Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire

Yep, they are knocking it out of the park with what they are showing in these updates. If the multiclassing adds enough variety, it’ll boost the replay value even that much more. Love that they are showing the skill trees (active and passive) so you can see every bit of the progression from the start.

As much as I enjoyed Tyranny, PoE is a step above it. If Deadfire can take some of the good out of Tyranny and add it to the improvements from PoE, it will be fantastic.

I guess I’m not the only one who preferred Pillars! Has a release date been announced?

Yeah, there are a few gameplay mechanics from Tyranny I wouldn’t mind seeing added to Deadfire.

I’ve never been a fan of multi-classing in RPGs, even back to late 70s D&D. I only made one so I could have a 1st edition bard (OP as all hell). So I doubt I dabble too much with it in Deadfire. Seems counter-productive to lose those really high-end class powers for lower/weaker abilities. But we’ll see. A templar just sounds cool. Imagine that Concelhaut battlemage I linked a few times in the PoE thread having a few fighter levels thrown in since it tops out well before level 16.

Sometime next year, robc04.

Thanks John. No doubt I’ll be getting this. I haven’t looked at any of the dev diaries, but maybe I should. Do they tend to reveal anything that would be more fun to learn about through playing?

You know, I honestly can’t answer that since it’s subjective. Personally I haven’t seen anything yet I wish I hadn’t seen. But of course with today’s marketing every new gameplay mechanic will be fully revealed prior to release.

Interesting.

What happened with Paradox?

Oh, that’s The Banner Saga publisher. Interesting.

It’s in the article you linked (the speculation, that is). :)

EDIT: Oops, sorry, I got my threads mixed up! You linked to the press release. Anyway, previous quotes from Paradox make it sound like Tyranny performed below expectations for them. Sounds like it was an amicable parting of ways.

Thanks! I didn’t have time this morning to do any sluething on my own. I’m pretty confident Deadfire will be like a Divinity Original Sin 2 for these guys, especially given the popularity of DOS2 itself. RPG uprising!

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.

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

Didn’t Paradox publish PoE though? I’d think that a more relevant metric. Did PoE not do well enough for them to be interested in publishing the sequel?

They published both, I believe. Pillars did well and Tyranny not so much. It seems their takeaway on that is that Pillars benefited from the nostalgia wave, but that waned once people had played that style of game again, hence Tyranny not doing as well.

I guess they should take a look at Divinity 2 then, and its sales. Good times for rpg lovers!

I suppose that theory makes a sort of sense, but iirc the Fig campaign for PoE2 was super successful, so I don’t see from their point of view why they would want to miss out. Maybe they asked for too much, like rights to the franchise, and Obsidian couldn’t come to their terms and so looked elsewhere?

EDIT - I was skimming the official forums and read a great point - someone mentioned Paradox did next to no advertising for PoE or especially Tyranny, and maybe Obsidian felt they would get more attention with a smaller publisher. I suppose we’ll never really know for sure.

Yeah, regardless of the internal details, it seems like it was an amicable parting of ways. Whether it was Paradox wanting to see larger numbers, Obsidian wanting to see more marketing investment, or just a disagreement on revenue splits or other business concerns, it seems like it was a situation where both parties thought it best to go in their own direction.

Considering that I heard barely a whisper about Tyranny, I’m not surprised it didn’t perform up to expectations. Personally, I believe lower sales to be the fault of marketing more than of the game or genre fatigue, although I’m sure to some it felt that Tyranny came too quick on the heals of PoE to offer something new.

But hey, I never became attached to Paradox as it connects to PoE. This is an Obsidian baby and I’m happy that it found a new home.

I kind of figured the problem with Tyranny was that it was a heavy story/dialog game, which isn’t most people’s cup of tea. I don’t know if it was a marketing thing, because it was my kind of game and I knew all about it. It just doesn’t seem like a mainstream game to me. I really enjoyed the game (and it allowed me to finally get into PoE which I ended up loving), but I wouldn’t recommend it to most people.

I think Tyranny’s biggest problem was probably just the whole “you’re the bad guy!” thing.

Tyranny was great, and far better than the meandering, pointless (Surprise! There are no gods! Only… there are… Here, let’s throw an extra city in here for no reason other than we had to think up another stretch goal) PoE. No, the problem with Tyranny was marketing. No one knew it was coming. It snuck up on most QT3 folks and clearly QT3 people are more informed than the general gaming public.

The marketing answer fails, because regardless of it sneaking up on everyone (which doesn’t seem true, there was talk about it, people just weren’t hyped about it), if word at release was how great it was, it would have sold more. Word of mouth of it wasn’t great at release though. I was following it and I got the feeling it wasn’t a must buy, but a wait for a sale. It’s the type of game that appeals to a certain kind of gamer, not a mass appeal game.