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Eternity Josh Sawyer at Digital Dragons: Deadfire post-mortem

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Yet when they get it they skip them just like anyone else, and read the lines to get through them faster. And nobody listened to all of voiced dialogue in DoS2 either.


I think people care more about their game seeming to have hight production value than about particular things that are associated with high production value. They want to feel that they use a high quality product, they want to boost their self esteem by using high quality products. They want to be seen as serious people. Playing games with VO is a status symbol for them. They don' really care about VO.

Well, it's an interesting question. When I watch a movie or television episode on my computer, I always use subtitles, and I read the subtitles as I watch. But I don't think you could say the experience of watching a movie with just the subtitles would be the same. Voice acting in video games might work in a similar way.

I watch everything with subtitles too!
 

Butter

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There's a difference of pacing between movies and video games. With movies, we accept and expect that the director/editor determines the pace at which we experience the content. With a video game, we expect to be the ones determining that pace ourselves. That's why it's obnoxious to have to sit through actors speaking lines at half the speed we can read them.
 

The Bishop

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Well, it's an interesting question. When I watch a movie or television episode on my computer, I always use subtitles, and I read the subtitles as I watch. But I don't think you could say the experience of watching a movie with just the subtitles would be the same. Voice acting in video games might work in a similar way.
There's a big difference between an actor reading lines in a movie and a voice actor going through a laundry list of text in a wordy RPG. There's not that much spoken text that goes into a movie, and actors spend lots of time preparing delivery of every line, developing the character and his traits of speech, learning accents and quirks. They also discuss that with movie creative directors, consult experts, undergo coaching. There's so, so much that goes into every line of dialogue of a movie (we're talking decent quality movie of course). Movie's actors voice is probably the biggest part of acting as a profession, and that, often non-verbal, component that actor creates in this process is the key to delivery of the whole narrative.

In contrast, voice acting in a game with "OMG more text than Bible!" will mostly consist of going through printed text one line at a time with little to no direction or context. An actor can easily have to do a bunch of characters of whom he only learned today. Going through dialogue trees in order of enumeration, trying to maintain semblance of consistency.

This is basically just reading with expression. I can do it myself. In fact, I can do it better, since I actually followed the story in the correct order to this point and remember some of the context. I'm not fatigued by a long reading session and I am paying attention. And on top of that I'm doing this at my own pace as opposed to a voice actor whom regretfully was never instructed to drop breathing into microphone so very expressively and fucking get on with it.
 

Mr. Hiver

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You watch movies passively, play actively. The two cannot be directly compared. When you play you want to move things forward, so you cannot wait and just listen to every bit of dialogue which grows worse if every single line is voiced.
Not even in simpler action games. And especially not on reloads. In very text heavy games just waiting for all characters to say their lines would take ... months in real time?

I think people care more about their game seeming to have hight production value than about particular things that are associated with high production value. They want to feel that they use a high quality product, they want to boost their self esteem by using high quality products. They want to be seen as serious people. Playing games with VO is a status symbol for them. They don' really care about VO.
Pretty much. An empty superficial demand with no real use.
But it creates a dumb vacuous hype at release so that results in more sales...

As for PoE games selling or not, The biggest reason for Deadfire relative flop was mistakes and bad memories of PoE, which sold well on initial nostalgia and Baldurs Gate vibes, which was heavily used in PR and kickstarter campaign.
The initial gut reaction is a very powerful thing in gaming. Not only people buy game and order it in advance but they hype it unreasonably in the early days out of shere excitement which creates word of mouth hype and draws more people in.
Yet when it was played a bit longer it turned out it had many problems and the overall story sucked in every sense - from the very basic idea to how it was integrated into the gameplay - VERY BADLY, unlike stories in BG games, which were clear and engaging and fueled by very good villains.

