Eternity PoE II: Deadfire Sales Analysis Thread

[fantadomat]

Maybe I have been skipping all the right RPGs. But I haven't seen writing this terrible since I was being forced to read the blogs of my dates 15 years ago.

Nah,it is just that bad. I have played most rpgs past 15 years and haven't see writing that bad.

 

[Roguey]

This purple prose will have you begging for Roguey-like sparseness.

 

[Sentinel]

I don’t see how this is any worse stylistically than, say, the Baldur’s Gate dream sequences.

Baldur's Gate didn't have any prose

 

[Kyl Von Kull]

I don’t see how this is any worse stylistically than, say, the Baldur’s Gate dream sequences.

Baldur's Gate didn't have any prose

It had narrated prose between each chapter and practically every other time you slept.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=TcxF59NcQtI

Edit; and since all the prose in the Deadfire intro is also voiced, it strikes me as a pretty good point of comparison.

 

[2house2fly]

I don't really care about it being unskippable (it's not really longer than Doc Mitchell in New Vegas, say) it's just done in the most plain way possible. A Star Wars crawl with a brief summary of the first game? Then you walk through some lines from the first game, apparently at random and not even the original lines?! What the hell is this??!!

Like, even off the top of my head it's not hard to think of ways to massively improve it. Even keep the same format with text on a black background, but have it be Berath talking to you, trying to make you remember who you were to stop your soul from dissipating or whatever. You can get the same information across without having just a dry summary of previous game events which barely even matter to this one- who cares about Thaos or the Hollowborn now?

The pertinent facts for a new player:

• You are a "Watcher" which means you can communicate with ghosts. Your Watcher Magic allowed you to break the curse on an ancient keep and become a minor noble in a colonial backwater.
• The keep has a giant statue in the basement made of magical stone.
• The gods of the setting literally exist, but were created a few thousand years ago by Advanced Magical Science. You are one of only a few people on the planet who knows this.

Keep that, ditch the cruft, edit out verbal descriptions of people we can see, and you've got an intro I can at least sit through without rolling my eyes

 

[Sentinel]

I don’t see how this is any worse stylistically than, say, the Baldur’s Gate dream sequences.

Baldur's Gate didn't have any prose

It had narrated prose between each chapter and practically every other time you slept.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=TcxF59NcQtI

Edit; and since all the prose in the Deadfire intro is also voiced, it strikes me as a pretty good point of comparison.

I thought you were talking about the BG2 dream sequences with Irenicus, not BG1.

But notice how light on descriptive text that bit is. It's straight to the point. The only descriptive text about Gorion is "At your side is Gorion, gray-haired even all those years ago." In PoE2 you'd have "drops of what could only be sweat ran down Gorion's testicle-wrinkled crimson red face."

 

[Blakemoreland Hybrid Boss]

The pertinent facts for a new player:

• You are a "Watcher" which means you can communicate with ghosts. Your Watcher Magic allowed you to break the curse on an ancient keep and become a minor noble in a colonial backwater.
• The keep has a giant statue in the basement made of magical stone.
• The gods of the setting literally exist, but were created a few thousand years ago by Advanced Magical Science. You are one of only a few people on the planet who knows this.

Keep that, ditch the cruft, edit out verbal descriptions of people we can see, and you've got an intro I can at least sit through without rolling my eyes

That won't do. You see, I am her... a narrative designer at Obsidian and my job is like important. If the premise was so simple, anyone would be able do my job, even people without a diploma in English Literature. cRPGs are high art and demand talented write... I mean narrative designers.

 

[Sigourn]

Here's my take on the designers Roguey mentions as being "peak Obsidian", excluding Chris Avellone.

What they weren't: Nearly as good as Chris Avellone. There's this idea floating around that there was this golden age where Obsidian was brimming with Avellone-tier talents capable of pumping out MotB masterpiece after masterpiece. I think that's a myth.

What they were: Representatives of a generation that was closer to the RPG Codex's cultural and artistic sensibilities than Obsidian's current crop of writers.

As for Avellone himself, he's so suis generis that there's not a lot to meaningfully discuss.

