Pentiment - Josh Sawyer's historical mystery narrative-driven game set in 16th century Bavaria

[Sunsetspawn]

Stack that shit with mentats and alcohol.

 

[Junmarko]

Doubt you actually want historical accuracy mate lol...

 

[Zed Duke of Banville]

The ultimate hipster:

 

[Feyd Rautha]

 

[cherry blossom]

Why don't they just make a text adventure module without combat for Pillars of Eternity, it's not like they can actually come up with genuinely different mechanics like Disco, they have too much mainstream brainrot for that at Obsidian.

 

[mediocrepoet]

cherry blossom I think that would actually dilute the Pillars IP since they were known and pushed as combat heavy games even if you didn't mow the lawn on each map.

Then again, this may have been more of a concern for Obsidian before Deadfire flopped and before their Skyrim ripoff was announced.

 

[<3sRichardSimmons]

cherry blossom I think that would actually dilute the Pillars IP since they were known and pushed as combat heavy games even if you didn't mow the lawn on each map.

Then again, this may have been more of a concern for Obsidian before Deadfire flopped and before their Skyrim ripoff was announced.

Hasn't it been indicated that Deadfire wound up profitable? I know its launch was a major disappointment, but I think "flopped" is an exaggeration, no?

 

[mediocrepoet]

cherry blossom I think that would actually dilute the Pillars IP since they were known and pushed as combat heavy games even if you didn't mow the lawn on each map.

Then again, this may have been more of a concern for Obsidian before Deadfire flopped and before their Skyrim ripoff was announced.

Hasn't it been indicated that Deadfire wound up profitable? I know its launch was a major disappointment, but I think "flopped" is an exaggeration, no?

It was the impression I had based on discussions here. But you may be right, I have no idea.

 

[Butter]

cherry blossom I think that would actually dilute the Pillars IP since they were known and pushed as combat heavy games even if you didn't mow the lawn on each map.

Then again, this may have been more of a concern for Obsidian before Deadfire flopped and before their Skyrim ripoff was announced.

Hasn't it been indicated that Deadfire wound up profitable? I know its launch was a major disappointment, but I think "flopped" is an exaggeration, no?

It had a long tail and eventually made its money back, but Obsidian clearly thought it was going to be hot shit and they had to ditch any plans for a third entry.

 

[Diggfinger]

cherry blossom I think that would actually dilute the Pillars IP since they were known and pushed as combat heavy games even if you didn't mow the lawn on each map.

Then again, this may have been more of a concern for Obsidian before Deadfire flopped and before their Skyrim ripoff was announced.

Hasn't it been indicated that Deadfire wound up profitable? I know its launch was a major disappointment, but I think "flopped" is an exaggeration, no?

It had a long tail and eventually made its money back, but Obsidian clearly thought it was going to be hot shit and they had to ditch any plans for a third entry.

It is hot shit.

Just very poorly marketed.
Josh since said the game made money, not just break even. But yeah, took hella long.

 

[koyota]

It had a long tail and eventually made its money back, but Obsidian clearly thought it was going to be hot shit and they had to ditch any plans for a third entry.

People who invested in it, got half the money they put in back.
(Lost half their money if you are a glass half empty person)

https://www.reddit.com/r/projecteternity/comments/cldd3l/final_poe2_dividend_of_20508_52_return/

 

[Butter]

It had a long tail and eventually made its money back, but Obsidian clearly thought it was going to be hot shit and they had to ditch any plans for a third entry.

People who invested in it, got half the money they put in back.
(Lost half their money if you are a glass half empty person)

https://www.reddit.com/r/projecteternity/comments/cldd3l/final_poe2_dividend_of_20508_52_return/

I don't know how the investment thing worked. I'm just quoting Sawyer.

https://jesawyer.tumblr.com/post/669770197986590720/hi-josh-hope-youre-doing-great-world-of-eora

Thanks. I don’t decide what projects the studio does, but a Pillars/Deadfire sequel seems unlikely in my opinion. Even though Deadfire did eventually make money, it took a while to do so. Initially it sold poorly and it took over a year for sales to pick up.

 

[BlackheartXIII]

Here a list of writers at obsidian that are assigned on an unannounced project, which i suspect that it's probably pentiment:
Kate Dollarhyde as narrative designer
Zoe Franznice and AK Fedeau as associate narrative designers (low level writing job, but due to the scope of project they will probably have the same responsibilities of a narrative designer, but in half of the cost (which is a great way to reduce production costs)).

 

[rusty_shackleford]

It had a long tail and eventually made its money back, but Obsidian clearly thought it was going to be hot shit and they had to ditch any plans for a third entry.

