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ProfessorCirno
Feb 17, 2011

The strongest! The smartest!
The rightest!
Alternately, Obsidian already cashed out on nostalgia. The Baldur's Gate revival isn't happening / didn't happen - people enjoyed going back for one game, and...that's it. This very type of game just might not be a popular one. Again, the overall reputation I see are "niche PC RPGs for people really into them."

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Starks
Sep 24, 2006

Amethyst posted:

The game has a high metacritic score, therefore it's good and people like it. Good. Thanks. This is a sensible metric for measuring how much people like the game. The sequel's popularity, however, is a bad and silly metric.

Haha easy there tiger. I said user reviews. The silly part was you trying to say that people that bought the first game didn’t like it.

Amethyst
Mar 28, 2004

I CANNOT HELP BUT MAKE THE DCSS THREAD A FETID SWAMP OF UNFUN POSTING
plz notice me trunk-senpai

Starks posted:

Haha easy there tiger. I said user reviews. The silly part was you trying to say that people that bought the first game didn’t like it.

Well, they didn't finish it. Nor did they buy the sequel.

Basic Chunnel
Sep 21, 2010

Jesus! Jesus Christ! Say his name! Jesus! Jesus! Come down now!

Zane posted:

a lot of people who buy these games don't even get 30% through them. i seriously believe success and failure is often orthogonal to sophisticated judgments of value. it's probably very typical that a superficial perception of certain gameplay and narrative hooks hits a mass consumer audience in just the right way which then builds upon itself.
You aren’t wrong, I think. I honestly think one of DoS2’s biggest assets were the (pretty heavily front-loaded) Easter eggs and weirdnesses - talking to animals, cannibal psychics, facechanging, etc. that could be described in brief. For people who were reading blog posts and not watching streamers, that’s the sort of stuff that screams “this game has surprises and anything can happen.”

I think PoE2 is a better game in every way in which they’re similar, and really underrated for all the problems I have with it, but it didn’t have that liveliness, for lack of a better term. Dungeon crawling and the disposition systems seemed to be the focus of promo, but maybe it would have helped to put up stuff like talking with the Hylspeak Death Guard in the hanging sepulcher…

Though now that I think about it, I’m pretty sure they also showed off all the ways you can own Benweth at Fort Deadlight, so who can say

Oasx
Oct 11, 2006

Freshly Squeezed

Amethyst posted:

Well, they didn't finish it.

We are talking about 50+ hour games, people barely finish 5 hour games.

Alamoduh
Sep 12, 2011
I don’t have any genius insights here, but I would like to say that I liked poe2 better than dos2. However, I never played dos2 multiplayer, only solo, and the game seems built from the ground up to support multi, at the expense of single- player enjoyment.

Poe2 really came into its stride with beast of winter and seeker, slayer, survivor. The two expansions are just so good with narrative expansion, and I really enjoyed the revelations about what eothas knew about the godhammer during the bridge aflame.

And maybe that’s part of the problem. Dos2 didn’t have an expansion- the game was complete when it was released. I know there has been conversation about the effect of DLC, and I can’t help but think that poe2’s halo would have shined so much brighter had everything been released at once. I also know that’s not feasible with the way the game was structured and funded.

After finishing seeker, slayer, survivor, I wanted more. The game is just excellent, and is right up there for my favorite game of all time (right next to the civilization series). The world is great, and though I understand the unpronounceable names criticism, I’m also chuffed by the attempt at something new.

As to Dos2 I recently played the remastered version after not playing since beating the game at release, and it was exactly the same- there was nothing to look forward to on a replay. Also, I found the combat to be unpredictable and janky- the antithesis of my turn-based preference- because I could never be 100% sure what would happen when my projectiles hit- would it ignite the ground, make an explosion, create a cloud that would then block my vision, or maybe heal the opponent, if for some reason these creatures that look alive are actually undead? It was a great game the first play through, but frustrated me on the second, so I didn’t finish. Still, that’s a lot of free time I spent on it!

dbzfandiego
Sep 17, 2011
I was almost pushed away by PoE's faults and I got the game for free, if I hadnt read the thread I wouldnt have made the decision to get PoE2 some day because at the end of it I liked the first but did not love it. Overall I would say the game was OK, and unless you really like cRPGs I would not recommend it to any of my friends. Its a niche game and while I do like these sorts of games maybe you cant run a mid size studio off of them.

dbzfandiego fucked around with this message at 07:39 on Nov 8, 2018

Fair Bear Maiden
Jun 17, 2013

Amethyst posted:

The games aren't buggy.

