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Josh Sawyer on the Possibility of a Pillars of Eternity 3 After the Low Sales of Deadfire (Update: Additional Comments)
- Thread starter Dancrane212
- Start date
Me too.
Sad to see this game didn't get success and we're getting games like Outer Worlds instead :(
I like the gameplay of DoS games and while I own both, I coudln't stomach the setting, the story of those games so never finished them, don't think I even got to ACT 2 of DoS 2.
I finished Tyranny, PoE & PoE 2 and love every minute of it. I'm not a fan of RTwP and I initially stopped my playthrough of Pillars 2 and restarted and finished the game with the turn based patch. If you love good stories and settings, these games are a treat imo.
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Is it just me or do quite a few sequels to crowfunded games do poorly? I'd guess it's because they don't have the same hype from the community due to not being crowdfunded, and that's a problem because they're usually in comparatively niche genres.
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It's 100% a combination of "Lack of clarity about what made this distinct" and "not at the forefront of a new funding hype train". PoE was one of the most prominent examples of "a 'long forgotten' genre done in AAA quality you remember only made possible by this newfangled Kickstarter thing" as a plus, and then Deadfire ditched that and confusingly marketed itself. It genuinely took me a few months of passive awareness to even realize it was an honest to goodness sequel, and not just another White March-esque expac.
All the stuff about the systems is besides the point; people still bought the first game en masse. I might be able to see DOS2 taking some of the air from the room, but it came out several months apart. CRPGs are big, sure, but they're not MMOs.
All the stuff about the systems is besides the point; people still bought the first game en masse. I might be able to see DOS2 taking some of the air from the room, but it came out several months apart. CRPGs are big, sure, but they're not MMOs.
Only played a bit of PoE 1 so far, but I agree, the writing (which makes or breaks games like these) is not even close to the old Black Isle stuff.
Also, load times.
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That was a problem Stoic hit with the release of The Banner Saga 2. They went back to kickstarter for the third game not just to get funding, but to help rally their support and increase engagement.
Follow-up: If narrative tone of Deadfire its reception
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Follow up post on the narrative tone of Deadfire possibly impacting its reception:
Since I own PoE and not Deadfire while wanting to play it I'll say my main reason is I didn't finish the very last portion of PoE though I loved my PotD playthrough. Therefore I can't justify paying the relatively high price for Deadfire while still having a few hours left of the first game.
I think the increased competition from Divinity: Original Sin 2 and Pathfinder: Kingmaker explain most of the difference. I also think the Island hopping setting was off putting to some. I backed the game on Fig, but didn't care for the theming. The ship combat is obviously terrible, and the whole spector of getting destroyed by higher level pirates randomly in the early game is a huge turnoff.
I got two hypothesis on low sales; A) people were bummed with White March Part 1 and 2; B) as far as I remember, it was released AFTER Divinity: Original Sin 2.
I love PoE 2 and this breaks my heart. They even made it full-on (and amazing, IMO) turn-based. :( I will admit I think I'd have preferred a bit less scattered island/sea exploration and more land-based/traditional (like PoE1) was, and the main story was too short (thus requiring exploration to really get the most out of the experience) but otherwise, I have little to complain about, especially with all the post-launch support, QoL updates, and amazing DLC.
I really liked Deadfire. A lot of good ideas and mechanics, and I found the story more interesting than PoE.
I think one problem may have been advertising. I usually browse the front page of Steam once a week, I Kickstarted PoE and owned it on Steam, and yet I did not see Deadfire pop up until about a month after it released. I do not keep up with gaming news despite being a regular on this board - this place is the source of pretty much 99% of my gaming news; if I miss a thread then I probably won't know about an upcoming game.
As much as I enjoyed that world if they never get a chance to return to it I am fine. They were two great games, and I still haven't touched the DLC for Deadfire.
I think one problem may have been advertising. I usually browse the front page of Steam once a week, I Kickstarted PoE and owned it on Steam, and yet I did not see Deadfire pop up until about a month after it released. I do not keep up with gaming news despite being a regular on this board - this place is the source of pretty much 99% of my gaming news; if I miss a thread then I probably won't know about an upcoming game.
As much as I enjoyed that world if they never get a chance to return to it I am fine. They were two great games, and I still haven't touched the DLC for Deadfire.
As far as this part goes I doubt it's the case. It seems to be widely agreed upon that the White March content is the best in the entire game and that it solved some issues people generally had with PoE like weak itemization.
I don't think anyone who played through the entirety of White March would've walked away with a bad taste in their mouth assuming they were already on board enough with PoE to get to that content. The worst thing you can really say about White March is that it's implementation in the middle of the game means you always have to make a choice whether to trivialize the vanilla endgame or the DLC content because once you've completed one of the two you're already above the recommended level for the other one, something that even the scaling option can't fix.