All I know is that, if not for GameBryo, New Vegas would be heralded as one of the greatest cRPGs ever made, and Avellone had very little input on the base game, which is the major source of my enjoyment (even though Dead Money is fucking sweet).

 

[Trashos]

I don’t see how this is any worse stylistically than, say, the Baldur’s Gate dream sequences.

I don't remember BG1's writing, the vague memory I have is that it was simple and silly, but mostly serviceable for that type of game. I don't remember much of it, tbh.

This is highly pretentious shit void of any talent (in terms of content), that has also been written for the wrong audience (why is it trying to gently get my feelings and senses into play in the goddamn introduction of a combat game?), and put in the wrong place. Style is all wrong too because it destroys the pacing at that point in the game, but the content is definitely not helping it.

There is nothing more I can do.

 

[DeepOcean]

I don’t see how this is any worse stylistically than, say, the Baldur’s Gate dream sequences.

Baldur's Gate didn't have any prose

It had narrated prose between each chapter and practically every other time you slept.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=TcxF59NcQtI

Edit; and since all the prose in the Deadfire intro is also voiced, it strikes me as a pretty good point of comparison.

Really disagree here,
The dream sequence prose you used as example deliver the following info:
1 - Gorion was to meet a wise man and this meeting is about you.
2 - Gorion is on a hurry, probably worried.
3 - there is a discussion about a serious issue as the narrator makes it clear that Gorion isn't used to raise his voice like this.
4 - You see the weird bird watching you and there is something wrong with it, meaning that some strange force is watching you as this isn't an usual bird.
5 - The wise man storms out of the keep and says "this child will the doom of you", meaning you are dangerous somehow.
6 - There is the ilusion of you having the same black eyes as the bird watching you as if the weird bird was inside you.
7 - There is an ominous, "Like the father, like the child."

The objective of the text is to foreshadow, to hint events to come making the player curious and to develop a bit the background of YOUR character with Gorion. It becomes clear that Gorion decided to raise you despite the advise given to him by the wise man, this develops your character as having a dangerous heritage that made those grown men afraid of you, it develops Gorion a bit because he could get rid of you and he didn't AND foreshadow a possible future where you manifest this dangerous heritage on yourself.

The texts on those screens change based on your alignment through the game and each time they appear, you gain a new power, good powers if you are of good aligment or evil powers if you are evil, the texts describe you getting close and closer to your divine heritage, if you are good, this is depicted on a more positive light with you controlling it and if you are evil, you embrace your nature become more and more like Bhall.

The descriptive text on PoE 2 is mostly superfluous like saying how the old bald dude is... an old bald dude and how Berath is divine by explaining all the divine intricacies of her armor when a woman with fucking glowing eyes floating on the ether was more than enough to get the hint.

 

[TalesfromtheCrypt]

The writing isn't stellar but that's not the issue. You could have the most incredible writing in that slow walking segment but it would still get boring and irritating on repeat playthroughs.

There are two issues, I am not disagreeing with that. Maybe they thought that the introduction was so great that everyone should watch it repeatedly.

Screencaps of bad writing please.

If that's the case it's upsetting that Deadfire has such writing.

Here you go:

An aged dwarf shares this strange floating platform with you. His face is creased by so many wrinkles that his features lie buried amid shadowy pockets of skin. Still, the dwarf's well-practiced habits have left telltale tracks of a welcoming rictus across his visage. You can see his smile coming before it blooms, reshaping the dwarf's face from a hanging sack of flesh into something resembling an oddly-carved, merry gourd, replete with unhealthy bumps and discolored botches.

A pale, slender neck rises from the gorget, topped by a hollow face. The milky skin stretched across it is delicate and translucent, like parchment that has been scraped clean too many times.

With each movement, her armor squeaks and groans as though bearing an incredible weight.

She points a finger in the direction of the dwarf who led you there. Though the movement is slight, her gauntlet squeaks like a rusty hinge.

Reference (7th minute and on):

Spoiler

That‘s...horrible. These people should read the complete Conan novels to get an idea how fun short, to-the-point descriptions can be. Probably to “racist“ for them though...