In PoE The Watcher sucked, the false Gods running on batteries of souls - in a setting where reincarnation is a known everyday thing yet completely irrelevant to societies, cultures and anything else - SUCKED, while the antagonist was a weird pretentious clown who blathered about stuff you couldn't care less while the game took away your agency to deal with it at several places. And there were issues with the combat system, encounters design and companions and so on.

So when Deadfire came along, there was no novelty anymore and everyone knew what they can expect, which was - not a game like Baldurs Gate.
The main story and the main antagonist were direct continuation and so the biggest problems all over again and all the bad feels created by PoE after it sold well simply rebounded.
In a nutshell.
 
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Codex Year of the Donut
There's a big difference between an actor reading lines in a movie and a voice actor going through a laundry list of text in a wordy RPG.
You're right -- most actors are shit voice actors. As someone who listens to a lot of audio books -- being able to convey a range of emotions solely through voice is not as easy as you make it out to be.
 

The Bishop

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There's a big difference between an actor reading lines in a movie and a voice actor going through a laundry list of text in a wordy RPG.
You're right -- most actors are shit voice actors. As someone who listens to a lot of audio books -- being able to convey a range of emotions solely through voice is not as easy as you make it out to be.
I have no idea if most actors are shit voice actors. Can't be right or wrong about it since I never made any claims in this regard. Also I made no mention of how easy or hard it is to convey emotions with voice. I'm not talking aloud when reading text to myself, no voice is used in this process. And I can assure you I'm very convincing in conveying emotions to me in my own head.
 

Diggfinger

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Just have Ron Pearlman read out a few lines at the beginning of your game. Then add a voiced line for your talking heads, here and there. That's all the VO you need:cool:
You're welcome, Josh
:thumbsup:
 
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Ninjerk

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Just have Ron Pearlman right out a few lines at the beginning of your game. Then add a voiced line for your talking heads, here and there. That's all the VO you need:cool:
You're welcome, Josh
:thumbsup:
and you can even shake his piss-soaked hand
 
The Real Fanboy
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Josh made the Digital Dragons aftermovie!!!!! So hope they upload his talk soon, he's still so the only good lewking game dev!




Thanks for thinking of me Orma but I saw it when Infini posted it earlier in the week! Removing ship combat (which is reeeeally boring) only to have the bosses put it back in the game.......that was so stupid.

And even tho I love Critical Role and the full vo, making Josh and the writers get so stressed was way harsh (but it did make the characters so good)

Basically whenever Josh mentioned the bosses interfering my face was like:
giphy.gif


But i still love the story and the game and without the messiness and the drama probably would never have lead to the new Queen Woedica stuff which I am living for!!!
 
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S.torch

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The director of POE2 really thinks the game would be more "popular" just for being turn-based instead of real time? he maybe need to re-think that the success of DOS: 2 is due to more than that.
 

Yosharian

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There's a difference of pacing between movies and video games. With movies, we accept and expect that the director/editor determines the pace at which we experience the content. With a video game, we expect to be the ones determining that pace ourselves. That's why it's obnoxious to have to sit through actors speaking lines at half the speed we can read them.
Completely agree. I read very fast, I end up skipping most of the VO even when I'm not skipping through the dialogue (which I rarely do)
 

sser

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Yet when they get it they skip them just like anyone else, and read the lines to get through them faster. And nobody listened to all of voiced dialogue in DoS2 either.


I think people care more about their game seeming to have hight production value than about particular things that are associated with high production value. They want to feel that they use a high quality product, they want to boost their self esteem by using high quality products. They want to be seen as serious people. Playing games with VO is a status symbol for them. They don' really care about VO.

Well, it's an interesting question. When I watch a movie or television episode on my computer, I always use subtitles, and I read the subtitles as I watch. But I don't think you could say the experience of watching a movie with just the subtitles would be the same. Voice acting in video games might work in a similar way.

I watch everything with subtitles too!

Lady I'm seeing now does that. I deliberately avoid starting any TV show I'm interested in with her. I'd rather watch it alone than with big ass lettering.


