People News Josh Sawyer says he failed with Pillars II, would direct a third game if he can figure out why

[Zed Duke of Banville]

The Forgotten Realms was the worst D&D/AD&D campaign setting created by TSR, a poor substitute for the Greyhawk campaign setting after Gygax's ouster necessitated its replacement as the default AD&D world, with the adaptation of Ed Greenwood's person campaign setting proving to be as bland, generic, and soul-less as possible.

Yet Josh Sawyer demonstrated himself incapable of creating a CRPG setting that rose even to the low level of the Forgotten Realms.

 

[Dr Schultz]

nd I can see why he doesn't understand his own setting, his own work and why Deadfire failed if he thinks Ed Greenwood's Forgotten Realms didn't have thought put into it.

Search in your heart and know that it's true, come to grips that it falls apart under scrutiny. A long blogpost he made https://rpgcodex.net/forums/index.p...-patch-4-0-preview.124865/page-6#post-5902301

I would like to think that I have enough experience with people to know that many of them, especially artists, are often confused, uncertain, and prone to using rationalization. Josh can ramble about what he thinks is and isn't but it doesn't change the facts. FR got butchered hard in the transition to third edition, yes. FR is also not a flawless setting, it's true. Yet, it's better, more compelling, more fun, and more interesting than Pillars of Eternity, simply because it's a fantastic setting, with fantastic imagery and features, meant to facilitate a compelling story, outside of the boundaries of normalcy. And before you reach for the "fantasy has to make sense" bullshit argument, yes, it has to follow its' own internal logic or else it falls apart and the willing suspension of disbelief is no longer willingly suspended. But I'll take having whacky and inconsistent things happening over a bleak, boring, meaningless nothingness, with absolutely nothing interesting, nothing fresh, nothing exciting or stimulating happening, which is what PoE is. Whatever Josh's goal was, he failed, because I found his opus to be on the same level of the shitty settings I, and many people I met, were making 20 years ago when we were trying really hard to break away from generic medieval fantasy settings that litter the RPG playgrounds.

Also you're fucking deluded if you think I'm ever going to take seriously an adult who capitalizes random letters in a word. Fuck Josh, fuck Pillars of Shiternity and fuck anyone who thinks you should waste time with this subpar gnostic period drama.

Do you really think the setting is what makes PoE (I&2) plot bland?

In the first game alone you have an ancient civilization that engineered their gods, a crusade (sorta) that terminates with the literal explosion of one of them, a centuries old conspiracy whose goal is to hide the origin of said gods and a plague (again man-made) that strips away children of their soul ...

I don't know you, but to me these are really interesting premises ON PAPER. Problem is, the only Obsidian employee that was able to write interesting bits of storytelling with these premises left the company long time ago...

Yes, because the plot is the setting. The plot exists as a vehicle for the writers to present their setting. The hero's journey is a long, boring car ride on an empty highway, with a couple of uninteresting and slightly obnoxious assholes in the back seat, with thousands of long signs passing by on which trivia is written, and the ride is very slow and you have to stop to read the signs multiple times. Sometimes you pass by an accident or a roadkill and you stop to look at it and try to help or eat it, but it's unsatisfactory and it leaves a bad taste in your mouth, and you get back in the car. And at the end of the journey, you are given an unsatisfactory conclusion because it's a revelation that you did not care about, because you didn't know where you were going, why you were going and it's not even where you expected to go in the first place, and the car isn't even what the manufacturer said it was going to be when you ordered it.

Anyway. my point is that you can have the most overwritten book in the world and there's probably some interesting ideas in there, but if you can't turn that into a story, it's just words on paper whose only purpose is to tell you that someone sat down to write on that paper. Nothing learned, nothing gained, nothing felt except indignation. Also most of the events you mentioned are not seen or interacted with, just told to you, and the only reason Thaos' stupid shit qualifies as "shown" is because of the technicality of you seeing past memories that you can't even interact with.

I could even agree with your post but - again - do you really think the fault for all the above lies in the setting?

I don't... The worldbuilding of Eora is solid and the sparks of an interesting story are all there. Sadly this story never happened... probably because Avellone was confined to companions writing during the first game and left the company soon after.