 

[Riddler]

^
^^
^^^

That’s why they’re called narrative designers. Deadfire has generally pretty good quest design, a well put together setting aside from the metaphysical stuff, and even the people who really dislike it agree that the itemization is top-notch. It’s also pretty light on lore dumps and the actual walls of text are rare. The writers of Deadfire are doing most of what you point out here. It’s on the traditional writing end of things that they sometimes fall flat.

"Sometimes"

 

[Kyl Von Kull]

I really don’t think the problem with the descriptive writing in Deadfire is the style. It’s the content.

Having just reread a bunch of the narration in BG and the non-dialogue text in PS:T, the big difference is that they’re usually describing things that are happening to you/inside your head. When you get description, it’s describing how you feel something or remember something or realize something etc... It’s typically relevant to your character.

In POE and Deadfire the description is usually only relevant to the NPC being described, so who cares?. But that’s not style, which is standard fantasy schlock. For example, I think Deadfire’s prose works just fine when you’re using your watcher powers to read an NPCs memories in conversation. I agree that the “he makes a meaningless hand gesture and scratches his ass” stuff is pointless.

tl;dr I reject the idea that descriptive text is the problem. Where these writers often go wrong it’s in what they choose to describe. That said, this shit is easy enough to skip.

 

[aweigh]

A swarthy fellow with a wrinkled brow beckons you.
"Aye, I've me swarthy brow to thank for me wrinkles, and pastrami be upon yourself".

1. [Lie] Hello.
2. [Truth] Goodbye.
3. [Might] "Spread those buttocks e'clair old man!" [Penetrate]
4. Exit.

 

[Cross]

I really don’t think the problem with the descriptive writing in Deadfire is the style. It’s the content.

Having just reread a bunch of the narration in BG and the non-dialogue text in PS:T, the big difference is that they’re usually describing things that are happening to you/inside your head. When you get description, it’s describing how you feel something or remember something or realize something etc... It’s typically relevant to your character.

In POE and Deadfire the description is usually only relevant to the NPC being described, so who cares?. But that’s not style, which is standard fantasy schlock. For example, I think Deadfire’s prose works just fine when you’re using your watcher powers to read an NPCs memories in conversation. I agree that the “he makes a meaningless hand gesture and scratches his ass” stuff is pointless.

tl;dr I reject the idea that descriptive text is the problem. Where these writers often go wrong it’s in what they choose to describe. That said, this shit is easy enough to skip.

No, the problem is both the style and the content. Contrary to what the writers of both T:ToN and PoE seem to believe, PS:T does not have purple prose. Its descriptions are concise and to the point. BG's prose is more flowery, but it's limited to the chapter transitions, so it never becomes a chore to read.

Compare Deadfire's description of that dwarf:

to Planescape: Torment's description of Deionarra, a ghost and one of the most important characters of the game:

Unlike Deadfire, where you get two paragraphs describing a character's smile in autistic detail (even though the portrait already shows him smiling through wrinkled skin), the writing in PS:T is content to mention only the things that would be immediately apparent to someone seeing Deionarra for the first time: her beauty and her posture, with the more flowery language ('ethereal breeze') used sparingly and with the important purpose of conveying her ghostly nature.

 

[Xeon]

IIRC Wasteland 2 had a button for a description of a person, will be great to have that or an option to show or hide descriptive texts in games. Only thing is weird about it for me in PoE2 is descriptions are voiced when its related to the gods.

 

[Trashos]

Compare Deadfire's description of that dwarf:

to Planescape: Torment's description of Deionarra, a ghost and one of the most important characters of the game:

Unlike Deadfire, where you get two paragraphs describing a character's smile in autistic detail (even though the portrait already shows him smiling through wrinkled skin), the writing in PS:T is content to mention only the things that would be immediately apparent to someone seeing Deionarra for the first time: her beauty and her posture, with the more flowery language ('ethereal breeze') used sparingly and with the important purpose of conveying her ghostly nature.

I was trying to leave PST (which I love) out of this for several reasons, the most important of which is that we will need to mention several "details" that will give the illusion that there is a legitimate discussion and comparison to be had. And the second most important is that it's highly probable that whoever wrote Deadfire's introduction was hired while PST's lead writer was still at Obsidian. Which I find disappointing.