People who invested in it, got half the money they put in back.
(Lost half their money if you are a glass half empty person)

https://www.reddit.com/r/projecteternity/comments/cldd3l/final_poe2_dividend_of_20508_52_return/

I don't know how the investment thing worked. I'm just quoting Sawyer.

https://jesawyer.tumblr.com/post/669770197986590720/hi-josh-hope-youre-doing-great-world-of-eora

Thanks. I don’t decide what projects the studio does, but a Pillars/Deadfire sequel seems unlikely in my opinion. Even though Deadfire did eventually make money, it took a while to do so. Initially it sold poorly and it took over a year for sales to pick up.

Fig investors could probably use this as the basis of a lawsuit.
There seems to be a false implication wrt the final Fig payout. It wasn't representative of sales, but what Fig was willing to accept to take Deadfire off their hands as they had partial publisher ownership rights. Fig therefore massively undervalued the rights from what public information we have available. There doesn't seem to be any (public) explanation as to why they did what they did or why they settled upon that specific amount.

If you were silly enough to buy more than a single share, I'd definitely contact a lawyer.

 

[mediocrepoet]

It had a long tail and eventually made its money back, but Obsidian clearly thought it was going to be hot shit and they had to ditch any plans for a third entry.

People who invested in it, got half the money they put in back.
(Lost half their money if you are a glass half empty person)

https://www.reddit.com/r/projecteternity/comments/cldd3l/final_poe2_dividend_of_20508_52_return/

I don't know how the investment thing worked. I'm just quoting Sawyer.

https://jesawyer.tumblr.com/post/669770197986590720/hi-josh-hope-youre-doing-great-world-of-eora

Thanks. I don’t decide what projects the studio does, but a Pillars/Deadfire sequel seems unlikely in my opinion. Even though Deadfire did eventually make money, it took a while to do so. Initially it sold poorly and it took over a year for sales to pick up.

Fig investors could probably use this as the basis of a lawsuit.
There seems to be a false implication wrt the final Fig payout. It wasn't representative of sales, but what Fig was willing to accept to take Deadfire off their hands as they had partial publisher ownership rights. Fig therefore massively undervalued the rights from what public information we have available. There doesn't seem to be any (public) explanation as to why they did what they did or why they settled upon that specific amount.

If you were silly enough to buy more than a single share, I'd definitely contact a lawyer.

I only glanced at the Fig investor stuff because as sketchy as crowd funding is, crowd investing in some sort of weird joint venture project that provides you with no power and questionable (likely no) transparency is akin to burning your money if you ask me. However, wasn't there a term in there regarding the period of sales value that would be looked at when determining project dividends? Like a year or something? I could've sworn that there was.

 

[rusty_shackleford]

It had a long tail and eventually made its money back, but Obsidian clearly thought it was going to be hot shit and they had to ditch any plans for a third entry.

People who invested in it, got half the money they put in back.
(Lost half their money if you are a glass half empty person)

https://www.reddit.com/r/projecteternity/comments/cldd3l/final_poe2_dividend_of_20508_52_return/

I don't know how the investment thing worked. I'm just quoting Sawyer.

https://jesawyer.tumblr.com/post/669770197986590720/hi-josh-hope-youre-doing-great-world-of-eora

Thanks. I don’t decide what projects the studio does, but a Pillars/Deadfire sequel seems unlikely in my opinion. Even though Deadfire did eventually make money, it took a while to do so. Initially it sold poorly and it took over a year for sales to pick up.

Fig investors could probably use this as the basis of a lawsuit.
There seems to be a false implication wrt the final Fig payout. It wasn't representative of sales, but what Fig was willing to accept to take Deadfire off their hands as they had partial publisher ownership rights. Fig therefore massively undervalued the rights from what public information we have available. There doesn't seem to be any (public) explanation as to why they did what they did or why they settled upon that specific amount.

If you were silly enough to buy more than a single share, I'd definitely contact a lawyer.

I only glanced at the Fig investor stuff because as sketchy as crowd funding is, crowd investing in some sort of weird joint venture project that provides you with no power and questionable (likely no) transparency is akin to burning your money if you ask me. However, wasn't there a term in there regarding the period of sales value that would be looked at when determining project dividends? Like a year or something? I could've sworn that there was.

To clarify, from that reddit thread:

I emailed the Fig team and they told me that investors should all be receiving documents showing the cancellation of these shares after the final payout.

Therefore, Fig explicitly canceled the shares.

There's various sections such as this in Fig's offering memorandum

Following a defined time after the delivery of a particular developed game, we will have the right to cancel the associated series of Fig Game Shares, under certain circumstances.