 

[Tweed]

There was too much worldbuilding, Sawyer and co were in a desperate bid to make me care about the world instead of letting that happen naturally or being relevant. I got bogged down with a bunch of stuff I didn't need to give a shit about and as a consequence I ended up caring about nothing. The only reason I was chasing Thaos was because the game kept insisting that if I didn't bad things would happen to me. By the time I was done I was completely apathetic and I was almost pleased I had fucked up the lives of my companions by not giving a shit about what they did with their various moral dilemmas.

 

[commie]

There was too much worldbuilding, Sawyer and co were in a desperate bid to make me care about the world instead of letting that happen naturally or being relevant. I got bogged down with a bunch of stuff I didn't need to give a shit about and as a consequence I ended up caring about nothing. The only reason I was chasing Thaos was because the game kept insisting that if I didn't bad things would happen to me. By the time I was done I was completely apathetic and I was almost pleased I had fucked up the lives of my companions by not giving a shit about what they did with their various moral dilemmas.

To an extent that's true...compare with Gold Box games....they certainly were coherent and there was bits of lore in the journal entries, but it was all lean and mean, and even if one didn't give a rats arse about the world of FR in general, the information about critters and places in the lorebook(which itself in the modern age would only need to be a click in the in game Codex) had all the relevant knowledge condensed within. You didn't stop and start the game as you went on. I saw a similar thing in TOW...there were characters that just dumped stuff on you and I just clicked through every option in case it would open up a quest or give a code etc. Ironically Mass Effect did it better by putting a lot of this stuff in the Codex and not so much in 'let me tell you about the world and everything in it' NPC loredumps.

Caring about the world should come naturally as you play, and not be forcefed. Despite my complaint about TOW above, I actually ended up being interested in the world despite apathy at the seemingly 'tryhard to be Fallout in Space if the bombs didn't drop' vibe that I was getting initially and this is cause overall, there was enough subtle lore being presented that made the place grow on me.

 

[Dr Schultz]

There was too much worldbuilding, Sawyer and co were in a desperate bid to make me care about the world instead of letting that happen naturally or being relevant. I got bogged down with a bunch of stuff I didn't need to give a shit about and as a consequence I ended up caring about nothing. The only reason I was chasing Thaos was because the game kept insisting that if I didn't bad things would happen to me. By the time I was done I was completely apathetic and I was almost pleased I had fucked up the lives of my companions by not giving a shit about what they did with their various moral dilemmas.

Being an History buff I don't think there is such thing as "too much worldbuilding".

Having said that, though, I DO think that Pillars Eternity games handle poorly their lore.

Worldbuilding could be good or bad per se. But even when it's good it could be used in a way that hindrance the story and the gameplay instead of enhancing them.

I dare to say this is precisely the case of both Pillars games.

 

[Popiel]

There was too much worldbuilding

That statement is objectively wrong. Piece of narrative art (be it a book or a game, doesn’t matter) set in a completely fictional universe is only ever as good as its setting. True art is telling about the setting in a competent way. Planescape: Torment achieves that as well as Tolkien does in Lords of the Rings (different art forms, but level of competency is, I would argue, the same). PoE fails completely. It’s the delivery, not the content. Lore is interesting, themes are interesting, stuff that goes on is interesting despite how it’s shown – it’s how all is delivered to the player which shows lack of skills.

 

[Kyl Von Kull]

I don't... The worldbuilding of Eora is solid and the sparks of an interesting story are all there. Sadly this story never happened... probably because Avellone was confined to companions writing during the first game and left the company soon after.

You can’t divorce the story from the setting. And you certainly can’t judge the setting in isolation from the story, especially when it’s an original IP where the developers can change one to fit the other.

 

[Robert Erick]

nd I can see why he doesn't understand his own setting, his own work and why Deadfire failed if he thinks Ed Greenwood's Forgotten Realms didn't have thought put into it.

Search in your heart and know that it's true, come to grips that it falls apart under scrutiny. A long blogpost he made https://rpgcodex.net/forums/index.p...-patch-4-0-preview.124865/page-6#post-5902301

I would like to think that I have enough experience with people to know that many of them, especially artists, are often confused, uncertain, and prone to using rationalization. Josh can ramble about what he thinks is and isn't but it doesn't change the facts. FR got butchered hard in the transition to third edition, yes. FR is also not a flawless setting, it's true. Yet, it's better, more compelling, more fun, and more interesting than Pillars of Eternity, simply because it's a fantastic setting, with fantastic imagery and features, meant to facilitate a compelling story, outside of the boundaries of normalcy. And before you reach for the "fantasy has to make sense" bullshit argument, yes, it has to follow its' own internal logic or else it falls apart and the willing suspension of disbelief is no longer willingly suspended. But I'll take having whacky and inconsistent things happening over a bleak, boring, meaningless nothingness, with absolutely nothing interesting, nothing fresh, nothing exciting or stimulating happening, which is what PoE is. Whatever Josh's goal was, he failed, because I found his opus to be on the same level of the shitty settings I, and many people I met, were making 20 years ago when we were trying really hard to break away from generic medieval fantasy settings that litter the RPG playgrounds.

