Eternity Josh Sawyer reflects on his failures with Pillars of Eternity

[felipepepe]

in part thanks to the turn-based mode.

...which was added A YEAR AFTER RELEASE when everybody interested have already finished the game and decided to never return.

I was listing why I liked it, not why it sold poorly. First game only had RTwP, so the sequel being equal shouldn't be a problem.

In fact, the turn-based mode got a lot of press and should've helped it sell even more. Apparently, it didn't make much of a difference. We'll see if Pathfinder has better results.

 

[Lilliput McHammersmith]

RE: Ship combat, I don’t think people heard about it and decided not to buy it because of that.

The ship combat is indicative of the rest of the game. Cool idea, bad execution. When I saw that it was a pirate game, I thought that there would be fun ship combat, ala Sid Meier’s Pirates! and it just blew. And then I realized that the same principle was true of the whole game. Companions were terrible, story was terrible, the interactions with the gods was terrible.

Overall, the ship combat made me realize how little I enjoyed the game, and thus I would not recommend it to anyone. So yeah I am not saying somebody saw the ship combat and said “dang idk man, I’m out”, it’s more that people who did buy it and played it did not recommend it, for more reasons than just ship combat.

 

[Horvatii]

And another thing that's pretty bad about it is that the stuff done during the minigame has no influence on boarding - you can't first murder half the crew to have an easier time in melee, because even if you reduce the crew to 1 the fight will be exactly the same.

ronk! there is a minimal crew but cannoning the top crew drops enemycount

 

[Nano]

Pirates. The problem is fucking pirates. The whole aesthetics and setting is very niche. But it is a sequel to the generic fantasy gameworld which is by default attracts more broad audience. So audience drops. Not every fantasy fan love pirates. Some of them even hate pirates. I'm not big fantasy fan, but I fucking hate pirates. Especially that ridiculuous Jack-Sparrow-homo-Cipher realisation of the pirates in this fucking abomination of a game.

Pretty sure some of the folks at Obsidian are furries. That's the only explanation I can think of for this character's existence.

 

[Delterius]

Pretty sure some of the folks at Obsidian are furries.

they are everywhere

we lost the war

the game was rigged from the start

 

[NJClaw]

Pretty sure some of the folks at Obsidian are furries.

they are everywhere

we lost the war

the game was rigged from the start

We were born from a woman that was seduced by a snake, we had no chance.

 

[Delterius]

Pretty sure some of the folks at Obsidian are furries.

they are everywhere

we lost the war

the game was rigged from the start

We were born from a woman that was seduced by a snake, we had no chance.

the human condition: a miserable pile of dicks, the lot of us

 

[Heroic Liberator]

Pretty sure some of the folks at Obsidian are furries.

they are everywhere

we lost the war

the game was rigged from the start

We were born from a woman that was seduced by a snake, we had no chance.

fucking dicks that's what we are

If Darth Roxor is to be trusted, then the authoritative word would be 'dongs'.

 

[Delterius]

tbh i think these threads about why poe sales suck ass are hopeless and naive

lmao people don't play games

they just buy stuff they 'have' to own

because MAYBE they'll get around to playing the other 2010934179048731094 sale whore games on their backlog

ie: sales is a matter of marketing

rpgs don't have inherent mass market appeal

if the game happens to be good and it sells, its a happy coincidence

sven's retarded 'generic item lootdrops galore' ideology didn't impede his sales

pathfinder's brokenass dumbshit didn't impede theirs

and poe1 still sold despite being boring as fuck

sure maybe poe1 not being d20 kept people who give a shit - ie crazy forum people - from spreading word of mouth

but tbh the public is retarded and probably didn't buy the game not because its shit, but because pirates instead of generic ass castles and shit

the world sucks

also direct sequel lololol what a fucking stupid idea

 

[Lilliput McHammersmith]

tbh i think these threads about why poe sales suck ass are hopeless and naive

lmao people don't play games

they just buy stuff they have to own

ie: sales is a matter of marketing

sure maybe poe1 not being d20 kept some people from spreading word of mouth

but tbh the public is retarded and probably didn't buy the game not because its shit, but because pirates

also direct sequel lololol what a fucking stupid idea

I agree. Direct sequels are hard to pull off for established studios. I don't know why anyone at Obsidian thought it was a good idea. Imagine how much better Deadfire would be if it wasn't tied down to continuing the Watcher's story.

 

[Riddler]

Pretty sure some of the folks at Obsidian are furries.

they are everywhere

we lost the war

the game was rigged from the start

We were born from a woman that was seduced by a snake, we had no chance.

Nah, my bloodline is pure.

 

[Readher]

and poe1 still sold despite being boring as fuck

An RPG game from a studio known for making RPGs that are usually technically flawed, but have great story and characters that keep people invested and make them bring up those games in positive light even many years after release, a studio that has never disappointed on that front so far, sold well. When it turned out the game didn't have that, a direct sequel to it did not sell. I'm not sure what's so hard to understand here. People had no way of knowing that PoE will be boring as fuck before it came out, but once they played it, they had reasonable grounds to assume that its direct sequel will be.

 

[Silly Germans]

Pretty sure some of the folks at Obsidian are furries.

they are everywhere

we lost the war

the game was rigged from the start

We were born from a woman that was seduced by a snake, we had no chance.

Nah, my bloodline is pure.

Hm being a barbarian suddenly lost a lot of its appeal ...

 

[Erebus]

Pirates. The problem is fucking pirates. The whole aesthetics and setting is very niche. But it is a sequel to the generic fantasy gameworld which is by default attracts more broad audience.

Deadfire's setting is considerably better than the BSB shit they used in Pillars 1. And it's quite a stretch to claim that it's all about pirates. The main inspiration for the three of the four factions is the era of colonization.