I meant people were maybe waiting for a complete package for PoE2, not a episodic game like PoE.
Honestly to me the game just doesn't look visually interesting or impressive, both from a Graphical perspective and from a UI design one. The art style is nice enough, though not particularly memorable due to the more muted design. Overall I think it's just a bit of a niche genre that has recently gotten some really good entries on PC (ie: Divinity) so I think they jumped to a sequel too soon (2018) after PoE1 (2015) and White March (2015/2016) where at that point most people hadn't consumed all the content yet.
If they make another game with that IP I hope they make more efforts to make it stand out, though I fear that with something like a perspective/gameplay change to match the higher budget value it would lose its identity and might as well be a different game. Also I just don't think pirate games are all that popular, so theming it over that so heavily didn't do them any favors.
If they make another game with that IP I hope they make more efforts to make it stand out, though I fear that with something like a perspective/gameplay change to match the higher budget value it would lose its identity and might as well be a different game. Also I just don't think pirate games are all that popular, so theming it over that so heavily didn't do them any favors.
I guess it's a matter of taste, but I actually think Deadfire is one of the best looking RPGs on the market:
The backgrounds look great to be sure, but that your camera is so limited and your interactions with the background feel scripted reduces how impressive it is. Personally the main thing that makes the game visually unapealing to me is the Character Models, Animations and Effects. Looking at Gameplay it just doesn't look impressive, it mostly looks good in screenshots where limited things happen.
In the end it's all personal taste of course, where perspective and context are key. But overall I think that style of visuals doesn't lend itself to looking like big budget quality game that sets itself apart as unique and validates a full price tag (Which IMO is why many wait for a sale or confuse it with other/past titles).
Pillars 3 would have to come from internal excitement to work on a CRPG again
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Relevant update on the matter:
jesawyer.tumblr.com
Frog Helms Fan Club
Hello, I don't play many games. I never played Baldur's Gate or any of those kinds of RPGs. I played PoE while on quarantine and am immediately hooked. The story and world building is so fantastic. I…
jesawyer.tumblr.com
It sounds like to me that step one would be that somebody comes up with a plan that makes PoE:3 successful. I think Avowed could help with that, along with the marketing reach of Microsoft.
Wasteland 3 is this month and might give us a clue into how well a CRPG could do under a gamepass like model. I don't know if the scale and scope match exactly though, Wasteland 2 was much shorter than Pillars 1 or 2 if I remember correctly. We also don't know if Wasteland 3 is going to be inXiles last isometric CRPG, given that they started working on it before the sale to Microsoft.
Wasteland 3 is this month and might give us a clue into how well a CRPG could do under a gamepass like model. I don't know if the scale and scope match exactly though, Wasteland 2 was much shorter than Pillars 1 or 2 if I remember correctly. We also don't know if Wasteland 3 is going to be inXiles last isometric CRPG, given that they started working on it before the sale to Microsoft.
It bums me out that Deadfire didn't too well sales wise, since it is a tremendous game -- better than the first in every way.
Its also interesting to see old posts from Josh Sawyer that mention the possibility of a Pillars game "in the same style" as the first two. Obviously we now know he was dancing around the game that would be revealed bas Avowed.
Its also interesting to see old posts from Josh Sawyer that mention the possibility of a Pillars game "in the same style" as the first two. Obviously we now know he was dancing around the game that would be revealed bas Avowed.
I loved the gameplay of both Pillars games, but honestly the world was kinda meh. If this means the team tries something different, I'm totally on board for that. Tyranny was fun and a great, weird setting. Plus it didn't overstay its welcome: the world needs more 20-hour RPGs, amirite?
I never played the first one but bought the second on a whim because people praised it so much. I got bored with it. I'm not interested in the story or the pirate ship aesthetics. I picked up Divinity original sin 2 around the same time and I'm on my third play through. The gameplay is so much better, graphics look better like an evolution I wouldn't imagined over all these years and battles have much more strategy with the terrain effects.
I loved real time with pause back with Baldur's Gate in 1999 but now I'd rather have turn based.
I loved real time with pause back with Baldur's Gate in 1999 but now I'd rather have turn based.
I'm not sure if InXile will have a side team to continue to make CRPGs since all signs point to them gearing up to make Brian Fargo's dream AAA RPG.
If Wasteland 3 is a big success I could see them continue to be a multi team studio, just depends if internally they want to keep making CRPGs now that they have AAA funding.
+1
I would think the Microsoft money could really help with that, too.
The voice acting in Deadfire adding so much, but I kept wishing for more control over the camera - especially as the team added the optional Turn-Based combat mode later.