Also you're fucking deluded if you think I'm ever going to take seriously an adult who capitalizes random letters in a word. Fuck Josh, fuck Pillars of Shiternity and fuck anyone who thinks you should waste time with this subpar gnostic period drama.

Do you really think the setting is what makes PoE (I&2) plot bland?

In the first game alone you have an ancient civilization that engineered their gods, a crusade (sorta) that terminates with the literal explosion of one of them, a centuries old conspiracy whose goal is to hide the origin of said gods and a plague (again man-made) that strips away children of their soul ...

I don't know you, but to me these are really interesting premises ON PAPER. Problem is, the only Obsidian employee that was able to write interesting bits of storytelling with these premises left the company long time ago...

Yes, because the plot is the setting. The plot exists as a vehicle for the writers to present their setting. The hero's journey is a long, boring car ride on an empty highway, with a couple of uninteresting and slightly obnoxious assholes in the back seat, with thousands of long signs passing by on which trivia is written, and the ride is very slow and you have to stop to read the signs multiple times. Sometimes you pass by an accident or a roadkill and you stop to look at it and try to help or eat it, but it's unsatisfactory and it leaves a bad taste in your mouth, and you get back in the car. And at the end of the journey, you are given an unsatisfactory conclusion because it's a revelation that you did not care about, because you didn't know where you were going, why you were going and it's not even where you expected to go in the first place, and the car isn't even what the manufacturer said it was going to be when you ordered it.

Anyway. my point is that you can have the most overwritten book in the world and there's probably some interesting ideas in there, but if you can't turn that into a story, it's just words on paper whose only purpose is to tell you that someone sat down to write on that paper. Nothing learned, nothing gained, nothing felt except indignation. Also most of the events you mentioned are not seen or interacted with, just told to you, and the only reason Thaos' stupid shit qualifies as "shown" is because of the technicality of you seeing past memories that you can't even interact with.

I could even agree with your post but - again - do you really think the fault for all the above lies in the setting?

I don't... The worldbuilding of Eora is solid and the sparks of an interesting story are all there. Sadly this story never happened... probably because Avellone was confined to companions writing during the first game and left the company soon after.

Yes, actually. I find the setting to be extremely bland and obvious, hence the homebrew "baby's first DND setting" comment I made way above. I remember reading through it when PoE was first released and constantly telling myself "This can't be all of it. This can't just be it.". Almost the entirety of it is real life civilizations and ethnicities, historical events and tolkien races but given a twist, and the twist is generally not compelling enough to carry them. The thing is, I love reading history books and reading about older civilizations, same as Josh I suppose, but that made me even more frustrated with the setting, since it was just real life cultures with different skin tones, heights, ear shapes and horns and some of them were furries, and the writers decided to make those cultures as safe, "realistic" and logical as possible, and presented them like a wikipedia article, instead of like a living, thinking, breathing people. It is a world so blandly written, and a plot so poorly presented, that it managed to make events that would normally be interesting, such as a crusade, the dropping of a nuke, and forests being infested by undead toddlers, be boring.

The other problem is that Josh and Obsidian's writers are Americans (TM), and Californians, and thus they are materialistic, consumerist, devoid of spirituality, introspection and conviction, and thus it is inherently impossible for them to write about divine beings, and a story about divine beings that makes it compelling. They could not stop themselves from putting the gods central to their setting and their stories through the lens of post-modernism and "tear them down", even though it was not earned, and then they flip-flopped on it when they realized they fucked up, but only made them annoying, bitchy super-powered giants. Maybe the story of the PoE franchise is really about Josh trying to work out his (lack of) belief in God, much like in his attempt with Honest Hearts, but since he is a soulless automaton of american-german descent and his writers are west coast pond scum, it's impossible to them to give a story about faith the gravitas and mystery it requires to work. Unless they spend a decade studying religions and mysteries at an academic level and shoot caffeine into their eyeballs like Kirkbride did, of course. That's the problem with PoE setting, in a nutshell (Or at least my problem with it). A fantasy Early Modern Period with none of the turmoils and romance of the real thing, focused on God conflicts, but without religion and mystery, all packaged and presented in a bleak, joyless first installment and an embarrassing, overtly sarcastic second installment. Not even Fat Cheeks Avellone could've wrangled a good story out of this mess. This is what makes it so frustrating to me. It was boring, it was worthless to go through, and I had entirely forgotten about it quickly after I finished playing the first game, but for some reason other people kept talking about the games, and the "merits" of the setting (even though they almost always only talked about Durance), and all the arguments that the game caused. In a sane world, it would be forgotten about quickly. But for some reason it keeps lingering, like a bad stench that won't just fuck off already.

