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Eternity Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire Pre-DLC Thread [GO TO NEW THREAD]

imweasel

Guest
Dave Williams was in charge of system design.
I don't think that's true. They announced him as the Lead System Designer early on but it was a puppet title and he moved to The Outer Worlds before the beta launched afaik.
Sensuki wants to pin game's sales failure solely on Sawyer. No one gets to share the blame.
Time will tell what truly went wrong, but it is really hard not to give Sawyer the bulk of the blame IMO.
 

Prime Junta

Guest
Time will tell what truly went wrong, but it is really hard not to give Sawyer the bulk of the blame IMO.

The Codex: huh, Deadfire is pretty good actually, imagine that

Also the Codex: but it's Sawyer's fault if it flops

Sorry my droogs but that doesn't fly. Apart from the usual Obsidian day-1 flakiness this is a solid product, better in most ways than P1 which was a resounding success despite being just this side of a clusterfuck at 1.0. It's also remarkable in that it's not dumbed down from P1* while at the same time having clearly more mainstream appeal.

If it flops it's not Josh's fault or indeed anyone's involved with making the actual product. Point the finger at marketing.

*On balance, there's a bit of dumbing down here and there but also a quite a bit of smartening up in other areas.
 

The Great ThunThun*

How DARE you!?
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Pathfinder: Wrath
It's not good.
It's not going to flop.

Also, there is much disconnect here between what the codex wants and what it thinks Sawyer/Obsidian wants. Sawyer is obviously making a game for casuals. And most pragmatically, he should. 90% people who played PoE did not finish it. The game was too farking boring. Since Obsidian cannot change the mechanics/setting to be more interesting without admitting that they made a poopoo, they were ought to make the game easier and fill it with romances so that the proletariat could enjoy the game too. And that gives us the polished turd that is PoE 2. Don't get me wrong. It is a fine game, right in the tradition of Fallout 3.
 
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Ruzen

Savant
Joined
May 24, 2015
Messages
238
Let's just agree that deadfire didn't live up to its hype.
First game, you can't wait to fights to end to continue the story. Now the fights are more interesting. The problems were patchable with the first game. how da hell they are going to patch the whole story?
 
Self-Ejected

Safav Hamon

Self-Ejected
Village Idiot The Real Fanboy
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2,141
Let's just agree that deadfire didn't live up to its hype.
First game, you can't wait to fights to end to continue the story. Now the fights are more interesting. The problems were patchable with the first game. how da hell they are going to patch the whole story?

What hype? This place was saying it would be total shit, and it turns out it's actually a good game with lots of potential.

If the game flops, and I don't think it will, then the blame should be on the marketing team. This is by far the superior to the first Pillars of Eternity.
 

imweasel

Guest
Time will tell what truly went wrong, but it is really hard not to give Sawyer the bulk of the blame IMO.

The Codex: huh, Deadfire is pretty good actually, imagine that

Also the Codex: but it's Sawyer's fault if it flops
It probably has a lot more to do with PoE 1 than with PoE 2. Initial sales of the sequel should pertain to the previous game, yet many who played PoE 1 are still refusing to buy the sequel. Does that means that the reception of PoE 1 is worse than initially thought? Maybe. At least I didn't miss any of the drama on the Codex... You wrote one of the 5+ PoE reviews, so I doubt you missed it either.

That all said, the blatant SJWism in PoE 2 certainly doesn't help sales either. Feargus (and the upper management) is certainly also to blame. He should have done his job and checked out what Sawyer was up to, but I guess he was just too busy trying to figure out how to get his entire family on payroll (thanks for the revelations, MCA).
 

Parabalus

Arcane
Joined
Mar 23, 2015
Messages
17,432
On another subject, I appreciate the few unmarked stuff in the game.
If someone could give me a hint about the sanguine harvest, I don't know where it takes place.

You can get a hint from
Arkemyr. But it's simple
read the book and go to the altar on
the 16th of every Month, it's on the island with the Fampyr cave in upper left quadrant
 

bminorkey

Guest
so i just finished this... the main quest was imo really weak, they gave your character basically no agency and it all felt super abstract.

side quests were pretty nice though (like the fampyr island), and the exploration.
 

imweasel

Guest
Feargus is going to improve the quality of Sawyer's work? I see you haven't read the MCA thread.
I admit, I didn't read all of it (yet). That Avellone "novel" is rather strong stuff.
rating_mca.gif
 

Trashos

Arcane
Joined
Dec 28, 2015
Messages
3,413
It probably has a lot more to do with PoE 1 than with PoE 2. Initial sales of the sequel should pertain to the previous game, yet many who played PoE 1 are still refusing to buy the sequel. Does that means that the reception of PoE 1 is worse than initially thought? Maybe. At least I didn't miss any of the drama on the Codex... You wrote one of the 5+ PoE reviews, so I doubt you missed it either.

That all said, the blatant SJWism in PoE 2 certainly doesn't help sales either. Feargus (and the upper management) is certainly also to blame. He should have done his job and checked out what Sawyer was up to, but I guess he was just too busy trying to figure out how to get his entire family on payroll (thanks for the revelations, MCA).

You are assuming that the controversial decisions are Sawyer's. I can see how the game's (lack of) difficulty may be his decision, but it's not out of the question that letting the writers go full retard, the announcement of the console release (obviously), the full voice acting (with all its consequences), and the mixing of several narrative themes (Gods, Factions, Pirates) were someone else's decision.

No matter. Even if those weren't Josh's choices, he should take the blame because he went along with them in a project he was leading. I just wouldn't automatically assume that all the above were his decisions.
 

Prime Junta

Guest
I can see how the game's (lack of) difficulty may be his decision

It's currently easier than he wanted it. He explicitly apologised for it on Twitter and said a rebalance patch is in the works.
 

