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

[Takamori]

Obsidian needs to recover their reputation. Try to avoid being compared to Bioware or Bethesda too much, especially the latter since everyone talkes about this game as a Skyrim clone. Thing is, Obsidian's claim to fame is having better writing, and you can't really show that in a trailer that's a few minutes long.

Kinda hard with Faggus there. Also bleeding the guys that made New Vegas happen and PoE 1 was just the nail in the coffin.

 

[Tyranicon]

Thing is, Obsidian's claim to fame is having better writing, and you can't really show that in a trailer that's a few minutes long.

Also something that's arguably absent for over a decade. The last Obsidian game that most people can agree on for having good writing is F:NV.

Otherwise it's a toss up. Unlike most of Codex, I didn't hate Tyranny. I actually think the writing is relatively solid for the main plot and a few of the characters.

 

[Cat Headed Eagle]

Obsidian needs to recover their reputation. Try to avoid being compared to Bioware or Bethesda too much, especially the latter since everyone talkes about this game as a Skyrim clone. Thing is, Obsidian's claim to fame is having better writing, and you can't really show that in a trailer that's a few minutes long.

Kinda hard with Faggus there. Also bleeding the guys that made New Vegas happen and PoE 1 was just the nail in the coffin.

Can't do much when you willingly jump into projects that are difficult to maintain and your management has always proven to be... less than ideal, to say something.

 

[Takamori]

Thing is, Obsidian's claim to fame is having better writing, and you can't really show that in a trailer that's a few minutes long.

Also something that's arguably absent for over a decade. The last Obsidian game that most people can agree on for having good writing is F:NV.

Otherwise it's a toss up. Unlike most of Codex, I didn't hate Tyranny. I actually think the writing is relatively solid for the main plot and a few of the characters.

My issue with Tyranny was the size of the content and the proposal not delivering what in theory meant. Be a villain a tyrant. Otherwise the game is all right.

 

[Cat Headed Eagle]

Thing is, Obsidian's claim to fame is having better writing, and you can't really show that in a trailer that's a few minutes long.

Also something that's arguably absent for over a decade. The last Obsidian game that most people can agree on for having good writing is F:NV.

Otherwise it's a toss up. Unlike most of Codex, I didn't hate Tyranny. I actually think the writing is relatively solid for the main plot and a few of the characters.

My issue with Tyranny was the size of the content and the proposal not delivering what in theory meant. Be a villain a tyrant. Otherwise the game is all right.

CRPGs have a pathological aversion to actual evil routes that aren't just cartoonishly evil, but I wouldn't blame the devs when it's also a consequence of the state of D&D after the satanic panic thing of the 80s.

 

[SpaceWizardz]

You know, there was a change in atmosphere right there in POE 2 compared to POE 1. While absolutely bland and more convoluted than it had any right to be, POE1's general themes dealt with pretty somber stuff. I haven't completed POE2, sure, but right from the get go you can feel that it becomes a fun fantasy flick with pirates, a giant cartoony god, and more shenanigans of the sort. So it anything changes, it's not like it hadn't happened before.

Deadfire obviously tried to emulate Critical Roll vibes. Original Pillars starts out with a much more melancholic atmosphere that unfortunately evaporates by the time you reach Defiance Bay, it's the only time this IP had anything resembling a unique identity of it's own.

 

[Riddler]

Avowed plot: some shit is happening in The Living Lands. The PC character finds out that this is related to some problem with the Maegfolc and the gods, after the events that happened in PoE1 and 2. Probably some shit god as Rymrgand. The PC character resolves the issue, but at the end some other thing happened due to it. The end.


You heard it here first.

wrong. there's an engwithan machine that makes the living lands go and you're now the herald of galawain because the cycle of reincarnation is breaking down there first.

Third time is the charm for making a main plot about gods that nobody cares about.

For the final twist it'll turn out that the Gods were actually real all along. The engwithans didn't create them, all they managed to do was attract them from the void and imprint upon them a bit, but the imprinting is now breaking down and the shoggoths beneath are starting to show.

 

[The_Mask]

I checked the comments section to the video and there are some people that never played PoE 1 or 2, so there are still fresh people ready to be disappointed.

 

[Cat Headed Eagle]

Nah, Lovecraft is boring. Make it more like Moorcock's universe. All gods and kings are crackheads.

 

[Cat Headed Eagle]

I checked the comments section to the video and there are some people that never played PoE 1 or 2, so there are still fresh people ready to be disappointed.

In about a year and a half, it's gonna be a decade of POE1. Those dudes were probably in middle school when the game was released.

 

[Delterius]

I checked the comments section to the video and there are some people that never played PoE 1 or 2, so there are still fresh people ready to be disappointed.

