Eternity Pillars of Eternity II: Deadfire Pre-Release Thread [BETA RELEASED, GO TO NEW THREAD]

[Excidium II]

Is sherry randall?

 

[Fry]

 

[santino27]

Wait if Randal was calling their boat Sherry but now Randal is Sherry, does that mean your boat will be called Randal?

 

[Kem0sabe]

Randal: "My life's been a circle of violence and degradation long as I can remember. I'm ready to cut it off."

Infinitron: "ok i guess"

Sherry: "Thanks, Sherry"

 

[LESS T_T]

Gamebanshee's interview with Feargus: http://www.gamebanshee.com/intervie...eternity-ii-deadfire-interview/all-pages.html

Covers some bit about Fig investment, sales and reception of PoE 1, features of PoE 2, roadmap to PoE 3, thought behind the relationship system, PoE PnP RPG, Cain/Boyarsky's Project Indiana (likely no announcement this year), production of PoE2, possibility of PoE complete edition (they're working on it), and others.

Buck: Sure. I find the business side of this fascinating, and while I don't want to focus too much on that, I’m curious what your post-funding sales have been for Pillars of Eternity? That initial funding amount would have included a lot of people like me who absolutely wanted a copy on day one and to be part of the pledging process, but how have your sales been since that point?

Feargus: So the latest information we have is from our last royalty report that we got from Paradox. And the last number was like – I think we're under just 900,000 units. So about 900,000 units was what we sold of the core product after the game came out.


Buck: So with the Kickstarter pledges, does that put you well over a million units sold?

Feargus: Yes, yes. If you include all the Kickstarter pledges, we would be at about a million.


Buck: Out of curiosity, how do those numbers compare to some of your previous titles, such as Neverwinter Nights 2 or The Stick of Truth?

Feargus: So Neverwinter Nights 2, I don't actually have good numbers on that. I think we're in this sort of, maybe, $1.5 million to $2 million range for Neverwinter 2, that's not counting the expansions. The South Park numbers – it sounds so silly, but we can't share because they're a part of the reports we get from Ubisoft and so those are confidential. And I'd forgotten what kind of unit counts Ubisoft has said. So in essence, about a million units on Eternity is probably lower than most of our other games. But it's a game that didn't cost $10 million or $15 million to make. And on top of it, because it's ours, we get most of the revenue. Paradox has their publishing portion that they take which is much smaller than what a publisher would normally take if they also funded the game.

Buck: And with those goals, I have to assume that the development costs for the sequel will be higher than the original Pillars to have that additional reactivity and choice & consequence?

Feargus: Probably the game is going to cost 40% to 50% more than the first Eternity did. And a lot of that is going into spending more time on the areas. You know, there were lot of areas that looked really good in Pillars 1 but there were some that were not maybe where they needed to be. But with Deadfire I think that you'll see that it may be that the worst-looking area in Pillars 2 is going to be similar to one of your better-looking areas in Pillars 1. That was a big focus again to show people that we're not resting on our laurels. We're going to make a real sequel, we're not going to just swap the story out. A lot of people actually would have been fine with using a lot of the content from the original game and then just kind of refining. We really wanted to move forward. We were already moving the engine going from Unity 4 to Unity 5, changing some things. And we hired a couple of really great graphics programmers and they had a lot of cool ideas on how we could push, sort of the 3D/2D aspect of the world even more.

And we decided to invest in that particularly because - I think we've now invested a lot into the engine such that that making a Pillars of Eternity 3 will be easier, where if we had not invested much in the engine then we would have had to make a lot of changes between Pillars 2 and Pillars 3.


Buck: Wait, did you just announce Pillars of Eternity III right here, right now?

Feargus: [LAUGHTER] Well, obviously, yes. If Eternity II is a sales success, we will be selling that and doing an Eternity 3.

Buck: Your pledge rewards have been pretty ambitious. Multiclassing is a big one. I know a lot of Pillars fans that are happy to hear that's coming to the sequel.

On the $3 million pledge reward, you mentioned that you're going to have inter-party relationships. Would you describe those as being similar to what we saw in the Infinity Engine game in terms of depth or are you taking it beyond that?

Feargus: When we did our update for that, Josh put a whole video together. And the goal with it is – there's been these arguments going on our forums and also on the big page about romances. And so we're trying to be very clear that these are companion relationships and not companion romances. Maybe there could be a situation where there could be a romance but it's not just this generic system where you do enough things and you get a romance scene as a reward. But it's not meant to be romancing characters and turn into a sexual relationship with them. It's about these relationships that you have with them and the relationships that they have with each other that develops them as characters.

This is the first time we've done it. Like, we've sort of shied away from having this is our previous games. I can understand the interest in those, but I have to admit in a lot of other RPGs, they felt very much like a Japanese dating sim. Like, if I give you the flowers and I press the button and then I do the quest and now I win. And I think we've always wanted to have it be more subtle than that. Sort of have more about what you're generally doing in the world and you're treating other people in the world. And so that's probably why we've never tackled it before and I think we have just been comfortable with the, again, the Japanese dating [sim].