With games though I almost always do subtitles. Voice acting and writing combined are very rarely good enough for me. Thinking back on it the only game I can remember that I'd always sit through cinematic stuff was probably Freedom Force 1 and 2; and actually Of Orcs and Men since it had decent writing and very good VO's. Others I'll just skip through a lot.
 

RaptorRex888

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I enjoyed the Woedica stuff as well, my characters backstory was a former Steel Garotte / Bleak Walker that respected what she stood for but lost his faith in her and her ideals after the ending of 1
 

Infinitron

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Post-postmortem:

The Deadfire Post-Postmortem

Since the video of my Digital Dragons postmortem for Deadfire went up, I’ve seen a few questions and comments that I think are worth addressing. If you haven’t seen the video yet, you can find it here:

First, it’s worth saying that this talk was only supposed to be 45 minutes, with ~15 minutes left for questions. I overran the 45 minute mark, so please understand that I couldn’t address every criticism people leveled at the game. I tried to talk about the things that came up most frequently in player and reviewer feedback.

1) Do you think the open world nature of the game contributed to the story/plot/pacing feeling weak?


Yes. I made the choice to make the game more open and knew that would impact how tight the story and its pacing would feel. However, even with that choice being made, I still could have done a better job with structuring and pacing the critical path.

For a while, we had a hard limit on where the Defiant could go in the archipelago. The in-story justification was that the Defiant was damaged and needed expensive repairs that you needed to raise money for. It could only move in the shallows, which comprised about 1/5 of the total map, encompassing Maje Island, Neketaka, Fort Deadlight, the Woedica pyramid, and some other places. We removed that, but we weren’t really doing anything with that restriction, story-wise, other than preventing the player from sailing from Port Maje to Hasongo without stopping at Neketaka.

I don’t have hard data for this, but I haven’t seen much anecdotal evidence that many/any players actually make that skip on their first playthrough. I think whether we (for example) forced the player to funnel through Neketaka/the palace before going to Hasongo is less important to the pacing of the story than disconnection between the factions and Eothas.

Re-working those plot elements may have required explicitly gating the player in the same way that the trial at the end of Act 2 creates a high-drama gate before going to Act 3, but then we’re really going back to the core issue, which was two disconnected plotlines.

Maybe this seems like an evasion, but I’m trying to explain that the plot was not conceived as disconnected to support the game being more open. The game was actually more closed during development. We did gate the player until we realized that the plot didn’t demand it. One could say, “Then why didn’t you change it then?” Because I made a mistake. That’s why I cited the plotting and pacing, not the open nature of the game, as the bigger issue. If the story had demanded more restriction and the pacing felt solid because of it, maybe I would have erred on the side of more restrictions.

And while a weak story is almost purely a negative for players, the map being almost entirely open does have positive aspects, that being the freedom to explore. Was it worth the trade off?

tumblr_inline_psw8voZjjM1ri73pi_640.png

It doesn’t seem like it, no.

2) Why wasn’t the Penetration system discussed?


Considering the broad nature of the postmortem, the Penetration system seemed like too fine a point to discuss in detail. The systems aren’t easy to talk about in less than a couple of minutes, and a couple of minutes would have pushed me past the time limit. Also, in the end, it seems like more players ultimately preferred Penetration to the previous DT system.

I’d like to step back to talk about something at a higher level, which is vertical progression in RPGs. Most RPGs/CRPGs focus on the vertical progression of numbers: damage, hit points, armor values, resistances, etc.

These numbers feed into formulae to produce a range of outcomes. The more inputs a number has and the wider the range of values on those inputs, the more quickly the formulae start to break down. This is why MMORPGs often abstract values and do arcane under-the-hood adjustments or go through periods of “squish” where all of the numbers get recalibrated/normalized (in the case of WoW, both).