Following a defined time after the delivery of a particular developed game, we will have the right to cancel the associated series of Fig Game Shares, under certain circumstances. We will maintain a cancellation right in respect of each series of Fig Game Shares, in order to be able to withdraw the series from the market and avoid the costs of continuing to have the series outstanding after the associated game has lost most or all of its earning power. In general, we expect that our right to cancel a series of Fig Game Shares will become effective after the passage of a pre-determined amount of time (typically, a number of years), and after the game has failed to meet a pre-determined earnings floor. For a description of our cancellation right with respect to the Fig Game Shares being offered in this offering, see “The Current Game, Developer and Shares”. Although the purpose of our cancellation rights is to help us avoid incurring unnecessary administrative costs, and thereby benefit our Company and shareholders as a whole, there can be no assurance that we will not cancel a series of Fig Game Shares before the earning power of the associated game has been completely and irreversibly exhausted, and thereby deny the holders of such Fig Game Shares some additional amount of dividends.

I simply don't see this in line with what Fig actually did. While they do explicitly reserve the right to cancel the shares at any time, this seems to be implied as an exception rather than the rule. Deadfire did not lose its earning power, there is no statement as to whether they even discussed this with Obsidian. Feargus -- regardless of your opinion on him -- would definitely be considered an expert in this area due to his very long history of operating companies that make and sell cRPGs of varying levels of popularity.

If anyone actually lost serious money on this, I'd contact a lawyer.

I don't think Obsidian did anything wrong. I'm suspect of Fig's motives, especially wrt Microsoft.

 

[mediocrepoet]

To clarify, from that reddit thread:

I emailed the Fig team and they told me that investors should all be receiving documents showing the cancellation of these shares after the final payout.

Therefore, Fig explicitly canceled the shares.

There's various sections such as this in Fig's offering memorandum

Following a defined time after the delivery of a particular developed game, we will have the right to cancel the associated series of Fig Game Shares, under certain circumstances.


Following a defined time after the delivery of a particular developed game, we will have the right to cancel the associated series of Fig Game Shares, under certain circumstances. We will maintain a cancellation right in respect of each series of Fig Game Shares, in order to be able to withdraw the series from the market and avoid the costs of continuing to have the series outstanding after the associated game has lost most or all of its earning power. In general, we expect that our right to cancel a series of Fig Game Shares will become effective after the passage of a pre-determined amount of time (typically, a number of years), and after the game has failed to meet a pre-determined earnings floor. For a description of our cancellation right with respect to the Fig Game Shares being offered in this offering, see “The Current Game, Developer and Shares”. Although the purpose of our cancellation rights is to help us avoid incurring unnecessary administrative costs, and thereby benefit our Company and shareholders as a whole, there can be no assurance that we will not cancel a series of Fig Game Shares before the earning power of the associated game has been completely and irreversibly exhausted, and thereby deny the holders of such Fig Game Shares some additional amount of dividends.

I simply don't see this in line with what Fig actually did. While they do explicitly reserve the right to cancel the shares at any time, this seems to be implied as an exception rather than the rule. Deadfire did not lose its earning power, there is no statement as to whether they even discussed this with Obsidian. Feargus -- regardless of your opinion on him -- would definitely be considered an expert in this area due to his very long history of operating companies that make and sell cRPGs of varying levels of popularity.

If anyone actually lost serious money on this, I'd contact a lawyer.

I don't think Obsidian did anything wrong. I'm suspect of Fig's motives, especially wrt Microsoft.

I think that's fair, especially depending on the timing of it. I get why this language is in there as continuing with accounting and/or auditing in accordance with applicable securities legislation has costs and it wouldn't make sense to continue to do so indefinitely, especially as most games do not have significant tails. Either way, the other thing I found sketchy about it was that Obsidian, at the time, was a privately owned company which has less transparency and accountability than a private company and Fig was set up by Feargus and others. So basically, there seemed to me to be a lot of power to play some sort of shell game with people's money and not a whole lot of recourse to avoid getting screwed.

Meh, glad I didn't pony up for it. It struck me as possibly a fun thing to do, but too risky to treat very seriously.

 

[mediocrepoet]

rusty_shackleford to expand on that, from 'tron's post at the time here:

Those of you who read our forums probably already heard about Fig yesterday. If you haven't, well, in short, it's a new, highly curated, video game-specific crowdfunding platform created by former Double Fine COO Justin Bailey, which aims to combine traditional rewards-based crowdfunding with equity-based investment to achieve larger budgets for game development. What makes Fig notable to us is that RPG bigwigs Brian Fargo and Feargus Urquhart, as well as Double Fine's Tim Schafer, are members of its advisory board. They will be responsible for curating the projects on the site and all have promised to launch their own future crowdfunding campaigns on it.