 

[Dr Schultz]

I don't... The worldbuilding of Eora is solid and the sparks of an interesting story are all there. Sadly this story never happened... probably because Avellone was confined to companions writing during the first game and left the company soon after.

You can’t divorce the story from the setting. And you certainly can’t judge the setting in isolation from the story, especially when it’s an original IP where the developers can change one to fit the other.

I politely disagree...

As far as I'm concerned, you can easly have a great story in a boring setting and vice-versa.

For the sake of argument, let's assume that your only experience with Tolkien is The Hobbit (the recent movies).

Being these three movies boring as they are would you say that the Middle Earth is a boring setting as well?

In all honestly, I can see the seeds of many good stories in the Eora worldbuilding. Sadly these stories never came into existece.

 

[Dr Schultz]

nd I can see why he doesn't understand his own setting, his own work and why Deadfire failed if he thinks Ed Greenwood's Forgotten Realms didn't have thought put into it.

Search in your heart and know that it's true, come to grips that it falls apart under scrutiny. A long blogpost he made https://rpgcodex.net/forums/index.p...-patch-4-0-preview.124865/page-6#post-5902301

I would like to think that I have enough experience with people to know that many of them, especially artists, are often confused, uncertain, and prone to using rationalization. Josh can ramble about what he thinks is and isn't but it doesn't change the facts. FR got butchered hard in the transition to third edition, yes. FR is also not a flawless setting, it's true. Yet, it's better, more compelling, more fun, and more interesting than Pillars of Eternity, simply because it's a fantastic setting, with fantastic imagery and features, meant to facilitate a compelling story, outside of the boundaries of normalcy. And before you reach for the "fantasy has to make sense" bullshit argument, yes, it has to follow its' own internal logic or else it falls apart and the willing suspension of disbelief is no longer willingly suspended. But I'll take having whacky and inconsistent things happening over a bleak, boring, meaningless nothingness, with absolutely nothing interesting, nothing fresh, nothing exciting or stimulating happening, which is what PoE is. Whatever Josh's goal was, he failed, because I found his opus to be on the same level of the shitty settings I, and many people I met, were making 20 years ago when we were trying really hard to break away from generic medieval fantasy settings that litter the RPG playgrounds.

Also you're fucking deluded if you think I'm ever going to take seriously an adult who capitalizes random letters in a word. Fuck Josh, fuck Pillars of Shiternity and fuck anyone who thinks you should waste time with this subpar gnostic period drama.

Do you really think the setting is what makes PoE (I&2) plot bland?

In the first game alone you have an ancient civilization that engineered their gods, a crusade (sorta) that terminates with the literal explosion of one of them, a centuries old conspiracy whose goal is to hide the origin of said gods and a plague (again man-made) that strips away children of their soul ...

I don't know you, but to me these are really interesting premises ON PAPER. Problem is, the only Obsidian employee that was able to write interesting bits of storytelling with these premises left the company long time ago...

Yes, because the plot is the setting. The plot exists as a vehicle for the writers to present their setting. The hero's journey is a long, boring car ride on an empty highway, with a couple of uninteresting and slightly obnoxious assholes in the back seat, with thousands of long signs passing by on which trivia is written, and the ride is very slow and you have to stop to read the signs multiple times. Sometimes you pass by an accident or a roadkill and you stop to look at it and try to help or eat it, but it's unsatisfactory and it leaves a bad taste in your mouth, and you get back in the car. And at the end of the journey, you are given an unsatisfactory conclusion because it's a revelation that you did not care about, because you didn't know where you were going, why you were going and it's not even where you expected to go in the first place, and the car isn't even what the manufacturer said it was going to be when you ordered it.