Penetration was an attempt to retain the transparent vertical progression of armor and weapon values while constraining/normalizing the input > output of damage vs. armor. The Pillars 1 DT system is easier to understand on a basic level, but I maintain that’s still harder to make tactical choices based on it. This is based on observation of players using the system. The Pillars 2 Penetration system takes longer for players to figure out, but once they figure it out, they generally make better decisions in the system.

Is vertical progression important? That depends on the audience and the nature of the game as a whole. Horizontal progression (i.e., unlocking different actions/capabilities) can have much more of an impact, and I prefer games that emphasize horizontal over vertical progression. But I didn’t make Deadfire to my tastes, specifically, and Pillars 1 + the Infinity Engine games were dominated by the importance of vertical progression.

Personally, I would like to try an armor system where you have light/medium/heavy armor and attacks simply have light/medium/heavy penetration, there is no numerical progression in that relationship, and armor and weapons (including magical ones) gain extra/additional cool abilities instead of progressing on a numbers treadmill.

3) How was ship-to-ship combat, which is seemingly not that complicated, so expensive?


It was so expensive because it was an entirely custom system that re-used almost no assets from the rest of the game. Every sound you hear in ship-to-ship, every drawing of a ship you see at various distances/states of decay, every custom string listing actions and consequences, the cue system, every piece of user interface, was custom.

One of our system designers came up with this concept of ship-to-ship combat because he believed it would be resource-light. I cut it after two iterations because it was very obvious to me at that point that it was going to be arduously resource-heavy.

I honestly think that if we had made ship-to-ship combat a real-time with pause system more like combat in Pirates!, it would have ultimately been less expensive and much more fun for more players.

4) Wow, you really don’t get why the game sucks, do you?

A game can suck in myriad ways for different people. The ways I talked about are the ways that came up most frequently for players and reviewers. I mentioned that at the beginning of the talk, but it’s worth saying again here.

If you’d like me to address the way in which you thought the game sucked, just ask me a question here and I’ll try to answer it.
 

FreeKaner

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And while a weak story is almost purely a negative for players, the map being almost entirely open does have positive aspects, that being the freedom to explore. Was it worth the trade off? It doesn’t seem like it, no.

Learned the wrong thing again. Fucking around in the open world of deadfire is the only good thing about it. The problem isn't that it isn't linear, the problem is that there is a disconnect between these two.

You either make a linear game focused on high stakes epic journey and story driven narrative with a tight and deliberate story OR you make a game that is more open and has more loose narrative with factions and explorations, as well as dealing with more mundane aspects of the world. You can't have both, not only will it very disconnected and disoriented, it will also be too resource intensive and exhausting.

Obsidian seems to be better at doing the latter, because that was the best parts of of both pillows and deadfire. Not the former, which they always botched with too much pseudo-philosophy, pseudo-theology and needless mystery with no pay off.
 

Infinitron

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I think that's what he's saying, FreeKaner.

His argument:

1) We designed the world to be more linear and gated at first.

2) But the way we wrote the plot didn't justify it - there was no reason for the world to be gated, so we opened it up.

3) In reality, we should have changed the plot instead. It wasn't a good plot for an open world.

4) So the reason the plot wasn't good wasn't because we intentionally set out to make an open world game. It was just not good, period.
 
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Infinitron

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Codex Year of the Donut Serpent in the Staglands Dead State Divinity: Original Sin Project: Eternity Torment: Tides of Numenera Wasteland 2 Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 A Beautifully Desolate Campaign Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire Pathfinder: Kingmaker Pathfinder: Wrath I'm very into cock and ball torture I helped put crap in Monomyth
That's what he's saying, FreeKaner.

No, he is saying they should have done a strong story and closed world, because open world didn't pay off. Rather than an open world focused strictly on factions without any direct sequel and all the god shit.

I don't think he would deny that as a valid option, but because the game started out with a closed/gated world, it would have made more sense for Obsidian to change towards that direction. So that's the option he brought up here.
 
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Tigranes

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ehhhhh no.