Our more perceptive readers quickly noted that while inXile had only recently concluded their crowdfunding campaign for The Bard's Tale IV on Kickstarter, Obsidian had not returned to crowdfunding since their initial outing back in 2012. Perhaps, then, the founding of Fig is a sign that Obsidian's long-awaited next crowdfunded RPG is not far off? This interview on VentureBeat with Feargus and Justin Bailey may point to that. Here are the relevant bits:

GamesBeat: Does this mean that the companies involved. Will Obsidian, InXile, and Double Fine not use Kickstarter in the future?

Urquhart: For our next games, absolutely [we won’t use Kickstarter]. But to be clear, we just worked with another company to do a board game. We did the Pillars of Eternity card game. That would still be something we’d use other crowdfunding sites to do, just because it’s not what we do, but it’s connected. I don’t want to say we would never do anything affiliated with any of the other crowdfunding outlets. But for games, this is why we’re getting together to do this together. And I’ll say together once more.

If you think that's sufficient separation to have arm's length objectivity and protect you that way, I... uh. Good luck to you.

I have no real information on Fig or any of its projects and nothing I say should be considered to be advice of any sort.

 

[rusty_shackleford]

rusty_shackleford to expand on that, from 'tron's post at the time here:

Those of you who read our forums probably already heard about Fig yesterday. If you haven't, well, in short, it's a new, highly curated, video game-specific crowdfunding platform created by former Double Fine COO Justin Bailey, which aims to combine traditional rewards-based crowdfunding with equity-based investment to achieve larger budgets for game development. What makes Fig notable to us is that RPG bigwigs Brian Fargo and Feargus Urquhart, as well as Double Fine's Tim Schafer, are members of its advisory board. They will be responsible for curating the projects on the site and all have promised to launch their own future crowdfunding campaigns on it.

Our more perceptive readers quickly noted that while inXile had only recently concluded their crowdfunding campaign for The Bard's Tale IV on Kickstarter, Obsidian had not returned to crowdfunding since their initial outing back in 2012. Perhaps, then, the founding of Fig is a sign that Obsidian's long-awaited next crowdfunded RPG is not far off? This interview on VentureBeat with Feargus and Justin Bailey may point to that. Here are the relevant bits:

GamesBeat: Does this mean that the companies involved. Will Obsidian, InXile, and Double Fine not use Kickstarter in the future?

Urquhart: For our next games, absolutely [we won’t use Kickstarter]. But to be clear, we just worked with another company to do a board game. We did the Pillars of Eternity card game. That would still be something we’d use other crowdfunding sites to do, just because it’s not what we do, but it’s connected. I don’t want to say we would never do anything affiliated with any of the other crowdfunding outlets. But for games, this is why we’re getting together to do this together. And I’ll say together once more.

If you think that's sufficient separation to have arm's length objectivity and protect you that way, I... uh. Good luck to you.

I have no real information on Fig or any of its projects and nothing I say should be considered to be advice of any sort.

I was actually unaware that Feargus was so closely tied to Fig.
This whole thing looks like a giant scam now

 

[Infinitron]

 

[Tyranicon]

Pffft.

 

[BlackheartXIII]

assigned art director is probably Hannah Kennedy.

 

[Sannom]

PAX <insert cardinal direction> is this week-end right ? I saw mentions that Grounded will have a presence there, I wonder if that's what the references to a possible reveal are alluding to...

 

[Roguey]

PAX <insert cardinal direction> is this week-end right ? I saw mentions that Grounded will have a presence there, I wonder if that's what the references to a possible reveal are alluding to...

Yeah, there's a Grounded panel but Obsidian/MS has nothing in the Expo Hall. Wait till June.

 

[BlackheartXIII]

pentiment will likely be a Disco Elysium esque rpg heavily inspired by umberto eco's the name of the rose (an murder mystery that set in an Italian Benedictine monastery in 1327) (43:58) hence, probably will design with a semiotic concepts in mind.

moreover the books that josh display in the interview might hint about the setting:

Die Geschichte der Gastfreundschaft im hochmittelalterlichen Mönchtum by Jutta Marua Berger (1999) (40:13): focus on the theory and the theological underpinning of Benedictine monks hospitality.

The Revolution of 1525 by Peter Blickle (1985) (43:11): a sociological perspective on the 1525 German peasant's war. https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/epdf/10.1086/243151.