FreeKaner

Prophet of the Dumpsterfire
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Devlet-i ʿAlīye-i ʿErdogānīye
Josh is responsible because we are essentially playing a game designed by handful of SA posters. He says he doesn't like class-based RTwP systems, cleans his hands off of it then just draws feedback to design towards a goal set by SA posters. Meanwhile the same SA posters he listens to don't know what the fuck they want and are bad at the game to begin with.
 

Trashos

Arcane
Joined
Dec 28, 2015
Messages
3,413
It's currently easier than he wanted it. He explicitly apologised for it on Twitter and said a rebalance patch is in the works.

I don't have to accept the official narrative. He did a similar thing with New Vegas. I consider it much more likely that he did it on purpose so that the casuals don't fall into despair. But I am only guessing, of course.
 

Prime Junta

Guest
I don't have to accept the official narrative. He did a similar thing with New Vegas. I consider it much more likely that he did it on purpose so that the casuals don't fall into despair. But I am only guessing, of course.

Nah, that's not how he rolls. He does his doubling-halving thing with balancing, and the last beta build was a bit... uh, over-tuned. This is just the next iteration.
 

Lahey

Laheyist
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Grab the Codex by the pussy
If it flops it's not Josh's fault or indeed anyone's involved with making the actual product. Point the finger at marketing.
If? It already has flopped commercially, or "drastically underperformed" if you prefer. Dissection of the corpse to find out why has taken place for days already, and will likely continue for many months. Reducing it to marketing alone is rash when that's just one factor.

As for its quality, while you and many others have expressed overall satisfaction with the game in this thread, there've been plenty unhappy with it too. I don't refer to shitposts like mine, but the micro-reviews indicating genuine disappointment. Ignore these if you wish, but from what I've seen Deadfire is perhaps equally divisive as its predecessor thus far, though it'll take a few weeks for more opinions to be expressed too, as always.
 

J_C

One Bit Studio
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Project: Eternity Wasteland 2 Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag. Pathfinder: Wrath
You are assuming that the controversial decisions are Sawyer's. I can see how the game's (lack of) difficulty may be his decision, but it's not out of the question that letting the writers go full retard, the announcement of the console release (obviously), the full voice acting (with all its consequences), and the mixing of several narrative themes (Gods, Factions, Pirates) were someone else's decision.
Probably. For example, he said it on his tumblr that he didn't ask for every NPC to be bisexual, it was the writers who did this on their own. But that begs the question, what kind of writers do they have, where EVERYBODY thinks it is a great idea to make every character fuckable by he main character.

I assume in this day and age Josh didn't dare to say no to these writers. If he asks the writers to roll back on this bisexual shit, he might have been outed as a cis scum. And Josh wouldn't want that.
 

Prime Junta

Guest
Nah, that's not how he rolls. He does his doubling-halving thing with balancing, and the last beta build was a bit... uh, over-tuned. This is just the next iteration.

Well, let me know when he releases a game that is accidentally too hard.

True, it is likely he would err on the side of caution for 1.0. But either way it's not how he'd like it.

Ignore these if you wish, but from what I've seen Deadfire is perhaps equally divisive as its predecessor thus far, though it'll take a few weeks for more opinions to be expressed too, as always.

Joned: Jun 9, 2017
 

Riddler

Arcane
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2,353
Bubbles In Memoria
Time will tell what truly went wrong, but it is really hard not to give Sawyer the bulk of the blame IMO.

The Codex: huh, Deadfire is pretty good actually, imagine that

Also the Codex: but it's Sawyer's fault if it flops

Sorry my droogs but that doesn't fly. Apart from the usual Obsidian day-1 flakiness this is a solid product, better in most ways than P1 which was a resounding success despite being just this side of a clusterfuck at 1.0. It's also remarkable in that it's not dumbed down from P1* while at the same time having clearly more mainstream appeal.

If it flops it's not Josh's fault or indeed anyone's involved with making the actual product. Point the finger at marketing.

*On balance, there's a bit of dumbing down here and there but also a quite a bit of smartening up in other areas.

While I agree that Sawyer overall has done an excellent job as a project manager in delivering a vastly superior product to PoE1 I'm not sure you can completly exonerate him of any blame.

I agree that marketing might be the primary issue here but choices in game design inform marketing. The biggest of these choices was to make Deadfire a direct sequel to PoE1. Barely anyone finished PoE and practically noone thought the watcher was a compelling character or that the story was particularly interesting.

Why put a stranglehold on marketing with the direct sequel crap? Why not create a new fresh and exciting character for your new game with its new exciting setting?

When has a direct sequel ever worked? BG2? The difference here is that people actually liked the story of BG..

Making a non-direct sequel doesn't seem to hinder other game franchises such as Fallout, Elder scrolls, Dues Ex, AssCreed, Call of Duty, Final fantasy, Dark souls, DoS.

Even Super Mario or Zelda games which share their extremely iconic characters across different games do not have the games be direct sequels to each other.

Direct sequels are a retarded idea unless people are extremely attached to the main character and the continuation of the story and even then it's debatable.

I'd chalk up much of the issues with the game's lack of success and it's lackluster marketing to this choice and whoever made it should feel bad and seriously reevaluate the reasons for it.

Edit: This could of course have been a choice on the owner level and considering the revelations in the MCA thread it seems increasingly likely that Feargus was behind shoehorning this in while Sawyer et al. wanted a New Vegas faction based game.
 
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Darth Roxor

Royal Dongsmith
Staff Member
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Djibouti
from what I've seen Deadfire is perhaps equally divisive as its predecessor thus far

lol dis nigga

it's true this game's reception is divisive, but poe1 impressions were downright polarizing
 

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