You either make a linear game focused on high stakes epic journey and story driven narrative with a tight and deliberate story OR you make a game that is more open and has more loose narrative with factions and explorations, as well as dealing with more mundane aspects of the world. You can't have both

That's pretty much exactly what Sawyer is saying. And I certainly agree with the statement.

He's saying that it's not like "oh we made it open world so that made the story weaker that was the fundamental problem", but rather, that the faction/Eothas disconnected story was weak & loose to begin with, and that tightening the story there, even if it made the game less open, might have been better in the end - precisely because that would give you a cohesive 'less open, story driven' experience.

You seem to be arguing that 'you go either tight or loose, but POE2 shouldn't go tight, only loose'. I don't know about that - in Deadfire's eventual form as a half-baked incoherent mix of tight and loose, the loose stuff is definitely more entertaining. But one would think that a properly strategised tight game from the start would result in stronger content.
 

Orma

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Torment: Tides of Numenera


1) Do you think the open world nature of the game contributed to the story/plot/pacing feeling weak?

Yes. I made the choice to make the game more open and knew that would impact how tight the story and its pacing would feel. However, even with that choice being made, I still could have done a better job with structuring and pacing the critical path.

For a while, we had a hard limit on where the Defiant could go in the archipelago. The in-story justification was that the Defiant was damaged and needed expensive repairs that you needed to raise money for. It could only move in the shallows, which comprised about 1/5 of the total map, encompassing Maje Island, Neketaka, Fort Deadlight, the Woedica pyramid, and some other places. We removed that, but we weren’t really doing anything with that restriction, story-wise, other than preventing the player from sailing from Port Maje to Hasongo without stopping at Neketaka.

I don’t have hard data for this, but I haven’t seen much anecdotal evidence that many/any players actually make that skip on their first playthrough. I think whether we (for example) forced the player to funnel through Neketaka/the palace before going to Hasongo is less important to the pacing of the story than disconnection between the factions and Eothas.

Re-working those plot elements may have required explicitly gating the player in the same way that the trial at the end of Act 2 creates a high-drama gate before going to Act 3, but then we’re really going back to the core issue, which was two disconnected plotlines.

Maybe this seems like an evasion, but I’m trying to explain that the plot was not conceived as disconnected to support the game being more open. The game was actually more closed during development. We did gate the player until we realized that the plot didn’t demand it. One could say, “Then why didn’t you change it then?” Because I made a mistake. That’s why I cited the plotting and pacing, not the open nature of the game, as the bigger issue. If the story had demanded more restriction and the pacing felt solid because of it, maybe I would have erred on the side of more restrictions.

And while a weak story is almost purely a negative for players, the map being almost entirely open does have positive aspects, that being the freedom to explore. Was it worth the trade off?

tumblr_inline_psw8voZjjM1ri73pi_640.png

It doesn’t seem like it, no.

2) Why wasn’t the Penetration system discussed?

Considering the broad nature of the postmortem, the Penetration system seemed like too fine a point to discuss in detail. The systems aren’t easy to talk about in less than a couple of minutes, and a couple of minutes would have pushed me past the time limit. Also, in the end, it seems like more players ultimately preferred Penetration to the previous DT system.

I’d like to step back to talk about something at a higher level, which is vertical progression in RPGs. Most RPGs/CRPGs focus on the vertical progression of numbers: damage, hit points, armor values, resistances, etc.

These numbers feed into formulae to produce a range of outcomes. The more inputs a number has and the wider the range of values on those inputs, the more quickly the formulae start to break down. This is why MMORPGs often abstract values and do arcane under-the-hood adjustments or go through periods of “squish” where all of the numbers get recalibrated/normalized (in the case of WoW, both).