Tell me how to access your version of reality, because it would be cool to play D:OS2 in a version of the world where it wasn't full of borked quests 2-3 months after release. Can't speak to its state now, but it definitely was not a bug-free game with speedy loading times and tons of polish when I played it.

Avalerion
Oct 19, 2012

DOS2 patch notes had "we fixed this one bug, for real this time" in them for ages.

Pwnstar
Dec 9, 2007

Who wants some waffles?

DOS2 was easy to make "10 Crazy Reasons to Buy This Game" youtube videos for. Based on zero evidence I'm assuming thats how most people hear about/decide what games to like.

Fair Bear Maiden
Jun 17, 2013
D:OS2 deserves the crazy success it's had. It's a fantastic game. It's also more marketable than Pillars II.

But at the same time, it makes me sad to see Pillars II do as badly as it seemingly did (hopefully it will at least have a decent tail), especially when I see that quickly attributed to the fact it wasn't set in a temperate European forest.

frajaq
Jan 30, 2009

#acolyte GM of 2014


Starks posted:

This is silly. The first game has great user reviews on both metacritic and steam and was by all measures very well received. Like I mentioned before I think the second game’s marketing is the culprit.

nah not the only culprit man sequels are more likely to sell less, and you have to remember at launch PoE 1 was kinda rough around the edges to say the least, and had a really boring Act 2 after a solid Act 1 (well if you do Raedric's Hold)



PoE 1 had was a massive success because it was still riding that crowdfunded hype wave, I imagine shitloads of people didn't actually realize what kind of game they were buying

ilitarist
Apr 26, 2016

illiterate and militarist

Pwnstar posted:

DOS2 was easy to make "10 Crazy Reasons to Buy This Game" youtube videos for. Based on zero evidence I'm assuming thats how most people hear about/decide what games to like.

Exactly.

I played DOS2 in MP with my wife and we both really liked it. It's a closest thing you may get to a D&D campaign: the world is systemic and it properly reacts to whatever you do, we have to compare notes on plot and NPC and so on. Even if you add MP you will still have a game that has only combat and dialogue, little adventure in between. The story and the world of PoE2 is much more interesting, Divinity 2 is a generic wrapper around the story where everything is either funny or moves the plot forward. PoE2 is a game I want to complete again and play on highest difficulty; I find DOS2 systems interesting too but it's much more about fun than about tactics.

Overall I don't see how you consider PoE2 a better game. It better suits me cause I like all this lore and politics and depth of systems, but it's undeniable that DOS2 is a better game overall. I like Mass Effect Andromeda but if a random person asks me for an RPG recommendation I'll probably say Skyrim or something, cause it's a better game in general for someone who doesn't know what he looks for.

Avalerion
Oct 19, 2012

Shouldn’t be that, witcher 3 & d:os2 are sequels and did even better than the first games.

Khizan
Jul 30, 2013


frajaq posted:

PoE 1 had was a massive success because it was still riding that crowdfunded hype wave, I imagine shitloads of people didn't actually realize what kind of game they were buying


PoE1 was a massive success because of all the people like me who were nostalgic about BG2. PoE2 was less than a massive success because of all the people who played PoE1 and found it lacking in comparison to their memories. Some people just didn't realize that their tastes had changed, but some people just found PoE1 to be rather mediocre, and it's hard to blame them for that. It just had so many problems.

Very few party member choices meant I'd be using almost the same basic party in every playthrough, or using a boring Inn NPC. Thaos is uninteresting as a villain. The second act has some huge pacing issues as well as being just generally boring storywise. Twin Elms is a failure as a large city area. The stronghold was utter trash, especially when compared to BG2's class strongholds/guilds/etc. The Endless Dungeons were a boring slog of terrible trash fights. All of those terrible gold Kickstarter NPCs. God, those were terrible because I didn't know at the time that they were just lovely kickstarter backer trash, so I kept reading that poo poo expecting it to matter and every one was worse than the one before it.

