Man, development and performance of this game feels like such a shame and missed opportunity.
I Recently started replaying Deadfire and I’m at once struck by how much this game gets right while at the same time missing key components to make it a truly great and enjoyable game, and instead leaves it an intermittenlty enjoyable but for me ultimately frustrating experience.
On the positive side we have:
- The graphics, they look great. The backgrounds, the particle effects, the weather effects etc. All this looks amazing. The one nit-pick I have is character models that just look Ok, especially combined with Sawyers realism boner making all the armors looking too similar for the view distance (because they mostly have cloth covering)
- The quest design is often very good. There are multiple solutions to practically every quest and you can utilise a vast number of abilities in mostly logical ways to solve problems.
- Great item variety with a tons of different types of equipment and effects. Tons of creativity and variety here even if it visually sometimes blends together a bit and has been somewhat nerfed since release.
- Reactions and reputations for most things you do.
- Some of the music is really nice, like the tavern music and the sea chanties, as well as some of the old tracks.
These are big positives and at the first glance this sounds amazing but unfortunately some of the negatives puts a damper on all the positive that has been accomplished.
- The biggest glaring negative is the poor character writing and the abysmal plot. In such a narrative heavy game as this you can’t fail this badly in these respects. The plot goes nowhere and you have little to no say over what happens, in an RPG! It is good that you can choose whatever faction you want to side with but when the overall plot has such massive implications and you have no means to impact it at all, despite obvious avenues to do so that are shut down by GM fiat (for what reason!?).
The characters are uniformly uninteresting and uncompelling. You neither want to be their friend or are interested in what they have to say. This extends to both the companions and other characters in the game, they all talk a ton but they say nothing of interest, nor are they funny. That Edér, aloth and Pallegina are returning characters says a lot here. Edér was the best of the lot and he was barely above non-offensive in the original.
- The gameplay is too easy and uniform. You quickly stumble upon some strategy that works for every encounter (perhaps outside of the mega bosses) and the lack of hard counters makes sure you never have to adjust. The game is trivialised on the highest difficulty by like hour 5. There are other issues like engagement, action glut leading to excessive pausing etc. but the lack of difficulty and hard counters is the most glaring because it makes every encounter become the same trivial shit.
- The new music is straight up bad. I assume this is because they didn’t have a dedicated composer and justin Bell’s meagre abilities were tied up with the late addition of full VA.
There are of course other issues as well, such as wokeness making things stupid but these issues aren’t so bad (although I dread what nu-obsidian writing team comes up with next.
So, what can be done about these things for an possible future game?
- Hire a competent lead writer, its painfully obvious that Sawyer isn’t up to snuff herding the current obsidian writers. At the same time, the writers aren’t that bad and with proper leadership they could probably turn out passable stuff.
- Hire a composer, or at the very least give your in house person a realistic chance of producing something decent. Music is important, it affects peoples perception and enjoyment of games to a very large degree, especially casual fans.
- Overhaul the combat system again. Either make it turn based or try to understand what makes real time games work and try to greatly decrease the required amount of pausing. This is probably a pipedream though seems sawyer will inevitably try to design this.
Is any of this going to happen? most likely not. If they make another game i forsee even worse writing, to the point of being completly unplayable, similar combat system OR
maybe a switch to TB and possibly the hiring of an actual composer with microsoft money.
Such a shame.