In about a year and a half, it's gonna be a decade of POE1. Those dudes were probably in middle school when the game was released.

there's a deluge of 20 somethings who think skyrim is too old to be playable meanwhile you old fools argue about silly things from dust to dust

 

[Cat Headed Eagle]

I checked the comments section to the video and there are some people that never played PoE 1 or 2, so there are still fresh people ready to be disappointed.

In about a year and a half, it's gonna be a decade of POE1. Those dudes were probably in middle school when the game was released.

there's a deluge of 20 somethings who think skyrim is too old to be playable meanwhile you old fools argue about silly things from dust to dust

I thought Skyrim was unplayable before it was cool.

 

[SpaceWizardz]

Also something that's arguably absent for over a decade. The last Obsidian game that most people can agree on for having good writing is F:NV.

Otherwise it's a toss up. Unlike most of Codex, I didn't hate Tyranny. I actually think the writing is relatively solid for the main plot and a few of the characters.

My issue with Tyranny was the size of the content and the proposal not delivering what in theory meant. Be a villain a tyrant. Otherwise the game is all right.

Tyranny lures you in with the premise of being a bureaucratic cog for an invading empire who is now tasked with establishing some kind of order in a territory freshly fucked by two rurly warbands only for it to immediately deteriorate into dungeon crawling antics and a insipid plot about obtaining godlike powers and defeating the dark evil.
Within mere hours all it's novelties are reduced to aesthetics and your left with a lame and brazenly unfinished BG imitation, I'll never understand the apologists.

 

[Delterius]

I checked the comments section to the video and there are some people that never played PoE 1 or 2, so there are still fresh people ready to be disappointed.

In about a year and a half, it's gonna be a decade of POE1. Those dudes were probably in middle school when the game was released.

there's a deluge of 20 somethings who think skyrim is too old to be playable meanwhile you old fools argue about silly things from dust to dust

I thought Skyrim was unplayable before it was cool.

meanwhile i employed the powers of empirical research to get to whiterun and observe that skyrim is merely frigid

i studied the blade and its 'snake, snake, fish' inscription

 

[Delterius]

and a insipid plot about obtaining godlike powers and defeating the dark evil.

dark evil?

 

[SpaceWizardz]

dark evil?

Kryos is the big baddie you're railroaded into opposing unless you pay $14.99 to unlock the "uh, nevermind lol" dialogue option at the end.

 

[-M-]

Honors & Awards​

• Semifinalist - Nicholl Fellowships in Screenwriting​

  Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences​

  I placed in the top 30 (out of over 6000 entries) in the annual screenwriting competition held by the organization that awards Oscars for excellence in film. I even received a phone call from the guy who produced Network(!), telling me how beautiful he thought my writing was.

This is the equivalent of failing a job interview and putting that job on your résumé.

 

[Roguey]

Deadfire obviously tried to emulate Critical Roll vibes. Original Pillars starts out with a much more melancholic atmosphere that unfortunately evaporates by the time you reach Defiance Bay, it's the only time this IP had anything resembling a unique identity of it's own.

Deadfire starts with your character dying and ends with a potential apocalypse on the horizon.

Kryos is the big baddie you're railroaded into opposing unless you pay $14.99 to unlock the "uh, nevermind lol" dialogue option at the end.

That ending was patched in for free, you didn't need buy anything. It came about because the original game was supposed to be about you becoming the overlord. Then they ran out of money and had to end it at act 3 of a 5 act game. When it was clear it wasn't going to get a sequel, they added in that non-standard ending (which wouldn't have made sense in the context of their original plan).

 

[Quillon]

Wasn't really impressed by the trailer. If I had seen this a decade ago it wouldn't have looked impressive in terms of graphical fidelity.

I was watching Cohh who was watching IGN after the xbox presentation; some dude at IGN said the obvious that it looks like MS is investing in Inxile much more than Obs and that one'd have thought it woulda been the other way around. Which you can tell by looking at both games' production quality from the trailers, so either MS has been believing in InXile more for some reason or Obs fucked it up with access to same MS resources. Whadaya guyz think?

 

[0sacred]

People cutting Obsidian slack for only showing lame action sequences in the trailer, while claiming how great current year Obsidian writing is gonna be.

Noticed how every PS:T retrospective only needs to show a few seconds of dialogue and you know what's up? You see that dialogue window with 10 possible responses and you know what kind of game it will be. The absence of anything RPG-y in this trailer is ominous, and not in a good way.

The Outer Worlds was aimed at casuals, and Avowed will be no different.

 

[Takamori]

Wasn't really impressed by the trailer. If I had seen this a decade ago it wouldn't have looked impressive in terms of graphical fidelity.