Sure, the game got better with later patches and the DLC, but the vanilla game was pretty loving bad in retrospect. The only reason I stuck with PoE as a franchise is because I was so nostalgic that I kickstarted the DLC before the game was released. If I hadn't done that, I'd never have gone back to PoE1 after my first playthrough because the experience wasn't good enough to justify buying DLC for it after having played it.

Fair Bear Maiden
Jun 17, 2013
My hot take is that actually Pillars of Eternity was a very good game.

ilitarist
Apr 26, 2016

illiterate and militarist
Witcher 3 and DOS2 were also largely standalone sequels.

PoE2 intro is there to mostly refresh your memory, I can't imagine coming into that mess and being told that you've fought an ancient conspiracy and killed immortal dude and owned a castle with a giant statue in a middle of it which is totally different from a talking statue you carry around. I almost think that the game would work better if you'd have some sort of amnesia FNV-style by default, because a lot of this stuff you're told doesn't matter in the end. You chose a recommended background and you turn off most of references to the first game, e.g. never met Pallegina, so you'll only have Eder and Aloth sometimes explaining what happened before your soul coma.

It also has a sin of sounding more interesting than the game you're playing right now. Funny enough, PoE1 already had this problem too: description of the Saints War sounded much more interesting if you want a story about gods and supernatural. And if you're more into politics than you get a lot of Broken Stone War about fighting against natives as well as War of Defiance which was fantasy independence war.

Chairchucker
Nov 14, 2006

to ride eternal, shiny and chrome

THUNDERDOME LOSER 2022




People liked DOS because you could set the landscape on fire and play MP IMO.

upgunned shitpost
Jan 21, 2015

Fair Bear Maiden posted:

My hot take is that actually Pillars of Eternity II was a very good game.

frajaq
Jan 30, 2009

#acolyte GM of 2014


ilitarist posted:

It also has a sin of sounding more interesting than the game you're playing right now. Funny enough, PoE1 already had this problem too: description of the Saints War sounded much more interesting if you want a story about gods and supernatural. And if you're more into politics than you get a lot of Broken Stone War about fighting against natives as well as War of Defiance which was fantasy independence war.

Welcome to the DEEP LORE realm

ilitarist
Apr 26, 2016

illiterate and militarist

Khizan posted:

Very few party member choices meant I'd be using almost the same basic party in every playthrough, or using a boring Inn NPC. Thaos is uninteresting as a villain. The second act has some huge pacing issues as well as being just generally boring storywise. Twin Elms is a failure as a large city area. The stronghold was utter trash, especially when compared to BG2's class strongholds/guilds/etc. The Endless Dungeons were a boring slog of terrible trash fights. All of those terrible gold Kickstarter NPCs. God, those were terrible because I didn't know at the time that they were just lovely kickstarter backer trash, so I kept reading that poo poo expecting it to matter and every one was worse than the one before it.

Now that I think about it you're right about how people would see it even though I disagree with almost every statement here. Because my disagreement would a long paragraph of explanation and thus it's hard to sell. As someone above said it's easy to make a video like "Top 10 things you can do in DOS2/Witcher 3/any BioWare RPG". Those options might be heavy handed but still. In DOS2 you can spend time with lizard prostitute, teleport yourself out of prison castle, get dragon to help you fight, turn your enemies into chickens, eat corpses for memories, get masks for undead, set everything on fire, talk to delusional animals. And all of this affects story and gameplay in some way. How would I sell PoE1/2? You can support any of several factions, each with a lot of political background. You can slightly change the mind of a murderous god about how exactly will he screw the world over. Everything else I'd want to say is about gameplay and you have to play it to understand how cool it is. Anyone who played NWN will say that it had more classes and more complex multiclass system. Soulbound weapons might be a rare advertisable thing there but it's a minor part of the game.

How do you sell PoE2?

Avalerion
Oct 19, 2012

ilitarist posted:

Overall I don't see how you consider PoE2 a better game. It better suits me cause I like all this lore and politics and depth of systems, but it's undeniable that DOS2 is a better game overall. I like Mass Effect Andromeda but if a random person asks me for an RPG recommendation I'll probably say Skyrim or something, cause it's a better game in general for someone who doesn't know what he looks for.

I think you hit it, poe1/2 are objectively the better rpgs, but divinity & skyrim are better games for casual players (and I don’t mean casual in a degoratory way).

