I have met many people in the PoE community especially who absolutely refuse to credit DOS2 as being part of the cRPG resurrection at all, let alone contributing much more to the cause than PoE did, which is where the DOS2 VS PoE2 animosity came from back in the day - and now the goalposts have been shifted to the Pathfinder games.
I mean, if my memory serves me well Wasteland2 and PoE1 met with major success on Kickstarter, and other titles followed, including Divinity: Original Sin (though whenever D:OS1 campaign is a direct result or just correlation is unknown to me).
D:OSs definitely stick out from “cRPG renesaince” as they are not nostalgia driven, and provided a different RPG experience, with innovative coop implementation. It doesn’t evoke fallout/baldurs gate/Planescape in a way that Wasteland2, Pillars of Eternity, Pathfinder or Disco Elysium do. So if for someone “cRPG renesaince” is all about recapturing the appeal of those classic cRPG then they do have a point. D:OS1&2 IMO are cRPG, as they too try to bring tabletop like experience into computer setting, albeit their approach is quite different and fresh.
Originally Posted by Saito Hikari
A lot of the flaws of PoE2 and its ultimate failure are now even generally attributed to resources being diverted in an attempt to chase after DOS2's popularity (full voice acting being the big one), at the cost of resources that could have been spent improving the actual game (namely fleshing out the actual companions, the vast majority of the companion quests could be done in less than 10 minutes after you start them, and the dev team were straight up quoted in an interview saying they weren't any meatier because they were expensive to create).
That’s a bunch nonesense. If I remember Sawyer’s GDC talk correctly Obsidian invested into PoE2 far more money BECAUSE how well D:OS2 did compared to well received D:OS1, and they hoped for he same when moving from success of PoE1 to PoE2. Still, most of PoE2 must have taken shape before D:OS2 launched - games aren’t made within a year’s time.
Full VO was strain but it was a late addition, and therefore didn’t influence content - game wasn’t created with full VO in mind. It might have contributed to unpolished launch, distracting key devs from polishing other stuff, but that’s about it. Surprisingly enough, if there was a money sink that wasted money and manpower it were: ship-combat, and convoluted relationship system. Ship-combat being forced upon Sawyer from one of the higher ups in spite of it proving to be a unenjoyable money sink before fig campaign, and the other was well intention idea of Sawyer that turn out really really badly.
“Vision quests” in PoE2 are lame indeed, but that ignores sheer content and reactivity that Obsidian gave to companions in regular conversation, which tramps any other comparable RPG. Still, nothing works as well, as a satisfying story arcs, and those were missing in Deadfire, unfortunately. Personally, I would attribute it to lack of strong narrative lead - while I like Sawyer a lot, I don’t think he has a knack for storytelling.
