Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire

[KevinC]

I sure hope so!

I sourced the Paradox statements (re: Tyranny) that I mentioned, if you wanted to get it straight from the horse’s mouth.

“Tyranny did ok,” says Paradox CEO Fred Wester.

“We’re overall ok with it, I think,” echoes Shams Jorjani, Paradox’s vice president of business development. “Everyone was hoping that it would do better.”

In fact, Tyranny’s performance at release came in just under the Swedish publisher’s expectations.

Next question, then: why didn’t Tyranny meet expectations? Wester points to a tough launch window in November - a month in which other great games, including Ubisoft’s Watch Dogs 2, struggled to punch through the pre-Christmas noise. Jorjani thinks Tyranny’s timing issue goes much broader, arguing that the appetite for ‘90s style RPGs has already been somewhat sated through crowdfunding.

“Obsidian did a great job of capitalising on the timing of Kickstarter and the wave of nostalgia for these type of titles,” goes his hypothesis. “We’ve seen that most of the titles after Pillars of Eternity, if you look at Wasteland, Torment - they haven’t been anywhere near that kind of success. So maybe it’s that a lot of nostalgia fed into the initial bubble and that’s why. These games have a market, but it’s never gonna be that peak [again].”

Jorjani draws a parallel to revivalist point-and-click adventure games and the initial warmth for a fondly remembered genre.

“But once people started playing them, they were like, ‘I kind of know why they aren’t prevalent anymore,’” he says. “This form of gameplay isn’t really working in today’s environment.”

So it sounds like it did OK, but not well enough that they were interested in publishing the sequel.