Jeff Vogel vs Pillars of Eternity

[Lacrymas]

A little known series called Lord of the Rings did this, it probably wasn't the first and certainly wasn't the last.

It actually was the first. Some people will say that Hyboria was the first created world in literature, but it's not, since it's Earth, it's just in an imagined past.

 

[gaussgunner]

PoE was obviously too ambitious in terms of writing. Obsidian didn't allow enough time/money to connect the dots in-game so it mattered. They just rushed to release. I have to agree with that business decision; it would've been a shit game even if they took another year to polish it, and people bought it anyway.

Vogel is the opposite. Play it safe, don't attempt anything that'll take more than a year or so, don't run out of money. He's a better manager in that regard. But he's shooting himself in the foot when it comes to marketing.

 

[Lahey]

itt: Infinitron presents the problem (Jeff Vogel criticized Obsidian), states the consensus (reaction), then takes it to Sawyer for the solution.
But hey I'm just a dumb newfag

 

[Lurker King]

There is a trend to substitute gameplay with anything but gameplay

When developers or publishers or XYZ dude in the industry see games as books, movies, art, etc., then it's not surprising that gameplay is not the priority.

Most cRPGs nowadays have awful combat, bland itemization and repetitive exploration, but these mistakes are forgiven since the genre “has moved forward” toward more mature uses such as SJW propaganda, pretentious-verbose writing and fake-choices.

The world had clearly lost its mind: Game developers want to be movie directors, but movie directors want to be philosophers, economists or writers; philosophers want to be activists while economists want to be scientists and writers want to be philosophers. Everyone would be better of if they stayed in their domains.

 

[Sizzle]

Neither him nor I advocate for removal of those verbose descriptions, just moving them around a little. What Vogel himself does or doesn't do is up to him, not everyone follows their own advice and it's hard to see outside yourself and your creation to conceive it in relation to other people or even other works, that's why constructive criticism is good. Anyway, every bit of lore has its place and time, it's just not in the character creation screen.

He didn't just advocate trimming down text, but removing entire char. creation options, such as sub-race.

And while I don't think that all the lore should be spelled out in the character creation screen, there should be some as to give you the general idea of the character you want to play.

The IE games could afford to give you little information in character creation as they were well-known, established systems. PoE was brand-new, and it was obvious they wanted to let the player know about all the lore they came up with for Eora. But, yeah, they did overdo it. Like Josh said, an editor was needed.

 

[gaussgunner]

itt: Infinitron presents the problem (Jeff Vogel criticized Obsidian), states the consensus (reaction), then takes it to Sawyer for the solution.
But hey I'm just a dumb newfag

Links please? Where did Vogel criticize PoE? He sounded like a fanboy in his blog post. Did Sawyer actually respond?

 

[Sentinel]

itt: Infinitron presents the problem (Jeff Vogel criticized Obsidian), states the consensus (reaction), then takes it to Sawyer for the solution.
But hey I'm just a dumb newfag

Links please? Where did Vogel criticize PoE? He sounded like a fanboy in his blog post. Did Sawyer actually respond?

Page 2 of this thread

Sawyer responds! :D

 

[Infinitron]

I should point out that there's a crucial difference between the criticisms of PoE made by Jeff and some other people, and the criticism typically made on the Codex.

Jeff complains about loredumps at the beginning of the game. About how it makes the game harder to get into.

Whereas even the Codexers who hated PoE were more positive about its beginning than they were about what came later. Most criticism of PoE's loredumpiness on the Codex seems to focus on the game's middle chapter, where it's claimed that the story loses steam.

Codexers are accepting of heavy lore in the introduction to a game. It's a part of learning about the world, a hurdle you're expected to jump through. They just don't want it to be there throughout the entire game.

 

[gaussgunner]

Page 2 of this thread

Tumblr embed, no wonder I missed it.

https://embed.tumblr.com/embed/post/mLP3pwrYBXvmjKGgb3QQig/161883319926

jesawyer
melnorme asked:

Destroy that douchebag Jeff Vogel NOW


I think his general criticism (that Pillars of Eternity is too wordy) is correct and it’s one that both I and Eric Fenstermaker (I feel comfortable speaking for him in this respect) noted internally before the game was released. We didn’t really have time to do serious editing passes on anything outside of a few major dialogues. Both at Black Isle and Obsidian, the designers have had a tendency to overwrite. Overwriting in itself is not bad, but only if editing is a normal part of the development process that follows the overwriting. Not enough time was allocated to editing on Pillars of Eternity.