Anyway. my point is that you can have the most overwritten book in the world and there's probably some interesting ideas in there, but if you can't turn that into a story, it's just words on paper whose only purpose is to tell you that someone sat down to write on that paper. Nothing learned, nothing gained, nothing felt except indignation. Also most of the events you mentioned are not seen or interacted with, just told to you, and the only reason Thaos' stupid shit qualifies as "shown" is because of the technicality of you seeing past memories that you can't even interact with.

I could even agree with your post but - again - do you really think the fault for all the above lies in the setting?

I don't... The worldbuilding of Eora is solid and the sparks of an interesting story are all there. Sadly this story never happened... probably because Avellone was confined to companions writing during the first game and left the company soon after.

Yes, actually. I find the setting to be extremely bland and obvious, hence the homebrew "baby's first DND setting" comment I made way above. I remember reading through it when PoE was first released and constantly telling myself "This can't be all of it. This can't just be it.". Almost the entirety of it is real life civilizations and ethnicities, historical events and tolkien races but given a twist, and the twist is generally not compelling enough to carry them. The thing is, I love reading history books and reading about older civilizations, same as Josh I suppose, but that made me even more frustrated with the setting, since it was just real life cultures with different skin tones, heights, ear shapes and horns and some of them were furries, and the writers decided to make those cultures as safe, "realistic" and logical as possible, and presented them like a wikipedia article, instead of like a living, thinking, breathing people. It is a world so blandly written, and a plot so poorly presented, that it managed to make events that would normally be interesting, such as a crusade, the dropping of a nuke, and forests being infested by undead toddlers, be boring.


The other problem is that Josh and Obsidian's writers are Americans (TM), and Californians, and thus they are materialistic, consumerist, devoid of spirituality, introspection and conviction, and thus it is inherently impossible for them to write about divine beings, and a story about divine beings that makes it compelling. They could not stop themselves from putting the gods central to their setting and their stories through the lens of post-modernism and "tear them down", even though it was not earned, and then they flip-flopped on it when they realized they fucked up, but only made them annoying, bitchy super-powered giants. Maybe the story of the PoE franchise is really about Josh trying to work out his (lack of) belief in God, much like in his attempt with Honest Hearts, but since he is a soulless automaton of american-german descent and his writers are west coast pond scum, it's impossible to them to give a story about faith the gravitas and mystery it requires to work. Unless they spend a decade studying religions and mysteries at an academic level and shoot caffeine into their eyeballs like Kirkbride did, of course. That's the problem with PoE setting, in a nutshell (Or at least my problem with it). A fantasy Early Modern Period with none of the turmoils and romance of the real thing, focused on God conflicts, but without religion and mystery, all packaged and presented in a bleak, joyless first installment and an embarrassing, overtly sarcastic second installment. Not even Fat Cheeks Avellone could've wrangled a good story out of this mess. This is what makes it so frustrating to me. It was boring, it was worthless to go through, and I had entirely forgotten about it quickly after I finished playing the first game, but for some reason other people kept talking about the games, and the "merits" of the setting (even though they almost always only talked about Durance), and all the arguments that the game caused. In a sane world, it would be forgotten about quickly. But for some reason it keeps lingering, like a bad stench that won't just fuck off already.

Frankly I had a completely different feeling playing these games. I was (and still am) under the impression that the setting of Eora was conceived like a more believable version of the Forgottem Realms, and it actually succeded at that (!!!).

The messiness of the setting to me came from the inspiration, not from the new elements, because, let be honest: The Forgotten Realms are essentially a patchwork of "cool" things put together with little or no regard for internal or external consistency. Everything that can be used in a high-fantasy campaign form a young game master is there. It's an all you can eat high-fantasy menu. And in the Tabletop RPGs ecosystem it works precisely for that reason.

Sawyer just rewrote The Forgotten Realms like an actual place, where actual believable historical processes had occurred. You have a political scenario that makes sense, with colonial powers that fight each other and with their native subjects. You have "gods" that are the kind of gods that real people would have prayed to and fought for. The impact of the magic on the different societies of Eora is taken extensively into account. The different levels of development around the world explain the variety of equipment you have, as well as the dungeons and even the classes.

Is this a soul-less operation? Maybe it is, but for the most part it succeeded. It is more consistent than its inspiration and it still offers lots of hooks for interesting storytelling (some of which I've already listed). Sadly these stories were never written...