Buck: I think there's a balance to it. I think back to Baldur's Gate II and you had potential romances but they were something of a puzzle that needed to be figured out. You practically needed a spoiler site like GameBanshee to figure out how to kick off a romance with one of the companions properly and foster it. Because you could literally have one set of dialog with a companion and choose the wrong option and it was over.

Feargus: That was it. Yes.


Buck: I like that aspect of being able to get into the point of no return with some of those characters, even though some people might see that as being too harsh and it might require the loading of a saved game from 10 hours ago. Do you think it's important to have it layered like that, where if you do say the wrong things or do certain things, your relationships will be affected for the rest of the game?

Feargus: That shows that your choices matter. If it’s allowed to always be recoverable, then your choices don’t matter.


Buck: Exactly.

Feargus: I think what's important about it in particular is that how the relationships works with each of your companions is different. It doesn't just follow a ROCE formula because some games have done that before where this is the companion template and this is how you're successful at it. And it feels good with the first one but then as you start doing more with other companions, you start seeing the structure, you start seeing that's it's just, "I do A and I do B and I do C and then I win.” And so I think the way we're doing it depends upon the personality of the companion themselves, it doesn't have a set number of steps, there's a system behind it so it's tracking a lot of different things. It feels natural, it flows naturally. But again, it's sort of our first fall into it, so we'll see how it ends up.


Buck: You had relationships in Alpha Protocol, too. Obviously, they weren’t inter-party relationships and had a different scope than what we're talking about here maybe, but they were there.

Feargus: Yeah, yeah. You're actually right. It's funny we think of that differently. We think of that as a part very specifically of his personal story in Alpha Protocol versus these longer term party-based romances that go on for however long.


Buck: Yeah, a hundred hours or even longer.

Feargus: Yeah. A hundred hours, exactly.

Buck: In one of the updates, you mentioned that you're going to release a Pillars of Eternity tabletop RPG. What can you tell us about that and will you be collaborating with any tabletop publishers on that?

Feargus: The thing that were doing right now is – it's going to be about a 30 page sort of rulebook. Not high level, but very, “Here's the rules.” I don't want to say it in a dense fashion but like, "Here are rules that we feel will let you play a Pillars of Eternity tabletop RPG but you will need to go create your own setting material and all that kind of stuff.” Look at that as a start.

I feel bummed out because a couple of years ago we were starting to talk a lot about getting to release a full book and things like that. We talked to Josh a lot and Josh was thinking, well, we could release it with multiple rulesets so people could use the rulesets that they want to use. So it'd be like the 5th edition ruleset but also 3.5 edition ruleset so people can play how they wanted to play. And we just didn't get it off the ground. Part of it was it looked like it was going to be a $200,000 or $300,000 investment. And it's not our industry but we started to talk about it more, as to who could we partner with? Could we do a crowd-funding campaign for it? Things like that.

So this is us dipping our toe in and putting it out there and seeing what people think. If we like it and if people are positive to it, then maybe leapfrog that into doing a full 400-page book with all the art and all that kind of stuff.


Buck: Sure, and then you have apps to consider – you have Fantasy Grounds and Roll20, for example. You have digital and other avenues where perhaps even if you did have a small handbook for it, anybody who picks that up can evolve that into a larger campaign or use supplemental accessories from other tabletop RPGs.

Feargus: Yeah. We did our guide book volume 1 for the first one. And so we're doing another guide book. So hopefully that's going to amount to – I can't think of the page count, but that could amount to 300-400 pages of material about the world that people could use to create their own adventures.

 

[Sherry]

Wait if Randal was calling their boat Sherry but now Randal is Sherry, does that mean your boat will be called Randal?

Hi.

You folks crack me up. The ship will still be named Sherry!

Spoiler

sorry I should edit this and give proper credit to existential_vacuum for the original image found here https://s28.postimg.org/692x98fr1/ship.png

Thanks,
Sherry

 

[oldmanpaco]

Hi.

What an evening. No what a day spending it with Obsidian during the live Twitch stream and I recognized a few names in the chat too so we were all hanging out together. :D I was drinking. Dini was drinking and then suddenly everyone was drinking so a really big congratulations to the team for allowing us into your lives for the duration of the countdown and hitting a whooping $4,407,598! When I first joined the site I wasn't sure what to expect despite reading a number of threads and watching other rude comments but the Pillars and Deadfire thread has been more than any other forum experience for me. Since my first post here there is always countless new Deadfire information posted that all I had to do was press F5 whenever I got back to the computer and voila, a slew of knowledge.

Honestly I do not know if I would have found that information searching all the other sites out there or if I did it would be fake news. Last night was so much fun for me and hearing all about Deadfire and just seeing the faces of the people working on the game and just really being down to earth with their rum shots and drinking yucky beer was a wonderful way to connect a community with the developer of games. So thanks so much for this Codex for providing links and posts about when the videos went live.

