and highly buggy.
Their solution was to simply make a game so devoid of features it couldn't possibly be shipped unfinished.

 

[bec de corbin]

It pains me that Sawyer is not working on the game, he can't do good narrative but at least he should work on the balancing, itemization and combat mechanics.
It honestly scares me that Obsidian might think TOW gameplay&difficulty is the way to go after its supposed commercial success.

I don't know what the hell "supposed" means here. It was demonstrably a commercial success. It just also sucks

 

[LizardWizard]

Many better games have been made on smaller budgets.

Coming from the poster that literally sucks F76 cock

Stop trying so hard to be edgy. Nobody takes you seriously.

 

[Flying Dutchman]

Many better games have been made on smaller budgets.


They failed because they were unfinished and highly buggy.
Their solution was to simply make a game so devoid of features it couldn't possibly be shipped unfinished.

I thought VTMB failed because of marketing, too? It's been a while, but I got the impression Activision was like, fuck this noise, get this crap-in-a-box out the DOOR.

Players who play it: Wow, this is actually pretty good

Activision: Then go stroke yourselves to climax while we do Call of Duty, dipshits

 

[purupuru]

It pains me that Sawyer is not working on the game, he can't do good narrative but at least he should work on the balancing, itemization and combat mechanics.
It honestly scares me that Obsidian might think TOW gameplay&difficulty is the way to go after its supposed commercial success.

I don't know what the hell "supposed" means here. It was demonstrably a commercial success. It just also sucks

Well it was on XGP so you can't get a clear picture with sales numbers, that would have been irrefutable.

 

[Flying Dutchman]

It pains me that Sawyer is not working on the game, he can't do good narrative but at least he should work on the balancing, itemization and combat mechanics.

It is a bad look for Avowed (hey, I'm so sick of my own Pillars universe I don't want to work on a third one), but I don't care Sawyer isn't on it. He over-systemizes everything into insanity and would probably lose himself for a month in currency design and what accents to put over which NuLanguage in the game.

What's Saw working on now?

Tabletop Pillars (don't care and judging by the output, neither does he) and his pet project (no word on this beyond cryptic self-fellatio posts on Twitter).

 

[purupuru]

It pains me that Sawyer is not working on the game, he can't do good narrative but at least he should work on the balancing, itemization and combat mechanics.
It honestly scares me that Obsidian might think TOW gameplay&difficulty is the way to go after its supposed commercial success.

What's Saw working on now?

His historical RPG I think.
https://rpgcodex.net/forums/threads/obsidian-general-discussion-thread.84849/page-331#post-6990949

 

[rusty_shackleford]

Many better games have been made on smaller budgets.


They failed because they were unfinished and highly buggy.
Their solution was to simply make a game so devoid of features it couldn't possibly be shipped unfinished.

I thought VTMB failed because of marketing, too? It's been a while, but I got the impression Activision was like, fuck this noise, get this crap-in-a-box out the DOOR.

Players who play it: Wow, this is actually pretty good

Activision: Then go stroke yourselves to climax while we do Call of Duty, dipshits

https://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/23/technology/circuits/choose-your-role-vampire-or-card-wielder.html

The last part of the game is, in fact, disappointing. After many brilliant and atmospheric adventures, Bloodlines falls into a pattern of encounters with groups of guards followed by big battles, as though the game's designers simply ran out of clever ideas.

Perhaps they just ran out of time. Bloodlines is often brilliant but feels unfinished. It is riddled with small but annoying bugs. At one point I fell through the floor into space. Several times the game froze when I walked through a door. Often I could not reload a half-empty gun until I fired another shot. There are also places where the game is just poorly conceived: after a conversation, your weapon is always holstered even if that conversation results in a fight, and automatic weapons have so much kickback that they are virtually useless.

https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/r_vampirebloodlines_pc

Now, the Devils.

Easy to sum up: Game isn't finished.

At the opening, you forgive the array of bugs and glitches as it being "rough around the edges", so joining the long line of games which stressed imagination above mere competence and polish: Sure, characters glide out of the room in the intro sequence... who cares? Look how amazing Santa Monica is...

Problem is, as you progress, they escalate. By the time you've reached the climax, they're become impossible to ignore and made all the worse by you not even particularly enjoying the game anymore. Having animation flickers and textures going wrong is a different thing from - say - reloading and finding that simple action has broken some of the level's scripting or getting caught in a game-ending crash bug upon exiting a mandatory mission. It runs considerably worse than Half-Life, sharing the stutter-frame-rate problem of its mother engine, but generally worse. It eats up Virtual Memory like anything, with long sessions leading to increasingly lengthy load times and slower frame-rates (I'm not a programmer, but "Memory Leak" sounds like a likely explanation). It just crashes. Even surface level shows signs of being rushed to release amass, like the dialogue in Chinatown having so many typos that even I, with my rudimentary grasp of the English tongue, wince.

https://web.archive.org/web/20140420210834/http://www.videogamer.com/pc/bloodlines/review.html

It's unfortunate, but it's most likely that Bloodlines will be remembered for the bugs and not the array of excellent characters, and some brilliant set-pieces (including a "The Shining" inspired scene in a burnt-out waterfront hotel). It's not surprising, though, considering Troika's reputation for releasing buggy games, and allowing a game to hit the shops that features not only a hamstrung opening cutscene, but also a without-fail showstopper bug (that requires the use of the debug console to circumvent) is nothing short of criminal - and will do absolutely nothing to enhance Troika's reputation. Add this to the fact that neither Troika nor Activision exactly rushed to release a patch - it took over a month for one to appear, by which time several fan-written patches had been released - and that the official patch itself merely papers over the cracks (this is particularly noticeable in the "fixes" to the opening cutscene) rather than address the core problems of the game (though at least it does fix the showstopper), it's no revelation to see Bloodlines sitting on the shelves in several stores at a much reduced price. Troika need to be made to watch an episode of Sesame Street brought to them by the letters "Q" and "A" until their alphabetic silhouettes are seared into their retinas.