In short: o me this setting is mostly a missed opportunity

 

[MRY]

There are, of course, some people who think that Tales from the Mos Eisley Cantina and midichlorians are the pinnacle of worldbuilding, and then there are some who think Star Wars was better when it was just hand-waving and fun adventures. I always thought Forgotten Realms was dumb, but games in the setting were often dumb fun, and I certainly think it's better off without fampyrs midichlorians.

 

[Trashos]

The presentation of the setting is so poor, that I cannot really judge the setting on its merits. Then I go to the game's wiki to read about the companions, and the presentation of the companions is so poor, that I am bored before I actually know anything about them (read those fucking first paragraphs there! ffs...).

When the execution is botched that hard, it is often hard to judge the concept behind it.

 

[Dr Schultz]

There are, of course, some people who think that Tales from the Mos Eisley Cantina and midichlorians are the pinnacle of worldbuilding, and then there are some who think Star Wars was better when it was just hand-waving and fun adventures. I always thought Forgotten Realms was dumb, but games in the setting were often dumb fun, and I certainly think it's better off without fampyrs midichlorians.

Usually I am of the same advise, Mike, but in this particular case I think that they really did a good job with the worldbuilding.

I can't see a single good reason why one can't tell an interesting story with the exact same premesses of POE. And those premises are made possiible by the setting.

 

[MRY]

I can't see a single good reason why one can't tell an interesting story with the exact same premesses of POE. And those premises are made possiible by the setting.

Let's start with "Bîaŵac."



Candidly, I bounced off the game so quickly that my impression of it is very superficial, but the entire setting seems constructed in a way that makes fantasy a chore, rather than a pleasure.

Early in my legal career, one of my jobs was sifting through petitions asking the court I worked for to review the cases. One common request was that the court overrule a prior decision (called Almendarez-Torres). This request was made hundreds of times during the year I worked there, and always rejected. So if you got an "overrule Almendarez-Torres" petition, you could just note "oft-denied" and cite to recently similar petitions that were denied. But once, I got this incredibly dense, hard-to-follow petition that went on for page after page explaining how, if you followed this thread of decision and that thread of decision, they indicated that there was a flaw in how criminal sentencings were being handled, etc., etc. About three hours in, I realized, "This is just asking the court to overrule Almendarez-Torres, without mentioning the case by name."

POE, to me, was basically that crazy prisoner's petition expanded from 5,000 words to 1,000,000 words. Every encounter I've had with the setting (my brief stint playing it, my efforts to read about it) suggest a grandiose effort to obscure fantasy tropes, such that if you really, really work hard to parse the stupid Welsh and sift through the longwinded backstory, you realize it's just about elves, gnomes, etc. doing exactly the same stuff they do in every other fantasy setting. It's like the opposite of, say, Darksun, which uses the player's familiarity with fantasy tropes to unsettle his expectations, or Warhammer, which uses the cliches to jumpstart a baroque setting -- allowing it to use more of the player's brainspace on obscure lore because the basic lore is hardcoded into every nerd's brain by now. Petition denied.

 

[Deleted Member 22431]

MRY is right.

I don't know who is worse in the pretentious scale: the writers of PoE or some posters here. Debating the flaws of the setting? Really, guys? Who gives a fuck. It's a BG clone that is supposed to emulate an adventure of killing monsters with extreme prejudice. They could write whatever. The game is bad because the combat system is bad. End of story.

 

[Dr Schultz]

Every encounter I've had with the setting (my brief stint playing it, my efforts to read about it) suggest a grandiose effort to obscure fantasy tropes, such that if you really, really work hard to parse the stupid Welsh and sift through the longwinded backstory, you realize it's just about elves, gnomes, etc. doing exactly the same stuff they do in every other fantasy setting.

Are they? Honestly I don't think, for these 3 reasons: Sawyer was smart enough to differentiate between cultures and races (species, actually) and therefore in PoE you can have, for instance, elves that fight in both sides of a colonial conflict 2) Moving the setting at the beginning of the modern age put on the table a bunch of "new" themes and tropes (colonialism, new discoveries, scientific revolutions, etc...) 3) The soul meddling stuff contributes to differentiate Eora from its model.

I'm more inclined to think that this setting tries hard to look like the Forgotten Realms, even if it's clearly not.