 

[Verylittlefishes]

Pirates. The problem is fucking pirates. The whole aesthetics and setting is very niche. But it is a sequel to the generic fantasy gameworld which is by default attracts more broad audience.

Deadfire's setting is considerably better than the BSB shit they used in Pillars 1. And it's quite a stretch to claim that it's all about pirates. The main inspiration for the three of the four factions is the era of colonization.

The main inspiration for Deadfire was not here at all.

 

[NJClaw]

Pirates. The problem is fucking pirates. The whole aesthetics and setting is very niche. But it is a sequel to the generic fantasy gameworld which is by default attracts more broad audience.

Deadfire's setting is considerably better than the BSB shit they used in Pillars 1. And it's quite a stretch to claim that it's all about pirates. The main inspiration for the three of the four factions is the era of colonization.

Everyone is rating you "no", "not sure if serious" and "fake news", but Josh himself said that what they had in mind for Deadfire was to make a game inspired to the Age of Sail.

 

[rusty_shackleford]

Pirates. The problem is fucking pirates. The whole aesthetics and setting is very niche. But it is a sequel to the generic fantasy gameworld which is by default attracts more broad audience.

Deadfire's setting is considerably better than the BSB shit they used in Pillars 1. And it's quite a stretch to claim that it's all about pirates. The main inspiration for the three of the four factions is the era of colonization.

Everyone is rating you "no", "not sure if serious" and "fake news", but Josh himself said that what they had in mind for Deadfire was to make a game inspired to the Age of Sail.

we're rating him no because it's a shit setting

 

[Sweeper]

Deadfire's setting is considerably better than the BSB shit they used in Pillars 1.

The PoE setting was probably the blandest fantasy setting I've seen, but at least it was coherent and made sense.
Throwing in Venetians, Polynesians and pirates in Deadfire did make the setting more distinct, and at the same time worse, and yeah I know the Venitians and Polynesians existed in PoE's world as well.

For a fantasy setting to be good, you need good, proper world building, and not exotic, rarely used cultures and shit.
It's like one of those retards that tattoo their entire bodies thinking they're unique and special having done so.

Arcanum on the other hand had an excellent setting, not only was it pretty unique in the mixing of the industrial revolution with traditional fantasy and the Victorian era, but the world was actually built around it, instead of just serving as a mark of uniqueness.

There was little to no world building in Deadfire, it basically amounted to "Look, we've got fantasy Italians, Polynesians and pirates, isn't the setting cool?"

 

[Delterius]

For a fantasy setting to be good, you need good, proper world building

Like in forgotten realms, golarion and thedas. All champions of sales. Lmao.

 

[Tigranes]

For a fantasy setting to be good, you need good, proper world building

OK but obviously you don't need any of that to get sales and critical success

 

[Sweeper]

Like in forgotten realms, golarion and thedas. All champions of sales. Lmao.

OK but obviously you don't need any of that to get sales and critical success

Spoiler

Oh I wasn't arguing about sales, only autists care about setting. I was just saying Deadfire actually had a worse one than PoE.

 

[BING XI LAO]

It's good to use unusual historical sources as inspiration, but they were a bit on-the-nose. Jeff Vogel used the japanese, nordic pagans, native americans, and egyptians in the Avadon series, but it was subtler.
Maybe PoE2's writing suffered from writing-by-committee. There was insecurity on the writers part, as with the hamfisted statue plot hook, and maybe it explains why writers felt bound to stick to a pre-agreed real-world identity for each faction.

 

[Tigranes]

Personally, I didn't feel that stuff like Vailians being too 'Italian' was the fundamental issue with POE/Deadfire setting. It may not be the best fantasy setting or culture ever made, far from it, but there was plenty of interesting stuff in there to work with. The far more fundamental, recurring problem in both games was that they couldn't work out how to leverage what they had for interesting dilemmas and situations that actually occur in the game itself.

I've thumped on about this multiple times in the past, but basically, you hear about Waidwen, you don't get to ever do jack shit around it. Same goes for the POE1 Deionarra. Same goes for colonial tensions in the Deadfire. Why isn't there a massive native riot in Neketaka while you are there, a riot which quickly devolves into finger-pointing and deception? Why do you do all these quests for the different factions, but you never get to actually screw over one faction in a truly decisive way and see how that changes the fate of the islands? Why isn't there some kind of Neketaka council election where you can see the results of your influence, or an instance where the Rauatai actually take over a Vailian island and impose different rules and hang some people on a stake? You spent all this time on a world map and a ship and stuff but like you don't even get to see cosmetically a faction expand and get more ships or plant their flags anywhere.

Deadfire doesn't necessarily need a more creative/imaginative/awesomely designed Huana/Vailians/etc. This isn't grand literature, there's plenty of sufficiently interesting shit in that lore to pull out for a fun game. The history nerdisms in POE aren't the culprit, it's a design failure to generate interesting situations on-stage.

 

[Jezal_k23]

You are right. It was weird going from New Vegas to a game where faction conflict is so central to the plot and yet feels so meaningless as well, and ultimately that really was a failure of crafting interesting situations for the player to engage with.

 

[Sweeper]

it's a design failure to generate interesting situations on-stage.

Nail on the head right there.
I'll always remember Donn Throgg staging a riot with orc factory works in Tarantum, the general position of orcs in the city, the conversation with Bill Gates Gilbert Bates about orcs.
And that's just Tarant. Without getting into the tech vs magic stuff between Dernholm and Tarant, the politicking in Caladon, or the fact that gnomes are Jews.
I remember very little of Deadfire.

And the socio economic difficulties of lower races is nothing new, irl or in fiction. It's been done to death. But it was done well in Arcanum, with real examples in its world.
Fucking show, don't tell.