I was watching Cohh who was watching IGN after the xbox presentation; some dude at IGN said the obvious that it looks like MS is investing in Inxile much more than Obs and that one'd have thought it woulda been the other way around. Which you can tell by looking at both games' production quality from the trailers, so either MS has been believing in InXile more for some reason or Obs fucked it up with access to same MS resources. Whadaya guyz think?

On that regard I'd guess that Fargo is a better business man compared to Feargus, probably have more contact with MS people and managed to pitch more resources for their projects while Feargus seems like the guy that accept whatever shit they throw and end up getting fucked because he couldn't calculate the resource and manpower needed to finish such project.

 

[notpl]

People cutting Obsidian slack for only showing lame action sequences in the trailer, while claiming how great current year Obsidian writing is gonna be.

Noticed how every PS:T retrospective only needs to show a few seconds of dialogue and you know what's up? You see that dialogue window with 10 possible responses and you know what kind of game it will be. The absence of anything RPG-y in this trailer is ominous, and not in a good way.

The Outer Worlds was aimed at casuals, and Avowed will be no different.

The trailer has an absence of virtually everything because they don't have a game yet, dude. People comparing the first gameplay-esque (probably not) teaser footage for this game - which, from the gossip, has likely been completely scrapped and restarted several times at this point - to the deep gameplay dives on offer from contemporaries are deranged. We don't know a thing about this one yet.

 

[SpaceWizardz]

Deadfire starts with your character dying

Instantly revived and immediately thrusted into a fight with pirates boarding your ship during an intense storm, an action-packed start to an swashbuckling pirate fantasy adventure. Compare to Pillars where your training wheel companions get eviscerated by the Biawic and you're left to wander the woods having schizophrenic episodes until you meet a man who you find out murdered his best friend because he was beating his wife (or something like that I don't really remember).
Two completely different introductions that set different moods.

 

[Tyranicon]

Also something that's arguably absent for over a decade. The last Obsidian game that most people can agree on for having good writing is F:NV.

Otherwise it's a toss up. Unlike most of Codex, I didn't hate Tyranny. I actually think the writing is relatively solid for the main plot and a few of the characters.

My issue with Tyranny was the size of the content and the proposal not delivering what in theory meant. Be a villain a tyrant. Otherwise the game is all right.

Tyranny lures you in with the premise of being a bureaucratic cog for an invading empire who is now tasked with establishing some kind of order in a territory freshly fucked by two rurly warbands only for it to immediately deteriorate into dungeon crawling antics and a insipid plot about obtaining godlike powers and defeating the dark evil.
Within mere hours all it's novelties are reduced to aesthetics and your left with a lame and brazenly unfinished BG imitation, I'll never understand the apologists.

I'm not sure if the claims that Tyranny ran out of money/time are true, but the game is very indicative of modern committee-written games. That is to say, the quality of the writing varied wildly.

What Tyranny does right are elements of its worldbuilding and setting it in the bronze age, with strong Greek (?) city-state influence. But even from the start, the dialogue and character writing (especially the companions) suffered what I'll call fish-out-of-water syndrome.

They clearly did not belong in the harsh world they supposedly are a part of. They are instead character tropes that modern audiences can understand and sympathize with.

More grimdark needed.

Wasn't really impressed by the trailer. If I had seen this a decade ago it wouldn't have looked impressive in terms of graphical fidelity.

I was watching Cohh who was watching IGN after the xbox presentation; some dude at IGN said the obvious that it looks like MS is investing in Inxile much more than Obs and that one'd have thought it woulda been the other way around. Which you can tell by looking at both games' production quality from the trailers, so either MS has been believing in InXile more for some reason or Obs fucked it up with access to same MS resources. Whadaya guyz think?

I don't want to be reductive, but it's disappointing to see two studios (former codex darlings even!) making on surface level what appears to be:

1. A Bioshock Infinite clone
2. A Skyrim clone

 

[Delterius]

Deadfire starts with your character dying and ends with a potential apocalypse on the horizon.

the sidekicks being zany and the setting being a sunny tropical archipelage overstated obsidian's overcorrection of the setting's mood. its obvious they wanted to make the game more lighthearted because players whined that poe1 was too dour. i believe they went too far at points. and yet deadfire has misery and death of ordinary people stalking every corner. locations like the gullet and the woedica temple show what's what.

it's still the same world as dyrwood, only instead of being set after a war the deadfire is seeing the prelude to conflict which is already emptying whole nations of people via slavers and refugees. there is no sickness gripping the land, but rather a looming apocalypse killing people by the droves and the gods debating wether its ok to nuke the entire place or not.

its like going to peru and saying wow what a great place to live, the people are so happy and tell funny jokes.