Pillars of Eternity 1 was loved, but then in Pillars of Eternity 2, you had the same type of crap talking as I see in here alot, verbatim. Lack of immersion, linear, Poor development of classes, Poorly developed/implemented game mechanics...I mean any of that sounding familiar? All that even though it has a 89% rating. But the band keeps playing lol. Now it seems that same record is going on here. My guess would be sometimes people just want to hate on something, and they just rotate the same kind of post on different RPG forums. Don't get me wrong, there is a lot of legit, well thought out critiques in regards to actual balance issues. But then you have the same old group of people that want to tear it down, or have some hate on for Larian. I guess it is the edgelord thing to do...
The failure of Pillars 2 is a difficult thing to quantify. There are a lot of reasons but it’s hard to tell what was the main factor. I’ve seen people blame everything from the setting to the open world design.
I recall during initial release that the Reddit community’s reaction to the story pacing and companions were lukewarm at best, and the common opinion then was that the only things 2 did better than 1 was having full voice acting (a huge financial drain and obviously in response to DOS2’s success), better graphics, and combat design.
But the writing was universally considered worse (with many saying the main character had no real agency, most of the companions felt like extensions of their factions whose goal was to manipulate the MC for political ends instead of simply being themselves, romances were awkward and shoehorned in without a thought, and that the entire main story was clearly written under the assumption that there was going to be a sequel, which was really the height of hubris), which is a death sentence for a direct sequel to a game in a niche genre whose main selling point was the writing to begin with.
The real factor was probably something much simpler though. I recall the game was crowdfunded through something called Fig instead of Kickstarter, and apparently that only came about because one of the major Obsidian heads owned majority share for that platform. So in the process of trying to avoid fees, they lost major advertising power.
Nepotism and hubris kills projects.
(It’s also widely reported that PoE2’s ship combat was something that was shoehorned in by upper management, and that the developers wanted to get rid of it. So that was a mismanaged resource sink on top of everything else.)
Contrast to Kingmaker which had the most disastrous launch of any recent cRPG in existence, but it recovered in the end due to the devs’ immense effort in fixing it, and most players recognized a good unique experience underneath all the bugs. It was a complete experience front to back, compared to PoE2 advertising a season pass DLC package right before release, and whose narrative partly ran under the assumption that you’d purchase and play through that content.
Kingmaker was further helped by the efforts of some amazing modders even without official mod tools who basically added in enough extra features that would qualify to be expansions by most standards. Such as the turn based mode that granted the ability to switch between both TB and RTwP at will, even mid combat, that is now an official standard for the series moving forward. Now it enjoys great word of mouth, and the sequel ended up raising more than DOS2 did through Kickstarter somehow.