Wizard Styles
Aug 6, 2014

level 15 disillusionist

frajaq posted:

nah not the only culprit man sequels are more likely to sell less, and you have to remember at launch PoE 1 was kinda rough around the edges to say the least, and had a really boring Act 2 after a solid Act 1 (well if you do Raedric's Hold)



PoE 1 had was a massive success because it was still riding that crowdfunded hype wave, I imagine shitloads of people didn't actually realize what kind of game they were buying
To be fair, a higher percentage earned the beat the game cheevo for PoE1 than D:OS1.
Not to say that the reception of PoE1 had absolutely nothing to do with the success of its direct sequel, but just looking at cheevos doesn't really prove anything.

And it's not like direct sequels are doomed to sell less than their predecessors either. Deadfire just wasn't Shadows of Amn.

ilitarist posted:

How do you sell PoE2?
HUNT A GOD
accomplish nothing

Carew
Jun 22, 2006
A lot of the things people in here attributing the failures of PoE1/2 to exist in successful RPG's and sometimes in much more heinous forms.

Chairchucker
Nov 14, 2006

to ride eternal, shiny and chrome

THUNDERDOME LOSER 2022




Carew posted:

A lot of the things people in here attributing the failures of PoE1/2 to exist in successful RPG's and sometimes in much more heinous forms.

...what?

Miftan
Mar 31, 2012

Terry knows what he can do with his bloody chocolate orange...

I've never played NG or any of the other old school crpgs. I hated D:OS1. Played it for about half an hour and gave up (twice). The exact same thing happened for PoE1 for me, except I came back to PoE because of a friend's recommendation. Still haven't finished it though, haven't even made it to act 3. I absolutely love D:OS2 (haven't finished it either though, I got very very close and got bored) and PoE2 and have hundreds of hours on both.

What I'm saying is that your theories are fun and all, but it's so many individual things that attributing it to any one thing or another is probably wrong.

TEENAGE WITCH
Jul 20, 2008

NAH LAD

ilitarist posted:

"Top 10 things you can do in DOS2/Witcher 3/any BioWare RPG"

How do you sell PoE2?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f1n9hADZBIs

Carew
Jun 22, 2006


Khizan posted:

Very few party member choices meant I'd be using almost the same basic party in every playthrough, or using a boring Inn NPC. Thaos is uninteresting as a villain. The second act has some huge pacing issues as well as being just generally boring storywise. Twin Elms is a failure as a large city area.

All this was true of DOS2 vanilla. The final act had pacing issues, Arx was a boring and buggy mess and it had even less party member choices.

Megazver
Jan 13, 2006

wiegieman posted:

Fig will absolutely continue as "a platform", inasmuch as its real goal was to be Kickstarter without having to pay Kickstarter their fee, but people would have to be pretty foolish to invest in crowdfunded games like this again. Honestly, they had to be pretty foolish the first time.

There is at least one game that used the same investment model that actually brought their investors money, apparently. PROJECT CARS, 200% of what people invested. And Fig's Kingdoms and Castles also brought their investors money, although people haven't mentioned specific figures beyond "doubled their money".

It's not really Fig's fault, it's just RTwP games being niche, it seems.

It seems like Torment, PoE2, Tyranny and, now, Pathfinder: Kingmaker all sold about 100-200k copies. I think this is just the size of the fanbase willing to buy a RTwP title and the ceiling for the subgenre's sales that devs will need to be aware of from now on when planning their budgets. PoE1 sold more than those because there was a lot of hype and nostalgia and there were new people thinking "hmmm, let give this type of game a try, there's a lot of reviews hyping it" and deciding afterwards "you know what, I'm good" and never buying another game like that.

Megazver fucked around with this message at 13:36 on Nov 8, 2018

Chairchucker
Nov 14, 2006

to ride eternal, shiny and chrome

THUNDERDOME LOSER 2022




It took me a bit to decipher your post. Had to reread it a couple times but I think I got it now.

Chairchucker
Nov 14, 2006

to ride eternal, shiny and chrome

THUNDERDOME LOSER 2022




Megazver posted:

RTwP

Torment

what

Megazver
Jan 13, 2006

You can replace that with 'aimed at Infinity Engine fans' if you want. Torment was turn-based, kinda, but you know that's who the target audience was.