I don't mind the isometric part, but something about PoE1/2's implementation of it really is difficult for me. I love the art in the games, but I really struggle with differentiating window dressing from interactable world in those games, an issue I haven't had with the other big CRPGs like Pathfinder: Kingmaker or DOS2. The mix of pre-rendered with interactable world leads to a bunch of times where I click somewhere I thought i'm able to move to but that's not the case. The other modern CRPGs don't have that style and it's much more clear to me where I can move and what I can interact with.
I love the games to bits, but if they make a PoE3 I hope they do a more clean break from the Infinity Engine style games.
inXile's next game is heavily rumoured to be an extremely ambitious AAA RPG. If that game is a hit, I suspect they would probably work on sequels.
I mean it isn't rocket science why it under-performed. Deadfire is dope as hell but POE 1 was special in the way that POE 2 wasn't. POE 1 was a renaissance of a beloved style of (nearly) dead CRPG. POE 2 in comparison wasn't nearly as celebrated or hyped at launch.
The game is still incredible.
The game is still incredible.
13% of people who played Pillars 1 finished it.
Hell, less then half of the folks who bought it got out of the first chapter (which is not long or hard). This should have been a pretty big red flag that while interest in a new infinity engine style game was there (as lots of folks bought the game), your implementation was turning a lot of people off.
Also having so much of the marketing around 2 being focused on "It's a direct sequel to 1, it takes place hours later! You can import your character and all your decisions carry over!" when 13% of people who played the first finished it was probably a really god damned stupid idea.
This
Hype around PoE1 and the return of grand CRPGs made it sell really well.
Most peoples having not even touched/finished the first one will not feel it's a good decision to buy PoE2..and there was a huge wave of CRPGs after PoE1 too, some better games even.
I'd love to play Deadfire, but I kept seeing posts advising to not play it on PS4. Supposedly it's broken on that platform. And with POE1 continuing to crash on me in Act 3 (on PS4), and with the load times as long as they were, I had enough and deleted it after I saw the warnings about the sequel.
The story and gameplay was great while it lasted though, and I was looking forward to the FF style gambits that I heard Deadfire had.
The story and gameplay was great while it lasted though, and I was looking forward to the FF style gambits that I heard Deadfire had.
old school CRPG fans may love Pillars for returning to that style of gameplay, but if they want broader appeal then that out-dated combat system has to go. It is not fun. I had to forced myself to the end of Pillars 1 and got bored very early with Pillars 2.
I hope that they do, since I think it seems we are approaching a nadir for isometric RPG houses again. There was a period of time when we had quite a few studios putting out 'bigger budget' titles in the space but Larian and Owlcat seem to be the last ones standing for now.
I hope they do too. I'm a big fan of these recent CRPGs.
Josh Sawyer is working on a passion project with a team of about 5 people. I wonder if it'll be a smaller scale CRPG. Or is Josh Sawyer the guy that wanted to make a bike shop simulator?
As someone who put >100 hrs in PoE and didn't even touch the sequel, my thinking was this:
I didn't want to play a pirate game. The marketing was all the way up the mizzenmast with swashbuckling derring-do. Whether or not there was a dramatic tonal shift between the two games, I certainly felt like I was being led to believe so.
PoE2's underperformance could well have just been a matter of setting.
I didn't want to play a pirate game. The marketing was all the way up the mizzenmast with swashbuckling derring-do. Whether or not there was a dramatic tonal shift between the two games, I certainly felt like I was being led to believe so.
PoE2's underperformance could well have just been a matter of setting.
I prefer the look we got as it evokes a look we rarely get anymore.
I honestly like when the meat is not the main game so i can pick and choose what and when i do things.
I'm pretty sure I had no idea it had been announced or even released until I saw the OT for it, honestly. Marketing did it no favors. I still am meaning to pick it up but I haven't finished the DLC for POE1 yet.
Also ZA/UM with Disco Elysium, I'm looking forward to their next projects.
The mismanagent of POE is legendary.
Get millions to make a game in the spirit of BG.
Instead of making a fun D and D adventure they make a slow depressing game that most players drop in the first act.
made dlc that is much better but sells like shit becuse you already turned people away.
launch a Fig campaign for POE2 that gets half the backers of the originals kickstarter.
made the game a direct sequal to a game most people didn't finish
Partnered with Versus Evil to publish the game
The game was rigged from the start..
Get millions to make a game in the spirit of BG.
Instead of making a fun D and D adventure they make a slow depressing game that most players drop in the first act.
made dlc that is much better but sells like shit becuse you already turned people away.
launch a Fig campaign for POE2 that gets half the backers of the originals kickstarter.
made the game a direct sequal to a game most people didn't finish
Partnered with Versus Evil to publish the game
The game was rigged from the start..
have you played tyranny? you can breeze through that entire game in 10-15 hours easy
Been meaning to get PoE 2 on PS4 for a while now. Really loved PoE 1 when i played it. The delayed console release didn't help.