but to the orthographical rendition of different phonemes in Welsh
Was? MMOesque system cannot be fixed no matter what you do. POE2 is more of the same, but instead of making setting interesting they were busy with really important stuff like kicking Avellone out through the door and adding hats to appease cross dressers. The only man who could do it on their roster.Yeah, PoE was really bad at launch. Still isn't amazing. People who were burned with PoE would not buy PoE2. Simple as that.
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.
In all honestly, I can see the seeds of many good stories in the Eora worldbuilding. Sadly these stories never came into existece.
But still, Mark, the bulk of the narrative in the first game spins around an Inquisitor who is trying to stop a scientific revolution
and in the second game around a struggle between colonial powers (this isn't literally the main plot in Deadfire but is where most of the narrative lies).
Don't forget the late Meiji era Japan ripoff of Rauatai.16th century Venice vs 18th century Great Britain.
In all honestly, I can see the seeds of many good stories in the Eora worldbuilding. Sadly these stories never came into existece.
You can tell a good story in any setting, so this strikes me as a pretty low bar.
But still, Mark, the bulk of the narrative in the first game spins around an Inquisitor who is trying to stop a scientific revolution
Bulk? You don’t find any of this out until roughly halfway through the goddamned game. Also, there’s nothing early modern about this narrative. You could just as easily set a religion vs science story in 12th century Cordoba. The setting in POE is thoroughly medieval aside from the presence of firearms..
and in the second game around a struggle between colonial powers (this isn't literally the main plot in Deadfire but is where most of the narrative lies).
Again, nothing distinctly early modern about Deadfire aside from the presence of tall ships and guns. They could tell the same story modeled on 13th century Venice vs Genoa (especially since Venice is already the model for Valia), rather than 16th century Venice vs 18th century Great Britain.
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.
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.
Is it correct to say that the goal of the "grandiose effort" was to "obscure", when Josh Sawyer himself will openly admit that Pillars of Eternity is an elves & dwarves game?
The dual nature of genre obscurantism - it can be aimed either at people who don't like a genre, or at people who really like it.
You can make a generic fantasy game with weird terms to disguise the fact that it's a generic fantasy game and sell it to people who don't like generic fantasy games.
Or you can do the same to sell the game to people who DO like generic fantasy games, have liked them for many years, and now on a meta level appreciate being able to go "Heh, I see what you're trying to do there, this is different but not really".
The second option is how Pillars of Eternity made me feel. Its obscurantism, far from being a disparagement of generic fantasy, is instead fan service for generic fantasy superfans. They figured that if you're the sort of person who thinks it's COOL to parse out the differences and similarities between fampyrs and vampires, then this is the game for you!
But again, I speculate that since Sawyer finds stock fantasy boring, he was trying to obscure the fact that he was actually making stock fantasy - maybe even from himself.