Pillars of Eternity

[Clockwork]

Don't think it's a minority, D:OS 1+2, Dragon Age Origins did very well in multi million sales, Tyranny, Pathfinder: Kingmaker, Wasteland 2 + 3 did million plus sales well each, Baldur's Gate 3 is hotly anticipated. All data from steamspy. Mutant year zero did well too but that's mainly tactics with a dash of rpg. Elder Scrolls, [/size]Fallout and Mass Effect are absolute killers in the industry but they're the only big first person RPGs to my mind. Deus Ex as well actually. Dark Messiah is fun as heck and since it's release has sold well but that's over a lot of years now (released 2006) and was actually the game I got steam for

I'd think it's about even. While the very biggest RPGs are first person, there are a lot of very well done and well-selling tactical RPGs.

[Jubal]

I finally played through Deadfire! It's... fine? It's pretty much what I expected from it? I will confess to not being blown away but it was fun enough. Spoilers ahead!

Things I liked:

Being a guy with a lil tricorne pirate hat tootling around trying to explore the Deadfire archipelago. I liked the exploration quests a lot. I got to name islands!

I like the way Deadfire does think at least a bit about settlements as well as people, and I thought the Gullet quests/plotline in Neketaka was especially a good example of that.

I liked having a boat! I'd have liked having more to do on the boat honestly - friendly duels or something? Could there have been an on-ship merchant after a certain quest?

I liked my custom built side character possibly more than my main character - I got a trap-finding rogue early in the game and kept her as a core party member, because she was the scout I was kinda working with her more than any other party member. Obviously not many interactions got to involve her, but I may steal the character concept from myself at some future point

The sneak mechanics work OK, with the exception that the game does not give you any tutorial/prompt on distractions, so I didn't realise until the late game DLCs that a lot of things that I thought were impossible for stealth missions were actually pretty easy and I just needed to throw spark-crackers.

The Forgotten Sanctum DLC was quite probably my favourite part of the game, excepting its arbitrarily difficult and unclear boss fight mechanics. But I got to go round a big wizardy library and do some sneaking in a way that was actually mostly fun and I finally met a character in this game who I actually liked (in the form of Bekarna, who's great). Generally the DLC's plotline is good as well: I found Tayn and Llengrath much more interesting colleague-rivals than the faction leaders in Neketaka.

Things I disliked:
The faction choice quest/mechanic stuff is incredibly annoying and reductive, and more generally politics is pretty badly represented. I kind of had that priced in when I started the game as a likely problem but it irked me regardless.

More generally they have some fairly good character writing and voice acting which they honestly end up under-using as a general wider part of the world, characters comment on the world on occasion but rarely interact with it, and most of the companion quests are fairly eh. Xoti's was good and made sense, a lot of them were kinda just puzzle hunts though. I got spoilered for Maia's, didn't do it, and she got a good ending anyway, so that seems to be optimal given completing her quest makes a bunch of endgame outcomes worse for other people you might care about.

Order of quests is a bit weird. The game has a ton of simple pass-the-bar skill checks in it, but it's very, very easy to lock yourself out of good outcomes simply by doing a thing a level or two early. I think some randomisation around the skill checks might actually have helped. It's also often unclear when you'll get watcher-only checks or when companions will be able to help or do a check themselves.

The designers seem to assume the game is much more built for people who want to learn a really finicky combat system and want the "puzzle" of running through a combat a bunch of times and re-speccing their party in a ton of ways to find a good combination. I think there are just too many options in the combat system for this to be working well except for a slightly obsessive core of players, I still have no idea how half the game's mechanics work: there's four core stats and four defences, but then there's also armour and penetration as a separate set of mechanics, and a concentration mechanic, and separate elemental damage mechanics, and a list of different inspirations and afflictions which also fit into certain categories, and that level of complexity just about works in tabletop and turn based systems but it's a bit much for pause & play.

On the same note, a ton of time spent making arbitrarily hard combat challenges should just have been spent on more plot, even tiny bits of tasks etc. Also, a lot of the time spent on the plot should have been spent on other bits of plot. I feel like I got a bunch of very, very verbose commentaries on a lot of areas where I'd have been much better being given a task quest to highlight the bit of world-building in question. Also some bits could have been conversations: I think spinning half of the very long final ending scene into a shipboard "one year later" where you can talk to people about what happened would have felt much better, the endgame had a lot of narrator voice even for my relatively pro-narrators taste.

Missed opportunities:
I thought there could have been much more imagination in the design of monsters/enemies/culture. Most random opponents were still undead, xaurips, two headed giants, etc. Did nobody think to open like east Asian or Polynesian folklore books given they're basing a whole game on those sorts of cultures?

A few touches could have made the generic (tavern-bought) companions a lot better. Even if you're not going to give them dialogue lines for the most part, there were times when the game could have easily acknowledged their presence and that would have made them a lot more fun to use.

I really don't know how you'd do a third game after this because the end of this game felt so world-shattering and lore changing that it might be quite hard to do a story continuation. Also why does the Watcher sail home at the end automatically? To sit in their rubble garden?



Anyway, that's adventures in Eora done for now. Not sure if these are games I'll revisit anytime fast but I'm glad I played them.