The codex has a very revisionist historical view of Troika.

 

[bec de corbin]

It's like how people nowadays smugly declare the poor reviews Kingmaker got a sign of CASUAL DECLINE but the game literally wasn't completable for months after launch

I love VTMB but it isn't acceptable to release a game like that

 

[TheDiceMustRoll]

It's like how people nowadays smugly declare the poor reviews Kingmaker got a sign of CASUAL DECLINE but the game literally wasn't completable for months after launch

I love VTMB but it isn't acceptable to release a game like that

I completed it 21 days after launch. What bug caused it to not be finishable?

 

[rusty_shackleford]

It's like how people nowadays smugly declare the poor reviews Kingmaker got a sign of CASUAL DECLINE but the game literally wasn't completable for months after launch

I love VTMB but it isn't acceptable to release a game like that

I completed it 21 days after launch. What bug caused it to not be finishable?

The game was unfinishable at launch.
Start about here and get reading: https://rpgcodex.net/forums/threads...go-to-new-thread.124047/page-148#post-5818260

 

[Ol' Willy]

The codex has a very revisionist historical view of Troika.

All Shittesda games are bestsellers despite being a bug-ridden mess on release.
No Mans Sky got some enormous sales on hype alone and the released product was an all out bugfest.

 

[Avarize]

at least he should work on the balancing

Definitely a no on that. Sawyer is the type of guy to make everything boring because it's easier to balance.

 

[Silverfish]

Yeah, okay dude. +2% fire damage against vampires when the moon is full and at least 4 planets are aligned, but only when your ranged skill is above 50, but under 75 on Sundays is boring.

 

[user]

It's like how people nowadays smugly declare the poor reviews Kingmaker got a sign of CASUAL DECLINE but the game literally wasn't completable for months after launch

Yes gamebreaking bugs gave it a very bad rep, but (almost always) bugs eventually get fixed. And in the case of Kingmaker the devs worked tirelessly the following couple of months after launch to eliminate the worst ones. I was one of the lucky(?) ones and finished the game soon after launch without any gamebreaking bugs. Thing is a huge number of complaints were like:

"why do I encounter enemies I can't beat"
"I don't have time to get into the mechanics"
"rng sucks when it doesn't help me"
"my game ended because of a series of bad decisions WTF"

No matter if you get smug about it or not, this is the new normal in the ever-growing consumerist gaming industry and a codex "classic" will never be anything more other than a niche in the general market, no matter how polished it may be on launch. And my guess is that Avowed, like Outer Worlds, won't bother becoming an exception.

 

[Efe]

some of the complaints were users being morons.
some of the complaints was very true.

downplaying legit ones now earns you nothing but a more relaxed QA from owlcat... which you wouldn't want.

 

[bec de corbin]

It's like how people nowadays smugly declare the poor reviews Kingmaker got a sign of CASUAL DECLINE but the game literally wasn't completable for months after launch

Yes gamebreaking bugs gave it a very bad rep, but (almost always) bugs eventually get fixed. And in the case of Kingmaker the devs worked tirelessly the following couple of months after launch to eliminate the worst ones. I was one of the lucky(?) ones and finished the game soon after launch without any gamebreaking bugs. Thing is a huge number of complaints were like:

"why do I encounter enemies I can't beat"
"I don't have time to get into the mechanics"
"rng sucks when it doesn't help me"
"my game ended because of a series of bad decisions WTF"

No matter if you get smug about it or not, this is the new normal in the ever-growing consumerist gaming industry and a codex "classic" will never be anything more other than a niche in the general market, no matter how polished it may be on launch. And my guess is that Avowed, like Outer Worlds, won't bother becoming an exception.

I'm glad that the forum about how good old games were has accepted that games being broken for months and months after launch is actually good

 

[TheDiceMustRoll]

The codex has a very revisionist historical view of Troika.

All Shittesda games are bestsellers despite being a bug-ridden mess on release.
No Mans Sky got some enormous sales on hype alone and the released product was an all out bugfest.

Bugs? I didnt think bugs were the issue with NMS. I thought the issue with NMS was that it, you know, wasn't anything like it was promised.

 

[Funposter]

The codex has a very revisionist historical view of Troika.

All Shittesda games are bestsellers despite being a bug-ridden mess on release.
No Mans Sky got some enormous sales on hype alone and the released product was an all out bugfest.

Bugs? I didnt think bugs were the issue with NMS. I thought the issue with NMS was that it, you know, wasn't anything like it was promised.

It was both. The game was extremely unoptimized and buggy at launch.

 

[Brotherman Bill]

Regarding marketing:
After Obsidian was aquired by Microsoft, they released Outer Worlds. Which sucked massively.
But it sold well, and reviewed well. So it seems Microsoft does do the marketing for Obsidian.

However, Obsidian seems to use this breathing space to lower their ambitions, for some reason. They have fired all their good writers and hired bland SJWs in their place. So tbh Obsidian will now be a knock-off Bethesda.

 

[TheDiceMustRoll]

who was fired? Chris? Didnt he - by his own admission - quit?

 

[Delterius]

josh was fired from the pillars of eternity franchise rip

 

[S.torch]

So it seems Microsoft does do the marketing for Obsidian.

The initial expectation around the game had little to do with Microsoft.