Anyway, since you brought it up, here is my take on the screenshot:

- Deionarra is one the most important characters in the game, as you mentioned.
- You have woken up in a fucking mortuary, you are being accompanied by a fucking floating skull, and you are trying to figure out what the fuck is going on. Everything has been set up masterfully to make you care about any additional little detail you may come across.
- And now you see a fucking ghost.
- An amazingly ethereal music starts playing in the background.
- Even with all this going for him, the writer sets out to describe details about a strikingly beautiful woman, not the ugly skin of a male dwarf.
- At that point, you are asked to absorb this information and make a choice. The gameplay has already started. This is important, because you are already in a periodic process of absorbing information and/or taking action. It is not an introduction like Deadfire's where you are much more passive.

Compare all this now with the disaster from Deadfire, where I have to care about the nut sacks on a random dwarf's face or something. Anyway, sometimes talk is cheap.

 

[Harold]

Sensibilities aside, Fenstermaker and Gonzalez may not have been Avellone-tier but they were definitely better than their replacements. The drop in quality between Pillars 1's Fenstermaker opening and Pillars 2's (Sawyer? Patel?) remains shocking to me

Josh has been the project director of games with good openings in the past, so this is Patel's Pratfall.

Dunno man, the opening of Deadfire effectively recapping the events of POE three times in a row, one after another ffs to me suggest more of a Sawyer 'no child left behind' autistic concern/directive for absolute, german clarity, even if he had some of the other writers write the actual text.

 

[Rev]

Yeah, the writing in PoE2's intro was too much filled with purple prose, and also the non-skippable part where you just click to walk around is boring. I agree with the one who was saying that the game could've started with the boat sequence without losing anything of worth.
Luckily, the game's writing gets better after that. Mind you, it's not great by any means, after all Avellone, Ziets, Fenstermaker, Gonzalez, etc. are not at Obsidian anymore, but it's decent and the amount of lore dumps and purple prose is quite low when compared to the intro and to PoE1.
It's not a game that will be remembered for its writing, anyway, but we all knew it from the start.

Considering how much better the game gets after it i just cant believe it isnt skippable.

I'm actually curious, since I remember you hated the guts out of PoE1. Did you like/are you liking PoE2 after the intro which you think is bad (rightly so)?

 

[TemplarGR]

Some people earlier in this thread blamed the fact that it is a sequel for poor sales, and listed some games that performed worse than their sequels. I lost track of those posts and i won't bother to search again in order to quote them, but i think they don't know what they are talking about.

They listed games like XCOM. Legend of Grimrock, Banner Saga, Shadowrun, that their sequels had lower sales than their first games, and blamed it on the fact that they were sequels, ignoring the elephant in the room: All these games were OVERRATED and sold far better than they deserved based on hype.

It is a common secret that the video game industry sells based on hype and manufacturing hype is often more important than actually developing a good game, which is why marketing and promotional budgets often overshadow development costs themselves...

Legend of Grimrock was a really poor game. The reason was it was real time party-based. That made controling your party a chore, especially magic users. It had poor content, pixel hunting, and you had to cheese enemies, for example backtracking while shooting. It had nothing on old first person RPGs like M&M, except the appearence, and sold based on hype and nostalgia. People got burned by the first game and didn't buy the second.

Shadowrun returns was an abomination. An RPG-lite that had barebones combat, barely any exploration or roleplaying, a trashy story, and a bland world. It was for all intends and purposes a glorified mobile phone game. Sequels barely improved upon its shortcomings, is it any wonder they didn't sell well?

Banner Saga was a Fire Emblem wanna-be with shallower combat and a cartoon aesthetic. The gameplay is pisspoor and the story barely worth caring about. Looked good on screenshots but it was forgettable. That is why only a tiny fraction of gamers bothered with the sequel.