 

[MRY]

Could be. Like I said, I didn't get that far into the game. To me, the aspects that seemed to diverge from high fantasy were among the least appealing. I think doing a time-shifted Forgotten Realms can be great when the time-shift is the core theme (see Arcanum, Shadowrun, WH40k), but that isn't what POE looked like to me. I might be mistaken, but I don't think the game is really thematized around "what if the Renaissance had Tolkien's bestiary?" or "what if the golden age of piracy had Tolkien's bestiary?" so much as being like "what if we added guns and the Carribean into Forgotten Realms?" But since my impression is so superficial, I probably should stop grousing. I'm like an enthusiasm fampyr.

 

[Murk]

No no, keep going, your posts are a delight to read.

 

[Robert Erick]

Got a little something for you, Orma:

Spoiler

 

[Robert Erick]

I can't see a single good reason why one can't tell an interesting story with the exact same premesses of POE. And those premises are made possiible by the setting.

Let's start with "Bîaŵac."



Candidly, I bounced off the game so quickly that my impression of it is very superficial, but the entire setting seems constructed in a way that makes fantasy a chore, rather than a pleasure.

Early in my legal career, one of my jobs was sifting through petitions asking the court I worked for to review the cases. One common request was that the court overrule a prior decision (called Almendarez-Torres). This request was made hundreds of times during the year I worked there, and always rejected. So if you got an "overrule Almendarez-Torres" petition, you could just note "oft-denied" and cite to recently similar petitions that were denied. But once, I got this incredibly dense, hard-to-follow petition that went on for page after page explaining how, if you followed this thread of decision and that thread of decision, they indicated that there was a flaw in how criminal sentencings were being handled, etc., etc. About three hours in, I realized, "This is just asking the court to overrule Almendarez-Torres, without mentioning the case by name."

POE, to me, was basically that crazy prisoner's petition expanded from 5,000 words to 1,000,000 words. Every encounter I've had with the setting (my brief stint playing it, my efforts to read about it) suggest a grandiose effort to obscure fantasy tropes, such that if you really, really work hard to parse the stupid Welsh and sift through the longwinded backstory, you realize it's just about elves, gnomes, etc. doing exactly the same stuff they do in every other fantasy setting. It's like the opposite of, say, Darksun, which uses the player's familiarity with fantasy tropes to unsettle his expectations, or Warhammer, which uses the cliches to jumpstart a baroque setting -- allowing it to use more of the player's brainspace on obscure lore because the basic lore is hardcoded into every nerd's brain by now. Petition denied.

You've perfectly summarized how I felt about it, except for one minor detail: The overused î letter in the game is part of our alphabet, and we pronounce it differently than what the writers intended, and every time it appeared, it turned the faux-welsh words into donkey noises, which was amusing to me.

 

[GarfunkeL]

so much as being like "what if we added guns and the Carribean into Forgotten Realms?" But since my impression is so superficial, I probably should stop grousing. I'm like an enthusiasm fampyr.

Caribbean already exists in Forgotten Realms, though of course without guns.

In fact, there are Viking Raiders expy and Caribbean Pirates expy and Arabic Corsairs expy in Forgotten Realms so that regardless of which flavour of salty adventures you're craving for, Faerun has what you need.

 

[oscar]

Forgotten Realms is dull and forgettable but at least you can happily ignore it and focus entirely on your individual adventure. PoE forces the player to come to terms with the setting (by using the very cheap tactic of re-naming and re-skinning fantasy races and tropes to try illicit a sense of novelty) what turns out to be.. just not that good or as intelligent as it thinks it is. I probably would have preferred a simple story like Knights of the Chalice what isn't afraid to call an orc an orc and instead focuses on the fundamentals of solid dungeons, itemisation and combat. Video game fantasy writers in general seem obsessed with creating these needlessly convoluted dour settings that actually end up the same thing you've seen a thousand times before but with one little twist or minor subversion that the narcissistic author feels he's flipped the genre on its head for coming up with (when all he's done is bore the audience to death and detract time and resources from making the game actually any fun to play).

 

[Bumvelcrow]

such that if you really, really work hard to parse the stupid Welsh and sift through the longwinded backstory

It's based on Cornish, MRY. Welsh is never stupid.

Admittedly, Cornish is similar enough to Welsh there is a certain amount of mutual intelligibility, but I think technical correctness is important.

Spoiler

 

[Heroic Liberator]

Welsh is never stupid.

I agree that it sounds nice, but the orthography is horrendous.

 

[Bumvelcrow]

I agree that it sounds nice, but the orthography is horrendous.

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