Penetration was an attempt to retain the transparent vertical progression of armor and weapon values while constraining/normalizing the input > output of damage vs. armor. The Pillars 1 DT system is easier to understand on a basic level, but I maintain that’s still harder to make tactical choices based on it. This is based on observation of players using the system. The Pillars 2 Penetration system takes longer for players to figure out, but once they figure it out, they generally make better decisions in the system.

Is vertical progression important? That depends on the audience and the nature of the game as a whole. Horizontal progression (i.e., unlocking different actions/capabilities) can have much more of an impact, and I prefer games that emphasize horizontal over vertical progression. But I didn’t make Deadfire to my tastes, specifically, and Pillars 1 + the Infinity Engine games were dominated by the importance of vertical progression.

Personally, I would like to try an armor system where you have light/medium/heavy armor and attacks simply have light/medium/heavy penetration, there is no numerical progression in that relationship, and armor and weapons (including magical ones) gain extra/additional cool abilities instead of progressing on a numbers treadmill.

3) How was ship-to-ship combat, which is seemingly not that complicated, so expensive?

It was so expensive because it was an entirely custom system that re-used almost no assets from the rest of the game. Every sound you hear in ship-to-ship, every drawing of a ship you see at various distances/states of decay, every custom string listing actions and consequences, the cue system, every piece of user interface, was custom.

One of our system designers came up with this concept of ship-to-ship combat because he believed it would be resource-light. I cut it after two iterations because it was very obvious to me at that point that it was going to be arduously resource-heavy.

I honestly think that if we had made ship-to-ship combat a real-time with pause system more like combat in Pirates!, it would have ultimately been less expensive and much more fun for more players.



4) Wow, you really don’t get why the game sucks, do you?

A game can suck in myriad ways for different people. The ways I talked about are the ways that came up most frequently for players and reviewers. I mentioned that at the beginning of the talk, but it’s worth saying again here.

If you’d like me to address the way in which you thought the game sucked, just ask me a question here and I’ll try to answer it.
 
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AwesomeButton

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PC RPG Website of the Year, 2015 Make the Codex Great Again! Grab the Codex by the pussy Insert Title Here RPG Wokedex Divinity: Original Sin 2 A Beautifully Desolate Campaign Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag. Pathfinder: Wrath
I haven't watched this yet, but is it really as much of a self-flaggelating as these Q/A make it sound?
 

FreeKaner

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A properly done tight game done by someone else maybe. It is not Obsidian's strong suit, certainly not current obsidian's.

Both can exist, no question about that. Doesn't mean every company can do both in every genre. Also party RPGs like this fit this format of adventuring in a world more, especially in the world they crafted. No one remembers BG2 for the latter half of it where you are doing a linear story progression or even its story, people remember the fucking around in the world. If Deadfire with linear tight story existed, it would not be deadfire at all. Everything they did in this game including the setting and map itself gives itself to loose format with factions. If you want to make BG1 sequel, go ahead, I think BG1 is better than BG2 even. It wouldn't be deadfire.

Storyfaggotry should generally saved for non-rpgs too but that is a different discussion altogether.
 
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Tigranes

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Sure, I agree with most of that. (And I think Sawyer is too.)

It's curious how we've traveled - from Obsidian's big (only?) traditional strength as its tight, story-based content, to a point where we think they might be better off going full hog into loose frolicking.

I think Deadfire was almost doomed from the start: I remember seeing the initial key points (ships! chase eothas! pirates!) and thinking jesus, there's a whole lot of everything here in a blender. In the context of creating a sequel to POE1, I'd have been happy with another relatively 'tight' game that tries to improve and fix the deficiencies in storytelling and combat mechanics. If they were coming out with a new IP or a spinoff game, it would make sense to go full SOZ, which would probably suit Sawyer's strengths (and the relative weakness of Obsidian's current writers). As it is, we got a game that's not actually SOZ, but is at its best in its sozzy moments.

(And, you know, I say all that as someone who enjoyed both games quite a bit. I think it's possible to like a game and still agree on an intelligent assessment of its fundamental flaws, or vice versa.)
 

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