XCOM was a very bad reboot for XCOM. Having been raised on the original and Apocalypse, my favourite, i eagerly waited for this reboot only to be utterly shocked at how trash it was. Especially at release with all the bugs. It had flash but no substance. Xenonauts was far better. At least Enemy Within added cool mechs, and since i love cool mechs, i bothered to finish a playthrough with Enemy Within. Then i uninstalled forever. Xcom 2 quality at release was pre-alpha at best, gameplay barely changed other than adding timers everywhere, and the graphics were barely improved while requiring a Top 500 mainframe to render at decent framerates. Is it any wonder it didn't sell?

Contrast these trashy games with Divinity Original Sin and how its sequel enjoyed better sales... Now your "sequel theory" doesn't apply, does it? DOS was a good game, so people bought the sequel. It is not rocket science people.

Blaming lower sequel sales on the fact that they were sequels is a cop-out. Saying that you should have named the games differently and pretend they were new games to get more sales is like saying "we fooled the suckers in buying our shit, and now we are going to name our next shit differently so we can fool them again". That is what i am getting from it.

As for Pillars of Eternity, i can't speak for the first one because i never finished it. I quit around 10-15 hours in. It was not bad, but it was BLAND. Boring. Too much text and a stupid combat system that to this day i never understood why they didn't just use DnD, in a setting i didn't care about, unlike for example stuff like Forgotten realms. Not to mention that PoE required 2 years and 2 expansions to become something playable. So is it any wonder people don't rush to buy the sequel? Asuming those sales numbers are accurate of course, steam settings change and all.

 

[Infinitron]

Some people earlier in this thread blamed the fact that it is a sequel for poor sales, and listed some games that performed worse than their sequels. I lost track of those posts and i won't bother to search again in order to quote them, but i think they don't know what they are talking about.

They listed games like XCOM. Legend of Grimrock, Banner Saga, Shadowrun, that their sequels had lower sales than their first games, and blamed it on the fact that they were sequels, ignoring the elephant in the room: All these games were OVERRATED and sold far better than they deserved based on hype.

As I said earlier, this theory will survive just as long as it takes for the "sequel fatigue" phenomenon to hit a game that you liked.

 

[Xeon]

I thought people said PoE2 being a direct sequel hurt it, like the Watcher being directly involved instead of another random dude. Not just it being a sequel, that is kinda dumb.

 

[Big Wrangle]

Saying "well bruh the games were just shit" isn't exactly a high IQ formula solver either. Not that I'm an expert in these things. One thing I noticed about the games presented is that quite some of them seem to take word of mouth for granted. There has been less noticeable marketing for Banner Saga 2 compared to the first, and the same applies to Grimrock.
You can make the top 1 sequel of all-time, but if you rely more on the first game reception more than letting people know the second game exists it will obviously sell less. The core audience is cool and all but it's nice to let others know the franchise exists, which Larian did well.

 

[TemplarGR]

I thought people said PoE2 being a direct sequel hurt it, like the Watcher being directly involved instead of another random dude. Not just it being a sequel, that is kinda dumb.

No, they didn't say that, because they listed sales numbers from games like Grimrock which were not direct sequels of anything.

And if sequels harmed sales, then how come Witcher 1-2-3 saw increased sales?

As I said earlier, this theory will survive just as long as it takes for the "sequel fatigue" phenomenon to hit a game that you liked.

Everyone of us is subjective, including me. But at 35 years of age and having played RPGs hardcore for more than 2 decades, i think i have the experience to understand what makes a game good or bad despite my personal feelings on the matter.

I rarely see good games not sell. It does happen, but not often. And when a sequel fails is more often than not an indication that the first game was overrated, unless the sequel was an abomination. For example Empire Earth 3 failed but it was trash by any standard.

The opposite also applies, a good first game can lead a bad sequel to good sales it does not deserve. For example Diablo III was an abomination but sold like hotcakes because people expected Diablo II.

People are not dumb. They don't spend money on things they don't enjoy, unless they are tricked into it. But you can only trick them so many times. So sales, in addition to some logical analysis, are a decent metric for the quality of most games.

TL:DR the sequel theory is trash.

 

[Nano]

No, the problem is both the style and the content. Contrary to what the writers of both T:ToN and PoE seem to believe, PS:T does not have purple prose. Its descriptions are concise and to the point.

You're forgetting about McComb's parts of PS:T. The Smoldering Corpse Bar was a bit of a chore to get through.