And to Obsidian I cannot say enough about Pillars and how much hours of enjoyment it brought me but I am upset about Sagani but hoping to get attached to a new party in my cabin. I started screaming at hearing the shout-out to Codex and the pirate ship and TheSentinel and then Randal omg . It truly felt like my first concert to see Paula Abdul with all the growing excitement right to the end of the Twitch stream. When a developer gives a community an open shout-out you know the community is doing something right for the industry!

okay. I do not want to gush too much but a final thank-you also to the admin who keep the place up and running and read my request about a name change which was in the works for awhile. When I logged in this morning the request had come through so you all may remember me as my childhood pet's name Randal but from now on I am Sherry which goes with my mini portrait from Ultima 6 the series I grew up playing when I was little.

My transformation is now complete. I am a true Codexer!

Thanks,
Sherry

Best. Troll. Ever.

 

[Lady_Error]

I have to say, though, playing a Paladin felt exactly as stated; rather static and boring. I cannot, however, substantiate this beyond "It felt that way", today, because it's simply so long ago that I played PoE and I literally cannot remember why it felt so meh. Just that it did.

Awesome button classes:

1. Ranger, since it's actually two chars in one: the best ranged combat class AND and a pet tank who cannot be killed or lose health.
2. Chanter, due to the Level 4 Drake summoning that you never run out of, unlike spells. Also doubles as locksmith.
3. Priest, for obvious reasons and they've got nice attack spells as well.

 

[HoboForEternity]

sherry pls

 

[Seaking4]

At this point I really hope the Codex fundraiser reaches the 5k goal so that we can put in the Sherry ship.

 

[Alienman]

Randal/Sherry is an Obsidian psyop.

 

[AwesomeButton]

I've also always watched Paula Abdul with a growing excitement.

 

[Prime Junta]

Randal/Sherry is an Obsidian psyop.

I don't care.

 

[cannondwarf]

Randal is love, Sherry is life.

 

[Mazisky]

Ehy, anybody knows if they reach 4.5\5.0 goals with after campaign stuff?

 

[Sentinel]

Ehy, anybody knows if they reach 4.5\5.0 goals with after campaign stuff?

It will count towards stretch goals. They're working on a way to allow us to track how close they are to stretch goals, I think.
If you're asking for predictions, I don't think they'll reach any stretch goal post-campaign.

 

[fobia]

Ehy, anybody knows if they reach 4.5\5.0 goals with after campaign stuff?

It will count towards stretch goals. They're working on a way to allow us to track how close they are to stretch goals, I think.
If you're asking for predictions, I don't think they'll reach any stretch goal post-campaign.

What? They're 100k short of the next stretchgoal.
How would they not reach that? I doubt they'll stop the slacker backer stuff very soon.

 

[Abu Antar]

Ehy, anybody knows if they reach 4.5\5.0 goals with after campaign stuff?

It will count towards stretch goals. They're working on a way to allow us to track how close they are to stretch goals, I think.
If you're asking for predictions, I don't think they'll reach any stretch goal post-campaign.

What? $4.5 mil. is basically guaranteed.

 

[Sentinel]

Ehy, anybody knows if they reach 4.5\5.0 goals with after campaign stuff?

It will count towards stretch goals. They're working on a way to allow us to track how close they are to stretch goals, I think.
If you're asking for predictions, I don't think they'll reach any stretch goal post-campaign.

What? $4.5 mil. is basically guaranteed.

Oh, I thought they had already hit the 4,5M for whatever reason. Well then yeah, they'll probably get the 4,5M one but won't go any further than that.

 

[Maculo]

Ehy, anybody knows if they reach 4.5\5.0 goals with after campaign stuff?

It will count towards stretch goals. They're working on a way to allow us to track how close they are to stretch goals, I think.
If you're asking for predictions, I don't think they'll reach any stretch goal post-campaign.

I hope you are wrong, if only because I want that seamonster encounter stretch goal.

 

[Lacrymas]

Tbh, I'd be more excited about fighting the gigantic sea creatures and hags than Ydwin being a companion. Good thing they are counting after-fig pledges, so that stretch goal is hopefully guaranteed.

 

[Sizzle]

They can always pull an inXile (like they did with the Bloom), and ask further help to reach that 4.75mil goal.

Though I'm hoping they'll stay away from inXile's business practices.

 

[Prime Junta]

Pillars 1 pulled about 200k in PayPal backing. The 4.75M stretch goal is a bit of a stretch but not totally out of reach. Would be surprised if it reaches 5M without further shenanigans.

 

[IHaveHugeNick]

They can pull an InXile and ask for further backing, or they can pull a Double Fine and open the game for further Fig investments.

I kind of hope they won't though, that 4.5 goal should wrap up the game nicely and should be reachable through PayPayl and slacker backers.

 

[Quillon]

I feel like they'll do 4.75 SG whether they get the money or not. The game would suffer if there won't be sea monsters, the first artwork they released has the ship surrounded by a sea monster(s) but they seemed really reluctant to do additional "full" companion which is why they put her at the end, she'll prolly stay as a sidekick.