More time has been allocated to review and editing on Deadfire and we’re devoting more of our tool development time to making the editing process easier for everyone involved in the future. In the context of dialogue, a lot of my review comments focus on development of the character, their voice, and their conflict(s); the use of prose to convey meaningful action and details that are not visible to the player’s eye; and giving the player a range of responses that seems appropriate to the moment, builds off of the player’s choices, and leads to entertaining outcomes.

Where I disagree with his criticism is in many of the specifics, mostly because of the needs of Pillars as a game that is trying to capture the spirit of tabletop AD&D rules and settings like the Forgotten Realms. For example, the criticism of the first choice the player makes: what sex do you want your character to be? You could say it’s mechanically irrelevant, but when it comes to conceiving of characters in different role-playing contexts, it’s not. I think the way Jeff describes creating a character is totally reasonable, but I also think a lot of tabletop gamers and BG/IWD/Pillars players conceive characters as individuals born into specific societies and specific roles who continue to develop through the course of play. I.e., many players enjoy both telling the GM/players/themselves about how they are and then showing them who they become through play.

I think a lot of players have experiences like mine as a 10 year-old lifting the lid off of the World of Greyhawk or Forgotten Realms boxed sets and opening the Cyclopedia of the Realms to pore over every entry or memorizing the heraldry of every kingdom in Oerth. I’d store and sort all of that lore in my head and dream up characters born out of that mix. Certainly not everyone had that experience, but these games also aren’t made for everyone.

In the comments section, Jeff posted, “You like this stuff, and I’m glad you like it. But a lot of people really don’t. Both sides can be made happy. So why not do that?”

I think editing our menu text, lore text, and dialogue as well as adjusting how information is presented would almost certainly be good changes for the majority of players, but I think a lot of the suggestions connected to high-level design decisions (e.g. getting rid of sub-races) would seriously annoy a big chunk of our core audience. The audience’s desires are a big part of our constraints that we design for. We have to be careful not to pare down or bury so much that we lose sight of why people loved these games – and love playing the A/D&D campaigns that inspired us – in the first place. In the pursuit of making everyone happy, we could very easily leave everyone dissatisfied.

56 notes

I wonder who "melnorme" is.

 

[Lacrymas]

He didn't just advocate trimming down text, but removing entire char. creation options, such as sub-race.

I think he got overzealous with that one. Josh or whoever can take whatever they want from Jeff's advice, removing sub-races isn't a very good, or even sensible or well-argued, decision, so you can safely ignore it.

Jeff complains about loredumps at the beginning of the game. About its slow beginning.

He explicitly mentions that the entire game has too many words and he falling asleep on the 1 key to get it over with, he just used the beginning as an example. PoE has many, many other problems, so it's hard for one person to go through them all.

 

[Lurker King]

Vogel’s second article is even better. It shows that “Pillars of Eternity” is not just pretentious in the writing department, but also in the combat system. Josh tried so hard to make the combat system look complicated when it is obviously banal, repetitive and painstakingly boring.

 

[Lurker King]

Jeff complains about loredumps at the beginning of the game. About how it makes the game harder to get into.

You are making his criticisms look softer. He is explicitly saying that there is pretentious-verbose writing in the text-descriptions of stats, sexes, etc.

 

[Infinitron]

He explicitly mentions that the entire game has too many words and he falling asleep on the 1 key to get it over with, he just used the beginning as an example. PoE has many, many other problems, so it's hard for one person to go through them all.

I'm not convinced. Why'd he choose that example, then? And how far did he even get after character creation triggered him so?

Again, I think it's very interesting and telling that when the topic of too-verbose writing in PoE is brought up, many people (including Eric Fenstermaker himself in our interview) immediately gravitate towards interpreting that in terms of the game's beginning being inaccessible, whereas on the Codex, people almost never complain about that. It's almost always some variant of "I got to Chapter 2 and then it got boring".

 

[Dayyālu]

He is chasing a different audience than those who bought his games in the past, and he goes about it in all the wrong ways. Avadon is just a terrible business decision, a game whose every design decision has been made for the wrong reasons.