2house2fly
Nov 14, 2012

You did a super job wrapping things up! And I'm not just saying that because I have to!

ilitarist posted:

How do you sell PoE2?

There's a ton of fun little interactions and moments in the game, I was surprised at how much entertainment value it had. They're largely in text, mind (eg the scripted interaction where you throw a grenade into a shark's mouth, or dig up actual pirate treasure) and not really trailer material

Furism
Feb 21, 2006

Live long and headbang

ProfessorCirno posted:

The thing with multiplayer is that it also helps make your game more accessible to being streamed, which is a pretty big form of advertisement.

I don't see what MP has to do with being streamed. I watched dozens of hours of XCOM2 videos from Beagle and they were all single player.

SunAndSpring
Dec 4, 2013
Also of note in the sad story of Pillars 2 is that it sounds like the management at Obsidian drove all of their writing talent away. People usually don't play Obsidian games for the gameplay, they play because there's usually great characters and interesting plots to unravel. George Ziets departed to work with inXile, Brian Mitsoda left to do his own thing, and Chris Avellone got kicked upstairs because he made Feargus mad and then left in the most spectacular way. The people who write now are just super amateurish in comparison. Nothing in Pillars 2 compares to any of the dialogue in Mask of the Betrayer, Vampire the Masquerade: Bloodlines, or anything Chris Avellone wrote. Like gently caress, I know people in here hate Durance but I can remember him, he wasn't a boring nobody like most of the other party members in 1 or 2, and who knows, maybe Grieving Mother would've been cool if she wasn't neutered before release. I kinda agree with Chris that they should just fire Feargus, he sounds like an incompetent idiot for letting the main draw of the company, the writers, be erased through his own stupid actions.

Also god please don't let Pillars 3 (if it even gets made at this point) be RTWP. gently caress nostalgia, make it turn-based, even the Baldur's Gate die-hards hate it. It's such a bad system, it's always something I have to work around rather than something that enhances my experience, and I just want it to die forever like it deserves.

Fair Bear Maiden
Jun 17, 2013
I just don't see this huge downgrade in quality people seem to notice in Pillars II compared to previous projects. If anything, there is a lot more color, vibrancy and variety to the prose and dialogue compared to Pillars 1 or Tyranny. I can understand disliking the *tone* and the lack of dark, esoteric companions, yes, but I don't think that's a question of quality.

Also, while I greatly enjoy the writing of people like George Ziets, it doesn't seem like it was a huge draw in games like Torment: Tides of Numenera, which was pretty badly received here by goons (I loved it, personally, though it's certainly a very flawed game).

Mitsoda left like... ages ago too, so it seems weird to bring it up?

EDIT: I'm also gonna say that it's great that Obsidian finally seems to have a large amount of women writers working on their projects. That was definitely a problem the company had before, and while it's not perfect (this is still largely a white nerdy company largely populated by white nerds in their 20s), it's better than it was.

Fair Bear Maiden fucked around with this message at 16:31 on Nov 8, 2018

MMF Freeway
Sep 15, 2010

Later!
Just lol if you don't think the writing in deadfire is a step up from poe1

Fair Bear Maiden
Jun 17, 2013
Hire me as an ideas guy Obsidian. I promise you, my turn-based, classless PoEIII design will sell gangbusters.

I also have a pitch for a Diablo-like Tyranny sequel!

Big Mad Drongo
Nov 10, 2006

Chris Avellone is a pedestrian writer and anyone defending him as some unfathomable genius really, really needs to read more non-video game fiction.

He's not terrible or anything, but the way he gets held up in the industry you'd think he was Faulkner.

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SunAndSpring
Dec 4, 2013
It's an overall step-up, in the sense that the factions aren't anemic like in 1, the plot kind of has a pace, and so on. But I dunno, every companion feels like Joss Whedon wrote them with only Eder breaking out of that mold since, hey, he was written by Eric Fenstermaker (who was pretty good on Fallout New Vegas but left the company like all the other good writers), and the plot is in the end, "You go around trying to find this dumbass god statue and then you watch him do something you can't stop, but you can give him one piece of advice, and then whoever shepherded you to the island the god landed on becomes the new ruler of Deadfire."

Also, good that there's more women, but none of them (and none of the new men for that matter) are very great at writing.

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