Avadon would have been a disaster. Problem is (after wasting years thinking that Steam was EEEEVIL) Vogel managed to get it on Steam at a somewhat low price, thus racking in tons of sales his previous valiant efforts failed to gain. That was 2011, before the contemporary age of "Steam has Japanese porn games on it because quality control went to hell".

Thus, he probably thought "Fuuuck, why did I put so much effort if I can merely enjoy past glories on a platform that gives me a ton of coverage?"

Considering how much he has cried about TEH INDIEPOCALYPSE since 2015, my guess is that he's making far less sales nowadays (still more than in the golden era of Vogel production though). But who cares, I'd maybe pirate his Geneforge remakes (because fuck you Jeff, if you are reading this make me buy your games, do something good and original for once and stop posting shitty pony memes and shitty blog articles *I* could write in 10 minutes and I'm not a 30-years industry veteran) and that's it.

 

[gaussgunner]

I'd never heard of Jeff before Avadon, which I got in a Humble Bundle, and I just thought it was a good effort from a noob developer, good graphics for that sort of game, gameplay has some rough edges, really needs better writing/editing/quests...

 

[Chaotic_Heretic]

I wonder who "melnorme" is.

Who else, but codex's biggest brown nosing shiller with no self respect - Infinitron

 

[Lurker King]

• PoE has a 10.4% completion rate
• Wasteland 2 has a 7.3% completion rate
• SR:HK has a 6.7% completion rate
• D:OS EE has a 5.3% completion rate
• Avadon has a 2.7% completion rate

Good, now we need to compare these numbers with the completion rate of Underrail, Age of Decadence and Battle Brothers.

 

[ore clover]

I can't really get behind Sawyer's rationale. Sure, D&D types love their lore. Whatever. Does the game need to vomit it all over during character generation? I feel like the point of char gen should be to actually make your character, not pull up next to the fire and spend a couple hours immersing yourself in the setting.

I don't think they need to kill all the extra stuff like subraces, but what's wrong with using a manual for the backgrounds exposition? Wouldn't even need to print it, just use a pdf. Include some quick blurbs in the char gen to summarize, if you must.

Maybe Sawyer was implying that when he mentioned his experience with those boxed sets. I think that'd be a good way to trim down on exposition without sacrificing the mechanics.

 

[CryptRat]

It's normal to have a lot of info both about the world lore and the mechanisms displayed before and/or during character and party creation, was it in the manual or on the screen, it's a dense part of the game where you have to take important decisions and it's the beginning so you have to learn from zero. The abundance of information to acknowledge at the start to create your party is part of the charm of RPGs.

 

[gaussgunner]

I'd also never heard of Josh before I joined the codex (I got tired of rpgs around the time he started working). Still not sure what to make of him. He makes sense when he's talking about design and writing, but PoE sucks and I don't think I'd like his earlier games either (and I never was a fan of tabletop AD&D either; too anal retentive for me). I realize he's working within the constraints of a larger studio (preexisting audience, publisher/kickstarter financing, dividing up the work among so many employees). If I had his job I'd fucking hate it, being the guy with the grand vision and watching the corporate machine butcher it. I can't really judge him as a designer unless he makes an indie game, maybe just him, a programmer, and an artist or two.

 

[JarlFrank]

completion rate
Battle Brothers

haha what

 

[Sizzle]

completion rate
Battle Brothers

haha what

LK isn't really in the habit of thinking things through before typing them up

But at least he managed to once again randomly namedrop AoD into a topic which has nothing to do with it :D

 

[Akratus]

He's the king of lurkers not the king of posters.

 

[Sentinel]

I'd also never heard of Josh before I joined the codex (I got tired of rpgs around the time he started working). Still not sure what to make of him. He makes sense when he's talking about design and writing, but PoE sucks and I don't think I'd like his earlier games either (and I never was a fan of tabletop AD&D either; too anal retentive for me). I realize he's working within the constraints of a larger studio (preexisting audience, publisher/kickstarter financing, dividing up the work among so many employees). If I had his job I'd fucking hate it, being the guy with the grand vision and watching the corporate machine butcher it. I can't really judge him as a designer unless he makes an indie game, maybe just him, a programmer, and an artist or two.

play New Vegas you knob

 

[FreeKaner]

I don't understand what's wrong with text that gives you background information just being there, if you don't want to read it then read it, what's the difference if they remove some text you need to hover over to read in the first place? People just dislike the mere choice of being able to read now?